Archives for August 10, 2004

A reader writes:

Could you please name five jazz CDs the beginning listener should own?

Another reader writes:

I have loved watching dance over the years, but have almost no idea of what goes where and why. Could you please recommend four or five books that might give me a formal and historical introduction to the art?

I love e-mail like this, and I never get tired of answering it.

To Reader No. 1, here are five CDs containing music that I listen to often, all of it jazz but otherwise extremely varied in style:

– The Essential Louis Armstrong (Sony). A brand-new two-CD set by the greatest of all jazz musicians, not perfectly chosen but full of good things and easy to find.

– Duke Ellington, Masterpieces 1926-1949 (Proper). An unusually low-priced four-CD imported box set that contains most of Ellington’s best pre-LP recordings.

– Ken Burns Jazz Collection: The Definitive Charlie Parker (Sony). An exceptionally good single-disc introduction to bebop’s key figure.

– Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (Sony). The most popular and influential jazz album of the Fifties.

– Pat Metheny, Bright Size Life (ECM). One of the earliest and most successful attempts to “fuse” jazz and rock. It still sounds fresh.

If you don’t like any of these recordings, you probably won’t like jazz.

Reader No. 2 should read these books, in this order:

– Robert Greskovic, Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Ballet (Hyperion). The best introductory book about ballet ever written, by the much-admired dance critic of The Wall Street Journal.

– Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (Yale). A comprehensive, well-written, impeccably reliable history of ballet and modern dance.

– Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry (Yale). The only available collection of writings by the most important dance critic of the century.

– Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker: An Arlene Croce Reader (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A superbly edited one-volume collection of reviews by the outstanding dance critic of the postwar era.

And, if I do say so myself:

– Terry Teachout, All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine (Harcourt). A short book about the greatest of all choreographers, written specifically for those who have either just discovered Balanchine’s ballets or are eager to do so. It’s out in November.

Speaking of All in the Dances, I just wrote and e-mailed to Harcourt, my publisher, a draft of the “flap copy,” publisher-speak for the description of the book and its author that will appear on the dust jacket. Here’s what I wrote:

Martha Graham said that watching George Balanchine choreograph a ballet was like “watching light pass through a prism. The music passes through him, and in the same natural yet marvelous way that a prism refracts light, he refracts music into dance.” Twenty years after his death, the ruthless, enigmatic founder of New York City Ballet still dominates the world of dance. He worked with Serge Diaghilev–and Sam Goldwyn. He made ballets to the music of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky–and to “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” A Russian

From the New York Times:

After Mr. Bush’s Davenport speech, his motorcade zoomed toward the nearby town of Bettendorf, where it stopped at a small farmers’ market. The president hopped out of his limousine, strode over to Ken Thomsen’s corn stand and bought some half-dozen ears with cash from his pocket. Then he peeled back one of the husks and bit into a raw ear….

Less than 24 hours later, the roadshow was in Ohio as the talk show host encouraged his listeners to speak up with queries for “Ask President Bush.”

“Go ahead, yell it out,” the president said. “If I don’t like the question, I’ll reinvent it.”

“Journalist Murray Sayle reputedly said there were only three kinds of pieces: 1) ‘We name the guilty man’; 2) ‘Arrow points to defective part’; and 3) ‘Everything you knew about X is wrong.'”

Mickey Kaus, Kausfiles (Aug. 9, 2004)

Are bloggers legally responsible for the postings that appear in their comments sections? So far as I know, this question has yet to go to court, but I won’t be at all surprised if it ends up there sooner rather than later, and when it does, you’ll feel the earth move.

I’ve said it before, but I want to say it again, this time with a slightly different spin: if you blog, educate yourself about libel law. Blogging is no longer a hobby for wonks. It’s a full-fledged form of electronic journalism. We’ve made the big time, much faster than most of us ever expected…and that’s when the lawyers come calling.

I hope blogging will always remain spontaneous and unpredictable. But it’s perfectly possible to be spontaneous and unpredictable without making yourself vulnerable to a libel suit by a litigious jerk with money to burn. Believe me, you don’t want to go down in history as a test case.

That’s my word to the wise for the day. I now resume radio silence.

I have what in Vicwardian times was quaintly known as “a weak chest,” meaning not that my figure is less than Greek (though it is, it is!) but that respiratory ailments are harder on me than on most people. When I get a cold, it has a way of sticking around, and it didn’t help that I hit the road for Massachusetts and Washington a few days after coming down with my most recent one. As a result, it didn’t go away, and soon I was laid low again. So I did something I normally find almost impossible to do: I took last Wednesday off. I didn’t write, didn’t blog, didn’t set foot out of my apartment, not even to go downstairs and pick up the mail. Surrounded by the temptation to work, I succeeded in putting it behind me for a whole day, and the better part of two more besides.

What do you do when you’re too sick to go out but not sick enough to sleep around the clock? Me, I like to reread familiar biographies, and this time around I opted for Peter Heyworth’s Otto Klemperer, His Life and Times: 1933-1973, the second volume of one of the few really first-rate biographies of an orchestral conductor. I’m sure it won’t strike most of you as promising sickroom fare, but Klemperer’s life was unusually interesting. In addition to being a great conductor (as this 1955 recording of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony makes surpassingly clear), he was a full-blown manic depressive who converted from Judaism to Catholicism and back again, which makes for quite a tale. On top of all that, Klemperer is also the answer to one of the all-time great trivia questions, for his son Werner grew up to become an actor who carved his name into the tablets of history by playing the part of Colonel Klink in Hogan’s Heroes. A refugee from Nazism who had a well-developed sense of irony, Otto lived long enough to see Hogan’s Heroes and find it amusing.

Rereading Heyworth’s book, I ran across this wonderful letter sent to Klemperer by Arnold Schoenberg, who may well have been the most arrogant person who ever lived. “After Klemperer had failed to accept an invitation to visit him,” Heyworth writes, “Schoenberg wrote a letter of rebuke.” Here it is:

I find it inappropriate that the extent or our meetrings should be determined by you…Anyone should consider it a pleasure as well as an honour if I enjoy seeing him often…Do not suppose that I am not aware of the gratitude I owe you for your many successful efforts concerning my material affairs. I am very conscious of that, do not and shall not forget it, and will seize every available opportunity to express my thanks practically. But my sense of order tells me..that every Kulturmensch [that is, “civilized person”] owes me tribute for my cultural achievements.

Isn’t that a hoot?

When I feel really lousy, so much so that I’m not even up to the challenge of letting my eyes glide passively over the pages of a thrice-read book, I stick to movies. Last Wednesday night, for instance, I watched Howard Hawks’ Red River, which I know well and love, and Only Angels Have Wings, which I’d never seen. Both of them hit the spot. I suspect there’s something about Hawks’ combination of exquisite cinematic craft and charmingly adolescent pseudo-stoicism that appeals strongly to a middle-aged man with a runny nose.

My day of rest was blissful, and it put me back on the slow road to recovery. But I knew well–too well–that so long as I stayed at home, my obsessive attitude toward work would sooner or later trip me up. Instead, I decided to do something even smarter and get out of town. I’d had such a good time on my first trip to Cold Spring that I figured I might as well do it again, so I called the Hudson House Inn and made a reservation. As soon as I sign off on this week’s Wall Street Journal theater column, I’ll be catching the next train north from Grand Central Station, and I won’t be back until Thursday afternoon. A two-day break may not sound like much to you, but it’s a big deal to me, so wish me luck at relaxing.

And so…goodbye. I have a rendezvous with a park bench by the Hudson River. See you around.