Archives for February 9, 2005

I’m in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal with a piece about my beloved friend Nancy LaMott, the nonpareil cabaret singer who died nine years ago, and her newly released CD, Live at Tavern on the Green:

“Live at Tavern on the Green” is the only recording of any of Nancy’s live shows to have been released commercially. It was taped at her final public performance. She was wearing a wig, having lost her bottle-blonde hair to chemotherapy. Seven weeks later, she was dead. Yet her sweetly husky mezzo-soprano voice had somehow remained untouched by the terrible disease that would soon take her away from all the things for which she’d longed, and she sang as if she knew she’d never have another chance. When she was done, the Chestnut Room of New York’s Tavern on the Green exploded in rapturous applause. That’s how I remember it, anyway, and I was there….

No link, so pick up a copy of today’s Journal if you’re out and about today. This one means a lot to me.

(To order Live at Tavern on the Green and Nancy’s other albums, go here.)

UPDATE: Live at Tavern on the Green is shooting up the amazon.com sales charts today. It’s the #17 music seller as of this hour, up from roughly #300 last night. I can’t even begin to say how gratified I am, though of course it’s mixed with bittersweetness….

MORE: Now it’s #7. It’s been climbing steadily all day.

I’m not sure whether I mentioned it, but I’ve just become a regular contributor to WNYC’s Soundcheck. Henceforth I’ll be dropping by the studio at least once a month to talk to John Schaefer, the show’s host, about matters musical. Yay! I soooo love radio….

My next appearance on Soundcheck will be on Thursday, and the subject is The Way Up, the hour-long Pat Metheny-Lyle Mays composition for the Pat Metheny Group that’s just been released on CD by Nonesuch, Metheny’s new record label. I’ll also be talking about how other jazz composers from Duke Ellington to Maria Schneider have grappled–some successfully, some disastrously–with the challenge of large-scale musical form. I think it’ll be worth hearing, if only because (A) John is the perfect on-air conversational partner and (B) we’ll be playing excerpts from The Way Up and other works.

Soundcheck airs in New York live each weekday at two p.m. on 93.9 FM. To find out more about the program, or to listen online via streaming audio, go here. I’ll be heard at the top of the hour. Give us a listen.

(To read more about The Way Up, go here.)

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility; humility is endless.

T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”

“To be really good, you have to be willing to have everybody in the world hate you.”

Amy Sherman-Palladino, Gilmore Girls creator, interviewed in the New York Times

(Thanks to the dashing Bondgirl for this and a trove of other GG links on the occasion of the show’s 100th ep.)