Archives for April 7, 2006

I wrote four thousand more words of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong on Thursday, which puts me within spitting distance of finishing yet another chapter. I think that’s just about enough for one week, don’t you? I’m going to try to get the fourth chapter locked up today, after which I’ll put the book aside for a couple of weeks and think about other things.

Here’s one more little taste before I go:

“Gut Bucket Blues,” the third Hot Five recording, made the biggest splash, for obvious reasons. It starts out with a twangy single-string banjo solo over which Armstrong unexpectedly speaks a few cheery words of encouragement in the same gravelly voice first heard on record a year before in “Everybody Loves My Baby”: “Aw, play that thing, Mr. St. Cyr, lawd! You know you can do it–everybody from New Or-leans can really do that thing. Hey, hey!” He puts his cornet to his lips and starts to blow, and the rest of the band comes tumbling in behind him. They play two collectively improvised blues choruses, after which the other musicians solo, with Armstrong good-naturedly introducing each one in turn: “Ah, whip that thing, Miss Lil! Whip it, kid! Aw, pick that piano, yeah…Ah, blow it, Kid Ory, blow it, kid…Blow that thing, Mr. Johnny Dodds! Ah, toot that clarinet, boy.” Then Armstrong takes center stage with a simple, penetrating solo that returns again and again to a flatted third–the same “blue” note around which King Oliver built the first chorus of his “Dipper Mouth Blues” solo. The other horn players come back for a final ensemble chorus, to which Armstrong appends a two-bar break prefaced by one of his patented upward rips.

That’s all there is to “Gut Bucket Blues,” and according to Johnny St. Cyr it didn’t take much longer to come up with the number than it did to play it. Elmer Fearn, the producer of the session, asked for a blues, and St. Cyr offered to start it off with a unaccompanied banjo solo: “So we made a short rehearsal and cut the number. When Mr. Fern [sic] asked, ‘What shall we name it?,’ Louis thought for a while and then said, ‘Call it The Gut Bucket.’ Louis could not explain the meaning of the name. He said it just came to him. But I will explain it. In the fish markets in New Orleans the fish cleaners keep a large bucket under the table where they clean the fish, and as they do this they rake the guts in this bucket. Thence The Gut Bucket, which makes it a low down blues.”

In 1966 Armstrong would tell a reporter that “all songs display my life somewhat, and you got to be thinking and feeling about something as you watch them notes and phrase that music–got to see the life of the song.” The same thing, it seems, was already true in 1925: his music even then was a self-portrait, a reflection of his vast experience of the world. He might well have said, with Montaigne, that “I have no more made my book than my book has made me: ’tis a book consubstantial with the author, of a peculiar design, a parcel of my life.”

That’s all, folks. See you Monday!

I’m in a foul mood in this morning’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I hold forth on Lisa Kron’s Well and David Marshall Grant’s Pen:

No theatrical season can call itself complete without a new play about a weird mother. This week there are two, and not surprisingly, they bear certain family resemblances. Both have monosyllabic titles, both contain elements of fantasy, both are graced with splendid performances by the actresses who play the ladies in question–and neither is any good, though one is a good deal more ambitious than the other….

It’s a bit more than a joke to say that a performance artist is a standup comic who got a grant. Not only is Ms. Kron’s onstage manner exceedingly nightclubby, right down to the ingratiating smirks she fires off at the audience every half-minute or so, but the program reveals that she got quite a few grants in support of the writing and production of “Well.” Alas, nobody bothered to teach her how to transform a monologue into a play….

Except for Jayne Houdyshell’s performance, I didn’t like anything about “Well.” (I didn’t laugh once.) Still, I freely admit that as awful as it is, it’s more interesting than David Marshall Grant’s “Pen,” the latest in Playwrights Horizons’ fast-growing string of excessively similar plays about family life. Here we get such staples of kitchen-sink dramaturgy as the vinegar-tongued, self-pitying mother (J. Smith-Cameron) whom multiple sclerosis has put in a wheelchair, the whiny ex-husband (Reed Birney) who just happens to be a shrink, the angry young teenage son (Dan McCabe) whose shoplifting of Christmas presents is a cry for help…but must I go on? The only thing missing is a working stove…

No link, so if you want to inspect the rest of the carnage, buy a copy of today’s Journal and read the whole thing, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with on-the-spot access to the complete text of my review, along with plenty of extra art-related coverage.

“Old age is very strange. It has a kind of aloofness. It’s lost so much, that you can hardly look upon the old as quite human any more. But sometimes you have a feeling that they’ve acquired a sort of new sense that tells them things that we can never know.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Narrow Corner