Archives for December 2006

“Going home must be like going to render an account.”

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Don’t worry–Terry is not in the hospital again! His heart is in perfect condition.

We occasionally get e-mails asking why the chronological order of this blog’s postings appears to have melted down, but the frequency of those e-mails has gone up sharply in the past couple of days, and here’s the reason: what you’re seeing, if you’re seeing it, are last year’s postings about Terry’s illness.

So what’s the problem? Whenever you visit the main page of “About Last Night,” what you see are the last seven days’ worth of postings, and nothing else.

If, however, you come to “About Last Night” via a link to a specific posting, the first thing you’ll see on your screen is the posting in question. Above and below it are all of the other postings for that week, in reverse chronological order.

Clear so far? Hang on–this is where it gets tricky. Start scrolling down and you’ll find all of the “About Last Night” postings for the same week last year, in reverse chronological order. Keep on scrolling down and you’ll find all of the postings for the same week in preceding years…and on and on ad infinitum, or at least all the way back to 2003, when “About Last Night” was launched.

This is how “About Last Night”‘s archives are set up, and it’s been causing a good deal of understandable reader confusion in the past few days. If, for instance, somebody sent you a link to Monday’s posting about Terry’s Christmas tree, you would have seen, not far below it, Our Girl’s posting from December of 2005 announcing that Terry was in the hospital. Result: alarms and confusions.

Alas, there’s nothing we can do about this peculiarity–it’s an immutable quirk of the software that generates our archives. So forgive us (and artsjournal.com) for giving you a scare, and please be assured that Terry is not–repeat, not–back in the hospital.

I helped decorate a Christmas tree up in Connecticut last Friday. It was traditional in every way, from the homely handmade star to the old-fashioned tinsel and fifty-year-old strands of colored lights that my hostess and I draped around its sweet-smelling branches. Even the music playing in the background, Johannes Somary’s 1970 recording of Handel’s Messiah, was conventional, if artily so.

It happens that I played bass for more than a few Messiahs in my college days, and before that I took part in decorating a dozen or so of my parents’ Christmas trees. As any working musician can tell you, Messiah is more fun to hear (or sing) than it is to play, but trimming a tree is one of the most purely pleasurable activities known to man, especially when you are, like me, lucky enough to have had a more or less uncomplicatedly happy childhood.

Why, then, did I never get around to putting up a tree of my own after I left home? The answer, I suppose, is that since I made a point of coming back to Smalltown, U.S.A., for the holidays each year, I never found it necessary. What began as a convenience hardened into habit, and by the time I was forty the notion of buying and decorating a Christmas tree seemed to me senseless. No doubt that said more about the confusion of my private life than it did about any domestic urges I was sweeping under the rug, but whatever my deeper reasons might have been, the fact remains that the tree I trimmed last week is the first one I’ve had in thirty-two years.

To be sure, I can’t claim to have been deprived, at least not by comparison with Louis Armstrong, who was born into a poverty so dire that he never had a Christmas tree of his own at any time during his New Orleans boyhood. Like most musicians, he spent his adult life living out of suitcases, and it was Lucille, his fourth wife, who bought and trimmed his very first tree, which she put up in a hotel room not long after they were married in 1943. He was so stunned by the gesture that he sat and gazed at the tree for a long time, and when he and Lucille moved on to the next gig, he insisted that they take it with them.

Yet I felt more or less the same way Armstrong did as I looked at the tree I had helped to decorate, thinking as I did so of the illness that struck me down last December. A year has gone by since the snowy morning when I called 911 and put myself in the hands of strangers, and since then I have been happier than at any other time in my adult life. Could it be that life–real life, not the unexamined kind–is like a roller-coaster ride in which happiness and fear are woven together in a twisty strand of feeling?

After the tree was trimmed and Handel’s Messiah had run its jubilant course, I put on Lambert Orkis’ recording of Franz Schubert’s Impromptus, played on a Graf fortepiano made in Vienna in 1826, two years before the composer’s death. Of all the great composers, Schubert is the one most in tune with life’s melancholy. Surely the uneasy, unceasing fluctuations between major and minor that dapple his music are harbingers of the ultimate inevitability of sorrow–and mortality.

But even as Schubert reminds us of what must be, he hints at the prospect of joy, and it was joy with which my healthy heart overflowed as I gazed contentedly at my twinkling tree. In a matter of days it will be stripped of its ornaments and consigned to the trash, but until then it will glow brightly, reminding me of Christmases past, even as Schubert’s music reminds us of the chubby, bespectacled man who once walked the streets of Vienna, haunted by the knowledge that he would likely die young. So he did–but his music is still with us, giving joy two centuries after the man who made it was laid in earth.

I’ve been much preoccupied of late with Alexander Herzen, the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual who is the principal character in The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard’s trilogy of history plays, whose first installment I reviewed in The Wall Street Journal the other day. I haven’t yet read the second or third installments–I want to see them first–but I’ll be surprised if Stoppard doesn’t find room in one of them for a remark Herzen made in his autobiography: “Art, and the summer lightning of individual happiness: these are the only real goods we have.”

I don’t know whether Herzen was right, but I do know that art and happiness are at least as real as my Christmas tree. To be happy, not in memory but in the moment, is the shining star on the tree of life.

Goethe said it:

All theory, dear friend, is gray–
The golden tree of life is green.

I rejoice to inform you that Julia Dollison is in town tonight for a one-night stand at the Jazz Standard, the best of all possible nightclubs. I’ve written about Julia more than once in this space, but if her name is new to you, go here to read my liner notes for her debut album, Observatory.

Two sets tonight, at 7:30 and 9:30. For more information, go here and scroll down. I’m going to try to get back from Connecticut for the second set, but it’s a long trip, so if I don’t make it in time, please show up in my place and cheer her on. Believe me, you won’t be sorry.

“Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others.”

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Anyone who played jazz in Kansas City in the Seventies ran into Jay McShann
from time to time, and was invariably the better for it. A great, genial presence on the bandstand, he played no-nonsense piano and sang the blues in a slyly insinuating manner that never failed to give pleasure.

History mainly remembers McShann as the man who led the big band with which Charlie Parker made his first studio recordings back in 1941, but he and his group were far more than just a footnote to bebop. Their Decca recordings of “Hootie Blues,” “Sepian Bounce,” and “Swingmatism” (reissued a couple of years ago as part of Jumpin’ the Blues, a budget-priced two-CD set from Proper Records)
are as ear-catching now as they were six and a half decades ago–and not just because of Parker’s solos, either.

After dropping out of sight for a long, dry spell, McShann resurfaced in 1969, subsequently recording an all-star comeback album called Last of the Blue Devils whose well-deserved success made him a fixture on the festival circuit. It was around then that I first heard him in person, marveling at the fact that he was still around, and still swinging. Those were the days when I’d just started playing bass professionally, and though I never got the chance to work with McShann, I was sinfully proud to be able to say that I was, like him, a Kansas City jazzman.

McShann died in a Kansas City hospital yesterday. He was ninety years old. The Kansas City Star‘s obituary is here, along with a package of related stories and video clips. It leaves out a few things, including the fact that Alvin Ailey made a dance in 1988, Opus McShann, set to several of McShann’s recordings, but it gets the important stuff right, and it also includes a characteristic quote from the man himself, courtesy of the Associated Press obit:

You’d just have some people sitting around, and you’d hear some cat play, and somebody would say, “This cat, he sounds like he’s from Kansas City.” It was the Kansas City style. They knew it on the East Coast. They knew it on the West Coast. They knew it up north, and they knew it down south.

They still do.

UPDATE: The New York Times obituary is here. It’s serviceable, though short. Nothing from the Washington Post, which surprises me–they tend to be quick on the uptake, but this time they dropped the ball. (The Post finally got in the game on Sunday.)

I reviewed two shows this week, one terrific (Two Trains Running) and one so-so (High Fidelity). Here’s the scoop, straight from this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

Not long after launching this column, I coined the Drama Critic’s Prayer: Dear God, if it can’t be good, let it be short. In fact, today’s playwrights are well aware of the shrunken attention spans of TV-conditioned playgoers, and so their plays are growing shorter by the season. I don’t have a problem with that–I like artists who stick to the point, assuming they have one–but the Signature Theatre Company’s revival of “Two Trains Running,” August Wilson’s 1990 play, is anything but boring even though it runs for three hours and ten minutes. If I hadn’t checked, I would have taken for granted that it clocked in at two hours and change.

What makes “Two Trains Running” so engrossing? It’s not the plot, because there isn’t one. All Wilson does is put his characters in a rundown Pittsburgh diner and set them to mulling over past misfortunes and present frustrations, swapping stories in the time-honored manner of working-class people who can afford no amusement but conversation. The time is 1969, and political implications are scattered throughout this snapshot of a ghetto neighborhood gone to seed, but Wilson never forces them on you. Like all great artists, he trusts you to connect the dots….

Stephen Frears’s film version of “High Fidelity” is on my Top Five list of good movies based on good books, in between “Strangers on a Train” and “Out of Sight.” (I actually prefer it to Nick Hornby’s novel.) The script is smart, the cast impeccable. What’s not to like? Nothing–so why turn it into a musical? Alas, the producers of “High Fidelity” came to a different conclusion, and now seem likely to lose their shirts….

The unfamiliar faces taking up space on the stage of the Imperial Theatre are bland TV-type actors who mostly do their best to remind you of John Cusack, Jack Black, Tim Robbins, Todd Louiso and Lisa Bonet. And that’s what’s wrong with “High Fidelity”: It’s good enough to make you want to go home and watch the movie again–but no better.

As usual, no free link, so buy the paper and read the rest of my review, O.K.? Or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you abracadabra-type access to my review, among innumerable other good things, including Joe Morgenstern’s super-smart film reviews. (If you’re already a subscriber, the review is here.)

The occasion for my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, is a new program recently announced by Carnegie Hall and the Juilliard School that will send young musical professionals into New York City’s public schools to teach–and, hopefully, to inspire by example.

Aside from the intrinsic merits of the program, what interests me about it is the fact that it is designed to inject artists into the community, thus helping to break down the wall that separates them from the people they serve. How many practicing professional artists do you know? If you read “About Last Night,” your answer is likely to be different from that of the average concertgoer. And why does that matter? To find out, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.