Archives for April 23, 2007

After a week of tweaking, adjusting, practicing, and otherwise getting used to our new publishing platform, I’m pleased (and relieved) to say that “About Last Night” once more looks the way it’s supposed to look. Making the switch to Movable Type wasn’t fun, but it turned out to be more than worth the trouble. Alas, Our Girl was out of Chicago on business last week and thus hasn’t had a chance to learn the technical ropes, but Doug McLennan and I hope to have her up and running within a few days.
The only problem we haven’t yet managed to fix is that our alternate URL, www.terryteachout.com, is still bouncing to the main ArtsJournal page instead of “About Last Night.” I don’t know why. The techies don’t know why. Nobody knows why. But we’re all working on it….
I’m also pleased to announce that the right-hand column has been updated, and I also added a half-dozen new blogs to “Sites to See.” Check it all out.
Now, back to blogging!

I wrote a review of Desmond Stone’s biography of Alec Wilder for the New York Times Book Review in 1996:

Alec Wilder spent his life looking for cracks to fall through. Though he wrote three songs that became standards (“I’ll Be Around,” “While We’re Young” and “It’s So Peaceful in the Country”), most of his “popular” music was too delicate and introspective to please a mass audience; though he composed hundreds of works for some of America’s greatest instrumentalists, these “classical” pieces were too strongly colored by jazz and popular music to win critical acceptance. Today, he is mainly remembered for his groundbreaking book “American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950,” surely the wittiest work of musical analysis ever written–and one that characteristically has nothing whatsoever to say about Wilder’s own songs, even such miniature masterpieces as “I See It Now” and “Did You Ever Cross Over to Sneden’s?”…
Wilder’s narcissistic shyness (he was precisely the sort of person for whom the term “passive-aggressive” was coined) didn’t stop him from moving to New York in the early 1930’s and setting up shop as a songwriter and arranger, but it did place severe limits on his ability to get ahead in the hard-nosed world of commercial music. As one contemporary recalled: “His music sounded different, he dressed differently, he acted differently….He just wrote what he wanted and the devil take recording supervisors, radio executives and bandleaders.”
No less problematic was his interest in writing music that moved freely from jazz to classical and back again, the first fruit of which was a series of three-minute cameos for five woodwinds, harpsichord, bass and drums. The limpid melodies, piquant scoring and fey titles (“Jack, This Is My Husband,” “It’s Silk, Feel It”) of Wilder’s octets delighted musicians and befuddled everybody else. Recorded in 1939 and 1940 by a crack group of studio players, the octets reinforced their composer’s reputation for uncommercial eccentricity, but also won him influential fans…

I’ve been praising Wilder’s octets for years to anyone who’d listen, but only seven of them have ever been reissued on CD. The rest remain firmly ensconced in limbo, and so far as I know, no one in the world has any plans to make them available again. (Are you listening, Hep Records?)
For this reason, I am delighted–nay, ecstatic–to announce that some anonymous benefactor lurking in cyberspace has celebrated Wilder’s centenary (he was born on February 16, 1907) by making eight of the Wilder Octet recordings available as podcasts.
Click on the links below and you can listen to:
• Concerning Etchings
• Dance Man Buys a Farm (the reference is to Artie Shaw)
• A Debutante’s Diary
• The House Detective Registers
• It’s Silk, Feel It!
• Little White Samba
• Neurotic Goldfish
• Sea Fugue Mama (the reference is to “Want some sea food, Mama,” a line from a 1939 pop song called “Hold Tight” whose lyrics are, ahem, cunningly naughty)
For the record, the rest of the octets have similarly fetching titles: “The Amorous Poltergeist,” “Bull Fiddles in a China Shop,” “The Children Met the Train,” “Footnotes to a Summer Love,” “Her Old Man Was Suspicious,” “His First Long Pants,” “Kindergarten Flower Pageant,” “A Little Girl Grows Up,” “Pieces of Eight,” “Please Do Not Disturb the House Detective,” “Remember Me to Youth,” “Seldom the Sun,” “She’ll Be Seven in May,” “Such a Tender Night,” “They Needed No Words,” and “Walking Home in the Spring.”
Give a listen. I guarantee you’ll be charmed.
UPDATE: Mr. Anecdotal Evidence is also a fan of Wilder’s octets.

“Though the years are sad, the days have a way of being jubilant.”
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance