Archives for August 2007

I took a six-month layoff from writing Hotter Than That, my Louis Armstrong biography, to work on the libretto of The Letter. Two weeks ago I picked up the threads of Armstrong’s life, and on Saturday I finished writing a ten-thousand-word chapter about his return to New York in 1929, his Broadway debut, and his emergence as a popular celebrity.
To celebrate, I’m going to share with you the section from “Playing Frantic: Fame, 1929-1930” in which I describe how Armstrong began recording with big bands. Enjoy!
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That afternoon Armstrong returned to the studio to cut two sides with the Luis Russell band, augmented by Eddie Condon on banjo and Lonnie Johnson on guitar. The first was “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” a ballad by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields that had become popular the year before when it was sung in Blackbirds of 1928, the longest-running all-black Broadway revue of the Twenties. This version, which opens with a melancholy, sweet-toned instrumental chorus split down the middle by Armstrong (who uses a straight mute) and J.C. Higginbotham, appears at first glance to have little in common with the daredevil small-group sides that had made the trumpeter’s name a byword among jazz musicians. It almost sounds as if he were sitting in with his beloved Guy Lombardo. But then he puts down his trumpet and croons an ingeniously oblique half-scatted paraphrase of the melody (Armstrong never sang a melody straight) accompanied by three gently mooing saxophones and Pops Foster’s bowed bass, followed by a high-flying trumpet chorus that sheers daringly away from the tune and soars off into the blue, ascending toward (but failing to hit) a climactic high D.
The results exemplified the recipe for a three-chorus solo he had shared with the New Orleans trumpeter Wingy Manone: “The first chorus I plays the melody, the second chorus I plays the melody round the melody, and the third chorus I routines.” They also showed that he could make a ballad sound as jazzy as a blues, a lesson that was not lost on his contemporaries. Ethel Waters paid homage to him in 1932 with a recording of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” in which she imitates with uncanny accuracy the vocal chorus from his 1929 recording, a witty and knowing tribute that also serves as an indication of the extent of his fast-growing celebrity.
What inspired Armstrong to record so sentimental a song in so personal a manner? The credit, amazingly enough, seems to belong to Tommy Rockwell, his tone-deaf producer. Years later Armstrong discussed the session with George Avakian:

Rockwell knew it had to be different. The song had been on the radio for almost a year, and everybody did it like cheerful–“One day I’ll buy you diamond rings, baby,” and all that. Rockwell thought I should do it like life really is–the guy really can’t give her anything but love. So he had Brother Higginbotham and the saxophones play it way down low, and I sang it that way, too.

And whose idea was it for Armstrong to record a show tune? His autobiographical writings shed no light on the matter, but three months earlier he had accompanied Lillie Delk Christian on her OKeh recordings of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and “I Must Have That Man,” another song from Blackbirds of 1928. Though he had never before recorded such fare under his own name, he had been playing it in public since his Sunset Cafe days in Chicago. Thus he might have suggested it to Rockwell, just as he was undoubtedly responsible for picking the last song recorded that day, a rocking instrumental named after a celebrated Storyville whorehouse whose black madam he remembered fondly: “Lulu White was a famous woman of the sporting world in Storyville…She had a big house on Basin Street called Mahogany Hall…The song was written after her house had gotten so famous…Rich men came there from all parts of the world to dig those beautiful Creole prostitutes…And pay big money.” “Mahogany Hall Stomp” shows off the Russell band at its swinging best, with Pops Foster thumping out a fat-toned bass line as Armstrong romps through three muted solo choruses (one of which consists solely of a sunlit high B flat stretched out for ten breathtaking bars) whose pellucid simplicity would be echoed at one time or another by virtually every jazz trumpeter of the Thirties.
But even if it was Armstrong’s own idea to record “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and “Mahogany Hall Stomp,” he could not have done so without Rockwell’s approval, and it was probably the OKeh executive’s idea to pair him with Luis Russell’s band as well. The success of the collaboration sealed his artistic fate: from 1929 to 1947 he would be the nominal leader of a big band, criss-crossing the country to play show tunes and pop songs for dancers who knew little or nothing of jazz. Many jazz fans came to feel that Armstrong had “sold out” by switching to big-band accompaniment, but in fact he had been fronting such groups ever since he quit King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in 1924. Had he done otherwise, he would never have become a star, though it would not have occurred to him, or the other well-known jazz instrumentalists of his generation, to do anything else. Dancing was where the money was. Even such stalwarts of the New Orleans style as Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton bowed to the inevitable and added saxophone sections to their bands. Most of the important small-group jazz recordings made between 1925 and 1940 were the work of studio-only pickup ensembles whose members were drawn from the ranks of the big touring dance bands.
Not until World War II laid waste to those ranks did small-group jazz become a big-time business, and even then the cautious Armstrong waited until two years after the war was over to dispose of his expensive orchestra and start working with a six-piece combo. He loved the Hot Five, but he saw no reason why he couldn’t make equally good music with a big band–and he was right.

“An announcement once appeared in a quarterly, against the name of the present writer, of an article to be entitled Conrad, the Soul and the Universe. The exasperation registered in this formula explains, perhaps, why the article was never written.”
F.R. Leavis, “Joseph Conrad” (courtesy of The Rat)

• AUGUST 2 To Lincoln, Massachusetts, home of Walden Pond (actually, it’s in Concord, just across the town line) and the Gropius House, about which I wrote in my last “Sightings” column:

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau built a tiny cabin near Walden Pond in Massachusetts, lived there for two years, then published a book about it. “Most men,” he wrote, “appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.” A century later, a German architect in flight from the Nazis moved to a meadow a stone’s throw from Walden Pond, where he put up a small house that is as deeply considered a dwelling as has ever existed.

The Gropius House, built by Walter Gropius in 1938, is a simple two-story structure that still looks breathtakingly contemporary. Its clean, right-angled lines and uncluttered floor plan are the very essence of the architectural style now known to aficionados as midcentury modernism. I paid a visit to the Gropius House the other day, and as I pulled into the driveway, I thought, This house could have been built yesterday–except that in 2007, few people would be willing to build a home that looks so utterly unlike the ones in which their neighbors live….

Like the Louis Armstrong House in Queens and the H.L. Mencken House in Baltimore (which is, alas, no longer open to the public), the Gropius House has been painstakingly restored to its original condition, and it looks as if its designer-owner had just stepped out for a walk. The walls are covered with very appropriate art, including a Hans Hofmann watercolor and a gorgeous lithograph by Toko Shinoda, an artist whom I now long to add to the Teachout Museum. In my experience, most midcentury-modern house-museums have superior tour guides, and this one was no exception: Joyce Bowden showed off its myriad marvels with informed and irresistible enthusiasm.

Next stop: Peterborough, New Hampshire, home of the MacDowell Colony, where Paul Moravec spent part of the summer writing the first three scenes of The Letter and Thornton Wilder wrote most of Our Town (which is widely thought to be a fictional portrayal of life in Peterborough). Dinner at Pearl Restaurant & Oyster Bar, an uncommonly fine Asian-fusion place incongruously located in a strip mall, followed by the Peterborough Players‘ splendid revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner (about which more here). Spent the night at the Benjamin Prescott Inn, built in 1853, whose proprietors are as nice as can be.

• AUGUST 3 To Portsmouth, New Hampshire, there to spend two days seeing the Seacoast Repertory Theatre‘s productions of Damn Yankees and West Side Story (about which more here and here). Dinner at Pesce Blue, recommended by the authors of Fodor’s New England, who nailed it in one. My seafood risotto was meltingly good.

• AUGUST 5 To Colby College in Waterville, Maine, alma mater of Linda Greenlaw, whose museum contains major collections of works by John Marin and Alex Katz, both prominently represented in the Teachout Museum. I went there on my first visit to Maine four years ago and have been dying to return ever since. The Marin galleries house the best selection of that great American artist’s work to be seen in any museum, not excluding my beloved Phillips Collection.

Next stop: Maine’s Blue Hill Peninsula, there to spend the night at the Oakland House Seaside Inn, whose accommodations include an 1907 arts-and-crafts-style cottage with a gazebo on the water. I passed the afternoon in a rocking chair on the porch, lapping up the salt air and reading a moldering copy of Good Evening, Everybody, the autobiography of Lowell Thomas, which I found on a bookshelf in the cottage library, tucked away among the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.

Most people remember Thomas–if at all–as the mellifluous voice of Twentieth Century Fox’s Movietone newsreels and the man who “discovered” T.E. Lawrence. (Arthur Kennedy played him in Lawrence of Arabia.) In my parents’ day, though, he was also America’s best-known and best-loved radio newscaster. Lowell Thomas and the News went on the air in 1930 and ran until 1976, long enough for me to tune in his farewell broadcast. Thomas grew up in Cripple Creek, Colorado, the wildest of the gold-rush towns, and lived to tell his dwindling band of aging listeners about Watergate. Now, like the rest of the stars of golden-age network radio, he is forgotten save by nostalgia-crazed old-time radio buffs. Sic transit gloria mundi!

(To be continued)

My recent appearance on XM Satellite Radio’s Downstage Center, the weekly program of the American Theatre Wing, is now archived on the ATW’s Web site. To listen in streaming audio or download it to your mp3 player, go here.
Howard Sherman, co-host of Downstage Center, wrote the other day to point out some things about the show that I hadn’t realized:

So far as we know, Downstage Center is the only national, weekly radio program featuring sustained conversation about theatre, covering Broadway, Off-Broadway and regional work; commercial and not-for-profit; musicals and plays; and speaking not only with actors, writers and directors, but artistic directors, designers, producers and on occasion, critics (there are a bunch of shows about musicals on both broadcast and terrestrial radio, as well as podcasts). Your interview was our 165th since the show began in April 2004, without a single repeated guest, and every one is available online for free as streaming audio and podcast.

All the more reason to listen, either via the ATW archives or by subscribing to XM, of which I am a very big fan. You can do the latter by going here.

Fame is a bee.
It has a song–
It has a sting–
Ah, too, it has a wing.

Emily Dickinson, “Fame Is a Bee”

Apropos of yesterday’s reflections on F. Scott Fitzgerald, a friend writes:

I have read Great Gatsby three times and still can’t feel why it slays people. In some funny way I think it is a guy book not a girl book. (I like Tender best.)
But Fitz’s life–that moves me! He had the guts to face his deterioration and write about it; to the end of his life he remained kind to other writers, and generous even to pricks like Hemingway; his naked admiration for their work and his appreciation for what it took from them to produce it; his never joining an ideological tong to protect his reputation, his never going left; his saying ‘life is a cheat and the conditions are those of defeat and the only thing that stands and redeems is work’ ; his love for the Murphys, for every excellent character he met; his admission of his failures; his attempt to make it work in hollywood; his note taking on thalberg; his brave open heart. I know he was an ass, but he was a wonderful endearing ass and in the end his life really did have some epic grandeur.
I just had to hold high the Stand Up for Scott Fitzgerald banner today.

I love this, and sort of agree (except about Gatsby!). The very last act of Fitzgerald’s life was edifying, and I hadn’t finished reading Matthew Bruccoli’s biography when I wrote that posting. But boy, did it take him a long, squalid, pathetic time to get there….

I was back in New York last week, shuttling between Broadway and Central Park to see Grease and A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Kathleen Marshall needs no gimmicks to make a show a hit. Her revivals of “Wonderful Town” and “The Pajama Game” put her solidly in the running for the title of Broadway’s hottest choreographer-director. Why, then, did she sign up to stage the Broadway revival of “Grease” mounted by the creators of “You’re the One That I Want,” the snooze-inducing reality-TV series that let its viewers choose the leads of this production? M-O-N-E-Y, I assume. Nevertheless, I’m pleased (and relieved) to report that Ms. Marshall has emptied her bag of theatrical tricks onto the stage of the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. “Grease” may not be much of a show, but this revival is still fun to see–in spite of the limitations of one of its audience-anointed stars….
It takes a scene or two for Daniel Sullivan’s Shakespeare in the Park production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to get off the mark. But once it starts moving, it quickly picks up comic speed and turns into a show that’s very much worth seeing….
Three members of the cast give performances deserving of special mention. Martha Plimpton, lately of “The Coast of Utopia,” is commandingly hot-blooded as Helena, the spurned lover. Laila Robins, who made a powerful impression on me three years ago in Bryony Lavery’s “Frozen,” gives a breathtakingly sensual performance as Titania, Queen of the Fairies. As for Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who played the hapless Leaf Coneybear in the original production of “The 25th Annual Putnam Country Spelling Bee,” he’s been cast as Flute, the cross-dressing member of the rude mechanicals, in which capacity he brings off the near-unprecedented feat of stealing the show from Bottom….

No free link. Go thou and do what you gotta do, preferably by going here to subscribe to the Online Journal. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

“I hold springtime in my arms, the fullness of it and the rinsing sadness of it.”
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (courtesy of The Rat)