Archives for September 24, 2007

I often have occasion to make favorable mention in this space and elsewhere of Think Denk, Jeremy Denk’s witty blog about “the glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.” Not long ago our mutual friend Anya Grundmann, who helps run the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera, invited the two of us to appear jointly at the next institute to talk about blogging. We live in the same neighborhood but had never met, so I invited Mr. Think Denk to tour the Teachout Museum and have lunch with me at Good Enough to Eat. It took us several weeks to come up with a mutually compatible date–we’ve both been on the road for much of the summer–but we finally managed to converge on Friday afternoon.
No sooner had I opened the door to my apartment than we started pelting one another with opinions, some of which we shared (four thumbs up for Verdi’s Falstaff) and some not (he likes Ives and Schumann a lot more than I do). The talk was more or less nonstop, though we did pause long enough to cram down lunch and listen to four records that came up in the conversation:
• Van Cliburn playing the first movement of the Barber Piano Sonata
• Gérard Souzay’s 1946 recording of Fauré’s “Clair de lune”
• A 1909 recording of Reynaldo Hahn’s “Offrande” sung by the composer to his own piano accompaniment
• A recording of “Quand’ero paggio,” an aria from Falstaff, made in 1907 by Victor Maurel, the baritone who created the role fourteen years earlier
Mr. Think Denk is every bit as smart and thoughtful in person as you’d expect from reading his blog. Time was when this might have surprised me, but experience has taught me that such is usually the case with the best bloggers. Alas, I’m afraid I talked his ear off about The Letter–I’d had an unusually productive work session with Paul Moravec the day before and was still booming and zooming as a result–but he was kind enough to act interested and ask leading questions, to which I obligingly responded by hosing him down with superfluous information. (At least I stayed off the subject of Louis Armstrong’s embouchure!)
No doubt one of the secondary reasons for my garrulity was that I’d finally managed to lick the case of allergy-heightened, stress-exacerbated sniffles that tore a hole in the past two weeks of my life. As usual I celebrated by revving up my engine: on Saturday I took a train to Baltimore to see CenterStage’s production of Arsenic and Old Lace, and the next day I was back in New York for a press preview of Dividing the Estate, Horton Foote’s new play. This week I’ll be writing three pieces, seeing two more shows, and paying a visit to the Armstrong Archives at Queens College.
Whatever else my life is or isn’t, it’s definitely not dull. Neither Mr. Think Denk nor I can still quite believe that people actually pay us to do what we do. Yes, I work too damn hard and don’t always take proper care of myself, but I suspect that the sheer pleasure of spending my days immersed in art up to the eyebrows offsets no small part of the resulting wear and tear.
It’s nice to be myself again.

I just got word that another book tentatively called Hotter Than That will be published around the time that my Louis Armstrong biography of the same name will be coming out from Harcourt. No, it’s not an Armstrong biography, but it is about jazz trumpet, which suggests that I may need to come up with another title. The prospect doesn’t unnerve me–my Mencken biography was retitled The Skeptic after I turned the manuscript in to HarperCollins–but it’s not too soon for me to be thinking about a new name, so I thought I’d share my problem with the readers of this blog.

“Hotter Than That” is, of course, the title of one of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings of 1928, so I went through the Armstrong discography to see if any other title leaped out at me. These caught my eye:

• King of the Zulus
• Fireworks
• That Rhythm Man
• You Rascal, You
• Laughin’ Louie
• Song of the Vipers (or, alternatively, “King of the Vipers,” which was one of Armstrong’s many nicknames)
• I’m Shootin’ High
• Jubilee

Your thoughts?

“Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.”
André Maurois, The Art of Writing