Archives for October 2007

“The number of jazz musicians in this country who piece out their lives in the shadows and shoals of show business has always been surprising. They play in roadhouses and motel lounges. They play in country inns and small hotels. They appear in seafood restaurants in ocean resorts and in steak houses in suburban shopping centers. They play in band shells on yellow summer evenings. They sit in, gloriously, with famous bands on one-night stands when the third trumpeter fails to show. They play wedding receptions and country-club dances and bar mitzvahs, and they turn up at intense Saturday night parties given by small-town businessmen who clap them on the back and request ‘Ain’t She Sweet,’ and then sing along. Occasionally, they venture into big cities and appear for a week in obscure nightclubs. But more often they take almost permanent gigs in South Orange and Rochester and Albany. There is a spate of reasons for their perennial ghostliness: The spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak; their talents, though sure, are small; they may be bound by domineering spouses or ailing mothers; they may abhor traveling; they may be among those rare performers who are sated by the enthusiasms of a small house in a Syracuse bar on a February night. Whatever the reasons, these musicians form a heroic legion. They work long hours in seedy and/or pretentious places for minimum money. They make sporadic recordings on unknown labels. They play for benefits but are refused loans at the bank. They pass their lives pumping up their egos. Some of them sink into sadness and bitterness and dissolution, but by and large they remain a cheerful, hardy, ingenious group who subsist by charitably keeping the music alive in Danville and Worcester and Ish Peming.”
Whitney Balliett, Alec Wilder and His Friends (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

I returned from my honeymoon last night to find my apartment full of unopened mail and my e-mailbox full of unread messages. What else is new?
I’d have much rather stayed in Connecticut, where Hilary is doing battle with a brutal case of post-marital sniffles, but Mr. Think Denk and I promised long ago to make a joint appearance this morning before a group of NEA Arts Journalism fellows, so I’m in Manhattan and Mrs. Teachout isn’t. Not until this weekend shall the twain meet again. Such are the lives of a busy married couple with two homes!
As for the events of the week just past, I’ll share some of them with you after I finish opening my mail, which won’t be today.
Later.
UPDATE: Some of the writers at this morning’s colloquy told me that they’d read my stuff when young and found it inspiring. Talk about having mixed feelings about a compliment…

I’ve written a fair amount in this space and elsewhere about Chris Thile, lately of Nickel Creek, most recently when he and the band performed with Fiona Apple in Central Park. In March I penned the program notes for a Carnegie Hall concert in which Chris and his new group premiered a large-scale piece called The Blind Leading the Blind:

The Blind Leaving the Blind is a 40-minute suite in four movements for voice, mandolin, violin, banjo, guitar, and bass. That’s the standard bluegrass lineup, of course, but The Blind Leaving the Blind doesn’t fit into that familiar pigeonhole, or any other. It’s not a medley-like string of songs, but a through-composed piece in which vocal passages and extended instrumental interludes are woven together into a tightly integrated whole that fuses the song-based structures of folk and pop with the large-scale, organically developed forms of classical music. If Chris were a classical composer, he might have called it a cantata, but that old-fashioned word suggests something far more formal in tone than the surprise-filled musical steeplechase that is The Blind Leaving the Blind….

For all these reasons and more, I was delighted to find the following press release in my e-mailbox when I got back to Manhattan:

Nonesuch Records has signed mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile as well as his new band, Punch Brothers: Chris Eldridge (guitar), Greg Garrison (bass), Noam Pikelny (banjo), and Gabe Witcher (fiddle). The band’s label debut will be released on February 26, 2008.
Thile is perhaps best known as a member of the Grammy Award-winning trio Nickel Creek, with whom he had played since childhood. He formed the band now known as Punch Brothers for his 2006 Sugar Hill record, How to Grow a Woman from the Ground. In a review of that album, the Chicago Tribune said, “After wandering ever further from bluegrass with Nickel Creek and his own solo albums over the past decade, mandolinist/singer Thile charges back to home base with a modernist bluegrass grand slam. Strutting their stuff with the boss is Thile’s cherry-picked crop of like-aged (mid-20s) acoustic virtuosi, including local boys Greg Garrison on bass and Noam Pikelny on banjo,” and the Wisconsin State JournalThe Blind Leaving the Blind, which the band performed at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall earlier this year, as part of label-mate John Adams’ In Your Ear festival.
Thile’s solo records and collaborations also will be released by Nonesuch, beginning with an album with composer/bassist Edgar Meyer later in 2008.
“In the more than two decades I have been at Nonesuch, this is the first time we have made two signings at once. The combination of natural talent, deep musicianship, and hard work has rarely been more obvious in a musical group of any genre than it is with Punch Brothers,” said label President Bob Hurwitz. “And regarding Chris–by the time I had heard him play a handful of phrases, I hoped that one day we might have the good fortune to work with him. He is the type of musician who comes around about once in a decade, and we are thrilled to begin a relationship with him now.”
Thile adds, “I’ve been a Nonesuch fan for years. It seems like every other record I fall in love with has that little ‘N’ on the back. When I found out the boys and I were going to be working with them I felt like I had been drafted by the Cubs. And I can’t imagine being more excited about a project than I am about Punch Brothers. The possibilities are endless with these guys!”
Review copies of the Punch Brothers album will be available later this fall, along with details of early-2008 performance dates.

I can’t wait.

“When the shrivelled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”
Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I ran across the following remark while surfing the Web the other day: “I scandalized a dinner party twenty something years ago by offering the opinion that since the invention of photography, all art has been more or less consciously fraudulent. I still think I was right.” Coming as it does in the wake of the release of Amir Bar-Lev’s My Kid Could Paint That, I expect that this flat repudiation of all things modern will fall on more than a few receptive ears.
I commented on this attitude four years ago:

The world is full of rejectionists of various kinds–not so many as when I was younger, but still quite a few. I have a number of older musician friends who claim to hate all kinds of post-Sinatra pop music, for example, and I also get occasional letters from readers who want to know how I could possibly admire the music of Benjamin Britten or the paintings of Giorgio Morandi, or take a movie like Ghost World seriously. What nearly all these latter correspondents seem to have in common is that they really, truly don’t like any modern art, a position which puzzles me. Now, I freely admit to having problems with large tracts of the modern movement, and I long ago brought in guilty verdicts on atonal music and minimalist art, but at no time in my life has it ever occurred to me to dismiss all modernism as a snare and a delusion.
Are these anti-modernists poseurs? Some probably are, but I can’t imagine that many of them are merely playing at the old-fogy game. A greater number, I suspect, are rejecting something about which they know nothing, or at least not nearly enough to have an informed opinion.

I suspect that the man who made the aforementioned remark fits into the latter category. For his benefit, and that of anyone else who shares his view, I pose the following question: do you think the following works of art are “more or less consciously fraudulent”?
• Charles Demuth, Eggplant (painted in 1922-23)
• John Marin, Mt. Chocurua–White Mountains (painted in 1926)
• Milton Avery, Trees (painted in 1936)
• Lyonel Feininger, Waterfront (painted in 1942)
• Arnold Friedman, Landscape (painted in 1945-46)
• Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Morning (painted in 1950)
• Fairfield Porter, Wheat (painted in 1960)
• Richard Diebenkorn, Cityscape I (painted in 1963)
• Helen Frankenthaler, For E.M. (painted in 1981)
• Neil Welliver, Blueberry Burn Morey’s Hill (painted in 1997)
• Alex Katz, Birches (painted in 2002)
• William Bailey, Turning (painted in 2003)
Unlike the creator of this quiz, I have no tricks up my sleeve. Each of these paintings is by a respected American artist, nine of whom are represented in the Teachout Museum. I’m just curious: does anybody out there honestly believe that all of these painters are frauds?