Archives for April 2008

I wrote eight thousand more words of Chapter Twelve of Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong yesterday before leaving for the theater at 7:20.
Stand by for an announcement….

“The biographer who writes the life of his subject’s self-concept passes through a façade into the inner house of life.”
Leon Edel, “The Figure Under the Rug”

Howdy, and sorry so quiet here. Like Terry, I’ve been working like crazy on my book although unlike Terry (I suspect) my definition of “like crazy” includes time for Scrabulous. It’s a brave new world for me, Scrabulous. And it turns out, a fairly addictive one! I keep wondering how much games like this will figure in future literary biographies, i.e., “Work on the trilogy then halted as he strove to get under 5 minutes on the Hard level of Web Sudoku.” But mostly, I’ve been concentrating — I want to be finished with this thing by summer. Till then, full warning, I’ll be a little tired and not as polished as I wish I were (not to claim that I’ve ever operated like a ray-gun of insight and incisive comment) — because really, when I take a break lately, all I want to do is stand around & chat nonsense & have nonsense chatted back at me.
• Edith Wharton’s The Mount needs to raise $3 million to stay open after April 24 (Thursday). The situation sounds dire; the worst part of the story is that Wharton’s personal library, which was re-acquired by the estate only a couple years ago, may have to be sold to make up the funds. I’ve been hoping to visit The Mount for a while now, and so was glad the story includes a slideshow tour of its interiors. So many author houses are a disappointment — you go there looking for something that’s only in the books — but with Wharton, with her love of design and ornamentation, it doesn’t seem so extracurricular.
• Isabel Fonseca, author of the incredible Bury Me Standing and the new novel Attachment, and who I feel oddly protective over as people seem bent on dismissing her as being only Martin Amis’s pretty wife when Bury Me Standing is a formidable, great piece of nonfiction, profiled by Charles McGrath for The New York Times. Going over her history, McGrath compares her entertainingly to the Max Beerbohm character Zuleika Dobson, “a beautiful young woman who turns up at Oxford and makes all the undergrads suicidal with longing.” (Via TEV.)

Yesterday I finished writing Chapter Eleven–the next-to-last chapter–of Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Then, after dinner, I wrote the first two thousand words of the final chapter, in which I tell the story of the making of Armstrong’s 1963 recording of Hello, Dolly! The end is now in sight.
I’m wired far too tight to tell you how it feels to be so close to the finish line, so instead I’ll simply share with you the unedited draft of the opening of Chapter Twelve, hot off the word processor and still smoking.
* * *
On December 3, 1963, Louis Armstrong and the All Stars showed up at a New York studio for their first recording session in two years. Not since they finished work on Dave Brubeck’s The Real Ambassadors had anyone shown any interest in making a new record by the most famous jazz musician in the world. It was taken for granted that Armstrong no longer had anything new to say, and in 1963 nobody wanted to hear anything that wasn’t new: that was the year of Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Bill Evans’ Conversations With Myself, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Getz/Gilberto, Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” Miles Davis’ Seven Steps to Heaven, and the Beatles’ “She Loves You.” And while Armstrong was undoubtedly grateful to have been given an opportunity to cut a record after so long a hiatus, this one didn’t add up to much. Instead of an ambitious album-length project like The Real Ambassadors or Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, all that Joe Glaser, his manager, had managed to scrape up for him this time around was a single for Kapp Records, an independent label run by Dave Kapp. The session was to be produced by Dave’s son Mickey, and the A side was a cheery little ditty from a new musical by a little-known Broadway songwriter named Jerry Herman who so far had only one show under his belt. The new show had yet to open, and no one had any idea how it would do. For the flip side, Armstrong and the band knocked out a lightly swinging cover version of “A Lot of Livin’ to Do,” a song from Bye Bye Birdie, which had closed two years earlier.
It was, in short, a job of work, a one-shot affair that had been thrown together by Jack Lee, a song-plugger for E.H. Morris, Herman’s publishing company, and Armstrong and his sidemen set to it with their customary professionalism but no great enthusiasm. According to Jack Bradley, a friend who came to the session, the trumpeter “shook his head in dismay” when he looked at the lead sheet for the new song. He preferred “A Lot of Livin’ to Do,” and so did everybody else in the studio. Herman’s square-cut tune, by contrast, was naggingly repetitive, his lyrics simple to the point of banality. Mickey Kapp decided that the record needed a little something extra to pep it up and brought in a seventh musician, a veteran session guitarist named Tony Gottuso who also doubled on banjo and lived close to the studio. Except for his sessions with the Dukes of Dixieland, Armstrong hadn’t worked with a banjo player since the early Thirties, and the twangy-sounding instrument was now so totally identified with funny-hat Dixieland and bluegrass that the very thought of using one now must have struck him as embarrassingly old-fashioned. Once the two songs were in the can, he promptly forgot about them and went about his business, flying off to Puerto Rico three weeks later for a holiday engagement at the Hotel San Juan.
Meanwhile Mickey Kapp sent an acetate of the single to Joe Glaser’s office. Cork O’Keefe, an old colleague, dropped by for a visit shortly afterward, and Glaser played the A side for him. “Listen to that, Cork, it’s a fucking hit,” he shouted. For once he was right on the money: “Hello, Dolly!” is a near-perfect pop record, at least as catchy as “Mack the Knife” and very nearly as well played. Like all hits, it is concise (two and a half minutes) and wholly to the point. A crisply played upward glissando by Gottuso leads into a no-nonsense eight-bar introduction by the band, at the end of which Armstrong enters with an equally straightforward vocal in which he loosens up the four-square rhythms of Herman’s melody and puts an even more distinctively personal stamp on his lyric: Hello, Dolly/This is LEW-issss, Dolly/It’s so nice to have you back where you belong. Next comes a rocking ensemble chorus in the band’s very best New Orleans style, after which Armstrong comes back to sing another half-chorus, wrapping it up with a neat little tag that sells the song’s title one last time: Dolly, never go away/Promise you’ll never go away/Dolly, never go away again! In addition to adding Gottuso’s banjo, Kapp had discreetly sweetened the mix with an occasional hint of overdubbed strings, but otherwise “Hello, Dolly!” was a pure product of Louis Armstrong and the All Stars, as plain and tasty as a plateful of red beans and rice….
* * *
More as it happens.
UPDATE: A friend writes:

What a wonderful story about the recording of “Hello, Dolly!” But why are you reading e-mails? The faster you finish, the faster we can all read it!

Hey, I’ve already written 1,600 more words so far today–a fellow has to have some rest!

“In playing for contemporary composers, I’ve always felt that the ones I respected were not inflexible about what you did to their music. They permitted a certain degree of freedom. I’ve found that the lesser composers were the ones who insisted, no, I said mezzo piano and that’s not my conception of mezzo piano. I think the great composers believe their work will endure even if one does not adhere to the exact indications of the music.”
Isidore Cohen (quoted in Nicholas Delbanco, The Beaux Arts Trio: A Portrait)

I’ll be finishing the next-to-last chapter of my Louis Armstrong biography sometime today. No blogging until then!

“The first-person narrated movie rests on one dynamic. It is the story of a person reciting the one great event of their life, the one big adventure of their life.”
James Ellroy, quoted in Shadows of Suspense

Two shows in this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column, one on Broadway (Harvey Fierstein’s A Catered Affair) and one off (Liz Flahive’s From Up Here). Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
If good intentions could keep a musical open, “A Catered Affair” would run forever. I don’t know when I’ve seen a show that looked better on paper, and I liked the idea of turning Richard Brooks’ 1956 film into a stage musical so much that I was actively rooting for the results to give pleasure. Instead they’re a disappointment–one so intelligently staged and performed, however, that at times you can almost believe the show is as good as its production. Almost, but not quite: Harvey Fierstein and John Bucchino, the creators of this new stage version, have missed the spirit of the movie by a mile, and no amount of creativity on the part of their collaborators is enough to make up for their own miscalculations.
The film, adapted by Gore Vidal from one of Paddy Chayefsky’s “Philco Television Playhouse” kitchen-sink TV dramas, was a sequel of sorts to “Marty,” the Chayefsky teleplay about a lonely butcher whose 1955 screen version knocked down four Oscars. Ernest Borgnine (whose performance in the film of “Marty” had just made him a star) and Bette Davis played Tom and Aggie Hurley, a Bronx cab driver and his sourpuss wife whose daughter is about to get married to her longtime beau. Mom foolishly decides to blow the family’s savings on a fancy wedding, even though the daughter (played by Debbie Reynolds) would rather tie the knot at City Hall….
Mr. Fierstein was right to think that Mr. Vidal’s screenplay had the stuff of a musical in it, but he made three big mistakes in adapting it for the stage. The first was to put an anachronistically contemporary spin on his book by turning Aggie’s brother, played in the film by Barry Fitzgerald, into a more or less openly gay florist, and the second was to play the part himself. No doubt there were at least a couple of gay Irish Catholic florists living in the Bronx in the mid-1950s, but the notion that one of them would have had the nerve to camp it up in front of his kinfolk (“If you will kindly remove your peas and posteriors, I will take to the cloistered confines of my secret shame”) strains credulity past the breaking point.
Mistake No. 3 was to invite Mr. Bucchino to write the score. I say this with regret, for I esteem him as one of the best cabaret songwriters around. The problem is that his songs, with their pastel harmonies and introspective lyrics, have nothing in common with the working-class setting…
Speaking of kitchen-sink dramas, Liz Flahive has gone all out in “From Up Here,” setting her first Off-Broadway play in and around a Midwestern home whose costly-looking kitchen (designed by Allen Moyer) is equipped with every modern appliance known to man or woman. I can’t remember the last time I saw a show with a set that contained a dishwasher and a clothes washer. Don’t be deceived by the décor, though: Ms. Flahive is a playwright of promise who has contrived to find fresh things to say in the overworked dramatic language of domestic realism….
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Read the whole thing here.