Two artists of note died last week.
• Charlton Heston, the better known of the pair, was a much-underrated actor whose old-age excursions into the muddy waters of political activism have had the inevitable effect of obscuring his artistic achievements. He also wrote a very good autobiography, which I reread in 2004 and blogged about with renewed enthusiasm:
Kindly omit boggling: In the Arena is one of the very few books by a movie star that is both intelligent and well-written. (Heston wrote it without benefit of a ghost, I might add–you can tell by the literary idiosyncrasies, including a decidedly shaky grasp of the Theory of the Parenthesis). Not only does Heston shed considerable light on the complex craft of film acting, but he was a class-A raconteur who dishes up polished anecdotes at every possible opportunity….
Heston was and is best known for Ben-Hur and the other historical epics he filmed in his beefcake days, but his acting got more interesting as he grew older and craggier. If you’ve never seen any of his best film performances, I strongly commend Will Penny to your attention.
• The death of Gene Puerling has yet to attract the attention of the increasingly culturally illiterate New York Times, but the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle both paid due tribute to his
great gifts. Puerling was the singer-arranger-resident genius behind the Hi-Lo’s (the superfluous apostrophe was part of the group’s official title) and the Singers Unlimited, the two greatest vocal jazz groups of the postwar era. What he didn’t know about harmony wasn’t worth knowing.
Many of the Hi-Lo’s albums have been transferred to CD in recent years, though the best one, And All That Jazz, is now out of print and hard to find. As for the Singers Unlimited, all of their recordings are collected on Magic Voices, a seven-disc boxed set. Alternatively, go to iTunes and download their luminous version of “The Shadow of Your Smile,” delicately accompanied by the Oscar Peterson Trio. If it doesn’t get you excited, have your ears examined.