Archives for November 2008

• “John Marin: Ten Masterworks in Watercolor” goes up next Thursday at Meredith Ward Fine Art and will be on display through Dec. 20. The show consists of ten works on paper by the pioneering American modernist whose virtuosity in the watercolor medium remains unrivaled. Some are from Marin’s estate, others from private collections, and most are familiar only to Marin specialists. It’s been a number of years since any of Marin’s watercolors were last on view in Manhattan, making this a rare opportunity to experience a great American painter at the peak of his powers.
For more information, go here.
• The Maria Schneider Orchestra, to which regular readers of this blog need no introduction, will be performing Nov. 25-30 (except for Thanksgiving) at the Jazz Standard. It’s become a tradition of sorts for Maria and her big band to set up shop at the Jazz Standard during Thanksgiving week. Alas, they don’t appear nearly often enough in the New York area, so tables are likely to be snapped up fast. Don’t delay–reserve today.
For more information, go here and scroll down.
• Speaking of my favorite New York nightclub, Roger Kellaway’s Live at the Jazz Standard, a two-CD set from IPO Recordings, was released today. I wrote the liner notes, which are based on a posting that I knocked out immediately after coming home from the opening night of the 2006 engagement at which this album was recorded:

Kellaway is currently fronting a piano-guitar-bass trio, which he claims to be the fulfillment of a “childhood dream.” Oscar Peterson led just such a group in the Fifties, and Kellaway, a lifelong Peterson fan who has always enjoyed playing without a drummer, knows how to make the most of the elbow room afforded by that wonderfully flexible instrumentation. Russell Malone is the guitarist, Jay Leonhart the bassist. The three men opened the set with a super-sly version of Benny Golson’s “Killer Joe,” and within four bars you knew they were going to swing really, really hard. So they did, with Kellaway pitching his patented curve balls all night long, including a bitonal arrangement of Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash” and what surely must have been the first time that the Sons of the Pioneers’ “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” has ever been performed by a jazz group.
Everybody in the band (including vibraphonist Stefon Harris, who joined the trio for “Cotton Tail,” “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and “52nd Street Theme”) was smoking. Kellaway, though, was…well, I really don’t have words to describe the proliferating creativity and rhythmic force of his piano playing. Sarah did pretty well, though: “Did you see my jaw drop?” she asked me when it was all over. Russell Malone, with whom I chatted between sets, put it even more tersely. “That man is scary,” he said, shaking his head.

Yes, it was that good and then some, and then some more–and now you can hear what you missed.

“Pictures can work perfectly; life cannot.”
Helen Frankenthaler (quoted in The Art Newspaper, June 2000)

Louis Armstrong was not only a great artist but one of the brightest stars in the sky of America’s popular culture. One of the signs of his admittance to that pantheon was the frequency with which Al Hirschfeld drew him. For most of his long lifetime, Hirschfeld was America’s best-known and most successful caricaturist. To be drawn by him was like being the mystery guest on What’s My Line? It meant that you’d really, truly arrived.

So far as I know, Armstrong first achieved that distinction in 1939, the year that he played Bottom on Broadway in Swingin’ the Dream, a swing-era musical version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that closed after just thirteen performances. Hirschfeld drew him for the New York Times that season. The failure of Swingin’ the Dream put an end to his brief stage career, but not to his popularity, and from then on he would figure prominently in Hirschfeld’s gallery of celebrities.

I wanted very much to include a Hirschfeld caricature of Louis Armstrong in A Cluster of Sunlight, my Armstrong biography, both as an indication of his renown and because Hirschfeld’s portrayals of Armstrong are vividly suggestive of the way in which he was perceived by the public at large. In the prologue to A Cluster of Sunlight, I talk about the contrast between “the grinning jester with the gleaming white handkerchief who sang ‘Hello, Dolly!’ and ‘What a Wonderful World’ night after night for adoring audiences” and the private man whom I got to know by listening to the private conversations that he taped for posterity throughout the last quarter-century of his life:

Off stage he could be moody and profane, and he knew how to hold a grudge. “I got a simple rule about everybody,” he told a journalist. “If you don’t treat me right–shame on you!” While he was anything but cynical, he had no illusions about the world in which he lived, whose follies he summed up with pointed wit. A friend dropped in on him after a gig and asked what was new. “Nothin’ new,” he said. “White folks still ahead.” He was as clear-headed about his own fame: “I can’t go no place they don’t roll up the drum, you have to stand up and take a bow, get up on the stage. And sitting in an audience, I’m signing programs for hours all through the show. And you got to sign them to be in good faith. And afterwards all those hangers-on get you crowded in at the table–and you know you’re going to pay the check.”

At the same time, I learned in the course of writing my book that Armstrong’s public face was not a mask. Though he was more complicated than he let on, he was in the end what he seemed to be, an essentially happy man who lived to give pleasure to his fans. In later years, to be sure, his minstrel-show mugging made many younger Americans uncomfortable, black and white alike. Ossie Davis, who co-starred with Armstrong in his next-to-last feature film, Sammy Davis Jr.’s A Man Called Adam, detested his good-humored clowning and wrote sharply about it: “Everywhere we’d look, there’d be Louis–sweat popping, eyes bugging, mouth wide open, grinning, oh my Lord, from ear to ear….mopping his brow, ducking his head, doing his thing for the white man.” But Armstrong’s stage persona was part of who he was, and it is impossible to understand him without accepting that fact and coming to terms with it.

The Armstrong whom Al Hirschfeld drew was the Armstrong whom Ossie Davis hated–and he wasn’t alone. One of the things that I discovered while researching my book was that Time commissioned a Hirschfeld caricature of Armstrong in 1998 that the editors chose not to publish after black staffers at the magazine complained that it was racially insensitive. While I didn’t include this story in A Cluster of Sunlight because it was peripheral to the narrative, it made me feel even more strongly that I needed to reproduce one of Hirschfeld’s caricatures in my book in order to provide the fullest possible context for my discussion of the changing ways in which black and white listeners perceived Armstrong throughout his long career.

The caricature that I had in mind was drawn in 1991. It is one of Hirschfeld’s most complex and evocative pieces of portraiture, a little-known color lithograph called “Satchmo!” that embodies what Philip Larkin once called “the stageshow Armstrong” more completely than any drawing of Louis Armstrong that I have ever seen–and I’ve seen plenty.

To be sure, I have no doubt that some contemporary viewers will see in “Satchmo!” the Armstrong to whom Shelby Steele referred in A Bound Man, his 2007 book about Barack Obama:

The relentlessly beaming smile, the handkerchief dabbing away the sweat, the reflexive bowing, the exaggerated humility and graciousness–all this signaled that he would not breach the manners of segregation, the propriety that required him to be both cheerful and less than fully human.

But I see another Armstrong in Hirschfeld’s drawing, the one whom the black jazz pianist Jaki Byard knew and loved. “As I watched him and talked with him, I felt he was the most natural man,” Byard said. “Playing, talking, singing, he was so perfectly natural the tears came to my eyes.”

Who is right? That’s for the reader of A Cluster of Sunlight to decide, which is why I paid a visit last Wednesday to the Margo Feiden Galleries, the representatives of Al Hirschfeld’s estate. I was anxious, having been told more than once that it was difficult and costly to obtain permission to reproduce Hirschfeld’s caricatures. Neither proved to be true. Within a matter of minutes, the deal was done, and I spent the remainder of my visit inspecting the gallery, whose walls are thickly hung with original caricatures, many of them of well-known jazz musicians (Duke Ellington was another of Hirschfeld’s preferred subjects).

Image #31, as “Satchmo!” is now known to Harcourt, my publisher, will be the final photograph reproduced in A Cluster of Sunlight. This is the caption I wrote for it:

“Grinning, oh my Lord, from ear to ear”: Many now feel ill at ease with the old-fashioned, crowd-pleasing entertainer portrayed in this 1991 caricature by Al Hirschfeld, but there was nothing false about Satchmo’s unselfconscious smile.

I hope you agree.

Incidentally, the subtitle of Shelby Steele’s book was Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. He was wrong about that, too.

Has music ever been a more direct source for your painting, in a way that looking at a master has informed your painting?
Not directly, but music is often essential background while I work. But if, for instance, I am listening to Mozart or Vivaldi or some great baroque piece, and I am lying there in the dark before I go to sleep, I can see it drawn. Then I begin to see how and why the harmony occurs, and you might get a whole, beautiful, patterned order, that is so pleasurable and so generous, and is endlessly good. You can hear it over and over again, and it is always giving you something. Joy, order, invention, pleasure, truth.
Helen Frankenthaler, interviewed in The Art Newspaper (June 2000)

Gérard Mortier resigned from the New York City Opera earlier today, leaving that already shaky institution in desperate straits. The New York Times broke the story here. Here’s the heart of the matter:

Speaking from his apartment in Ghent, Belgium, Mr. Mortier said he decided to resign when it became clear that the board would not give him the money needed to produce a meaningful slate of opera productions. He said that from the start he had been promised a budget of $60 million, a number even mentioned in his contract. But the board was prepared to approve only $36 million, he said, not much more than the basic fixed costs of running the company, leaving him little room for innovative productions.
“I told them with the best will I can’t do that,” Mr. Mortier said. “I cannot go to run a company that has less than the smallest company in France.” Mr. Mortier is in the final year of running the Paris National Opera, which has a budget closer to $300 million. “You don’t need me for that,” he said.
Previous City Opera budgets had been around $42 million, not including overspending that created a $15 million deficit….

In June I wrote a “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal arguing that Mortier’s programming innovations might well end in disaster for the company. Under the circumstances, it seems appropriate to reprint that column in its entirety. Here it is.
* * *
New York’s second biggest opera company is closing up shop–temporarily. Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater, home of the New York City Opera, will be undergoing major renovations throughout City Opera’s 2008-09 season. The company had originally planned to present a series of concert opera performances in various locations around the city, then decided to trim costs by cutting back to a single semistaged version of Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra” that will be be performed at Carnegie Hall next Jan. 15 and 16. In addition, City Opera’s orchestra will be giving five concerts of modern music, one in each borough of New York City.
That’s all, folks.
Not until the fall of 2009 will the New York City Opera resume its regular schedule, and when it does, the repertoire will consists of six 20th-century operas. No Handel, no Mozart, no Puccini–just Claude Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” Leos Janacek’s “The Makropulos Case,” Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” Benjamin Britten’s “Death in Venice,” Olivier Messiaen’s “St. Francis of Assisi,” and Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach.” All of these works are widely admired, but none has ever been mistaken for a box-office draw.
Gérard Mortier, City Opera’s new general manager, is the man behind this risky roll of the dice. Mr. Mortier, who previously dished up postmodern opera at the Salzburg Festival and the Paris Opera, has said that New York needs “a new vision in opera,” and his first season definitely fills the bill. But he doesn’t think that New York needs a new opera house, and so City Opera is abandoning its long-standing attempt to move out of the theater it shares with the New York City Ballet and build one of its own.
To be sure, Mr. Mortier is well aware of the inadequacies of the State Theater, which was built with dance, not opera, in mind. Among other things, the house was designed in such a way as to deaden the sound of dancing feet–the opposite of what should happen in an opera house, where the goal is to make the singers on stage more audible, not less. Hence the renovations, whose purpose is not only to spruce up the shabby-looking auditorium but to improve its inadequate acoustics by installing an orchestra pit that can be raised and lowered at will.
I wish Mr. Mortier all the luck in the world, but I fear that he may have gotten things backwards. Paul Kellogg, his predecessor, had already breathed new artistic life into the once-moribund company by presenting a smartly staged, shrewdly chosen mix of operas that ranged from baroque showpieces to brand-new American works. As Mr. Kellogg saw it, the company’s main problem was that it performed in a 2,800-seat auditorium that was both acoustically flawed and too big to suit the theatrically serious productions he favored. After 9/11, he pushed hard to build a three-theater complex at Ground Zero, a plan that I backed on this page five years ago. Alas, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation turned up its nose at Mr. Kellogg’s ambitious scheme, and now that the redevelopment of Ground Zero has gone sour, the chances of building an opera house there are…well, zero. That’s why Mr. Mortier has chosen to renovate City Opera’s currrent home rather than trying to build a new one.
While I see his point, I can’t help but wonder what effect the company’s year-long hiatus will have on the loyalty of its current subscribers. Will they find new ways to spend their money? And even if they don’t, what will they think of the fare that Mr. Mortier plans to offer them in 2009? In Europe he has long been identified with ultratrendy, government-subsidized updates of familiar operas, most notoriously a “Fledermaus” in which Johann Strauss’ lovable characters snorted cocaine and got beaten up by Nazis. If that’s what he has in mind for, say, “Pelléas,” I have a feeling that his stay in New York might end up being shorter than he expects.
But Mr. Mortier is right about one thing. The New York City Opera needs to try something different–not because Mr. Kellogg’s productions were inadequate, but because the Metropolitan Opera, City Opera’s neighbor at Lincoln Center, has changed its once-stodgy theatrical ways. Under Joe Volpe, the Met offered a steady diet of blandly staged warhorses spiced up with an occasional dash of Eurotrash. But Peter Gelb, his successor, is bringing in stage-savvy directors like John Doyle and Bartlett Sher, and while the results so far have been artistically uneven, they have also brought the Met into direct competition with City Opera, which for many years had a near-monopoly on imaginatively staged large-house opera in New York.
So how does Mr. Mortier propose to fight back against the 10,000-pound gorilla next door? By offering the public a megadose of modernism. And he might be right, too, since under-40 classical-music fans appear to be more open to new sounds than their parents. If, on the other hand, he’s guessing wrong about the open-mindedness of his audience, then Gérard Mortier may be remembered as the man who turned out the lights at the New York City Opera–for keeps.

I’m back in New York and feeling grumpy: today’s Wall Street Journal drama column contains thumbs-down reviews of Black Watch and Romantic Poetry. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
What is war like? Those who, like me, have never seen combat in person often look to art to tell us what we missed, while pacifist playwrights seek to portray war in order to persuade us that it is ever and always a bad thing. Yet both groups ignore the warning of Walt Whitman, who worked in the army hospitals of Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, a harrowing experience which persuaded him that “the real war will never get in the books.” Nor has the National Theatre of Scotland succeeded in putting it on stage in a believable fashion in “Black Watch,” a theatrical spectacle about the Iraq war whose return engagement at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse has just been extended through Dec. 21….
“Black Watch”‘s portrayal of modern war is aestheticized and prettified almost beyond recognition. Much of the show consists of a series of tableau-like montages whose elaborate choreography is meant to juxtapose the regiment’s ceremonial duties with the bloody realities of war. Yet those realities are carefully kept at arm’s length, just as the composite personalities of the soldiers seen in “Black Watch” are never allowed to emerge save in flashes.
Of course there are many ways to show war on stage, and some of them, like Shakespeare’s battle scenes or the dream-like vignettes of violent death woven into “Company B,” Paul Taylor’s World War II ballet, are highly aestheticized. But these great works of art never pretend to be anything other than works of art. They do not offer themselves as documentary slices of life, and so we feel no need to trust their makers to tell the truth. Nor do Shakespeare or Taylor ever indulge in the tear-jerking sentimentality to which “Black Watch” not infrequently stoops…
John Patrick Shanley is a gifted but uneven writer in whose authorial personality tough-minded realism and dopey whimsy exist side by side. When the former is in command, we get “Doubt” and “Defiance”; when the latter takes charge, we get “Joe Versus the Volcano” and “Romantic Poetry,” the dreadful new Off-Broadway musical to which Mr. Shanley has contributed the book and lyrics. It’s about a cellphone salesman from Newark who longs to be a poet, which tells you just about all you need to know about the plot, in which–are you sitting down?–love conquers all….
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Read the whole thing here.