Archives for April 16, 2009

I flew the coop earlier this afternoon and strolled across Central Park to see the Bonnard show at the Metropolitan Museum. More on Monday, but since the show closes on Sunday, I’ll just say for now that if you’re going to be in or near New York City between now and then, you really, really need to see “Bonnard: The Late Interiors.” I can’t believe I almost missed it!
Make haste.

I just got the following e-mail from Larry Cooper, the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editor in Boston who is in charge of the manuscript of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong:

The proofs just arrived, early by a few days. Where shall I send them? I will wait for your reply.

No, I’m not shaking like a leaf–yet. But ask me again tomorrow….

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Exit the King (disturbingly black comedy, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)

• God of Carnage * (comedy, PG-13, closes July 19, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Distracted (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 17, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes May 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It) (one-act plays, PG-13, vastly too complicated for children, closes Apr. 25, reviewed here)

A good biographer will do just about anything to comb snippets of apocrypha out of his book. Fortunately, Louis Armstrong almost always told the truth about himself, but anyone who gets interviewed once or twice a week throughout the second half of his life is likely to streamline some of his favorite stories, and in writing Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong I did everything I could to track down the earliest possible primary sources for Armstrong’s oft-told tales.

Here’s one of the best-known ones, told in the trumpeter’s own words:

A few weeks before Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans came out, he appeared on Stage Show, a TV series hosted by Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. “We was going to play ‘Rampart Street Parade,'” he remembered, “and we’re discussing what tempo to play it, and I say, ‘Why don’t you play it not too slow, not too fast, just half fast.’ The audience finally picked it up….From then on–couldn’t nothing follow it.” That was Satchmo: he took his music seriously, but never himself.

Everyone familiar with Armstrong’s life has heard that story, and I had no particular reason to doubt its veracity. But did Satchmo really, truly toss off that double entendre on live network TV in 1954? The version of the story that I quoted in the original manuscript of Pops is the one that he told an interviewer fourteen years after the fact. Might he have been painting the lily?

While I did manage to establish that Armstrong had in fact appeared on Stage Show on August 21, 1954, I had to take his word for it that he’d really said what he said he said, and that was where I left it–until last week, when I made a discovery that made me jump up and down with glee. Not only was the audio portion of Armstrong’s 1954 appearance on Stage Show recorded, but a sound file containing his introduction to “South Rampart Street Parade” has actually been posted on the Web. (To listen to the file on your computer, stop all five of the mp3 files on the page in question, then restart the one marked “Click Here for Louis Armstrong.”)

I listened to it with my mouth hanging open. Then I rewrote the last lines of the tenth chapter of Pops accordingly:

A few weeks before Satchmo came out, he appeared on Stage Show, a TV series hosted by Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey on which the three musicians played “South Rampart Street Parade” together. “I think we should get together on the tempos there, right?” Armstrong told the brothers on camera. “I’ll tell ya whatcha do now. Not too slow, not too fast–just half-fast.” The studio audience roared with delight. That was Satchmo: he took his music seriously, but never himself.

It’s true! It’s true!

UPDATE, 2019: Alas, the site in question no longer exists, but I swear that I heard the clip in question a decade ago!

“Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.”
René Daumal, The Lie of the Truth