Archives for October 18, 2011

I spend so much time seeing plays and musicals these days that I don’t get to spend nearly enough time doing anything else. When I went to the Blue Note on Sunday night to hear Pat Metheny and Larry Grenadier, I realized with a start that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to a nightclub. Such is the paradoxical fate of the erstwhile generalist who mutates into a specialist in midlife: it’s immeasurably rewarding to immerse yourself in a single discipline, but it cuts you off from all sorts of other good things.

Fortunately, I bobbed to the surface in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, for Metheny and Grenadier gave the kind of performance that you’re lucky to see a half-dozen times in your life, totally focused and hypnotically involving. It was ecstasy-making to watch them move with nonchalant grace from “Bright Size Life,” the song in which Metheny helped codify the language of fusion thirty-seven years ago, to an oblique, near-abstract, hard-swinging blues, sounding equally at ease in both tunes.

I had the good luck to be seated ten feet from the bandstand, and to be sitting with Julia Dollison and Kerry Marsh, two old friends who are themselves jazz musicians of the highest accomplishment. (I wrote the liner notes for Julia’s first album, which was co-produced by Kerry, her husband.) All three of us know Pat a bit, and we got a chance to chat with him after the show, which was almost as much fun as hearing him play. He is the nicest and most modest fellow imaginable–you’d never guess that he’s also one of the most important and influential jazz guitarists of the postwar era–and it was pure pleasure to catch up and swap stories.

Listening to Sunday’s performance had a stirring effect on me. As I said to Julia and Kerry afterward, “That wasn’t a set–it was a way of life.” For me, of course, it was a reminder of the way of life that I practiced many years ago, and to which my friends have consecrated their own lives. I like to call myself a recovering musician, a line that rarely fails to get a laugh, perhaps because there’s a certain amount of truth in it. I wrote about that in this space five years ago:

Somebody asked me once if I were a frustrated musician. “No,” I said, “I’m a fulfilled writer.” But that doesn’t mean I never think about what might have been, much less what used to be. The way I feel about having once been a musician is not unlike the way some reformed alcoholics feel about booze. They know they can’t live with it anymore, but they also know how much they liked it, and they remember, as clearly as if it were this morning, how good that last drink tasted. I remember, too.

Needless to say, my playing days are over. I’m a full-time writer now, for better or worse, and I feel even more fulfilled now that my professional life encompasses both criticism and writing for the stage. Nor do I regret having chosen to fling myself into the world of theater, whose endless bounty feeds my soul far more than adequately. But as I packed my bag and prepared to fly to San Francisco, where I’ll be seeing Kevin Spacey in Richard III tomorrow night, I found myself feeling no less grateful for having had the chance to dip my toe into the once-familiar stream of jazz again, if only for a night. It was good to be home.

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Bill Evans plays “Time Remembered”:

In light of the recent death of Steve Jobs, The Wall Street Journal has given me an extra drama column today in which to review Mike Daisey’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Here’s an excerpt.
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Mike Daisey is the inventor of his own pigeonhole. He calls himself a “storyteller” and specializes in semi-improvised autobiographical monologues of the kind that made Spalding Gray semi-famous. But his “stories” tend to be issue-driven and to have a political edge, which makes them seem more like theatrical journalism than storytelling. In “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” Mr. Daisey’s journalistic side comes to the fore, in part because he had the luck (if that’s the word) to bring his new show to the Public Theater immediately after the death of its subject. Even if Mr. Jobs were still alive, this show, in which Mr. Daisey weaves together his experience as a technogeek with the story of a visit that he paid to the Chinese factories in which Apple’s products are assembled, would still have a journalistic feel.
All that said, Mr. Daisey’s new monologue is first and foremost a work of theatrical art, just as Mr. Daisey himself, though he is not an actor in the ordinary sense of the word, is an awesomely gifted stage performer. Indeed, it is so strong a piece of theater that you can’t help but wonder about its journalistic soundness. About that I’m not qualified to render judgment, but I can vouch for its theatrical soundness: “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” ranks alongside “Follies” as the most exciting show in town.
Mr. Daisey used to worship at the Apple altar, and Mr. Jobs, he claims, was “the only hero I ever had.” Then he went to Shenzhen, the city where Apple products are put together in huge sweatshop-like factories that reportedly make use of child labor. Mr. Daisey claims to have talked his way into some of these factories, and to have spoken to some of the leaders of the illegal “secret unions” that are struggling to improve conditions in Shenzhen. What he saw shocked him to the core…
Mr. Daisey is the least glamorous figure imaginable, a sweaty, bulbous fellow with a foot-wide mouth whose demeanor suggests the kind of smart-ass second banana you might expect to encounter in a high-school romcom. But no sooner do the proceedings get underway than he starts to work his coarsely irresistible magic. Imagine an essay by Tom Wolfe being read out loud by John Belushi and you’ll get some idea of how he comes across onstage. His klaxon-horn delivery is that of a stand-up comedian, but it acquires an energizing tightness of focus from the fact that he remains seated throughout the show, using his hands like a mime to add color to his words….
The trouble with “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” as with all theatrical journalism, is that Mr. Daisey is in essence asking us to take his word for it. He hasn’t brought back pictures or named names, and the artful anger with which he tells his tale inevitably makes it still more suspect. You don’t have to be a puritan to prefer that facts be served straight up. Still, Mr. Daisey deserves much credit for telling his audience things it almost certainly doesn’t want to hear…
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Read the whole thing here.

“She smiled, as only the very old can, intimating an acceptance of things that once could not be accepted.”
William Brodrick, The Sixth Lamentation