Archives for November 2013

A production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera The Medium, originally telecast on Studio One in 1948 and featuring Marie Powers and other members of the original Broadway cast:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.”
Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century

I’m departing for Washington, D.C., very early this morning and will be more or less inaccessible for the next forty-eight hours. Not only does Gotham Books, the publishers of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, have me booked as tight as an apple skin throughout my stay in the nation’s capital, but I’ll be on the jump as soon as I get off the train in New York on Wednesday.
Needless to say, the blog will continue as usual, but I won’t. See you on Thursday!

From 2003:

Wild Strawberries is a beautiful movie–one that knows how beautiful it is, and wants you to know, too. The older I get, the less readily I warm to that kind of art, be it film, painting, music, the novel, or what have you. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy revisiting Wild Strawberries after a quarter-century. I did, very much. But I don’t know whether I’ll ever feel the need to see it again, whereas I rarely let a year go by without watching The Rules of the Game. Which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about me, aesthetically speaking….

Read the whole thing here.

“A film is–or should be–more like music than like fiction.”
Stanley Kubrick (quoted in Norman Kagan, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick)

Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington continues to draw attention in the media–too much, really, for me to report in detail, so I’ll stick to the highlights:
• Tom Nolan, Artie Shaw’s biographer, reviewed Duke for the San Francisco Chronicle:

The Duke was a star, whose characteristic-seeming confidence, elegant personality and visual flair were essential components of his public identity.
Rex Stewart, one of his longtime sidemen, described how Ellington looked when he came onstage one night in the 1930s at Harlem’s Cotton Club: “Duke made his dramatic entrance attired in a salmon-colored jacket and fawn-gray slacks and shoes. The shirt, I remember, was a tab-collared oyster shade and his tie some indefinable pastel between salmon and apricot. The audience cheered for at least two minutes.”
All elements of Ellington’s colorful, complicated, oft-secretive life–public and private, musical and personal–are brought to similar vivid life in this grand and engrossing biography…

Read the whole thing here.
• Michael Giltz reviewed Duke with like enthusiasm for the Huffington Post:

With verve and insight, Teachout details Ellington’s lucky breaks, from that stint at the Cotton Club to musicians’ strikes that paradoxically helped him out. Naturally Teachout is sharp on the music in all its dizzying forms, from classic songs like “Take the ‘A’ Train” to extended works that fall in and out of favor but have proven enduring….

Read the whole thing here.
• By now I’ve given a couple of dozen radio interviews about Duke, most of which can now be heard in streaming audio on the web, with many more coming in the next few weeks. Not surprisingly, these interviews tend to cover similar ground, so I won’t burden you with a comprehensive listing, but this concise chat with Jordan Rich of Boston’s WBZ-AM, a well-informed jazz enthusiast, struck me as especially interesting.
• Kathryn Jean Lopez interviewed me for National Review Online about Duke and other matters of related interest (including my thoughts, such as they are, on Lou Reed). It’s a long and wide-ranging Q-&-A in which, among other things, I single out my favorite sentence in the book. You can read it all here.

I’ll be making two unusual out-of-town live appearances this week to promote Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington:
• Politics & Prose, the independent bookstore in Washington, D.C., where I’ve previously spoken about H.L. Mencken and Louis Armstrong, is sponsoring a Duke-related bash on Tuesday night at Bethesda Blues and Jazz Supper Club. Not only will I be speaking about, reading from, and signing copies of Duke, but a jazz quartet will be performing songs by the master. You can dine there as well, and I plan to do so–the menu looks fabulous.
The club is at 7719 Wisconsin Avenue and the show starts at seven p.m. Admission is $25. To buy a ticket or for more information, go here.
• The New Jersey Performing Arts Center is presenting a Duke Ellington tribute concert called “Portrait of Duke” on Saturday afternoon as part of its week-long James Moody Democracy of Jazz Festival. I’m the curator of and master of ceremonies for the program, which features performances by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks (about whom much more here) of original charts by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Hilary Gardner, about whose debut album I recently raved in this space, will supply the vocals. I’ll be reading excerpts from Duke and introducing rare film clips of Ellington on and off stage.
The show starts at two p.m. Admission is $49. To buy a ticket or for more information, go here.

Duke Ellington plays Billy Strayhorn’s “Lotus Blossom” in Copenhagen in 1967:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)