Archives for October 7, 2014

Since the paperback edition of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, my most recent book, will be coming out on November 4, it gives me special pleasure to pass along the news that Duke has just won an ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for “outstanding print, broadcast and new media coverage of music.”

According to the press release:

The Timothy White Award for Outstanding Musical Biography in the pop music field recognizes Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, written Terry Teachout and published by Gotham Books. This award honors the memory of the late Tim White (1952-2002), the author of many acclaimed musical biographies and an Editor-in-Chief of Billboard magazine….

The Awards were established in 1967 to honor the memory of composer, critic and commentator Deems Taylor, who died in 1966 after a distinguished career that included six years as President of ASCAP. The Awards have been renamed this year to also honor the memory of Virgil Thomson (1896–1989), one of the leading American composers and critics, and a former member of the ASCAP board of directors. The 46th ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Awards are made possible by the generous support of ASCAP, The ASCAP Foundation and the Virgil Thomson Foundation.

I rejoice in this great honor.

For more information about the prizes, go here.

I was recently interviewed for an upcoming HBO documentary about Frank Sinatra, during which I had occasion to recall the moment that I first started taking Sinatra seriously. It happened in 1973, when he resumed performing in public after an abortive “retirement” two years earlier. Among his first appearances was an NBC special called Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back. My family watched it, of course, because my father was a Sinatra fan of long standing, but I wasn’t expecting any miracles. I was, after all, a high-school senior who’d never been able to see what my father saw in Ol’ Blue Eyes. To me he was yesterday’s news, a self-important man in a toupee who recorded stiff-as-a-board cover versions of songs like “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and “Sweet Caroline” and pretended to be hip. What could he possibly have had to say to me?

The answer came when Sinatra sang “Send in the Clowns,” the show’s next-to-last number. Not only had I never before heard that now-standard ballad, but I didn’t even know who Stephen Sondheim was, being a small-town boy who lived far from Broadway. Yet I was stunned by the seriousness of both the song and Sinatra’s performance, which seemed to come from another world infinitely far removed from the ring-a-ding-ding midlife-crisis antics that I’d found so offputting. “You know, there really must be something to this guy,” I told myself, and resolved on the spot to dig deeper into his music.

I still have a clear mental picture of that performance. I remember how Sinatra walked to the lip of the stage, sat on the steps as the lights went down, said a few brief words about Sondheim and A Little Night Music, then started singing. But when I described the scene for HBO, I immediately added that I’d only seen Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back once, when it aired in 1973, and that it was more than possible that my middle-aged memory was misleading me.

As soon as I got home, I went straight to YouTube and started searching, and mere minutes later I was watching a clip of Sinatra singing “Send in the Clowns” on NBC forty-one years ago. Sure enough, it was just as I recalled it: Sinatra sits on the steps, lit only by a tight pinspot, and sings the song with total involvement and unaffected simplicity, his face a grave and reverend mask of remembered sorrow.

How extraordinary that those four life-changing minutes should have etched themselves so precisely on my memory. That’s what great art can do to a susceptible boy.

From 2004:

Here’s something you probably don’t know: Evelyn Waugh revised several of his novels, some quite extensively, when preparing the uniform edition of his books that was published in England in the early Sixties. Don’t be embarrassed–many of Waugh’s most ardent American fans are unaware of these revisions. The reason for their ignorance is that the editions of Waugh’s novels that have circulated most widely in this country, the Little, Brown trade paperbacks, are straight reprints of the first American editions.

I mention this because I only just discovered that the Everyman’s Library edition of Brideshead Revisited, the novel Waugh edited most ruthlessly, not only reprints the revised version but includes an introductory essay by Frank Kermode in which Waugh’s changes are discussed at length and in detail….

Read the whole thing here.

“Writing has a long gestation because the writer never knows what might prove useful. If he is, as Henry James suggests he ought to be, ‘one of those on whom nothing is lost,’ he has no spare time, no ‘down time,’ no time to kill. A hastily written pen-for-hire piece of journalism may have decades-old origins unknown even to the writer. Every thought, every experience, every book read, might come in handy.”

Patrick Kurp, “They Never Stop Working”