Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.
My father, who was born in 1926, loved the popular music of his generation, especially the big bands of the Thirties and Forties (Stan Kenton was his all-time favorite) and the pop singers of the Forties and Fifties (he favored Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and June Christy). He started buying records of his own when he was in high school, and eventually amassed a good-sized collection of 78s, 45s, and long-playing albums, to which I was allowed to listen whenever I liked.
Alas, he started to lose his hearing in the Sixties, and a time came when he no longer listened to music for pleasure save when driving. By then, though, it had become surpassingly clear that I had a not-considerable amount of musical talent, and my parents went well out of their way to make it possible for me to pursue that talent. I started studying violin in the elementary-school music program of Smalltown, U.S.A., in 1966, and from then until I graduated from high school eight years later, I would spend much of my free time playing, listening to, and thinking about music.
It was, of course, classical music that I played on violin, but I’d taken a a shine to jazz and big-band music long before that. While my father wasn’t specifically interested in jazz, he picked up a fair number of full-fledged jazz albums over the years. After $64,000 Jazz, the first one to which I listened regularly and closely was In a Mellotone, an anthology of sixteen extremely well-chosen 78 sides cut by the greatest of Duke Ellington’s bands, the one that he led from 1940 to 1942.
Released in 1956, the year of my birth, In a Mellotone featured most of Ellington’s top soloists, including Johnny Hodges on alto saxophone, Tricky Sam Nanton on trombone, Ben Webster on tenor saxophone, and Cootie Williams on trumpet, and it contained several of the Ellington band’s best-remembered compositions, among them “Cotton Tail,” “Main Stem,” “Rumpus in Richmond,” “Perdido,” “A Portrait of Bert Williams,” and the title tune, a medium-tempo swinger that became and has remained a jam-session staple.
The track that hit me hardest, though, was “Sepia Panorama,” which featured Jimmy Blanton, the first bassist ever to become a major jazz soloist. I had only just started teaching myself how to play that notoriously unwieldy instrument, and Blanton’s slender, penetrating sound and breathtaking technical facility were worlds away from the simple one-and-three bass parts heard on most of the pop and country records played on the radio in those days. I didn’t know anything about Blanton, but I instinctively understood that I wanted to play the way he did, and within a few months I was capable of plucking out a more-than-approximate facsimile of his introductory solo. If anything in particular made me long to be a bass player, it was hearing “Sepia Panorama” at the age of twelve.
Beyond that, what could I possibly have made of the Blanton-Webster band, as this Ellington group is known to jazz aficionados, in 1968? The fact is that I took it for granted. It was, after all, one of countless musical discoveries that I made around that time, and no one in Smalltown knew enough to tell me that Ellington was a genius and In a Mellotone a landmark of American music. I must have assumed that this was what big-band music was supposed to sound like, and it took rather longer for me to understand that the Blanton-Webster band was to jazz what Men Without Women was to short stories.
Forty-five years later, I devoted the better part of two chapters of Duke, my 2013 biography of Ellington, to the Blanton-Webster band. The heart of the matter is in this paragraph:
Even the dullest of dullards finally figured out that the records [Ellington] cut in 1940 were setting a new standard, not just for him but for jazz in general, and today the recordings of what has come to be known as “the Blanton-Webster band” are generally thought to mark the summit of his compositional achievement. Long before his death, that view was enough of a commonplace for Ellington to find it oppressive. “I find I have all these other lifetimes to compete with,” he said. In time he found the competition so irksome that he relegated the Blanton-Webster years to a single sentence in Music Is My Mistress: “During this period—1940-41—we produced some very good music.” He had a point, for the band continued to play on a high level long after Blanton died, just as Ellington continued to write first-rate pieces. But never again would he do so with such consistency, nor would any of his later bands strike so perfect a balance of virtuosity and idiosyncrasy.
That, however, was in 2013. In 1968, I would have been content to assure you that In a Mellotone was a great album and that the guy playing bass on “Sepia Panorama” was…well, I probably wouldn’t have thought to call him a “motherfucker.” At least not yet, that is: I still had a lot to learn.
(To be continued)
* * *
“Sepia Panorama,” composed by Duke Ellington (with the unacknowledged collaboration of Billy Strayhorn) and recorded by the Ellington band in 1940. The bassist is Jimmy Blanton and the tenor saxophonist is Ben Webster:
“Sepia Panorama,” recorded by the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1988. The arrangement is by John Lewis, the group’s pianist, and the bassist is Percy Heath:
Dock Boggs plays and sings “Pretty Polly” at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival. Before the performance, he talks about making his first phonograph records in New York in 1927:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review the off-Broadway opening of Soft Power. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Talk about timing: “Soft Power,” the new David Henry Hwang-Jeanine Tesori musical about Chinese-American cultural diplomacy, has opened at the exact moment when relations between the Trump administration and mainland China have become impossibly fraught. The deftness with which Mr. Hwang and Ms. Tesori juggle reality and fantasy can’t help but put you in mind of the real world, in which two deeply dissimilar cultures, one of them a democracy weathering a populist convulsion and the other an order-worshipping authoritarian state, seek to come to profitable terms with each other.
If that doesn’t sound much like a good old-fashioned Broadway musical…well, neither did Stephen Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” back in 1976. And while I’m not quite ready to call “Soft Power” a Sondheim-quality masterpiece after a single viewing, I can already say that I don’t remember when I last saw a musical that was this smart—and touching.
Mr. Hwang and Ms. Tesori describe “Soft Power” as “a play with a musical.” DHH (Francis Jue), the protagonist of the play, is Mr. Hwang, more or less, and the musical around which the play is wrapped is a fevered dream that he has after being stabbed in the neck by a thug and nearly dying (which really happened to Mr. Hwang). In the show, DHH is invited by Xūe Xíng (Conrad Ricamora), a Shanghai theatrical producer, to turn a hit Chinese movie romcom called “Stick to Your Mistake” (yes, it’s imaginary, and it sounds better in Chinese) into a Broadway musical that will be, like Mr. Hwang’s own “Aida,” a “world-wide smash.” DHH doesn’t find the proposition practical: In the film, a married couple pulled apart by love decides to stay together instead of pursuing individual happiness, a Chinese-style denouement that is nothing like that of a Broadway show. Still, a job’s a job, so he goes to work anyway, discovering in the process that Xūe is caught up in an extramarital relationship similar to the one portrayed in “Stick to Your Mistake.”…
That’s where the musical comes in. What Xūe wants DHH to do is write a show that will persuade Western viewers of the superiority of the Chinese way. “What a truly great civilization achieves,” he explains, “is ‘soft power’—through our ideas, inventions, culture—to change the way people think.” This, Xūe believes, is what such great Broadway musicals of the past as “The King and I” have done, and his hope is that “Stick to Your Mistake” will similarly “bring Chinese values to the world.”
So what kind of musical does DHH dream up in his delirium? A crazy parody of “The King and I” in which Xūe and Zoe (Alyse Alan Louis), his American mistress, play the principal characters….
In the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review an off-Broadway revival of Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
“Molly Sweeney,” Brian Friel’s 1994 play about a 41-year-old woman blind from early childhood onward whose sight is unexpectedly restored by surgery, hasn’t been done in New York since the Irish Repertory Theatre’s superb 2011 production. Now Keen Company, one of my favorite off-Broadway troupes, is presenting a small-scale revival of this three-hander that is noteworthy for an unusual piece of casting: Pamela Sabaugh, the first low-vision actor ever to play Molly, is reprising the groundbreaking performance she gave at Philadelphia’s Amaryllis Theatre Company 12 years ago, this time in a version staged by Jonathan Silverstein, Keen’s artistic director. I didn’t see Ms. Sabaugh in Philadelphia, but it’s hard to imagine anything better than her calm, centered acting as the Molly of this production, who discovers that the world of sight she was once forced to imagine is not so miraculous as she had always supposed.
I was struck by the subtlety with which Ms. Sabaugh and Mr. Silverstein bring out an aspect of the play that was not fully clear to me when I first saw it: Strong as she seems to be, Molly is in truth a victim, a woman to whom men do things for reasons of their own….
Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums every weekday in the order in which I first heard them.
9. The Beatles, The Beatles (Apple)
I knew a certain amount about the Beatles when I first heard the White Album, as The Beatles is universally known, in 1969. Like all my elementary-school classmates, I’d seen them on The Ed Sullivan Show, and even though I had yet to purchase my first full-fledged rock album, I’d since been introduced to a fair number of their singles by listening to the radio and watching the animated-cartoon series called The Beatles that ran on ABC every Saturday morning from 1965 to 1969. It wasn’t very good—in fact, it was perfectly awful—but some of the songs, “Paperback Writer” and “Penny Lane” in particular, did catch my ear. Even so, I wouldn’t have called myself a Beatles fan: I was much more interested in Tchaikovsky, Judy Collins, and $64,000 Jazz.
Then, however, came “Revolution.” No sooner did I hear it on the radio than I went right out and bought the single, the B side of “Hey Jude.” As the ear-shattering introductory fuzz-guitar riff blasted out of the cheap little record player in my bedroom, I connected for the first time with rock as a present-tense music. To put it another way, I now understood that rock and roll was the music of my generation, just as $64,000 Jazz had been the music of my parents’ generation. The difference, of course, was that I liked both kinds of music—and still do.
The White Album came out three months later, but I couldn’t afford a double album, so I borrowed Bob Nelson’s copy early in 1969 and spent the next few weeks starting to get a grip on its proliferating stylistic variety. It didn’t yet occur to me that the Beatles I had known and briefly loved no longer existed: I simply took it for granted that the White Album, like its predecessors, was the product of a genuine group effort. It wasn’t, of course, which explains why I loved some of the songs and didn’t much care for certain others, as well as why there were more than a few, “Helter Skelter” and “Revolution 9” in particular, that I didn’t get at all.
I went through a long stretch of not listening to the Beatles in college. It wasn’t until their albums started to be transferred on CD that I returned to their music and decided that in fact I still loved it. A few years later, I wrote an essay for Commentary in which, after much thought, I set down what I had to say about them:
After the Beatles, rock-and-roll would never be the same. What started out as a stripped-down, popularized blending of country music and rhythm-and-blues intended for consumption by middle-class teenagers evolved into a new musical dialect in which it was possible to make statements complex and thoughtful enough to seize and hold the attention of adult listeners….
Neither virtuoso instrumentalists nor pure songwriters, they instead explored the possibilities of the hybrid art of the record album as art object more successfully than any other popular musicians of their generation. For this—and for the beauty of their best music—they will be remembered.
I’ll stand on that, and on my after-the-fact conclusion that Revolver was the best thing they ever did. That said, the White Album is also full of good things, and though I doubt I’ll ever feel the need to listen to it all the way through again, few months go by when I don’t put on “Back in the U.S.S.R.” or “Blackbird” or “Julia” and marvel at what the Beatles could do when the stars were in phase.
(To be continued)
* * *
“Back in the U.S.S.R.,” from The Beatles:
The video for the single version of “Revolution,” directed by Michael Lindsey-Hogg and filmed on September 4, 1968:
The “Penny Lane” episode of The Beatles, which originally aired in 1967:
Shura Cherkassky plays Igor Stravinsky’s Circus Polka: For a Young Elephantas an encore at a 1995 recital. This piece was originally commissioned by the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1942 to accompany a “ballet” for fifty elephants that was choreographed by George Balanchine:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
