I turn up in “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Piano” in the New York Times. My selection is “The Homeless Wanderer” by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. This choice has proven successful, at least in the sense that many people have written to me, “Wow, I didn’t know about her! She’s great.”
The previous DTM post about this Ethiopian nun is “The Story of the Wind.” In that post I namecheck Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska’s “The Maiden’s Prayer,” which has turned out to be Lang Lang’s choice for “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Piano.” H’mm!
“The Maiden’s Prayer” is indeed a proven “gateway drug” selection. It’s not a great piece of music but it offers compelling introductory level piano glamor. (Lang himself plays it very well, of course.)
“The Maiden’s Prayer” makes me think of the theme to “Hill Street Blues,” also in E-flat, written by Mike Post almost exactly one hundred years after Badarzewska-Baranowska’s hit. How many kids have fooled around with the big box thanks to being shown these charismatic collections of E-flat, A-flat, and B-flat triads?
I’m going on a 7-week tour with the Mark Morris Dance Group doing Pepperland and taking a break from social media (except cute photos with dancers on Instagram) until May. Do the Gig listings will continue. Don’t forget to subscribe to Transitional Technology if that’s your kind of thing. (I seem to be responding to emails from the associated Substack address, at least some of the time).
Thanks for reading! Much more Iversonian text when I’m back, I have several things I’ll be working on while on tour.
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Rob Schwimmer put together the geography of the upcoming weeks as follows. Please say hi if you come to the show! P.S. I am playing trio with Jeff Williams and Conor Chaplin at the Vortex March 24, and duo with Martin Speake at the 606 Club on April 22.
LONDON
BIRMINGHAM — WEST MIDLANDS
SALFORD — GREATER MACHESTER
BRADFORD — WEST YORKSHIRE
EDINBURGH — MIDLOTHIAN
CANTERBURY — KENT
CARDIFF — SOUTH GLAMORGAN
PLYMOUTH — DEVON
SOUTHAMPTON — HAMPSHIRE
NORWICH — EAST ANGLIA
NEWCASTLE — TYNE AND WEAR
DUBLIN
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Photo with Dance Heginbotham yesterday in Philadelphia:
While some fans argue that Charles McCarry was the greatest American spy novelist, I find the faint undercurrent of conservative politics — or at least a kind of sentimental elitism — a bit troubling. McCarry is the “thinking person’s spy novelist” only if that thinking person believes that the establishment naturally produces our best and brightest. However, that quibble hasn’t prevented me from reading every installment of the Paul Christopher series. The prose is masterful and the details are fresh. While most of the obits name-check his earliest books, in my view McCarry improved over time. If I had to pick one from McCarry’s heyday I might suggest Second Sight, which concludes a long family saga somewhat in the manner of bestselling mainstream authors of the era like Herman Wouk or James Clavell.
McCarry is frequently compared to John LeCarré. Both wrote enormous and sophisticated books full of betrayal and both careers peaked during the Cold War. For my money, LeCarré remains indisputably greater, although LeCarré also seemed to lose his way a bit after the fall of the Berlin Wall. McCarry’s delightfully direct thriller from 2004, Old Boys, showed a possible way to go forward, although that momentum was lost in the following Christopher’s Ghosts. A surprising attempt at dystopian science fiction, Ark, has an Elon Musk-type of hero bent on saving part of the world’s population. I need to look at that again; indeed, it is probably time to review all of McCarry. Whatever their flaws, the books go down easy.
Charles McCarry was a product of the establishment 1950s, while Brian Garfield was a child of the disgruntled 1960s. Garfield’s comic masterpiece Hopscotch trumps all of McCarry and might be the great American spy novel. I’ve read and re-read Hopscotch over a dozen times and it never fails to satisfy.
Nothing else I know by Garfield has the same power. Indeed, some of his books are quite bland and workmanlike, which is why I’ve never felt compelled to collect them all. There might be other masterpieces in the Garfield canon but I suspect most are in the middleweight class. When I was younger I enjoyed Kolchak’s Gold, an international thriller that includes a vivid first person account of the Russian Civil War. It’s better than something similarly situated by Ken Follett or Frederick Forsyth, but any given paragraph will probably lack the natural charisma of Garfield’s friends and peers Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block.
Garfield’s most famous book is Death Wish. Thanks to the Charles Bronson movie, “vigilante justice” became a rallying cry for the worst instincts of the reactionary establishment. Garfield’s follow-up, Death Sentence, attempted to tame and reframe the message of the original to no avail: The popular Bronson sequels kept the structure of the first installment.
Garfield’s output dwindled sharply after all that hullabaloo. It would be interesting to learn the whole story of Garfield’s relationship to his work and the outsized footprint left by Death Wish.
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I regret that I never chased down and met James Dapogny. He was always on my list, and I once sent an email that didn’t elicit a response. Truthfully I know very little about Dapogny, never even heard him play piano, but the big book Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton: The Collected Piano Music is one of kind. The first time I looked at it I was bewildered: There was something this good about jazz in the world of the printed page? While much of DTM is partly in reaction against Gunther Schuller’s Early Jazz and other heavy-handed academic jazz texts, I am not reacting against Dapogny. Dapogny is more of a father figure for this website.
The large suite Bud Powell in the 21st Century has had two successful performances. The three night run in Umbria was written up by Willard Jenkins and the concert with students at NEC was reviewed by Bill Beuttler. Beuttler mentions some of the notable people in the audience at Jordan Hall, including Bud Powell’s son, Earl John Powell.
Jason Moran, Sarah Deming, Ethan Iverson, Dave Holland, Earl John Powell, Eddie Karp
20th Century musical legends are leaving us at an accelerated rate.
Michel Legrand wrote two of my favorite songs: “The Windmills of Your Mind” and “You Must Believe in Spring.” In both cases the lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman are integral to the finished work. Noel Harrison sings wonderfully in the credits to The Thomas Crown Affair. (The title sequence is by Pablo Ferro, also recently passed.)
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André Previn was a splendid Gershwin pianist (Aaron Diehl turned me on to Previn’s Concerto in F) and a sympathetic conductor (I admire the Rachmaninoff concertos with Ashkenazy). I don’t know most of his other work so well, but an anecdote from his days writing music for Hollywood is immortal:
One day, the story goes, [Irving Thalberg] was in his projection room running a new MGM film when something on the sound track bothered him. “What is that?” he asked irritably into the darkness. “What is that in the music? It’s awful, I hate it!”
The edge in his voice required an answer, even if that answer was untainted by knowledge. One of his minions leapt forward. “That’s a minor chord, Mr. Thalberg,” he offered. The next day, an inter-office memo arrived in the music department with instructions to post it conspicuously. It read as follows: “From the above date onward, no music in an MGM film is to contain a ‘minor chord.’” Signed, “IRVING THALBERG.”
(From the memoir of the same name, No Minor Chords.)
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Ed Bickert was one fourth of one of the greatest jazz LPs of all time, Paul Desmond’s Pure Desmond with Ron Carter and Connie Kay. Here’s “Have You Met Miss Jones” and an accompanying transcription. Just fabulous playing from all three musicians, including Don Thompson and Terry Clarke: kind of a “Canadian All-Star” band!
So, Green Book won best picture. That was a mistake, but at least some of the backlash seems out of balance.
I’ve quoted Gerald Early on Louis Armstrong before:
The pain that one feels when Armstrong’s television performances of the middle and late sixties are recalled is so overwhelming as to constitute an enormously bitter grief, a grief made all the keener because it balances so perfectly one’s sense of shame, rage, and despair. The little, gnomish, balding, grinning black man who looked so touchingly like everyone’s black grandfather who had put in thirty years as the janitor of the local schoolhouse or like the old black poolshark who sits in the barbershop talking about how those old boys like Bill Robinson and Jelly Roll Morton could really play the game; this old man whose trumpet playing was just, no, not even a shadowy, ghostly remnant of his days of glory and whose singing had become just a kind of raspy-throated guile, gave the appearance, at last, of being nothing more than terribly old and terribly sick. One shudders to think that perhaps two generations of black Americans remember Louis Armstrong, perhaps one of the most remarkable musical geniuses America ever produced, not only as a silly Uncle Tom but as a pathetically vulnerable, weak old man. During the sixties, a time when black people most vehemently did not wish to appear weak, Armstrong seemed positively dwarfed by the patronizing white talk-show hosts on whose programs he performed, and he seemed to revel in that chilling, embarrassing spotlight.
Early’s despair about Armstrong on TV seems to be similar to those that are in despair about Green Book. Are there those that still think Louis Armstrong was an Uncle Tom? Green Book is far less important than Pops, but perhaps there’s at least a chance that the discussion around the movie will eventually become less bitter.
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If Don Shirley had been better-known, there might have been a different response to the movie. Shirley was an obscure figure and his style is remarkably hard to categorize. If you demanded that I place him in one genre for eternity, I’d call Shirley’s output “light music,” although that’s certainly a bit unfair: In my piece I make a case for a lovely solo piano album of spirituals. At any rate, those rushing online to “defend Don Shirley” are staking out a strange position. Shirley has gotten a far bigger second act then anybody could have predicted. Thanks to Green Book, the music of Don Shirley is back from the quietest of graves.
“The Man I Love” was Shirley’s showstopper, where he simultaneously offered the melody and a Chopin “Revolutionary Etude” kind of accompaniment in just the left hand. It’s not as profound as a Leopold Godowsky transcription for left hand alone, but Shirley isn’t aiming for anything that profound, either. Shirley’s “The Man I Love” aligns perfectly with a certain strata of Gershwin reception: the virtuosic violin transcriptions of Jascha Heifetz, the lush cocktail piano stylings of Cy Walter, the André Kostelanetz And His Orchestra LP Gershwin Wonderland.
This strata is not the deepest Gershwin reception — from the same era, Duke Ellington’s trio version of “Summertime” is stunningly dark and convoluted — but the charming genre of “hard to play but easy to listen to” was beloved during the post-war years when many American families were acquiring their first Hi-Fi stereo. My uncle Jim never listened to Ellington, but Shirley was just his speed.
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Speaking of Ellington, one of Shirley’s most intriguing performances was not released commercially but now can be heard on YouTube. For”New World A-Comin'” Shirley mostly made up the piano part himself (not much was notated by Ellington).
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I’m happy to sign a petition to not give “Green Book” any Oscars, especially if we could travel back in time and un-nominate “Whiplash” and “La-La Land.” Among other missteps, these award winning Damian Chazelle films are blithely unaware of any kind of African-American aesthetic. At least the director of Green Book, Peter Farrelly, knows he needs to try to include that aesthetic — although I’m unconvinced that the real Don Shirley could sit in and play the blues as smoothly as Mahershala Ali does.
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Ron Carter and George Walker tell their stories in Finding the Right Notes (Carter’s book written by Dan Ouellette) and Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist (Walker’s autobiography).
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Don Shirley’s “stateless” condition in Green Book, where he is forging a private path to negate stereotypes and fight institutional racism, is in line with the lives of some of the greatest American musicians, perhaps especially jazz musicians. Some of the sharp critiques of Green Book ignore how a stateless condition is hard to explain in a sound byte. When George Walker won a Pulitzer prize for music, nobody cared, but when the prize went to Kendrick Lamar, everyone could quickly agree that the establishment had recognized black music at last.
DO THE M@TH 