Terry Teachout's Blog, page 43

TT: Come on and hear

In case you haven't heard, 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 big-band charts by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, including "Chelsea Bridge," "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blues," "Ko-Ko," "Mood Indigo," and "The Mooche."

Hilary Gardner, a fabulous young singer about whose debut album I recently raved in this space, is supplying the vocals. As for me, 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 .

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:

• Annie (musical, G, closing Jan. 5, reviewed here)

• Matilda (musical, G, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Good Person of Szechwan (play, PG-13, extended through Dec. 8, reviewed here)

• Juno and the Paycock (drama, G/PG-13, far too dark for children, closes Dec. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Fun Home (musical, PG-13, unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 1, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• The Winslow Boy (drama, G, too complicated for children, closes Dec. 2, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"She was never ironic or sarcastic or cynical or nihilistic or contemptuous or any of those things, which are all the signs of the tarantula in smart people, the resentful small deadly creature that never fights...that only waits to bite fiercely and maybe kill you that way."

Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood

TT: Once upon a summertime

In April I was reunited with an old friend from Kansas City whom I hadn't seen in the flesh for a couple of decades. She recently sent me a half-dozen snapshots that she took some thirty-five years ago, of which this one is the funniest and, I think, the most characteristic.

We were at an outdoor jazz concert that I was reviewing for the Kansas City Star. I can't remember who was playing in Brush Creek Plaza that sunny summer afternoon, or why I chose to strike the preposterous pose that my friend captured on film, but I still thought it might amuse you to see what I looked like in my long-gone youth.

Because I've hung onto no more than a handful of old photos, none of them dating back more than a decade or so, it always takes me by surprise to see the older ones that my friends and family have preserved. The "me" in my mind's eye is the person whom I see in the bathroom mirror every morning, a pleasant-looking gent on whom middle age crept up so stealthily that he never saw it coming.

Most people tell me that I look younger than my fifty-seven years, which I suppose should be heartening, but when I look at the youngster pictured above, all I can see is the countless changes wrought by time's cruel hand. Yes, he and I are recognizably the same person, but my hair is unequivocally gray now, while my eyes are rimmed with crow's feet and shadowed with the unsought knowledge to which Philip Larkin alluded in the great poem that gave me the title of this posting . In it I describe the effect of seeing a class photo from 1962 that was sent to me four years ago by another friend of my youth:

What do I have in common with the boy on the front row? I'm still left-handed, brown-eyed, and clumsy. I still love to read--and I'm still shy, though I've learned to behave otherwise. But I moved away from Smalltown well over half a lifetime ago, and I left behind much of what I thought I was. First I wanted to be a fireman, then a concert violinist, then a schoolteacher. Never did I imagine myself living in New York, writing books, or becoming a drama critic. Nor would the boy in the picture have been able to grasp what it would mean to do any of those things.

"It's a good thing we don't know what it's like to be grown up when we're small," I told a colleague of mine the other day. "If we did, we'd kill ourselves." He laughed, as I meant for him to do--but I was kidding on the square. I love my life, my job, my after-hours pursuits, my adored Mrs. T. At the same time, though, I also know, unlike the cheery fellow with the pencil who is pictured above, that even at its smoothest, the road of life is full of potholes, some of them deep enough to bend the axle of the best-built car.

I'm glad that he didn't know about some of the bigger ones that were waiting for him up around the bend, that he was content that day to enjoy the company of the lively young woman who took the snapshot at which he would marvel half a lifetime later. Sufficient unto the summer is the happiness thereof.

* * *

Melissa Errico sings "Once Upon a Summertime." The music and orchestral arrangement are by Michel Legrand and the words are by Johnny Mercer:

TT: Snapshot

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.)

TT: Almanac

"A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it."

Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century

TT: Black hole

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!

TT: Lookback

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 .

TT: Almanac

"A film is--or should be--more like music than like fiction."

Stanley Kubrick (quoted in Norman Kagan, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick)

TT: Over the weekend with Duke

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 .