Terry Teachout's Blog, page 49

TT: Close enough for jazz

The National Book Foundation announced the 2013 National Book Award finalists this morning. As I recently predicted , Duke didn't make the cut, but that's fine with me. The list of books that were shortlisted today for the nonfiction award is more than enticing enough as is, and I'm proud to have been one of the ten semi-finalists.

To my five colleagues who are now in contention for the big prize, I wish you all the very best of luck.

TT: Read all about it

Marc Myers recently talked to me about Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington for JazzWax , his widely read music blog:

JW: You write that Ellington borrowed extensively from other musicians. Do you view him then as a great original composer or a brilliant recycler who leveraged scraps to create bigger, more dramatic works?

TT: He was both. The Ellington who cobbled together "Sophisticated Lady" out of a pair of melodic fragments supplied by Lawrence Brown and Otto Hardwick was, to use your apt phrase, a "brilliant recycler." But the Ellington who wrote masterpieces like "Ko-Ko" from scratch, on the other hand, was a truly great original composer--and you mustn't forget that most of his music was completely original....

To read the first installment of our two-part conversation, go here .

TT: Snapshot

Gary Karr plays the first movement of Serge Koussevitzky's Bass Concerto, accompanied by Carl Seale and the Valley Symphony Orchestra:



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

TT: Your daily dose of Duke (cont'd)

Duke Ellington and Count Basie play "One O'Clock Jump":

TT: Almanac

"It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles."

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

TT: Lookback

From 2003:

A faithful film adaptation of a novel of any considerable literary complexity can never be more than a species of illustration--a commentary at best, a comic book at worst. To watch it inevitably becomes a kind of game in which the viewer scores the film according to how many surface details the director gets right. Do the actors look the way they "ought" to? Are the sets convincing? Does the dialogue sound familiar? It's a good game, but it has nothing to do with art....

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Your daily dose of Duke (cont'd)

Duke Ellington plays Billy Strayhorn's "Lotus Blossom" in Copenhagen in 1967:

TT: Almanac

"The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life."

Angus Wilson, The Wild Garden

TT: One for the money

Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington got its first newspaper review in Sunday's Buffalo News, a smart, knowledgeable rave by Jeff Simon, an experienced jazz buff (he's been around long enough to have reviewed the Ellington band three times in concert) who understands exactly what I was trying to do and is qualified to say whether or not I did it.

Says he:

Teachout's book is as far as can be from hagiography. You can't go as far as to call it a "revisionist" biography, but Teachout is, by night, the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and there is scarcely a page of "Duke" that isn't marked by the utmost in critical lucidity and detachment. That is, I think, so much the case that it is virtually impossible to find a word or even a comma or semicolon in "Duke" that comes from the unmistakable fandom that, for good or for ill, has always functioned as ground zero for jazz criticism....The result, I think, of giving no quarter to fandom of any sort, may be the definitive Ellington biography thus far.

Read the whole thing here .

TT: News of the weekend in review

Kentucky Opera 's double bill of The King's Man and Danse Russe came off like clockwork, or greased lightning, depending on your taste in metaphor. I could say more, but that covers it: Paul Moravec and I were completely happy with the results, and so, it appears, were the people who came to see and hear our second and third operas in Louisville. Good singing, good conducting, good staging, good design--good everything, in fact, all the way from top to bottom and back again. It's not for me to say so, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the world hasn't seen the last of these two pieces.

Incidentally, I said something about The King's Man and Danse Russe in an interview that I think might be worth passing on:

Opera is theater. Sure, we call it opera because we use opera singers. But these are shows that we've done. One [Danse Russe] is like a musical, the other [The King's Man] is maybe like a little movie. The more theatrical the opera creator can be today, the more that opera is going to come right across the footlights and land in your lap and excite you.

That's the Moravec-Teachout operatic credo in a nutshell.

On Saturday my brother and sister-in-law drove out from Smalltown, U.S.A., to catch the matinee performance. It was the first time that I'd seen David and Kathy since Satchmo at the Waldorf opened at Shakespeare & Company fourteen months ago--far, far too long--and their presence made me even happier. I was able to regale them at brunch with the news of the first-serial publication of "Duke Ellington, King of Jazz," an excerpt from Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington that ran in that morning's Wall Street Journal, and in the evening we dined at a restaurant on the top floor of a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright's son-in-law, which was great fun.

I was way too busy throughout the rest of my stay to see much of Louisville, though I did eat my first Hot Brown at the Brown Hotel (where a friend of mine who came to the opening-night performance was staying). I also paid an eye-popping visit to the Leight House , a spectacular piece of midcentury-modern residential architecture whose nonagenarian owners, Leonard and Adele Leight, are not only patrons of Kentucky Opera but world-renowned collectors of studio art glass, a medium of which I previously knew nothing more than the name of Dale Chihuly but which I now mean to study in earnest (starting with Michael Taylor ).

As for Duke, it'll be officially published on Thursday, but my book-tour duties are already underway. By the time that most of you get around to reading these words, I'll be en route via Orlando to Vero Beach, Florida, where I'm to speak about Duke tomorrow afternoon at an invitation-only luncheon meeting of the Indian River Literary Society.

On Wednesday I'll return to New York to see the Broadway revival of Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy and chat with John Schaefer about Duke on WNYC's Soundcheck . Come Friday I'll take the train down to Washington to tape a Duke-related PBS NewsHour segment that is currently scheduled to air on October 21.

From then on, things will be a little hectic. As always, watch this space for details....

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A TV story about the Leight House and its owner-collectors: