Cuban song and diplomacy

Cuban musician Carlos Varela performed in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. 

Through Music, a Quiet Diplomacy






December 29, 2009
Trying to Sway America’s Cuba Policy With Song
By GINGER THOMPSON

WASHINGTON — When one of Cuba’s best-known musicians landed in the United States, his first appearance was not onstage, but on Capitol Hill.

Carlos Varela, often referred to as Cuba’s Bob Dylan, had come to remix an album with his good friend Jackson Browne. But he also hoped to help reshape relations between the United States and his homeland.

So before going to Hollywood to work on the album, he stopped in Washington early this month for meetings with legislators and a lunch with a senior White House official. Later he held a jam session in the House Budget Committee meeting room.

Almost everywhere Mr. Varela, 46, went during his weeks here, including at universities and policy institutes, small talk about music gave way to pressing, albeit polite, questions on policy.

“I don’t represent any government or political party,” he said. “But perhaps that’s why governments and politicians might be willing to listen to what I have to say.”

The singer and songwriter, making his first trip to the United States in 11 years, is part of a movement by artists, scholars and businessmen to change United States policy toward Cuba from the bottom up. Nearly a year after President Obama took office promising to open a new era of engagement with Cuba, the two governments seem stuck in the same old stalemate, with Washington demanding that its Communist neighbor adopt democratic reforms, and Havana railing about American interference.

Tensions resurfaced Dec. 5 when Cuba detained a United States government contractor who had traveled to Havana without proper authorization to hand out communications equipment to dissident groups.

Still, even while jousting continues at the highest levels of government, the Obama administration has quietly expanded cultural and academic exchanges as a way of reaching out directly to Cuban people. Many of those who participate try to avoid politics.

“We are all about the music,” Robert Bell, the singer and bass player of Kool and the Gang, told The Associated Press before the band took the stage Dec. 20 in Havana. “We don’t come as politicians, we come as musicians.”

Others see such exchanges as chances to fill a political vacuum.

“Everyone who has gone to Cuba comes out questioning our policy because what they see there is nothing like what they have been told by American politicians,” said Andy Spahn, a political consultant to Steven Spielberg and others, who hosted a party for Mr. Varela and has taken celebrity clients to Havana.

Stephen Rivers, a celebrity public relations consultant who has made numerous trips to Cuba, said, “There’s so much fiction surrounding our relationship.” He described Kevin Costner’s being mobbed by Cuban fans during a 2001 visit as evidence that the island was hardly cut off from American culture.

“The truth is, we are much more isolated from them than they are from us,” he said.

In September, hundreds of thousands of Cubans gathered in Revolution Square in Havana for a “Peace Without Borders” concert led by the Colombian-born singer Juanes. The concert, which featured a number of American musicians, was organized with significant logistical and licensing assistance from the Obama administration.

Before the event, polls showed that more than half of the Cuban-American community in Miami, led by those who fled repression on the island, viewed the concert as an affront. Afterward, more than half expressed a favorable view of the event.

“Juanes opened the door for change,” wrote Sergio Pino, a businessman and a powerful voice in the Cuban exile community who was once a staunch supporter of the trade embargo against Cuba, in a letter to The Miami Herald. “It is time to rethink our strategy.”

Also in September, Cuban environmental officials, previously denied visas to attend conferences in the United States, were invited to Washington to discuss conservation issues relating to the Gulf of Mexico. In October, a group of environmental experts from the United States went to Havana to continue the talks.

“I know people are complaining that President Obama has not made any changes toward Cuba, but from where I sit, there’s been remarkable change,” said Daniel Whittle of the Environmental Defense Fund, which organized the trip.

Despite its decades-old embargo against Cuba, the United States has long been the largest foreign supplier of food to the island. Mr. Obama lifted Bush administration restrictions to make it easier for American farmers to do business with Cuba. In November, dozens of them attended the Havana Trade Fair.

Then in early December, Mr. Varela arrived in Washington. It was his first United States visit since 1998; he was denied a visa in 2004 by the Bush administration, which routinely denied visas to Cuban artists and academics as part of an effort to topple the government by isolating it.

In a meeting with Representative Howard L. Berman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr. Varela suggested a different approach.

“There are some Cuban politicians who use the isolation to their benefit,” Mr. Varela said. “But I do not believe that anyone in Cuba could stand in the way if the United States decided to open relations. If the United States did that, the change in Cuba would be unstoppable.”

Using music to bring together opposing sides in one of this country’s longest-running foreign policy debates might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea inside the Capital Beltway.

Before the Juanes concert in September, Mr. Obama told a reporter from Univision that while such events did not hurt the United States’ relations from Cuba, “I wouldn’t overstate the degree that it helps.”

Mr. Varela, whose trip to the United States was sponsored by a nonprofit political organization called the Center for Democracy in the Americas, said he was not naïve about the magnitude and complexity of the tensions between the United States and Cuba.

His life has been marked by the highs and lows of the Cuban revolution. The government gave him a world-class education in music and theater, but refuses to broadcast many of his songs, which have veiled critiques of the Communist leadership.

Over the years, politics has cost him a band (members defected in Spain in 1997), a brother (he left Cuba 12 years ago) and perhaps a chance for greater international acclaim.

The fact, for example, that his lyrics have never landed him in jail, like many Cuban political dissidents, has contributed to suspicions among some Cuban-Americans that he is a Cuban agent.

Music, he said, is not going to bring a rapid end to 50 years of political conflict. But, he said, in the absence of meaningful diplomatic exchanges, musicians can serve as more than celebrities.

“Music is not going to move governments,” he said. “But it might move people. And people can move governments.”

Definin' the Blues

When I was 12 years old, I found a Count Basie album in my father's record collection that contained a 1941 performance of "Goin' to Chicago Blues" by Jimmy Rushing and the Basie band. That was the record that made me fall in love with the blues—though it goes without saying that I couldn't understand all of the lyrics, especially when they touched on what for me was the still-unexplored land of adult relationships. I found the first stanza in particular to be impenetrably puzzling: Goin' to Chicago, sorry that I can't take you / There's nothin' in Chicago that a monkey woman can do. What on earth, I wondered, was a "monkey woman"? Teetering as I was on the edge of puberty, I boggled at the exotic possibilities.

“As much as a method of music making, blues were a medium of language. ” Read the full excerpt from 'Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary'

On top of everything else, Mr. Calt's book answers a question that has vexed me at odd moments for the past four decades. No sooner did I open "Barrelhouse Words" for the first time than I turned to page 164, where I found this admirably concise definition of "monkey woman": "An overly obliging or compliant female." Now I can die happy.

Ella rediscovered

Herman Leonard Photography L.L.C./CTSimages.com - A Herman Leonard photograph of Ella Fitzgerald performing at the New York nightclub Downbeat in 1948. Watching rapturously are Duke Ellington, center, and Benny Goodman, in glasses behind Ellington.

Ella is one of those few people who is instantly recognizable, and who needs but one name. Her voice is unique.

Verve has just released “Twelve Nights in Hollywood,” a four-CD boxed set of Ella Fitzgerald singing 76 songs at the Crescendo, a small jazz club in Los Angeles, in 1961 and ’62 — and none of it has ever been released until now.

These aren’t bootlegs; the CDs were mastered from the original tapes, which were produced by Norman Granz, Verve’s founder and Fitzgerald’s longtime manager.

The story in the Times has full audio stream of three songs; well worthwhile listening. I shall look into having HWPL buy the CD set when I get back from Mexico.

There’s nothing rare about a joyous Ella Fitzgerald recording; the woman exuded joy in nearly every note she sang. Yet the level on these sessions soared higher and plumbed deeper.

Why these tapes stayed locked in the vault for nearly half a century — and what it took to set them free — is a tale of a producer’s neglect, a jazz sleuth’s obsession and a string of happy coincidences.

Norman Granz was recording Ella a lot that year. The tapes were vaulted after a dozen of them were issued in an LP, and did not do well. For a quarter century the tapes were forgotten.

Then, in 1988, Phil Schaap, a dogged jazz scholar well known for excavating long-lost treasures from studio archives, was contracted by PolyGram (which had recently bought Verve) to compile a discography of all the recordings — issued and unissued — that Fitzgerald ever made for the label.

Our intrepid Mister Schaap.

Early on in the task, riffling through PolyGram’s vast tape facility, then in Edison, N.J., Mr. Schaap unearthed the never-released tapes of a 40th-birthday concert that Fitzgerald recorded at the Teatro Sistina in Rome on April 25, 1958. He urged PolyGram’s executives to release them. When they did, as an album called “Ella in Rome,” on the concert’s 30th anniversary, it soared to No. 1 on Billboard’s jazz chart. Stephen Holden, in The New York Times, hailed it as “a treasure for the ages.”

It was soon after this triumph that Mr. Schaap came across the tapes from the Crescendo Club — not just the tracks that Granz had picked for “Ella in Hollywood,” which was long out of print, but the other reels, which nobody had unspooled for nearly three decades. Mr. Schaap listened to all of them and thought that here was another trove of hidden jewels.

Max Roach always spoke very highly of Phil Schaap and his historiographical efforts.

But by this time Verve was busy producing CD reissues of Fitzgerald hits. There was no appetite for sifting through what appeared to be the rejects of an old flop. And there things stood until late last year, when Mr. Seidel was re-reading a biography of Fitzgerald by Stuart Nicholson. In the back of the book was an expanded version of Mr. Schaap’s discography — 61 pages long — as commissioned by the author.

Mr. Schaap has listened to hundreds of Granz recordings over the decades, including the released master takes and the unreleased alternate takes. Granz, he said, was “a great man of profound vision,” but as a record producer, he “infrequently dwelled at length on what takes should be issued.”

Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies and a former good friend of Granz, agrees. “Norman was maybe the most lavish record producer there ever was,” he said, but he was often “unconcerned or careless” when it came to preparing and issuing the albums. (Granz died in 2001.)

Herman Leonard, the great photographer, once took a picture of Duke Ellington sitting at a front-row table in a small New York nightclub, beaming at Fitzgerald while she sang. More than any other album, “Twelve Nights in Hollywood” gives us an idea of what Ellington was smiling at.

Salsero reborn

Rubén Blades, Panama's former tourism minister, at an Upper West Side restaurant on Monday.













Video: Rubén Blades with Calle 13 (YouTube)

Federico Garcia Lorca - Ode to Walt Whitman

In reading Ian Gibson's biography, Federico García Lorca : a life, I came across metnion of a Lorca poem, Ode to Walt Whitman.


Federico Garcia Lorca - Ode to Walt Whitman

By the East River and the Bronx
boys were singing, exposing their waists
with the wheel, with oil, leather, and the hammer.
Ninety thousand miners taking silver from the rocks
and children drawing stairs and perspectives.

But none of them could sleep,
none of them wanted to be the river,
none of them loved the huge leaves
or the shoreline's blue tongue.

By the East River and the Queensboro
boys were battling with industry
and the Jews sold to the river faun
the rose of circumcision,
and over bridges and rooftops, the mouth of the sky emptied
herds of bison driven by the wind.

But none of them paused,
none of them wanted to be a cloud,
none of them looked for ferns
or the yellow wheel of a tambourine.

As soon as the moon rises
the pulleys will spin to alter the sky;
a border of needles will besiege memory
and the coffins will bear away those who don't work.

New York, mire,
New York, mire and death.
What angel is hidden in your cheek?
Whose perfect voice will sing the truths of wheat?
Who, the terrible dream of your stained anemones?

Not for a moment, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies,
nor your corduroy shoulders frayed by the moon,
nor your thighs pure as Apollo's,
nor your voice like a column of ash,
old man, beautiful as the mist,
you moaned like a bird
with its sex pierced by a needle.
Enemy of the satyr,
enemy of the vine,
and lover of bodies beneath rough cloth...

Not for a moment, virile beauty,
who among mountains of coal, billboards, and railroads,
dreamed of becoming a river and sleeping like a river
with that comrade who would place in your breast
the small ache of an ignorant leopard.

Not for a moment, Adam of blood, Macho,
man alone at sea, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
because on penthouse roofs,
gathered at bars,
emerging in bunches from the sewers,
trembling between the legs of chauffeurs,
or spinning on dance floors wet with absinthe,
the faggots, Walt Whitman, point you out.

He's one, too! That's right! And they land
on your luminous chaste beard,
blonds from the north, blacks from the sands,
crowds of howls and gestures,
like cats or like snakes,
the faggots, Walt Whitman, the faggots,
clouded with tears, flesh for the whip,
the boot, or the teeth of the lion tamers.

He's one, too! That's right! Stained fingers
point to the shore of your dream
when a friend eats your apple
with a slight taste of gasoline
and the sun sings in the navels
of boys who play under bridges.

But you didn't look for scratched eyes,
nor the darkest swamp where someone submerges children,
nor frozen saliva,
nor the curves slit open like a toad's belly
that the faggots wear in cars and on terraces
while the moon lashes them on the street corners of terror.

You looked for a naked body like a river.
Bull and dream who would join wheel with seaweed,
father of your agony, camellia of your death,
who would groan in the blaze of your hidden equator.

Because it's all right if a man doesn't look for his delight
in tomorrow morning's jungle of blood.
The sky has shores where life is avoided
and there are bodies that shouldn't repeat themselves in the dawn.

Agony, agony, dream, ferment, and dream.
This is the world, my friend, agony, agony.
Bodies decompose beneath the city clocks,
war passes by in tears, followed by a million gray rats,
the rich give their mistresses
small illuminated dying things,
and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred.

Man is able, if he wishes, to guide his desire
through a vein of coral or a heavenly naked body.
Tomorrow, loves will become stones, and Time
a breeze that drowses in the branches.

That's why I don't raise my voice, old Walt Whitman,
against the little boy who writes
the name of a girl on his pillow,
nor against the boy who dresses as a bride
in the darkness of the wardrobe,
nor against the solitary men in casinos
who drink prostitution's water with revulsion,
nor against the men with that green look in their eyes
who love other men and burn their lips in silence.

But yes against you, urban faggots,
tumescent flesh and unclean thoughts.
Mothers of mud. Harpies. Sleepless enemies
of the love that bestows crowns of joy.

Always against you, who give boys
drops of foul death with bitter poison.
Always against you,
Fairies of North America,
Pájaros of Havana,
Jotos of Mexico,
Sarasas of Cádiz,
Apios of Seville,
Cancos of Madrid,
Floras of Alicante,
Adelaidas of Portugal.

Faggots of the world, murderers of doves!
Slaves of women. Their bedroom bitches.
Opening in public squares like feverish fans
or ambushed in rigid hemlock landscapes.

No quarter given! Death
spills from your eyes
and gathers gray flowers at the mire's edge.
No quarter given! Attention!
Let the confused, the pure,
the classical, the celebrated, the supplicants
close the doors of the bacchanal to you.

And you, lovely Walt Whitman, stay asleep on the Hudson's banks
with your beard toward the pole, openhanded.
Soft clay or snow, your tongue calls for
comrades to keep watch over your unbodied gazelle.

Sleep on, nothing remains.
Dancing walls stir the prairies
and America drowns itself in machinery and lament.
I want the powerful air from the deepest night
to blow away flowers and inscriptions from the arch where you sleep,
and a black child to inform the gold-craving whites
that the kingdom of grain has arrived.

Jeanne-Claude: 1935-2009

* REMEMBRANCES
* NOVEMBER 20, 2009

Part of a Creative Powerhouse Behind Ephemeral Artworks

By STEPHEN MILLER and KELLY CROW

With her husband, Christo, Jeanne-Claude was part of an inseparable artistic duo that produced some of the world's most well-known and monumental works of art.

Jeanne-Claude, who died Nov. 18 in New York City at age 74 after suffering a brain aneurysm, created landmark public displays using textiles, including the 18-foot-high, 24-mile-long "Running Fence" in California and "Surrounded Islands" in which the couple installed giant lily pad-like structures in Florida's Biscayne Bay with 6.4 million square feet of bright-pink fabric. Their 2005 creation, "The Gates," a series of 7,503 orange nylon panels erected for 16 days in New York's Central Park, drew crowds in the middle of winter.

One of their most notable works was the 1995 wrapping of the Reichstag, the seat of the German Parliament in Berlin, in silvery fabric, a project the couple had contemplated for more than two decades. The logistical headaches were so large, Jeanne-Claude once said, that it turned her husband's hair gray and hers red.

Forceful and outspoken, Jeanne-Claude was fond of telling interviewers that there were only three things the couple never did together: fly in an airplane (they took separate flights); make sketches (Christo's job); and manage their taxes (Jeanne-Claude's job). Adding to the vision of two artists merging their creativity was the fact they shared the same birthday.

Jeanne-Claude took the lead in raising funds for projects through the sale of Christo's sketches and other materials to collectors and museums. Such self-financing of large projects is rare in the art world, but the couple said they feared relying on sponsors would compromise their artistic freedom, said their longtime lawyer, Scott Hodes.

Jeanne-Claude avoided galleries, selling directly to collectors. When funds were scarce, she would offer prospective buyers a discount for cash upfront.

To finance a project, Jeanne-Claude told The Wall Street Journal in 1984, "I'll sell almost anything but our son."

Christo often said Jeanne-Claude's contributions to their work went beyond finance and logistics; the basic conception of "Surrounded Islands," he insisted, was hers.

Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon was born June 13, 1935, in Casablanca, Morocco, where her father was stationed as a general in the French military. She attended schools in France, Switzerland and Tunisia before moving to Paris. In 1958, she met Christo when he was commissioned to paint a portrait of Jeanne-Claude's mother. According to the couple's Web site, "By the time Christo had done an impressionist portrait, a classical portrait and a Cubist portrait of the mother, Christo and Jeanne-Claude were in love."

Soon, she was collaborating on works such as installations of large stacks of oil barrels in Cologne, Germany, and Paris. She personally took charge of wrapping a fountain and medieval tower in Spoleto, Italy, in 1968, at the same moment Christo wrapped an art museum in Bern, Switzerland.

Two years ago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum bought a trove of drawings and photographs documenting the "Running Fence" project that will be exhibited next spring as "Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence."

George Gurney, the museum's deputy chief curator, said, "She couldn't draw, but she collaborated aesthetically on every other decision. It was always a joint endeavor."

The couple never flew together so that in the event of a crash the surviving partner could complete their projects, according to Mr. Hodes. Christo is determined to go ahead with "Over the River," a fabric roof over a six-mile stretch of a river in Colorado, Mr. Hodes said.

God is in the House

Sightings - November 14, 2009

You Never Saw Art Tatum Sweat

That's why the centennial of his birth went all but unnoticed
Terry Teachout

For the critic, the word "best" is like a grenade without a pin: Toss it around too freely and you're likely to get your hand blown off. But you won't get many arguments from musicians if you toss it at Art Tatum, who was born a century ago last month. Tatum was—and is—the most admired jazz pianist who ever lived, a super-virtuoso whose whirlwind technique left his colleagues speechless with envy. "When that man turns on the powerhouse," Fats Waller said, "don't no one play him down." Nor was his renown restricted to the world of jazz: Vladimir Horowitz loved Tatum's playing so much that he made his own arrangement of "Tea for Two," a song that was one of Tatum's specialties. Yet outside of Toledo, Ohio, Tatum's home town, the centennial of his birth on Oct. 13 went all but unnoticed. And though the greatest of all jazz pianists is as revered today as he was in his lifetime, he is essentially unknown to the public at large.

On the other hand, Tatum, who died in 1956, was never a full-fledged celebrity, not even in the days when he got written up in Time magazine and made occasional appearances on such popular TV programs as "The Tonight Show." Unlike Waller, Duke Ellington or Ella Fitzgerald, who knew the profitable secret of mass appeal, he was an artist's artist known mainly to those who were already in the know.

What was it about Tatum that kept him in relative obscurity? Part of the problem, I suspect, is that his personality was almost entirely opaque. We're told that he liked baseball and drank Pabst Blue Ribbon beer by the quart, but little else is known for sure about his private life. James Lester's "Too Marvelous for Words," published in 1994, is the only biography of Tatum, and it fails to give much of a sense of what he was like offstage, not because Mr. Lester fell down on the job but because Tatum was unforthcoming on the rare occasions when he talked to journalists. In his most extended interview, a conversation with Willis Conover of the Voice of America, he is well-spoken but frustratingly noncommittal. The only surprise comes when he confesses that "I don't feel that I have all of the technical facilities that I would like to have." That's the musical equivalent of hearing Alfred Hitchcock tell a reporter that he wished his movies were scarier!

Not only did Tatum keep his own counsel, but he broke a cardinal rule of success for the performing artist: He made it look too easy. Just as most of us prefer to watch a trapeze artist work without a net, we like to be absolutely sure that a virtuoso is giving us our money's worth, and a seemingly effortless performance, no matter how spectacular it may be, deprives us of that slightly sadistic thrill.

Needless to say, anybody who can stumble through a C-major scale knows that Art Tatum always gave his audiences 10 times their money's worth. I can't count the number of jazz pianists who have described the experience of hearing Tatum for the first time in words similar to those of Gerald Wiggins: "I thought it was two guys playing the piano." But there was nothing to see in person, just a burly, impassive man who sat quietly at the keyboard, never moving his hands a millimeter more than necessary. In one of the few surviving film clips of Tatum's playing, a 1954 TV performance of Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays" that can be viewed on YouTube, you can see for yourself what Jon Hendricks meant when he said that on the bandstand, Tatum looked "like an accountant—he just did his work." Close your eyes and it sounds as though someone had tossed a string of lit firecrackers into the Steinway. Open them and it looks as though you're watching a court reporter take down the testimony of a witness in a civil suit.

Is it possible to wow the public without tossing your hair around? Yes and no. Fred Astaire never let you see him sweat, but he sweetened his deceptively casual virtuosity with just enough charm to make it irresistible. Tatum, by contrast, was more like Jascha Heifetz, a titan of the violin who brought off his stupendous feats of technical wizardry without ever cracking a smile or looking anything other than blasé—and though Heifetz was immensely famous, he was always more respected than loved.

The great violin teacher Carl Flesch got to the bottom of this paradox when he observed that "people would forgive Heifetz his technical infallibility only if he made them forget it by putting his entire personality behind it." The operative word here is forgive. To the small-d democrat, virtuosity is an insult, a tactless reminder of human inequality that can only be forgiven when the artist makes clear through visible effort how high a price he has paid for his great gifts. Art Tatum, like Heifetz, was too proud to make that concession. He did all his sweating offstage. That's why his exquisitely refined pianism will never be truly popular: No matter how much beer he drank, you could never mistake him for one of the guys.
—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Saturday. He is the author of "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong," out next month from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

Self-assigned stories

Slideshow









Roy DeCarava, a retrospective Q 779 DeCarava
Roy DeCarava, photographs Q 779 DeCarava


Interesting tie-in to jazz musicians, including Coltrane.


Photographer Roy DeCarava is pictured in his Brooklyn home in 1991.

Vermeer's "The Milkmaid"

Obituaries

Today a spate of obits; included some from previous days.


Bruce Wasserstein, Lazard Banker, Dies at 61 Mr. Wasserstein was a Wall Street investment banker who helped pioneer the hostile takeover and reshaped the mergers and acquisitions business into a high art. Brother of Wendy Wasserstein, the playwright (Heidi Chronicles).

Al Martino, Singer of Pop Ballads, Is Dead at 82



Al Martino as Johnny Fontane in a scene from "The Godfather." Mr. Martino, 82, was renowned for a string of hits, including “Spanish Eyes” and “Volare,” and for his role as the wedding singer in “The Godfather.”





Nan Robertson, Who Chronicled Discrimination Suit at The Times, Is Dead at 83 Ms. Robertson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, was widely known for her book “The Girls in the Balcony.”


Captain Lou Albano, Wrestler and Showman, Dies at 76 Mr. Albano was a pro wrestling villain who reinvented himself as a pop culture celebrity in a Cyndi Lauper music video and in movies and television.

William Wayne Justice, Noted Judge, Dies at 89 Judge Justice of Federal District Court ruled on ground-breaking class-action suits that compelled Texas to integrate schools, reform prisons, and educate illegal immigrants.
If he'd gotten to the Supreme Court, he would've been Justice Justice.

Dickie Peterson, Singer for Rock Band Blue Cheer, Dies at 63Mr. Peterson’s screaming vocals and pounding bass lines helped push the psychedelic blues-rock trio Blue Cheer into the musical territory that would later be called heavy metal.


September 27, 2009 : William Safire, Political Columnist and Oracle of Language, Dies at 79 Mr. Safire was a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The Times. Quite a combination of careers. Dig the PC.

James P. Johnson

October 6, 2009 - Music Review Raising Roof and Headstone for Pioneering Pianist By BEN RATLIFF A definition of righteousness: about 75 people, crammed into the West Village club Smalls, watching a series of pianists play James P. Johnson on a grand piano in a benefit concert to buy a headstone for his grave. Like all the other stride-piano soloists of the teens and 1920s, Johnson has been lodged in a historical second tier, probably because he’s not known for band music and didn’t tour sufficiently. But he’s the truest passageway from pre-jazz to jazz-as-we-know-it. He was a pioneering and powerful solo pianist, a composer of short sketches (including “The Charleston,” his era-defining hit, and “Carolina Shout,” his finger-buster étude) and extended orchestral works.

Fats Waller does a great rendition of Carolina Shout.

Duke Ellington learned “Carolina Shout” from a piano roll and finally met Johnson at a concert in Washington in 1921. Afterward they stayed out until 10 a.m. “What I absorbed on that occasion,” Ellington wrote later, “might, I think, have constituted a whole semester in a conservatory.” He homed in on Johnson’s strong, grounding swing and sweet, splashing melodies; to link Scott Joplin and Ellington — or even Joplin and Thelonious Monk — you need to put Johnson between them.

The link.

Johnson died in 1955 fairly isolated after four years of illness, and his body lies in an unmarked grave in Maspeth, Queens. The spot was found in February by Scott Brown, a Johnson scholar, and the idea was hatched for “James P. Johnson’s Last Rent Party,” a daylong blowout of Johnsonia at Smalls on Sunday, with historical talks and performances.
The day ended with five hours of solo piano — by 12 performers — and a little bit of four-hands playing. Unlike the Harlem rent parties Johnson used to play, it wasn’t remotely a competition. Though several pianists wrestled with the same material (especially the charging “Carolina Shout”), the emphasis was not on besting one another but on beneficially knocking the tunes around, treating fairly neglected music like common repertory.
Ethan Iverson, the pianist from the Bad Plus, announced that the beginning of his set would be “classical”: an earnest shot at Johnson’s style. He played “Carolina Shout” with sensitivity and clarity, keeping the stride rhythm steady in the left hand. Then he went off into his own updated, posteverything style, full of explicit dissonance, repetition and strange dynamics.

“The Charleston” was his killer: it started with deliberately messy tone rows, his two hands playing at cross-purposes, the left staccato and slow, the right flowing and medium-tempo. Inevitably, and with humor, he finished in the song’s proper style.

Mike Lipskin, a pianist based in San Francisco who studied with the stride pianist Willie (The Lion) Smith, played stride-piano songs as if they were his drinking buddies: his versions of Johnson’s “It Takes Love to Cure the Heart’s Disease” and Luckey Roberts’s “Pork and Beans” were rowdy and familiar, and he made Johnson’s “If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight)” mellifluous and lovely, smiling at the audience rather than monitoring the difficult variations in his left-hand stride patterns.

Aaron Diehl performing in front of a photograph of James P. Johnson on Sunday.

The evening’s revelation was Aaron Diehl, a pianist in his mid-20s who has played with Wynton Marsalis and Wycliffe Gordon. His style, on “Scaling the Blues,” “Over the Bars” and the second movement of Johnson’s “Jazzamine Concerto,” was modest, secure and insinuating, with an iron sense of time. A few different pianists worked in their own tunes as Johnson tributes; Mr. Diehl’s was a slow, gorgeous blues.


Ted Rosenthal and Dick Hyman closed the night. They performed some pieces together at the keyboard, including “Twilight Rag”; then Mr. Hyman, one of the world’s great specialists in early jazz piano, performed Johnson’s music with well-practiced dynamic shifts, elegant and sometimes a bit too showy for the circumstances. But complaining is pointless. Mr. Hyman smoothly played the entire 10-minutes-plus solo-piano version of Johnson’s “Yamekraw,” a rhapsody with classical flourishes and stride interjections. Who else does that?

'The Man Who Waited'

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Mr. Bergman was born in New Orleans and raised mostly in Minneapolis. He began taking and developing snapshots at age 6, and save for a few teenage years he has strived to be a great photographer-artist ever since. But he has remained an out-of-step one, isolated from contemporary tastes, a cult figure to the few who have seen his work in person or in a 1998 book.

Finally, and separately, Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery, and Phong Bui, a curatorial adviser at P.S.1, decided to give Mr. Bergman shows. The works that will go on display later this month were shot from the mid-1980s to about 1996. They are intense, soul-stirring, intimate color portraits, all untitled, all unlabeled as to place or person: There's just a date and a few technical details. Stripped of information, the viewer is forced to consider the human condition.

Mr. Bergman won't explain his art: "It's visual," he says. "I don't need to talk about it." But he does tell the story of a subject in the Bronx who asked him where he was from. When Mr. Bergman said "Minnesota," the man said, "You come all this way only to see yourself."

One day, in 1966, a friend showed him a book that changed his life—Robert Frank's "The Americans." As soon as he saw Frank's empathetic pictures of ordinary people, he purchased a Nikon 35mm.

It wasn't that Mr. Bergman imitated Mr. Frank. Rather, he says, "what was so breathtaking about Frank was that his work proved that the main thing one needed was a personal vision, and the main thing one needed to serve that vision was intuition and feeling."

Went to see the exhibit on Sunday 15 November, at PS 1. The photo were large, unlabeled, several pictures to a room. Each subject was centered in the frame; only one was smiling. The PS 1 space has very high ceilings, creaking floors, and big windows. It was very enjoyable.

For most New Yorkers today, the name Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) means the gilded bronze equestrian monument to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street: Victory, crowned with laurel and clutching a palm frond, strides ahead of the bearded general, with his fierce gaze and windblown cape, erect on his snorting horse. A century ago, Saint-Gaudens would have also been widely known for his Diana—a tall, athletic nude, stepping forward as she releases an arrow from her bow—a landmark sculpture that once dominated the New York skyline from the tower of the original Madison Square Garden. (Removed when the building was razed in 1925, Diana is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) In 1908, not long after the sculptor's death, the Metropolitan Museum installed a memorial exhibition of 154 of Saint-Gaudens's works in the Great Hall—what was then the Sculpture Court. Now we can broaden our acquaintance with the artist at the far more modest "Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," a finely tuned exhibition, on view through Nov. 15, that showcases the Met's considerable holdings of the sculptor's works and provides a context for his celebrated monuments. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bronze cast of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, 1910. That the Sherman Monument largely defines Saint-Gaudens for many of us is entirely appropriate. The sculpture exemplifies his distinctive refined, vigorous style, a synthesis of acutely observed naturalism and classical idealism, informed by the legacy of the Renaissance. The Sherman Monument shares the assured forms and the tense equilibrium between powerful warhorse and powerful rider first announced by those quintessential mounted warriors of the Renaissance, Donatello's Gattamelata, in Padua, and Verrocchio's Colleoni, in Venice. There are even echoes of the iconic Roman bronze that inspired both Donatello and Verrocchio, the equestrian portrait of Marcus Aurelius, once the centerpiece of the Campidoglio, in Rome.


Verrocchio's Colleoni



















Donatello's Gattamelata

Recording Pioneer

Just 23 years old when she recruited the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a recording contract in 1950, Wilma Cozart Fine went on to create hundreds of orchestral albums that set the standard for classical-music recording for decades.

Mrs. Fine, who died Sept. 21 at the age of 82, led Mercury Records' classical-music recording business in the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when senior female executives in the industry were rare. She initiated and produced the label's "Living Presence" series that ultimately grew to a catalog of more than 400 classical recordings.

Despite more than half a century of technical innovation since Mrs. Fine's first recordings, her work is still considered exceptional for the clarity and realism of its sound.

The Mercury catalog included contemporary composers as well as music of the Civil War, made with period instruments and re-enacted battle sounds recorded at Gettysburg.

Seeing O’Keeffe

Piñon and Chimney Rock
















Other O’Keeffe inspirations, as shown by Pat Carlton.

Las Meninas

A picture of an artist's studio is an invitation to enter his private realm, to ponder his perception of the creative process and to marvel at the extent to which art, at its most profound, can transcend the limits of its historic moment and constructed space. Diego Velázquez's "Las Meninas" (1656)—marked by a massive scale, unremitting technical virtuosity and centuries of critical analysis—is a tour-de-force studio painting and one against which legions of later artists, including Goya and Picasso, have measured themselves. Countless writers have debated the work's seductive visual riddles: its transparent naturalism yet strangely inaccessible subject, its striking combination of a captured moment and staged studio portrait, its meticulously wrought but, in the end, ambiguous perspective. Perhaps the greatest masterpiece of the Golden Age of Spanish art, it has been heralded as a summation of the painter's illustrious career and enduring quest for nobility in an age and culture that did not sufficiently esteem its native artists. In the waning decades of the Hapsburg empire in Spain, Velázquez's "Las Meninas" also offered a telling glimpse of the world of the aging Philip IV, where artifice and illusion often masked, to dazzling effect, an increasingly dismal reality.





Velázquez's first biographer, Palomino, identified the painting's cast of characters, all of them part of the royal household. At center stands the exquisite Infanta Margarita, whose radiant innocence is captured in sheer, scintillating strokes and framed by the solicitous handmaidens (or meninas) who attend her. To the right appear two dwarfs who served, in keeping with court custom, as playmates to the princess; one of them, Nicolasito, teases a sleepy mastiff. Just behind, a lady-in-waiting to the queen chats with an unnamed gentleman, while beyond and silhouetted in a luminous doorway, the queen's chamberlain pauses to look back. And poised at left before his easel, with palette lowered and paintbrush frozen in midair, the artist himself gazes intently out, most likely at Philip IV and his wife, Marianna of Austria, whose likenesses are captured in a shimmering, distant looking glass. It is here that the painter's paradoxes begin.

In the far back, above La Infanta's head, is the mirrored image of the royals.

Unchained Melody

Oh, my love
my darling
I've hungered for your touch
a long lonely time
and time goes by so slowly
and time can do so much
are you still mine?
I need your love
I need your love
Godspeed your love to me

Lonely rivers flow to the sea,
to the sea
to the open arms of the sea
lonely rivers sigh 'wait for me, wait for me'
I'll be coming home wait for me

Oh, my love
my darling
I've hungered for your touch
a long lonely time
and time goes by so slowly
and time can do so much
are you still mine?
I need your love
I need your love
Godspeed your love to me

Kandinsky

Sketch for "Composition II." 1909-1910

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Beginning in 1929, Solomon R. Guggenheim, advised by his friend Hilla Rebay, the notoriously difficult painter, collector and connoisseur of modernist art, bought more than 150 works by Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), along with many by other similarly high-minded artists. In 1939, Guggenheim put his collection on display at his Museum of Non-Objective Painting—the direct ancestor of the present Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum on Fifth Avenue that bears his name. Rebay was the first director. "Uncle Solomon's garage," as his niece, the vanguard enthusiast Peggy Guggenheim, called the museum's first incarnation, included permanent galleries devoted to Kandinsky, a reflection of Guggenheim and Rebay's enthusiasm for the rigorous nonrepresentational approach the painter developed in his quest for what he called, in his writings, "the spiritual in art." Now, the Guggenheim returns to its original mission with a comprehensive retrospective, "Kandinsky," opening Friday and on view through Jan. 13. It's the first major exhibition devoted to the Russian-born artist and theorist—possibly the very first abstract painter—since the Guggenheim's three-part survey more than a quarter century ago.

That exhibition is surveyed in the book Kandinsky at the Guggenheim. (1983). Vivian Endicott Barnett. New York : Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum : Abbeville Press. One of the paintings accompanying the article in today's print Wall Street Journal, and part of the online slideshow is Black Lines (Schwarze Linien). December 1913. Oil on canvas. 51 x 51 5/8 in. The painting is also the cover of the forementioned book.

Another painting in both locales is Succession. April 1935. Oil on canvas. 81 x 100 cm.

The forementioned book is one of several that HWPL has; it also owns video about him, and 26 slides of some of his artworks.













The New York Times also has a review of the art exhibit, and accompanying art work.

Surrealist biomorphism: “Capricious Forms” (1937), a work from Kandinsky’s Paris period, is part of a retrospective at the Guggenheim.











Picture With a Circle" (1911)


Audio Slide Show Color, Movement, Transformation

Concert by the Sea

Joyful Noise Amid the Greenery

www.verdisquarefestival.com

The Other Frank Sinatra

For years, I have been careful to follow the advice Duke Ellington gave me when I was in my early twenties: "Do not categorize music or ­musicians—like 'Dixieland' or 'modern.' Listen, open yourself, to each musician." I failed to heed Duke's counsel with regard to Frank Sinatra Jr.

Duke is reputed to have also said "There are two types of music: good music, and everything else."