Searching new music for Keepers

“Most of the music we play,” a musician who specializes in contemporary works told me recently, “is not great. Some of it is very good, but it lacks something. It falls short. But we need to play it — not only because something great may turn up, and if we don’t play it, we won’t know it, but also because this is the music being composed now, and it ought to be heard.” 

Many of their colleagues seem content to keep grinding out Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Brahms concertos, with little concern for new works. But it is becoming clear to more and more musicians, especially younger ones, that if they are going to have careers — or even a field to have careers in — they cannot keep playing the pillars of the standard canon over and over, spectacular though those works may be. 

Absolutely. There are simply so many times I can listen to Take the A train before yearning for something different. Then again, when I hear Mood Indigo ... still, innovation is important.

Tall Guy With Smile Melts a Town’s Cold Heart

“I think I’ve sort of been grandfathered in,” Mr. O’Neal, known here as the Big Shamrock, said at a news conference before his conducting debut on Monday. “I think, you know, people kind of appreciate my humor, and they appreciate my hard work.”

John Lennon

30 years ago today (not "It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play") John was shot and killed.

Ray Davies writes:  It had just turned December on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I was on my customary morning jog, heading out of Central Park toward 72nd Street. The sun was out but it was treacherous underfoot. I’d slipped on some ice and gone tumbling, to be rescued by a group of college boys.


“Are you all right, sir?” they asked, sounding concerned in a way that indicated that I might have looked frail, fragile and quite possibly old. I felt like saying, “Of course I’m all right, man, can’t you see that I am a globe-trotting rock star?” But I saw the genuine concern in the boys’ faces and thanked them, cautiously continuing my run.

Poignant seems too much of a cliché, but so it is.

Yoko Ono writes:  The most important gift we received from him was not words, but deeds. He believed in Truth, and had dared to speak up. We all knew that he upset certain powerful people with it. But that was John. He couldn’t have been any other way. If he were here now, I think he would still be shouting the truth. Without the truth, there would be no way to achieve world peace. 

On this day, the day he was assassinated, what I remember is the night we both cracked up drinking tea. 

They say teenagers laugh at the drop of a hat. Nowadays I see many teenagers sad and angry with each other. John and I were hardly teenagers. But my memory of us is that we were a couple who laughed.

Another appreciation: We remember what we remember of Lennon, and of that night. When I was young, he was the only adult that mattered outside my family — the Beatle of Beatles. I loved his wit; his irony; his “Help!”; his urgent, reedy voice; his unceasing transformations. Like everyone else who loved him, I can’t help grieving, even now, for all the transformations we lost 30 years ago when John Lennon was only 40.

A nice picture gallery at the Washington Post. And another tribute. And a gallery of pictures from 1980: curious to see an NYPD officer wearing a tie.

Took out and watched  The U.S. vs John Lennon.Very enjoyable, touched a nostalgic nerve.

His books include Skywriting by word of mouth, and other writings, including The ballad of John and Yoko, and In his own write & A Spaniard in the works.

Where a Bird Played Sax,

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times - Judy Rhodes in her East Village row house, once the home of the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker.




There are two signs in front of 151 Avenue B, a row house in the East Village facing Tompkins Square Park.  One is a bronze plaque identifying the building as a former home of the jazz legend Charlie Parker, who lived in the ground-floor apartment from 1950 to 1954.cThe other is a handwritten slip of paper taped to the window of that same apartment, warning, “Please Don’t Knock Before 2 P.M.” Both signs were put up by the building’s owner, Judy Rhodes, who worked hard to get the building declared a city landmark in 1999.

Bravo to her.

As for the “Don’t Knock” sign, Ms. Rhodes said she still favored the “jazz hours” she kept when she was a jazz producer, photographer and hard-core fan. “Nighttime is still the only time I can settle in and take care of my projects,” said Ms. Rhodes, 74, who since 1979 has lived in the apartment Parker inhabited with Chan Richardson and their children. In the life of the saxophonist nicknamed Bird, it was an atypically stable period. Here in this cozy apartment, Parker became a family man. He ate regular meals with the children, pushed them in swings out back and walked them to school. It was Bird’s sanctuary — he once practiced in the large walk-in closet. There is still plenty of bird song in the apartment. Ms. Rhodes has two pet parrots and she takes in injured pigeons she finds nearby and nurses them back to health. She releases the recuperated ones in Central Park or at a bird sanctuary upstate.

She took an interest in the jazz loft scene, befriending avant-garde musicians like Butch Morris, Mal Waldron and Bill Dixon, and producing concerts and booking musicians for jazz festivals and gigs at clubs like the Village Vanguard and Sweet Basil’s. At one point, she brought a Steinway piano into her front room and opened it as a rehearsal space, attracting artists like Art Blakey, Dewey Redman and Don Cherry. “They all thought it was hip to be in Bird’s house. Dewey used to stand in the closet, praying or something. Once when Don was here, he said he had a vision of Bird heading out in a tuxedo.”

There are constant visits from fans of Parker, a pioneer of the bebop style who died in 1955, his body ravaged by drug abuse and alcoholism. “One time,” she said, “a group of Japanese people came in and one of them fell to his knees, crying and kissing the floor.”

Bird lives.

She recalled learning in 1979 that the building was on the market, and the real estate agent who showed her the place pointed out Parker’s 'practice closet.' “I went into the closet and closed the door and I said to myself, ‘I have to have this house,’ ” she said. “I just really liked the idea of living in the place where Bird lived.” She paid $90,000 for the four-story row house, she said, and over the years invested much more in improvements to the Gothic Revival building, which is between Ninth and 10th Streets and was built in 1849.

The place has a Bohemian, jazzy feel, with plenty of African art, and walls covered with jazz photographs taken by Ms. Rhodes. There is still the faded birdcage-themed wallpaper Parker selected as a humorous nod to his nickname, and the same heavy cast-iron tub where Parker — and then Ms. Rhodes — bathed their children.

Jazz greats on the stoop in Harlem!

Listening to Bird Flight this morning, Professor Schaap mentioned his website; looking through it, I found this gem (amnong others).

Mexico's native son, Limon

Dostoyevsky’s ‘Sick Man’ Hits YouTube

Film of Paul Bowles Short Story Rediscovered

Rapper finds order in Orthodox Judaism

Last play at Shea

Kevin Mazur/Newmarket Wrekin Hill

Master musicians

A series of DVDs have performances by jazz artists, usually broadcasts in European television. The two latest I watched, and enjoyed immensely, were Erroll Garner and Wes Montgomery. True masters of their instruments.

John Lennon at 70

Google had this doodle on its home page yesterday and today in tribute to Lennon.

John Lennon would have turned 70 on Saturday, and the anniversary has occasioned a flood of events and releases to commemorate the songwriter and his work. In a way, Lennon’s stature — the reason for the celebrations — makes some of them seem beside the point. Since he was murdered outside the Dakota, 30 years ago in December, Lennon has remained a powerful presence in the culture, both for his songwriting and performances as a Beatle and for his post-Beatles life as a peace crusader, born-again feminist and alternately strident and affecting solo artist. Do we really need to be reminded about John Lennon? 

An iconic picture.

Numerous concert tributes will celebrate Lennon too, including a concert by the surviving members of his first band, the Quarry Men, at the Society for Ethical Culture on Saturday night.

Giant steps

John Coltrane, tenor sax ; Tommy Flanagan, piano ; Paul Chambers, bass ; Art Taylor, drums.

Giant steps -- Cousin Mary -- Countdown -- Spiral -- Syeeda's song flute -- Naima -- Mr. P.C.

I've been listening to it recently; magnificent music.

Who Owns Michelangelo’s ‘David’?

Max Rossi/Reuters - Visitors to the Accademia Gallery in Florence stop to get a closer look at Michelangelo’s “David”.

Does Italy, or Florence own the statue?

Ballet’s New Talent

John Handy III

Heard some of his music today, at 12.30, before heading into work at HWPL. One cut was from his album In the Vernacular.

One hit wonders of the '50s & '60s.

Farmingdale Library called asking for two songs: Let me go lover! and I'll Always Love You. The second song is in sheet music; the first in this book.

Q 784.5 O

Songs:
Alley cat song -- Angel of the morning -- Apache -- Theme from Baby, the rain must fall -- The birds and the bees -- Bobby's girl -- Book of love -- Chantilly lace -- The deck of cards -- Dominique -- Eve of destruction -- Grazing in the grass -- Guitar boogie shuffle -- Happy, happy birthday baby -- Harper Valley P.T.A. -- I like it like that -- Israelites -- Leader of the laundromat -- Let me go lover! -- Love (can make you happy) -- May the bird of paradise fly up your nose -- More -- More today than yesterday -- Na na hey hey kiss him goodbye -- On top of spaghetti -- Pipeline -- Pretty little angel eyes -- Sea of love -- Silhouettes -- Stay -- Stranger on the shore -- Sukiyaki -- Tie me kangaroo down sport -- Who put the bomp (in the bomp ba bomp ba bomp) -- The worst that could happen.

Storied Trove of 1930s Jazz Is Acquired by Museum

The Andy Goldsworthy Project

Domenico Ghirlandaio

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Italian Renaissance painter from Florence. Read about a fresco he painted, Madonna della Misericordia, in the Chapel of the Vespucci, in Ognissanti, in which Amerigo is present, in The mysterious history of Columbus : an exploration of the man, the myth, the legacy , by John Noble Wilford.

 

 Amerigo is second from left.

Los Tigres del Norte

Interesting article about this Norteño band in the 24 May issue of  The New Yorker, by Alec Wilkinson. He makes the point that Norteño music has its roots in polka, brought to northern Mexico by Czechs and Germans at the end of the XXIXth century who arrived to work in iron and copper mines. "The Mexican version is more exuberant than the European one, and has more flourishes. The Mexicans play it so it sounds like music from a warm region instead of a cold one."



La Puerta Negra

Bureaucracy meets Art

Dominic Favre/European PressPhoto Agency - BIG IDEA Christo and his wife and collaborator, Jeanne-Claude, who died in November, with a rendering of “Over the River” in February 2009.
More Photos »

Slide Show

Christo’s Impact

I have my own pictures of the Gates

Joseph Frank

Google's tribute today on its home page.

Ponte Vecchio

In search of Beethoven

Genius explored. Some interesting scenes with Gianandrea Noseda, Emanuel Ax, Hélène Grimaud. Lots of talk, some rapture. In one set of scenes Maestro Noseda conducts Filarmonica della Scala in Beethoven's Opus 55, Symphony no.3 in E flat major "Eroica" with vim and vigor; when the work ends he kisses the score with Mediterranean passion. In fact, I noted that Mediterraneans showed more passion than others: Hélène Grimaud, playing Opus 73, Piano Concerto no.5 in E flat major "Emperor" shows amazing emotion, near rapture, as she interprets the work.


 Satisfying. Of course, it has a website.

"Can you believe I had to play Bach with a gun?"

Ben Lando for The Wall Street Journal - Llewellyn Kingman Sanchez-Werner rehearses with his Iraqi hosts on the Rasheed Hotel's baby grand.

BAGHDAD—Karim Wasfi, director and conductor of the Iraqi National Symphony, was waiting in the lounge of the Rasheed Hotel one recent afternoon for two things: the arrival of a 13-year-old American pianist scheduled to headline a rare concert here; and the Steinway grand he was supposed to play.
The prodigy, Llewellyn Kingman Sanchez-Werner, was coming from New York. The piano was coming from the symphony's rehearsal space, just five miles away from the hotel. Mr. Wasfi was more worried about the piano.

 Mr. Wasfi's orchestra has faced many such obstacles. Its predecessor, the Baghdad Symphony Orchestra, started in 1944 and was shut down again and again over the decades by the strains of war, economics or politics. After Saddam Hussein was deposed, in the postinvasion chaos, Mr. Wasfi recalls, instruments were broken, music sheets ripped, a concert hall burned. "It was a grotesque scene," he says.

In the following years, the orchestra often waited until the last minute to reveal concert times to avoid an attack on such a large, high-profile gathering. Mr. Wasfi says he once took to carrying a sidearm for protection. "Can you believe I had to play Bach with a gun?"

Mr. Sanchez-Werner, the young pianist, is also a musician with a mission: "to fulfill my passion of doing things for the world…at a humanitarian level." A Juilliard student, he plans to play in Rwanda this summer, for the second time, and says he will perform at the Kennedy Center next year for the 50th anniversary celebration of the United Farm Workers. He performed at the White House in December.

 Thirteen years old? Quite impressive.

Mr. Wasfi wore coattails for the concert. After closing with Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade," he and Mr. Sanchez-Werner embraced on stage.

Iraq is "a nation that is so wonderful," the pianist says, "but struggled so much it needs to have something like that in which they can participate."

Lamenting The Future Of the Blues

In early May, I traveled to Memphis to attend the Blues Foundation's 31st annual two-day gala, which included its Hall of Fame induction ceremony and awards banquet. Buddy Guy received a Lifetime Achievement Award. Pinetop Perkins, now 96 years old, turned up, as did 80-year-old Bobby "Blue" Bland and 78-year-old Hubert Sumlin. I heard folk blues, country blues, jump blues, Chicago blues, Delta blues, Texas blues, fast blues, slow blues, good blues and bad blues. What I didn't hear was new blues, and I flew back home no less relieved of my own blues over the genre's troubling future.

Got the blues flying bqack from the blues 'cause of the state of the blues.

Today's blues music isn't only steeped in the past; it's anchored to it. During the performances before and during the banquet, I could trace to almost every song, instrumental solo or vocal style I heard its originator or its most celebrated proponent—and I'm far from an expert on the history of the blues. These tales of heartache, oppression and fleeting joy sounded all too familar.
According to Jay Sieleman, the Blues Foundation's executive director, most blues fans aren't looking for something new. "We all don't want the blues to be the same ol', same ol'," he said, "but it'd better be close."

Laying down the law.

The blues establishment seems to have little interest in reaching out to other musical communities. No rock, hip-hop or jazz artists with a musical debt to the blues were part of the activities in Memphis. Perhaps in turn, blues musicians aren't invited to participate in most major rock festivals...

Keep it pure, ensuring it atrophies; well done.

"We're all worrisome about getting a young audience," XM Satellite Radio's Bill Wax said over sweet tea in Memphis. At the same time, though, he said: "I don't believe the blues world looks for the next big thing. We love people who play around with the form, but we don't want people to mess with the tradition."

Nonsense: keep it pure, resist change, and the music will wither away.

For the blues to have a future in which daring artists bring in new listeners, the establishment needs to share the blues with people who have a different idea of what it is. The future can be built on new modes of expression if musicians and fans remember the blues isn't merely a form. It's a feeling. Capture it, as so many artists did in decades past in so many ways, and you're playing the blues, whether it's with a bottleneck, a big band or a studio full of digital effects.

Jason Moran, the gifted jazz pianist who eagerly explores the blues, explains how he connects with a feeling necessary to make authentic music: "I remember saying to an older musician that I wanted to play bebop, and he said, 'You can't. You didn't live in that time.' That really fired me up to think about what was going on in that time to make those musicians play that way."

That's nonsense, that one can't play it if one didn't live in a particular time; that would make all music die.

"The blues is getting to be like an endangered species," Mr. Guy said by phone. "It's like somebody put a spell on it."

Traditionalists closed to change.

As for Mr. Guy, he profited from some outreach when his daughter Shawnna asked him to appear on "Block Music," her 2006 platinum album. "It's a new thing, a different way," Mr. Guy said of the rap-blues marriage. "Like when Muddy put electricity to the harmonica."

Exactly.

Endless Highway

In reviewing the book You don't look like a Librarian, for The Indexer, I came across the group My Morning Jacket. One of the songs in their 2008 CD, Evil Urges, is Librarian. Eager to hear them, I took the one CD that Peninsula Library owns with them, Endless Highway, a tribute to the music of The Band. One other group on the CD that does a nice job with the song Chest Fever is Widespread Panic.

His Writers' Workshop? A Prison Cell

The life of William Sydney Porter came with a twist at the end. The man who achieved fame under the pen name "O. Henry" had spent more than three years in federal prison on embezzlement charges—a secret that he carried to his grave when he died on June 5, 1910. Not even his daughter knew. It took the investigations of a professor, C. Alphonso Smith of the University of Virginia, to unearth the startling truth. Shrewd observers might have guessed that Porter was hiding something. During his decade-long run as one of America's best-loved writers, which included authorship of "The Gift of the Magi," he avoided conversations about his past. He turned down requests for interviews. He dodged cameras. Yet when Smith announced his discovery in 1916, the effect was the opposite of what Porter had feared. Rather than shunning him as a criminal, the public became fascinated by a personal history that might have been lifted from one of his own tales.

I know the name, but not his work. And I seem to remember there is a bar near Union Square, below Gramercy Park, that is named O'Henry. I've been there, maybe when I worked at MetLife. So I went searching on the Web, and found it via Google maps.

Pete's Tavern, on 18th Street and Irving Place, that's the place. Here is the banner from its website. Also, a picture from Panoramio.

That's what I remember.

Pete's Tavern first opened its doors in 1864. From that date to today it has remained open. This achievement makes Pete's Tavern both an official historical landmark and the longest continuously operating bar and restaurant in New York City. It even stayed open during Prohibition: disguised as a flower shop. Pete's Tavern is proud of its history and steadfastly maintains its traditions. It still looks as exactly as it did when its most celebrated regular O. Henry wrote the classic Gift of The Magi here at his favorite booth by the front doors, in 1902.

From its website, some of its history.

One hundred years after his death, Porter's legacy as a master of the short story appears secure. In his hometown of Greensboro, N.C., the local historical museum plans to reopen next month after extensive renovations. It will include a new section on O. Henry. In Texas, where Porter spent his early adulthood, there are museums devoted to him in Austin and San Antonio. In New York, his final home, the book industry selects a set of O. Henry Prize Stories each year and publishes them in a special volume.

Which is curious, based on this next paragraph: Lots of high-school students still receive a taste of O. Henry, but college professors rarely put his work on their syllabi. To be sure, the bulk of Porter's output was middling. He specialized in pleasant diversions whose main purpose was to entertain. The tales can feel contrived. Even the best bear the marks of hasty composition. Several legends surround the writing of "The Gift of the Magi," but all agree that Porter cranked it out under deadline pressure in just two or three hours. Despite the story's popular appeal, it's easy to believe that "The Gift of the Magi" would have benefited from a second draft.


If so, if his work is middling, why did O.Henry become so well regarded?

Imprisoned by Clichés, Laments and Exposition

Jorge Martín's opera "Before Night Falls" given its premiere recently by the Fort Worth Opera, is based on the memoir by the dissident Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas. Tortured and imprisoned by the Castro regime, Arenas was forced to repudiate his writings and his identity as a gay man; a few years after escaping to New York in the Mariel boatlift, he was stricken with AIDS and committed suicide. It's a subject with great possibilities, but Mr. Martín, who wrote his own libretto in collaboration with the memoir's translator, Dolores M. Koch, outlines the story without really making the audience live it. The Arenas character, Rey, is onstage for every scene of its 2½ hours of music, singing about his suffering, but it's never clear what it was that he wrote that was so threatening to the regime. And as lament follows lament, Rey never seems to change.

More than Communists, Cubans in power and with influence are machos, and homosexuality is not accepted.

Most of the opera is exposition and lamentation without dramatic tension, so it's a relief when an actual antagonist—Victor, the Castro hardliner—finally starts torturing Rey by burning his manuscript and knocking him around in prison. The most dramatic moment comes when Victor forces Rey to watch a television broadcast of Ovidio, Rey's mentor, denouncing his own writing and that of his friends, including Rey. And although one of Rey's greatest crimes in Cuba was to be homosexual, that fact, though much talked about, gets little expression, except in two gauzily homoerotic group ballets (cue those harp glissandos). Perhaps in deference to the sensibilities of Fort Worth, we never see Rey in a love relationship with a man.

Forth Worth sensibilities?

Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto

An article in the 27 May 2010 issue of the New York Review of Books, entitled Radiant, angry Caravaggio, discusses an exhibit at the Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome (February 20 - June 13, 2010). This work is labeled circa 1597; from the ceiling of the Villa Boncompagni-Ludovisi in Rome, recently opened to the public.

Hispanic Society

We went to the Hispanic Society yesterday, Sunday. Quite impressive, and, gladly, not at all crowded. Hamilton Heights is not a popular destination for many; they don't know what they're missing (let's keep it that way).

Most impressive was the art work of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida. Aside from three canvases in the main room, there is a series in its own large room.


The 14 paintings that make up Sorolla's ambitious and overwhelming "Visions of Spain" (1913-1919), which were originally commissioned by Mr. Huntington for the Hispanic Society, are newly installed in their own large gallery after returning from a tour of six Spanish museums. Both a tour de force and a tour of Spain, the paintings are especially persuasive thanks to extensive conservation work that has restored their brilliance. The sailors, fishermen and fish in the post-Impressionist "Ayamonte" (1919) are all in tones of white, yet poles apart from those of the gauchos and cattle in "Andalucía, The Round-Up" (1914)—reflecting the variations in light in different parts of Spain. It's easy to be put-off by clichéd images of local color and ceremonies, folk costumes and dances, but Sorolla manages to draw you into these settings, conveying an authenticity that also speaks to a moment in time, because the scenes were developed from the artist's travel sketches.

The paintings are very large, and it is only because the room is so large that one can get enough perspective to see them properly. Ayamonte is one of them. 

http://museosorolla.mcu.es/

African Folk Gets a Jazz Infusion

Even for Regina Carter, the extraordinary jazz violinist and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, there's risk when straying from familiar terrain, as she does on her new album, "Reverse Thread" (E1 Entertainment).

On "Reverse Thread," her seventh album as a leader, the 43-year-old Ms. Carter reinterprets traditional and contemporary folk music from Kenya, Mali, Uganda and other African nations; the impact of the continent's music on the Western canon is represented by Papo Vázquez's "Un Aguinald Pa Regina" and "Day Dreaming on the Niger," a song co-written by Ms. Carter and Reginald Washington that first appeared on her 1997 album "Something for Grace."

Upper Broadway's buried treasures

Standing on what was once the estate of the bird painter John James Audubon, known today as Audubon Terrace, at Broadway and 155th Street, is an assemblage of elegant Beaux-Arts structures built during the first three decades of the 20th century. Some of the original tenants—including the American Indian-Heye Foundation, the American Geographical Society and the American Numismatic Society—have moved out, but fortunately the Hispanic Society of America remains firmly planted.
In fact, it is taking over some of the vacated spaces. Now that the Hispanic Society has completed the first phase, at a cost of about $5.5 million, of its continuing renovation under the direction of architect Maria C. Romañach and with the aid of Spain's Ministry of Culture, New Yorkers no longer have any excuse to disregard its jaw-dropping collections.

One of our walking tours a few years back covered exactly this area; I remember Trinity cemetery across 155th Street. We walked around the area.

Upon entering the Society's elegant courtyard, the first work one encounters is the magnificent and commanding portrait by Francisco Goya of "The Duchess of Alba" (1797). Several other Goyas are on the balcony above, which serves as a venue for a quick survey in Spanish painting from the late Renaissance to the late 19th century.

 I don't think of a Goya anywhere outside a museum.

 The Hispanic Society of America
Joaquín Sorolla's 'Ayamonte'

 The Hispanic Society of America
Diego Velázquez's 'Portrait of a Little Girl'

La Gioconda

Heard acts 3 and 4 past Saturday night, and liked the music. Music in Act 4 really grabbed my attention. It was a familiar version of a piece called "The Dance of the Hours" -- which is also in Fantasia.

Another famous parody of "The Dance of the Hours" is Allan Sherman's song Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, describing a miserable time at summer camp. It uses the main theme of the ballet as its melody.

Mamet's top 10

What plays does David Mamet like best—and why?

• Thornton Wilder's "Our Town"
• Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's "The Front Page"
• Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
• Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire"
• Arthur Miller's "All My Sons"
• John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt"
• William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life"
• Mart Crowley's "The Boys in the Band"
• Gore Vidal's "The Best Man"
• Clare Boothe Luce's "The Women"

America's Golden Boy

I know the name, but not the music.


* MUSIC
* MAY 18, 2010

America's Golden Boy

By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER

Philadelphia

In this centennial year of the American composer Samuel Barber (1910-81), performances of his work are taking place throughout the nation and abroad.

Meanwhile, as I communed recently with his spirit at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, Barber's alma mater, a birthday bash was in full swing. Central to the festivities was a celebratory all-Barber concert by students and faculty in the handsome recital hall where the composer himself had performed as a student.

A child prodigy who had entered the newly founded conservatory at age 14, Barber was very much its golden boy when he graduated in 1934. Handsome, refined and well-spoken, he was a musical triple threat as well, achieving distinction there as a composer, pianist and singer.

Barber recorded his own setting of Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" with the Curtis String Quartet in 1935. The recording preserves not only the lovely tone of his light, nuanced baritone, but his superb diction. The voice and its music were central to Barber's creativity; even his instrumental works are guided by a born singer's lyrical sensibility. While unmistakably 20th-century in character, his melodies tend to move in singable arcs rather than the jagged declamation of much modernist writing.

Barber, who wrote an operetta at age 10 (to a libretto by the family's Irish cook), had revealed himself as worthy of professional rank while still at Curtis, and it wasn't long before his first major orchestral score, the sparkling overture to Sheridan's comedy "The School for Scandal" (1931), entered the symphonic repertoire. In 1937 his Symphony in One Movement (1936) became the first American symphonic work performed at the Salzburg Festival. In 1938 Arturo Toscanini conducted his "First Essay for Orchestra" and the "Adagio for Strings" on an NBC Symphony broadcast, and by the time his Violin Concerto appeared the next year, Barber's international position was secure.

Barber has been called many things—neo-romantic, eclectic, conservative—terms considered almost pejorative during the second half of the 20th century. During Barber's formative years, radical American composers such as Leo Ornstein, Henry Cowell and Charles Ives, happily experimented with new musical language, much of it bitingly dissonant. They exhorted young Americans to embrace the avant-garde. But Barber's musical development had been carefully guided from childhood by his aunt and uncle, Louise and Sidney Homer. She was a star contralto of the Metropolitan Opera during Caruso's heyday; her husband was a highly regarded composer of art songs. Uncle Sidney encouraged Barber to pursue his own artistic path regardless of outside pressures. At Curtis, Prof. Rosario Scalero, a prominent composer in his own right, further instilled in Barber a deep sense of traditional craftsmanship.

Hence, Barber held himself aloof from the controversies that honed the cutting edge of his time. Though he increasingly incorporated Stravinskian dissonance and complex syncopation into such works as the Violin Concerto, "Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance," the "Capricorn Concerto" and Cello Concerto, he felt under no obligation to employ anything that interfered with his fundamental urge to write emotionally expressive, well-crafted music.

Composer David Ludwig, artistic chair of the Curtis performance studies department, observes that creating a good composition is like making a good story. "And like well-written stories, Barber's scores are structurally watertight."

Barber might today be indisputably regarded as the standard-bearer of 20th-century American music were it not for two contemporaries—Aaron Copland, 10 years older than Barber, and Leonard Bernstein, eight years younger. Both outlived him. Copland and Bernstein deployed the postwar media to greater advantage than Barber, conducting, teaching, writing books and making the most of a golden age of network-televised concert music that put them in the public eye much more frequently than Barber. Moreover, each produced a body of work that struck a chord among a wide range of audiences: Copland's homespun ballet scores captured in the popular mind the essence of rural America, while Bernstein's jazz- and Broadway-inflected music embodied urban America's cosmopolitanism and cultural malaise. Their works' immense popularity led to widespread performance and recognition. Because Barber never sought his own easily recognized all-American idiom, his music—however rich in invention and sheer beauty—did not achieve the same popular identity.

Nonetheless, having already received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1958 opera "Vanessa" (premiered at the Metropolitan Opera, and the first American opera to be staged by the Salzburg Festival), Barber seemed poised to consolidate his pre-eminence through the three commissions he received to inaugurate New York's Lincoln Center. His 1962 Piano Concerto, written for the opening week of Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall, garnered him a second Pulitzer Prize. "Andromache's Farewell," a concert scene for soprano and orchestra based on Euripides' "Trojan Women," was lauded as well. But the highest honor was supposed to be realized with the premiere of his opera "Antony and Cleopatra" to open the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966. It was a fiasco primarily because of Franco Zeffirelli's overwrought production, and because preperformance hubris had set expectations unrealistically high. Nevertheless, it seemed as though the musical press were gunning for Barber at the time. Revised, and restaged by Barber's life-partner and sometime collaborator, Gian-Carlo Menotti, it was received far more positively at its second premiere at the Juilliard School in 1975. But on a personal level, Barber seems never to have regained the wind in his sails, and died believing himself forgotten.

On the contrary, Barber has remained among the most programmed American composers over the decades. His music represents the best meaning of "conservatism"—the conservation and perpetuation of what Barber felt was a living musical tradition stretching back two centuries. And Barber's work represents his lifelong pursuit of honest, meaningful expression. "There's no reason music should be difficult for an audience to understand," he said in an interview later in life.

Probably the most frequently performed Barber work has been the Adagio for Strings. Yet it has never become hackneyed. "Because it's perfect music," says Mr. Ludwig, "and ravishingly beautiful. I think there is something melancholic about it that appeals to everyone, almost a sense of loss that moves people deeply." He also says that while Barber's training is "Eurocentric, his music is not just American in style but very democratic. It's not just accessible to the most highly trained musicians but also to anyone out there in Rittenhouse Square. So its accessibility runs across the board. It's vibrant, it's full of energy, it's completely unpretentious."

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.

Ismael Rivera

Found him whilst listening to Héctor Lavoe radio on last.fm website. Born in Saturce, PR, 5 October 1931.

In 1952, Rivera joined the U.S. Army but was quickly discharged since he didn't speak English. When he returned to Puerto Rico he went to work as a lead singer with Orquesta Panamericana, thanks to the recommendation of his friend Cortijo.

How did he get in, in the first place?

Cortijo's Combo continued to gain fame and so did Rivera's reputation as a lead singer. Benny Moré visited the island and was so impressd with Rivera's voice and skills that he baptized him as "El sonero mayor". The band went to New York City and played in the famed Palladium Ballroom, where the orchestras of Tito Rodriguez, Tito Puente and Charlie Palmieri also played.

What amazing music that must have been.

Ebb Tide

Crossword puzzle clue, 62 across: Hit for Vic Damone and the Righteous Brothers; answer: Ebb Tide. Frank Sinatra also recorded it: Frank Sinatra sings for only the lonely.

Tales from the field hit the road

As the Mexican-immigrant workers called braceros age, a touring exhibit tells their stories

Slideshow

SAN JOSE, Calif.—During World War II, facing a national labor shortage, the U.S. government turned to Mexico. It recruited about two million Mexican laborers to work on farms on in 29 U.S. states, helping to plant crops and pick cotton. The workers were known as braceros, a term derived from the Spanish word for "arm." Many of the braceros settled in the U.S., marrying and raising families. Now in their 70s and 80s, they are gradually dying off—advocates estimate that more than half of all braceros have passed away—and few Americans know their stories.

To ensure that those memories remain alive, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and a consortium of universities embarked five years ago on a project to record the oral histories of braceros, conducting interviews with surviving members of the program around the country. Nearly 1,000 interviews have been digitally recorded and uploaded onto a website, www.braceroarchive.org. An exhibit called "Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program 1942-1964," based on the interviews and featuring documents, photographs and artifacts from that period, is now touring the U.S. It will open at the Museo Alameda in San Antonio later this month.

young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel

* CULTURAL CONVERSATION
* MAY 6, 2010

With Gustavo Dudamel
Before His U.S. Tour Begins

By DAVID MERMELSTEIN

Los Angeles

The young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel is so personable, unpretentious and full of energy that it's easy to see why even seasoned journalists treat him with kid gloves. Yet as he approaches the end of his inaugural season as the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music director, his first major post, an assessment of his achievements seems in order.
[ccdudamel] Zina Saunders

He and the orchestra have just concluded "Americas & Americans," a small series of concerts billed as his first festival with the ensemble, and they are about to embark on their first tour: an eight-city trek across the U.S., beginning in San Francisco on May 10 and culminating in New York on May 22. The programs feature works by Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Bernstein and John Adams.

On a Saturday afternoon last month, Mr. Dudamel, age 29, looked entirely at ease wearing jeans and an orange rugby shirt while sitting in his bright, airy and still largely unfurnished office at the Walt Disney Concert Hall—a space until recently the private domain of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the orchestra's longest-serving leader. Five years ago, Mr. Dudamel was unknown in this city—and most others. But in the summer of 2005 he made an electric American debut at the Hollywood Bowl, leading the Philharmonic in music of Tchaikovsky and Silvestre Revueltas. Intense interest in him followed, reaching a peak in April 2007 when he was named Mr. Salonen's successor. Dudamania has yet to subside.

Mr. Dudamel and his wife now rent a house in the Hollywood Hills, and he suggested that life here pleases him, praising Los Angeles's abundance of good food and drink and noting that the weather is similar to Venezuela's. Moreover, plenty of locals speak his native Spanish. But more important, he is taken with this city's appetite for artistic adventure. "I came for a concert of modern music," he said in his still-limited English, referring to attending one of the Philharmonic's new-music programs. "It was all modern music, and it was sold out. I was very impressed. This is a city of new traditions. People are really open to new things, and that is important."

Yet he also respects classical music's conservative canon—something that must come as a relief to Philharmonic patrons who considered Mr. Salonen an uncompromising avant-gardist. Mr. Dudamel maintains that his programs will balance old and new. "It's not difficult when you have good music," he said. "On this tour, we will do Mahler's Symphony No. 1 with John Adams's 'City Noir.' Next year we have a Brahms festival, and all the symphonies will be paired with new music, including two world premieres—so it's Brahms, but with new and amazing composers. It's like when you go to eat and try a new dish: You always have it with something you already know. That's the kind of combination I want."

This view has already been reflected in the handful of programs Mr. Dudamel led this season. In November, for example, he conducted vibrant, evocative accounts of two scores by the 20th-century Italian composer Luciano Berio that used older material as inspiration. But on the same program he directed a comparatively wan account of Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony—especially compared with versions I heard this season from David Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic. And on a bill not long after, he sandwiched a dull and diffuse reading of Alban Berg's impassioned Violin Concerto, with Gil Shaham as soloist, between sprightly readings of Mozart's "Prague" and "Jupiter" Symphonies.

So the results are mixed. The performances are often thrilling, as with a roof-rattling Verdi Requiem last fall or last month's by turns haunting and snappy take on Bernstein's "Age of Anxiety Symphony" (featured on the coming tour). Yet sometimes his performances are less consistently rewarding than his myriad boosters would have it.

The conductor has only praise for his predecessor, Mr. Salonen, who backed him for the job he now holds. But that doesn't mean the Philharmonic's sound will go unchanged. "I arrived to a wonderful orchestra," Mr. Dudamel said. "The fact that they were 17 years with one conductor made a stability in the orchestra. They were having this connection with Esa-Pekka, and he left it in an amazing condition. But we don't have the same way to interpret, or ideas about repertoire. We are now working really deeply on the sound, and it's a different point of view. They already have their amazing sound, but we have to combine energies. And to describe that is difficult. Lighter? Heavier? More sunny? More dark? I don't know. It's more the personality; we are building a personality."

Mr. Dudamel is now in his third season as principal conductor of Sweden's Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and he remains artistic director of Venezuela's esteemed Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, a title he acquired at age 19. So his relative youth is not an issue. "Of course, I don't have the knowledge and the experience of a 60- or 70-year-old conductor," he said. "But I have been conducting for 17 years, starting at 12. When I see the development of my life, I can see that every day has been a new step forward. I'm always crazy to learn. In 10 years I will have more experience and in 20 even more—if God give me life. So I'm not worried about that. When you are focused on the things you want, and you study, and you are open to listening, all of the experience is coming naturally."

If Mr. Dudamel appears unflappable, that's because he is. Even mention of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's repressive president, does not faze him, though he quickly steers the conversation toward El Sistema, his country's vaunted and longstanding music-education program for underprivileged youths, from which he himself sprung. "For me to talk about politics is really impossible," the conductor said. "But it's very important to understand that I'm coming from this wonderful program of music, and through music we are building a better country. I'm very proud of my country. . . . As an artist, the main thing is to unify, to stand on the stage and play music for everybody."

Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on classical music and film.

Many fences

This article is from the Wall Street Journal. An accompanying photo in the print version is not online. I have my own photos of the Central Park installation, February 2005.

When artists working outside gallery and museum walls in the 1960s and 1970s put down their tools, they often had only a handful of black-and-white photographs or a grainy video as evidence of their labor. Like postcards sent from a place that no longer exists, these images were meant to underscore the "purity" of the art—an ephemeral event or a construction not designed for the ages—and might also serve to attract funding for the next project or as the paltry things their dealers were supposed to sell.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose signature style became the wrapping or marking of a structure or area with fabrics, had a more ingenious approach. They funded their dreamy, supersize, transient creations—realized most recently in 2005's "The Gates" in Central Park—with the sale of preliminary drawings and models, leaving the documenting of the results to the acclaimed filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, and to the German photographer Wolfgang Volz. The Maysleses co-produced and co-directed five sumptuous color films about large-scale projects by the Bulgarian-born sculptor and his Moroccan-born artistic partner and wife, beginning with "Valley Curtain" in 1974 and ending with "Umbrellas" in 1990, while Mr. Volz has been their official photographer since 1972.

Christo And Jeanne-Claude: Remembering The Running Fence
Smithsonian American Art Museum Through Sept. 26

A remarkable example of this long, fruitful relationship can be seen at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. "Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence" is devoted to one of the couple's most ambitious and evocative works of art: the 18-foot-high white nylon fence that ran for 24½ miles across two rolling northern California counties and into the Pacific Ocean. It stood for two weeks in September 1976.

Along with nearly 50 drawings, a 58-foot-long scale model, and 250 photographs by Mr. Volz that recall the planning of the work and the miraculous result, the show features continuous screenings of the 1978 film "Running Fence," directed by the Maysleses and Charlotte Zwerin, as well as "The 'Running Fence' Revisited," a new film directed by Wolfram Hissen. Both documentaries convey, better than any set of objects could, the utopianism, nerve, luck, grass-roots organization, horse-trading and lawlessness that led to one of the few successful and popular works of American environment art.

Whether "Running Fence" would be impossible to accomplish in today's America is hard to gauge. Even in the mid-1970s, long before the age of terrorism, the odds were slim that a pair of New York artists with foreign accents could persuade 59 sheep ranchers and dairy farmers to allow an enormous fabric fence to snake across their property. As it was, convincing them and getting permits took four years. "You're a stranger here," one rancher tells Christo in the Maysles film. "You have to overcome that."

The intensity of the opposition is captured in an early scene in which a man shouts, "That's art? Some lousy curtain coming through here. Hell with it. I'm against it. I think it's stupid." And it wasn't only amateur art critics who initially hated the idea. Environmental groups also objected, especially to the component that called for the fence to spill down a cliff on the beach and disappear into the ocean. Some Sonoma and Marin county commissioners voted against its going up, too.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude never discuss on camera why they settled on this site. But the largely treeless contours of the golden hills are undeniably sensual. The mutations of the piece as it reacts to wind, fog, sun and ocean are captured beautifully in the Maysles film, which dwells more on the hour-by-hour construction—highlighted by the suspense of a last-minute injunction from the California Coastal Commission—than on the arduous process that eventually won over the doubters.

This is oddly modest of the Maysleses, who were instrumental in changing the minds of landowners. The artists had shown their honorable intentions by screening in local homes their previous collaborative film, "Valley Curtain," in which a 1,300-foot-long orange curtain was strung across a gap in the Colorado Rockies for 28 hours.

Mr. Hissen's film is better at revealing the uniquely American circumstances that allowed the project to succeed. As important as the $2,500 or $3,000 offered to each landowner was the promise by the artists to donate the construction materials when the piece was disassembled. Several recipients cut up the tall metal pipes that had supported the ad hoc fence, recycling them as permanent fence posts. "You give a farmer something free and they think they got the world by the tail," one local says.

County officials' disapproval also gave the project unexpected cachet. The government's telling the owners they couldn't do with their land as they wished angered a number of them, causing them to look more favorably on the outsiders. "Looking back, if the supervisors hadn't said no, Christo would have had a hard time getting this done," says another resident.

Most of all, the tenacity of the couple and their unshakable faith in their unusual ideas seem to have earned respect, trust and affection from people who had never heard of site-specific art. In a pivotal scene filmed by the Maysleses at one of 20 public meetings in which the project was argued about, Christo tells the crowd: "The art project is right now here. Everybody here is part of my work."

He wasn't kidding. Overcoming hostility and working within bureaucracies has been as integral to Christo's art as the structures he sketched and built. Early on, he and Jeanne-Claude (his invaluable and highly intelligible mediator) realized that the post office in Valley Ford was a hub for the sparsely populated area, and so they went about courting the support of the postmaster.

The lasting impact of "Running Fence" on this still-rural community is the focus of Mr. Hissen's documentary. He filmed a reunion last year between Christo and Jeanne-Claude (two months before she died) and the surviving participants and observers of the project. "There's no Rembrandts hanging in people's houses out here," says one man. And yet "Running Fence," then and now, ignited serious conversations about "what is art" among citizens who had never thought it was a question.

It is fitting that the Smithsonian American Art Museum bought the project archive for "Running Fence" in 2008. But to gain a deeper sense of its emotional scope, watch the Maysles-Zwerin film. The putting together of the artwork seems not unlike a barn-raising, demanding the same cooperation and, when the fence is secure and rippling in the breeze, evoking the same giddiness and pride. I can't be alone in feeling patriotic about a country that allowed such an unlikely and lovely thing to exist.

Mr. Woodward is an arts writer living in New York.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D9


* ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
* APRIL 6, 2010

A California Dream Come True. By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

Analog Soul

Brooklyn, N.Y.

The reasons for the satisfying success of the old-school soul unit Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings come together at this small, hand-built recording studio in a rickety brick row house in the Bushwick section. Nearby, chained guard dogs laze in the early spring sun. Next door to Daptone Records' headquarters, an auto-body shop quakes with industry. It's a likely location for a studio that's the opposite of state-of-the-art.

With its out-of-fashion tape-recording equipment, the House of Soul studio, as it's known, gives the Dap-Kings' music a resonance that recalls the delightfully greasy soul tracks cut some four decades ago at Stax or Royal Recording in Memphis, Tenn., the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Ala., or Malaco's studio in Jackson, Miss. Ms. Jones and the Dap-Kings built this studio by hand; she's proud to tell you she wired the electrical sockets. Under the floorboards in the isolation booth, where singers and soloists record their parts, are old tires stuffed with clothes to give the space vibrancy and warmth. Mark Ronson brought Amy Winehouse here to record tracks for her monster hit "Back to Black," with the Dap-Kings providing instrumental support. The framed platinum album the Dap-Kings received for their contributions is on the musty basement's floor, not far from what looks like a paint-by-numbers portrait of Stevie Wonder.

The studio reflects the spirit of the Dap-Kings, a self-contained unit dedicated to straight-to-the-gut soul, as their new album attests. Out next week, "I Learned the Hard Way" (Daptone) features the Dap-Kings laying down a solid foundation under Ms. Jones, who as a vocalist is somehow defiant yet vulnerable. To be sure, Gabriel Roth's arrangements and production celebrate classic soul recordings, but to call "I Learned the Hard Way" retro is to miss the point: This is the kind of American music whose commercial fortunes may ebb and flow, but as an art form it is everlasting. "There ain't nothing retro about me," Ms. Jones told me. "We're not hopping on anybody's band wagon."

The Dap-Kings comprise a three-piece horn section with a bone-rattling baritone sax, two guitars, Mr. Roth's bass, drums and Ms. Jones—a tiny dynamo with a big voice and bigger stage presence. In concert, they come out and hit hard from the opening note of a soul revue hosted by their guitarist Binky Griptite. On disc, the Dap-Kings are wall-to-wall soul, with abundant nods to their predecessors. But they're well aware it's no longer the '60s music scene. If it were, and radio played soul and R&B with the joy and frequency it once did, two songs on the new album—"She Ain't a Child No More" and "Better Things"—would be hit singles.

Ms. Jones joined the Dap-Kings a decade ago. Media make much of her brief stint as a corrections officer at New York's Rikers Island prison, but more relevant is her rollercoaster experiences as a singer. Thwarted early in her career by a thoughtless young producer who told her she lacked the look to be a star, Ms. Jones sang in a successful wedding band for almost 20 years before walking away to join the Dap-Kings, who had an unwavering commitment to soul music.

"I was turning down a $500 gig for a $75 gig," Ms. Jones said. "But I felt it's what I had to do." The Dap-Kings had secured a residency at a club in Barcelona, providing the singer with her first trip overseas, but those close to her thought she'd made a mistake. "My own family said, 'What is she doing running around Europe with these guys?'"

The band's furious stage show helped it build its reputation and lock in its sound. In 2004-05, it played more than 250 shows in 14 countries. The Dap-Kings' breakthrough album, "100 Days, 100 Nights," followed. Critics caught on, and countless TV and festival appearances followed. College-age members of the audiences who hadn't lived through soul's great era heard the band and introduced it to their parents. Ms. Jones and the Dap-Kings were no longer seen as a nostalgia act out on the fringe.
[dapkings] Associated Press

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.

"We knew we were on to a good thing," Mr. Jones said. "We weren't making any money before, but now we were on a roll." Without a regular income, Ms. Jones had moved in with her mother in Far Rockaway, Queens. Now she was able to get out on her own again.

On the heels of "100 Days," new opportunities beckoned. Ms. Jones worked with Lou Reed and had a role in Denzel Washington's "The Great Debaters." "Finally, my look paid off," Ms. Jones told me with a wry smile. The Dap-Kings backed Al Green. The full unit appeared on the all-star charity album "Dark Was the Night." Back in Bushwick, sessions began for "I Learned the Hard Way," a title that reflected Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings' rise to success.

As for the studio, with its analog recording equipment and reel-to-reel tapes, Mr. Roth, who produces under the name Bosco Mann, said: "It's all just a tool. Analog sounds good, but it's more important to have a good drummer." Owning the House of Soul means the Dap-Kings don't have to rent costly studio space by the hour, he added. The trick is to avoid the trappings of success and make better records. And to let Ms. Jones continue to blossom.

"Sharon has an unmatched ability to connect with an audience," he said. "She can't mail it in. As she says, what comes from the heart reaches the heart."

By JIM FUSILLI

Nimble Gimble hums along

Getty Images Johnny Gimble performs in Austin, Texas in May 2009

Country music does not usually catch my attention, but this piece did.


"When I was 15," he recalled in a recent phone interview, "I was working for a radio band in Shreveport. Cliff Bruner, the hottest Texas fiddler of them all, was on the same package shows, playing for Jimmie Davis. I asked him, 'Cliff, how do you play that hocum?,' which is what we still called swing there. And he said: 'Can you hum what you're thinking? Practice till you can play what you can hum.'


"Later, when I was in the Army, in Austria, they didn't play any country music on the Armed Forces radio, just big band, and I'd hear Slam Stewart [of Slim & Slam] humming along with his bass, so I started practicing that—humming some hot licks and then trying to find them on the fiddle. When I got with the Wills band in 1949, Bob would let me hum along on the bandstand. My son Dick sometimes does that playing bass, too, and my granddaughter Emily Gimble can scat, humming along with her jazz piano solos."

Sonny Stitt

A beautiful sax. Touted as Bird's heir, a burden too great for any one, he grew into his own sound. Found this on YouTube; whilst only music, it is a magnificent example of his gorgeous tone.



This second one is a video: JJ Johnson (trombone), Howard McGhee (trumpet), Tommy Potter (bass), Kenny Clarke (drums), Walter Bishop Jr. (piano), and Sonny Stitt (sax) performing Bird's My Little Suede Shoes. Berlin, September 26, 1964.


A gem follows: Bird and Coleman Hawkins in an excerpt of "Ballade" followed by Bird, Buddy Rich, Hank Jones and Ray Brown jamming. It ends with Norman Granz describing the following two pieces (which are not played), which bring in Lester Young, Flip Phillips, Harry "Sweets" Edison and Ella Fitzgerald.


That last one mentioned above is here:

Orozco exposición

ABRE MUESTRA DE OROZCO - (Foto: EFE)

Más de 340 piezas componen la magna exposición del muralista mexicano José Clemente Orozco, que fue inaugurada en el Instituto Cultural Cabañas en Guadalajara | Ver nota
 

Muestra de José Clemente Orozco llega a Jalisco La exposición está compuesta de 345 dibujos, acuarelas, gráficos, pinturas, tintas, recortes de periódicos y reproducciones fotográficas de su obra dentro y fuera de México

Más de 340 piezas componen la magna exposición del muralista mexicano José Clemente Orozco, que fue inaugurada en el Instituto Cultural Cabañas en Guadalajara, capital del occidental estado de Jalisco.

Esta es "la más grande retrospectiva" de la obra del artista jalisciense que se presenta en México en las últimas tres décadas, dijo la directora del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), Teresa Vicencio.

La exposición "José Clemente Orozco pintura y verdad" está compuesta de 345 dibujos, acuarelas, gráficos, pinturas, tintas, recortes de periódicos y reproducciones fotográficas de su obra dentro y fuera de México.

Las piezas que la componen, distribuidas en 19 salas de manera cronológica, estarán expuestas hasta el próximo 31 de julio.

Por primera vez en la historia serán exhibidos los 150 dibujos preparatorios que el artista hizo para cada uno de sus murales en México y Estados Unidos.

En ellos se muestra la evolución de Orozco como artista plástico desde sus inicios como caricaturista en diarios del país, su etapa como pintor de caballete hasta su trabajo como muralista, afirmó el curador de la exposición, Miguel Cervantes.

"Quisimos reunir la obra de Orozco de una manera lo más panorámica posible y mostrar que tanto los dibujos de sus inicios como sus pinturas están a la altura de Picasso, Rembrandt, Matisse o Goya", señaló el experto.

Durante la investigación que duró dos años, los curadores registraron más de mil 600 obras de Orozco diseminadas en suelo mexicano y estadounidense.

La obra exhibida pertenece a coleccionistas mexicanos y extranjeros, a la colección de la familia del pintor, a museos mexicanos, así como de la Biblioteca Baker en New Hampshire y el Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York, en Estados Unidos.

Para esta exposición, la Secretaría de Cultura del Gobierno de Jalisco y el Fondo de Cultura Económica publicaron un catálogo de 600 páginas de las obras expuestas.

Además se editó la antología crítica "La zarza revivida. José Clemente Orozco a contraluz" con 60 textos recopilados desde 1913 de plumas como José Juan Tablada y Octavio Paz que constituye "la primera edición con tal cantidad de ensayos", dijo Cervantes.

Luego de su paso por el Hospicio Cabañas, la exposición será trasladada al Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, en Ciudad de México.

Exhibición   Por primera vez en la historia serán exhibidos los 150 dibujos preparatorios que el artista hizo para cada uno de sus murales en México y Estados Unidos (Foto: EFE )

A magnum opus for Ransom

Austin, Texas


Even without a Texas nexus, it's an excellent fit: Magnum's huge archive of press prints—some predating the founding of the venerated photographers' cooperative in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others—has arrived at the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center here. (The archive was recently bought by the private investment firm of computer magnate Michael Dell; the Ransom Center will catalog and exhibit it for at least five years.) To reposition itself in today's digital marketplace, Magnum will use the funds realized from the two tractor trailers full of what it produced so well using old-school technology. The Ransom Center, having recently celebrated its own 50th anniversary, will continue doing what it only seems to get better at: collecting and preserving the paper trails of many media, including the materials just deaccessioned by Magnum.
deaccessioned: the process of legally removing objects from a repository/museum's collections.

 Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos - 

Cartier-Bresson's 'Place de l'Europe. Gare Saint Lazare' (1932).

At last count, Ransom's large building on the UT campus houses 36 million manuscript pages, one million rare or significant books, five million photographs, and 10,000 objects, from Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish typewriter to the sunglasses Gloria Swanson wore in "Sunset Boulevard." While many of Ransom's 70,000 annual visitors come to gawk at its Gutenberg Bible (one of only 48 complete copies) or the first photograph taken in nature by Joseph Niepce in 1826, what places Ransom in the rarefied company of research libraries like Harvard's Houghton, Yale's Beinecke or the Library of Congress is the breadth and depth of its 20th-century British and American collections.

Most of the contents are accessible to anyone with an I.D. and a wish-list. Simply walk in and you can soon be rifling (carefully) through acid-free boxes of Tennessee Williams's papers, as Vanessa Redgrave did when she went searching for a certain previously unpublished, unproduced Williams play. Or you can have a look at Ezra Pound's copy of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," in which the poet scribbled "For E.P., miglior fabbro, from T.S.E."—the mold that grew on the inside cover is left as provenance; Pound buried it in Italy to protect it during the war.

The Ransom Center was named for its founder, Harry Huntt Ransom, an English professor and then university chancellor, who decided in the 1950s that Texas needed its own Bibliothèque Nationale. Rather than compete, so late in the game, for rare books with long-established libraries, Ransom took the unconventional tack of pursuing the prepublication manuscripts and archives of late-19th- and 20th-century British and American writers, for which little market then existed. (Not so now.) Flush with funds from university oil revenues, the "Great Acquisitor," as Ransom was called, snapped up the collections of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw, to name a few, as well as many nonliterary archives, such as that of theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, and 5,000 boxes of producer David O. Selznick's papers.

The Harry Ransom Center - The Magnum archives arrive at the Ransom Center.

Enter Thomas F. Staley, a James Joyce scholar, who took the helm of the Ransom Center in 1988, 12 years after Ransom's death. Among the 100 archives he's scored for the Ransom during his tenure are those of British playwrights Tom Stoppard, John Osborne, David Hare and Arnold Wesker, as well as those of writers David Mamet, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes, Penelope Lively and the Ransom's largest single-author collection, the 10-ton archive of Norman Mailer. Today most of the funding for Mr. Staley's acquisitions—including the $5 million tab in 2003 for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate papers and $2.5 million in 2005 for Mailer's—comes from the endowments of private sources he so adroitly cultivates. (As for the Magnum acquisition, MSD Capital, L.P. would not divulge the pricetag, but a source familiar with the transaction said the Ransom has insured it for more than $100 million.)

Affable, kinetic and with an impish sense of humor, the 74-year-old Mr. Staley conducts operations from an office whose decor and contents feel slightly at odds with the contemporary setting: rare books mingle in antique bookcases with Joyce journals and review copies of new books; the walls are covered with autographed memorabilia from the past century. An Eve Arnold photo of Marilyn Monroe, sitting in a playground reading "Ulysses," fairly leaps off the wall.


Mr. Staley typically looks at up to five collections a month, adding that while he "certainly could not imagine a Virginia Woolf doing this, more authors today are aware of the possibilities and try to negotiate their archives during their lifetimes because they need the money." Mr. Staley's ability to tap deep pockets—quickly—for an acquisition is legendary. As a result, he says, "we get a shot at many of them, the first-refusals."

Steve McCurry / Magnum
Steve McCurry's famous photo 'Pakistan. Peshawar. 1984. Afghan Girl at Nasir Bagh refugee camp' is part of the collection.

In a shrewd game of what he stresses is "chess, not checkers," Mr. Staley keeps three different tiers of authors on his radar screen, looking for those likely to be future subjects of literary scholarship. (A group of curatorial-minded younger readers scouts collectable younger talent.) He stays in personal touch and also monitors the writers' personal (read: financial) circumstances. He knows the dealers, is friends with many of the writers, and has terrific stories of hard-ball negotiations—successful or not—with an Osborne (who held out during his lifetime; his widow subsequently made the deal with Mr. Staley) or a Wesker (who made lunch for Mr. Staley at his home in Wales and showed him his archive, stored in a damp barn covered with plastic, in hopes of getting Mr. Staley to up his offer—he didn't). Mr. Staley also tells of the fun he had, in the early '90s, marshaling a "minyan" of Texans for the funds to "get I.B. Singer's archive out of New York."

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Robert Adams's Heart of Darkness

He makes frequent forays to London and delights in the serendipity of stumbling upon a folder of moldy, mouse-nibbled Beckett and Harold Pinter letters while poking around Stoppard's barn, helping the playwright pack up his papers for Austin. But it would be hard to top his discovery, years ago, while inventorying a newly acquired collection of Joyce papers, of some onionskin leaves that Mr. Staley "realized were the famous lost link, the missing draft with Joyce's corrections in his own hand to the opening of 'Finnegans Wake'—an item more valuable than the price we had paid for the entire collection." This is empirical proof of Mr. Staley's axiom that "10% of an archive represents 90% of its value, and 90% of an archive is worth 10% of the price."

That great sucking sound made by the exodus of the papers of so many British writers from "over there" to here has understandably generated some push-back from across the pond, some going so far as to denounce it as "cultural vandalism." Others blame their own for simply lacking the cultural chutzpah of a Tom Staley.


Ms. Lewis writes about the arts for the Journal from Austin, Texas.
* ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
* MARCH 25, 2010


A Magnum Opus for Ransom
By Anne S. Lewis