Showing posts with label Piano. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Piano. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Uncertain coda for mansion with a musical heritage
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
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.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Chopin's 'Soul and Heart'
By BYRON JANIS
March 1 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great composer and pianist Frédéric François Chopin. Or was it? Not according to his sister Ludwika, Franz Liszt and Chopin's close friend Jules Fontana. They all said, at one time or another, that he was born on March 1, 1 809, despite Chopin's insisting his birthday was a year later. To add to the mystery, there is a birth certificate issued by the parish church in Brochów, Poland (and on display there to this day)—near Zelazowa Wola, the small town outside Warsaw where Chopin was born. It gives us still another date: Feb. 22, 1810, the same date inscribed on Polish monuments and on his burial site at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.Getty Images - Portrait of Frederic Francois Chopin (1810 - 1849), Polish composer and pianist
Saturday, November 14, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
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?
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?
Thursday, September 17, 2009
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