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.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
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.
Friday, May 7, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel
* 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.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
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.
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
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
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
Thursday, April 1, 2010
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
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
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