Doble o Nada

Interesting idea. Renzo Franchi sounds just like Carlos Gardel. Juanita falls in love with him, but, really, with Gardel. And the twist is that Renzo replaces Gardel in Bogotá and Medellín when the real Carlos goes back to Buenos Aires. And it is Renzo who dies in the plane crash. So Gradel outlives himself. Fun. Too bad I don't speak Argentinian.

This Bird don't soar

Bird!

After reading this review of Crouch’s book, I was excited, and reserved the book. Why? Don’t I know enough about Charlie Parker? Of course I do; I’ve been listening to Phil Schaap for decades. DO I need to know more? Of course not. But … this is Bird. So I took the book. I read to page 41, and, disappointed, and annoyed, I shut the book. And returned it. Crouch relies on metaphors, similes, cliches, and other grammatical tricks, tries to come up with a cadence that he supposes, I suppose, will make the reader feel Bird’s music … But, it don’t work.

    Example: discussing Coronado’s exploration of the territory above the Rio Grande led by Marcos de Niza. Included in the group was an African slave named Estevan. This Arab Negro, Crouch writes, died up there, Niza said, for some foolish and arrogant act; the promotion from slave to scout had yeasted his head to self-destructive proportions. You know, give them an inch. (41) What?

And: But the things his fellow band members were thinking was of no consequence to Charlie Parker. He had his mind on other matters. How does Crouch know? Conjecture? Sure, it is easy to suppose Parker wanted to score dope before playing music, but that can not be assumed, not in a biography. In fiction, sure.

Searching for Sugarman (2012)

a documentary film directed by Malik Bendjelloul, which details the efforts of two Cape Town fans in the late 1990s, Stephen 'Sugar' Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom, to find out whether the rumoured death of American musician Sixto Rodriguez was true, and, if not, to discover what had become of him. Rodriguez's music, which never took off in the United States, had become wildly popular in South Africa, but little was known about him there.

Excellent. Engrossing story, excellent music.

Norman Granz

Hershorn, Tad. (2011). Norman Granz : the man who used jazz for justice. Berkeley : University of California Press.

 When I saw it, I had to take, even though, at the time, I had four or five other books. A couple of years ago I saw a CUNY grant available for writers of biography. Daydreaming, I wondered whom I might write about, and Granz came around: I could not fin done bio written about him. Interesting man, interesting book. After starting to write La Roja en verde, and the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, things changed. Worth going back to; stopped at p.122

Mentioned in book: Nat King Cole

Sleepy Lagoon case - connected to Zoot suit riots

 David Stone Martin - influenced by the line art of Ben Shahn;drew covers for Granz


 Joe Turner sang in Duke Ellington's Jump for Joy in LA, 1941 (34)

Marie Bryant: sang with Duke; had relationship with Granz

p.46: Prez's only recordings without drums, first in a trio 

T-Bone Walker (51)

Gjon Mili (65) - Jammin' the Blues

 

3 books returned

The checklist manifesto: how to get things right, Atul Gawande.
Explores the use of checklists, originating in aviation, in medicine. Gawande logically moves through how lists were developed, and refined, his acceptance and adoption of lists in his medical practice, and in the WHO in a study and project on reducing the number of surgeries performed. In his usually meticulous manner, the good doctor lays out the case for using checklists: conscientiously used, well written (concise and comprehensive), they can help in any field. I quite agree. I have begun to develop a checklist for investing.

Bing Crosby: a pocketful of dreams : the early years, 1903-1940, Gary Giddins.
The only biography that seemed worth reading turned out not to be. Giddins is a music wroter with a long record; I have read some pf his work. But, in this case, he seemed to be (too) enamored of his subject matter. I put it down rather quickly. I'll have to look for another biography. My desire to read about Crosby came from reading Seabuiscuit; Crosby was a racehorse owner who was in friendly, and not-so friendly competition with the Biscuit's owner, Charles Howard. Of course, crosby also has a connection to Bix Beiderbecke. I was hoping to read all about both, but, alas, this was not to be the book for me.

The fountainhead, Ayn Rand ; with special introduction by the author. After Paul Ryan was nominated for the Republican VP nomination, I thought I would take a look at this work that he lauds as being very important in his life. I read two pages and put it down; it was very poorly written, for my taste.




One out of three is good: a .333 batting average is baseball is very good.

Searching for music, I found this book, and while I was not sure if I would read it, I did, and rather enjoyed it.

Kastin, David. (2011. Nica's dream: the life and legend of the jazz baroness.  New York: W. W. Norton.

The Music Never Stopped

A father who teaches his son all about his own music in the late 1950s is shocked to find his son estranged from what he has been taught: instead of remembering Bing Crosby fondly, he has become a Deadhead, is against the VietNam War, and wants to forgo college to play music. The father forces a confrontation, and is unrepentant when his son leaves home. Nearly twenty years later, for the first time the parents of Gabriel receive a phone call that sends them into a whirlwind of guilt, repentance, and, eventually, reconciliation. Except that Gabe is not well: a tumor has damaged his brain, and he can not remember anything after 1970.

One day, in a library, researching microfilm, the father, Henry, reads about a therapist who uses music to reach patients similarly afflicted to his son. It is she who manages to reach Gabe, especially once she realizes that it is 1960s music, and not the 1940s and 1950s music his father insists on, that touches Gabe deep inside and brings him out.

Nicely done. In Rotten Tomatoes, typically, it gets a higher audience mark than a critical mark: 85% vs 65%. An involving, if sentimental and predictable family drama elevated by J.K. Simmons' sympathetic lead performance. The film is based on a story by Oliver Sacks, The last hippie (which, in an interview accompanying the film, the good doctor says is based on a true case of one of his patients).

Hedy’s folIy

In a front-page review, on Sunday 18 December 2011, John Adams (the composer) writes about The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, by Richard Rhodes. The illustration accompanying the review speaks to her attributes: a startlingly beautiful Vienna-born actress who, although still in her early 20s, had accomplished her own scandal by appearing nude and simulating passionate adulterous sex in a mostly silent movie called “Ecstasy.”

Louis B. Mayer had seen her "Ecstasy" but was ambivalent about her (“You’re lovely, but . . . I don’t like what people would think about a girl who flits bare-assed around the screen.”). Nonetheless, he signed her to a contract, with the proviso that she change her name.

She commanded the screen not so much for her acting, which at best was passably droll and arch, but rather for the perfect beauty of her face, with its colliding sensuality and innocence, and for the subtle irony and sly intelligence that animated her work with screen partners like Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart and Charles Boyer.

Under contract to MGM, she worked hard, was generally liked, and although not a diva was scrupulous about fighting for her rights in an era when actors and actresses were “properties” rather than people. She avoided the celebrity party circuit, preferring small gatherings with close friends. At home she set up a drafting table and devoted her downtime to inventions, including a bouillon-like cube that when mixed with water would produce an instant soft drink. It was at a dinner at the home of the actress Janet Gaynor in 1940 that she met George ­Antheil.

Antheil was a composer from Trenton, and had caused a sensation similar to Stravinsky with his Rites of Spring. He went to work in Hollywood, scoring films. He had also written a book, “Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Criminology.” He also wrote pieces for Esquire, and Hedy Lamar had read one of those.

According to Antheil’s autobiography, “Bad Boy of Music,” Hedy requested the meeting because she had read one of his Esquire articles about glands. This was Hollywood, and the most beautiful woman in the world was concerned about her breast size.
These were days before implants.

That a glamorous movie star whose day job involved hours of makeup calls and dress fittings would spend her off hours designing sophisticated weapons systems is one of the great curiosities of Hollywood history. Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her ­munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials.

Love me or leave me

Cast: Doris Day, James Cagney, Cameron Mitchell, Robert Keith, Tom Tully
Director: Charles Vidor
Writer: Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart
Running Time: 122 min.
Genre: Drama, Musical
Rating: No Rating
Synopsis: One of the gutsiest movie musicals of the 1950s, Love Me or Leave Me is the true story of 1930s torch-singer Ruth Etting, here played by Doris Day. While working in a dime-a-dance joint, Ruth is discovered by Chicago racketeer Martin The Gimp Snyder (fascinatingly played with nary a redeeming quality by James Cagney). The smitten Snyder exerts pressure on his show-biz connections, and before long Ruth is a star of nightclubs, stage and films. Ruth continues to string Snyder along to get ahead, but she can't help falling in love with musician Johnny Alderman (Cameron Mitchell). After sinking his fortune into a nightclub for Ruth's benefit, Snyder is rather understandably put out when he finds her in the arms of Alderman. Snyder shoots the musician (but not fatally) and is carted away to prison. Upon his release, Snyder finds that Ruth is still in love with Alderman; he is mollified by her act of largesse in keeping her promise to perform in his nightclub at a fraction of her normal salary. No one comes off particularly nobly in Love Me or Leave Me, even though the still-living Ruth Etting, Martin Snyder and Johnny Alderman were offered full script approval. The fact that we are seeing flesh-and-blood opportunists rather than the usual sugary-sweet MGM musical stick figures naturally makes for a more powerful film. In his autobiography, James Cagney had nothing but praise for his co-star Doris Day, and bemoaned the fact that she would soon turn her back on dramatic roles to star in a series of fluffy domestic comedies.~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

I enjoyed it. This review captures the film quite well. Doris Day pulled off the songs; her voice had a little, even more than little, resonance and vibrato to it (a couple of times I thought of Sara Vaughn), not the usual limited range and sweetness of so many other musicals.

Erotic Muse

Bawdy

Band Wagon

Great dancing, nice singing, thin plot, and Oscar Levant all in one film. A classic

Groovy, man

Groovy? I don't know. Nothing that I have seen quite captures what I remember as the spirit of the 60s. Maybe it is my memory that is at fault. These days, it would be no surprise.

The movie seems kinda hokey and cliché-ridden, but the actor who played Michael Lang was spot-on. Fun, anyway.

Honeydripper

A John Sayles work. Worked nicely. Stacey Keach played a racist sheriff who was not an ogre, yet enough of a son-of-a-bitch to seem real. Ebert writes about it with praise.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080117/PEOPLE/648662905/1023

Hilary and Jackie

A good film about the musical Du Pré sisters: as children both were prodigies, and Hilary was more highly regarded by adults for her talent on the flute. Eventually Jackie emerged as a prodigious talent, and did indeed become a world-class cellist.

Music and the dynamics of the relationship between the sisters are the core of the film. Daniel Barenboim is introduced as Jackie's love interest and husband. After a section of the film tracing the early lives and teen years of the sisters, the film looks at their lives first from Hilary's viewpoint, and, later, from Jackie's.

Rachel getting married

Anne Hathaway and Rosemarie DeWitt star in this eclectic movie. The music is unusual, and wonderful.


Kym (Anne Hathaway) is released from rehab for a few days so she can go home to attend the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). At home, the atmosphere is strained between Kym and her family members as they struggle to reconcile themselves with her past and present. Kym's father shows intense concern for her well-being and whereabouts, which Kym interprets as mistrust. She also resents her sister's choice of her best friend Emma (Anisa George), rather than Kym, to be her maid of honor. Rachel, for her part, resents the attention her sister's addiction is drawing away from her wedding, a resentment that comes to a head at the rehearsal dinner, where Kym, amid toasts from friends and family, takes the microphone to offer an apology for her past actions, as part of her twelve-step program.

The Life, Music, and Times of Carlos Gardel

Reissued work; saw on New Book cart, and took. Read of him until 1925. Born in Toulouse, France, in 1890, he moved to Argentina with his mother, his father long gone. Fascinating to read of the development of his career, from a somewhat anti-social youth to a man dedicated to a singing career.

Originally published in 1986. A work in Spanish, from 1999:
Carlos Gardel, su vida, su música, su época. Simon Collier; traducción de Carlos Gardini. Buenos Aires : Editorial Sudamericana, 1999.

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.

Buena Vista Social Club

A classic. Quite enjoyable. Bravo, Ry Cooder.

Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone

Sam Falk/The New York Times - Little Girl Blue: Nina Simone at the Village Gate in 1965.


In 1960, one year after Nina Simone’s first album, “Little Girl Blue,” was released, the poet Langston Hughes struggled to put the appeal of Simone’s music and presence — that dusky voice, that unblinking gaze — into words. “She is strange,” Hughes wrote in The Chicago Daily Defender. “So are the plays of Brendan Behan, Jean Genet and Bertolt Brecht. She is far out, and at the same time common. So are raw eggs in Worcestershire.”

Hughes was just getting warmed up. “She is different. So was Billie Holiday, St. Francis and John Donne. So is Mort Sahl, so is Ernie Banks.” He continued: “You either like her or you don’t. If you don’t, you won’t. If you do — wheee-ouuueu! You do!”

Simone soon befriended Hughes, and through him she dove into the beating heart of that era’s young black intelligentsia, becoming close to both James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, who would become godmother to Simone’s daughter. That Simone was absurdly talented was already clear. But her new friends helped crystallize her inchoate political thinking.

One result was a stunning song, “Mississippi Goddam,” written by Simone in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham church bombings and the killing of the civil rights advocate Medgar Evers. In many respects it represented the pinnacle of what would become a long and tangled career. “Alabama’s got me so upset,” Simone sang. “Tennessee made me lose my rest./But everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.”

It was a song that inserted her into the forefront, at least musically, of the civil rights movement. Its recording is a moment that Nadine Cohodas’s fascinating if turgid new biography of Simone, “Princess Noire,” builds toward and then falls away from. In the case of her career, that falling away was a long, slow and painful one into mental illness, megalomania and increasingly strange behavior.

From the start audiences and critics had trouble pinning Simone down. She was a classically trained pianist, but her work also drew upon jazz, gospel, the blues, folk and European art songs. When the jazz writer Ralph J. Gleason described her as “some exotic queen of some secret ritual,” he was commenting on her comportment as much as her sound.

Simon was a remote and formidable presence onstage, not afraid to stop a song midchord in order to chew out a talky audience member. While playing at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1961, she snapped, “For the very first time in your lives, act like ladies and gentlemen at the Apollo.”

Her anger spilled over offstage too. After the Animals had a hit in 1965 with “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” a song that was written for Simone, she confronted the band’s lead singer, Eric Burdon. “So you’re the honky,” she said, “who stole my song and got a hit out of it?”

Simone wrote an autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You,” that was published in 1991, but Ms. Cohodas is convincing on the subject of that book’s factual deficiencies. Ms. Cohodas has clearly done her research, but “Princess Noire” remains a strangely distanced and brittle biography.

Books read

Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library

Clark Gable: A Biography

Homo Politicus, by Dana Milbank

Russia: A Long-shot Romance


The Producer: John Hammond and the soul of American Music

Travels with Herodotus