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.

'Tis autumn

In 1991 filmmaker Raymond De Felitta heard a singer named Jackie Paris on a Los Angeles radio station and began a search that first yielded the fact that Paris had died in 1977. In 2004 De Felitta discovered Paris was alive and making a comeback in a New York City nightclub. This film explores the life of the jazz singer along with an exploration into what it is to live the life of an artist in its least glamorous aspects. Includes interviews with jazz legends including Billy Taylor, James Moody, Anne Marie Moss, Mark Murphy, George Wein, and others.

Outsider Pictures

Paris had a distinctive voice. A tenor, it was pleasant, yet, for me, it lacked something, some quality. One person in the film said that once someone explained Paris's lack of success by saying he doesn't sound like anyone. A valid point. We are so inclined to say that a writer, a musician, a singer, resembles another, as a way of qualifying (and, often, pigeonholing) the talent, that someone who can not be so qualified can suffer thereby.

He also played guitar and tap-danced. Of the latter, there is no recording extant; there was a recording of Paris playing guitar in a trio, and singing: he reminded me a lot of Tiny Grimes (see above).

That he didn't make fame is strange. The film explored and tried to answer that. Perhaps his temper and his ego got in the way, though he would hardly be the first musician to have an outsize ego and temper. Peggy Lee tried to propel his career. Ella liked him. But, clearly, someone didn't.

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.

The US vs. John Lennon

Surprisingly engaging after all these years. One of the talking heads was G. Gordon Liddy, an done of the great revelations, to me, he made was just how obsessed Tricky Dickie Nixon was with Lennon. Recent (in the past ten days, or so) releases of Nixon tapes continue to show just what an idiot and a criminal he was – yes, he was a crook.

Monk

Kelley, Robin D. G. (2009). Thelonious Monk: the life and times of an American original. New York: Free Press.

New book. Reviewed in the Times on 18 October.

Thelonious Monk, the great American jazz artist, during the first half of his jun­ior year at Stuyvesant High School in New York, showed up in class only 16 out of 92 days and received zeros in every one of his subjects. His mother, Barbara Monk, would not have been pleased. She had brought her three children to New York from North Carolina, effectively leaving behind her husband, who suffered bad health, and raising the family on her own, in order that they might receive a proper education. But Mrs. Monk, like a succession of canny, tough-minded, loving and very indulgent women in Thelonious Monk’s life, understood that her middle child had a large gift and was put on this earth to play piano. Presently, her son was off on a two-year musical tour of the United States, playing a kind of sanctified R & B piano in the employ, with the rest of his small band, of a traveling woman evangelist.

That was the original Stuyvesant, on 15th Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenues, on the south border of Stuyvesant Square.

The brilliant pianist Mary Lou Williams, seven years Monk’s senior and working at the time for Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy orchestra, heard Monk play at a late-night jam session in Kansas City in 1935. Monk, born in 1917, would have been 18 or so at the time. When not playing to the faithful, he sought out the musical action in centers like Kansas City. Williams would later claim that even as a teenager, Monk ­“really used to blow on piano. . . . He was one of the original modernists all right, playing pretty much the same harmonies then that he’s playing now.”

Mary Lou Williams is brilliant.

Robin D. G. Kelley, in his extraordinary and heroically detailed new biography, “Thelonious Monk,” makes a large point time and time again that Monk was no primitive, as so many have characterized him. At the age of 11, he was taught by Simon Wolf, an Austrian émigré who had studied under the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic. Wolf told the parent of another student, after not too many sessions with young Thelonious: “I don’t think there will be anything I can teach him. He will go beyond me very soon.” But the direction the boy would go in, after two years of classical lessons, was jazz.



Monk was well enough known and appreciated in his lifetime to have appeared on the cover of the Feb. 28, 1964, issue of Time magazine. He was 46 at the time, and after many years of neglect and scuffling had become one of the principal faces and sounds of contemporary jazz. The Time article, by Barry Farrell, is, given the vintage and target audience, well done, both positive and fair, and accurate in the main. But it does make much of its subject’s eccentricities, and refers to Monk’s considerable and erratic drug and alcohol use. This last would have raised eyebrows in the white middle-class America of that era.




There will be shapelier and more elegantly written biographies to come — Monk, the man and the music, is an endlessly fascinating subject — but I doubt there will be a biography anytime soon that is as textured, thorough and knowing as Kelley’s. The “genius of modern music” has gotten the passionate, and compassionate, advocate he deserves.

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello - Thelonious Monk

Genius In Exile

One morning in September 1940, a newly arrived European musician paid a visit to the conductor Otto Klemperer in Los Angeles and found him ­discussing Gustav Mahler with his fellow-exile Bruno Walter. The visitor went on to lunch at the new home of Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades, where he worked on some chamber music with Mann’s son Michael, a ­viola player. In the evening, he dropped in on Igor Stravinsky in Hollywood, assisting in a run-through of his violin concerto.

For a brief and unrepeatable moment, an eyeblink in cultural history, the City of Angels contained the future of classical music.

Classical music is, of course, a misnomer: something is classical because it is valued for its transcendence, and is from an earlier age. This classical music is really Western European orchestral music. Much as I like it, some of it, anyway, I can not help but notice that it is a bunch of white men that are its stalwarts, its stars. Surely there was much more other music around that qualified as beautiful, transcendent; just depends where we look.

For the duration of World War II, Los Angeles was at the cutting edge of musical creation. How the frontiers of a rarified art ­relocated to a place ruled by sun, surf and superficial movies is the subject of “A Windfall of Musicians,” ­Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s engaging study, based in the main on survivor interviews and documentary archives.

The influx was provoked by Adolf Hitler, whose ­seizure of power on Jan. 30, 1933, soon enough meant the banishment of modern art and Jewish musicians from German public life. Hollywood offered exiled ­writers a chance of employment, luring in the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, the best-selling “Grand Hotel” novelist Vicki Baum and Erich Maria Remarque, the author of the World War I classic “All’s Quiet on the Western Front.”

Musicians sought sanctuary first on the East Coast, with its venerable symphony orchestras and prestigious ­universities, drifting west in disillusion with the deep ­conservatism they encountered. Los Angeles, for all its open-air lifestyle, was no paradise. ­Schoenberg ­partnered Charles Chaplin and George ­Gershwin on the tennis court but found himself teaching music to ­“superficial and external” students, many of them ­concerned more with their credits than the ­challenge of art. Appalled by the ubiquity of commercialism, ­Schoenberg told the artist Oskar Kokoschka that he was living in a “world in which I nearly die of disgust.” Lotte Lehmann, a serene Lieder singer, wrote a novel called “Of Heaven, Hell and Hollywood,” leaving no doubt about the infernal realm she now inhabited.

I have searched high and low for the book, but it is not to be found, alas.

Ms. Crawford, who has spent much of her working life teaching and making music in Southern California, brings a physical familiarity to her narrative and a keen eye for poignant detail, the shock of the new. She quotes Vicki Baum’s first impression: “I stayed drunk for weeks with this sun and air and the beauty of the hills.” Ms. Crawford makes too much of minor figures like Ernst Toch and perhaps too little of Kurt Weill, whose Hollywood visits require deeper research. ­Nevertheless, “A Windfall of Musicians” is valuable for its account of how the West became a cultural force in America, a rising counterweight to the ­tradition-stifled East.

Up to a point, that is. In 1997, the trustees of the ­University of Southern California decided to rename the Arnold Schoenberg Institute building after a recent ­donor and vacate its contents. Vienna rescued the composer’s archives, his scores, his letters and his paintings, housing them in a purpose-built Arnold Schoenberg Centre. With this crowning slur to history, Los Angeles was cleansed of its modernist accident, or aberration.

2 filmsBrazil, Film, Latin America, Music, Musicians, Puerto Rico, Salsa, Spain

Calle 54, and El Cantante