Author: Devra Hall Levy

Time Traveller

I just started reading The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. The story is bizarre but the writing is lovely. In the prologue the premise is explained: this guy comes and goes from the present quite suddenly and without will, travelling in time, while his wife leads a normal linear life. When I read the last two sentences of the prologue, however, I thought perhaps they might have been uttered by an artist who lives so much in and for his or her art that other people are often excluded. Here are the two sentences:

I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.

On a much less poetic note, actually more political, it seems that we are all going backwards in time to an era of censorship and fear. The thought police are visible today. The AP Wire reports

The FCC said an episode of the CBS crime drama ”Without a Trace” that aired in December 2004 was indecent, citing the graphic depiction of ”teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy.”

CBS objected, saying the program ”featured an important and socially relevant storyline warning parents to exercise greater supervision of their teenage children.”

Some perspective is provided in a related NY Times article

Many complaints are lodged in large numbers by organized groups and not by independent viewers

Survival Among Friends

Three members of the survivor’s club met for lunch yesterday. Terry Teachout, Bill Kirchner and I have surmounted serious medical challenges (“can’t kill us”), but after a brief homage to the benefits and boredom of daily workouts, our conversation focused on staying afloat professionally, navigating the barrage of information that floods our world daily, balancing demands on our time, and assessing/predicting current/future cultural trends. (TT is very savvy about such things – if you are not a regular reader of his blog, you should be).

Kirchner, a consummate musician, radio host and jazz historian, is also a teacher at The New School (lucky are the jazz students in his classes). I was invited to stop by his class before our lunch to watch a video of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra taped for Ralph Gleason’s “Jazz Casual” program. It was a late 1960s broadcast featuring, in addition to Thad and Mel, Bob Brookmeyer, Snooky Young, Jerome Richardson, and Roland Hanna. I’m going to have to buy the DVD (also includes the Modern Jazz Quartet and Dave Brubeck Quartet and Paul Desmond). Anyway, Bill sent an email later in the day —

Re our conversation today, I’m reminded of something a friend of mine, composer-arranger-producer Bob Belden, said to me a few years ago: “Most people have to reinvent themselves a few times in a lifetime. Jazz people have to do it every few years.”

I guess that’s the price we pay for not being downsized, outsourced, or otherwise devalued. Or as another colleague put it: “It’s lonely down here at the top.”

Speaking of friends and survival, another email yesterday informed me that two of my good friends/neighbors, were in a horrific car accident yesterday and, happily, got away without any apparent major injuries. Here’s the description another friend/neighbor sent. (Not knowing what legal machinations might be involved, I thought it best to not mention any names)

[They] were taking their bass boat to the boat shop for its annual check-up when a testosterone-poisoned male in his early/mid twenties tried to dart his souped-up off-road SUV across their lane, behind their truck. Being of insufficient mental facility to “look both ways”, the young man failed to note the 20 foot long bass boat and trailer behind the truck, and slammed into the trailer at approximately 50-60 mph.. The impact of the SUV spun the trailer, and the truck pulling it, several 360-degree revolutions in the direction the truck was traveling. The boat broke loose from the trailer and flew *over* [their] truck, skidding approximately 300 feet down the freeway before coming to rest across two traffic lanes.

The SUV jumped the trailer and rolled several times before coming to rest across two other lanes, as the truck pulling the boat, and carrying [them], skidded to a stop in the middle of the freeway. It appears [his] expertise in handling the skidding vehicle, and his ability to regain control of the vehicle, prevented the truck from rolling over or careening at high speed into the concrete center divider.

[They] were… treated for numerous aches and pains, sore backs, and necks and released [from the hospital] with no apparent major injuries. The male driver of the SUV accompanied the tow truck and his crumpled vehicle away from the scene without requiring medical treatment. The trailer and bass boat were destroyed, and [their] truck sustained significant rear-end damage.

Talk about survival! I am very happy to hear that they’re okay. We live on a wonderful block where our immediate neighbors are truly good friends who can be counted upon in good times and bad. I may not be very religious in a formal sense, but I am blessed to have great friends, near and far.

Today’s Questions

Talking with a friend the other night about DevraDoWrite (why do I blog is an oft asked question) I heard myself say that I like to encourage people to think about things. It seems that more and more often I have been posting my thoughts followed by some variation of “and what do you think?” I can’t say that I’ve gotten many responding emails, but I figure that y’all are just too busy to write in. So I continue to make my statements, profer a link or three for you to puruse, and hope that you mull over a thought or two that might not otherwise have crossed your mind.

Three items in today’s New York Times caught my fleeting interest.

1. Miles Davis is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Does he belong there? Ben Ratliff reports. (I am not sure if online access to some or all of The New York Times stories is limited to subscribers, so my apologies if these links do not work for you.)

2. Is there room for “cute” on Broadway? Today Ben Brantley reviews the just opened show based on the music of Johnny Cash. He writes “Ring of Fire wrestles with a really bad case of the cutes” — but he allows that some people like that sort of thing; “If so, then let Ring of Fire transport you to a bygone era — not the vintage years of the Grand Ole Opry or bouncy old Broadway, but the age of The Lawrence Welk Show and Sing Along With Mitch.” (The show is produced by Richard Maltby, who I will be interviewing on Thursday. More about that/him later.)

3. Should we spend money taking care of old stuff? Hiring staff to to care for manuscripts is a huge financial problem for most institutions. Some might think that “memorabilia” is trivial and not worthy of the expense, but the value of experienced research specialists, curators and archivists should not be underestimated. Caring for the artifacts is only one vital component, as is knowing what is there with an appreciation for what these things might mean now and in the future. Last week at Juilliard I saw photos from the 1930s and 40s, program flyers as I’ve mentioned previously, student manuals about the schools rules and regulations (in some respects they are more like primers in ettiquette), and I now have a copy of Luther Hendreson’s scholastic transcript (he was a good student). I am indebted to Juilliard archivist Jeni Dahmus for the time she spent putting together a cart full of goodies for me to see, and to her boss, Jane Gottlieb, who welcomed me so graciously and who is mentioned in today’s article “Juilliard’s Library Braces for New Role.”

Influential People

I spent several hours yesterday pouring over archival records at The Juilliard School of Music. Among the papers from the 1937-38 academic year I found a flyer announcing a series of six lectures by Mlle. Nadia Boulanger. The price to attend all six 3 PM lectures (February 9, 16, 23, March 9, 23 and 30) was $15, or $7.50 for students.

Is it a coincidence of that I recently received an email from my friend Phil mentioning Mlle. B? The proud father wrote:

So, until this evening, I didn’t know that Nadia Boulanger taught Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, and Quincy Jones…courtesy of a PowerPoint report that Robin is organizing for her 6th Grade class.

Now that’s an interesting legacy. Makes me wonder how you and John will be credited as teachers and/or influences when Robin’s children write their 6th Grade reports.

Wow.

John gets letters now and then mentioning the day he said this or did that and how they never forgot it, whatever it was. Back then, Mlle. Boulanger probably didn’t know just how influential she was. You never know what effect your words and actions may have on someone else, whether at the time or much later.

Big Brother

I received an email yesterday from amazon.com.

Devra Hall, Amazon.com has new recommendations for you based on 169 items you purchased or told us you own.

I don’t keep track of how many books and CDs I buy from amazon, let alone which titles, but they do. Still, unless they read DevraDoWrite (which I doubt), they have no idea what “items” I own beyond those that I purchase from them. And I don’t even own all of those — many were bought as gifts. They don’t seem to differentiate between books that were shipped to me and books shipped elsewhere. Nor, I suspect, do they weigh when the purchase was made. A topic of interest to me few years ago may no longer be on my mind.
Here are a few of the titles that they recommended for me:

  • Writing for a Good Cause: The Complete Guide to Crafting Proposals and Other Persuasive Pieces for Nonprofit
  • Fall Down, Laughing : How Squiggy Caught Multiple Sclerosis and Didn’t Tell Nobody
  • Love and Its Place in Nature : A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis
  • Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values)
  • Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)
  • The Cornish Trilogy
  • Fat Pig : A Play
  • The First Year-Multiple Sclerosis: An Essential Guide for the Newly Diagnosed (The First Year Series)
  • Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill?
  • Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer: How to Win Top Writing Assignments
  • Doubt (a play)
  • The Well-Fed Writer: Financial Self-Sufficiency As a Freelance Writer in Six Months or Less
  • The Pillowman: A Play
  • Lives of Extraordinary Women: Rulers, Rebels (and What the Neighbors Thought)
  • Demystifying Grant Seeking: What You REALLY Need to Do to Get Grants
  • Bartok: The Piano Concertos ~ Pierre Boulez
  • The Kite Runner

    • While many of their suggestions were obvious — I recently bought a book on grant writing, hence suggestion #1, and I’m sure I bought a book about MS when I was first diagnosed back in 1999 — the basis for other suggestions mystified me. I finally figured out that the play recommendations stemmed from a purchase I made for someone else — I bought a copy of Frozen for a friend and apparently other people who bought that play also bought Fat Pig and The Pillowman, or maybe they just figure a play is a play is a play.

    Today I got another amazon email with a recommendation that makes no sense to me:

    We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon also purchased books by Patrick McMullan.

    I had purchased Zafon’s book last summer at the recommendation of Rifftides and enjoyed it very much, but what that novel about the son of a widowed bookstore owner in 1950s Barcelona has in common with Patrick McMullan’s “collection of more than 1000 photographs of the quintessential human act—the kiss…” I cannot fathom. I guess I’ll just have to take it at face value — a couple of people happened to buy both titles.

    Why am I boring you with all of this? So we can all think about the double-edged swords also known as technological innovations. Is it a lovely convenience to have someone (something?) keep track of your tastes and sift through the onslaught of incoming information, or not?

    Fatal Error?

    Fatal Error M1004 — that’s what my computer says when I turn it on.
    Power up, two beeps to get my attention, then with some old DOS based messages about the hardware it encountered and system stuff, it stops with that Fatal Error message and give me a choiuce of F1 to continue or F2 to go into set up. The first time I picked continue, and was able to get running, but not without some glitches which may or may not be related; worst among them being my email program that gives me wierd messages about being unable to get my mail because it is busy processing my folders. Now that could just be a coincidence of timing — I am an electronic packrat and have years worth of saved email, so it just could be that I hit some measure of “full” simultaneous with these other as-yet-unknown issues….we’ll see.

    Anyway, I did get onto the Internet where it seems that Fatal Error M1004 may have somethoing to do with the Flash BIOS. I read up on it, downloaded the latest version and tied to install only to find that my current Flash BIOS is already up-to-date. So it’s not that.

    There’s another fix they recommend – unplugging the computer, removing the battery, then holding the power on/off button for a whole minute, something about resetting the memory??? I may try that later, but maybe I’ll get some writable CDs first and save some crucial data first — just in case.

    Until I get this handled, in between a bunch of scheduled interviews for the Luther Henderson book, blogging may continue to be lite. Noon today I’ll be visiting with Mercedes Ellington, Duke’s grandaughter. So, please check back tomorrow. I will have much to tell you about.

    Passing Judgement

    I recently heard a pianist who has great facility, a voluminous repertoire, and knows all the correct chord changes. I heard someone describe this musician as “a cocktail pianist,” but I disagree. I heard a depth of harmonic understanding far greater than that which I’d expect from “a cocktail pianist.” So why then did the performance leave me cold?

    Several reasons, including a lack of swing and an overabundance of cleverness. The music was so busy going here, there and everywhere that it never found a groove, and I could never get a good foot-tap going. But most off-putting was that I could hear all the hard work that was going into the performance. With each lean into the piano and up-tic of a shoulder I could see the brain gears engaged and grinding away to create intricate segues between tunes and find just the right bar into which a clever musical quotation could be inserted.

    I closed my eyes, but even then the performance was painstaking, and therein, I believe, lays a problem. Great works — be they musical, literary, fine art, or theatrical — should feel effortless. We the audience, want to experience the end result, at least at performance time. I add that “at least at performance time” caveat to acknowledge our interest in behind-the-scenes processes – an attraction well plumbed by ArtistShare. But when we see or hear the heavy lifting and mental machinations during a performance, when we see the man behind the curtain, the magic disappears.

    So, if the appearance of effortlessness is one criteria for a great performance, what else? What makes an artist great rather than average?

    • Superior technical skill?
    • Emotional presence?
    • Unique sound or style?

    I would posit that many artists have one or two of these attributes, but that only those few who have the whole package become the great masters or legends in their field. Having said that, I must also acknowledge the point made by Owen Cordle, jazz writer for the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and also JazzTimes. In an account shared online courtesy of Rifftides, Owen writes “Sometimes the spirit of a thing can give you hope and heal you even when the source isn’t perfect. ” I agree. Here’s another excerpt (read the full account here):

    This may sound odd, but part of the joy came from watching Lou grab bits and pieces of the heads and sometimes feel his way through the first improvised chorus or part thereof and then nail the chord changes solidly the next time around. He was fallible and human but a quick study. And that was the beauty of it — recovery, ingenuity, memory and the musical ear in action on the wing.

    I’d likely have felt the same way had I been there. What leaves me cold is not so much the awareness of the “work” being done as the purpose of that work. When the goal is communicating the essence of the music, all is well, but when the stylistic trappings, technique and cleverness become the point unto themselves, then all is lost. This is true of great writing as well as great music; if the style screams “look at me,” it is usually to cover up some deficit. I’m hoping that some of my esteemed colleagues and DevraDoWrite readers will weigh in with their thoughts via email.

    And here’s one more thought to consider. Should an artist’s personal reputation matter? Whether factual or speculated, based on press or personal knowledge, should anything other than the person’s artistic ability influence our choices of consumption? Clearly publicity and advertising do influence us, but should that be so? Perhaps I am missing out when I refuse to pick up a book by Frey just because I think he’s a liar. Being a liar doesn’t preclude being a good writer, at least not technically. And I won’t even consider reading a book by someone named Cupcake, partly because of the Frey fallout, partly because of her name, and partly because I’m sick of the look-at-my-sorry-life-now-better memoirs. None of these are good reasons to dismiss a work unseen, but hey, I’m only human and that’s my reaction. I’m glad I became a Sinatra fan before I heard that he wasn’t always such a nice guy. It’s also a good thing I read “In Cold Blood” before I found out that Capote made stuff up and exploited his subjects and Harper Lee too. Hmmm.

    I’ve Got Mail: Lady Carol Sets the Record Straight

    I thought my memory might be a little fuzzy, but I was close. I combined two sessions, both in Japan and just days apart, into one recollection shared in my post in the wee small hours of this morning/last night. But I knew there was a story to it. Here it is in the words of Carol Sloane:

    Dear D: “Sophisticated Lady” was not a “direct to disc”, but there is a nice bass/voice duet on it. It was the first recording my Japanese host/concert promoter arranged for me, so I sang the songs they specifically requested. You’re right: it does feature Roland, George and Richie. The date was October 16, 1977. The direct to disc was a few days later, just Roland and George and me, on October 23:

    The memory of that date is still fresh in my brain: Mraz arrived quite exhausted after recording at a separate studio for about 10 hours; Roland had exquisite gout pain in his right foot, and I had a MAJOR head cold. No sneezing or blowing your nose between takes on a D-T-D … God, we were three miserable, tired, uncomfortable people. And we did experience one break-down … say about four tunes in … which necessitated going back to the top. I swore I’d never put myself through that sort of torture ever again. And I never did. I also never did quite agree with the technicians that D-T-D produced a finer-sounding recording.

    Confirmation Bias

    Defined in an article I read this morning online, confirmation bias is:

    … when we only read material, attend events, join organizations or hire employees that match our own backgrounds, experiences and beliefs. It’s when we screen out information we might not agree with.

    It’s an Op-Ed piece by Cheryl I. Procter-Rogers, President, the Public Relations Society of America that relates to the challenges public relations professionals face when we-the-people have the ability to so narrowly focus our attentions — after all, there’s little point in preaching to the choir.

    Her concern, which relates equally to advertisers, is of little concern to me as I am always looking for ways to filter out the sales pitches, whether outright advertising or advertising via subtrafuge, ie pr. (Yes, I used to be a publicist.) However, she does raise an excellent point about the downside of such filtering:

    I speak often to our members about the unintended consequence of confirmation bias on our society—more intolerance and even less understanding of our differences. Thanks to the Internet, TiVo and Sirius satellite radio, one can have one’s biases validated daily by self-selection.

    That is something worth thinking about….and, all together now, that is why I love blogs and the serendipity afforded by the Internet.

    Carol Sloane. Friday. Be There.

    Okay, I’m biased. Carol is a longtime friend and we were nightclub running buddies more years ago than either of us would like to count. Recently Jerry Jazz Musician did a roundup asking various artists to name a record session that they would like to have been at — I would like to have been present when Carol recorded direct-to-disc in Japan with Roland Hanna on piano, George Mraz on bass and Richie Pratt on drums. When that album first came out direct-to-disc was brand new technology and all her New York jazz friends were in awe, especially of the track that opened with just voice and bass. I think this was the Sophisticated Lady album was later released by Audiophile, but I’m not positive. Carol?

    This Friday night, March 3rd, radio host Steve Schwartz is doing a Carol Sloane birthday show. Tune in to WGBH, 89.7 FM, 8 PM to midnight Eastern time. If you’re out of range, listen online: go to www.wgbh.org/jazz and click on “Jazz From Studio Four.”

    If you are already a fan, you won’t want to miss it. If you’re not familiar with her work, you owe it to yourself to give a listen. You should also check out her web site.