american music | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Podcast • June 17, 2014

Robin Kelley’s Transcendental Thelonious Monk

Robin Kelley‘s superb biography brings the Thelonious Monk story back from the ragged edge to the creative center of American music. And it brings my reading year to a blessedly loving, gorgeously swinging, dissonant, modernist, and utterly one-off climactic note. There may be another jazz biography as thickly detailed, as audibly lyrical, as passionate, as thrilling as this one, but I can’t bring it to mind.

There’s a vastly detailed, fresh take here on an immortal jazz pianist and composer whose life is often remembered as freakish, at best impossibly mysterious. Not that jazz players hadn’t known from the early 1940s that young Monk was a giant, and ever afterward that those odd, distinctive Monk tunes (nearly 100 of them) are the exotic orchid-like treasures of the American song book.

But this was a man who mumbled at the keyboard, got up and danced around it onstage, showed up late and sometimes disappeared; who did time for small drug offenses and famously lost his “cabaret card” required to play in New York jazz joints. This was a man who suffered bipolar disease and finally died in 1982 in the care of the same rich European lady who’d been Charlie Parker’s last refuge almost 30 years earlier. It is an impossibly eccentric story until Robin Kelley fills in the life of an unshakeably original musician, and with endless family detail paints a fresh picture of a consistently generous friend, a revered and attentive son, father and husband, in triumph and trouble.

In this telling Monk emerges as (not least) a heroic African-American Emersonian at the keyboard. Monk’s insistence that “the piano ain’t got no wrong notes!” resonates with Emerson’s war on conformity and consistency. Monk’s stubborn, self-sacrificing attachment to his own aesthetic summons up Emerson’s “trust thyself” wisdom, and his advice that “a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within.” “To believe your own sound,” (paraphrasing “Self-Reliance”) “… that is genius.” Monk knew.

One of Robin Kelley’s many arguments with the received wisdom on Monk is that, though he was the house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem after 1941, and a cornerstone of the regeneration of jazz at mid-century, he belongs to no genre, no “period.”

I kind of break with tradition: I don’t see him as part of the bebop movement. I see his harmonic ideas as being fundamental to so-called bebop, but he wasn’t really out of that. He spent more time in the early forties hanging out in these old piano parlors, at James P. Johnson’s house, with the great stride pianists up in Harlem at that time, Clarence Profit, Willie “The Lion” Smith… He learned piano from an African-American woman who lived in his neighborhood named Alberta Simmons. Nobody’d ever heard of her until my book. She was a fabulous stride pianist. She was part of the Clef Club. She knew Eubie Blake and Willie “The Lion” and all these cats. And so, he grew up playing that and maintaining the old stride piano style because of three things.

One, they believed in virtuosity, but virtuosity that is expressed through your individual expression, not just through speed. How could you take a tune that everybody plays, like “Tea for Two,” and really make it sound like you, like your inner soul.

Two, Monk learned from these guys all the tricks that became fundamental to his playing: the bent note, for example. We say “Monk was so amazing because he could bend notes.” Well, wait a second. Listen to James P. Johnson play Mule Walk. He’s bending notes. It’s all about that. Monk learned all that from those guys, the clashing, the minor seconds, they’re playing that stuff back in the twenties.

And then, you mention Monk’s mumbling. Well, Willie “The Lion” Smith said in his own memoir, “if a piano player’s not mumbling or growling, you ain’t doing anything.” That’s old school.

What Monk did was take the oldest, rooted tradition of the piano, in Harlem, New York, all over the country. And then he combined it with a future we have yet to achieve. It’s collapsing space and time. And his whole approach to the piano is one that brings past and present and future together in one. And he had never ever left his roots as a stride pianist — all the way to the very last tune he ever played.

Robin D. G. Kelley in conversation with Chris Lydon, December 18, 2009

From the Archives • February 25, 2014

Yehudi Wyner’s Life in Music: a Composer with Piano Hands

Yehudi Wyner is an approachable guy in a forbidding field: contemporary “serious” music. He gives us an opening here to ask where new sounds come from. In his case new music comes out of a ...

Yehudi Wyner is an approachable guy in a forbidding field: contemporary “serious” music. He gives us an opening here to ask where new sounds come from. In his case new music comes out of a sort of compost of the canon, from Bach to Bartok, and then everything else he’s heard over 80 years, from his father’s Yiddish art songs to boogie-woogie and gospel music. “Somehow it registers in the brain and has an effect,” he says of the past. The other big thing you’ll be hearing from Yehudi Wyner is that his music has its very bodily beginning in his hands. It’s a physical, almost gymnastic test of what ten fingers can do, want to do, find themselves doing.

The centerpiece here is the Pulitzer Prize piano concerto that was a Grammy finalist this year, “Chiavi in Mano” (or “Keys in the Hand”). Yehudi Wyner wrote it for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the pianist Robert Levin, “Mozart’s nephew,” as we call him here, the man who has presumed to fill in some missing elements in the “unfinished Mozart.” The one-movement “Chiavi in Mano” begins with an introspective piano solo and ends with an orchestral boogie-woogie. In between is a roaring contest of the elements. “For Bob Levin,” the composer laughs, “it’s just a skirmish, a war game with dull bayonets.” But all of it — in Yehudi Wyner’s unveiling of his process — stems from the simplest contrast of intervals between keys on the piano: the major and minor “third” between, say, C and E, then C and E-flat. It’s as simple and as grand as that: using a cellular structure to build something new and various, as different and connected in its parts as your nose and your toes.

The privilege here is to sit at the piano with a man who can think and play and talk all at once:

CL: You were playing a Bach Partita when we walked in. What does that daily dose do for a man?

YW: It gives him the feeling that he’s in touch with the greatest possible art: physical, mental, spiritual, integrated, and above all, healthy. Bach was really, I think, the greatest artist and possibly the greatest specimen of human being and thinker who ever was conceived on earth.

CL: Does the composing happen, Yehudi, between hands and ear, or do you write it with eye and pencil?

YW: Hands and ear. Hands, ear and pencil. And instrument. I work at the piano. The model for me is the indescribable, sensuous, as well as intellectual joy of dealing with Bach or Mozart. Other composers too, of course, but they above all, where every moment at whatever level of struggle… has a satisfaction, always is nourishing. I do this at the instrument and test it and feel how durable it is, how much I can stand repeating something without finding it exhausting or boring, then I think I have achieved something, I’ve found something, I’ve stumbled on some material that’s worthwhile.

CL: Is there a gold-standard “perfect” piece of music out there for you?

YW: No. If you want to say, are there 1000 pieces from the canon that I love beyond description and can find no fault with, I would say yes. But I do not feel there is one.

CL: Yehudi, give us a report to the ancestors, so to speak. A decade into the 21st Century, what’s the state of this art?

YW: I came back from the Grammys two weeks ago feeling there is very little affirmative music in contemporary America, and has not been for the last fifty years, because what passes as affirmative is really rather imperial and militaristic. It all comes from a kind of big-band, I mean marching-band society, and it blares and it proclaims, but it doesn’t really affirm. It ascribes to the affirmation that Beethoven would have, but it fails all the time because it’s very superficial and aggressive. And that applies even to the music of people we admire, like Copland and others. But it occurred to me — with all the jazz references in “Chiavi in Mano” — that that’s where the true affirmation in American music is. It’s in popular music, it’s in jazz, it’s in gospel. That music is so self-sufficient, it never proclaims its affect, or its message. It just is the message.

The music that is being promulgated, that is being produced and broadcast most widely, is aggressive, very shiny, very egocentric, very repetitive, and noisy, busy, and in some ways, mindless. It’s very physical. The problem not that that music exists, it’s that that music has inundated our culture and our youth. When you finish being conditioned by that music, there’s very little capability of any kind of other sensibility. You’re no longer sensitive to things that move at a slower pace, things that are nuanced, things that have complication and things that have lots of reference to the past.

CL: What’s the chance that we’ll get composers’ music in the public ear again — even in the manner of Copland and Gershwin?

YW: I think for the foreseeable future the chances are very slim. In the long term, things change. Certain cultures collapse and others come up, the convention of the concert hall and the function of concert music and art music is not a permanent given. The audience is certainly shrinking and certainly aging. Those things are incontrovertible. The thing that persuades us that there are possibilities for other things is the ubiquitous presence of music: people have it on their iTunes, they have it constantly at their beck and call. There is this phenomenon… people coming out of schools and forming small groups here and there, and somehow keeping the art alive, perhaps as the monks kept ancient art alive in the monasteries, in isolation during the middle ages. But I think for the foreseeable future there is no possibility for an Igor Stravinsky or a Shostakovich, or an Aaron Copland, or even an Ives on the general public screen.

Yehudi Wyner at his piano bench with Chris Lydon in Medford, Massachusetts, February 18, 2010.

Podcast • March 15, 2011

Alan Lomax and the Salvation of American Song

We’re listening in awe and gratitude to the all-American sounds that Alan Lomax recorded and saved for all time. There’s outlaw minstrel Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly, singing a cocaine ode “Take a Whiff on Me” in 1934. Then Woody Guthrie accompanying himself, Pete Seeger and others on “Bound to Lose,” playing a guitar with a label on it: “This Machine Kills Fascists.” And then there are the strangely uplifting choruses of prison work songs from the Angola Convict Sugar Plantation in Louisiana and the Parchman Farm Penitentiary in Mississippi — songs like “Rosie,” which Lomax recorded in 1947 with prisoners, “C. B. and the Axe Gang.” As John Szwed writes in his vivid biography of the protean Lomax, “This was as close as twentieth-century people were going to come to the sound of slavery.”

Alan Lomax (1915 – 2002), The Man Who Recorded the World in Szwed’s subtitle, was the son of a proper folklorist at the University of Texas. The old folklore compiled texts; the new would revel in the truth of sound that had body language in it, too. Together in the early Thirties, father John and his teenage apprentice had set out across the South with early Edison recording equipment on what John Lomax used to call a “hobo-ing” trip. What Alan ended up compiling was a sort of unofficial, non-commercial people’s soundtrack of the Great Depression. Homegrown songs of spirit seem in retrospect to be pouring out of the suffering soil wherever Alan Lomax turned. Makes you wonder: what is the music of the meltdown today, and where’s to find it?

John Szwed [Martha Rose photo]

Alan Lomax brought a roaring confidence to new fields opening up in the 30s. There was something of the great Edison in Lomax’s recording chops as the tech kept improving. He had something of John Hammond’s talent-spotting gift in the period when Hammond was signing Billie Holiday and the Count Basie band for Columbia Records. “He’s got an infallible ear for the un-commercial,” Hammond said dismissively. There was also something of Orson Welles in Lomax’s showmanship — maybe something of Elvis Presley in Lomax’s fantasies. Lomax was open to rock’n’roll, despite its commercialism, and he was soft on Elvis — not least, John Szwed remarks in our conversation, because Elvis did what Alan wanted to do: liberate the white man’s hips! Even as he coopted so much black musical style, Elvis was the herald of a great healing shift in racial cultures.

Alan Lomax grew up to be a walking trove of all the world’s musics — especially its songs. By the end he’d built “folksonomies” of song elements and delivery styles, a whole anthropology in which the ways people sing marked the main links and differences between the cultures of continents. John Szwed is talking about an ecstatic genius whom many friends found “oppressive” if only because of his certainty that nobody anywhere knew what he knew about songs. “But Lomax was arguably one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century,” Szwed writes, “a man who changed not only how everyone listened to music but even how they viewed America.”

Podcast • January 11, 2010

Terry Teachout’s Pops: Culture-Changing Genius

Terry Teachout‘s fine reconsideration of the man called “Pops” solidifies Louis Armstrong’s standing as not just the greatest horn player since the angel Gabriel, but an all-transforming artist at the level of James Joyce or ...

Louis Armstrong’s power to astonish was never in doubt. Hoagy Carmichael, the songwriter of “Stardust” and “Georgia,” dropped his cigarette and gulped his drink the first time he heard Louis, barely out of his teens, in 1921. “Why,” Hoagy moaned, “isn’t everybody in the world listening to that?” Over the next 50 years the whole world heard Louis, and marveled, but there were always questions, too: Could honky-tonk music from red-light New Orleans get standing, really, with Schubert and Bach? Was Louis in artistic decline after the Twenties? Was he an Uncle Tom in all that Satchelmouth clowning?

All the modern answers as Terry Teachout documents them are over the top now in favor of Louis Armstrong. Listen to the testimonies his fellow horn players Ruby Braff and Wynton Marsalis gave me on Louis’s legendary centennial, July 4, 1900: that if Louis wasn’t actually God, he was at least proof of God. His grandeur, complexity and consistency as man and artist seem now beyond question. Harold Bloom, keeper of the cultural canon and an astute jazz listener, too, pairs Armstrong with Walt Whitman as the greatest American contributor to the world’s art, the genius of this nation at its best. It turns out we could believe our ears after all.

CL: You refer to him at one point as a middlebrow genius, which I think is awfully good, but spell it out.

TT: I used that phrase because Armstrong is a guy whose favorite band leader was Guy Lombardo, a guy who just liked a good tune, who happened to be a culture-changing genius. And he didn’t see why you couldn’t like Guy Lombardo and Caruso and the Beatles and Barbra Streisand, and Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton — he just thought it was all music.

The picture on the cover of my book was taken by Philippe Halsman in 1965. It is an outtake from a session that was photographed for the cover of LIFE, this very famous photo that everybody’s seen of Armstrong with his eyes popping and the horn pointing outward and he’s dressed in this tux. He looks wonderful and he looks like the Armstrong we all know.

In this photograph, Armstrong’s just standing there with a very enigmatic half-smile on his face, holding his horn, dressed beautifully, looking like a man who knows something that maybe we don’t know, a man who knows his complexity, the complications of his own personality, who has seen the world as it is and in a very deep sense has accepted the world as it is.

Armstrong is a man who is at peace with himself. At the very end of his life he sent a letter to a friend that I quote at the end of my book, where he says that ‘my whole life has been happiness and I love everybody.’ And he wasn’t kidding, he really wasn’t kidding.

That kind of acceptance of the fundamental realities of life, not meaning that you don’t want life to be changed, but that you accept the world as it is, and decide that you’re going to make the best of it, that’s really at the heart of his character, and I think of his genius too. It allows him to take in all things in his music and his art, the sadness, the beauty, the joy, the comedy, and make them one.

Terry Teachout in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 8, 2009

Podcast • August 7, 2008

Hanging Out at Tanglewood

Tanglewood beats working… for anybody who gets to listen, and perhaps specially for the young performers who are pouring their talented hearts into the opportunity of a lifetime. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with ...

Tanglewood beats working… for anybody who gets to listen, and perhaps specially for the young performers who are pouring their talented hearts into the opportunity of a lifetime.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Doug Fitch, Christin-Marie Hill and Erik Nielsen here (27 minutes, 12 MB MP3)

Erik Nielsen, conductor; Christin-Marie Hill, mezzo; and Doug Fitch, stage director at the Tanglewood Music Center.

In the theater shed on the western edge of the Tanglewood lawn I am sitting in on the rehearsal of the Kurt Weill-Bertholt Brecht masterpiece — not The Threepenny Opera but the cult classic of decadence and the new German music theater between the world wars, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Because the Boston Symphony Orchestra maestro James Levine is out sick this summer, the anything-might-happen atmosphere around the Tanglewood preparations feels a tiny bit like the no-net air of risk and revolution that hovered over the riotous, contentious first performances (with Lotte Lenya starring) in Leipzig and Frankfurt in 1930. The prophetic power of the show — its bite into our world — is one amazement. The spectacle of young professionals finding their way is another. Three of them talked with me after the first rehearsal in costume: the stand-in conductor Eric Nielson, the mezzo singing the villainous Widow Begbick, Christin-Marie Hill; and the stage director Doug Fitch.

Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Opera is a funny world. One of the reasons “Mahagonny” is such a great thing to do is that it’s an opera at war with opera. It comes out of this Cabaret – dark, dark, dark side of burlesque… and what is opera? Opera is the polo of the culture world. It’s elite, it’s extremely expensive, you never make money on it, it’s really fun to do. And people get hurt!

Stage Director Doug Fitch in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Tanglewood Music Center, August 1, 2008

For every age and part of the world, there is a place about which fantasies are written. In Mozart’s time it was Turkey. For Shakespeare, it was Italy. For us in Germany, it was always America. You have no idea how little we knew about America. We had read Jack London and we knew absolutely all about your Chicago gangsters, and that was the end. So of course when we did a fantasy, it was about America.

Kurt Weill, in The New Yorker: June 10, 1944

[In “Mahagonny” and our own world] …the word that comes to my mind is insatiability. It’s a constant need… For me, this opera is about the insatiable feeding of desire. It is never going to go away. And the way it’s set up… there’s no way you ever can find satisfaction or be pleased… You know, it’s called “The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny.” It doesn’t sound like it’s going to end well from the very get-go. What seems so powerful about this piece is that nobody inside the

opera knows what’s going on with them; they’re all trying to do their best. Jack, who eats himself to death, is doing this not even because he wants to eat. He’s feeling: “Have I done well enough yet?” and his friend says, “Don’t do things by half. Go all the way. Just do it,” like the Nike commercial, a major motto of our time. “Just do it.” Weill and Brecht imagined this.

Stage Director Doug Fitch in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Tanglewood Music Center, August 1, 2008