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architecture, painting, lifestyle, music, society, theory

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock N Roll

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an alternative history of American popular music

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock N Roll is a serious and well-informed piece of cultural criticism. I am no committed student of rock and roll, though my life to date, from about ten years onwards spans that of rock and roll and much else in the world of pop music. I’ve always enjoyed it without really knowing why, and for me popular music was never the inevitable concomitant of dancing. As a history of American music this is a solid, well researched and interesting book.

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll Elijah Wald has an encyclopaedic knowledge of his subject plus a shrewd understanding of the business side of the pop music industry; and this is one field of music-popular entertainment – where money is more central than any other. He fills out his narrative from Ragtime and early Jazz to the Twist and Rock- folk with a dazzling array of talent, social history and, unsurprisingly race relations.

But to get to the Beatles thread, Wald sees the Liverpool foursome as a typical late fifties group, travelling around local dance-halls playing covers of other records to young kids who wanted to dance. I was one of them as it happens – in 1963 they played at the Shrewsbury Music Hall and I was there as someone trying to dance (I never learnt).

But the Beatles were not so typical as Wald himself supposes. Far from it. They were unusual in that they did not survive on a diet of material supplied by song writers, beavering away for record companies. They dared to write their own songs and this meant they could direct their own careers more closely than others less talented. They could also introduce trends which others followed.

So, after an early focus on rock and roll – covers of Chuck Berry and some rockers of their own like She was Just Seventeen – they produced a sentimental but haunting song, Yesterday, to link up with that earlier tradition of ballads. This song was of course a worldwide hit and soon there were nearly 200 covers of it by different artists. The ability of the Beatles to influence others was clearly immense as their popularity went global in the late sixties.

Wald argues they distracted white kids from getting into black soul, causing them instead to regress to sentimental ballads, paving the way for Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Elton John and the like. Then they became more pretentious and got into meditation, clothing their music with arty mystification and letting loose the likes of The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, and yes, Led Zeppelin. Then a whole galaxy of sub sects were spawned which are still developing and mutating.

I’m sure there is something in this. Even McCartney says of Yesterday “we didn’t release Yesterday as a single in England at all because we were a little embarrassed by it; we were a rock and roll band”. Rock music is very imitative – witness how many US performers produced ‘Beatlified’ songs to jump on the new British bandwagon. Wald also points out that after 1966 the Beatles did not perform live but were closeted in their studios making more advanced, experimental pop music – as George Harrison joked: “our avant garde a clue music”.

With Sgt Pepper, moreover, they refused to issue any singles. Wald describes these albums as ‘musical novels’ or ‘art’; all this of a different order to the two to three minute thrashes of fifties rock and roll which had drawn them into the business. Soon rock and roll’ became a word to describe a historical period in popular music; a more generic ‘rock’ was what followed the post Beatles period.

Wald makes another interesting point regarding the white and black wings of the business. While both black and white artist were aiming at the same audience up to the mid to late sixties, he claims the Beatles marked a bifurcation into the more sophisticated white-appealing ‘rock folk’ and the more rhythmically complex black-appealing ‘soul’.

I hope I’ve summarised his argument sufficiently. Does it stack up? I think it does – but I have two doubts about it. First I don’t think you can attribute everything since the late sixties to the Beatles. I would reckon Bob Dylan had an equal influence on charting the new directions, along with the likes of Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Eric Clapton.

Second I’m not sure there was ever such a separation between black and white audiences. I recall a universal acclaim for both Beatles music and Tamla for example. But I recommend this book for anyone wishing to gain a grasp of why rock and roll lost its rebellious snarl and its sneer, its thundering, testosterone celebration of youthful sexuality and became more serene, thoughtfully wistful and poetic.

© Bill Jones 2009

Beatles Destroyed Rock N Roll Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Elijah Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.336, ISBN: 0195341546

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How to listen to jazz

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how to listen to jazzguidance notes for beginners

Knowing how to listen to jazz isn’t easy. It’s an improvised music, but it is based upon well-defined and disciplined musical structures. Does that seem like a contradiction? Here’s how it works.

When jazz musicians play together, they often choose well-known songs. They don’t need printed musical scores, because they have all learned these songs by ear and by heart as part of their training.

The songs themselves will be based on well-rehearsed musical structures. For instance, George Gershwin’s melody I’ve got Rhythm has the typical architecture of the popular song – lasting for thirty-two bars. The parts are arranged are arranged as follows:

  1. Eight bars of melody   (A)
  2. The same eight bars – repeated   (A)
  3. Eight bars in a different key   (B)
  4. The first eight bars played again   (A)

This structure is known as AABA. (and the B part is called ‘the bridge’ or ‘the middle eight’). Thousands of songs are written in this pattern, and over time some of them have become popular with both jazz musicians and the listening public. These songs are known as ‘standards’, and jazz musicians learn them as a natural part of their own training and development.

  1. Cole Porter’s   Love for Sale
  2. Billy Strayhorn’s   Lush Life
  3. Hogy Carmichael’s   Skylark

The same is true of another musical form – the twelve bar blues. This is a structure underpinning folk tunes, laments, and much of what lies at the heart of jazz performance in many styles. The architecture is similar:

  1. Four bars of melody   (A)
  2. Four bars repeated   (A)
  3. Four bars with variation   (BA)

This is grossly over-simplified, but the main point is that the jazz musicians know these patterns before they begin to play. All they need to decide between themselves is what key to play in.

They are therefore improvising, but their performance is based upon a harmonic structure known to all the musicians concerned, and they have the very advanced listening skills and musical ‘memories’ to know where they are up to in the sequence at any given time.

How to listen to jazz

When they have decided what tune to play, the performance will normally have a structure or sequence of events which is determined partly by the instrumentation or make up of the group and partly by the unspoken inclinations of the musicians themselves – without requiring prior arrangement.

  1. The ensemble will play the chosen tune
  2. Then (often) the tune will be repeated
  3. A ‘solo’ instrument will improvise on the tune
  4. A second instrument might do the same
  5. The ensemble will return to play the tune
Instrumentation

The piano has a complex, multi-functional role in a jazz ensemble. Its main purpose is to sustain the harmonic structure of the tune throughout the performance. It plays the melody, may also feature as a solo instrument, and it provides support for other instruments during their solos.

The double-bass provides a combination of harmonic and percussive support throughout any performance. It usually sustains a four beats to the bar rhythm (known as the ‘walking bass’), playing notes from the chords to the tune, and it only occasionally features as a solo instrument.

The drums provide the dominant rhythmic pulse, which is often created by a four-four pattern tapped out on cymbals, accompanied by a variety of percussive effects on drums punctuating the performance.

The saxophone is a typical ‘solo’ instrument. It plays the melody, and then is very popular with instrumentalists as a solo instrument – mainly because it is suitable for producing an individual and recognisable sound or tone. This is partly because it has an intimate connection with the propulsive force generating the music – air from the player’s lungs. The same is true of the trumpet.

The improvised solo

Basically, the soloist makes up variations on the chosen tune, which is based upon its harmonic chord sequence. Parts of the original melody may be detectable during the improvisation, but experienced jazz musicians are capable of inventing entirely new melodies which have very little in common with the original.

Indeed, some soloists are so skilful they are able to quote long passages from other familiar tunes and make them fit into the harmonic sequence of the tune being played. This is possible because they are intimately acquainted with a huge repertoire of ‘standards’ – and they do this both as a demonstration of their skills and as a homage to the tradition of this music.

The soloist is supported throughout the performance by accompanying musicians, who play a supportive role in providing the harmonic framework as a ‘reminder’, possibly whilst waiting their own turn to take a solo.


Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers

This video clip of a live 1958 concert in Brussels shows a classic performance of the kind described above. The ensemble plays the melody (Moanin’ by Bobby Timmons) then there are three soloists – Lee Morgan on trumpet, Benny Golson on tenor saxophone, Bobby Timmons on piano, then Jamie Merritt on bass, .

I chose this example because it is played in an unusually subdued mood and slow pace. This should make it easier to appreciate the structure and the separate parts of the performance. [It should be said that most performances by this group are performed at much faster tempos and louder volume. Art Blakey is famous for his ‘High-Energy’ groups and playing style.]

Marks of quality

All great jazz musicians tend to develop an individual, recognisable style on their instrument. They create a ‘sound’ of their own, which to an experienced listener is instantly recognisable after only a few notes. The same is true for both instrumentalists and singers.

ColtraneMusicians with good taste always pay respect to the tune they are playing. If saxophonists such as Dexter Gordon or John Coltrane play a ballad (You Don’t Know What Love Is, for instance) their rendition and interpretation will be sympathetic to the original meaning of the song. They will follow the nuances of the melody and even the words of the lyrics with a performance empathetic to the original. Great singers such as Jimmy Scott, Johnnie Hartman and Billie Holiday always follow this rule. Second and third rate singers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Cleo Laine do not.

Having said that, great improvisers sometimes completely re-interpret a work – either by playing the melody in a new manner, by changing its underlying chord sequence, or by inventing an entirely new melody. Good examples of this process at work include Miles Davis and Gil Evan’s version of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and John Coltrane’s re-working of Rogers and Hammerstein’s rather sickly show tune My Favourite Things.

Looking ahead

Needless to say, there are exceptions to all the points made above. There are groups that play without a piano; musicians who write their own original tunes; and even performances (by big bands in particular) where everybody reads the music from written scores. But if you understand the basic principles of jazz performance as outlined here you will know the conventions from which these are deviations.

It certainly helps if you know the melody before hearing a performance, because this allows you to keep the tune in mind whilst listening to the improvisations upon it. This is something which becomes easier as you develop your listening experience. And that’s what an appreciation of jazz music is all about.

Performing at Birdland one night in 1951, Charlie Parker was in the middle of improvising on a be-bop tune when he spotted Igor Stravinsky in the audience. Without losing any connection with the tune or its chord sequence, he began to pepper his solo with brilliant interpolations from the composer’s Firebird Suite, causing Stravinsky to bang his cocktail glass on the table with delight and amusement.

That captures the essence of jazz at its best.

© Roy Johnson 2011

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Howard Hodgkin

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illustrated critical survey of contemporary masterworks

I’ve been a long time fan of the work of Howard Hodgkin. (So much so that I opened a gallery devoted to his work here.) He has a great sense of form, uses luscious colours, and produces semi-abstracted compositions which are like rich food for the visual sense. The problem in interpreting his work is that there’s a tension between the degree of abstraction of the image and its ostensible subject, usually stated in its title. Hodgkin claims that he is a ‘realist’ painter, but it’s sometimes difficult to understand how a couple of deep blue brush strokes across the centre of a green stippled canvas whose frame is dripping in blood red gloss represents ‘An Evening with Kevin’.

Howard HodgkinAndrew Graham-Dixon’s study is an attempt to solve this problem. He presents a historical survey of Hodgkin’s work which is beautifully illustrated in the full colour it deserves. It’s an approach to art criticism which is well informed (in biographical terms) which pays attention to the details of what appears on the canvas, and yet which seems to stop short of interpretation.

He does his best to make the case for representation by suggesting that Hodgkin paints memories, feelings, and moods; but when it comes to evaluating individual works he hides behind a smokescreen of supposition and conditionality. His argument goes something like this, in

this painting may have some connection with … it recalls someone else … it might have affinity with …. it can also evoke …and it might be said to represent something …

He describes almost every brush stroke in gushing prose, but he hasn’t got any hard evidence to offer. And whilst he’s getting his critical knickers in a twist, he doesn’t address glaringly obvious issues such as the fact that Hodgkin paints over the frames of his pictures. Why does he do that? What’s the significance of such a bold gesture?

It’s interesting to note that after running out of meaningful things to say about the paintings, he’s quite prepared to go on talking about their titles. And in the end, this might be the problem.

If a glamorous canvas of deep greens splashed against a black border, with red and yellow dots in the background were called Composition #9 there might be less fuss than if it were given the title In the bedroom . Andrew Graham-Dixon would be less preciously strangulated, and we could just enjoy some more coloured paint on canvas.

Howard Hodgkin

In bed in Venice

But Hodgkin does give his paintings apparently descriptive titles – such as Nick 1977 which looks like two windows covered by Venetian blinds, You Again 2001 which is three interlocking pyramids, and Learning About Russian Music 1999 in which a red and ochre frame surrounds blue, green, and brown brush strokes. So the problem remains.

There is the merest smidgeon of representation still present in his work, but the acid test would be guess the subject if the paintings were not captioned. I doubt if Andrew Graham-Dixon or anyone else could do it.

Fortunately, I don’t think it matters in the end. Personally, I am quite happy to accept Hodgkin as a quasi-abstract painter whose sense of colour is simply ravishing. The reproductions of the paintings here are excellent, and this is a good-value survey of them.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Howard Hodgkin Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Andrew Graham-Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, London: Thames and Hudson, (revised and expanded edition) 2001, pp.232, ISBN 0500092982

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Igor Stravinsky: 1882-1934

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part one of the definitive biography

This is the currently definitive biography of Igor Stravinsky – master of European modernism whom many consider to be the greatest composer of the twentieth century. It’s a consummate and magisterial piece of work – superbly referenced and annotated; and just about every claim made within it is backed up with evidence. The notes to the text itself run to 113 pages.

Stephen Walsh begins by clearing the ground between himself and Robert Craft – the man who made himself Stravinsky’s amanuensis, secretary, helpmate, and collaborator towards the end of his life. Craft wanted to control the Stravinsky estate (including the money) as well as his critical reputation, but Walsh is having none of that. He insists on factual accuracy, backed up with hard evidence.

Igor StravinskyYet even though it’s quite clear that he knows everything there is to know about the details of Stravinsky’s life, and can justify every claim with a fully referenced source, he has problems constructing a logical and readable narrative of the composer’s life. For instance Stravinsky’s brother Roman dies three times within as many short chapters at the start of the book, and Stravinsky is abruptly announced to be twenty years old and has completed his first piece of music on page fifty. Most of the previous forty-nine have been devoted to describing the Russian countryside.

Walsh is exceptionally good at recreating the social and historical context in which Stravinsky was raised – from the lack of sanitation in late nineteenth-century Petersburg to the fact that the composer didn’t even go to school until he was nearly eleven.

The story of Stravinsky’s life is already fairly well known, so what does Walsh offer that’s new? Well, quite apart from his claim to accuracy in interpreting textual evidence, it’s quite clear that he is an authority on Russian cultural history. Every time a friend, relative, or acquaintance enters the story, his narrative swells out for pages on end with their biographical details – to the extent that (especially in the earlier part of the book) Stravinsky himself becomes a indistinct figure, hovering indistinctly like some half-forgotten ghost.

This is a feature of Walsh’s approach which you would expect to diminish as Stravinsky becomes more successful – largely because he is endlessly on the move from one city and country to another – Petersburg, Brittany, Switzerland, Paris, Cote d’Azur. This is the material of a biographer’s dream. But Walsh is more interested in scouring correspondence to apportion exact responsibility for the plot development of the early masterpieces (Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring) The composer’s dramatic private life is left relatively unexamined – despite his meeting with such luminaries as Debussy, Ravel, Proust, Schoenberg, and Manuel de Falla.

And this avoidance of the personal has some serious repercussions. When Diaghilev throws an enormous tantrum on hearing of Nijinsky’s marriage, Walsh still can’t bring himself to mention the fact that they had been lovers. Diaghilev shunned The Rite of Spring because of its close connection with his ex-favourite – and this immediately affected Stravinsky’s ability to earn a living from its success – for a personal, not a musical reason.

But we do gain benefits from his thoroughness, as well as having to endure its longeurs. On Stravinsky’s first visit to Spain, an affair with the ballerina Lydia Lopukhova is followed up biographically to record that she later married Diaghilev’s financial manager, and then later after eloping from London with a Russian general, she eventually married John Maynard Keynes.

Another thing which emerges instructively from all the background commentary on Stravinsky’s work (and that of his collaborators) is what utter rubbish many of the so-called critics wrote about the music. Jacques Riviere on the Rite of Spring for instance:

The Rite of Spring … has no juice to dull its brilliance, no cookery to rearrange or spoil its contours. It is not a “work of art”, with all the usual palaver. Nothing blurred, nothing reduced by shadows; no veils or poetic softenings; no trace of atmosphere. The work is whole and untreated…

As he becomes more successful, the 1920s are passed in the swirl of a quasi-bohemian, quasi-aristocratic milieu. Oedipus Rex was a collaboration with opium-addicted Jean Cocteau, whose detoxification cures were paid for by Coco Chanel, with whom Stravinsky had a brief affair.

But the dominant figure in this first volume is certainly Diaghilev, with whom Stravinsky collaborated on almost all his early major works. The two men had their differences, especially over money; but they respected each other as artists, and seemed to bring out the best in each other.

The other problematic leitmotif in Stravinsky’s life is that of copyright, which had not been internationally agreed at the time of his early works. There were also very complex arrangements whereby some people ‘owned’ works because they had paid a commissioning fee, and others held the rights to performances for a limited period. This resulted in erratic income for the composer – though a man who could buy a large chauffer-driven automobile in the 1920s was not in financial difficulties.

Stravinsky also had the expense of keeping two ‘families’. For his life was divided permanently between his lover Vera Sudeykina, with whom he lived in Paris and took on concert tours, and Katya, his wife and the mother of his four children, whom he left at home and visited when required.

It’s interesting to note how fond Stravinsky was of any technical developments which would assist him in both making a record of his own work and exploring the possibilities of new sounds. He made piano rolls, bought a player-piano, learnt to play the cimbalom, and eagerly recorded his work on both mechanical and electrical equipment.

Serious musicologists will be glad to learn that Walsh puts a lot of effort into tracing the developments in Stravinsky’s musical style. This goes (in this volume) from the expressive force of the Rite to the neo-classicism of Apollo. This is done in an all-round manner by looking at the original ‘idea’ (often the result of a commission) then the musical material from which he took his inspiration, through to the actual conditions (and possible limitations) which surrounded the first performance.

Despite some of the negative effects of Walsh’s writing, I found this a fascinating account of the artist and a well-informed glimpse into a rich period of cultural history. Volume one ends in 1934 with the Nazis in the ascendant and Stravinsky sharing musical chit-chat with Mussolini, for who he had a high regard. In this climactic year Stravinsky took out French citizenship and moved his entire extended family into a fifteen-room apartment near the Place de la Concorde – in the arrondissement next to his lover Vera. Stravinsky’s main worry about this proximity was that his eighty-year-old mother should not find out about his not-so-secret other life.

Igor Stravinsky - Part 2 See part two of this biography

© Roy Johnson 2009

Igor Stravinsky Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky – A Creative Spring: Russia and France 1882-1934, London: Pimlico, 2002, pp.696, ISBN: 1845952219

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Igor Stravinsky: 1934-1971

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second volume of the definitive biography

The first volume of this masterly biography ends in 1934 with the death of Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky’s composition of Persephone, his adoption of French citizenship, and his no less important decision to move his extended family from the south of France to take up residence in Paris – in the next arrondissement to his lover, Vera Sudeykima.

To give some idea of the complexities of these arrangements, Stravinsky not only made it known to his wife that he paid Sudeykima an allowance, but as if this was not enough he heaped onto it the additional humiliation that in his absence she should hand over the money to her in person – which she did.

Igor StravinskyThe second volume opens with the darkening years of the mid-1930s, and Stravinsky remaining as politically naive as ever in the face of rising fascism and anti-Semitism. The only thing which seemed to disturb him was a general assumption that he was Jewish – which was not the case. He continued to give his moral if not practical support to Mussolini and Franco, and he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1938 with the somewhat disingenuous excuse that he needed the money to pay his daughter’s medical bills.

As the 1930s progressed Stravinsky’s personal life seems to have become worse and worse. There were problems with his four children, all of whom had difficulties creating independent destinies for themselves, permanently overshadowed as they were by the fame and the rather dictatorial manner of their father. His wife Katya became ill and was confined to an Alpine sanatorium, run along similar lines to the Berghof in Thomas Mann‘s The Magic Mountain. Her daughter accompanied her on the journey, and was also kept there as a patient.

Then in 1938 fate struck a double blow. First Stravinsky’s daughter died, then his wife. Yet so many people rallied to help him that within a short time he had secured a teaching post at Harvard, married Sudeykima, and he ended up living in California – like Arnold Schoenberg ‘expelled into Paradise’.

This was a period in which he tried without much success to find work composing for the film industry. He knew all the right people, and Hollywood was happy to adapt his earlier works, but none of the big projects mooted came to fruition. Instead, he produced such miniatures as the Circus Polka for dancing elephants and the Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman’s band. However, he came back in full force with the composition in 1946 of the Symphony in Three Movements.

Interestingly enough the copyright issue crops up yet again (just as it did in the first volume) – but with a new twist. Stravinsky and his advisors hit upon the ruse of his revising earlier pieces of work. If they could be made sufficiently distinct from the originals, they could be re-copyrighted. Moreover, if Stravinsky took out US citizenship (which he promptly did) he would have full protection and ownership of the new versions – which could be translated into hard cash.

The war in Europe had one good effect on Stravinsky: it caused him to re-think his reactionary political views – rather as it did for his fellow-exile Thomas Mann. He became a Trueman-supporting democrat.

If Diaghilev was the presiding secondary figure in Volume One, the equivalent figure in Two is Robert Craft. He was a young American student of composition and conducting who managed to inveigle himself into the Stravinskys’ affections to such an extent that he became a combination of amanuensis, secretary, manager, advisor, and even domestic help. He also had close access to Stravinsky’s manuscripts – which was to cause a lot of trouble later.

Musically, the centrepiece of this second volume is the composition of The Rake’s Progress which took three and a half years. He worked with Auden and Chester Kallman as librettists. This was followed by Agon and the premiere of Canticum sacrum in St Mark’s, Venice. From this point on, his compositions became increasingly influenced by a Schoenbergian twelve-tone scale form of writing, even though he had kept himself at a very long arm’s length during his rival’s own lifetime.

Since Stravinsky’s personal life had settled into an almost conventional marriage with Vera, Walsh’s account now begins to focus on a concert-by-concert account of his professional life: (Stravinsky maintained that he earned his living as a conductor). Walsh records every possible detail of the choice of programme, the fee paid, the musical rehearsals, and the roles played by agents, go-betweens, and performers.

The latter part of the book traces Stravinsky’s last (and serial) compositions, but it is really a detailed examination of just how much Robert Craft controlled, contributed to, or even created works which were published under Stravinsky’s name. He also began writing letters and memoirs which were attributed to the man who was in a roundabout way his employer.

As Stravinsky declines into ill-health approaching death, the story becomes an almost nineteenth-century inheritance drama of tax lawyers, relatives, Craft, and various hangers-on vying for control of Stravinsky’s assets and archive with a view to lining their own pockets. And when he did eventually expire the conflict between warring parties became pure Jarndyce Vs Jarndyce, with the widow Vera eventually paying out $200,000 to retain control – and even that was only an interim measure. The dispute continued even after her death; the relatives died off in their turn; and even the eventual purchaser of the archive, Paul Sacher, was duped out of almost two million dollars by the lawyers.

Fortunately for us, the music lives on.

Igor Stravinsky - Part1 See part one of this biography

Igor Stravinsky Buy the book at Amazon UK
Igor Stravinsky Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2003

Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky – The Second Exile: France and America 1934-1971, London: Pimlico, 2007, pp.709, ISBN: 0712697950

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Internet Art

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modern art meets digital technology – the latest results

As bandwidth has increased and rates for subscribing to it have dropped, so we have easier access to sites offering high quality graphics, animations, and even streamed videos. Digital artists can now make their work available to a very wide audience. This survey of contemporary internet art attempts to merge visual art with the digital world. It comes from the cheap-and-cheerful but excellent value ‘World of Art’ series of paperbacks from Thames and Hudson. As somebody who has recently started to experiment with Internet art – albeit in a Blogging sort of way – I bought this book thinking it would give me some new ideas. It did – but it’s a lot more besides.

Internet ArtIt starts off quite usefully with a quick overview of computers and the Internet, then situates the origins of Net art in the experimental art of the 1960s and 1970s. I was surprised Rachel Greene didn’t have examples from these early years. For instance, it’s half way through the book before she even mentions ASCII art.

Instead, she pitches straight into Web-based ‘happenings’ from the 1990s, where web sites are used to co-ordinate and publicise public events – usually of a ‘situationist’ type. The most interesting innovation which I had not seen before is ‘Browser Art’- where browsers are re-programmed using JavaScript and Perl scripts to simultaneously display a mosaic of materials from multiple sources. The other genre which seems promising is software art.

She is very well informed about what is going on in what I suppose still calls itself the avant-gard, so it’s all the more disappointing that her expression of it is clouded by the written style of the art school manifesto:

As site-specific sculpture operates vis-a-vis the particular components and ideologies of a place, so do many works of Internet art derive in significant ways from their location within a networked public field of vision and consumption.

Fortunately, the book is profusely illustrated, which helps you through two hundred pages of that sort of thing.

I was disappointed that she missed the chance to categorise the various genres of art object that are made possible by the Internet – the web site as display gallery, as record of an expedition, as interactive game or challenge, as multimedia experience, and so on – though she does discuss examples of each.

Blogging is covered in one sentence, and Flash animations don’t even get a mention. Even hypertextuality doesn’t get much of a look in, yet lots of space is devoted to silly art-school pranks and radical [for which read pretty useless] ‘experiments’.

Overall, this strikes me as a missed opportunity, because she clearly knows a lot about radical art of the 1990s, but her lack of historical and conceptual depth means she is unable to synthesise it. Instead, she provides a descriptive tour of various fin de siècle activist posturings, happenings, and staged art events about which most sane people will neither know nor care.

So far as I’m aware, the book on Internet Art has still to be written. Correct me if I’m wrong. Yet there’s bound to be something in here somewhere for anyone interested in the relationship between digital technology and art. Despite my reservations, I look forward to browsing some of the more inventive sites she lists in a well documented Webliography.

© Roy Johnson 2004

Internet Art Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Rachel Greene, Internet Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 2004, pp.224, ISBN 0500203768

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Jacob Epstein

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controversial Anglo-American modernist sculptor

Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) was a sculptor who became a controversial pioneer in the world of modernist British art. He was born in New York’s Lower East Side to Jewish immigrant parents who had escaped anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland. When the family moved to a more respectable neighbourhood, he chose to remain amongst the ‘Russian, Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Chinese’ who clustered in what was then a very unfashionable part of the city.

Jacob Epstein

Rock Drill

In 1902 he travelled to France, enrolling at the Ecole de Beaux Arts and visiting Rodin’s studio. He was a fan of his fellow countryman Walt Whitman, and there is a distinct element of homo-eroticism in his early works that parallels the celebration of the human body (largely Male) that features in Whitman’s poems. This is an element of his vision that became important in later works and his battles with censorship and even the mutilation of his statues and carvings.

In 1905 he transferred to London and quickly made contact with people such as George Bernard Shaw and Augustus John. Even more surprisingly he secured a large public commission at the age of only twenty-seven. This was for a series of decorative statues for the new headquarters of the British Medical Association in the Strand.

The nude figures he produced depicting maternity and Hygieia (goddess of health and cleanliness) became the target of outraged prudish hostility, and a press campaign was mounted by the Evening Standard. The project was completed, but it was twenty years before he received another architectural commission.

He was supported and befriended by Eric Gill, who had similar ambitions to bring primitive elemental forms into public art. They planned to build a private temple in Sussex where they could express their enthusiasm for nudity and sexuality without hindrance. The project was never completed, but the celebration of human physicality pervaded almost everything they went on to produce.

Epstein’s next major work was the now-famous tomb of Oscar Wilde in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. This was admired by the young fellow-immigrant artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, but the French authorities protested against the winged figure’s nakedness and ordered its genitals to be obliterated. They were later hacked off by protesters more than once.

Meanwhile his domestic life was no less controversial. He was married to Margaret Dunlop but at the same time he had a number of lovers who his wife not only tolerated but allowed to live in the family home, along with the children who were conceived by them as a result.

Epstein isolated himself in a Sussex coastal village and produced a number of excellent abstracted figures of pregnant females and copulating doves, clearly influenced by the work of Constantin Brancusi who he had met in Paris. It has to be said that the works of Epstein, Brancusi, and Gaudier-Brzeska became almost indistinguishable around this period.

Just before the outbreak of war, in 1913 Epstein produced the first drawings for what was to become his most important work – Rock Drill. In its first version the dramatically modelled figure of a quarry worker was mounted astride a tripod, handling a real drilling machine.

Nothing could have better symbolised the Vorticist movement which championed his work in the second (and final) edition of its magazine BLAST. But Epstein refused to join the group founded by his supporter Wyndham Lewis. In fact Epstein was so appalled by the mechanised slaughter of young soldiers in the conflict of 1914-1918 that he removed the drill and tripod from the original sculpture.

This turned out to produce a much more aesthetically pleasing result – the futuristic head and torso which seemed to symbolise the machine age. Yet following this success his activity more or less split into two parts. The first was producing traditional bronze portrait busts for celebrities in a style that could have come from any time in the previous two-hundred years. The second was his far more interesting series of monumental carvings and sculptures that expressed something of the modern age. The first part provided him with an income; the second with continued notoriety.

Jacob Epstein

Femaile Figure

It is amazing to recall the virulent hostility (and anti-Semitism) that his work aroused. Even the Royal Academy participated in the mutilation of his public commissions. Following the exhibition of his controversial Adam (1938) the statue was sold off for next to nothing and later displayed in a Blackpool funfair. Visitors were charged a shilling entry to view its enlarged genitals as a form of pornographic amusement. The same fate befell his next major work, Jacob and the Angel (1941) – though this has since been rescued and is now in the relative safety of the Tate Gallery.

He participated in the Festival of Britain 1951) but by this time he was being outflanked by younger contemporaries such as Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Lynn Chadwick. He completed further commissions for religious figures, notably on the re-built Coventry Cathedral, but his final secular work was the magnificent war memorial that stands in front of TUC headquarters at Congress House in London.

He was knighted in 1954, but his later years were marked by personal loss. His son died of a heart attack in 1954, and his daughter committed suicide later the same year. Epstein himself died in 1959 at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington – next door but one to the birthplace of Virginia Woolf.

© Roy Johnson 2018

Jacob Epstein biography – But the book at Amazon UK

Jacob Epstein biography – Buy the book at Amazon US

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Joey Alexander

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The name Joey Alexander was mentioned on JazzFM.com the other night, and his piano playing was so good I looked up further examples. My goodness! Not only is he very good indeed – but he’s still only thirteen years old. Check out this YouTube clip of him playing John Coltrane’s (very difficult) “Giant Steps”.

Josephine Baker

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Josephine Baker (1906-1975) was a celebrated African-American dancer and entertainer. She became famous in the Parisian Follies Bergeres, made friends with artists and intellectuals, and eventually renounced the US to become a French citizen. Her reputation was based on the fact that in addition to her being a talented singer and dancer, she also had an effervescent personality and she performed in states of near nudity on stage. However, she was also active in the Civil Rights Movement, refused to perform to segregated audiences, participated in the French Resistance, and was awarded the Legion d’honneur by Charles de Gaul after the war.

Josephine Baker

She was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St Louis, Missouri. Her mother was a descendant of black slaves, and it is thought that her biological father was white. As a child she lived in near poverty and had very little formal education. By the age of eight she was working as a live-in domestic servant for white families. She dropped out of school, became a waitress, and for a time lived on the street, sleeping in cardboard boxes.

By the age of thirteen she was married – and divorced a year later. She began singing and dancing in a street performance group. The area was rich in vaudeville, night clubs, and brothels. At fifteen she married Wille Baker, whose name she kept and used professionally for the rest of her life. But in 1925 she left him when her dancing group was booked in to a New York City venue.

The 1920s in New York was a period of what became known as the ‘Harlem Renaissance’. There was an artistic and intellectual explosion that took place in Harlem, NYC. Writers such as Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer, plus musicians such as Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton became not only popular but fashionable.

The birth of the Civil Rights Movement gave new confidence to black Americans as an expressive force. And Josephine Baker fitted within this ambience very comfortably, performing at the Plantation Club and in the chorus lines of popular Broadway revues. Around this time she also had a relationship with the blues singer, Clara Smith.

In 1925, still only nineteen years old, she got her first big break – opening in La Revue Negre in Paris at the Theatre de Champs Elysees. She moved on to the Folies Bergere and became famous for her erotic dancing, sometimes appearing almost nude except for a cluster of artificial bananas around her waist. To this exoticism, she added the novelty of a live cheetah in her act.

She met a Sicilian Pepito Abatino who passed himself off as a count: he became her lover and manager, developing her singing skills. Her reputation became international, and she toured in South America, taking the opportunity to have an affair with the architect Le Corbusier who was designing a house for her in Paris.

She also repatriated her fame back in the United States, appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies in 1936. But the reception back home was less than enthusiastic, so she returned in disappointment to Paris the following year, marrying an industrialist and becoming a French citizen.

At the outbreak of the Second World War she was recruited by the French Deuxieme Bureau (French military intelligence) as an ‘honourable correspondent’. Her role was to mingle with foreign diplomats and embassy officials (particularly the occupying Germans) picking up information on troop locations and military intelligence. She also worked for the Red Cross and entertained troops in Africa and the Middle East.

After the war she bought a chateau in Sarlat near the Dordogne and began adopting children from all over the world. She accumulated twelve orphans in all, which she called her ‘rainbow tribe’. In 1947 she married for the fourth and final time, to Jo Boillon, a French orchestra leader. Like her other formal liaisons, the marriage did not last long.

In the 1950s she returned to America, where her public reception was much better than before. She performed to sell-out audiences from Miami to New York. However, when she challenged the famous Stork Club in Manhattan for refusing to accept mixed races, she was attacked by the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell. He accused her of being a Communist sympathiser, she lost her work visa as a result, and she was forced to return to France.

But her fight on behalf of racial equality did not go unrewarded. She was recognised by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). The Association declared May 20 Josephine Baker Day in her honour. And at an individual level she was befriended by the film actress Grace Kelly (Princess Grace of Monaco).

In 1963 she spoke at the March on Washington rally, alongside Martin Luther King. Later, when he was assassinated, his widow Coretta Scott King invited Baker to take his place as leader of the civil rights movement. She turned down the offer in order to look after her children. But in 1968 she was declared bankrupt over unpaid debts, and she lost occupancy of the chateau, which is now open as a museum in her memory. Grace Kelly gave her financial assistance and the loan of a villa in Monaco.

In 1975 she starred in a retrospective revue celebrating her fifty years in show business. The revue in Paris was financed by Prince Rainier of Monaco and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. It was attended by an international array of celebrities – but four days later she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and died at the age of sixty-eight. At her funeral she was given full French military honours, and the Place Josephine Baker was named after her in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris.

© Roy Johnson 2018

Josephine Baker in Art and Life – Amazon UK

Josephine Baker in Art and Life – Amazon US

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Larkin’s Jazz

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4-CD boxed set compilation of Larkin’s favourite music

During the last decades of the twentieth century Philip Larkin was a sort of unofficial poet laureate – having turned down the offer of the real post on the death of John Betjeman. What many of his admirers didn’t realise at the time was that he used to write regular reviews of jazz recordings for The Daily Telegraph for a decade between 1961 and 1971 (later published as All What Jazz) and in fact as a youth he even harboured aspirations to become a jazz drummer. Larkin’s Jazz is a 4-CD box set compilation of his favourites.

Larkin's JazzA poet famous for his gloom (he called himself ‘the Hermit of Hull’) he confessed in later life that jazz had provided him with some of the happiest moments of his life. And his enthusiasm for the foot-tapping, life-enhancing spirit of jazz music lasted from his boyhood in pre-war Coventry to his death in 1985. This multi-disc compilation of his favourite music was created as a tribute to the poet and critic on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his passing.

The vast majority of these tracks are what used to be called ‘hot’ jazz – upbeat and spirited music – from his first record purchase of ‘Tiger Rag’, through Lionel Hampton, to Earl Bostic’s ‘Flamingo’ (which I remember buying as a teenager in the 1950s to dispel the tedium of Family Favourites, and Those You Have Loved.

The contents of the four discs are arranged in a sequence that reflects the order in which Larkin experienced the music. The first CD brings together the recordings that he collected as a youth in the 1930s. These include Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, The Chicago Rhythm Kings, and Count Basie. These might strike contemporary listeners as decidedly old-fashioned, but it should be kept in mind that jazz music at that time was regarded generally as a risque and corrupting influence, and the only music (apart from classical) broadcast by the BBC was of mind-numbing banality.

Larkin's JazzThe second disc collects some of the music he experienced at University, along with fellow student Kingsley Amis who became a lifelong friend. Outstanding names here include Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Condon, Muggsy Spanier, and Gene Krupa. You might be tempted to conclude from this that his taste was mainly for white musicians, but to his credit Larkin was an early enthusiast for blues singers such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.

The third represents the music he reviewed during his stint for the Telegraph, and appears to cast the appreciative net a little wider. Sidney Bechet, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and Duke Ellington are featured names here. Not that Larkin’s reviews were confined to such a narrow historical period. But it’s well known that he was no lover of modern jazz, and the compilers have probably more accurately reflected Larkin’s tastes rather than including music by Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and even John Coltrane that Larkin had reviewed but did not like.

Most of these recordings were originally issued on 78 rpm records, which constrained performances to about three and a half minutes maximum. But the fourth CD features more extended items taken from long playing records that Larkin used to listen to with friends in the 1970s and 1980s.

These Proper Box productions are tremendous value at four CDs for less than ten pounds, but this one has the additional bonus of an accompanying booklet that offers not one but two essays of appreciation, plus commentary notes, photographs and a full discography of every track. This scholarship is shared by Trevor Tolley, an authority on Larkin and John White, a colleague of Larkin’s at the University of Hull, biographer of Artie Shaw, and co-editor of Larkin: Jazz Writings. No wonder it’s already at the top of the best-seller lists.

Larkin's Jazz Buy the CDs at Amazon UK

Larkin's Jazz Buy the CDs at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010

Larkin’s Jazz, London: Proper Box Records, 2010, ISBN: B003LZ38IW

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