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Larkin’s Jazz

September 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

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

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© Roy Johnson 2010


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


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Filed Under: Music Tagged With: Cultural history, Jazz, Larkin's Jazz, Music, Philip Larkin

Larkin’s Jazz Essays and Reviews

July 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Jazz criticism from a major English poet

Larkin’s Jazz is a collection of record and book reviews that has been assembled to flesh out Philip Larkin’s oeuvre of writings on jazz. It also seeks to correct the idea that he was a jazz reactionary — an impression he created himself by his introduction to All What Jazz, the collection of his monthly record reviews for The Daily Telegraph. This also covers a wider time span – starting with a piece he wrote for a school magazine and going up into the early 1980s.

Larkin's Jazz essays It’s a collection of reviews from the Guardan the Observer and elsewhere. What emerges is a rational, humane view of jazz and related topics, a sincere concern for the plight of African-Americans (who he refers to as Negroes – which was PC at the time) and of course a lustful sense of fun for the music. He writes on Count Basie, Billy Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, jazz photography, other jazz critics such as Francis Newton and LeRoi Jones. The editors Richard Palmer and John White do everything they can to reclaim the image of Larkin which has been generated by his biographies and published correspondence:

these book reviews give the lie to the charges of misogynist, racist and anti-modernist curmudgeon levelled against Larkin by politically correct critics who also revealed themselves as incapable of detecting irony or wit in the purple prose that vivifies much of his correspondence.

Whether they do that or not depends partly on how much else any reader already knows about Larkin and his – ahem, idiosyncratic views and tastes. But these pieces are certainly well worth reading in their own right. As a reviewer myself, I noticed how well-crafted the reviews are – amazingly short, yet combining an account of the book or the record, a personal opinion, and a neat sliver of readable journalism as well.

Of course much of what he has to say is about very traditional forms of jazz, and even though that’s clearly his own taste it’s not entirely his own fault. He was reviewing at a time when most print publications on the subject of jazz were rather conservative.

He admires the writing of Whitney Balliett, but sees its limitations:

in the end we are left with the impression of brilliant superficiality. Perhaps that is editorial policy: the New Yorker was always strong on polish. But the only thing you can polish is a surface.

This collection has been edited with loving care. Even the smallest items and least-known names are swaddled in supportive endnotes. It’s one for connoisseurs: devotees of jazz music, or those interested in the opinions and occasional writings of a very influential poet.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Richard Palmer and John White (eds) Larkin’s Jazz: Essays and Reviews 1940-84, London: Continuum, 2001, pp.190, ISBN: 0826453465


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Listen to This

December 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essays on classical and contemporary music

Listen to This is the follow up to Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century which was a huge success when it was published last year. His new book is a collection of essays which first appeared in The New Yorker where he is resident music critic. Some readers will be amazed at the wide variety of music he covers. In one sense (to use the language of record producers) he’s monetising his back catalogue, because some of the essays date from as long as nearly twenty years ago.

Listen to ThisIn the magazine and on his blog at The Rest Is Noise he makes a vigorous effort to document, expand, and proselytise on behalf of contemporary music. And I use the term ‘contemporary’ for two reasons. The first is that although much of his writing is concerned with the traditions of church, concert hall, and chamber music stretching from the early renaissance to the present day, he rejects the term ‘classical’ as inaccurate and restricting. It does not include what we now call ‘early music’ and it excludes music being written and performed by living composers. The second reason is that it also excludes music from other genres, such as jazz, experimental modernism, and rock – some of which attract far more listeners than any ‘classical’ music has ever done.

This collection seeks to redress this narrowness and imbalance by including essays on pop and contemporary art music, alongside pieces on Brahms, Schubert, and Mozart. Not that he is entirely at ease in embracing these apparently contradictory enthusiasms. In his opening essay he wrestles with this seemingly conflicting taste for classical and pop music, and it’s significant that whilst his love of traditional music is rooted in composers such as Beethoven, Mahler, and Wagner, but he can look beyond these to modern symphonic music, his taste in popular genres is far less mature and well-informed. He’s attracted to superficial pop stars, white American rock music, and even talentless wannabes such as Bjork.

He also touches in his introductory essays on a far more interesting and fundamental issue. How is it possible, he asks, to write critically and analytically about music, when it is an abstract form of expression? Because music, despite all its power to move us emotionally, doesn’t actually mean anything. How can this be true, when so many people find such a great deal of satisfaction in listening to it? This is a paradox to which he never really finds a solution.

Ross is an incredibly fluent and entertaining writer, and he can go on for several hundred words describing his reaction to Beethoven’s Eroica. But ultimately, his account of this experience comes down to what he rightly calls the ‘purple’ school of music criticism – ‘Beethoven’s Fifth symphony begins with fate knocking at the door’.

There’s an essay on Mozart in which he examines the composer’s greatness in the process of reviewing a Philips’ issue of the complete works on 180 CDs. This gives him the opportunity to spot evidence of links between dramatic situations and musical motifs in pieces written many years apart – which he offers as evidence for the notion that Mozart had these constructions wired into his inventive DNA.

He is drawn towards biographical interpretation, but has to admit that there is precious little evidence to support it. The fact is that artists can create tragic art works during happy periods of their life – and optimistic upbeat works when they’re in the middle of personal tragedies.

An essay on the pop group Radiohead is not much more than a well-written character sketch of the band members, with some festival rock atmosphere thrown in. It’s the sort of thing which does not help his cause to enlarge the scope of what he calls ‘the music’ at all. The documentary-journalistic approach is much better employed when he gives an account of classical music in contemporary China.

The same is true of his essay on Bob Dylan. There’s plenty of biographical anecdote stressing his eccentric behaviour and amazing productivity, and in-depth consideration of ambiguity in his lyrics – but very little about the music itself. The most interesting detail to emerge from what is obviously a close acquaintance with his live concerts and recorded work is that Dylan constantly reshapes his own material – adding new lyrics to songs, changing their harmonic structures, and even recycling old lyrics with new melodies. Jazz musicians do this all the time, but it is unusual in both pop and ‘classical’ music, and it strikes me as being a topic worthy of further examination.

He has what can only be called a weakness for experimentalism. [I was surprised at his taking John Cage seriously in The Rest is Noise.] Here he creates a touching portrait of John Luther Adams, giving a sympathetic account of compositions for ninety voices that last for six hours, and continuous music that is ‘composed’ by seismic readings and temperature measurements from local meteorological stations. This is music you can ‘live in’, music that never ends – which begs the question of whether it is music at all.

Naturally he is in favour of bolstering more public support for musical education and participation in the arts, but he doesn’t seem to understand that culture in any society is produced with what’s left over after the basic requirements for survival have been met. A nation with half its population living on food stamps and state benefits hasn’t got the resources to spare for violin lessons for underprivileged children – whose parents don’t have the money or the inclination to attend concerts of classical music. In other words, his heart is in the right place, but he doesn’t seem to have thought through the relationship between art and economics. Only societies with large budget surpluses can afford to subsidise nineteenth century sized orchestras.

The best essay in the collection is his most recent – a virtuoso survey of the descending base line which appears throughout western musical history in forms from the chaconne to the twelve bar blues. This manages to combine the technical analysis of music with the ‘purple’ approach to criticism, arguing that there is something fundamental in this progression which illustrates a ‘meaning’ in this seemingly most abstract of art forms. After all, it is no accident that most ‘sad’ music is written in minor keys.

He’s amazingly well informed about the world of music as a profession, and sandwiched within these essays there are some fascinating insights which could easily be expanded into articles in their own right – the history of applause at concerts for instance, or the fact that the average member of the Berlin Philharmonic is a generation younger than the Rolling Stones.

Although it lacks the continuous narrative and the intellectual rigour of The Rest is Noise this is a fascinating collection of studies that brings an infectious enthusiasm to the appreciation of music. He doesn’t solve either of his two main problems, but his exploration of the issues is inspiring and certainly promotes the urge to listen more.

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Alex Ross, Listen to This, London: Fourth Estate, 2010, pp.400, ISBN: 0007319061


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Filed Under: Music Tagged With: classical music, Essays, Music

Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record

Norman Lebrecht is a writer and pundit specialising in classical music who often appears on Radio 3 taking phone-in commentaries on what the BBC supposes to be very controversial topics such as “Should government subsidise the Arts?” and “Is the Internet taking over from print journalism?”. He comes across in the spoken word as a pushy and self-aggrandising windbag, but I must say that in Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness the same approach makes for lively reading.

Maestros, Masterpieces and MadnessWhat he offers here is a history of recording classical music, from its faltering start at the beginning of the last century, to the present. His main argument is that what was at first perceived as a somewhat impure medium gradually took hold of the public imagination when the technology became affordable in the form of the LP record and then the CD. This led to an explosion of recording the classics which was fuelled by vainglorious recording companies and famous conductors alike. This accelerated until the whole system ground to a point of collapse brought on by their greed, by over-production, and a failure to see changes in mass media.

That’s the story in a nutshell, but it is told via a combination of detailed insider knowledge of how classical music works as a business, with celebrity vignettes, potted biographies, and what might be called lashings of The Higher Gossip.

Many of the principal conductors we think of as cultural icons and household names emerge from these pages as vain, self-seeking, and egotistical monsters – pocketing huge sums in secret deals behind the backs of their employers, and moving from one orchestra and city to another in a relentless search for more prestige.

This starts with figures such as the mercurial and dictatorial conductor Toscanini and the unscrupulous record producer Walter Legge, and then moves into more recent years with company takeovers which seem more motivated by whim and rivalry than any artistic or business logic.

He’s very well informed about all sorts of details. How Decca was a haven for gays (Britten, Tippett, Maxwell Davis) and how Deutsche Grammophon (owned by Siemens) had used slave labour from the death camps to keep its empire going.

The golden years are awash with lucrative record deals, and projects which replicate every popular classic known to man, ten times over. But then in the 1960s things begin to change. That’s because the record companies suddenly realise that they are making more money out of pop music.

By the end of 1956 Elvis had sold $22 million worth of discs and merchandise in the US, half as much as the whole of the classical market.

From this point onwards there was a struggle between pop and classical in the board rooms. One brought in the money, the other wasted it on a prodigious scale. Despite a temporary revival with early music, the end was in sight. And when it came there was lots of grief and pain for everyone. By the time we reach Internet downloads and Peer-2-Peer filesharing, the game is up.

You’ll love this story if you are interested in behind-the-scenes of the music world, and gossip about those people with high reputations but much lower levels of behaviour. It’s got schadenfreude by the bucketload. (Actually, that’s a fair example of Lebrecht’s style rubbing off on me.)

And yet for all his dirt-dishing on the famous, he actually supports a high patrician line of cultural conservatism. You get a strong sense of regret that things have turned out as they have. He doesn’t see the process he describes as one of change, fuelled by one technology after another, which probably has more people listening to classical music than ever before – as I am doing right now, over the Internet.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Norman Lebrecht, Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness, London: Allen Lane, 2007, pp.324, ISBN: 0713999570


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Natural Selection

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books

‘A critic,’ Philip Larkin once declared, ‘is a man who likes some things and dislikes others, and finds reasons for doing so and for trying to persuade other people to do so.’ Gary Giddins has been doing this for many years. In several collections of jazz journalism (including the recent Weather Bird) Gary Giddins has conveyed his enthusiasm for and devotion to the music and its practitioners. This latest book Natural Selection includes pieces on jazz, but also illuminating essays on silent movies, film noir, TV shows, DVD and CD releases, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Classics Illustrated, Friedrich Durrenmatt and the Jewish novelist Soma Morgenstern.

Gary GiddinsGiddins’ firm conviction is that ‘jazz and film have much in common, beyond parallel births, changing technologies, and competing bids as America’s pre-eminent cultural love child. They are resolutely manipulative arts. Music continuously mines emotional responses; movies are structured around emotional releases, whether musical, comic, tear-jerking, shocking, pornographic, or suspenseful. Musical works and movies usually exist in concise units of time, their effectiveness dependent on tempo, rhythm, contrast, style, and interaction’.

He proceeds to apply this apercu to (among others) Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis and the Marx Brothers. Chaplin he suggests ‘ruined numerous comedians who wanted our tears but didn’t possess his equilibrium (Jerry Lewis, Jackie Gleason, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and Billy Crystal for starters’). The Marx Brothers ‘were grown-ups pretending to be children, pretending to be grown-ups.’

Jerry Lewis (‘Idiot Semi-Savant’) might be adored by the French, but they are mercifully unaware of ‘the sanctimonious talking head who sapped the affection of a generation with horrific television appearances.’ Bob Hope, a comic movie actor to be taken seriously, became dated as a glib and increasingly unfunny comedian, ‘increasingly sanctified as the rich, conformist, golfing buddy of every White House duffer.’ Jack Benny (not widely known in Europe, but a household name in America) ‘may be the only great comedian in history who isn’t associated with a single witticism’.

Various iconic screen stars receive their succinct dues. Greta Garbo ‘reminds us that the cinema is the ultimate expression of voyeurism: her close-ups are her money shots’. A young Marlon Brando ‘gave American actors new modes of being racked with ambiguities’. Of the latter-day Brando, Giddins asks: ‘Excepting Orson Welles, has any other actor cloistered himself in so much fat?’

Bing Crosby (Giddins is his biographer) ‘is the most conspicuously neglected of the Golden Age of Hollywood stars’. So far, so good, but the critical faculty seems alarmingly absent from Giddins’s claim that Doris Day (‘Blond and Beaming’), was ‘The coolest and sexiest female singer to achieve movie-musical stardom’. Moreover, many of the film/DVD reviews collected here are bogged down in often tedious technical detail.

Not surprisingly, Giddins is at his considerable best in jazz reviews – which include refreshing reassessments of Glenn Miller, and Billie Holiday. Miller has long been dismissed by critics as ‘a humourless purveyor of diluted swing, banal novelties and saccharine vocals’ but is now being celebrated as the creator of ‘a sound that clings remorselessly to the collective memory.’

Both Miller (and Fats Waller) ‘humble critical stereotypes and show ways that jazz and pop once enriched each other, and might still’. But reviewing The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, Giddins finds it almost totally worthless, with entries on jazz – ‘which one might argue is the essence of American music’ – only found after much searching.

Elsewhere, he suggests that ‘there is a correct way to sing Cole Porter, much as there is a correct way to act Shakespeare’ and commends Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Ella Fitzgerald as ‘accomplished Porterphiles’. Giddins confesses to be a life-long admirer of Duke Ellington. ‘People often describe their first time with Duke Ellington in terms of losing their virginity, and for me it seemed like the next best thing’.

In an excellent piece on ‘Jazz for the Eyes’ (The Sound of Jazz/Jazz on a Summer’s Day), Giddins writes of Lester Young’s single-chorus, 39-second tenor solo on the TV (not studio) version of Fine and Mellow, that it is ‘so sublimely constructed that after you’ve heard it a couple of times, it becomes part of your nervous system, like the motor skills required to ride a bicycle’. As for the vocalist on this number, Billie Holliday: ‘if it is possible for two people to make love while one partner is playing the tenor saxophone 10 feet away from the other, that is what Young and Holliday were doing.’ And ‘Billie’s pantomime of pure pleasure embodied a sensual appreciation of the music in a way no actor has ever succeeded in doing’.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day also had its share of ‘indelible jazz images: Anita O’Day ‘in a feathered hat and black sheath dress with white fringes, thrusting her glottis at Sweet Georgia Brown‘; trombonist Jack Teagarden ‘grinning as though he’d crashed an unexpected party while Chuck Berry rocks Sweet Little Sixteen‘, and Louis Armstrong recounting his unlikely answer to the Pope, when asked if he had children – ‘No, Daddy, but we’re still wailing’.

Giddins is particularly mischievous at posing and then answering questions. One example must suffice. In a review of the movie White Palace, Giddins ponders the prevalence of oral sex in recent films and asks: ‘What’s with all these blowjobs?’ His answer: ‘They represent Hollywood’s latest code for breaking the ice, for reaching out and touching someone, for initiating a sincere and meaningful relationship. No more kissing on the mouth, no more ‘What was your major?’ Just cut to the fly, followed by a shot of an actor faking instantaneous ecstasy.’ Partly autobiographical, Natural Selection is also an artful work of ‘intelligent design’. Giddins persuades us to revisit some of the movies and books, and all of the jazz performances he so obviously enjoyed reviewing – and sharing.

© John White 2006

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Gary Giddins, Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, & Books, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp.432 , ISBN: 019517951X


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Filed Under: Music Tagged With: Cultural history, Gary Giddins, Jazz, Music, Natural Selection, Radio

The Bride of the Wind: The Life of Alma Mahler

July 27, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Alma Mahler was one of the most famous (some would say infamous) grandes dames of the first part of the twentieth century. She was rich, famous, gifted, and very glamorous in her younger years. And she had a penchant for artists, writers, and men of power that led to a succession of husbands and lovers. She was born in 1879 to a father who was a rather feckless painter and a mother who was an ex-singer. The family eventually became successful via some royal patronage that was common in the Hapsburg Empire at that time. But their rise in fortunes was cut short when the patron shot himself and her father died when she was quite young.

Alma MahlerAlma was not close to her mother, and had no time at all for her younger sister. The remainder of her life seems to have been a search for powerful authority-figure substitutes for the father she had lost. As a young woman, obviously aware of her physical attractiveness, she had a series of chaste but coquettish relationships with older men. Her widowed mother married one of her father’s artistic colleagues, and Alma mixed at her social ease in the Secessionist artistic circles that were established in Vienna towards the end of the nineteenth century.

One of her first serious connections was with Gustav Klimt, but the relationship was nipped in the bud by her mother, who disapproved of the liaison. When she began to develop her own interests in music in the form of song composition, she engaged the services of Alexander von Zemlinsky. She thought he was hideously ugly, but in order to become his student she flattered him by saying that he was ‘becoming too attractive to her’.

This characteristic flirting would persist throughout her life. Nevertheless, she was on the point of giving herself to Zemlinsky when she met Gustav Mahler, a composer who was just on the point of becoming great. He proposed to her on their fourth meeting – on the condition that she give up all thought of her own musical ambitions for herself. There was only to be room for one musician in the Mahler household.

She submitted to this egoism, produced two children, yet kept her musical friendships with Zemlinsky and Pfitzner alive in order to maintain her self-respect. It’s perhaps understandable that passages in this excellent biography dealing with her marriage to Mahler are dominated by the husband’s professional difficulties and triumphs rather than her own development.

Gustav Mahler achieved great success in Europe and even America where the family lived for the part of each year. But Alma characteristically developed a sense of restless disaffection from her husband, and ended up having a nervous breakdown which called for a sanitorium ‘cure’. [This is the era Thomas Mann deals with in his novel The Magic Mountain.]

Whilst taking the cure she met the architect Walter Gropius and started an affair with him. On return to Vienna she was prepared to equivocate between these two attachments, but Gropius upped the ante by writing to Mahler, saying that he wanted to marry his wife. Mahler was devastated, and suddenly found it in himself to support Alma’s musical interests – but it was too late. He died shortly after this.

Gropius perhaps wisely, put his relationship with Alma on hold – and she meanwhile temporised with relationships with musician Franz Schrecker and biologist Paul Kammerer – then in 1912 met the artist Oskar Kokoshka.

Their’s was a stormy love affair that lasted three years. Kokoshka wanted to marry her, but she resisted shackling herself to a poor and (then) unknown artist. They quarrelled a lot, and he was terribly jealous of her previous attachments, but he produced lots of important work, including his masterpiece The Bride of the Wind which gives this biography its title.

The Bride of the Wind

Kokoshka enlisted in the first world war, almost as a gesture of despair about their relationship; he was badly wounded, and whilst he was convalescing she married Gropius.

If the Gustav Mahler episode was not sufficient proof, her relationship with Kokoshka certainly demonstrates to power of Alma Mahler as an inspiring muse to great artists. It’s interesting to note just how many of Kokoshka’s great paintings were produced around this time.

However, with Gropius she seemed to have found a partner with whom she could find some semblance of emotional tranquillity. She was even eager to start another family with him, which they did in 1915, after a secret marriage. The outcome was her daughter Manon, who proved to be a tragic child who died of poliomyelitis whilst still young.

Gropius was himself called back into the war, leaving Alma to fall in love with the poet Franz Werfel who was ten years younger than her, and just at the start of his career. In 1918 Alma suffered the premature birth (with complications) of her fourth child Martin. Gropius was summoned from military duty on the assumption that the child was his. He discovered fairly rapidly that it was not.

There was a showdown between Gropius, Werfel, and Alma – but she refused to choose between them as husband and lover. Eventually, Gropius agreed to a divorce. He went on to establish the Bauhaus project: Werfel gradually abandoned poetry and wrote instead a series of commercially successful novels, all of which are now completely forgotten.

Alma now had everything she wanted, yet her life continued to be full of restlessness, distress, and antagonism with her daughter Anna, who was married several times, and had an affair with the writer Elias Canetti.

Alma eventually married Werfel, despite their political differences. He was a leftist with non-partisan sympathies for both the communists and the social-democrats: she was an arch conservative who admired Mussolini and was so anti-Semitic she even thought her own children were tainted by ‘miscegenation’.

She rejoined the Catholic Church in 1932 and almost immediately started an affair with Father Johannes Hollnsteiner, a professor of theology – an affair that Werfel knew about and tolerated in exchange for a quiet life.

Fortunately, all these dubious goings on are surrounded in this biography by some first rate political mise en scene. There’s a very readable account of the collapse of Austria and Vienna in particular amidst the competing factions of fascists, social-democrats, monarchists, and communists.

Despite her right-wing sympathies, when Austria was threatened by Germany in 1938 Alma had the good sense to transfer her money to Zurich, and she escaped with Werfel, ending up in the south of France along with many other European refugees at that time. Their escape route was the now familiar one of Marseilles to Perpignon on the Spanish border; over the Pyrenees in secret; then from Spain to Portugal, and a boat journey to freedom. It was a route travelled by many others, including Victor Serge, Walter Benjamin (who did not survive the suicide capsule he shared with Arthur Koestler), André Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp.

After a rapturous reception in New York Alma settled in California. As her fellow refugee Arnold Schoenberg put it she was ‘exiled to paradise’. A comfortable home with a strictly Ayrian butler was established, from which she deemed the Allied forces fighting in Europe were ‘weaklings and degenerates’. She thought Hitler was a ‘superman’ and claimed that the Red Cross facilities in the concentration camps were ‘excellent’. When her husband died in 1945 she didn’t even go to his funeral.

Yet after Werfel’s death she seems to have lost her sense of purpose and direction. She sorted out his papers and wrote her own self-justifying autobiography And the Bridge is Love, and went to live in New York. There were some attempts to retrieve her property in post-war Austria, but when she visited her old home in Vienna it was in ruins. Even the marble had been ripped out to furnish nearby houses.

There was a quasi-reconciliation with her daughter Anna, who was so disoriented she didn’t even know who had won the war. They were like characters at the end of Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus. She lived until 1964, still drinking a bottle of Benedictine a day, then at the age of eighty-six the light went out on her life – and on the end of an era.

Alma Mahler - The Bride of the Wind Buy the book at Amazon UK
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© Roy Johnson 2012


Susan Keegan, The Bride of the Wind: The Life of Alma Mahler, London: Secker and Warburg, 1991, pp. 346, ISBN: 0670805130


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Filed Under: Biography Tagged With: Alma Mahler, Biography, Cultural history, Modernism, Music

The Life of Jimmy Scott

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical biography of major but under-appreciated singer

I have to confess that I only heard of Jimmy Scott quite recently. Understandably so, it turns out. He’s one of the best kept secrets in the world of jazz and ballad singing. I heard his voice on a radio broadcast, was intrigued, bought a couple of CDs from Amazon – and was completely blown away. He’s completely unlike any other male singer you’ve ever heard of – mainly because he sounds like a woman. This is the result of a congenital disease which denied him puberty.

Jimmy Scott But that isn’t all: he has a style which is stripped bare to a minimum and yet very mannered at the same time. Like all good jazz musicians, he pays attention to song lyrics and sings them as if he means them. The most interesting things about him are his voice quality – high falsetto, big vibrato – and his delivery, which is laid back to a point where you think he might fall over. But he never does. The nearest style I can think of is Billie Holliday – one of his early fans and an influence. As David Ritz puts it in this very readable biography:

The rhythms he creates are wholly original. He does more than take his time. He doesn’t worry about time. Time disappears as a restraint or a measure. As a singer, his signatures are idiosyncratic phrasing and radical, behind-the beat syncopation. His career, like his singing, has lagged far behind the beat.

Scott’s life was full of personal heartbreak: from a dysfunctional family; orphaned as a teenager; married four times; duped by record producers; constantly on the move; scorned as an outsider; drink, (soft) drugs. He lived, as David Ritz accurately puts it, the jazz life.

Oddly enough, he claims that his early influences were Paul Robeson and Judy Garland two singers who you would think were at opposite ends of the musical spectrum.

The amazing thing, for someone who is still alive and singing now (I heard him with a German tenor player only a few weeks ago) is that he cut his musical teeth with people such as Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Tadd Dameron. His working life spans the last half-century.

Much of the racy vivacity of Ritz’s narrative comes from the fact that he transcribes the accounts of people he interviewed in his research. There are also some very entertaining vignettes along the way – such as life on the road in the high-octane Lionel Hampton band in the late 1940s.

His biggest fans were the people who matter musically – Bird, B.B.King, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Billie Holiday, and Shirley Horn. Later on he was championed by Lou Reed and Madonna.

And his own musical taste is impeccable – as in his perceptive observation that Stan Getz got better as he got older “Whatever he learned from Lester—and he learned a lot—he expanded on the lessons until he became a master himself”

He started out promisingly enough, but every time he tried to make his breakthrough record albumn, an old producer would surface to block his ambition with a ‘cease and desist’ order straight out of a nineteenth century melodrama. Scott remained unembittered – though it has to be said he took out a lot of his anger on the people closest to him.

The 1970s and 1980s are like waste years, with Scott working as a hotel lift attendant and a shipping clerk to make ends meet. Then there are a succession of failed enterprises which left him living off social security. But then he finally got some recognition and success in the 1990s when largely white audiences began to catch on to him. By then he was sixty-eight years old.

So the story has a reasonably happy ending – but he had to wait almost half a lifetime for it. This is an enthralling account of a real survivor, recounted with genuine but not uncritical admiration, and supported by a scholarly apparatus of bibliography and discography which left me yearning to read and listen to more of this truly remarkable artist.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Jimmy Scott Buy the book at Amazon UK

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David Ritz, Faith in Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002, pp.270, ISBN: 0306812290


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The Oxford Companion to Jazz

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays on jazz musicians and jazz history

This latest addition to the distinguished Oxford Companion series comes with an encomium from record producer George Avakian: “No book on jazz has ever attempted the scope of this monumental collection of 60 studies by 59 writers. [It] is both a reference work for the scholar and a rewarding book to be dipped into by the casual reader.” Edited by composer, educator, and saxophonist Bill Kirchner, The Oxford Companion to Jazz is both impressive and slightly disappointing.

Companion to Jazz The essays are uneven in quality, there are several typographical errors, some of the black and white photographs are poorly reproduced, there are no ‘Notes on Contributors’, and the eye-straining ‘Selected Bibliography’ and ‘Index of Names and Subjects’ are not accompanied by a discography – although several essays are, in effect, record reviews. But this stout Companion has more strengths than weaknesses, and is a valuable addition to jazz literature. Kirchner’s contributors include such notable critics and musicians as Dan Morgernstern, Gunther Schuller, Patricia Willard, Bill Crow, Digby Fairweather, and Richard M. Sudhalter. There are also essays from Loren Schoenberg, Dick Katz, Mike Zwerin, Lewis Porter, Brian Priestly, Will Friedwall, Scott De Veaux, Max Harrison and Ted Gioia.

The topics covered range from ‘African Roots of Jazz’ (Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.) and ‘European Roots of Jazz’ (William H. Youngren) – which present two opposing views of the same topic. Extended essays also cover such neglected subjects as ‘The Jazz Age, Appearances and Realities’ and ‘Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging after World War II’.

There are chapters dealing with jazz styles – such as ragtime, swing, bop (an excellent piece by De Veaux), third stream, and fusion – and the locations of jazz – New Orleans, New York, California, and Kansas City. Even Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia are exhumed and examined.

Acknowledged jazz masters (and mistresses) receive individual (and sometimes overlapping) evaluations: Bessie Smith, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young; Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan (in a perceptive essay by Patricia Willard). There are also chapters on the modern masters Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and John Coltrane – though ‘cutting edge’ instrumentalists and vocalists of the past two decades receive short (or no) shrift.

Separate entries on the instruments of jazz offer some revealing insights – Michael Ullman on the clarinet, Gunther Schuller on the trombone, Don Heckman on the saxophone, Randy Sandke on the trumpet, Bill Crow on the bass, Burt Korall on the drums, Neil Tesser on ‘The Electric Guitar and Vibraphone in Jazz: Batteries Not Included’. There are also several essays on pianists.

In one of the best essays, ‘Jazz Improvisation and Concepts of Virtuosity’, David Demsey explains that ‘in a great soloist’s repertoire, every tune is like a familiar subject of conversation: although fresh ideas are always emerging, the language needed to communicate them has a consistency for each individual.’

He then applies this observation to the recorded work of masters ranging from Louis Armstrong to Ornette Coleman. He makes a good point in his suggestion that:

It is in the solitude of the practice room – ‘the woodshed’ – where, for even the most inexperienced student and the legendary jazz master alike, the basic elements of form and harmony are ingrained, new melodies or voice-leading pathways are learned, and experiments are made in rhythmic manipulation.

The Oxford Companion to Jazz, like the music and musicians it celebrates, is hugely enjoyable but best taken in measured doses. Holding this massive tome open takes two hands. If, as the editor hopes, it also sends (or introduces) the serious or casual reader to the recorded performances of the artists discussed, so much the better.

© John White 2005

Companion to Jazz Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Bill Kirchner (ed), The Oxford Companion to Jazz, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.864, ISBN: 019512510X


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Filed Under: Music Tagged With: Jazz, Modernism, Music, Oxford Companion to Jazz

The Oxford Dictionary of Music

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

definitions and an encyclopedia of musical matters

Actually this is what should be called (for the want of a better term) a dictionary of classical music, because it does not seek to cover all musical genres. Entries run from the note A to the Polish soprano Teresa Zylis-Gara, and include major (and minor) composers plus their works, famous performers and conductors, characters from operas, musical concepts and genres, musical instruments, and even mini-essays on topics such as ‘Electronic Music’.

The Oxford Dictionary of MusicIt’s as up-to-date as one could expect for a work of reference of this kind. There are 12,500 entries on all aspects of the subject, and topics stretch from music of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to potted biographies of contemporary composers such as Judith Weir and performers such as Cecilia Bartoli. I checked against (for instance) George Benjamin (b. 1960) and Thomas Adès (b. 1970) – and both of them had entries.

Its one nod towards ‘popular’ music is to include mention of song composers such as Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. For anyone interested in music, whether as a student, concert-goer, record collector or Radio 3 listener, it is a welcoming book – in which the author shares his enthusiasm for the obvious as well as the obscure. To give a very typical illustrative example, the section on American composer John Adams runs as follows:

Adams, John (Coolidge) (b Worcester, Mass, 1947). Amer. composer, conductor, and clarinetist. Studies Harvard Univ. and comp. with Kirchner, Del Tredici, and Sessions. Head, comp. dept. San Francisco Cons. 1972-82. Comp-in-res., San Francisco SO 1979-85. One of minimalists, he has deliberately forged an eclectic idiom which borrows from most of the major 20th cent. composers and from jazz. Comps.:

OPERAS: * Nixon in China (1984-7) ; The * Death of Klinghoffer (1990-1); I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky, mus. th. (1994-5); Doctor Atomic (2003-5).

ORCH.: Common Tones in Simple Time (1980); Shaker Loops, str. (1983); Harmonielehre (1984-5); Tromba lontana (1986); Short ride in a fast machine (1986); The Chairman Dances (1987); Fearful Symetries (1988); Eros Piano, pf, orch. or chamber orch. (1989); Chamber conc. (1991); El Dorado (1991); vn. conc. (1993).

VOICE(S) & ORCH. OR ENS.: Christian Zeal and Activity, spkr. on tape., ens. (1973); Grounding, 3 solo vv., instr., elec. (1975); Harmonium, ch., orch. (1980); Grand Pianola Music, 2 sop., 2 pf., small orch. (1981-2); The Wound Dresser, bar., orch. or chamber orch. (1988).

CHAMBER MUSIC: Pf. quintet (1970); American Standard, unspecified ens. (1973).

PIANO: Ragamarole, (1973); China Gates, (1977); Phrygian Gates, (1977).

TAPE ONLY: Onyx, (1975); Light Over Water, (1983).

The entire body text is set in Times New Roman, which for works of reference is a little unfashionable these days – but which I felt was sympathetic to the subject of classical music.

This latest revised edition has been supplemented with 1,000 new entries; lists of composers works have been brought up to date; and the entries now also include musical directors, critics, producers, and designers. Whether we call it ‘classical’ music or anything else, everything you might wish to know about it is covered here. [It’s also now available in a slightly abridged paperback edition.]

© Roy Johnson 2012

Dictionary of Music Buy the book at Amazon UK

Dictionary of Music Buy the book at Amazon US


Michael Kennedy, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, (revised edition) Oxford: Oxford University Press, sith edition, 2012, pp.976, ISBN: 0199578109


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Filed Under: Dictionaries, Music Tagged With: Dictionaries, Music, Oxford Dictionary of Music, Reference

The Rest is Noise

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

classical music in the twentieth century

Alex Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker magazine who blogs prolifically at The Rest is Noise. And even though he doesn’t have comments switched on at his site, his postings are required reading for anyone who wants to keep abreast of classical music – especially as seen from New York city. His tastes and references are amazingly eclectic and unstuffy. One minute he’s analysing the latest staging of the Ring Cycle and next he’s reporting on developments in contemporary rock music or a recently discovered private recording of a John Coltrane radio broadcast.

The Rest is Noise This is his long-awaited first book and major oeuvre as a critic, tracing the development of twentieth century classical music from the first night of Strauss’s Salome (no accent) in 1905 to John Adams‘s Nixon in China in 1987. He has an amazingly developed sense of cultural history- reminding us whilst discussing the development of Thomas Mann‘s traditional musical ideas in relation to Schoneberg that Leon Trotsky spent the years 1907 to 1914 in exile in Vienna where these modernist moves were being played out, alongside the work of Karl Kraus, Oskar Kokoshka, and Egon Schiele. He darts back and forth in time in a way which is at first bewildering, but there’s a good reason for doing so – usually to show how far back cultural convergences began.

His narrative is spiced by what might be called the higher musical gossip. He slips in references and anecdotes which sparkle like gems on the page. Schoneberg’s bon mot on his exile in California: ‘I was driven into Paradise’, and Charlie Parker spontaneously quoting from The Firebird when he spotted Igor Stravinsky was in the audience at Birdland one night.

It’s an approach which relies heavily on anecdote and cultural montage – but his juxtapositions are all backed up by scholarly references which are kept wisely at the back of the book, They don’t encumber the narrative.

His descriptions of symphonies and major orchestral works are a mixture of technical analysis and an impressionistic account of what is going on:

In the last bars, the note B aches for six slow beats against the final C-major chord, like a hand outstretched from a figure disappearing into light.

Maybe the mixture is just about right. After all, it’s difficult to write about music, which is essentially abstract. When you think about it, music doesn’t mean anything, even though it can be incredibly moving and beautiful. Though that, of course, is meaning of a kind.

The Spirit of Schoenberg presides over the first part of the book: all other music seems to be measured against his purist ethos and practice. This phase ends with the premiere of Berg’s Lulu in 1937. My only disappointment in this section was his account of Duke Ellington, which concentrated on his not-to-be-performed opera Boola and failed to bring out the element of small-scale symphonies or concertos which characterised much of his sub three-minute compositions for 78 rpm recordings.

In the second part, Shostakovich is let off the hook somewhat. As a way of explaining his capitulation to Stalinism, Ross describes him as having ‘divided selves’ – though to do him credit, Ross doesn’t try to conceal the privileges he enjoyed (spacious Moscow flat with three pianos, for which he thanked Stalin personally) whilst his contemporaries were being led of to the Gulag or despatched with a bullet in the back of the head.

It’s interesting to read of the style wars of the 1940s and 1950s with the benefit of half a century’s hindsight. Major composers such as Stravinsky were being written off by people who are now forgotten – and it’s even more amazing to read that the champions of atonal music and the concerts arranged to promote them were funded by the CIA.

Ross clearly has his heroes – Strauss (despite his Nazi associations) Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. And even though he may not have intended it, Pierre Boulez emerges from the narrative as a distinctly pushy, unpleasant piece of self-aggrandisement.

I was surprised that he took John Cage so seriously – somebody who has always struck me as completely bogus – but he gives a touching account of Aaron Copland, who suffered harassment and criticism in his own country during the McCarthy trials for his leftish sympathies, despite his having written such iconic evocations of America as Appalachian Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man

There’s a whole chapter on Benjamin Britten, where I was glad to see that Ross doesn’t shy away from the much-ignored fact that much of Britten’s work deals with the sexual and emotional violation of young boys. He even reveals that Britten (in a Michael Jackson moment) took the juvenile star of his 1954 The Turn of the Screw (David Hemmings) into his own bed. But Ross’s account of Britten is far from smutty. There’s a several page long account of Peter Grimes which is the most extended musical analysis in the whole book.

He ends his narrative with an account of the American minimalists – the music still apparently split into two camps, but this time ‘uptown’ and ‘downtown’ – and he has a roundup of developments in Europe following the collapse of communism and the Berlin Wall. His story concludes with a part-wish, half-expectation that classical and popular music will somehow embrace each other in a way which will create new forms in the twenty-first century.

This is a very readable, indeed a compelling work which combines love of the subject with a detailed knowledge of its history and cultural context. It’s the sort of book that makes you feel like reading with a piano keyboard to hand in order to follow the formal sequences and chord progressions he describes. Unmissable for anyone interested in twentieth century music.

© Roy Johnson 2007

The Rest is Noise Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Rest is Noise Buy the book at Amazon US


Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: listening to the twentieth century, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007, pp.624, ISBN: 0374249393


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Filed Under: Music Tagged With: Alex Ross, classical music, Cultural criticism, Cultural history, Music, The Rest is Noise

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