I Don’t Have to Do That

AS EACH FLEETING WEEK swipes another physical ability and leaves a fresh pain in its wake, I’m comforted by the mantra I summon: I don’t have to do that. It’s not belligerent. It’s a gentle reminder, obedience to which keeps me free of ache and frustration.

For example. I’m six feet four inches tall, a height offset, particularly when viewed from a distance, by the bulges I wear in a horizontal direction. And I probably would measure up now as an inch or two shorter, thanks to spinal collapse and my general crouch, but I haven’t measured my height in years. I don’t have to do that.

That height, combined with what I assume was a pleasantly accessible mien, often inspired shorter fellow-shoppers to ask me to reach items down from high shelves. I happily obliged. Now my shoulders are shot – I blew out both rotator cuffs by hammering a stage platform into being – and I can barely reach to the height of my head. Should someone ask that favor now – well, you know where I’m going. Of course, they don’t ask, because that accessible mien has also gone away.

Which means I’m merely a grumpy old man – I’m 68 as I write this – who becomes one of many trudging a grocery cart through a checkout line reminiscent of Cold War-era photos of GUM store queues. This makes me a target for the complainers which, despite my infirmities, I am not. “How long are they gonna make us wait here?” might go the opener, or “Can you believe that parking lot?” (Are we questioning its existence?) or “Whoever heard of paying five bucks for a carton of eggs?” My tactic is to first pretend I’ve been startled out of a reverie and ask the questioner to repeat the query. Then I shrug – a shrug can be a focus-grabbing gesture – and respond, respectively, “I’m in no hurry,” “It’s a beautiful thing,” and “I wouldn’t know. I have hens.”

Sonny Days

IN THE END, it comes down to your Moldy Fig quotient. If, like me, you rooted yourself in a jazz era that barely stretched into the Second World War, making friends with bebop has been too much of a challenge to pursue. Sure, I’ve been tempted by Bird and Diz, but never enough for a lasting commitment. At least at first. My horizons eventually broadened thanks to the same vehicle that got me interested in non-mainstream music in the first place: friends who insisted I listen to something that was new to me.

I wish I’d had this Sonny Clark set back then. Mosaic Records has just released The Complete Sonny Clark Blue Note Sessions, which captures the recordings made under the pianist’s name between 1957 and 1961, resulting in nine LP releases. Clark is remembered as an inventive exponent of the “hard bop” movement, a label I find too ill-defined—but there’s a lot of hard-driving, angular music in these grooves.

And then there’s something else, to which I now wish to point you. Acquire this set (and do so soon, because you know how quickly these limited-edition Mosaic sets tend to sell out) and head to Disc Five. That’s the “Singles Session,” recorded November 15, 1958, with bassist Jymie Merritt and drummer Wes Landers. The idea was to create recordings for jukebox play. From the first notes of Don Redman’s “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You,” we’re on very accessible ground. Clark had a history of solo-piano work, and it shows. It’ll lure you on in, your fig condition notwithstanding.

Trumping the Tramp

HE WAS FAR FROM A SAINT. We want to forgive him because he was funny as hell, a process that grows less and less difficult as the misbehaviors of others in the public eye grow (or are revealed to be) more heinous. Charlie Chaplin’s biggest sin was that he liked women, liked them young, and liked them to satisfy a prodigious sexual appetite. Chaplin’s biggest crime was his outspoken political stance, which was misinterpreted vigorously enough to win him a fat FBI file and eventual banishment from the U.S.

Scott Eyman’s meticulous study places the comedian’s film career against a rising tide of manufactured disapproval, culminating in the horrific kangaroo trials to which Chaplin was subjected and deftly (but not at all overtly) paralleling them to the kind of ideological nonsense we’re sprayed with in the age of MAGA. You think Trump is a dangerous idiot? Wait’ll you get to know J. Edgar Hoover.

Chaplin’s early years are sketched with sympathetic precision, covering the important points of his career and examining a fraught relationship with his show-biz parents: a father, famed for his music-hall turns, who was mostly absent and soon dead, and a soubrette mother who lost her mind. Although Eyman doesn’t indulge in too much psychological speculation, he sees this a stage-setting the relationships Chaplin eventually with the friends, co-workers, and, especially, women in his life.

He started as a boy performer in England, eventually landing a berth in the Fred Karno troupe, which toured knockabout sketches throughout the U.K. and, ultimately, across the U.S. In 1914, when Charlie was 24, he was invited to make films for Mack Sennett. In breathtakingly short order he created the character of the Tramp and placed him 36 one-reelers, all in the space of a year. Skyrocketing popularity led him to set his own terms for his subsequent 25 films, now two-reelers, that he wrote and directed for two different companies through the end of 1917.

Tooning In

THERE HAS BECOME A TRADITION for symphony orchestras to devote an evening to serving as accompaniment to a feature-length movie. In nearby Saratoga Springs this summer, the Philadelphia Orchestra will be pandering to the masses by playing to a Harry Potter movie. Silent movies invite accompaniment even more, typically with a single performer at the keyboard.

Turns out there’s a middle ground, a place where six virtuoso musicians serve as the soundtrack to a eclectic selection of cartoons. The music is high-spirited, in the tradition of the John Kirby Sextet and the Raymond Scott Quintet (also a sextet, but don’t worry about it. Scott didn’t).

The Queen's Cartoonists

The Queen’s Cartoonists derive their royal appellation not from the late sovereign but from their New York City borough of residency. They are impossibly talented. Joel Pierson is the pianist and leader, providing commentary throughout the show. Greg Hammontree generally plays trumpet, but picks up other instruments or percussion items as needed. Mark Phillips plays clarinet and/or (curved) soprano sax, while Drew Pitcher is usually playing tenor sax but switches out to any number of other instruments and noisemakers. Bass-player Sam Minaie plucks, snaps, and slaps his instrument like a madman, although he can turn around a bow a charming melody as well. And Rossen Nedelchev, behind the drum kit, not only provides a solid drive for this ensemble but also manages the video portions of the program.

The Hour Has Come

THE WORLD THAT JAMES JOYCE presents in his writing is unique. It’s Dublin, of course, portrayed in prose and verse by a master of language. But it’s a city he knew in staggering detail, peopled by those he also knew well, given life in a few deft strokes of his pen. Joyce also loved music. He sometimes seemed as likely to sing as to write, and music threads throughout his writing, with mentions of song after song, popular and obscure.

Richard Wargo, Michael Pavese,
and Dorothy Danner

So it’s no surprise that Joyce’s words lend themselves to music. Better still, the characters he describes think and act with the intimate characteristics of chamber music. Dubliners, a collection of fifteen stories finished in 1905, offers a view of the city through the lives of a number of seemingly unremarkable residents.

Two of them figure in the story “A Painful Case,” which is the subject of a new opera by Richard Wargo. It premiered as part of this summer’s music festival at the Sembrich Museum in Bolton Landing, New York, and it’s so new that only the first act (of two) was presented.

It was envisioned as a one-act but, as Wargo writes in the program notes, he didn’t anticipate “over the course of writing the libretto and developing one evolving relationship between the two characters in this intimate story, that the opera would double in size.”

“Bicycling,” the New Craze

Guest Blogger Dept.: We haven’t heard from Robert Benchley since January, at which time he was addressing a very seasonal topic - a mid-winter sport carnival, to be exact. Wishing to assert himself as a man for all seasons, or at least the current temperate one, he offers this disquisition on bicycling.

                                                                                        

THERE is a new sport this season which bids fair to have great popularity among the younger sets, a sport imported, as are so many of our outdoor games, from England, where it has had a great vogue for several years now. This sport is called “bicycling,” and derives its name from the instrument on which it is practiced—the “bicycle.” You will see that this word is made up of two words: “bi,” meaning “two,” and “cycle,” meaning wheel—“two wheels.” And such indeed it is, a veritable two-wheeled contraption, on which the rider sits and balances himself until he is able, by pushing two pedals arranged for the purpose, to propel the whole thing along the roadway at a great rate. And what a lark it is, too!

Drawing by Gluyas Williams

We show a picture of a bicycle here, and you may figure out for yourself just how it works. You will see that the pedals are so fixed that when one foot is up the other is down, thus giving the feet an equal chance at the rousing exercise and doing away with any chance of the rider’s becoming one-sided, as might well result from a position where one foot was up all the time and one foot down.

You will also observe that the saddle is placed at just the right height from the pedals, so that the rider sits on it easily without having to stretch his legs out beyond their natural length—or, on the other hand, without having to contract them. When experiments were being made on the first bicycle by the inventor, it was thought that it would be necessary for anyone who was going to ride one of the things to stretch his legs out anywhere from one to four feet beyond their natural length in order to reach the pedals. The inventor was very much discouraged when he realized this, “for,” as he said to his partner, “there won’t be enough people in the world who can stretch their legs out from one to four feet to make any decent kind of sale for my machine at all.”

Grin and Berlioz It

DURING A Q&A SESSION at the Bard Music Festival, the question was posed: “Do you ever fall asleep when you’re conducting?” The question was aimed at Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and conductor of the orchestral portions of the festival programs. “Do you ever get bored up there?” This took place during a panel discussion titled “A Revolutionary Life in a Revolutionary Era,” and the subject – the subject of two weekends’ worth of programming, in fact – was Hector Berlioz.

The question was inspired by Berlioz’s “Lélio,” a work for narrator, vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra, performed at the festival the evening before. It’s a formidable work (not that you expect anything less from this composer) that resists categorization. It is rarely performed, which is a major reason it was part of the festival’s opening concert, paired with Berlioz’s most famous work, the “Symphonie fantastique,”to which it is intended as a sequel.

Dr. Botstein has an impressively elegant way of suffering fools. His reply was measured, with just a whiff of archness. In the days before media saturation, before recordings were available, he explained, concert pieces were constructed to give listeners some musical signposts. And those listeners (I’m not quoting exactly) had actual attention spans. They didn’t have phones in front of their faces. In other words, it’s not the music that’s the problem. It’s the distracted listener.

Yet if ever there was a composer for the distracted listener, it’s Berlioz. Not for him, generally, the intimate gesture. “Lélio” just happens to be one of his least-accessible works. I wasn’t there for that performance, but I spent the entirety of the following day soaking in the variety of events that characterizes each day of this festival.