The Fable of the Bohemian Who Had Hard Luck

Guest Blogger Dept.: Not surprisingly, George Ade has something to say on this matter. I’m not exactly sure what this matter is, but let’s hear him out on the subject. Drawing by Clyde J. Newman.

                                                                                           

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a Brilliant but Unappreciated Chap who was such a Thorough Bohemian that Strangers usually mistook him for a Tramp.

Would he brush his Clothes? Not he. When he wore a Collar he was Ashamed of himself. He had Pipe-Ashes on his Coat and Vest. He seldom Combed his Hair, and never Shaved.

Every Evening he ate an Imitation Dinner, at a forty-cent Table d’Hôte, with a Bottle of Writing Fluid thrown in. He had formed a little Salon of Geniuses, who also were out of Work, and they loved to Loll around on their Shoulder-Blades and Laugh Bitterly at the World.

The main Bohemian was an Author. After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity. Posterity hadn’t heard anything about it, and couldn’t get out an Injunction.

Grouching

IT BEGAN HAPPENING around Hallowe’en, which is why nobody noticed it at first. Then it became one of those wryly amusing end-of-the-news stories on a local station in Anaheim, but because it was so close to Hollywood, nobody took it very seriously. A man who looked, dressed, walked, and talked exactly like Groucho Marx had been wandering the streets. As he was neither escorting any children nor begging at the doorways himself, his presence aroused suspicion – at least according to a busybody who insisted on being interviewed – but when he remained in the Groucho guise throughout the subsequent days, his wife called a nearby hospital and it made the news again. The local story was picked up by other stations across the country that shared the network, and it made its to social media as well. That’s where I noticed it.

My first experience was in an Aldi. I rounded a corner, its endcap a display of pet food, and glimpsed a man in a swallowtail coat placing items on a checkout line. He was slightly stooped and his hair was brushed back. As he turned to his cart, I saw a mustache, eyeglasses, and improbable eyebrows. I took all this in as, feigning disinterest, I proceeded up the aisle before me, processing the sight. Groucho was buying boxes of cracker assortments.

It wasn’t Groucho, of course. Some wag had chosen to adopt the garb and make-up of the comedian, possibly in a new-inspired copycat gesture. I hurried down the adjacent aisle in time to see Groucho finishing the checkout. “I had a wonderful shopping experience,” I heard him tell the cashier, adding, “but it certainly wasn’t at this fleabitten place.”

A Preferred Byas

WITH NO SLIGHT INTENDED to my family’s generosity, the ultimate Christmas present arrived early, and it came from Mosaic Records. Ten CDs devoted to the work of tenor sax artist Don Byas, ten CDs covering only June 1944 through September 1946, but showcasing a vital moment of transition in the world of jazz. This was a transition being enthusiastically explored by an artist who would then quit the United States in annoyance over his lack of recognition.

Byas was born in Olahoma in 1913 to parents who played musical instruments. By the time he reached his teens, he was playing clarinet, alto sax, and violin, and at 17 he began performing with local bands and even organized a band under his own name. Three years later he was on the west coast, now playing tenor, where he’d work with Lionel Hampton, Buck Clayton, and Eddie Barefield. That’s also where he met Art Tatum, whose work floored him.

“Art Tatum really turned me on,” Byas told jazz writer Art Taylor, who collected the interview in a book titled Notes and Tones. “That's where my style came from...style...I haven't got any style! I just blow like Art. He didn't have any style, he just played the piano, and that's the way I play.”

Given the easy manner in which Byas straddled swing and bebop, he could be termed a musical chameleon – but, as this set proves, he really wasn’t. Those were simply complementary parts of his natural voice. You hear the rhythmically adventurous swing player right from the start, as he solos in “Dance of the Tambourine,” a Hot Lips Page original. Byas follows Page’s vocal with an easygoing chorus (Page, on Mellophone, takes the bridge). But the next session, six weeks later, finds Byas rocketing along in bop mode, as “Riffin’ and Jivin’” throws fast-paced technical challenges at the crew. Trumpeter Charlie Shavers has no problem with this kind of thing, nor does pianist Clyde Hart. And dig Hart’s celeste work on “Free and Easy,” the ballad that follows.

A Fanatic’s Fantastique

More from the Concert Vault Dept.: While perusing some 1987 material, I found the following. The piece is an “advance,” written to promote an event, in this case a concert I very much wish I hadn’t missed, as I, too, am a Berlioz fanatic. I usually only post reviews, but this casts an interesting light on the Berlioz piece. Nelson remains active as a conductor, although he doesn’t seem to be holding down any regular positions at this point, preferring to travel and work throughout Europe when he’s not in Chicago or Costa Rica.

                                                                                   

Conductor John Nelson warns right from the start that you will be surprised by the “Sympbonie fantastique.”

He is presenting a version that purports to be truer to the Berlioz original than the one we’re used to hearing when he leads the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Troy Music Hall, the last concert in this season of Troy Chromatic Concerts.

“I’m a hopeless Berlioz fanatic,” Nelson admits. “And this new Behrenreiter edition is hair-raising, especially if you’re used to the old one.

“There’s a repeat in the fourth movement that has been omitted for decades, and, because that movement is a march to the scaffold, it’s even more ominous.”

Berlioz wrote the symphony as a tone-poem describing a young artist’s macabre dreams under the influence of opiates (young artists were the 19th-century French equivalent of major-league pitchers today).

A Voyage of New Music

From the Musical Vault Dept.: Long before Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute installed it shiny new performance centr (EMPAC), experimental arts were humming in RPI’s halls. Neil Rolnick taught there from 1981 to 2013, where he started the nation’s first MFA program in Integrated Electronic Arts. Now based in New York City, he’s an Adjunct Faculty member at NYU’s Department of Music Technology in the Steinhardt School of Music and Performing Arts Professions.  And he remains busy as hell. Check out his website for more information. Here’s a piece I wrote about his activity in 1987.

                                                                                       

YOU EXPECTED THE PERFORMERS to clone new life or at least travel through time and space. The setup included computers, mixers, amplifiers, keyboards, speakers and lots and lots of twinkling lights And, yes, in a way they did clone new life and move through time and space.

Neil Rolnick. Photo by
Gisela Gamper

Neil Rolnick, director of electronic music at RPI, presented a concert in the Electronic Arts Performance Series Monday night at the RPI Chapel and Cultural Center in which three works that used electronic sampling techniques were featured.

Sampling is a process by which any sound or sequence is recorded (“sampled”) by a synthesizer that can then reproduce it identically or with variance in rhythm and pitch.

And so we began with Rolnick’s own “A Robert Johnson Sampler.” Contemporary classical composers too often lose their senses of humor and musical heritage as they get too academic. Rolnick, on the other hand, affirmed his link with American jazz by sampling the distinctive sound of this blues pioneer and weaving it into a weird texture that began by isolating the matter of the sound itself from the Johnson’s process of making music.

A meditative slow section examined the link between the blues chords and their antecedents in church music; for a finish, the rhythm of the chord-strokes themselves was the subject.

Setting Your Steaks

From the Food Vault Dept.: Mention of our steakhouse meal on board the Queen Mary 2 set me to recalling some of the places in that category that I’ve reviewed over the years. I have a fondness for the The Barnsider in Albany, NY, although I haven’t been there in a long time. Probably worth a revisit now, especially because I can visit as a civilian. Which is also to say that it’s still in business, now with affiliated units in Massachusetts: The Hardcover in Danvers, and Beverly’s The Beverly Depot. (Photos are courtesy The Barnsider.)

                                                                                            

SURE, IT SEEMS LIKE the Barnsider always has been there, but the fact that the place has been going strong for over 40 years still seems somehow shocking. Forty years? A steakhouse?

That’s probably one of the keys to its success. It offers, and always has offered, a menu that’s compelling in its reliability. In a market that is notoriously averse to culinary innovation, the Barnsider is more conservative still. Steaks, seafood, salad bar.

Another key: terrific service. It’s easy to argue that steaks are steaks, so there needs to be an extra touch to keep the customers coming back. The Barnsider does it nicely.

When I last wrote about the place, in 1994, I complained that the filet mignon was a pricey $19. Today it’s $23. And pricing on the rest of the menu is consistent with what you’ll find in other area steakhouses; in fact, compared to some of the better ones, the Barnsider is a bargain.

The Long Journey Home

BY THIS TIME, we were so accustomed to packing and moving on that the finish of our stay in London seemed no sadder than that of any of our other stops. My wife and I had given ourselves enough time at each of those places so that we didn’t feel too rushed – three nights in each, two nights in London – and there’s a psychological advantage in knowing that you’ve still got a week on board an ocean liner ahead.

On the morning of August 11, we met our driver, Mohammed, outside the Euston Square Hotel, and set off for Southampton and a 4:30 PM departure of the Queen Mary 2. Mohammed was a native of London, whose first words after greeting us were, “Don’t touch that door!”

This was directed at take-charge Susan, who was about to slide open the side door of his van. But, as he pointed out, the door was motorized and would slide when he pushed the appropriate button. This is not to suggest that he was in any way unpleasant; I heard in his comment too much experience with obtrusive passengers in what, we learned, was his own vehicle.

I should take a moment to note that all of the car-service limos and vans we hired were equipped not only with comfortable seating and plenty of room for our luggage, but also bottled water and charging ports. Like a good waiting room, but without TV screens and, of course, other people.

Crown Jewels

From the Concert Vault Dept.: I’ve reviewed them in these pages before, but it was a treat to discover one I’d forgotten about – especially as my recent UK trip has caused my anglophiliac side to bubble up. So let’s spend a few paragraphs with the King’s Singers as they were some fourteen years ago.

                                                                                 

LEGENDARY CHORAL CONDUCTOR Sir David Willcocks likes to tell the story of a group of singers who worked with him at King’s College in the mid-1960s and aspired to go out on their own. “You’ll never make it,” he told the Schola Catorum Pro Musica Profana, as they began calling themselves. After achieving considerable success as the King’s Singers, the group has made a point of saving a seat for Sir David at their annual Albert Hall concert – a seat that Willcocks happily occupies.

Kicking off a three-week U.S. tour, the King’s Singers stopped in Schenectady last Friday, returning to Proctor’s Theatre with a program leaning to the more pop-oriented numbers that make up much of their repertory.

It began with a 1988 arrangement by former Singers tenor Bob Chilcott of five American folksongs including and under the title of “Simple Gifts” – but beginning with a classic shipwreck song titled “Golden Vanity” that highlighted the group’s signature style, creating harmony and rhythmic accompaniment through the deft use of vocalise and lyric fragments.

Woody’n You

From the Record Shelf Dept.: I looked this up online to remind myself of the CD set and – hey! What a handsome job of packaging! I was sent a promotional copy to review, which came in a conventional jewel case with a PDF of program notes. And to make matters worse, Metroland magazine never even ran the review I wrote, so it’s reproduced below. As of this writing, you can get it from woodyguthriecenter.org for a hundred bucks, from Amazon for $65, and from a Discogs seller for about $35 bucks.

                                                                                   

EVERY NOW AND THEN, something turns up unexpectedly. Caravaggio's “The Taking of the Christ” was unearthed, but I still await a complete print of Orson Welles’s “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Meanwhile, a stash of Woody Guthrie recordings was discovered in a Brooklyn storage bin, part of the inventory of Stinson-label records that fell into limbo following a tangled series of bankruptcies and family disputes.

It’s too fascinating a story to recount here, and Ed Cray and Bill Nowlin have a detailed essay in the booklet accompanying the four-CD set, “My Dusty Road,” that reissues 54 of these very significant recordings.

One of the unfortunate characteristics of the Guthrie legacy is that his recordings were  produced fast and cheap, and many of them, drawn from dubs of dubs, sound like crap. Some of the songs from these sessions went to original co-producer Moe Asch’s Folkways label, which had a way of making everything sound terrible, and are now available through the Smithsonian-Folkways label. More on that in a moment.

Antiestablishment Enthusiasm

From the Vault Dept.: What was I pondering in print 40 years ago? I had just started writing for Albany’s Metroland Magazine, before it became an alt-weekly. Paul Grossman, the editor, welcomed classical-music coverage, including such musings as you find below.

                                                                                        

THE STRANGEST ASPECT of a classical musical concert is the expected regulation of audience enthusiasm. A curious tradition of etiquette is at work here, requiring you to applaud politely only after the piece is over – the sort of thing you were trained to do during grade-school assemblies. But music, being a totally aural art, makes a direct appeal to the senses. And, being a real-time experience, it carries its own momentum, which can produce an excitement you’ll find in no other entertainment. The instrumentalist is trained to sing through a device not connected with the body. An ensemble strives to attain a single identity out of all these abstractions, and therein the magic lies: when that goal is accomplished, you, the listener, are liable to be emotionally transported far beyond the concert hail.

Michael Sylvester, tenor

But don’t applaud too much! And never between movements! The classical Establishment gives that sort of behavior a great big frown. I wonder if those who have put their music on such a pedestal aren’t responsible for driving away a large potential audience with this restraint stuff. It’s your means of communicating with the performers, after all. And they like to know how they’re doing. You wouldn’t let a good lick go unapplauded during a rock or jazz concert, and opera audiences, those unique beasts, are great at showing the singers a response. So here we have an orchestra, or a chamber group or, especially, a soloist, who has just tossed off a neat, nasty movement with aplomb, and you’ll find that most of the audience just sitting there, rustling, coughing, opening the program again.

Most audiences – but not all. A college-student audience can be very responsive, and I’ve never known a performer to dislike the attention. A Carnegie Hall crowd, on the other hand, can be deathlike. They don’t even cough.

London Assurance

WE ARRIVED in the nerve-center of England with very little planned. The evening meal is always a good starting point, so we took a walk in the neighborhood of our hotel to see what came to hand, so to speak.

We were in the borough of Camden, where it turns out that Euston Station – where our train from Edinburgh left us – essentially put the place on the map. It was opened in 1837 to offer train service to Birmingham, the first inter-city line in England, and it was a tremendous success. And this came only 27 years after Euston Square was created, giving a name to this area. It’s still best-known as a transportation hub, with tube and bus service here as well, but it’s also home to University College London.

Which means that we had UCL housing located in our neighborhood, as evidenced by the crowd spilling onto the sidewalk at the Crown and Anchor pub. We were walking up North Gower Street, site of our hotel, toward Drummond Street, where I understood I could find a restaurant.

Good thing we like Indian food. Among the eateries there were Raavi Kebab, Dwana Bhel Poori House, Drummond Villa, Ravi Shankar Bhelpoori House, Sizzling Bombay, Taste of India Euston, and Chutneys. Why did we settle on Masala King? Because a pleasant gentleman in the doorway of that place exhorted us to try it. He was one of several eager souls hawking their restaurants, reminding me of the sales pitches I’d hear in Manhattan’s Little Italy on a Saturday night.

Dogs Go Dutch

From the Classical Vault Dept.: For a while, back in the heady double-aughts, I wrote for the online classical-music journal andante.com, which sparkled briefly and died. And I did double-duty on the concert reviewed below, writing about it both for andante, which you’ll find here, and for Metroland (also dead), which you’ll find below.

                                                                                                 

THE CUMULATIVE EFFECT of a classical music concert is easily clouded by familiarity, where pieces present themselves as dangerous or safe. Mozart overture: safe. Berg concerto: dangerous. Stravinsky ballet suite: recently dangerous, now, especially with Berg just gone by, very safe indeed.

Photo by Gary Gold

The Albany Symphony’s contemporary music ensemble, the Dogs of Desire, presented eight world premieres last weekend, all of them commissioned by the group. Talk about dangerous! Musically, there was nowhere to hide, and the 99-seat theater in the Troy Performing Arts Center holds you pretty well captive, too, especially when it’s packed to the brim as was the case for the both of the performances (7 and 10 PM) that night.

I saw the early show, and found every aspect of it impressive. The works themselves proved what a vast range of style and sound falls into the category of classical music; the programming demonstrated that the leap from one “dangerous” work to another is itself exciting. I’m sure each of these works would stand the test of familiarity, but the element of surprise was thrilling.

Peint o Gwrw Welsh Pub

From the Food Vault Dept.: Recalling the highlights of my recent trip to the UK, pubs figure prominently. That’s why I’m unearthing this 2014 review of a popular pub in Chatham, NY. As it happened, the place had but two more years of life under Tom Hope’s management, then he sold the place to Angus Van Beusichem, former manager of Albany’s City Beer Hall, and Gray and Thomas Ballinger, who own the City Beer Hall building. Much of the decor was purchased and preserved. Food prep has moved to an open kitchen, with a strong emphasis on locally sourced food and, of course, beer. Look for it now as the People’s Pub.

                                                                                    

“IF I LIVED NEAR THE PLACE, I’d be there all the time,” a friend of mine said, and I had to agree. It’s been decades since I’ve shared a neighborhood with a tavern, let alone one that bursts with character.

Styling Chatham’s Peint o Gwrw as a Welsh pub has been more than a marketing gimmick for owner Tom Hope. It salutes his heritage – he has determined it’s one of only four such pubs in the country, with two of them in St. Louis – but also gives him a forum in which to offer the food and hospitality he finds meaningful.

“I’ve been living here for 20 years,” he says, “and I realized soon after I moved in that there was no place nearby where you could get a pint. I had to drive 15 minutes into Hudson.

He’d been working at his wife’s quirky retail store, American Pie, in downtown Chatham when a realtor told him that the price of a building across the street had dropped. He looked at the place and made an offer. “And suddenly I was in the pub business,” he says. Had he run one before? “I didn’t have a clue. I still don’t.” And it was an unluckily timed opening, occurring as it did at the beginning of September August 2001, but the operation has grown and thrived in the succeeding years.

Train to London

EVEN AFTER the Beeching Axe fell in the 1960s, Great Britain still has plenty of trains. Trouble is, the lines are owned by a variety of companies that don’t necessarily coordinate scheduling among themselves, running often elderly equipment over often unkempt track lines.

Nevertheless, I devised a timetable that should have gotten my wife and me around the UK during our fortnight there. We had six connections to pursue. Southampton Central (SOU) to Seaford (Sussex) (SEF) required only one change, with a fifteen-minute window between trains. Seaford to Moreton-in-Marsh (MIM) in the Cotswolds was more involved, with one train-change to put us in London, a brief tube trip, then two more changes of train, the last of which with a nine-minute transfer window.

You get the gist, but let me get this out of my system. Moreton-in-Marsh to Manchester Victoria (MCV) demanded three train-changes, with ten- to 25-minute transfer windows. Manchester Victoria to Edinburgh (EDB) required one change, but Edinburgh to London Euston (EUS) was a single six-hour journey. Ditto the trip from London to Southampton: one train, but a tube trip to London Waterloo to start that one off. And all of this for a grand total of about £1,000.

The online reservations system was frustratingly inconsistent about the seats it offered, with off-peak, first class off-peak, first class anytime, and first-class advance among the mix, without noting why any one was available and others weren’t. Added to that was our luggage – two bags apiece, and that was packing lightly – as well as my transport chair, which folded into its own very bulky package. Would we be able to fit it all, never mind lug it from station to station? And the plan presupposed that trains would be on time, of course, and when I mentioned this to the people we met at our various stops, they laughed hollowly and approved the plan we eventually enacted: car service. I don’t even know how much that eventually cost us, as Susan got those credit-card bills, but it was well over a thousand pounds. And, as she agrees, it was worth it.

A Mid-Winter Sport Carnival

Guest Blogger Dept.: Looking for ways to combat the winter blahs? Robert Benchley offers an inspiring portrait of what the more adventurous folk among us are getting up to.

                                                                                                  

LONG ABOUT THIS TIME OF YEAR, we sportsmen find ourselves rather up against it for something to do to keep the circulation pounding even sluggishly along. Golf, tennis, and paddling about on water-wings are out of season, and somehow bear-hunting has lost its flavor. Bear-hunting has never been the same since the supply of bears ran out. There really is nothing much to do except sit behind the stove in the club-house and whittle. And even then you are likely to cut your thumb.

Drawing by Gluyas Williams

In an attempt to solve this mid-winter problem for red-blooded men, a postal ballot has been taken to see what others of our sort are doing during the long evenings to keep themselves fit for the coming open season. Some of the replies are strictly confidential and cannot be reprinted here. You would certainly be surprised if you knew. Send a dollar and a plain, self-addressed envelope and maybe we can make an exception in your case. The address is Box 25, Bostwick, Kansas.

Following, however, are some excerpts from letters concerning which the writers have no pride:

“I keep in training during the winter months,” writes one man, “by playing parchesi with my little boy. The procedure of this only fairly interesting game is as follows:

All Hands on Decca

From the Recordings Vault Dept.: I’m guessing that it was the Gershwin pieces, which included arrangements of the Three Preludes, that impelled Heifetz to jump from RCA Victor to Decca in 1945 in order to record a host of short violin pieces. I also suspect he was trying to win some kind of financial concession from RCA, to which he returned after that Petrillo strike mentioned below. The Decca sides also were included in the first Complete Heifetz set; by the time the second appeared, RCA (by then a Sony acquisition) had lost the rights, which went to Deutsche Grammophon, on which label a set of the Deccas appeared. They’ve also been issued in Europe and elsewhere by Naxos as part of a two-disc set that also includes Heifetz’s V-Disc recordings.

                                                                                           

ONE OF THE TRAGEDIES OF THE early 1940s was the nearly complete loss of the transition from swing to be-bop. A recording ban instituted by the musicians union’s own Hitler, James Petrillo, stopped such progress dead for many, many months.

One of the first labels to agree to the union’s demands was Decca, and violinist Jascha Heifetz, otherwise a lifelong RCA Victor artist, waxed a number of sides with them, many of which have been unavailable for almost 20 years (some for more than 40).

It’s a collection that duplicates his later, stereo output only a little, and wins in performance comparison. And who can resist the curiosity of the two sides he cut in 1946 with Bing Crosby, as if to attempt a latter-day Fritz Kreisler-John McCormack union?

Heifetz, a longtime Gershwin fan, transcribed selections from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” for violin and piano shortly before recording them in 1945. The arrangements are reminiscent of the turn-of-the-century showpieces Heifetz grew up with, but the playing has the gutsy intensity of one well aware of the lyrics. Although the recordings never sounded very good to begin with and suffered more distortion en route to compact disc, Heifetz plays with a passion that doesn’t come through in his 1965 re-recording of the Gershwin.

Six Concertos for Several Instruments

THERE WAS A CUSTOM that may still persist of welcoming a new year with a concert featuring all six of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. I never attended one of those, offering as a weak excuse the fact that I was often working on New Year’s Eve (see previous post). But I like the idea, and often replicated it in my living room, choosing one or another of the many recordings I have of those pieces, sometimes mixing them up to enjoy the exciting contrast between the earlier and later recordings, the latter usually by historically informed performance groups. Here’s a playlist if you want to try it yourself. You can probably find all of these on YouTube:

* Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F - Busch Chamber Players (1935)
    As old-fashioned a version as can be. This is the first recording of the piece. That’s Dennis Brain’s father on horn, John Barbirolli’s wife on oboe.
* Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F - Orchestra Mozart, Claudio Abbado (2007)
    A small ensemble with original-instrument specialists (see below).
* Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G - English Chamber Orchestra, Raymond Leppard (1974)
    A big sound with an intimate-style interpretation, and an unusually extended middle movement.
* Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in D - Concentus Musicus Wien, Nicholas Harnoncourt (1964)
    The ensemble and conductor that really started the HIP movement - but by now
    sounding comparatively restrained.
* Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D - Concerto Italiano, Rinaldo Alessandrini (2005)
    Alessandrini, an early-music specialist, is also on harpsichord.    
* Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in Bb - Chamber Orchestra, Fritz Reiner (1949)
    Back to the big, pre-HIP sound, but from a conductor who loved Bach.