Ulysses: A Glorious Voyage

THE MORE IN TOUCH YOU ARE with your inner monologues, the easier it is to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Easier, but still not easy. An autonomic ease informs those fragmented thoughts and abrupt subject changes, but putting them into written words reveals a terrifying jumble. Song lyrics and other quotations; the distraction of a passerby; guilt, anger, hope, regret – each of us is the sum of a culture absorbed. Make that the culture of Dublin in 1904, add more characters whose heads we inhabit, follow them through that city over the course of a single day. That’s “Ulysses.”

Scott Shepherd and Cast
Photo by Maria Baranova

A high-school teacher advised me simply to launch into the book and not allow myself to be dismayed. A half-century later I took that advice, although I had the massive Cambridge Centenary edition in hand. It reproduces the 1922 text and surrounds it with essays and annotations. I was inspired to take on this task in anticipation of seeing a version of the story on stage. By the time I was in my theater seat, I’d gotten halfway through.

New York-based Elevator Repair Service has won an excellent reputation for adapting classic works of literature for the stage. I saw “Gatz,” their version of “The Great Gatsby,” at EMPAC in Troy, NY, in 2008, two years before its acclaimed debut at New York’s Public Theater. Improbably set in a shabby office building, it opened with Scott Shepherd as a frustrated office worker who finds a paperback copy of “Gatsby” in a desk and begins reading it aloud, thus taking on the character of narrator Nick Carraway and soon drawing his fellow-workers into performing the story. Including every word of the book, “he said”s and “she said”s included.

The Rockwell goes MAD

I DON’T REMEMBER when I discovered MAD, but I know which piece of theirs first shook me out of my suburban complacency. Titled “The National Safety Council's Holiday-Weekend Telethon,” written by Dee Caruso and Bill Levine, drawn by Mort Drucker (one of his earliest pieces), it presented a TV telethon in the Jerry Lewis tradition, although with a Dean Martin caricature instead, and it begged viewers to drive recklessly in order to add fatality numbers to the tote board in order to meet the Safety Council’s quota. The piece ran in the January 1959 issue, when I was not yet three, so I must have discovered it in one of the endless reprints that MAD issued over the years. Laughing at the macabre proved liberating.

Parody Triple Portrait
by Richard Williams

“What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine” is an unprecedented exhibition now running (through October 27, 2024) at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., bringing together original artwork and other related items chronicling the history of our most influential satire magazine.

MAD was created in 1952 when writer-artist Harvey Kurtzman persuaded EC Comics publisher William M. Gaines to launch a humor book – giving Kurtzman a break from the highly popular “Two-Fisted Tales” series he’d been exhausting himself creating. MAD was a four-color comic at first, where talented artists like Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, and, especially, Will Elder were given the liberty to be as crazy as they wished. It worked.

Five rooms at the Rockwell Museum are devoted to the magazine’s artists and pages, which also means that it’s capturing over 60 years of American cultural history. But how odd it is to see those pages – some of which I recognize quite well – enshrined, as it were, as oversized wall displays with careful lighting and dignified info cards. Somebody thinks this is art!

The American Way

DRUM CRASHES OPEN THE PIECE, giving way to the low brass and a rising figure then picked up by the strings. It seems to dissipate in some filigree from the winds, but almost immediately the brass is back with another portentous figure. Orchestral texture is a key to this piece, titled “1920/2019" and written by Joan Tower. She has a long history with the Albany Symphony Orchestra, which means that we know her work through this local connection and welcome each new example of what she’s writing.

The Albany Symphony has been championing music by American composers – and new music in general – for far longer than I’ve been writing about them, which itself takes us back some 40 years. May we therefore conclude that it’s not some kind of gimmick? In fact, it’s what should be the mission of every classical-music performing group. It’s easy, both as listener and performing entity, to get mired in the popular repertory, but the purpose of this kind of music has long been both to entertain and challenge the listener. And this is what the ASO accomplished nicely in the pair of concerts I attended during their annual American Music Festival.

The Albany Symphony Orchestra with
flutist Brandon Patrick George.
Photo by Gary Gold

The full orchestra performed on Saturday, June 8, offering a well-contrasted array of works in the acoustically benevolent EMPAC Concert Hall. Tower explained, in a pre-concert intro, that the title of her work salutes the year in which women got the right to vote and the year the saw the height of the #MeToo movement. “But the title really has nothing to do with the piece,” she concluded in a characteristically humorous way.

Don’t take her joke seriously. There is a vigorous sense of empowerment as the piece builds to its finish. The big moments are gloriously big, the small – as when a solo violin muses over the throb of some winds, or a clarinet is mocked by a trumpet – have a nervous intimacy. But each of these episodes flows into the next with a sense of inevitability, a sense that builds to a satisfying finish.

What Is So Rare?

AN APPOINTMENT BOOK sits open on my desk, its two overview pages for the month of June staring back at me with pencilled appointments filling many of the squares. “Many,” in this case, being a vague term, as vague, in its way, as “most,” but my gut feeling is that the latter term might even more appropriately apply.

I’m pushing 70, “pushing,” in this case, being a vague term that nevertheless feels entirely apt, and because I’m also fat and sedentary, many of those appointment-book squares are filled with medical appointments. There turns out to be a fractal quality about elder health care, as each specialist I consult tends to send me to a sub-specialist to deal with an aspect of my condition I didn’t know was there yet which will demand a blood test and/or MRI and add yet another medication to the daily pile I swallow.

A handful of social events fill other squares; rarely now are there rehearsals and performances, but they do occur and even those can seem burdensome when nestled on those pages.

It’s only the start of June, yet the month already feels oppressive. I’m well familiar with the phenomenon that can make the anticipation of an event more annoying than the event itself – it’s the curse of many a nine-to-fiver – but even with that in mind, I can’t shake this sense of dread. Why?

Let’s try a little exercise. (This is me talking to myself. You don’t actually have to do this.) Imagine that all those appointment squares are blank. Is there a particular event you’d prefer to see listed?

Beethoven Steps Out

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Martha Argerich turns 83 on June 5, so let’s salute her with a look back at performance she gave in Saratoga Springs in 2002, when she was merely 61. She has a full touring schedule listed on her website, but we won’t see her in Saratoga again any time soon: once the powers-that-be axed conductor Charles Dutoit from the roster, we lost access to his wives, current (Chantal Juillet) and former (Argerich) as well as many other friends.

                                                                                           

THE IDEAL IS to serve the composer’s music – and thus the composer’s intentions – as well as possible. If this means subsuming yourself to an idea of what the composer might have wanted hear, then Martha Argerich wouldn’t be your pianist of choice. But her performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Philadelphia Orchestra at SPAC last week demonstrated that when a star soloist places her stamp of individuality on a work like this one, sparks fly. Good ones. The kind that revitalize a well-worn piece of music and remind us why the music became important in the first place.

Written in 1795 and revised over the next few years, the concerto is firmly in the classical form but with substantial bulges at the edges. It’s purposefully written to showcase the soloist, and Argerich put her fiery technique to good use. The opening movement has an air of classical delicacy about it, interrupted periodically by unexpected cascades of arpeggios from the soloist that the orchestra insists on shepherding back into line.

Which adds a nice edge of tension between pianist and orchestra, with Charles Dutoit exacting precise but flexible control over the group as Argerich rode the rhythm with surprising (and surprisingly effective) rubato. The slow movement revealed a level of lyrical drama I’ve never noticed before, and she charged into the finale with both guns blazing yet without sacrificing any of Beethoven’s vaunted wit.

A Day at the Clark

IT’S EASY TO OVERLOOK the outings that take you not very far. What counts as close? Living as we do in the rural wilds of New York’s farming country, between Utica and Albany, a 90-minute drive is nothing. And that’s where Williamstown, Massachusetts awaits, so we decided to make a recent day of it at the Clark.

Or, to put it correctly, the Clark Art Institute. Or, to put it historically, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, because it was that fabulously wealthy couple who collected enough significant art to decide, as they advance in years, that a museum was needed to house it. Sterling Clark was an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, alongside his brothers Stephen and Ambrose, but they were a fractious bunch and plans to put up that museum in Cooperstown were scuppered by fraternal fighting, and Sterling chose Williamstown instead.

A great Francophile, Sterling spent many years in Paris, where he met and married Francine Clary, a performer with Comédie Française. She, apparently, had the better eye for great art, and approved of paintings her husband otherwise might not have acquired.

Sterling wanted a building with plenty of natural light and the classical architecture of the Frick Collection, and went through two designers until he settled on Daniel Perry. The cornerstone was laid in 1953, and the museum opened two years later. Sterling died the following year; Francine survived him by four years.

Along with ongoing renovations to that structure, the Manton Research Center, which houses the library, was added in 1973. The Lunder Center, added in 2008, offers more galleries and a  seasonal café; the Clark Center (2014) has more gallery space as well as dining and retail areas. The artworks in the permanent collection come from a range of classic Dutch, Flemish, and Italian painters, alongside the Impressionists and other fin-de-siècle artists. Works by Renoir, Rodin, George Inness, and John Singer Sargent abound.

Brushing Up Your Shakespeare

The Bard on the Boards Dept.: Here’s a pair of book reviews that turned up in a recently discovered pile of clippings, and it’s one of the few pieces I was asked to write for the Albany Times-Union before that publication tired of me or couldn’t afford me or just plain chose to hate me. I never know for sure, but I am a very dislikable guy.

                                                                                         

SHAKESPEARE BIOGRAPHERS are hamstrung by the almost complete lack of documentation about the playwright’s life. But that hasn’t stopped them from coming out with many volumes of what amounts to educated speculation.

Giving Bill Bryson the task of writing the Shakespeare volume for HarperCollins’s “Eminent Lives” series was an inspired choice. The author of “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” among many other fine and funny books, Bryson combines a zest for research with a compelling narrative style. Which are front and center in “Shakespeare: The World as Stage” (Atlas Books, 199 pages, $19.95).

Part of the book’s fun lies in seeing how Bryson juggles those few known facts. Acknowledging that the reader is probably aware of most of them, he reinforces his discourse with the scholarship of others, from reliable writers like Sam Schoenbaum to frauds like the 19th-century fanatic Delia Bacon, who kicked off the  somebody-else-wrote-Shakespeare’s-plays movement that embarrassingly persists today.

The Vinifera Tradition

From the Vines Dept.: Sometimes your past lurks in old bankers boxes. I opened one recently expecting to see only books and found in addition a pile of clippings, including the article reproduced below. I wrote it for the Syracuse New Times in 1988, and it necessitated a very pleasant visit to the winery thus portrayed. I’d written about Hermann Wiemer before, but never visited him in situ. Wiemer sold the vineyard in 2007 to Fred Merwarth, who continues to run the operation under Wiemer’s name.

                                                                                             

AS NEW YORK STATE gains an ever-improving reputation for production of good wine, the Finger Lakes, that paw about 80 miles southwest of Syracuse, are recognized as the source of acclaimed wines made from Vitis vinifera, the grape family responsible for the distinguished wines of Europe.

 Hermann J. Wiemer. Photo
by Patricia Darbee Weirich

Vinifera has to go up against the sweet Labrusca grapes that have grown like weeds in this region for so many years, but with a spokesman like Hermann J. Wiemer at the publicity helm, it won’t be long before it predominates. And Wiemer’s winery produces vintage after vintage of award-winning varietals to back up every statement the forthright founder makes.

“I don’t think the big companies will grow vinifera,” he says. “Their attitudes are entirely different from ours. Unfortunately, they have the resources and time to cultivate what they please, but they don’t realize that the consumer is now asking for a better wine.” Wiemer is fond of characterizing New York’s plonk as reeking of the “rubber hose,” used to move the hybrid juice along its brisk production line. “It’s up to the little guys to take the risk and grow vinifera,” he says.

A native of the Mosel region of Germany, Wiemer grew up among relatives on both sides of the family who were immersed in the wine business. He arrived in this country in 1968 to work for the Bully Hill Winery, and discreetly bought 140 acres of land on Seneca Lake a few years later.

The Last Boulevardier

IT STARTED WITH a Criterion Collection closet picks video that featured Justine Triet, a director most recently known for the movie “Anatomy of a Fall.” Criterion invites filmworld-related people of renown to swipe DVDs from their closet while discoursing about their choices, and Triet selected Paul Mazursky’s “An Unmarried Woman,” Soderbergh’s “sex, lies, and videotape,” and Antonioni’s “La notte” before spotting “Presenting Sacha Guitry,” a four-DVD set (part of Criterion’s Eclipse Series, which features overlooked movies) and exulting over Guitry’s classic films.

Good enough for me! I found a copy of that collection and, not knowing what to expect, started with “The Story of a Cheat,” which Guitry wrote and directed in 1936. Unlike the many films he developed from his own plays, this one came from his only novel. Right from the beginning it declares itself a different kind of story, most of it told through flashback and narration as we see Guitry’s character slip through a number of disguises as he makes his dishonest way through French society.

For a man who scorned cinema, insisting that theater was the only viable form of such entertainment, he threw himself onto the screen with surprising and delightful innovations, enough so that he’s credited with influencing directors from Truffaut to Hitchcock to Welles – and it’s easy to draw a connection from Guitry’s use of narration to what Welles did in “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Truffaut, himself a huge, declared “Guitry is Lubitsch’s French brother.”

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.