A June Wedding at BTF

From the Theater Vault Dept.: Looking over last week’s story, I noted that the adjacent piece in my files reveals some of the Albany area’s theater offerings as noted forty years ago on this date. It thus is merely an exercise in nostalgia, and an easy way to fill a blog-slot.

                                                                                         

Berkshire Theatre Festival

ONE OF THE DELIGHTS AVAILABLE to natives of a town small enough to publish a paper only weekly is the information thus available about what your neighbors are up to. One of the heartbreaks available to adolescents in such a town is the-black-and-white evidence of the inevitable nuptials of those you’ve loved and, romantically, lost. This was the case in the town where I grew up, and it was both painful and amusing to note the two great wedding flurries: the first occured right after graduation from high school; the second took place four years later. I subscribed to the paper long after I’d left the town, just to confirm that the matrimonial axe was still picking ‘em off.

This is in reaction both to the month of June, with its flurry of gowns, tuxes, and raucous motorcades, and the observance of this tradition by the Berkshire Theatre Festival, which has opened its season with Carson McCuller’s “A Member of The Wedding.”

Setting the Stage with Shakespeare

From the Opera Vault Dept.: Paulette Haupt made her conducting debut at the Lake George Opera in 1973, with “The Barber of Seville, and liked the experience enough to continue conducting in Kansas City and San Francisco during the ensuing years. She moved to the producing end and served as artistic director for the Lake George Opera from 1981 to 1985 – which means she was already on her way out when she spoke to me for the piece you’ll find below. She was co-founder and served as Artistic Director for the National Music Theater Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center from 1978 to 2017, which she left in order to concentrate on her company Premieres, which she founded in 2001. She also founded the Music Theater Mentor Program, but it was killed by the pandemic. She continues to be very active in the development and production of new works. 

                                                                                     

Paulette Haupt

“I’M PARTICULARLY EXCITED about the balance of the season,” says Paulette Haupt-Nolen, general director of the Lake George Opera Festival. “‘Romeo and Juliet’ hasn’t been done here since 1969, so there’s been a whole turnover in audience since then. And it’s one of my favorite operas – it’s so lush with music and drama. The conductor, Cal Stewart Kellogg, wrote to me recently – he conducts all over the place and just came back from a tour of Italy and Israel – and said how honored he is to be conducting here this summer. He, too, raved about the score.”

“Romeo and Juliet,” which opens the LGOF season July 13, was written by French composer Charles Gounod to a libretto fairly faithfully based upon the Shakespeare play: according to the Victor Book of the Opera, “If there are fewer words than in the original,. there is, at any rate, the consolation of the music that is sweetly sentimental and sometimes of a dazzling brilliance.” 

The New Bone-Dust Theory of Behavior, or, Is Your Elbow All It Should Be?

Guest Blogger Dept.: Which I ought to rename Robert Benchley Dept., because I have featured Benchley essays more often than those by any other writer. They are gems. Some of them don’t age well if you’re thinking in terms of historical context, but all of them endure for his masterful use of language.

                                                                                      

A LITTLE WHILE AGO, it was your teeth that were to blame for everything. And now, after you have gone and had tin-types taken of your teeth, showing them riding in little automobiles or digging in the sand, some more specialists come along and discover that, after all, it is your glands that are the secret of your mental, moral and physical well-being.

Benchley by Gluyas Williams

A book called “The Glands Regulating Personality” claims that the secretions of the various glands throughout your body determine whether you are a good or a bad boy, cheerful or agile, Republican or Democrat. Anyone singing “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow” does not face the facts squarely. The words should go: “For he has jolly good glandular secretions, which nobody will deny.”

In order to be at least two jumps ahead of the game, we are prepared to set forward another theory to take the place of the gland theory when that shall have become scratched. All enthusiasts who want to keep abreast of the times will dip right into ours now; so that when the time comes they will be able to talk intelligently on the subject.

Briefly, the facts are these:

Balm for Mom

From the Food Vault Dept.: I missed Mother’s Day again this year. My own mom is long-gone, but I’m married to a mom. She, however, put in some years in a restaurant kitchen, as did I, and we thus became inured to the insanity that holiday provokes. Thirty years ago I put a hopeful spin on the occasion, which I hope can still be helpful these days.

                                                                                          

AN ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED culture-wide sense of guilt gets us schlepping Mom out to dinner on Sunday, resulting in the busiest day of the restaurant year – busier than Thanksgiving, busier than Easter, busier than the end-of-the-year holidays.

Which means that Mom might easily end up subjected to one of the worst meals of her life. Follow the instructions in this handy guide, however, and you might pull through relatively unscathed. This advice is based on the years I spent waiting on tables and, later, cooking. The scenario may have changed since then – but I doubt it.

The type of restaurant that can turn out 700 dinners on a Saturday night is generally well suited to Mother’s Day traffic, and usually can afford to put out a special menu with bargain prices. But the objective usually is turning over tables, so you won’t see many parties lingering over coffee and holding hands. Then again, it’s been years since I held hands with Mom after dinner.

So the most important things you can do when planning a meal at such a restaurant are to make a reservation, give an accurate count of the people involved and show up on time. Too many customers think that they’ve simply reserved a table for the duration and give themselves a half-hour of leeway here and there. And restaurants try to indulge that – it’s good business, after all, not to yell at the patrons – but they can’t afford to do so on Mother’s Day.

Bach Meets Bond and More

From the Vault Dept.: Again asking myself what I was doing forty years, I discovered that, beyond not truly wishing to know, I’d been to two quite different area concerts, the reviews of which follow.

                                                                                    

“WHAT’S THE POINT OF COUNTERPOINT?” is the question asked by a new work for narrator and orchestra by Victoria Bond, music director of the Empire State Youth Orchestra. The piece had its world premiere in a concert Saturday afternoon at the Egg at Albany’s Empire State Plaza with the combined forces of the ESYO and Sesame Street’s Bob McGrath. While it may not achieve a “Peter and the Wolf” height of popularity, it certainly addresses a most difficult musicological question with considered insight.

Victoria Bond

With the wealth of music by Bach and Handel being performed, this year, we’re surrounded by some of the finest examples of counterpoint ever written. It is so complicated a subject, however, that to appreciate all of the mathematical permutations going on in, say, Bach’s “Art of the Fugue” requires the acumen of a well-trained composer. It’s nice to have some kind of introduction to it, and the Bond piece could serve the needs of listeners of all ages. Its construction is as a children’s tale: the protagonist, a tune, is looking for a friend. Tune is befriended by a bird, which takes him on a tour of the cities of Rhythm and Harmony before discovering the tent where the city of Counterpoint is headquartered, and being treated to a display, rendered with a likening to acrobatics, of part of the “Art of the Fugue.” 

A Tone Parallel to Duke Ellington

THE STANDARD BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH in which the subject is born, did remarkable things, then died gets upended by Jack Chambers’s new Duke Ellington book. Titled A Tone Parallel to Duke Ellington, it satisfies that promise by looking at the man in terms of his music. Acknowledging Ellington’s own preference for terming much of what he did as “beyond category,” the book nevertheless proposes a number of categories that become lenses through which particular pieces of music are studied, revealing, in many cases, fascinating aspects of the man. If it sounds hifalutin’, fear not. Chambers makes it a very accessible journey.

Eleven chapters plot the journey, offering a remarkable variety of topics. Take “Forty-Eight Years with the Duke on Trains.” It serves the dual purpose of acknowledging Ellington’s love of that mode of travel (his most frequent use of which “coincided with the golden age of rail travel in the United States,” as Chambers notes) and the many effective songs he wrote that captured an essence of rail travel. 

Of course, the best-known, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” was written by Ellington collaborator Billy Strayhorn, and it’s a subway song, if you want to get technical, but the Ellington-written catalogue includes the beginner effort “Choo Choo (Gotta Hurry Home),” from 1924, just after he arrived in New York;  “Lightnin’” from 1932; “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” (1946); and the dazzling “Daybreak Express” (1932). About the last-named, Chambers writes:

Ad Nonsense

SUCH AN ENTICING OFFER! Subject the reader (that’s you) to an ad or two and you’ll start raking in the earnings in no time. Online revenue was making millionaires out of people far younger than I am, yet I was there at the beginnings of all this computers ‘n’ internet stuff, writing about it, for heaven’s sake, so why should I be left out.

And it would be so simple to get started. Just answer a few 
questions . . . 

As it happens, I went through that process already, soon after I started this blog in 2011, back when ad-clicks quickly turned into money and I actually got a couple of payments. Then it turned out that the majority – in fact, the entirety – of those clicks were coming from my wife’s workplace, as she generously pursued a campaign of putting some money in my pocket (thus avoiding having me take money out of hers). Google caught on, and ripped away my ad-revenue account.

Classic Vanguard Jazz Piano Sessions

HALFWAY THROUGH CD 3, which is given over to the protean Mel Powell, comes his Sonatina for Piano, nestled between the likes of “You’re Lucky to Me” and “Makin’ Whoopee.” The piece was included on the original Vanguard ten-inch LP release, an album titled “Mel Powell Septet,” the septet in question also including Buck Clayton, Henderson Chambers, Edmond Hall, Steve Jordan, Walter Page, and Jimmy Crawford, recorded at the end of 1953. High-powered players, and they really dig in on the four tracks where they’re included.

Of course they do. Powell was revered by the jazz community at this point in his career, acknowledging his dynamic jazz piano playing, composing, and arranging, most notably with Benny Goodman in the late 1930s – at which point Powell was still in his ‘teens. His earliest piano studies were in the classical realm, but a performance by Teddy Wilson so astonished him that he veered into jazz, with outstanding results. Powell’s Army stint during World War II put him in Glenn Miller’s Army-Air Force Band; while in liberated Paris at the end of the war, the French-fluent Powell sat in with Django Reinhardt and visited the Bibliotheque Nationale’s Debussy archive, celebrating one of Powell’s all-time heroes and inspiring his composition “Duplicates: A Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra,” which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

You can see Powell in the 1948 film “A Song Is Born,” a vehicle for the always-annoying Danny Kaye but which contains a fantastic jazz sequence in which the incredibly youthful-looking Powell is joined by Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Benny Carter, Charlie Barnet, Louis Bellson, and the Golden Gate Quartet. But it won’t prepare you for this Sonatina.

Lorin Maazel in Cleveland

THE CENTERPIECE of this 15-CD set is an appealing Beethoven symphonies cycle spread across seven CDs to replicate the initial LP box-set release. (That actually was an eight-record set, but a judicious shift of some overtures reduced the count.) Mired as I was in vinyl during my formative years, I don’t mind this approach. I don’t need all 80 CD minutes filled, and I’m still spared the side-flip in the middle of a symphony.

Lorin Maazel led the Cleveland Orchestra in those Beethoven sessions beginning in October 1977, with the recording of Symphonies 3 and 5 and a trio of overtures; the following February they taped 6 and 7 and, on a single-day marathon, 1, 2, 4, and 8. (Donald Rosenberg’s biography of the orchestra disagrees and spreads out the sessions, but I prefer to believe the superhuman marathon approach.)

The ninth, saved for last, was recorded on October 13, 1978, and included the voices of Lucia Popp, Elena Obraztsova, Jon Vickers, and Martti Talvela, with Robert Page leading the Cleveland Orchestra chorus. Excellent vocal work in a thirlling finale. In an audacious move, the symphonies came out the following March as that eight-LP set. Although maybe it wasn’t so audacious: Had the symphonies hit the shops as individual items, buyers probably would play favorites, leaving poor 1 & 2 and 4 & 8 to languish.

Going Back to T-Town

THE STORY OF ERNIE FIELDS BEGINS, as it must, with the visit from John Hammond. This was in the late 1930s, when Hammond was prowling the country to find the kind of jazz talent he enjoyed. He’d already discovered Count Basie but was always eager for more. Tipped to the talent of the Fields organization, he traveled to Tulsa, Ernie’s home city, where he tracked down the bandleader and set up an audition.

Hammond was delighted. He set up an audition for Willard Alexander, the powerhouse band-booker for William Morris. Alexander also was impressed. Next step: Move the band to New York. Make some records, play the Apollo.

Some problems start to creep in. Some members don’t want to travel. Alexander had already told Fields that he might have to replace some of the weaker members, so Fields brought some new hires aboard. Trouble was, the guys who insisted on staying behind were the very players with whom Alexander was most impressed.

But the band did make it into the recording studio, waxing nine sides for Vocalion in August 1939, and four more a month later. They played the Apollo and some city ballrooms and took some upstate gigs as well. And then – nothing. Alexander was promising more dates, but money was running out and some of the band members wanted to go home. Soon enough, Ernie shared that feeling.

Fantastic Four

WE’RE HEARING an increasing death-knell for big box sets, so I’m thrilled to welcome the reissue of all of the Guarneri Quartet’s RCA Red Seal recordings in a 49-CD set from Sony Classical (current owner of the RCA catalogue). The recordings run from 1965 to 1986, with a singular jump ahead to 2005. The quartet changed labels in the mid-‘80s, recording for Philips and Arabesque (much of the time re-recording works initially waxed for RCA). But this set is an excellent starting place for getting to know the core quartet repertory – and also a benchmark collection of those recordings. Performances don’t get much better than this.

You’ve got all of Beethoven’s quartets, as well as his charming quintet in C; a complete Brahms and Schumann package, issued as it was originally as a three-record, now three-disc set, alongside quintets and piano quartets by those composers as well. Lots of late Schubert, Mozart, Dvořák; quartets by Mendelssohn and Grieg and Debussy and Ravel. And a complete Bartók  traversal for a little more crunch.

What’s not here are the likes of Barber and Ives, no Lutosławski or Berio, and certainly nothing Second Viennese. Which is not to say those weren’t in the Guarneri repertory: works by many of those composers were performed in concert, but I suspect that nervous RCA execs discouraged them from recording the more modern stuff. Even their wonderful disc of Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence” sextet was dropped from the catalogue for lack of sales mere months after it appeared in late 1966. (It was reissued a decade later, after the ensemble had achieved superstar status).

Nightmare on Main Street (Encore)

From the Food and Wine Vault Dept.: I wrote this piece in 2009, when the issue of wine in grocery stores was gaining momentum. I blog-posted it in 2016, when it seemed to be gaining some traction. Now it has more traction than ever, with a lot of press being churned up by plausible-sounding advocacy groups that probably are on the payrolls of grocery conglomerates like Price Chopper. The figures in the piece below are outdated, I suspect, but the sentiment remains the same.

                                                                                                

AMONG THE NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF BUDGET’S many breathless proposals to save, grab or re-claim money, the one of most concern to this column is a proposal to allow wine sales in grocery stores. It’s pitched to accrue something like $150 million over the next three years ($105 million the first year; far less thereafter), most of it coming from the licensing fees the supermarkets would pay.

Whether all 19,000 grocery and convenience stores across the state actually would pony up is but one of many variables projected into this proposal. But the Business Council of NY State has eagerly signed off on the issue, promising that it “will create new markets for upstate and Long Island wineries and convenience for consumers,” according to council president Kenneth Adams. “In addition, the proposal will generate new revenue for the cash-strapped state.” It’s a point of view no doubt shared by two of council’s board members with a large stake in the issue: Paul S. Speranza, Jr., General Counsel and Secretary to Wegmans, and Neil Golub, CEO of Price Chopper.

Completing Louis Armstrong

AROUND THE TIME Louis Armstrong moved from a big band to a small-group setting in 1947, grumblings were being heard. At first, it came from the Black community, especially from fellow musicians. Dizzy Gillespie termed him a “plantation character” in a DownBeat article, and would later amplify that sentiment. Miles Davis went after both Armstrong and Gillespie, writing “I hated the way they used to laugh and grin for audiences.” The general argument was that Armstrong’s onstage antics were too reminiscent of minstrelsy, an era laden with racist baggage. And this attitude was writ in stone by white critic Gunther Schuller in his 1967 book Early Jazz, wherein he praised Armstrong’s innovative genius, “at least until the early 1930s, when he did succumb to the sheer weight of his success and its attendant commercial pressures.”

This chorus of misguided criticism would crescendo throughout the 1950s and ‘60s as the critics parroted one another, not unlike the classical-world phenomenon of ritually calling Jascha Heifetz’s performances and recordings “cold,” a judgment only attainable without listening to the artist. But critics tend to be reliably sheeplike.

This is why it’s a good thing that Armstrong authority Ricky Riccardi began his three-volume biography of the jazz genius with the third book in the series, What a Wonderful World, published in 2011. It picks up Armstrong’s story from 1947, when he made the important transition to the small-group setting that he’d use for public performances for the rest of his life. The most important task for anyone wishing to paint a balanced portrait of the man’s life is to objectively present those criticisms, then counter them with thoughtful analysis.

The Once and Future Ormandy

THREE MASSIVE BOX SETS have given us nearly 300 CDs of Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in recordings made between 1944 and 1968, which is the entirety of his recordings for the Columbia label. Ormandy decamped to RCA, according to a 1967 New York Times piece, with mixed feelings, laying the decision at the feet of the orchestra’s board. But, according to the article, Columbia’s then-president Clive Davis “indicated that a dispute over the repertory Mr. Ormandy had been permitted to record figured heavily in the split.” The article finished with Ormandy recalling his earlier years with RCA, implying that he had more freedom then.

We had a look at what’s almost the earliest of Ormandy as a conductor with the 11-CD box of Minneapolis Symphony recordings, presenting an astonishing amount of repertory recorded in January 1934 and January 1935, including a terrific Mahler 2. Now we can explore the conductor’s first steps with the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he succeeded Leopold Stokowski on the podium – as thankless a challenge as could be imagined.

Stokowski, after all, was handsome, dynamic, and relentlessly charming, probably the only symphony conductor ever impersonated by Bugs Bunny. And he’d shaped the orchestra into an ensemble that easily sat alongside the bands in Boston and New York. Ormandy co-conducted for a couple of years before taking over the job completely, and the two co-recorded during that time as well. (Sony should consider issuing a box set of Stokowski’s Philadelphia work.)

Finish Lines

ONE OF THE STANZAS of “Crooked Foot Lane,” the opening track of Amy Engelhardt’s new album “Finish What,” runs

Downloaded directions / How to escape / Wrapped all of his fractures / In surgical tape

and is part of a compact paean to aspects of disability and acceptance. But the phrase “surgical tape” has a special resonance here. Engelhardt’s lyrics carry the incisiveness of a surgical operation, and I’m mired in enough of the past to decide that the tape in question could also be a strip of magnetic recording tape, once the usual vehicle for an audio recording.

In which case this entire collection of eight songs and an instrumental could be filed under “surgical tape.” The lyrics pierce more skillfully through the epidermis of our emotional lives than I’m accustomed to encountering, even as they dance to catchy tunes presented in inventive arrangements – and there’s a story behind that that we’ll get to shortly.

Engelhardt harbors an impressive nexus of talent, developed as she went from musical-theater kid to in-demand singer to songwriter to playwright/performer. A recent manifestation of the last-named is her solo show “Impact,” which I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and wrote about here.

Lash Resort

From the Food Vault Dept.: Speaking of Vermont, as was the case with the last two posts, here’s a journey back some 17 years to revisit the piece I wrote about The Whip Bar & Grill, a restaurant at Stowe, Vermont’s Green Mountain Inn. It’s still in business, although no longer serving lunch. Keep in mind the menu and, especially, prices have changed since I wrote this piece. But don’t let it affect your appetite.

                                                                                          

DRIVE UP STOWE’S MOUNT MANSFIELD (or, if you have a constitution more rugged than mine, bicycle or walk) and, when you near the peak, clamber in and around the paths and boulders that constitute Smuggler’s Notch. Imagine the forbidden cattle being herded over that mountaintop, cattle from Canada, forbidden because conflict with Canada-friendly Britain was a defining feature of early 19th-century politics.

And agriculture was a defining Stowe industry, and politics be damned: cranky Vermonters needed their animal trade.

Mt. Mansfield dominates the town: it’s the highest peak in the state, and has given rise to the tourism upon which the area now thrives. Hikers, campers and, especially, skiers show up when it’s warm or cold; foliage draws tourists in fall.

Lodges humble and swanky flank the road to the mountain, but in the center of the charming village of Stowe sits the Green Mountain Inn, one of the first structures listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with an 1833-vintage building at its heart. Other buildings have been added over the years, and the complex now offers tasteful accommodations ranging from a single queen bed to a two-bedroom, multi-story townhouse – over 100 rooms in all.

Latchis Past and Present

USUALLY WHEN A KID RUNS OFF with the family money, it’s for a nefarious purpose. We expect the kid to come to no good, to crawl back, if he’s lucky, and beg forgiveness. This was not the fate of Peter Latchis. His father, Demetrius, emigrated from Greece to New Hampshire at the start of the last century, operating a pushcart from which to sell produce. He grew his enterprise and did well enough to amass a tantalizing amount of cash. His son suggested that the family invest in the up-and-coming film industry. Dad refused, so Peter took it on his own initiative to help himself to some of that money and build a movie theater, opening it as the country (and the movie business) entered the no-holds-barred 1920s.

The theater was enough of a success to inspire the family – Peter had six brothers – to build more, eventually running a chain of 20 of them throughout New England, along with hotels and restaurants. And movies were a good business: Despite the Wall Street crash of 1929, the family remained financially unscathed.

In 1938, the Latchis brothers opened a grand memorial to their late father in Brattleboro, Vermont. It was what they termed “A Town within a Town All under One Roof,” including a hotel, restaurant, ballroom, and a lavish 700-plus-seat theater. The first movie shown there was the Sonja Henie comedy “My Lucky Star,” but the theater was designed to host live entertainment as well; among the performers were the Trapp Family (pre-”Sound of Music”), pianist Rudolf Serkin, all the big-name big bands, singers from the Metropolitan Opera, and, more recently, Don McLean, Roger McGuinn, Al Di Meola, the Brattleboro Concert Choir, the Windham Philharmonic, Paula Poundstone, and even operas by Wagner.

Getting Sirius at The Latchis

DATING, AS IT DOES, FROM 1938, Brattleboro’s Latchis Hotel is the kind of small-city gem that was built to welcome big-city escapees seeking a rural(ish) retreat without sacrificing the luxuries to which they were accustomed. The luxuries are still here, even if the guests now arrive by car instead of train. And the hotel is also host to three theaters that offer first-run and specialty films as well as live performances.

The hotel’s International Music Series presented the Sirius String Quartet in its Main Theater tonight, an ensemble that has been around since 1994 and quickly evolved a personality that bypasses the mainstream quartet repertory in favor of personal expressions and explorations. “We write and arrange our own music” cellist Jeremy Harman explained as the quartet took us through a program much of which is featured on their new CD (and streaming collection) “Incantations,” which I’ll get back to in a few paragraphs.

My wife insists that she found a soothing aspect to the concert, but she’s much better than I am at taking music at face value. I’m busily trying to untangle structure and harmony as I seek to contextualize what I’m hearing in a framework in which the music of this ensemble will never fit. They’ve collected elements from free jazz and Eastern Europe and vintage pop and more and synthesized them into sounds that test the limits of their instruments.

Ormandy Reigns Supreme - Again

FROM THE OPENING MOMENTS of the first CD in this collection, Bach’s “Easter Oratorio,” you’re whisked back to a time before historically informed performances roamed the land. It was recorded in April 1963, a year after Nicholas Harnoncourt’s Concentus Musicus Wien made its debut, but well before those arrow-like violin bows and valve-less brass spread into mainstream concert halls and recordings. With the HIP sound firmly tamped into my ears, I was shocked by the size of the orchestra and the operatic aspect of the soloists. Yet, if we were to hear this work at all back when it first was issued, this is how it would sound.

Massive orchestral forces do not diminish Bach’s music, nor do such beyond-reproach singers as Judith Raskin and Maureen Forrester. With this in mind, skip ahead to Ormandy’s recording of the “St. John Passion,” again with Raskin and Forrester, again with the mighty Philadelphians (and cover art by Paul Davis). The strings play hypnotically as one – as they do throughout the recordings in this set – and the Columbia engineers were able to mic the brass and winds to give them a stunning presence.

This is the second of Sony’s Columbia Stereo Collections devoted to Ormandy, and the third large set when you count the 120-CD set devoted to mono recordings. This present set, a long box of 94 discs, runs from 1964 to 1983, although that’s a bit disingenuous. The recordings in this set actually run from 1961 to 1968, with some languishing until 1975 for release.

The Free Lance

THERE’S A REJOINDER common to gigging freelance musicians, when invited to play a job for no money but with guaranteed “exposure”: “People die of exposure.”

I’ve had my share of such entreaties. I was naive enough – oh, let’s just say stupid enough – to think there might be credibility in that offer. There never was. It was just a horseshit move by a promoter or head of an entertainment committee or other such booking agent figuring that the place to save money was on the performers.

Because it’s tough to get catering on the cheap, and printers and other event-adjacent workers don’t make a habit of cutting their fees for the magic allure of “exposure.” By extension, of course, plumbers and electricians and other similar professionals have to make a living off what they do – but when it’s some manner of entertainer being considered, there’s a too-prevalent mindset that doesn’t take that seriously as a career choice. If you’re a professional in an entertainment field, I’m preaching to the choir. If you’re the kind of asshole who seeks to short-change your gig-workers, I’ll never convince you.

As I noted here a couple of weeks ago, I pursued a kind of literary piecework forty years ago, writing arts-related stories for Albany, NY-area publications. It started when a touring production of “Sweeney Todd” arrived at Proctor’s in Schenectady and I couldn’t afford tickets. I had a failed marriage (but remained married) and a new girlfriend. I was working the afternoon shift for an AM radio station that played second-generation big-band music and easygoing jazz; because of its daytime-only license, I had to shut down the station at dusk, which arrived earlier and earlier as the year waned and meant that my hourly wage paycheck diminished accordingly.