Not Every Rake Is Rescued

POOR TOM RAKEWELL! He’s a lazy fellow looking for easy money, trying to hang onto his fiancée Anne Trulove even as her father disparages his indolence. He makes a wish; the wish comes true. He has fallen into a fortune. And fallen is the word: The fortune comes with devilish strings attached. 

Adrian Kramer as Tom Rakewell, Marc 
Webster as Trulove, and Lydia Grindatto 
as Anne Trulove. Photo credit: Kayleen 
Bertrand/The Glimmerglass Festival

The Glimmerglass Festival debuted its first-ever production of Stravinsky’s only opera, and it’s a knockout. Adrian Kramer is a Tom who manages to be endearing in spite of his obvious self-involvement; Lydia Grindatto beautifully sings the rather thankless role of Anne, the role having been here written more as a 1950s TV wife than a 1730s bawd. But it’s Aleksey Bogdanov, as the evil, delightful Nick Shadow who steals the show. He almost can’t help it: villainous baritones usually are the most charismatic of the cast, but Bogdanov brings an extra dimension of vocal agility to his performance, to my ears edging out the Shadows I grew up hearing on recordings (viz., Mack Harrell, John Reardon, and Samuel Ramey).

William Hogarth’s series of eight paintings known collectively as “The Rake’s Progress” were completed in 1734 and immediately followed by a series he made of nearly identical engravings, the better for public distribution. It’s essentially an eight-panel cartoon strip, each panel advancing the plot of the decline of Tom Rakewell (as he was named in the series) alongside busy visual commentary driving home the attendant moral message. Eighteenth-century England reveled in misbehaving and then regretting such behavior; Hogarth’s satiric paintings thus were greatly popular.

Back to the Land

YOU’RE SAVVY ENOUGH to wish to dine responsibly. You visit farmers’ markets in season; perhaps you cultivate a vegetable plant or two. You’ve restructured your personal menu to allow those vegetables more opportunity to shine, and you may even be paying the price for locally sourced meat. Or you’re on the brink of discovering all this, and would like to know where to begin.

Let me recommend Origins Café. Located in the wilds of Cooperstown, New York, far enough from the village to bring nothing baseball-related into view, this seasonal restaurant has been successfully operating for 14 years. And if you didn’t know that everything they serve is carefully chosen and good for you, you’d be lulled into enjoying it as just another fine restaurant.

It was founded by sisters Kristen and Dana Leonard, who grew up on this property. “Forty-two years ago, our parents started a little greenhouse here,” says Kristen, “basically a small nursery in a little hoop house in a place that evolved to be the café. We literally grew up there, in a little crib in the corner of the greenhouse. And then like anyone who grows up in a small town, you want to get out and travel as much as you can. So we went off to school and studied environmental sciences. And that's actually how we got into food. It was through more of an environmental sustainability lens.”

A House of Her Own

PUBLISHED IN 1984, the novel The House on Mango Street became a best-seller for author Sandra Cisneros, selling over six million copies and becoming a classic for readers in casual and academic settings. It’s an episodic books, its 44 chapters running anywhere from a sentence or two to several pages, the first-person account of a 12-year-old Chicana living in a changing Chicago neighborhood.

The 2025 Glimmerglass Festival world premiere 
production of "The House on Mango Street." 
Photo Credit: Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

The tone of each story is provocative but charming at the start; soon darkening as the stories proceed. We follow Esperanza, the narrator, as she comes to terms with evolving social and sexual challenges. How does a book that’s become a schoolroom classic translate to the opera stage? As we learned from its world premiere at the Glimmerglass Festival, it couldn’t be more timely and compelling. 

Cisneros, who co-wrote the libretto with composer Derek Bermal, preserves her slyly evocative literary style, in which a simple description can be colored by an unexpected simile or metaphor. “Sally is the girl with eyes like Egypt and nylons the color of smoke,” runs one description; “At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth,” is another. The novel presents as a memoir; the opera turns it into a memory play.

Art Isn’t Easy

THE 1985 PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING MUSICAL “Sunday in the Park with George” makes its Glimmerglass Festival debut in a handsome, enthusiastic, but flawed production. It inspired the theme of the current season, “The Art of Making Art,” which is drawn from a lyric in the show.

An amazing cast fuels this production. John Riddle and Marina Pires carry the show through two challenging acts, and though I detected some first-night nerves at the top of the opening-night performance, they quickly settled into the world of the piece with virtuosic aplomb. Riddle is George. In Act One, he’s the painter George Seurat; Act Two returns him as the painter’s (fictional) great-grandson, also named George, who is an artist using laser technology.

John Riddle as George and Marina Pires as Dot (far R) 
with the ensemble. Photo by Brent DeLanoy/
The Glimmerglass Festival.

Pires is Dot, the audaciously named model who adores George but bristles at his offhand treatment of her. She and Riddle carry the bulk of the musical numbers, alone or in duet; a lively ensemble picks up the rest.

Inspired by George Seurat’s pointillistic painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” the first act follows the obsessive artist’s challenge of capturing an idyllic pastoral scene on an oversized canvas as he splits his time between plein-air sketching on the island itself and applying, in his studio, the thousands of colored dots that make up the work.

The Desire That We Love

JEALOUSY AND DESIRE: Two emotions that provoke nearly all the pain we suffer and the pain we inflict. Each is a confluence of component emotions, making them hard to put into self-aware words. But they’re easily reflected in music, the abstract nature of which carries it deep into our emotional core. Put words to that music and the feelings those words provoke become much more compelling. 

Greer Grimsley as Baron Scarpia, Kellan Dunlap as Spoletta, 
Yongzhao Yu as Mario Cavaradossi, with Jabari Lewis and 
William Predmore, members of the ensemble. 
Photo Credit: Brent DeLanoy/The Glimmerglass Festival

Puccini’s “Tosca” was criticized by its premiere critics for being too haphazard in structure, too ghastly in subject matter, and even too musically ugly. Wrote a Boston critic: “The composer shows a well-nigh diabolical ingenuity in massing together harsh, ill-sounding timbres.” Added the New York Sun: “Both eye and ear are often offended by the consecutive fifths, raw harmonic progressions, and alterations of the tawdry with the solemn.” And a London critic concluded: “Should this opera prove popular it will scarcely indicate a healthy or creditable taste.”

Blues with a Feeling

MANY OF THE SONGS we choose to sing spring to our lips because they’ve been drilled into our brains by corporate profit-fueled repetition, clogging airwaves and streaming channels. But there are other songs, songs that speak to our dreams and disappointments, songs that offer reassurance. Those are songs we have to seek out, parting the waves of noise to get to these underheard jewels.

Annie, Hannah, and Jonny Rosen
Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Those are the songs that Annie Rosen sings. She offers her selections in a carefree manner, but it’s clear that she’s living the material, drawing from it a power and joy that help shepherd each song into the hearts of her hearers. In one way, it’s the work of a mystic. In another – and this is probably what her Caffè Lena audience felt – it’s a rollicking good time.

Annie and the Hedonists is a family group, anchored by Annie and her husband, guitarist Jonny Rosen; many of the other performers have been working with them long enough that it wouldn’t surprise me to see them together at the Thanksgiving table. And there was a special guest vocalist at this particular show – daughter Hannah, who sang with her mother on “Here in California,” a Kate Wolf song, to the accompaniment of Dad’s guitar. 

O, Say: Can You See?

Happy Independence Day. As we continue to move through the most fraught, dangerous era in American history, let me offer some advice culled from Timothy Snyder’s excellent and more-appropriate-than-ever book “On Tyranny.” (Tim Duggan Books, New York, 2017). I recommend that you buy a copy for yourself as a handbook for the resistance that is so badly needed today.

                                                                                                  

Defend institutions: It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side.

Beware the one-party state: The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office.

Be wary of paramilitaries: When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the
system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

Stand out: Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

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.