National Symphony

J. and I went to hear the National Symphony on Saturday. First concert this entire season, it so happens. This is unusual for us – we usually try to hear a couple in the fall and a couple more in the spring – but for whatever reason most of the stuff they played this season just did not seem all that appealing. This past weekend's program, however, looked interesting, and it proved to be worth hearing. Led by guest conductor Mark Elder, whom I have never heard of, they played four works (instead of the more usual three), and I was completely unfamiliar with all four (J. knew one from her ballet days). In that respect, it was almost like what going to hear a concert in the days before recording must have been like. If you wanted to hear a work, you had to hear it live.

Anyway, first up was Stravinsky's Danses concertantes. Apparently there is some disagreement over whether Stravinsky wrote it specifically as a ballet score, or whether Balanchine choreographed a ballet to it after the fact. It is a suite of five short movements in theme-and-variations form, played without pauses. There is not a lot of melodic material to latch onto, but it does have a distinctively Stravinskian sound, and some unusual but effective orchestration. It's an interesting work, and I am glad I heard it, but I would not go out of my way to hear it again or own a recording.

Next up was Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto, with Louis Lortie, whom I also have never heard of, soloing. My knowledge of Prokofiev is limited, but the works that I have heard have usually failed to grab me on an emotional level. Distinctive and original for sure, but they never quite clicked with me. I don't think I'm subconsciously resisting Prokofiev's work because of his voluntary repatriation to Stalin's Russia after twenty years in the West, but who knows. In any event, the Second Concerto was no different. It is a short work – a little over fifteen minutes – in either a single movement with a slow middle section, or three movements strung together, depending on how you look at it. The piano part is extremely virtuosic, bombastic and busy – it reminded me of nothing so much as Liszt stood on his head – but it sorely lacks in lyrical quality. It is obviously extremely difficult – we had an excellent view of the keyboard from our right-side chorister seats – and Lortie tossed it off with impressive aplomb, but since the material leaves no room for subtlety, it is hard to say anything more about the interpretation.

Things started to look up in the second half. It opened with Polenc's Aubade – an unusual work that is very rarely performed. Subtitled "concerto choreographique," it has an inverse connection to the Stravinsky: conceived as a ballet, it was never staged, and became a purely instrumental work. It was privately commissioned to be performed in a house, so Poulenc scored it for solo piano and a mini-orchestra of 18 instruments. In essence, it is a microscopic piano concerto in eight short sections. To me, the last section was the most remarkable – the mesmerisingly repetitive arpeggio in the strings are dead ringers for minimalist composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich that would not arrive for thirty more years. Eventually, the astringent sound of a stop-muted horn cuts across the pattern jolts the listener out of his reverie. Good stuff.

The bulk of the second half was occupied by Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony, which alone would have been worth the price of admission. It is amazing that Shostakovich was as productive as he was in the political and artistic climate of Stalin's late-1930s Russia, especially after his overwhelming Fourth, which J. and I heard in New York in December, nearly cost him his career. Only a year later, he produced his Fifth which, while more reasonable in scale, was of a piece with its predecessor in its emotional content. He followed two years later with the Sixth, even more pared down in scale, but no less defiant of the political and social climate that surrounded him. Its structure is unusual – a long slow movement followed by two short fast ones, and most of the weight is in the opening. It is chilling in its dark beauty. It literally gave me goosebumps. Only Shostakovich can build tension like that – he starts with a “normal” chord, and slowly moves the string parts to the outer degrees of the underlying harmony one by one, as if slowly tightening a ratchet, until the tension is so palpable you can almost see the sound ready to snap. The orhestration is great, and features solos from two of my favorite instruments – English horn and bass clarinet. The subsequent movements are lighter, but only to a point. In the second one, you can almost hear some “heroic” sounds that would have met with the approval of Soviet censors, but they are short-lived. Overall, both of these movements are sinister and unsettling, only slightly less astringent than similar sections of the Fifth. This I would definitely hear again. In fact, I am wondering if it isn't finally time for a complete set of Shostakovich symphonies, high price and all.

Easter Mass

Last Sunday, J. and I went to the National Basilica for Easter mass. Me going to mass? What's next – pigs that fly? Yet, that's exactly what I did. Second year in a row. It was J.'s idea, originally – though a supremely rational person and a passionate advocate of the scientific method (a bit too passionate sometimes if you ask me – she has been known to demand hard numbers where none were to be had), she is occasionally unable to resist the pull of ritual, especially if it reminds her of the sadly infrequent moments of joy she had had with her family when she was a child, so she goes to mass on Easter and Christmas. Both this year and last, we went to the noon mass, officially called the Solemn Mass. I am the worst person to ask about the specific differences between it and other kinds, and J. was not helpful either. The important thing is that it was the one with the great music.

For those of us who treat church as a spectacle, Vatican II has many sins to answer for (pun fully intended), chief among them is a complete evisceration of the musical content of the traditional mass in a lame-arsed attempt to embrace the sixties' counterculture that was thinning out the ranks of the faithful at an alarming rate. What they ended up with was the dreaded “folk” mass -- “Puff the Magic Dragon” with religious lyrics. Thankfully, they retained enough sense to make it optional, and the National Basilica, to its great credit, stuck with the works – massive organ played by a virtuoso organist, an excellent choir and, for the noon Easter mass, a sizable brass ensemble. Yes, I treat the Easter mass as a concert. As such, it was quite enjoyable, though our seats this year were not quite as good as a year ago. As we were walking in and finding seats, the organist was already playing something amazing; it could have been one of Bach's countless organ chorales. He played something along similar lines at the end, as we were walking out, and improvised on it with abandon.

Other highlights included a haunting choral work by Palestrina and a piece for choir and brass by Richard Wayne Dirksen, a composer with whom I was not familiar. Turns out he was a local DC composer, associated for many years with the National Cathedral. The piece we heard on Sunday, the title of which I neglected to note, was surprisingly dark, with an unsettling recurring trumpet motif uneasily coexisting with a jagged, if not quite atonal, choral line. If I must use extra-musical religious imagery, it made me think more of the mess the supposedly benevolent God continues to tolerate in this life than any joy we can hope to experience in the next. Good time was had by all.

Olympics

Anne Appelbaum gets it right once again. Of the many points she makes in her piece, I was particularly glad to see the statement that the modern Olympics were set up with an explicit political purpose in mind. All this stuff about Olympics being somehow above politics is bogus.

Motion detectors

The light switch in a public bathroom in a 24-hr. grocery store is controlled by a motion detector and hooked up to a timer. When someone walks in, the detector turns on the light. The bathroom is housed in a large room. The motion detector is located by the door, but the business end of the bathroom is a fair distance away, on the opposite end of the room. At 7:00 a.m., the foot traffic in the bathroom is very light, and if a person spends a while on the useful end of the bathroom, the timer does not realize there is someone there, and turns off the light. No amount of hand waving can then turn it back on. They don't teach that in engineering school, do they?

You can't make this stuff up

A recruiting poster at my local gym. 24 by 36, framed, with a picture of three smiling personal trainers and the following list of perks:

• Flexible Hours
• 401(k) Plan
• Continuing Eduction

Scott Hamilton

Around Christmas, I picked up a copy of Scott Hamilton's My Romance. It is apparently out of print, but last I checked, Daedalus Books and Music still had copies and was selling them for $6.

Scott Hamilton's story is well-known. When he arrived on the scene in the mid-1970s, Wynton Marsalis was still half a decade away, and acoustic jazz was at the lowest point of popularity and respect it would ever reach. If that wasn't enough, Hamilton dared to play in the style not of the fifties and sixties, but of the thirties and forties, taking his inspiration directly from players like Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. To him, it was as if bebop had never happened. What makes Hamilton great for me, however, is not just his style of playing but his attitude. He simply doesn't care. His music is not cerebral. None of that America's Classical Music stuff. It is not simplistic – it does demand to be listened to – but it does not need, or want, to be analyzed, critiqued, and written about. It is there to be enjoyed. He plays for people who go to a jazz club to have a drink and unwind after a long week at work, to have a good time, maybe to romance their honey. That quality, and his utter lack of concern with progress and innovation, does give most his recordings a certain kind of uniformity. But on My Romance at least, the quality of playing is so consistently high that it manages to avoid stagnation entirely.

A little personal digression. Things in acoustic jazz were never as bad as the naysayers would have us believe. Hamilton may have been the youngest to play that kind of stuff when he started out, but he certainly wasn't the only one. His, however, was the first jazz I heard live. I was about sixteen, and one day out of the blue, my father said, “Let's go to a jazz club.” As with many other aspects of American culture, he has always held a very romantic image of the jazz club in his mind; to him it was one of the symbols of the life he strove for so long to achieve for himself and his family. He has been listening to the big names his whole life, of course, and even I was starting to know Duke Ellington and Count Basie, if not quite Miles Davis and John Coltrane yet, but we were both completely ignorant of the local jazz scene in New York, so we opened up the paper, called around and asked a few question about who was playing – we wanted to make sure we were getting the real thing, not smooth jazz, blues, or rock. We ended up at the now- defunct Fat Tuesday's on the East Side (low 20s, if memory serves). Hamilton's quintet was the act, and we could not have asked for better luck.

My father was in heaven – this was exactly the kind of music he was craving to hear – and even I, though I didn't understand the music then, was captivated. Hamilton being who he is, my lack of a firm grasp of the melodic and harmonic aspects of jazz did not kill the show for me – far from it. There was still the sound of his tenor sax – rich, husky and effortless – and the easy, understated swing of his group, who played with quiet nonchalance but grooved like nobody's business. Hamilton's guitarist of those years, Chris Flory, particularly fascinated me. I had been dabbling on guitar for a year or two by then, and knew something (though very little) about the instrument, so I naturally approached what I was hearing through his playing. In contrast to the rest of the band, he looked very young, younger than even Hamilton himself, who was probably about as old then as I am now. He was dressed in a dark suit and had an intense, penetrating look in his eyes. At the end of the set, he didn't leave, but unlike Hamilton, who chatted with customers and signed autographs, Flory stood in the corner, smoking (you could do that indoors back then) with a don't-bother-me expression on his face. He played, pardon the cliché, like a god. A quiet and very self-confident god. Here was a musician who could speak volumes through his instrument without the distortion, speed and histrionics of rock-n-roll. I could dig that, even at sixteen.

Then there was the club. A quintessential old-school New York jazz club – dimly lit, simultaneously inviting and forbidding, and covered with a decades-old patina of old Manhattan. I made it back twice since then – once with my father again (to hear Hank Crawford) and once with a girl I knew in New York in those days that I attempted to date, unsuccessfully of course, whenever I was back from school. The club closed sometime in the 1990s, while I was living out West.

Anyway, back to My Romance. I've been spinning it non-stop since the beginning of the year, but I finally got around to sitting down and listening to it properly. Spectacular record. It features a different band than the one Hamilton had when I heard him live, but it is excellent. The pianist Norman Simmons, in particular, shines. He is almost a co-leader, contributing two originals, the opening “Abundance” and the Latin-tinged “Jan,” and soloing strongly throughout. His touch is confident but not overbearing, a less ethereal Tommy Flanagan maybe, and his comping is spot-on.

The surprise of the record is the trombone of Joe Helleny. I had not heard Hamilton with a trombonist before, and mostly it works. Helleny's solos are the only disappointment of the album – he tends to rush through his phrases and smears too many notes for my taste (though on “Abundance” he grabs you with the first note and holds you firmly for the entire solo) – but his doubled lines with Hamilton are pure magic. Another surprise is the fact that My Romance is not all standards. Hamilton has been so prolific over the years yet so married to the American songbook that he had had to reach for some obscure material (“Poor Butterfly” by John Golden from 1916, anyone?), but here he not only records two of Simmons' tunes, but actually contributes one of his own – a simple but effective blues called “Sugarchile.”

The rest of the album is vintage Hamilton. Confident, relaxed, with a tone to die for, floating merrily over the rhythm section and playfully foiling Helleny's trombone. Jazz ballads frequently bore me, but the title track is a gem – talk about perfect music for romancing your honey. It has been a long time since I enjoyed an album so completely. Grab a copy while you still can, especially since it's only six bucks.

Pat Metheny

I submitted the following review to the Washington City Paper about three weeks ago. I haven't heard from them since, so I am posting it here on the assumption that if they haven't run it by now, they won't.

***

Pat Metheny Trio, Day Trip
(Nonesuch Records, 2008)

Pat Metheny: acoustic and electric guitars, guitar synthesizer
Christian McBride: bass
Antonio Sanchez: drums

Longevity is the measure of creativity. The question is not only “what can you do?” but “how long can you sustain it?” and it is the answer to the latter that we tend to use when crowning a great artist. By that standard, Pat Metheny has done better than most. Since arriving on the scene in the mid-1970s, with a minimum of missteps he managed to evolve enough from one recording to the next to avoid boring his listeners while remaining instantly recognizable. While we know Metheny mostly for his distinctive flavor of light, worldly fusion, a big part of what enables him to stay relevant is a steady diet of side projects, both as a leader and as a sideman, and the backbone of those has been his various acoustic trios, the latest of which, with Christian McBride on bass and Antonio Sanchez on drums, has just released its debut Day Trip on Nonesuch.

Day Trip is at least as diverse as its predecessors in its choice of raw materials, perhaps more so. The fast, angular rubato of “Let’s Move” recalls Metheny’s early days of enthusiasm for Ornette Coleman, the soulful backbeat of “Calvin’s Keys” grooves and sizzles, and on the cool swagger of “When We Were Free” Metheny’s playing is bluesier than anything he has recorded in recent memory. For those who prefer something a little less intense, the lilting bossa-nova of “Snova” and the vaguely melancholy chord changes of “At Last You’re Here” find Metheny playing attractive, wistful, restrained solos, and the acoustic “Dreaming Trees” brings to mind the best of his early Pat Metheny Group mood pieces, in feel if not in actual sound.

As good as most of the guitar playing on Day Trip is, Metheny deserves at least as much, if not more, credit for consistently finding musicians for his trios with an amazing ability to integrate with both his artistic vision and his sound, and inspiring them to perform not only at the peak of their own prowess, but also with an intense sensitivity to others around them. Christian McBride, almost as much of a veteran as Metheny himself, is astonishing. In the best tradition of modern bassists, his harmonic thinking is advanced but always in the spirit of the tune, much like Metheny’s own. When comping, he stays out of the spotlight, but remains consistently engaging. A true accompanist, he enriches the leader’s playing without overshadowing it. He solos frequently but never gratuitously, and always employs his prodigious technique in the service of music. The younger Sanchez, who first appeared on Metheny’s Speaking of Now in 2003, is just as impressive. He is more self-effacing, taking only two short solos, but gives the record a spine without which it would be an aimless mess. Of previous Metheny trio drummers, he is closest to Bill Stewart – less edgy than Roy Haynes and more modern than Billy Higgins, he fills more space than either, but always organically.

The album is the first Metheny trio record to feature nothing but his original compositions, and one gets a sense that perhaps he has overextended himself just a bit. Usually an inspired songwriter and a tasteful arranger, Metheny is not above recycling himself: “Is This America?,” written in honor of the victims of hurricane Katrina, is a dead ringer for his “Travels,” most recently recorded in 2000 with his last trio. The most grievous offense to these ears, however, is his old guitar synthesizer, first used in an acoustic context on 1984’s Rejoicing. He dusts it off for two tracks on Day Trip. Never particularly pleasant and out of technological necessity one-dimensional, a quarter century ago the synth’s tone could at least have been said to push the envelope and make an attempt at something genuinely new in an essentially ossified sonic world. Today, it is simply irritating.

Day Trip is a solid recording, recommended with very few reservations, but one can’t help wondering whether after thirty-plus years of incessant music making, Metheny is finally starting to run out of steam. Each of his previous trio records had a distinctive sound and feel, different from anything he has done before, and dedicated fans could look forward to having their long waits rewarded with something almost ground-breaking. Day Trip, on the other hand, while competently written and expertly played, echoes Trio 99-00 of eight years ago readily, perhaps a little too readily. In the trio context at least, Metheny has spoiled us with decades of unrelenting originality, and it would be a shame to see him stuck in a rut at a time when jazz needs every original voice it can get.

St. Petersburg

Finished W. Bruce Lincoln's Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia over the weekend. Excellent book. Lincoln's writing is great – clear and accessible without being journalistic or glossing over the nuances. His coverage is very comprehensive. It is clear that of the many topics a book like this must address if it is to succeed, the cultural and artistic life of the city, and the individuals embodying that culture and that art, are closest to his heart. This, however, does not cause him to short-change the architectural, political, economic and military aspects of St. Petersburg's role in Russian history.

Of the many reasons for my enjoyment of the book, I will single out two. One is his vivid and enthusiastic descriptions of intellectual life of the Silver Age – the early avant-garde of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Russia, the days of the Stray Dog cafe, the epoch that gave rise to writers and poets like Blok, Akhmatova, Belyi, Maiakovsky, and many others. For the first time in my life, I understood the romance of the Russian avant-garde and the mystical appeal it holds for many Western artists and scholars.

The other is the fact that Lincoln spares no criticism of the Communist regime's brutal and unyielding suppression of all that was creative, individual and distinctive in Russian intellectual life. It dates back to the earliest days of the Bolshevik revolution, and continued, in full force, right up until 1991, and while acknowledging that some periods (the “Zhdanovschina” of the waning days of Satlin's reign) were far worse than others (Khruschev's “thaw” of 1956-1961), Lincoln does not doubt for a second that in the final analysis it was never benign and never excusable.

My complaints about the book are few. The narrative speeds up significantly towards the end, and Lincoln covers all of the post-Communist 1990s in roughly the same number of pages he dedicates to a single building by Quarenghi in the chapter on the reign of Catherine the Great. This is unfortunate – to me, the entire post-1991 history of St. Petersburg is encapsulated in a single televised image of a city bus with smashed windows and peeling paint. It would have been nice to have the details filled in. To be fair, Sunlight was Lincoln's last book, he died before it was published; in fact, the entire last chapter has the feel of having been put together by someone else, probably his wife.

If there are any other deficiencies, they are trifling. Lincoln, a fluent speaker of Russian from what I understand, in translating certain words almost always choses the closest English cognate even when it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to an average reader. So he renders коммиссионный магазин literally as “commission shop” instead of the far more natural “consignment shop;” rock climbers become alpinists, and – my pet peeve – retirees are pensioners. Once, on p. 313, no doubt through an oversight, he even commits the despicable Soviet practice of treating Jew as an ethnicity. All of these, however, are minor quibbles in an otherwise engrossing and exceptionally informative book. Highly recommended.

A connection-to-history note: While discussing the brief flowering of Russian jazz in the late 1950s, Lincoln mentioned the orchestra of Oleg Lundstrem which my father heard live as a teenager in Kazan, and which was directly responsible for his becoming a life-long jazz fan and a convincing amateur on four instruments.

Candlelight

J. and I had invited a friend and coworker of J.'s and her husband over for dinner on Saturday. They were scheduled to arrive around 6:00. At 3:00, gale-force winds appeared seemingly out of nowhere. At 4:00, the power went out in our building.

Somehow, I have managed to avoid power outages throughout my adult life – there may have been one or two short ones when I lived in New York in the eighties, but that's about it. When I was kid, though, they were common – the power grid in that part of the world at the time was already overtaxed, ill-maintained and grossly mismanaged. To that end, my parents have always kept copious numbers of candles in the house, would light a dozen or so as soon as we lost electricity, and go about their business as if nothing happened. We couldn't watch television, but with nothing but four government-run channels, only three of which would come in with any degree of clarity, it's not like there was a whole lot to watch anyway. Perhaps it was those experiences that engendered in me a love of candlelight at an early age, more likely it was the general sense of romance and mystique associated with it. Suffice it to say I love candles, and J. and have been keeping a big box of them in the closet, but for whatever reason we've hardly used them. Until Saturday.

I briefly considered calling off the dinner and going out instead, but since most of the food was already prepared, the gas in the stove was flowing, and I had two full boxes of matches in a kitchen drawer, with our guests' consent I decided to go ahead. We lit every candle we could find, jury-rigged a flashlight over the stove, and proceeded to have one of the most memorable evenings in recent memory.

My choice of menu proved serendipitous – Italian appetizers didn't need any cooking (except for the peppers which I had roasted earlier) and the short ribs had been braised in the morning. The only thing I actually had to cook by candlelight was the risotto, and though we had only a vague idea of what it, or everything else for that matter, looked like, we could tell by the taste that I didn't mess up too badly. To my surprise, I didn't feel any more stressed about getting everything on the table than I would have with full electric lighting, and once we actually sat down to eat, it was lovely.

The candlelight sparkled in the wine and water glasses on the table and gave J.'s coworker, whose skin and hair are naturally very light, a mysterious, Feast in the time of Plague pallor. Pretty quickly we realized that you lose much more than light when the power goes out – you lose noise. We couldn't have any music on, obviously, but even beyond that, it was deathly quiet – no refrigerator sounds, no sounds filtering through from neighbor's apartments, however faint, nothing. It seems that even when there is nothing identifiable making noise, there is always some amount of white noise present, something is always humming somewhere, the silence is never total. Now it was complete. When the building's generator started up downstairs to power the emergency lighting, I could hear it so distinctly that I could have probably counted the revolutions of its drive shaft by ear.

The lack of power was also strangely liberating. In an instant, we had to accept that there were things that we simply would not be able to do, like look at photos for example, or look up on the internet random things that came up in conversation. We had no choice but to focus on the conversation and one another. We haven't known J.'s coworker and her husband for very long, and the relative lack of activity options forced us, gently, to ask more personal questions. Of course, the evening didn't pass without its comic moments. When I offered everyone coffee, and our guests smirked “how are you going to make it?” I proudly produced a French press only to realize that I had no way of grinding the beans unless I resorted to mortar and pestle.

Aafter dinner, we lingered over some delicious Australian semillon as the candles started to burn out one by one, said our goodbyes around 11:00, apologizing for having to make our guests walk down twelve flights of stairs, then turned in, happy not to be able to set our alarm clocks. The power was finally restored at 10:00 a.m. Sunday morning.

Chet Baker

For some unknown reason, the E Street Theatre was showing Let's Get Lost this weekend, Bruce Weber's 1988 documentary on Chet Baker. The film was a major source of inspiration and point of reference for James Gavin's biography of Baker that both J. and I read last year. Nowadays, however, it's pretty much impossible to see, so we had to take advantage of the opportunity.

It was all right. The book, I thought, made Baker sound like an inhuman monster. The film did not redeem him for me, but it did for J. She thought he seemed more vulnerable when she actually heard him talk. For me, he was perhaps a bit more coherent than I expected him to be (at the end, Weber discloses that Baker was in treatment at the time of their interviews), but otherwise, not any more appealing.

Interviews with three of his five wives (well, he never married one of them officially) formed the backbone of the film. The entire time I was reading the book, I marveled at what in the world would make someone like Baker, the consummate jerk that he was, attractive to so many women in such a powerful fashion, and I hoped that the movie would elucidate that. Not only did it not make this any clearer, but in fact made it even more incomprehensible -- all three, especially Diane Vavra and Ruth Young, seemed so normal. I did find Young's account of Baker trying to make a comeback in the seventies, playing the dingiest New York clubs for a pittance, touching.

Baker's third wife Carol and their three children, all living together in Oklahoma at the time the film was made, also made less of an impact than I thought they might. In the book, Gavin paints all four as conniving monsters, but on film they came across as average, if not particularly charitable to their celebrity father. Maybe I've been desensitized by overblown Hollywood villains to the point that the subtlety or real-life ones is lost on me.

The rest of the footage was visual frosting. Weber tried to create a mood, and I suppose it worked for the most part, especially since meaty footage from anything other than the last few years of Baker's life is virtually non-existent. We see Baker being driven around L.A. in a vintage Eldorado, surrounded in the back seat by two younger women whose identities are never made clear. We see Baker walking along the beach. More tellingly, we see Baker in the studio, trying to record a take, completely ignoring the producer, and everyone else indulging him. We see members of Baker's last band, a bunch of young Italian guys, who seem to worship him to the point of being ready to lick the soles of his shoes, and aren't the brightest tools in the shed when away from their instruments. In retrospect, I suppose, the impressionistic footage does help to create the sense that Baker, though still walking, talking, and sort of playing, has already left this world in all meaningful ways and entered one of his own, one that would claim his life a few months after Weber finished shooting.

For some strange reason, the audience at the Friday night show was completely obnoxious. People kept leaving and coming back throughout the first half of the film, rustling bags of popcorn, and one guy in the row behind us fell asleep and started snoring so loudly that I had to poke him in the shoe (twice!) and, once he finally woke up, tell him that he was snoring. I haven't seen behavior this bad even in a commercial theatre, much less in a place that supposedly attracts viewers that appreciate film as art rather than entertainment and therefore could be expected to be a bit more respectful.

Spanish class

We're in trouble now. One student cannot hear, pronounce or understand the difference between nosotros and nuestros.

Wayne Shorter

Having recently finished reading a biography of Wayne Shorter, I decided to give a thorough listen to the only solo Shorter I actually own – Adam's Apple, from 1965. It's a good album. Not cosmically good, not transcendent, but solid. Featuring a quartet of Herbie Hancock, Reggie Workman and Joe Chambers in addition to Shorter, it's best known for having the first recorded version of "Footprints" – Shorter's best-known and most widely-covered composition. The version he recorded with Miles Davis a few months later is better known, but this one is excellent as well. It is more rhythmically direct and insistent than Davis's, making up in groove and decisiveness what it lacks in atmospherics and ambiguity.

The rest of the album, too, is nothing to scoff at. Adam's Apple did give in partly to Shorter's record company's demands for commercially viable music, with predictably mixed results. The title track that opens the record is a funky soul-jazz number in the style that was all the rage then. Not Sidewinder-funky, but funky. Shorter is comfortable, having learned to play this kind of stuff with Art Blakey, but he sounds uninspired. Hancock's solo is as much of a disaster as he was capable of allowing to be released – he never really finds the groove the rest of the musicians are in, doesn't develop his ideas, and comes off as bumbling.

Thankfully, the rest of the record is a giant step up. The other “commercial” track, a Brazilian-ish sounding "El Gaucho" works far better. It's a minor blues laid over an edgy bossa-nova groove, and vaguely resembles something Joe Henderson might have done in his early days. Shorter's solo is confident and inspired, as is Hancock's – neither one is beholden to the supposedly accessible intentions of the tune, and they explore the harmonic and melodic potential of the music fully.

What elevates the record above the workaday for me, however, are the two slow tunes – Jimmy Rowles' "502 Blues," and Shorter's own "Teru." The former is obviously a tune from a different pen and a different time than Shorter's own. The melody's intervals are far more grounded in conventional tonality than the rest of the material. Shorter manages to impose his own mood on it, though, and it works like a charm. His version ends up being dark and searching but without the deliberate evilness someone like Miles would have imposed on it. "Teru," to my ears, is a minor masterpiece. The head is very minimalist – only a handful of notes – but utterly original and distinctive. The feeling is melancholy, but Shorter's harmonies are vague, and the tonal center is not at all obvious. He achieves the mood he is looking for without having to resort to an excess of melodramatic minor chords. The rhythm section's backing is perfect – Chambers, who is perfectly capable of sounding like two drummers at the same time – barely touches the cymbals with his brushes here.

My 2003 CD reissue came with a curiosity – Hancock's "The Collector" included as a bonus track. I was not surprised that it was not released on the original LP – it is way different in feel than the rest of the music here. It is more intense, more Milesian and just far more “out” in general. Chambers does his best Tony Williams impression, and both Hancock and Shorter throw all caution to the wind (too much for my taste), and more than once come very close to falling off the cliff of dissonance.

It's all connected after all

I guess it had to happen sooner or later. A post in an RSS feed I subscribe to cited another to which I also happen to subscribe. Does this say anything about anything? Inevitable, because if I'm interested in both, eventually they'll have something in common to discuss? Dunno -- most people would instinctively place the two on opposite sides of the political spectrum. I guess it's just a big, world-wide web out there.

Russian "elections"

Excellent op-ed from Anne Appelbaum in today's Washington Post. She confirms my long-held view that the Russian government is reflexively anti-Western, and, since time immemorial, has been mounting a concerted effort to make the public feel the same way. I'm not trying to gloat -- she offer far more insight in the limited amount of space that a newspaper column allows than I ever could.

As we all know, Russia held "elections" last weekend. The basic question Appelbaum tries to answer is, "why bother?" The answer, she thinks, is the fundamental insecurity of the Kremlin regime. They know, deep inside, that their system is worse than a Western democracy both on a moral and philosophical level as well as a pragmatic one, but they have no effective way of dealing with the fallout should the public realize this. Therefore, an appearance of democracy is maintained, accompanied by doing everything possible to convince the populace that not only is there democracy in Russia, but that it is actually of higher quality than in the West.

Appelbaum's only point that made me raise my eyebrows a bit is her claim that this approach at least gives the Kremlin a fighting chance to stave off the massive civic unrest that would be almost guaranteed to happen once the oil runs out and the economy plummets again. Once that happens, the Russians will see that the emperor has no clothes (or too much expensive clothes as the case may be, and, more to the point, that it is an emperor in the first place), and would demand genuine, Western-style accountability. Oh how I wish she were right. But I have grave doubts. With no history of democracy and accountability in the entire society ever, what are the chances? Ukraine is small, and, as an identifiable geopolitical entity, relatively young, and therefore capable, socially, of an attempt at a Western-style system. Russia, of which neither is true -- I am not so sure.

Anyway, I heartily recommend her entire article.

Spanish class

A couple of weeks of Spanish class to catch up on. Going well, mostly. Several people have given up, so the class is now noticeably smaller. This is a good thing -- everyone gets to talk more. Last week, more than half the class was spent on nothing but speaking. The instructor conducted a relatively extensive (by intro standards) interview with each student, using everything we have learned so far, plus additional words and expressions that he defined as he went along. Two patterns emerged.

One -- most students are extremely frustrated not to be able to say what they think. They are thinking in complex terms -- full vocabulary, past and future tenses, etc. Of course, they have none of this in Spanish yet. But they seem to be unwilling, or it just doesn't occur to them, to simplify intentionally and reduce their answer until they can say it, even if that leaves the nuances out. They try to say it all, and immediately get stuck. This is annoying, but I can relate -- my initial reaction is to go complex too, especially since I could say it all perfectly adequately in French, and some part of my brain somewhere must think "If I can say it in one foreign language, I ought to be able to say it in another." Takes some effort to accept that it doesn't work like that.

The other pattern is far more irritating -- when students can't say something in Spanish, they immediately blurt it out in English. To them, it's better to say it in some language than not to say it at all, and they are either too lazy, or just too overwhelmed, to pause and ask. To me, it's infinitely better to use ¿Cómo se dice? five times in a sentence than to use a single English word, but evidently others don't feel that way. That drives me crazy, but what can you do...

Last week's exchange of the evening:

Instructor to student: ¿De dónde es tu esposo?
Student: De Toledo
Instructor: ¿Si? ¿España?
Student (pauses): No... Ohio

Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter

I finished Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter by Michelle Mercer last night. I enjoyed it for the most part, though the book is not without its problems. If I am remembering correctly, this is the only biography of a person still living that I've read to date. It is also the only authorized biography I have ever read, in the sense that Shorter himself actively participated in its creation by granting hours of informal interviews to the author. As such, it raises some obvious questions.

I must admit that I initially found the idea of helping to write one's own biography distasteful. Throughout the book, Mercer paints Shorter as an excessively humble, self-effacing guy, yet here he is, contributing copiously to his own biography. Can there be anything more self-indulgent? Also, on some level I question the very premise of writing a biography of a living person. Anyone whose life's work is not complete, and, more importantly, has not had a chance to be analyzed fully and influence those who come after, does not deserve a biography, one might argue. But then, one could probably argue the opposite just as effectively, assuming the subject has made sufficient achievements in his lifetime. And on that count, Shorter definitely qualifies. While not unique, he is one of a very small group of musicians still living that have a direct link to the “magic” jazz age of the 1950s and 60s. And of those, the group that is still actively recording and performing is even smaller. In fact, besides Shorter, the only one I can think of readily is Herbie Hancock (widely discussed in the book). Since jazz, even the most accessible kind, has a very tenuous connection to the mainstream, we have no idea whether in twenty or thirty years anyone will be capable of writing about someone like Shorter, much less inclined to, so I suppose it makes sense for someone to do it while the opportunity is there.

Mercer is definitely a fan, and that, combined with the authorized nature of the book, makes the writing laudatory. A little one-dimensionally so. Throughout the book, Mercer paints Shorter as a really nice guy, and downplays what a more impartial biographer would emphasize. It's not that I'm looking for “dirt,” but deployed judiciously, it can help the reader form a more complete picture of the subject. The most glaring example is that if Footprints is accurate, Shorter is the only major jazz musician in history who has never used any drugs. I find that difficult to believe (though not impossible – even today, at 74, he seems to be in excellent shape). His first marriage gets exactly one paragraph. And, perhaps most disappointingly, I would have loved to know more about Shorter's brother Alan.

Alan appears to have been a professional musician too (it's not entirely clear), a trumpeter, but his style was so avant-garde that he had no public success at all in the US, and even in Europe, where he lived for most of his life, it was marginal. Was he a good musician, just misunderstood? Or did he never acquire real skills as a player and compensated by simply being weird? Did his personal idiosyncrasies, which Mercer examines just enough to give her readers a taste, contribute to his bizarre style? We don't know. Granted, this is a biography of Wayne Shorter, not his brother. Still, since it's pretty much a given that Alan himself will never get a biography of his own, I would have been interested to know more.

All that said, the book is far better than just about any other fan-written biography I've come across. First of all, Mercer is a solid writer. She makes extensive use of direct quotes, both from Shorter and many other people who knew him, but she works them expertly into the text, and the narrative flows smoothly. She also deserves credit for some coverage of Shorter's demons. While drug use is conspicuously absent, Mercer makes no secret of his drinking, and eventually the admission comes that it was a serious problem that plagued him through most of his life. What “dirt” there is, it is entertaining, like the incident when Tina Turner came to stay with the Shorters to escape her abusive husband.

Mercer's biggest accomplishment for me, however, is tying the arc of tragedy in Shorter's life to the decisions he made as a musician. And tragedy there was, in spades. Severely brain-damaged daughter who finally died at fourteen, after being cared for on a daily basis by Shorter and his wife. Father being killed in a car accident on his way to see Wayne. Brother dying prematurely of a ruptured aorta. Seeing great jazz musicians and close personal friends go one by one – Coltrane, Lee Morgan, Miles. And finally, Ana Maria, his wife of 26 years, mother of the brain-damaged daughter, with whom he reunited once after a separation, and who had serious drinking problems of her own that they overcame together, being killed on TWA Flight 800 in 1996.

Through most of his career, Shorter was excoriated by critics for many of his solo recordings. Too electric. Too rock-n-roll. Then, ten years later, not rock-n-roll enough. The writing is too dense. Live shows are a mess (because the musicians can't play the dense writing). Touring with Santana cheapens his value as a jazz improviser. Etc., etc. I haven't heard most of his solo recordings of the 70s and 80s. But Mercer, to her credit, has. According to her, there is real depth to the music, especially compositionally. More than occasionally, that depth was too personal – accessible only to Shorter himself, unless explained – hence the lack of critical acceptance. After reading the book and learning what he went through, I cannot begrudge him the opacity of his solo output.

On purely musical terms, the book mostly satisfies. I'm not sure if Mercer is a musician herself – I suspect not – but she understands enough to discuss the music intelligently. Someone looking for really deep analysis of the minutia of Shorter's composing and improvisation will not find it here, but that allows Mercer to avoid entirely the turgid, high-falutin' commentary that some supposedly great critics have indulged in in the past (Martin Williams comes to mind).

My final criticism has to do with the way the book discusses the way Shorter talks. Mercer makes a big deal of Shorter's oblique, oracular way of speaking, about music as well as everything else. When one of his short-term bands in the early 80s botches a tune when trying to improvise multiple lines simultaneously, his assessment is “sometimes a rabbit runs down a hole, and sometimes he falls down a hole.” “Put more water into those chords,” he tells pianist Danilo Perez. Perez contemplates for a while, thinks he knows what Shorter wants; they do another take. “But the water has to be clean,” Shorter says. Mercer paints this as a positive, a sign of his unorthodox, all-encompassing thinking, and a skill at incorporating all experiences into his music-making. In fact, she implies a bit of a special status for herself when she enthuses that Shorter talks to her like that, too, and that she understands him. The anecdote she uses that illustrates this well is a phone call that interrupts one of their interviews. A journalist wants to ask Shorter questions about his new album. Shorter tries to talk his abstract philosophy, but the journalist persists. Finally, Shorter gives up and gives him the direct answers he wants. When he hangs up, he asks Mercer, “you don't want me to talk to you like that, do you?” Maybe she doesn't, but as a reader who does not know Shorter personally, I want her to. Yes, the fact that he has a tendency to speak in cryptic koans is telling, but I cannot imagine at least some people's reaction not being simply "that dude is weird. Can't he talk like a normal person?" True, his insistence on a broad-terms approach is a sign of an advanced mind, but it is also, I am sure, an explanation for many failures and misunderstandings in his music and his life, and deserves to be examined as such.