Portland, Days One and Two

We arrived late on a Friday afternoon, after a long but mercifully trouble-free connection through Los Angeles. A much needed vacation. Our hotel, the deLuxe, though just outside the heart of downtown, was very nice, quite luxurious, with friendly and professional staff and one of the more comfortable beds I recall finding at a hotel. Our room - the most basic and least expensive - could have been a tad larger and could have benefited from an armchair, but on balance, it was a more than adequate base of operations.

Somewhat unpacked and marginally refreshed, we walked through the heat of late-afternoon downtown to Nel Centro, a hip Italian joint located in the Hotel Modera (a former Days Inn dressed up in imitation mid-century modern duds) for a happy hour-cum-early dinner. The patio, though attractive, was crowded and lacked any shade whatsoever, so we settled in at the bar for drinks and a couple of delicious small plates. The crowd was young and fashionable - a bit too much for us - but on balance we enjoyed it.

We had no plans for the rest of the evening, so we took a leisurely walk back to the hotel while admiring the downtown architecture and whiled some time away at the Driftwood Room, apparently legendary around Portland. When the hotel was thoroughly renovated a couple of years ago, the regulars fretted over the old bar's fate, but the new owners resurrected it in its original form - walls covered with planks of wood, pieces of namesake driftwood adorning the room, the organic curve of the bar and an almost total darkness, broken up only by a few votives on the small tables and a handful of obliquely placed colored footlights that spotlit the walls without really illuminating anything. My negroni was perfectly proportioned and delicious.

We started our Saturday morning with a breakfast at Mother's, a pilgrimage spot for locals and tourists alike. Arriving a few minutes after the 9:00 a.m. opening time, we found chaotic crowds but were seated almost right away, although not in the main velvet and brass room that contains the bar. The food - fresh berry pancakes for J. and wild salmon hash for me - was delicious, to say nothing of Portland's famous Stumptown coffee, served in an insulated French press and worth every penny of the $7.50 they charged for it.

We took our time finishing breakfast, then gradually made our way to the Saturday Market, a Portland institution, but not before making a detour into the legendary Second Avenue Records. The Market, though lively, proved to be a disappointment. I was hoping for serious local artists exhibiting and selling their work, but although we did see some impressive photography and even one artist who constructed her images out of long sequences of microscopic numbers, on balance we found too many cheesy t-shirts and flowing tie-dye dresses and not enough other things.

Tiring of the market (and probably spending more time there than it warranted), we strolled South along the Willamette River through the unseasonably hot and sunny day, admiring Portland's numerous bridges and eventually arriving at some impressive looking but very new and thus still isolated residential high-rises and, just beyond, one of the more outlandish examples of Portland's preoccupation with public transit -- the Aerial Tram terminal. The Tram took us to the OSHU campus at the top of the hill, where we got an excellent view of snow-covered Mt. Hood, about 45 miles to the South-East and took a few pictures in the small sculpture garden before heading back and catching the streetcar to the Pearl District.

The Pearl is probably the quintessence of pre-recession Portland - hyper-modern and undoubtedly very green condo blocks, boutiques selling hideous urban clothing, chic-looking restaurants. On the whole, though, the neighborhood did less for me than I expected. Some of the residential architecture, to be sure, was far more attractive and engaging than anything I have seen most other places - rooftop gardens, asymmetrically cantilevered balconies, matte exterior paint in muted but contrasting colors. But the neighborhood, while it had sterilized itself of the original grit so plentiful in the rest of the city, did not replace it with dense sidewalk life you might find in a city like San Francisco. On a Saturday afternoon, it felt empty and sterile. Sweaty and tired by this point, we escaped briefly into the Deschutes brewery for a pint of one of their delicious ales, then headed back to the hotel to clean up for dinner.

We had a reservation at Wildwood, located in the Nob Hill area of Portland, and having run out of time to walk or take the streetcar, we ended up experiencing our one cab ride in Portland. The driver, with whom we chatted amiably throughout the ten-minute drive to the restaurant, was a fellow in his mid-twenties, well-spoken and obviously educated. Not something you find in other large or even medium-sized American cities (and small ones have no need for cabs at all these days). He was only the latest example of what I had been observing since the moment we stepped off the airplane. All service jobs in Portland are done by - I have no slick euphemism to employ here - young white people. The city was eerily immigrant-free. I would have to wait another day to find out precisely why that was.

Our dinner at Wildwood proved to be delicious. I started with tiny house-made gnocchi served with fava beans, morel mushrooms and bits of bacon. J. opted for greens with feta, heirloom tomatoes and peas. Both were delicious, with mine decidedly more substantial. For the main course, this being our first proper dinner in the Northwest, J. chose Chinook salmon served over potatoes and green beans, sauced with just a drop of brown butter. Simple to the extreme but just about perfect. I took our server's recommendation and ordered the pork chop, which, though far too large even on a day when I had no lunch, was spectacular -the most tender and flavorful pork I've had in years served over potatoes and shockingly sweet braised leeks. Our wine was a local Pinot Noir from Apolloni - more Californian than Oregonian in style, but very satisfying.

Sated, we slowly walked through the beautiful summer evening back towards downtown and our hotel, admiring the lively bars and restaurants along 23rd Avenue intermingled with stately but still boutique pre-WWII apartment buildings. I must admit that more than once that evening, I caught myself imagining an alternate universe in which Portland was home rather than a destination.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

W.G. Seblad is unique, in my experience, in that his fiction is classified as such but does not read like fiction at all. He is the flip side of someone like Truman Capote in In Cold Blood -- a piece of journalism that for all the world reads like a novel. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, in particular, comes off like a combination of travelogue, memoir and, at times, textbook, but never a novel. Written in the first person, it is a meandering account of a man -- there is no doubt that it is Sebald himself -- wandering, mostly on foot, through the English countryside, occasionally meeting people, and seeing places and things that launch him on long historical asides that sometimes don't end up anywhere near where they started.

If this sounds like a curious book, it is, but ultimately, the strange style -- I'm not even sure if that is quite the word for it -- is largely irrelevant. For me, Sebald is all about the mood, and Rings is full of it. Subdued and melancholy, it never degenerates into outright brooding -- about the right balance for me these days. The thing that strikes one immediately is that large swaths of the narrator's world, at least until he meets whomever it is he set out to find, is almost completely devoid of people. The few that are present are always so remote -- fishermen on the beach observed from a tall cliff, an embracing couple on a distant hillside -- that they offer no human companionship at all. When he does finally meet his interlocutors, they are inevitably individuals, never groups, engaged in some solitary pursuit. It is a world that, while not entirely appealing, is one in which I instinctively feel comfortable. The darkness and weight do get intense at regular intervals, but even then I feel drawn in by the stark beauty of his scenes. One does not read Sebald to cheer oneself up.

The Emigrants, which I had read a while ago, uses the same approach, and I enjoyed it slightly more than Rings, perhaps because the latter book, during one or two of Sebald's historic/educational asides, does get just a touch polemical -- something I do not remember the other book doing, heavy on history though it was. And the last chapter, dedicated entirely to the history of sericulture, and from which the narrator is completely absent, feels tacked on as an afterthought. Still, on balance, The Rings of Saturn gave me many an enjoyable moment of contemplating the narrator's, and by extension my own, loneliness in the world.

2007 Leelanau Cellars Vignoles

The last of the bottles I brought back from Michigan last summer. Vignoles is an obscure grape used for blending in France, but a couple of wineries in Michigan make it as a varietal. L. Mawby even makes it into a sparkler. Anyway, Leelanau Cellars' Vignoles -- very fruity on the nose, melon, maybe a little cucumber. Some sweetness. On the palate, just a touch off-dry, rich and viscous for a white, with excellent acid. Definitely a food wine. I paired it with some pasta with an asparagus and ricotta sauce, and it worked well, the richness of the ricotta offsetting the wine. But it would stand up to something significantly more garlicky as well.

Bill Frisell at the Barns at Wolftrap, 3/3/2010

Went to see Bill Frisell at the Barns at Wolftrap a couple of weeks ago. I didn't really know what to expect. His music has been known to vary pretty drastically from one record to the next, with only his guitar tone maintaining some kind of consistency, and his current trio consists of drums (Rudy Royston) and viola (Eivind Kang)! The show was less weird than one might have expected. Frisell's unmistakable tone was there, and the band sounded surprisingly complete despite the lack of a proper bass voice or other chordal instruments, probably because Frisell himself is so good at filling a lot of space without sounding muddy. The band occasionally slid into free-ish bits of noise and open meter, but by and large stayed in the groove, mostly thanks to Royston who could have easily overplayed but didn't. Kang, for my money, was the least impressive of the bunch. I never really embraced the violin and its ilk as a valid voice in an improvised context, and the fact that Kang was amplified killed the rich overtone series of a good instrument, flattening it into a droning mess. Occasionally, the viola worked well as a sound effect, sounding at times like a whimpering animal or some evil, post-apocalyptic calliope - but as a soloist Kang was not memorable. But on the whole, the show was worth hearing. Frisell is fairly rare in today's world in that he is very idiosyncratic yet almost always accessible, and the live performance was no different. I won't run out to buy a copy of his latest record, but the evening was enjoyable nonetheless.

Sweeney Todd

Saw a production of Sweeney Todd at Signature Theatre last night. J. got some last-minute tickets at a discount. There was a part of me that expected to hate it for the simple reason that it is a musical, but only a part, because I had seen it on Broadway many years ago, must have been 1989 or thereabouts, and I recall having liked it, although I remember no details aside from the general premise of the famously macabre story. Well, last night I did not completely hate it. To be sure, the "musicalness" of it grated on my nerves - the hokey love songs and the overwrought, hyper-theatrical singing style that instantly screams "Broadway" and makes me want to plug my ears. But there were a few redeeming qualities as well - seriously creepy set and costumes, generally solid vocals (with the exception of Anthony and, on some songs, Johanna, whose love story side-plot was kind of pointless anyway) and Sondheim's score that was surprisingly modern and dark, especially on the theme song (reprised throughout the show).

Above all, however, the reason Sweeney Todd works is because it has a hefty dose of tragedy. Todd is a tragic character, and the ending is only somewhat happy, in that the bad guy gets it, but so does everyone else. Only the young lovers - largely irrelevant as I pointed out - live. The thing basically ends in a blood bath. Great art, and even decent art, must reflect either the emotional state of an individual, or some essential aspect of the human condition, on a deep level, and to do that, it must contain a great deal of tragedy, for it is tragedy, more than anything else, that defines our essence and our interactions with one another. That is why most musicals miss the mark by a mile, and why Sweeney Todd gets closer than most despite staying largely true to form.

Edmunds Wilson, To the Finland Station

Edmund Wilson's To The Finland Station is a minor classic, and having finally read it after it had spent years on my list, I can see why. The writing is extremely engaging and frequently quite beautiful. There were times when I found the book hard to put down. Because of this, I read without taking notes, so what follows is shorter and more shallow than it might have been otherwise.

...Station is an unusual book - it is the literary and ideological history of socialist revolutionary movements in Europe. Wilson starts with the earliest thinkers who left a significant body of work to which we can trace the Radical Left - Michelet, Renan and their immediate followers. The bulk of the book is dedicated to Marx and Engels and their written output. In the final section, which is somewhat less focused on written work, Wilson discusses the rise of Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

One of the really remarkable things about ...Station, though, and the main reason why it is so engaging, is a very strong emphasis on biography. In particular, Wilson renders Marx, and his relationship with Engels, with such vividness and attention to detail that we get a very vibrant and complete portrait of both men. In fact, the middle section of the book would suffice as a biography of Marx for most readers. The portrait of Marx that emerges is that of an extremely unpleasant character. He was a mad genius, utterly incapable of functioning in society, unable to manage the simplest details of daily life without help, all the while driven inexorably to write. He was opinionated to the extreme, unable to suffer the slightest disagreement, disdainful of all interlocutors, even those who were largely supportive of his aims, and obsessed with always having full control of any movement that claimed him as its ideological foundation. He was doted on throughout his life by his long-suffering wife and financed by Engels, without whose handouts he would have probably perished, unable as he was to hold a job of any sort.

As to the substance of his subjects' work, Wilson is frustrating. He is an extremely keen critic of Marx & Co.'s work, and where their arguments, or methods, or both, don't hold water, which they don't in many places, Wilson deconstructs them with impressive subtlety and finesse until there is nothing left. He is unequivocal on the fact that for all the ink they have spilled on their theories of dialectical materialism, "the truth is that Marx and Engels never worked out their own point of view in any very elaborate way." (p. 213).

I am particularly grateful to Wilson for not ignoring the aspect most others do: their utter disdain for some of Europe's, and the world's, peoples that they felt were incapable of executing a revolution and should therefore be eliminated so they don't stand in the way. Engels in 1851: "The Poles have never done anything in history except commit courageous quarrelsome stupidities" (p. 270). And a little later: "Engels also approved when 'energetic Yankees' took California away from the 'lazy Mexicans' because... the former were better fitted to work the country..." (ibid.).

For all that, however, Wilson, who is well known to have been sympathetic to the political Left, turns right around and expresses an almost unbridled admiration for his subjects' achievements. It is true that technically he is admiring the writing - the persuasiveness of their arguments, the effective responses to their critics, etc. - but the terms he uses are tantamount to admiring the substance of the ideas the writing contains:

These writings of Marx are electrical. Nowhere perhaps in the history of thought is the reader so made to feel the excitement of a new intellectual discovery. Marx is here at his most vivid and his most vigorous - in the closeness and the exactitude of political observation... etc. (p. 237)

To The Finland Station was first published in 1940, when the West, and thus Wilson, could still be forgiven for not yet having understood the full implications of Stalin's most egregious crimes of a few years earlier. By the time he reissued the book with a new introduction in 1968, the full extent of the horror was well known, and in fairness, I must acknowledge that he does make an effort to repent: "I had no premonition that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known..." (p. v). He also makes one of the most scathing character sketches of Lenin I have read. But he makes no effort to trace the beginnings of that tyranny to the work of Marx and his cohorts and followers that he so admired, so we are left with the deflating sense that the obviously brilliant Wilson is little more than another exponent of the fallacy that makes the continued appeal of the radical Left so frustratingly persistent: that Marxism was ruined by its implementation and at its core remains a good idea.

Keith Jarrett: Testament: Paris/London

In television, it's called jumping the shark. The gimmick gets stale and the audience stops caring. It pains me to say this, but judging by his latest recording Testament: Paris/London (ECM, 2009), I'm afraid the same may have happened to Keith Jarrett.

But maybe I am being insufficiently charitable. I firmly believe that any music must be able to stand on its own, requiring no written or spoken commentary, introduction or analysis, but maybe, just maybe, with Testament you could make a case for starting with the liner notes. Like some of his music, Jarrett's notes have always been a little pompous and self-absorbed for my taste, and Testament is no different, but unlike his previous recordings, here we get way more about the man's emotional state than we bargained for. He tells us about his wife leaving him, about almost having a nervous breakdown before one of the concerts documented here, and about how people around him, both friends and strangers, lifted his spirits and, together with the categorical imperative of playing freely improvised music, helped him get through the ordeal. So those who might be inclined to indulge Testament as something Jarrett had to do out of desperation, and thus forgive whatever artistic deficiencies it might have, have my permission to do so. Ultimately, though, these confessions are neither here nor there. They do not absolve the music from the requirement of having to stand on its own, and that it comes close to not doing.

Jarrett has been playing and recording improvised solo concerts for decades. He would start with a strain or two of melody, or a simple chord progression, and extrapolate from it on the spot for as long as necessary, until the material had nothing left to give up. It did always amuse me that he ran out of steam, however gracefully, just before he would have exceeded the length of an LP side, though in his defense, I will mention that he took the advent of CDs in stride and would improvise non-stop for an hour or more in his late-80s and early 90s concerts. But I digress. Many of these recordings contain moments of sublime beauty and overpowering poignancy. As self-indulgent as they are, we do not need to make extra-musical excuses for their validity. The music itself has always offered more than enough. The guy sure knew how to get at your inner core with stuff that he claimed to have pulled mostly out of his head and mostly on the spot.

About ten years ago, however, after recovering from a long illness, Jarrett's style changed. As first documented on Radiance (2002), each individual improvisation became shorter and more harmonically and melodically dense. He was now communicating in discrete units instead of a long narrative arc. Far more significant than the length, however, was the fact that Jarrett tried to abandon all preconceived notions. He wanted to improvise from a completely blank slate. Much of the resulting music acquired, in the best cases, a certain brooding darkness, initially appealing but ultimately directionless, and in the worst, the seemingly random abrasive dissonance of hyper-modern atonal compositions. Much, but not all. One does not throw away thirty years of experience overnight, or even in the course of a single illness, however serious, and at least half of the material on Radiance betrays much of Jarrett's old style, only on a smaller scale. The heart-rending minor-key melodies are there, as are his trademark foot-stomping vamps that launch his right-hand lines into the sonic stratosphere. Also present is a strong whiff of the American Songbook which he clearly absorbed while working on his album of unaccompanied standards The Melody at Night, With You (1998). On Radiance, Jarrett is not playing the actual standards, of course, but their chords and the general direction in which some of that music moves are definitely in his fingers. There is plenty of incomprehensible, intellectually overwhelming and emotionally closed noodling on Radiance, to be sure, but with the judicious use of your CD player's programming feature, the two discs can be distilled down to about an hour of very enjoyable music.

Which brings us to Testament. Three discs, two complete concerts, no editing. Whatever the personal upheavals in Jarrett's life, it is obvious that he has been moving consistently in the direction started on Radiance, and has traveled quite a distance over the past decade. He still has a lot to say, and in the relatively short time limit of the individual tracks he has imposed on himself (most are in the 6-9 minute range), he has to cram in a lot of notes into each one. The melodic and harmonic foundation of his old style is not completely gone, but he has clearly shed much of what was still in his toolbox a decade ago. The result is that the communication between the performer and his listeners, or this listener at least, has broken down almost completely. Jarrett's thought patterns are so densely packed and idiosyncratic, and are so lacking in audible structure and organization, that when the music is over, I think nothing and feel nothing, but not in a meditative, mind-clearing sort of way. Instead, I seek meaning intensely while he is playing and find myself woefully unsatisfied when he is done.

A small handful of tracks - it seems silly listing names when they are all just Part 1, Part 2, etc. -- are still effective. Predictably, they are the ones that have retained the vestiges of his original style. Where recognizable chord progressions and motifs based on familiar intervals percolate to the surface, Testament momentarily satisfies. These moments are much too few and far between, however. The bulk of the music remains Sphinx-like in its impenetrability. For Jarrett himself, I suspect the recording is a triumph. He has come closer than ever before to being completely spontaneous. His audience, however, has lost a once eloquent improviser who has withdrawn completely into his own world.

Snow

Greater Washington, DC, has been under two feet of snow since Saturday, and another foot is predicted for tonight. The temperatures have been hovering in the upper 20s and low 30s. The city, needless to say, is not handling it well. All government offices and schools closed even before the snow started on Friday, and remain closed. The subway was completely shut down all weekend, and above-ground stations didn’t open until this morning, with trains, which normally come every 3-5 minutes during rush hour, running as much as a half hour apart. The streets are a mess – practically nothing has been plowed, at least not in a way that is actually helpful, and for some incomprehensible reason, there is no evidence of anyone doing the most obvious thing: spraying salt.

I grew up in a cold place. The snow typically started falling in late October, would stick by mid-November and the ground would remain covered until at least late March, with a fresh dusting of an inch or two falling every few days. Temperatures in the single digits Fahrenheit were commonplace. More significantly, though, it was a place where both modern technology and a Western work ethic and sense of responsibility were in short supply in the best of times. So how did we do it? The subway – the city’s only piece of public infrastructure that worked almost flawlessly – ran on schedule regardless of the weather. The rest of the transit system didn’t, but then, it never did. The buses and street cars were antiquated, unsafe, overcrowded and filthy, but they stumbled along every bit as well (or poorly) in driving snow and frigid cold as they did on a beautiful summer day (itself a rare occurrence). Not once do I remember a complete cancellation of service due to weather.

Four-wheel drive was unheard of outside the military – the few people who did own private automobiles, my father among them, typically drove locally built replicas of 1960s Fiats: rear-wheel drive, 60 hp engines, skinny bias-ply tires and no safety features to speak of (power-assisted brakes were an extra-cost option; ours didn’t have them). Yet not once did my father refuse to drive because of the weather. He would take the battery out of the car and carry it indoors at night (giving himself permanent back problems in the process) lest it would be dead the next morning because of the cold, but not driving did not occur to him. Sometimes, he had to dig the car out with an ice pick, and it took a while, but off it went eventually down the slushy street, fishtailing and spinning its tires.

I do not remember seeing the streets being plowed. I am sure they were, but I cannot imagine it being done efficiently. Nothing else in that society and that system ever was, and the idea of the government, at any level, providing a decent service to its citizens without being bribed, cajoled, or threatened from above, was anathema to the very way the system worked. So while I am sure snow plows disrupted traffic in the center of the city regularly, I would bet money the streets weren’t any cleaner for it.

So how did we do it? How did we not only function, but took the miserable cold, snow and filth in stride every winter? Why is it that masses of people were absent from work regularly, but never because of the weather? Is it simply a question of being used to it?

Wgot 2008

I've been promising my friend S.G. a review of the latest mix he had put together (or, rather, his computer running wget had put together for him) for a while, so here it is.

Keren Ann: Hallelujah
This is one of the rare songs where a specific version - the late Jeff Buckley's in this case - has rendered any version that would come after it irrelevant. I suppose one could argue that a genuinely well-crafted song such as this one lends itself to a variety of interpretations, and I suppose it does, but that does not guarantee those interpretations' success. Keren Ann deserves a few points for trying, but that's about it.

Max Richter: The Twins
I have a vague recollection of this track circulating around the internet a year or two ago, and if memory serves, there was a video associated with it that was in some way remarkable. Having never seen the video, I can't comment. The tune is a pleasant enough vignette that wouldn't be out of place on a soundtrack to an indie film.

Sven Libaek: Inner Space: Dark World
Speaking of film music, this guy is supposed to be a real film composer. Objectively, this is dismissable, but something about the mood it creates does it for me. The combination of vibes and electric piano - frequently difficult to pull off because the timbres of the two instruments are so similar - helps. A highlight in an otherwise dim set, no question about it.

Ratatat: Mirando
This style probably has a name, but I'm not hip enough to know what it is. A kind of jungle-meets-lo-fi. Some cool-sounding analog synths and Steve Hackett-like guitar bits, but the tunes doesn't go anywhere and quickly starts to grate on your nerves, or mine at least. Gains a bit on repeated listening, but not much.

Armin Van Buuren: Precious
What techno was meant to be - infectious beyond belief but manages to create a mood with some seriously dark minor chords despite a relentlessly pounding beat. Good stuff.

Voyager One: The Future is Obsolete
It starts out with enough promise, thanks to seriously floppy and echoey drums and exaggeratedly English vocals, but ends up sounding like a bad version of Ride (if anyone remembers those guys).

Breakbot: Happy Rabbit
The name of the band says it all. The headache arrives quickly, though the discoey bass line might have worked in a different context.

The Retail Sectors: The First Step to the End of Life
Ever heard an introduction that does not introduce anything? This is it.

The Postal Service: Brand New Colony
The sound is recognizable, but I've liked these guys' other stuff better. The interlude in the middle of the song is a nice touch.

Chakachas: Via Cuba
This has to be a joke. A polished but generic rhumba backing track that sounds like it was originally intended for a different, and better, recording, with seriously goofy vocals, in English but rendered in the most offensively stereotypical Latino accent. A musical equivalent of blackface?

The Coast: Nueva York
Piano-driven indie power pop with more than a touch of Crowded House and maybe even a little Springsteen. Could be a lot worse.

Man Man: Black Mission Goggles
Circus music on steroids. The fact that the first four bars of each verse are dead ringers for The Beatles' Come Together does nothing to redeem the track. There is an allusion to Tom Waits about forty seconds before the end, but I suspect most people would quit listening long before then.

Mystery Jets: Young Love (Shoes Mix)
Can't decide if it wants to be art-pop, techno, or 80s-retro. Next.

Cloud Cult: When Water Comes to Life
Another cinematic track, decently arranged with some strings... until the vocal kicks in.

Emily Jane White: Bessie Smith
The standout track on the whole disc. Who cares that she is a dead ringer for Cat Power? The song just works, propelled along by some gorgeous arco double bass. I think I'll get the album.

???:???
No tags on this one. Waltz time keeps your attention for a while, but the whiny vocals and generic arrangement lost me about a minute and a half into the track.

Can Joann: Endure en Vogue
Nice high-register bass. Now how about a song to go with it?

Voice of the Seven Woods: Satai Nova
Another track that sounds more like a vignette than a full-blown song, but the acoustic guitar is actually pretty slick.

Jim Noir: Don't You Worry
This guy really wants to be performing in the sixties, but since he can't, he feels compelled to add some gratuitously reverbed synths. The listener gains nothing.

The Walkmen: Lady Midnight
So this is alt.country? Or just a Johnny Cash rip-off? And why is it so boring?

Gnarls Barkley: Run
Words fail me. Take a James Brown LP and play it at 45 rpm, then mix it with the backing track played at the intended 33 1/3.

Stefan Zwieg, Beware of Pity

I have neither the skill nor the inclination to analyze fiction, so there isn’t much that I could say about Stefan Zwieg’s Beware of Pity that wouldn’t be trite. My friend C.S., whose copy I borrowed, claimed that it was the best novel he has ever read, though he has since disowned that claim. I did not think much of the book for most of its duration, delighting in the details more than the overall theme, which I thought was spoon-fed to the reader to a disappointing degree. The characters, too, with the possible exception of Dr. Condor, were not portrayed with particular distinction or vivid color. Imagine my pleasant surprise, then, when the story, as it neared its denouement, steadily gathered steam and, in the last thirty or so pages, became almost overwhelming in its power and the palpable sense of inner torture Hoffmiller experiences. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that what I thought was going to be the climax (given away by the introduction I had made the mistake of reading), was not it at all, or only a small part of it. Hoffmiller is an anti-hero that the best (worst?) in literature will need to reckon with.

For some reason, I was imagining the novel as a movie the entire time I was reading it, preferably a high-budget period melodrama, with thoroughly researched and exquisitely rendered detail. True, a film of Beware of Pity would likely be British, despite the story taking place in Austro-Hungary on the eve of WWI, but for some reason I was picturing Paul Giamatti as Condor. I could also imagine someone like Ian McEwan writing the novel today – same setting, same characters, just a little more evenly rendered without sacrificing any of the power of the ending.

Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane: Complete Riverside Recordings

In their day, and to some extent still, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane were two of the most controversial figures in post-war jazz. Both have had their ardent admirers and fierce critics since time immemorial. The consensus today seems to respect them both as pioneers who pushed the art form into theretofore unchartered territory, while the aesthetic and emotional appeal of their music remains as open to debate as ever. It is all the more surprising, then, that the two hardly ever played and recorded together. Aside from a double set of their Carnegie Hall concert from 1957, released to great fanfare four years ago, and a barely audible bootleg from the Five Spot from around the same time, The Complete Riverside Recordings (Riverside, 2006) is the only other surviving document of their collaboration, and purportedly the only one recorded in a studio.

Recorded by Orrin Keepnews, then owner and producer at Riverside, over three sessions in the spring and summer of 1957, the set promises more than it delivers, but almost makes up for that by other unexpected revelations. This is an archival document, not a record to be listened to for pleasure. False starts, aborted takes, and even studio banter are plentiful. Whether you consider that to be valuable or distracting will depend on your perspective, of course. Suffice it to say this is a record to study, not to float away to into some magical jazz universe. Far more important, however, is the personnel. Monk, Coltrane's senior by nine years and the undisputed leader of these sessions, had brought in a septet (!) which included, in addition to Coltrane, Art Blakey on drums and Wilbur Ware on bass, the now forgotten Ray Copeland on trumpet, Gigi Gryce on alto and, unbelievable though it sounds, Coleman Hawkins on second tenor.

Or perhaps not so unbelievable - Hawkins was Monk's first steady employer in the late 1940s, and the quintessential swing-era saxophonist had done an amazing job late in his career keeping up with the bebop kids without sacrificing his trademark style. So the most obvious reason the recording is valuable is the opportunity to hear not the interplay between Monk and Coltrane, but the contrast between Coltrane and Hawkins. In fact, the first track to offer this - Gryce's Blues for Tomorrow -- does not feature any of Monk's piano at all (he is reported to have fallen asleep and wheeled out on an equipment cart, but Keepnews had to use up the studio time he had paid for). Coltrane solos first, followed immediately by Hawkins. Coltrane was on the cusp of his "sheets of sound" period in 1957, but here he betrays little of what was to come a couple of years later. His tone is much less edgy than what most listeners are used to, but the solo as a whole is unfocused, and already sounds unnecessarily busy. Hawkins wins hands-down - his statement is swinging, well structured, played with enough energy to keep up with the rest of the band but without compromising clarity.

Further comparison between the two is available on Ruby, My Dear - Hawk and Trane get one version each. Coltrane acquits himself better here - his solo is measured, relaxed and very "inside" (the same can be said of his solo on Epistrophy), while Hawkins pulls off a few boppy runs in homage to his session mates.

Behind all of this, or some of it at any rate, is Monk. He actually solos very little, preferring to play the role of glue, but when he finally does on Epistrophy and Well, You Needn't in the middle of Disc Two, it is very effective. His solos are firmly based on the themes, he does not show off, and where he uses the dissonance for which he was supposed to have been famous, he balances it perfectly with space - the stranger the intervals, the fewer notes he uses. His comping, too, is much in the same vein, though it is worth considering the fact that he plays much more behind some of the horns than others, and the one that gets short thrift is Coltrane. Whether it was a clash of two intense musical personalities, or a simple lack of familiarity with one another's styles, we will never know. Suffice it to say that Monk lays out a lot, and when he does not, as on Trinkle, Tinkle and, to a lesser extent, Nutty (he starts but seems to give up after a while), his playing behind Coltrane is far from adventurous. It sounds as if the two couldn't quite find a shared musical language, and Monk, being the more experienced of the two at the time, simply got out of the way.

His playing behind Gryce, by contrast, whether sparse, as on the short version of Epistrophy, or more dense, as on Well, You Needn't, is always appropriate. It really seems that of the bunch, Hawkins included, Monk is the most comfortable with Gryce, and in general, it would not be an overstatement to say that Gryce is the real discovery of the record. Boppy, but without the nervous jitter of Charlie Parker, he develops his solos thoughtfully and has a good feel for the tune and his accompanists. Definitely on this reviewer's list to explore further.

Whether Complete Riverside Recordings is essential will depend on your approach. For an historian of 1950s jazz, it is an indispensable document. For the rest, it tantalizes with possibilities while leaving us with little that is truly satisfying, while at the same time suggesting many areas for further exploration.

Kennedy Center Chamber Players, January 10th, 2010.

First concert of the year last Sunday: the Kennedy Center Chamber Players with an all-Brahms program. Three string sonatas, one each for cello, viola and violin. In a word, excellent.

Cellist David Hardy opened with the E-minor sonata, Op. 38, which is possibly my favorite piece of chamber music, partly because it is so transparent. As great as much of Brahms's work is, a lot of it can be quite dense. So much goes on all at the same time, even when only two instruments are playing, that following the music takes real effort and can, in extreme cases, take away from the emotional enjoyment. Not so with Op. 38. Apparently written for a musician for whom cello was a secondary instrument, it is full of gorgeous melodies, unhurried, logical development, and interplay between the soloist and the accompanist that is immediately graspable but no less delightful for it. My reference version of the work is the recording Yo-Yo Ma did with Emmanuel Ax back in the mid-80s, but that's almost beside the point. Comparing a live performance to a recorded one is apples to oranges anyway, and is even more meaningless in this case because the early digital sound of the CD on my decidedly non-high-end system is so abrasive as to be downright unpleasant. If you are shocked at the idea of Yo-Yo Ma sounding scratchy, I would be happy to lend you the disc. Still, it does establish some kind of baseline, however low.

Hardy and pianist Lambert Orkis, who accompanied on all the works, sounded gorgeous, not only by comparison to the CD, but objectively. Their tempos were a bit more brisk than Ma and Ax's, but at the same time they managed to sound less metronomic, slowing down and stretching the beat just a little on the quieter sections. On the arrestingly beautiful main theme of the first movement, Hardy dug into the low strings with gusto and never let up. Orkis's accompaniment - typically of Brahms, he was really a co-soloist (Brahms even listed piano first when he published most of his sonatas) - was easy, confident, and never let itself be overshadowed by the cello.

Up next was the E-flat viola sonata which I had never heard before. The character of the work could not have been more different - it was full of Brahms's trademark density, but somehow managed to create a lighter mood, being neither dark nor melodramatic (the cello sonata, by contrast, is a bit of both). Violist Daniel Foster took a measured, analytical approach, and while I enjoyed hearing a new and interesting work, two days later I could not recall much about it; whether because it was unfamiliar music or because of Foster's detached approach, I do not know.

After the intermission, we were treated to Nurit Bar-Josef's rendition of the D-minor violin sonata. Bar-Josef, of course, is the National Symphony's principal, and as close as DC has to a violin superstar. She was fantastic - as much as I enjoyed the other two performances, she was on a different plane in terms of how much of herself she put into the music. Just her movement - she looked like she would start leaping about the stage any instant - betrayed her complete emotional dedication to the music. And the D-minor sonata is no picnic to play, either. The last of the three sonatas for the instrument Brahms wrote, it is the longest and the most complex. Probably because it is in a minor key, it is also my favorite. It is full of all kinds of stuff. In the opening movement, the jumps between high and low registers are so dramatic that sometimes it sounds as if a trio is playing. The entire work is full of Brahms' trademark baroque-like long eighth-note runs that he was so fond of using, especially in his late works. The last movement is marked Presto Agitato - enough said. Bar-Josef and Orkis took everything in stride but managed not gloss over anything. Or so I am remembering it now -- to be honest, I was too absorbed in the music to register many of the details. And that is exactly what you want from a first-rate live performance.