Avatar!

I just saw Avatar which I was predisposed to hate. Because James Cameron is such a huge corn ball.  While the some of the aesthetics are annoyingly Maxield Parrish, the dialog dreadful and the world-view thuddingly Manichean, I came away marveling and touched.  You can read the reviews over at moviereviewintelligence, but I was struck by two comparisons that I haven't seen anybody else make.

First, Hayao Miyazaki.  There are many Miyazaki tropes: fantastic flying machines, fully realized imaginary animals, luminous floating seed-pods, ecological apocalypse.  The forest reminded me the one in Princess Mononoke.    Cameron's film lacks the moral complexity and generosity of the anime masterpiece.  But he shares Miyazaki mastery of action and motion.  In fact, with Avatar, Cameron joins the ranks of Miyazaki, Peter Jackson and Kurosawa in directing large action sequences.

Second, Wagner.  Really, Wagner really can't be staged.  If only someone would give Cameron or Jackson or  Guilermo del Toro $200 million to produce the Ring, I'd be very happy.

The thing I liked most, in a way, was seeing Segourney Weaver in her Avatar body looking like a 19 year old college student with dreads and a little red "Stanford" t-shirt.  The promise of art is deathlessness and this giant popcorn entertainment delivers a strange jolt of rememberence.

It's sexy too.

Sunday Miscellany

A worthwhile descussion on the state of recorded music but ignores classical and jazz.

Bill Douglas hipped me this analysis of at Lester Young "Do the Math."

I can't tell you how much I admire El Ultimo Trago by Concha Buika and Chu Chu Valdez.  Plus, it sounds absolutely sensational.

I've become fascinated by the music of Morten Feldman.  The pieces are so long, nothing seems to happen: preeminent modernism but the antithesis of what we think of as modern.

Chopin and the Dark Forest of the Self

Above is a video of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli playing Chopin.   It is not, perhaps, the most compelling performance of the first Ballade, but seeing him play is wonderful.  As a pianist I can tell you it is technical perfection: the stillness of the upper body, the posture, the position of the hands. Then there's the way he looks: perfectly tailored, impeccably trimmed mustache, the slightly raised eyebrows.  The concert artist as matinée idol.

The piece itself is at the core of Polanski's "The Pianist."  Adrien Brody's character plays it in the abandoned chateau -- or rather plays most of it, it's slightly abridged.  None of the reviews I read comment on the centrality of Chopin to the movie.  And Chopin is in a way the first musical exemplar of tragic nationalism. 

Jeremy Denk  has an illuminating discussion Chopin whom he defends as a "serious" composer. He says  "I told Mitsuko Uchida once that I might have trouble choosing between Chopin and Schubert, and the storm that crossed her brow would have shut down the airports for days." 

Uchida's a great musician and pianist.  Her repertory is the epitome of the serious musician -- with serious meaning Austro-German.  She's much more demonstrative -- showy --  than Michelangeli, but recording the Schoenberg piano concerto is about as serious as you can get.  I would hate to think or her as a philistine, which is what Denk's report makes her look like.

Of course the discussion "Chopin vs. Schubert" is kind of like "Who would win, Predator or  Wolverine?"  So maybe her reaction was to how silly the question is. 

In any case, Denk then proceeds to a very good analysis of the Polanise-Fantasy with excerpts from the score and sound snippets -- part of a larger argument for the importance of Chopin as a serious composer.  It makes me want to hear him play the piece.  I once heard Richard Goode, a close colleague of Uchida's at Marlboro and also echt serious, play it at Macky Auditorium in Boulder on a lovely spring afternoon with the sun streaming in and he played it very beautifully.

It does seem that pianists celebrated for their Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert do not excel at Chopin.  Brendel, a very sober musician, recorded the Liszt sonata, but no Chopin as far as I know.  

In any case, it's possible that today more pianists excel at Schubert than Chopin.  Odd, because no composer is kinder to the pianist than Chopin.

Here is an extended quote from Theodore Adorno on Chopin, which makes the case better than anybody:


"Chopin's form is no more concerned with the development of the whole through a series of minute transitions than with the representation of a single free-standing thematic complex.  It is as remote from Wagner's dnyamic thrust as from the landscape of Schubert....he (removes) himself , as it were from the flow of the composition and directing it from the outside.  He does not high-handedly create the form, nor does he allow it to crumple before the onslaught of the themes.  Rather, he conducts the themes in their passage through time. The aristocratic nature of his music may reside less in the psychological tone than in the gesture of knightly melancholy with which the subject renounces the attempt to impose its dynamism and carry it through.  With eyes averted, lake a bride, the objective theme is safely guided through the dark forest of the self, through the torrential river of the passions.  Nowhere more beautifully than in the A-flat ballade, where the creative idea, once it has made its appearance like a Schubert melody, is taken by the hand and conducted through an infinite vista of inwardness and over abysses of expressive harmonics where it finds its way to its second confirming appearance. In Chopin paraphrase and doubtless every kind of associated virtuosity is the resigned expression of historical tact."

Here's Moritz Rosenthal:

For Susan Edwards April 9, 1943 to November 25, 2008

Ship of Death - D.H. Lawrence:

Have you built your ship of death, oh have you?
Oh build your ship of death, for you will need it.

Now in the twilight, sit by the invisible sea
Of peace and your little ship
Of death, that will carry your soul
On its last journey, on and on, so still
So beautiful, over the last of seas.

When the day comes, that will come.
Oh think of it in the twilight peacefully!
The last day and the setting forth
On the longest journey, over the hidden sea
To the last wonder of oblivion.

Oblivion, the last wonder!
When we have trusted ourselves entirely
To the unknown, and are taken up
Out of our little ships of death
Into pure oblivion.

Oh build your ship of death, be building it now
With dim calm thoughts and quite hands
Putting its timbers together in the dusk.

Rigging its mast with the silent, invisible sail
That will spread in death to the breeze
Of the kindness of the cosmos, that will waft
The little ship and its soul to the wonder goal.

Ah, if you want to live in peace on the face of the earth
Then build your ship of death, in readiness
For the longest journey, over the last of seas.

soundcloud - my music - Wee Small Hours

It seems that the internet has destroyed music -- well seriously impaired the be ability of musicians to make money. Or at least hurt the ability of the people who used to make money off musicians to make money. Barnes and Noble in Boulder used to have a half-way decent CD section, but now that they've moved and even though they have maybe 50% more space, their selection so small as to be useless. Music in the age of mechanical reproduction, and especially digitally stored music, becomes worthless because it can be perfectly copied almost no cost.


At least once a year, I dream about Frank Sinatra, which is odd because I don't especially like Frank Sinatra. The whole rat pack, booze and mafia, tough guy business gives me the creeps. The depressed Sinatra, post Ava Gardner break-up, I understand and appreciate. I can do without ring-a-ding-ding and the Chairman of Board shtick. 


Reading the Gay Talese piece I was struck by Sinatra's childhood in Sicilian ghetto of northern New Jersey. For some reason I couldn't help but think about Jay Z. There's something similar about them: not in their musical aesthetic, but in the posture of aggrieved male narcissism and the threat of violence, and in the image or corporate wealth and dominance.  A very substantial achievement on the part of both, no doubt about it: masters of their own fate, when so many of their artistic contemporaries and peers were swallowed whole.  But for me, give me Duke Ellington or Quincey Jones.


Of course, as a saloon pianist, I can't escape the Sinatra. I don't think he wrote a note himself, but Julie Styne and Jimmy van Heusen and Michelle Legrand wrote masterpieces with him in mind.


Note: Maybe I have a problem because I was a Protestant proto-geek growing up on Jersey in the '50s in a family that was prejudiced against the Italians. We'd drive up to Red Bank to look at their Christmas lights. My mother always pointed out that "they" drove fancy cars, but used fruit crates for furniture.  "Pizzeria, diarrhea" we'd say in our smug Midwestern transplant way.


So here's "In the Wee Small Hours."


Regards


Small Hours  by  user1620611

Free Improv at Naropa

Last night I attended a performance at Naropa given by Stephen Nachmanovitch, along with Janet Feder, Mark Miller and Art Lande. Nachmanovitch seems like an interesting character. A student of Gregory Bateson, he teaches improvisation to musicians and actors and his his "Free Play: Improvisation and the Art of Life" is in wide use at Naropa.

I went primarily because of Art Lande, a formidable pianist and musical thinker. Alas, at least for me, the performance never caught fire. 100% improvised, it consisted of affable scrapings, noodlings and euphonic digressions: new age sonic wallpaper.

I went and looked as some of Nachmanovitch's writings on his web site and started thinking about free play. I was reminded of Kant's bird of reason, that, he says, flies so well in the air of experience that it imagines it would fly even better in a vacuum.

So what is the air that resists the free play of the improviser? What, for the player is the spirit of gravity? What, in other words, is the matter? The most common body of freely improvised music is from the so-called "free jazz" school: John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler: a movement that started in the '60s when the notion of freedom had as great a political significance as an a artistic one. Perhaps in those days, the political and artistic were not that different.

Now if you ask me, these people were using their artistic freedom to dig rather than to soar. The most successful were the most obsessive and the most long winded and the most demanding. Ornette is a great musician, but he's been playing the same solo for forty years.

Of course, all musicians are obsessive -- it's required to master an instrument. But improvisation can be a journey into the known -- or the unknown known -- a return to roots and memory and darkness as much as an Icarus flight to the Sun.

Keith Jarrett is probably the most celebrated and commercially successful free improviser. Yet when he sits down with nothing planned he caries in his head, hands and heart the entire history of keyboard music going back at least to Bach. So he picks up the entire problematic of Western music and is vexed by those things that have vexed his predecessors.

Here's the Wayne Shorter Quartet. Their obsession is the blues, the memory of Miles and the urgency of listening.

soundcloud - my music - blue and green

Miles Davis: "I wish I could swing like Wynton Kelley."
Jimmy Cobb: "I wish you could too."

The first jazz album I bought was "The Unique Thelonious Monk" which was issued in 1956. I would have been ten, so I probably didn't buy it that year. Maybe a year or two later. One of his few trio albums - Oscar Pettiford and Art Blakey. standards like "Lisa" and "Tea for Two" and "Darn the Dream." None of his own compositions. Really a great record.

The next was "Milestones." Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Red Garland, Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers. It's never gotten the respect it deserves -- just cheap reissues. But I think it's better than "Kind of Blue."

Regarding "Kind of Blue," I, probably perversely, prefer the Wynton Kelley tracks to the Bill Evans ones.

I've been watching "Mad Men" which re-creates a certain part of the late '50s and early '60 with amazing accuracy. The problem is, all the characters are hateful idiots. There was a lot more going on, and you get an occasional hint of it.

I wish I could swing like Wynton Kelley too.

Bluegreen by user1620611

Takacs at Boulder - Review

I have been attending the Takacs Quartet's programs in Boulder for at least twenty years. Their all Beethoven concert at CU on Nov. 1st was jaw-dropping in its excellence and restorative in its humanity.

They are embarking on a Beethoven cycle at the Southbank Centre in London this year. I suppose that even for an ensamble as well regarded as the Takacs, box office matters and, in these times, nothing is better box office than Beethoven.

My only complaint with their long tenure in Boulder has been the conservative nature of their programming. While they may play Shostakovitch elsewhere, we never hear it here. Nor do they play Schoenberg, Webern, not to mention any of the Carter quartets, works which place him up there with the masters of the form. Indeed, given the Takacs Hungarian roots, one would expect them to program Kurtag, whose exquisite miniatures could be easily included without taking up much space.

This Sunday's program - November 1st - consisted on the Op. 18, No. 1, the Op. 95 and the Op. 131.

The Opus 18 quartets are a little problematic. There is an unhappy tension between the formal, symmetrical elements, e.g., the sonata expositions, and the development sections which are too big and intense in comparison. Balance is sought by repetition, which makes the works seem static. Beethoven didn't work out this technique until the Eroica.

The Op 95 is from the fallow period when Beethoven was obsessed with his nephew. It is seems somehow troubled and a little unsure of itself. And therefore charming.

Op. 131, we are told, was Beethoven's favorite quartet. It is, Maynard Solomon says:

in seven movements to be performed virtually without pause...A contunity of rythmic design adds to the feeling that this is one of the most completely integrated of Beethoven's works. But there are many presures toward discoutinuity at work...six distince main keys, thirty-one changes of tempo (ten more than Op. 130), a variety of textures, and a diversity of forms within the movements -- fugue, suite, recitative, variation, scherzo, aria and sonata form -- which makes the achievement of unity all the more miraculous." Maynard Solomon, Beethoven

The notions that the late quartets were the work of someone who had turned his back on the world, of some sort of renunciate mystic who didn't care about his audience, that the works are rebarbative and obscure are nonsense. All five have brilliant endings. The writing for each instrument is generous in its opportunity for virtuoso display. Nor is it the case that they were not performed during Beethoven's lifetime (regardless of what the program notes say). Solomon again:

There were private performances of the quartets in 1826 and 1827. And we know that Schubert was given a private reading of the Quartet, Op. 131 in November 1828, five days before Schubert's death. ("He fell into such a state of excitement and enthusiasm," Holz reported, "that we were all frightened for him.")

Performances of works that as thoughtful and sober a musicologist and critic as Maynard Solomon would describe as "miraculous" almost always disappoint -- like Marcel seeing Berma, the reality is never as good as the expectation.

In this case the Takacs was up to the challenges - mental, physical and emotional, with a performance of extraordinary bravery, refinement, nuance, color and power. Everything was in place, accurate and precise yet felt completely spontaneous, as though the music were coming into existence for the first time.

Almost two hundred yeas later, we can understand exactly how Schubert reacted. Revolutionary art, and late Beethoven is the eternal avant guard, is always new. At least in the hands of the extraordinary members of the Takacs Quartet.