WOSU Public Media - Classical

Music history. 

If the phrase doesn’t conjure images of a schoolmarm rapping knuckles with a hickory stick, it might just stick in your throat like a crust of dry bread.  This is unfortunate, for what is history but a deep, dense mesh of people’s stories, some funny, some sad, some strange?  And what is music if not beautiful, impassioned, relaxing, joyous?  How does such a melange of excitement and beauty get drilled down to what most might consider a skeleton of dry, dry bones?

We might look to the schoolmarm for one answer to this last question, since she may well have buried the human stories of musical works and their authors beneath mounds of random facts.  And if you’ve ever sat down to read the phone book, you know that facts alone do not a narrative make.  In Secret Lives of Great Composers:What your Teachers Never Told You about the World’s Musical Masters (Quirk Books, 2009), author Elizabeth Lunday has put the “story” back in history and, in doing so, has brought back to life the composers who for so long have seemed all to dead, all too dull, and all too distant from us today.

Lundy starts by making the very good point that composers of art music were never the uptight crowd many of us envision today.  “The idea of ‘outrageous musician’ is much older than rock and roll,” she writes in her introduction to Secret Lives,  “a lot of composers led truly outrageous lives.  Mozart had a potty mouth, Schumann had syphillis, and Bernstein had an ego bigger than New York City.  Bach wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier while locked up in the clink, Wagner cranked out Lohengrin while on the run from creditors, and Puccini crafted Madama Butterfly while trying to keep his wife from hunting down his (latest) mistress.”

These are broad outlines of just a few of the more outrageous composer anecdotes out there.  And these stories do make for good, even if not always entirely accurate, copy.  There is some dispute, for example, about whether or not Schumann had syphillis.  We do know he went mad, threw himself into the Rhine, and spent the rest of his life in an institution.  That’s outrageous (though sadly so) enough, isn’t it?

But for this type of book perhaps we need not be too pushy when it comes to apocrypha.  It’s all about the good read, and Lundy’s paperback volume, amply illustrated from cover to cover with graphic novel-style artwork by Mario Zucca, isn’t vying for status among peer-reviewed musicological monographs.  Secret Lives of Great Composers is an anywhere-anytime book: the volume is sized just right for tucking into your briefcase or purse, and the stories unfold in sections brief enough to tackle while sitting in the dentist’s waiting room.  Don’t like to get into thick plots during a flight?  Secret Lives is your next vacation book.

Read while on vacation?  In a sense, this book is a vacation, in that each story in it is truly a trip.  One of my favorite composer stories (which we are to believe is true - at least the composer writes about it in his memoirs) is that of Hector Berlioz’s triple murder plot.  The composer of the Symphonie fantastique and, later, La Damnation de Faust was on his Prix de Rome stay in Italy when the mother of his fiancée, Camille Moke,  wrote to tell him that she preferred her daughter marry the rich piano maker, Camille Pleyel.  Lunday sums the story up well: “To put it lightly, Berlioz lost it.  He decided his only recourse was to murder Pleyel, his fiancée, and her mother.  He developed an elaborate plan to disguise himself as a ladies’ maid so that he could enter his beloved’s house unsuspected; he even purchased a dress, wig, and hat as part of the plot.  He stole a pair of pistols and armed himself with vials of strychnine and laudanum.”

I’ve always suspected the laudanum, literally the opiate of the masses in the nineteenth century, was for Berlioz, not the Moke-Pleyel trio.  The story ends with Berlioz somewhere between Italy and the south of France discovering that he had left his disguise in a coach.  When he reached Nice, Lunday writes, “he had returned to his senses. He consoled himself by writing an orchestral overture.”

That orchestral oveture, if you care to know, was his Le roi Lear overture.  The stories in Lunday’s book go on an on, one wild romp after another through the pages of time.  And, if you’re into this kind of thing, Secret Lives also tells us that Berlioz was a Saggitarius, Bach was an Aries, and Wagner was a Gemini. 

What better way to commune with the composers who wrote the music that enriches your life?  Those composers were people, with passions and fancies just like yours.  Far from dead, they jump off the pages of Lunday’s book with all the life of a good story.

- Jennifer Hambrick

I interviewed soprano Roberta Peters for print a number of years ago, just

Roberta Peters balancing Joseph Pilates at the gym, Life magazine

after she celebrated the 50th anniversary of her Metropolitan Opera debut (November 17, 1950 as Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni). This performance was not only the 20 year old’s Met debut, it was her first professional appearance on any stage.  She went on as the understudy on a few hours notice, in a cast of seasoned professionals including Eleanor Steber,  Ljuba Welitsch and Jerome Hines.  Fritz Reiner conducted, no less.  (”He told me, ‘Dunt vurry dollink. Ven I point, you zink!’”) There followed a career that for all I know may be on going in 2010. Miss Peters sang over five hundred Met performances in thirty- five years. Out of curiosity I looked her up recently on Youtube and I was floored at what I found: a 1994 performance of Casta diva from Bellini’s opera Norma. I didn’t know this existed, and I’m still buzzed by the remarkable technique, the flawless line and the superb musicianship. Roberta Peters was sixty- four years old here. Watch,  listen and learn:

WOW!

Roberta Peters had a Met-centric career. She sang in London, Moscow and Vienna but she was busiest at home.  She was Ed Sullivan’s most popular TV guest (ask your parents…) She was crossover, long before the term was widely used. Grand opera, show tunes, musicals, you name it she sang it and people admired her for over forty years.  But I was unprepared for the warm legato spin of her singing in this  Norma clip. To give you some contrast, to let you hear how little her voice deteriorated, here’s Roberta Peters in 1955:

“”I stress again and again” she told me. “Singers must practise.  They must keep their vocies exercised.  And you must know what suits you and stick to it.  I almost never left my fach. The coloratura, soprano leggero roles.  Later I did a few Bohemes and Traviatas away from the Met.  I do regret not singing I puritani althugh I did record the arias.  My one favorite role was Salome. I loved that. When she sings, Ach, ich habe deine Mund gekusst!”, I always get chills.”

Me too. Maybe not from the unsung Salome, but that 1994 Norma excerpt has me verklept.

–Christopher Purdy

This is Samuel Barber’s centennial year. The composer was

Samuel Barber 1910-1981

born in West Chester, Pennsylvania on March 9, 1910, and died in New York, on January 23, 1981. These posts will offer some of his exquisite vocal music.

REINCARNATIONS, (1940) is a collection of three poems by James Stephens set by Barber for four part chorus in 1940. By this time Barber had joined the faculty of his alma mater, the Curtis Institute, and was receiving financial support from the chatelaine of Curtis, the wealthy Mary Louis Bok, who was soon to marry Efrem Zimbalist.  Toscanini’s championing of barber’s First Essay for Orchestra and the Adagio for Strings had brought the young composer celebrity, but I  suspect he found the pressure of fame hard to deal with. Rather than a lot of self promotion, Barber went “home” to Pennsylvania, and to Curtis but he didn’t stay long. His relationship with Gian Carlo Menotti ripened into a marriage, and with Mrs. Bok’s help a home was purchased for the couple in Mt. Kisco, New York. Barber was about to enter a busy period, collaborating with Martha Graham and the Metropolitan Opera.  But not before he turned to the poetry of James Stephens.

James Stephens (1882-1950) was an Irish poet “born in the same hour” a James Joyce. Stephens mined Irish myth for his work, and Barber brilliantly captures both the breathlessness, the passion and the sorrow of Stephen’s words in Reincarnations. Here’s the first of the set,  Mary Hynes

She is the sky of the sun, she is he dart of love; She is the love of my heart

Anthony O’Daly is my favorite of the three. The lower voices function as a dirge and the high enunciate the text as if “keening”.

Since your limbs were laid out, the stars do not shine!

The Coolin is the most loved in the set.

Come with me under my coat, and we will drink our fill/Of the milk white goat

The performanvces come from the CD An American Collection with The Sixteen conducted by Harry Christophers.

We’ll be exploring more of Samuel Barber’s vocal music in weeks to come in his centennial year. He gets lost in the (deserved) success of the Adagio for Strings. Aside form the orchestral music, there are many great songs, Dover Beach, Knoxville:Summer of 1915 and the opera Antony and Cleopatra. Stay tuned.

–Christopher Prudy

I have Earl Wild to thank for my appreciation of George Gershwin.  I have to admit that when I first began listening to classical music, in what I guess you could call a  “serious” way in the early 1980’s, I didn’t immediately take to some of Gershwin’s music, that unique blending of orchestral concert music and Jazz.  I thought, give me Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Mahler, even Stravinsky–or give me real Jazz, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, but not this hybrid form.  Well, it was Earl Wild’s joyous and exuberant performances that won me over.

My first recollection of the late, great Earl Wild was his fantastic recording of George Gershwin’s music with the Boston Pops and conductor Arthur Fiedler.  While there are other fine versions of these pieces, they have never been performed better than this.  The recording of Rhapsody in Blue from 1959 and particularly the Concerto in F from 1961, are magnificent; both the pianist and orchestra sound great in this brash and outgoing music.  The Variations on I Got Rhythm demonstrate Wild’s marvelous virtuosity as well, and the recording includes An American in Paris, and in its most recent CD incarnation, the Cuban Overture as well–an easy first choice for a single disc collection of Gershwin.

I discovered that Earl Wild was a Gershwin specialist and had a long history of playing his music.  In 1942, Toscanini invited Wild to play Rhapsody in Blue with the NBC Orchestra, and it was such a success that it made Wild a household name in America.  Another of his specialties was his virtuoso transcriptions which included Gershwin songs as well as Rachmaninoff and other composers (readily available on CD), confirming Wild’s brilliance as a composer and transcriber, as well as being a great virtuoso at the keyboard.  For Wild’s brilliance as a performer of Romantic works in the standard repertoire, see the video my colleague Boyce Lancaster has posted on this blog site in his tribute to Earl Wild (playing Franz Liszt’s Fountains of the villa d’Este), or see Christopher Purdy’s blog from last November 3rd in which he describes the superb recording of the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto (recorded with the London Symphony and Jascha Horenstein in 1965).

I couldn’t find a video of Earl Wild Playing any Gershwin, but I did come across this 1971 Boston Pops performance with him and Arthur Fiedler playing the 3rd movement of Tchaikovsky’s 1st Piano Concerto.  Enjoy:

–John Rittmeyer

To celebrate Earl Wild’s extraordinary life and career, WOSU FM will

Earl Wild 1915-2010

present three installments of Mr. Wild’s 1995 radio series, Earl Wild’s Grande Piano (’Grande’ with a e, please) produced here at WOSU.  These programs will pre-empt Music in Mid Ohio, which resumes March 7th.

Please see www.earlwild.com for more information about this great artist and raconteur, and join us Sunday evenings at 6: Feb. 7, 14, 21, and for an extended interview with music on February 28th on WOSU 89-7 FM or on line at www.wosu.org.

Earl Wild’s Grande Piano grew out of discussions I had with Mr. Wild and his partner Michael Rolland Davis, after recording a one hour special with the artist in 1994.  Mr. Wild was living in Columbus at the time, and making exquisite recordings at his home, Fernleaf Abbey, in Linworth.  Earl Wild in conversation was hysterical, opinionated, profane, intelligent, brilliant, smart, off-color and often unsuitable for broadcast. Earl Wild’s commentary on Grande Piano, his choice of artists, his knowledge of and passion for music, and his own artistry were second to none.  I have hours of outtakes and you’ll have to go to my funeral to hear them (it will be worth it).

I served as Producer of the series, since it was in large part my”fault” for asking in the first place as the gentlemen himself was wont to say. Kevin Petrilla did all the editing and made the series a fit for radio.  As you listen, you are hearing Kevin’s work as much as Earl Wild’s. Michael Rolland Davis was crucial in making all of this happen, and  lot of the work was his. (You wanna know from magnificent recordings, go to www.ivoryclassics.com).  I made notes, coordinated, got Earl into the studio, did some edits and stayed out of the way. Nobody functioned as a producer for Earl Wild.  He knew exactly what he wanted to do and he did it. Thank God.

Here’s an outline of the four programs to be heard in February.  Music in Mid Ohio returns March 7th.  Please join us.

Sundays, 6 PM WOSU 89-7 FM or on line www.wosu.org

So many of today’s artists who have big recording contracts are just plain old fashioned boring. B-O-R-I-N-G.

FEB 7

Earl Wild plays and discusses performances by

Arthur Rubinstein Schumann: Arabeske

COMPARISONS:  Mozart: Don Giovanni Serenade

arr. Busoni with Leslie Howard; arr. Backhaus with Earl Wild

Brahms: Rhapsody 1 Ivo Pogorelich

Prokofiev: Visions fugitives Deborah Arder

Debussy: Images (selections) Ivan Moravec

Leslie Howard, the British pianist who performed the Busoni transcription you just heard, has been working for years on the project of recording the complete solo works of Franz Liszt. I say, good luck!

FEB 14

Earl Wild plays and discusses performances by

Earl Wild's Grammy award winning CD

Egon Petri  Beethoven: Sonata in F# Op. 78

COMPARISIONS Tchaikovsky: April (The Seasons)

Brigitte Engerer; Mikhail Pletnev

Schumann: Blumenstueck Christopher Saiger

Liszt: Transcendental Etude 5 Minoru Nojima

Debussy: 2 Etudes Paul Jacobs

Rachmaninoff: Preludes in G Major and g minor Earl Wild

Record companies are responsible for foisting on the public through their massive publicity budgets hundreds of mediocre discs…usually a necessary to a library of recorded music as a plague of locusts.

FEB 21

Earl Wild plays and discusses performances by

Vladimir Horowitz Scarlatti 3  Sonatas

COMPARISONS

Brahms Capriccio Op. 76 no. 2

Walter Gieseking; Murray Perahia

Schumann: Buente-blaetter Clara Haskil

Schumann: Fantasie, Op. 2 Ania Dorfamn

Chopin” Nocturne in f#, Op. 48, no. 2 Earl Wild

Busoni: Carmen Variations Marc-Andre Hamelin

Most competitions today have descended to the level of state fairs, where the competitors rattle off their wares in a sideshow of technique and endurance

FEB 28

Earl Wild with music and in conversation with Christopher

Earl Wild on Ivory Classics. www.ivoryclassics.com

Purdy (rec. 2006)

EARL WILD’S GRANDE PIANO-SUNDAYS AT 6 PM BEGINNING FEB 7 on WOSU 89-7 FM

P.S. Earl Wild was called in late in the day to join Maria Callas for one of

Earl Wild with Maria Callas

her last concerts, on her 1973-1974 world tour. I believe it was in Dallas. Callas was playing to cheering houses but her voice was gone. She knew it, everyone knew it. Earl Wild was and remained at the height of his powers. He told me she would sit backstage, in Halston and pearls, thumbing through music to try and find something she could sing, deciding only as they walked out on stage. The public cheered and went nuts anyway. Coming off stage after a harrowing performance (hers) and listening to the cheers, La Callas took Mr. Wild by the hand and said, “Come Earl, they love us” and sailed out with him to the applause.

–Christopher Purdy

A mighty voice has been silenced with the passing of the last of the great romantics…Earl Wild, who died quietly in his sleep early Saturday morning.

He was an engaging, charming, witty artist who was not afraid to voice an opinion, whether about music and those who performed it, world events, people he knew, or the quality of his martini.  Dinner conversations covered all of those topics and more.

My wife (WOSU Music Director Beverley Ervine) and I were privileged to have been invited by Earl and his companion Michael Rolland Davis (also his manager) for a rehearsal of an upcoming Carnegie Hall performance, followed by a delicious lasagna supper.  Their Northwest Columbus home, dubbed Fernleaf Abbey, also served as Earl’s recording studio.  When you entered, you couldn’t help but notice the black Baldwin grand piano which dominated the room, various pieces of electronic recording equipment, and the cathedral ceiling, which offered great acoustics for Earl’s recording engineer, Ed Thompson, to work with.

To this day, I still remember sitting awestruck as Earl began playing Liszt’s “Les Jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este” with it’s bell-like tones evoking the sparkling waters of the fountains Liszt could see from his balcony.  Never had I heard such a sound come from a piano.  It is a sound and a memory I carry with me to this day.

As you may have also read, Earl played for many presidents, from Herbert Hoover through Lyndon Johnson, and has entertaining stories about them all.

Earl Wild played for Presidents

None, however, is more riveting than his account of playing at Constitution Hall in Washington D.C. for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.

Earl Wild on the Kennedy Inauguration

Earl’s impish side also came out in his music.  The same hands which pulled Liszt and Rachmaninoff from the keys also brought us Variations on a Theme by Stephen Foster, “The Doo Dah Variations”, and his virtuosic treatment of the simple “Mexican Hat Dance.”

I have included a video of Earl Wild below to allow you to experience something of what we saw while watching him rehearse…seeing his hands as they danced along the keyboard.

I am grateful to have had the privilege to have known Earl Wild, to have seen and heard him play, and to be in a position where I can continue to make his amazing talent available to listeners for years to come.

Earl, may you rest in peace. — Boyce Lancaster

This is Samuel Barber’s centennial year. I’ll be posting

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

occasionally on his vocal music. We begin with his opera Vanessa, first performed on January 15, 1958 at the Metropolitan Opera, New York.

Composer Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania on March 10, 1910. He died in New York in 1981. From the time he was a young man Barber was at the forefront of American music. His First Essay for Orchestra impressed Arturo Toscanini, who performed the work with the NBC Symphony. There was no more important an imprimatur for a young composer. Toscanini  encouraged Barber to adapt a part of his String Quartet into what became the Adagio for Strings. That work alone was enough to get Barber into music’s Valhalla, but lovely as it is the Adagio is not the whole story.

In 1955 Samuel Barber was commissioned to write a new opera for the Metropolitan. Barber’s life partner, composer Gian-Carlo Menotti came up with an original libretto (some say inspired by Isaak Dinesen) about a lovely baroness living in isolation in a “northern country”, attended only by her niece and her mother (who will not speak to her) after having been jilted by her lover 20 years earlier. The lover’s return is expected as the opera begins, but it his son who arrives. The opera was called Vanessa-and it had a long gestation. Barber was the nephew of the great American contralto Louise Homer (1874-1947). She and her husband, the composer Sidney Homer had mentored the younger man, but they were long gone by the mid 1950s. Still, their influence led Barber to an appreciation of the voice and a great skill in writing for singers. He himself was a fine baritone and recorded one of his own work, Dover Beach.

Vanessa takes up with her the son of her deceased betrothed, Anatol, despite the younger man’s fling with Erika, Vanessa’ niece. Erika miscarries, Anatol and Vanessa are married and leave for an extended honeymoon. “Lock the gates” Erika tells the footmen at the opera’s end. “Cover the windows and the mirrors. From now on, I will see no one.”
So Erika takes over the life Vanessa had lived before we met her.  End of story.

The libretto was considered narcissistic.  It was hard to feel much sympathy for the tile character who was beautiful and wealthy, and who subjected her elderly mother and a lovely younger woman into a life of solitude.

Casting proved problematic. All agreed that  the beautiful young mezzo

Rosalind Elias b. 1930

from Lowell, Massachusetts, Rosalind Elias, would be a perfect Erika, and she owned the role. To her went the  hit tune, Must the Winter Come So Soon? heard at the beginning of the opera:

Anatol arrives in the storm. The wrong Anatol, but Vanessa doesn’t know that yet. “Unless you still love me, I do not want you to see my face, Anatol”.  This is Eleanor Steber, the first Vanessa, with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos:

Eleanor Steber was not the first choice for Vanessa. Maria Callas was, but La divina heard the score and told Barber, “The younger girl has the best part, and I must do a title role!”  Next up came soprano Sena Jurinac, who agreed, but cancelled six weeks before the premiere.  Steber was third choice.  She was in town and she worked cheap.  It was silly to negate Eleanor Steber.  She was (still) beautiful but aging, with a gleaming, wonderful voice and there was no better musician in the business. Steber was no stranger to Barber’s music, since she had both commissioned and premiered his glorious Knoxville: Summer of 1915 ten years earlier. But the Met’s director, Rudolph Bing  preferred European artists, and Steber was known to be struggling with alcoholism (as Barber was) . No matter. Eleanor Steber learned the part in three weeks. If she had crib notes hidden on stage for the premiere on January 15, 1958,  it didn’t keep her from turning in a fine performance.

Here’s part of the Quintet, To Leave, to break, to weep and remember

Eleanor Steber (1916-1990)

from the end of the opera. Vanessa and Anatol are leaving on their honeymoon, perhaps never to return. Erika has shut down. She will go on, but alone. “Let me look around once more” sings Vanessa. “Who knows when I shall see this old house again?”

Eleanor Steber: Vanessa; Rosalind Elias: Erika; Nicolai Gedda: Anatol; Giorgio Tozzi: The Doctor; Regina Resnik: The Old Baroness. Metropolitan Opera Orchestra conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos.

The day after the premiere, critic Max deSchauensee had this to say in The Philadelphia Bulletin

“A brilliant audience which crowded the vast spaces of the Metropolitan to capacity, singled out the principals for repeated applause and gave the composer and his associates 17 calls at the final curtain…Mr. Barber has written a sophisticated score with plenty of vocal opportunities for the singers.  The preludes which anticipated the scenes were particularly evocative.  There were solos for Eleanor Steber and duets between the heroine and tenor Nicola Gedda, excellent in the role of the volatile Anatol.  Strong personal successes were obtained by Rosalind Elias, as the forsaken Erika, and by Giorgio Tozzi as the kindly but bibulous family doctor….Comments in the lobby during intermission would indicate that the opera struck its mark with many in the audience.  General sentiments applauded the fine workmanship of the score and rejoiced in the fact that an American opera, long overdue, had made its appearance at our principal opera house.”

Vanessa was given a dozen performances with the same cast to 1959,

Vanessa original cast recording on RCA

and was revived in 1965, with Mary Costa replacing Eleanor Steber. The opera never caught on at the Met. At first hearing it’s hard to feel for the characters and the music is either too sharp or too sentimental. But Vanessa bears repeated listening. It grows on one. In recent years, long after Barber’s death, Vanessa has finally caught on, with productions in St. Louis, Spoleto, Washington DC, Bloomington, London (with Christine Brewer and Susan Graham) and at the New York City Opera, with Lauren Flanigan. Renee Fleming is an obvious casting choice for a Met revival, perhaps with Joyce DiDonato and Eric Cutler.  At age fifty- two, Barber and Menotti’s somewhat faded Baroness and her unhappy niece are here to stay, an American opera no longer young but finally, moving.

–Christopher Purdy

Nancy Harms

In the world of Public Radio, the word Minnesota evokes thoughts of Garrison Keillor, Minnesota Public Radio, and piles and piles of snow.  Now, there are some music lovers for whom the Twin Cities are hot year-round.

Clara City MN native Nancy Harms fell in love with jazz after seeing Harry Connick, Jr. on TV.  She loved and studied music, eventually going into teaching, but she wanted to sing.  A friend suggested she needed to move.  Where to?  New York?  Chicago?  Neither.  Rather, she headed for that hotbed of jazz, Minneapolis-St. Paul.  Before you laugh, it seems Minnesota has a thriving jazz circuit and features both established performers and newcomers.  In the Indigo is her debut recording…one I think shows a lot of promise.  So start a fire, open some wine, and share share a quiet evening with them.  And go ahead and have Nancy in…in this case, three is not a crowd. - Boyce Lancaster

I Wished on the Moon

Tuh Dah! On Monday, January 25th, NPR will reveal the first of 50 singers who’ve made their mark internationally and across recorded history in their year-long exploration of “50 Great Voices.”
  
In October 2009, NPR Music  solicited nominations from listeners and received thousands of suggestions. Those nominations were whittled down to roughly 100 singers. Now the project is going live, revealing  the stories behind the singers selected. Many names you’ll recognize. There will be surprises.  One thing is for certain; it’s going to be interesting.

You can explore the nominated voices here, and check the “50 Great Voices” page every week to hear a new profile and guess who will be next.

Listen for it Mondays, alternating on “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” You can also subscribe to the Music Notes newsletter to be notified every time a new story and podcast is available.

 I’ll be tuning in every Monday. Will you? — Beverley Ervine

Me and my horn, we know each other. We know what we can do. When I’m blowing, it’s like me and my horn are the same thing.

Terry Teachout has written a new scholarly, footnoted and highly enjoyable biography of the great Louis Armstrong (and btw: It’s LEW-is, not LOO-ey).

Pops is published by Houghton Mifflin. It’s great for fans or for readers like me who think they love jazz but don’t know too much about it. This reader was pleased to know that Armstrong modeled a lot of his phrasing on the opera singers of his youth, especially Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini-no doubt the latter inspiring the glorious staccato high Cs Armstrong could blow like no one else. A rough childhood in New Orleans’s Storyville led to a stint in the “Colored Waif’ s Home for Boys”

I feel as though although I am away from the Waif’s Home, I am just on tour from my own home, I feel just that close at all times

The home had a brass band, handy for local funerals and whorehouses, and one thing led to another. First the cornet, then the trumpet. King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and the Hot Five gave Armstrong a life on the road and their recordings, beginning in 1923 put jazz near the mainstream. Over the years, swing, bop, rock and Hollywood were sampled and sometimes abandoned, but until the end of his life, Louis could sing and Louis could blow and the world was glad to listen. Teachout doesn’t gloss over the grief Armstrong took for seeming to pander to white audiences with his toothy grin and on stage antics. This is not a reverent book, but it is an honest book and allows us to understand the importance and the skill of Armstrong’s artistry thirty years after his death. Along the way, there’s a spicy private life, a fondness for cannabis and a devotion to an herbal remedy called Swiss Kriss, guaranteed to clear the pipes. As a very young man, Louis Armstrong adopted a young boy named Clarence, the son of a distant relative. Clarence became brain  damaged as a child, and Armstrong cared for Clarence for the rest of his life.

Especially helpful is the appendix: Thirty Great Recordings by Louis Armstrong, beginning with Chimes Blues in 1923, and including Heebie Jeebies (1926) I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues (1931) Blueberry Hill (1949) Mack the Knife (1955) and Hello Dolly (1963)-an anthem Armstrong was saddled with for the rest of his life, but it gave him a huge boost in late career.

Never mind. Here’s Mack the Knife, in Stuttgart, 1959:

I was surprised to learn the What a Wonderful World is not considered very important to Armstrong’s career. It’s important to me:

Pops by Terry Teachout. Read this book and fall in love again for the first time!

My life has been my music, it’s always come first, but the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, ’cause that’s what you’re there for is to please the people.

–Christopher Purdy