Quote of the Day (Alex Ross, on the Piano’s ‘History of Weirdness’)

“It has never been just about the music. The notion that performers should be faceless butlers of genius, impersonally conveying sublime messages in sound, has no basis in tradition. The bonkers antics of virtuoso pianists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries prove otherwise. Franz Liszt, whose stage costumes ranged from Magyar military garb to priestly robes, would sometimes stop between pieces to chat with admirers. The infamously acerbic Hans von Bülow, while on an American tour, became so irritated at the promotional efforts of the Chickering piano company that he took out a jackknife and scraped the brand’s name off the instrument. Vladimir de Pachmann once appeared at a recital holding a pair of socks; these, he claimed, had been knitted for Chopin by George Sand. And so on: the history of the piano is a history of weirdness.”—Music critic Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern” (a profile of pianist Yuja Wang), The New Yorker, June 3, 2024

The image accompanying this post shows the last of the three “bonkers” piano virtuosi mentioned by Ross, Vladimir de Pachmann (1848-1933). He sure doesn’t look crazy here, does he?

But the adjectives that most commonly pop up in any online description of this magician of the keyboard are “controversial,” “notorious,” “eccentric,” and, most charitably, “florid.”

I imagine that Ross has had quite a chuckle at some of the cinematic representations of this “history of weirdness,” such as Roger Daltrey in Ken Russell’s Lisztomania and John Cleese’s mynah bird-afflicted Beethoven on “Monty Python.”

Quote of the Day (Piano Great Bill Evans, on Jazz)

"Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists in the time it is created. And anyone who makes music according to this method conveys to me an element that makes his music jazz." — Jazz pianist-composer Bill Evans (1929-1980), quoted in Bill Lees, “The Poet: Bill Evans,” in Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism From 1919 to Now, edited by Robert Gottlieb (1996)

This Day in Jazz History (Guaraldi’s ‘Fate to the Wind’ in Unexpected Hit)

April 18, 1962—Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus was released on this date by Fantasy Records, which soon found a happy surprise: A pair of deejays, instead of playing what was supposed to be the breakout single of composer Vince Guaraldi’s LP, began giving heavy airplay to the B side. A year later, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” would earn gold record status and a Grammy as Best Instrumental Jazz Composition.

As a teen, growing up listening to the New York progressive rock station WNEW-FM, I would be enthralled by the soaring closing theme played by deejay Dennis Elsas. Eventually, I learned that this was “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” and that the talented pianist highlighted there had also composed the soundtrack for the Yuletide classic A Charlie Brown Christmas as well as other TV Peanuts specials.

Go through all kinds of jazz anthologies, though, and you’ll be lucky to find anything on the San Francisco-based pianist. At the same time, many of the artists who are featured in these books never attained the level of commercial success achieved, albeit for only the length of his shortened life, by Guaraldi.

His non-Peanuts compositions deserve to be known as widely as wonderful work such as “Linus and Lucy” and “Christmastime Is Here.” “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” is the natural place to begin.

As the title of the LP indicates, the starting point for this was Antonio Carlos Jobin’s soundtrack to the 1959 film, Black Orpheus. As another jazzman, Stan Getz, would be two years later with "The Girl From Ipanema," Guaraldi was much taken with Jobin’s work, and several songs from this LP--his first with a newly formed trio--would be inspired by it. When Fantasy Records got Guaraldi’s finished product, they decided to promote, as the first single, "Samba de Orpheus."

Buck Herring and Tony Bigg, program director and music director (respectively) at Sacramento's KROY, had other ideas. They began playing “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”—in a big way. Every two hours, actually. The song then entered the charts, where it stayed for another 18 weeks.

The song opened a window of commercial opportunity for Guaraldi, who had been reluctant to expand beyond his fervent San Francisco base by extensive touring. That window widened further with the Peanuts specials.

There are musicians who tire of fan demands for their most famous works. (Joni Mitchell, for instance: "Nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint a Starry Night again, man!'") Not Guaraldi. His response invariably was, "It's like signing your name to a check."

Fans came to appreciate other, non-musical aspects of "Dr. Funk," too, such as his widely varying haircuts, unusual hats, and, as can be seen in the image accompanying this post, a flamboyant moustache.

Guaraldi had finished his 16^th Peanuts soundtrack when he was stricken dead by a heart attack in 1976. None of the composers who succeeded him in his Peanuts role lasted as long or made as indelible an impact.

Since Guaraldi’s death, cover versions of his songs—especially Charlie Brown Christmas tunes—have been released by the likes of Shawn Colvin, Dianne Reeves, Diana Krall, She and Him, and Sarah McLachlan, to name just a few. But perhaps his most devoted musical acolyte is George Winston, who has recorded two CDs of Guaraldi material: Linus and Lucy and Love Will Come. 

It also appears that, at long last, Guaraldi is receiving sustained biographical treatment, courtesy of Derrick Bang’s Vince Guaraldi at the Piano. Many fans, I’m sure, will be anxious to hear about this fine musician and composer who died way too soon.

In the meantime, sit back and click on this YouTube audio clip of "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" and let yourself be swept away.

This Day in Jazz History (Thelonious Monk, Bebop Pioneer, Dies)

February 17, 1982— After years of progressive withdrawal— first from recordings, then from concerts, then from the company of fellow jazzmen— pianist-composer Thelonious Monk died at age 64 in Englewood, NJ, from complications of a stroke. Once the subject of a Time Magazine cover story— one of only four jazz musicians accorded that honor at the time— he spent his last years in seclusion at the Weehawken, NJ home of longtime patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter.

The life and work of the composer of such standards as “Round Midnight” and “Straight, No Chaser” fascinates me for reasons extending beyond the off-center songs that amazed and perplexed jazz aficionados in the postwar years.

There was, for instance, his association with Bergen County, NJ, where I live. Not only did he die in my hometown, but one of his most fascinating tunes (one that has ended up on my iPod), the May 1954 recording “Hackensack,” from his Criss-Cross LP, takes its name from the location of his studio (maintained by engineer Rudy Van Gelder, a kind of Zelig who always seemed to be around every major jazz recording). On his blog, recording artist and Grammy-winning producer Joe Henry hailed “Hackensack” for “its playful melody, its willful dissonance, and its swinging take on the blues.”

Van Gelder would go on to establish a new, state-of-the-art facility in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, in 1959, but the Hackensack original was the spot of Orrin Keepnews’ indelible introduction to the offbeat ways of Monk. The Riverside record producer had enlisted the services of estimable musicians Kenny Clarke and Oscar Pettiford on his first project with Monk. The group was to go from the music label’s midtown Manhattan offices across the Hudson to Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio.

“I was relieved when Monk arrived almost on time,” Keepnews recalled, in an autobiographical piece collected in Robert Gottlieb’s fine anthology Reading Jazz (1996), “just after Pettiford, but Clarke was nowhere to be found. We waited with growing impatience and concern; we telephoned everywhere; eventually Thelonious suggested using a substitute.” Keepnews resisted the idea of using a relative neophyte for this initial session, and Van Gelder agreed to hold off for another day. “Kenny, when finally located, insisted quite convincingly that Monk had told him the date was scheduled for the next day. It was not the last time that Monk was to indicate a lack of concern for such routine things as time and place and passing on the kind of basic information that is important to ordinary people.”

For a time, Monk’s considerable eccentricities encompassed mostly his cavalier disregard for time, his hats, his tendency to dance onstage, his staring into space, and his mumbling. But he would need to be hospitalized for mental illness, and the disease worsened even more dramatically in the late 1960s.

Just what the exact disease was remained indeterminate at the time. Autism, Tourette’s Syndrome, and schizophrenia were commonly suggestged. In a recent biography, Robin D.G. Kelly presents evidence for a diagnosis of manic depression.

Whatever the condition was, pharmacology, then in the comparative dark ages, was in no state to treat it. Thorazine and Lithium were both tried, to no lasting positive effect. In fact, Kelly, while acknowledging in an online Atlantic Monthly interview that Lithium might have helped diminh Monk’s worst episodes, also believes that it “contributed to an unwillingness or a lack of desire to play.”

But in the end, it all comes back to the important thing: the music. Critic Dan Morgenstern, in his book Living With Jazz, notes vividly the nature of Monk’s technique at his creative zenith, before the wayward thoughts in his mind overwhelmed the sounds only he could hear:

“To Monk, the piano was a sounding board. A study should be made of his use of the pedals, both the damping and sustaining one. He used his feet as unorthodoxly as he did his hands, and as percussively. He struck his notes, aware that the piano is a percussion instrument, a big, tunable drum. His technique may have been eccentric, but it was intensely functional….He knew exactly what he wanted from the instrument.”

This Day in Classical Music History (Lothario Liszt Starts Recital Craze)

June 9, 1840—Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt laid the groundwork for taking the Continent by storm in his advertisement for a new concert form he would try this night at London’s Hanover Rooms: the solo piano recital.

For the last several years, Liszt had soaked up literary as well as musical influences in an attempt to reshape the creative culture of his time. As a result, when he first tried to describe how he wanted to affect audiences, he chose a different metaphor in a letter to the Princess Belgiojoso of Italy:

“These tiresome musical soliloquies (I do not know what other name to give these inventions of mine) with which I contrive to gratify the Romans, and which I am quite capable of importing to Paris, so unbounded does my impudence become!”

It took another few years for Liszt to adopt a suggestion by music publisher Frederick Beale that they use the term “recital” instead. People reacted quizzically at first, but were soon won over by the skill and intensity with which the virtuoso Liszt played.

Very much included in his fan group were women. Woody Allen once joked that he didn’t believe in reincarnation, but if it existed he’d like to come back as Warren Beatty’s fingertips. He might have done better as Liszt’s—he’d have perhaps just as many women, but all sorts of musical performances and compositions to his credit, too.

In fact, the latter were part and parcel of the package that attracted women. “Before Liszt, pianists kept their hands close to the keyboard, playing from wrist and finger rather than arm or shoulder,” explained longtime New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg in The Lives of the Great Composers. “But not after Liszt. He established once and for all the genre of the bravura pianist, the pianist who would haughtily come out, cow the audience, lift hands high, and assault the instrument.”

Alfred Brendel, no mean pianist himself, explained that as part of his act, Liszt would plunge into the audience between recitals to mingle with the audience. This, I suggest, was an opportunity for him to press the flesh—literally.

If Liszt were paying attention from the stage, he probably already had a good idea who would warm to him. He would negligently whip off his silk handkerchiefs and velvet gloves. This would send the females in the audience into such fits that they’d fight each other over these accessories. They probably would have thrown their undergarments at him, too, the way they did a century and a quarter later with the “Welsh Elvis,” Tom Jones--only, given the size of undergarments in the early Victorian period, it probably would have taken a fortnight to accomplish that feat.

Liszt stopped playing for money after 1847, spending nearly the last four decades of his life composing instead, for the most part. More bizarrely, he ended up taking Holy Orders and was known as Abbe Liszt in his last quarter-century.

Liszt’s life contains so much eccentricity, contradiction, passion, and incident that it has proven irresistible to Hollywood. Predictably, Tinseltown has never known to let well enough alone and has resorted to fictionalizing it.

I can still recall as a child watching a late-afternoon weekday movie series featuring Song Without End (1960), starring Dirk Bogarde as the Romantic idol. The Liszt lover in that biopic, Princess Carolyne Wittgenstein, was not an especially attractive woman. That, of course, would have been a complete non-starter at the box office, so Capucine had to be cast in the role.

But that was nothing compared with what Ken Russell did to the virtuoso’s career in Lisztomania. I never thought that anything could equal the over-the-top direction of his screen adaptation of Tommy, but reading about what he did with Liszt, I may have to revise that opinion.

Imagine this, faithful reader: Ringo Starr, as the pope. Wearing cowboy boots.

I’m not going to write any more on this topic because, after that last line, you won’t be able to remember anything I say, anyway.

This Day in Jazz History (Erroll Garner Makes Mark in Concert Hall)

March 27, 1950—The Cleveland Music Hall, long a Midwestern mainstay on the classical music circuit, hosted an artist entirely different from its usual restrained fare: Erroll Garner, a jazz pianist-composer who compensated for an inability to read music with an uncanny ear, a stunning aural memory, and an infectiously joyful improvisational style.

Later in the decade, Garner became the first jazz artist represented by Sol Hurok since the classical impresario had booked Benny Goodman in Carnegie Hall before WWII.

Every artist—heck, every person—should have a champion, someone who will beat the drums incessantly for you, or go to bat if, in effect, you can't. Garner’s champion was his longtime manager and executor of his estate, Martha Glaser, who not only helped secure him the booking at the prestigious Cleveland venue, but who, five decades later, sharply (and, in my opinion, rightly) upbraided Ken Burns for omitting him from the epic public-television history Jazz.

Burns’ contention that Garner wasn’t a “seminal innovator” is questionable. What isn’t is Garner’s personality. The warmth and good humor that poured from his keys accurately reflected his demeanor. (You can also sense this in the image accompanying this post.)

If Burns (and, presumably, at least some of the consultants for his series) were not too high on Garner, the overwhelming majority of his fellow musicians didn’t make the same mistake. One such musician, Art Blakey, had, like his fellow resident of The Hill section of Pittsburgh, taken up the piano.

That is, until Garner completely outclassed him at the instrument one night, and the owner of the hall strongly urged Blakey to turn to the drums—which he did.

Like many jazz musicians, Garner died far too young—in this case, at age 55, from lung cancer—but in addition to his many reworkings of jazz standards, he also composed 200 songs of his own in his truncated career, including “Misty.” You might have heard Jane Monheit bring her rich, creamy vocal delivery to the tune, but decades ago people became most familiar with it on the small and big screen.

Throughout most of the Sixties, listeners of the Today Show awoke to the strains of this lushly romantic jazz instrumental. When the producers switched to a different one in the early 1970s, composer Ray Ellis’ “This Is Today,” they might have wished they hadn’t. Someone noticed that it sounded a lot like the Godspell hit “Day by Day,” and sued for copyright infringement.

Around the same time “Misty” was fading from the TV picture, it gained new prominence in Clint Eastwood’s film, Play Misty for Me. The director who, over the last four decades, has probably done more than any other to employ jazz themes in his films, found an evocative artist in the first movie he helmed that had a contemporary setting.

Like many fans, I came to Garner through his 1956 recording, Concert by the Sea, where I became intoxicated by his “four-in-the-bar” left-hand technique and introductions that turned the basic melodies inside out. I've bought several other CDs of his work since, and they all leave me convinced that his departure from the music scene left a gaping hole unable to be filled.