On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

[“Jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, posing for adult art students.” Photograph by Gordon Parks. Castle Hill, Massachusetts, July 1955. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901.

WKCR-FM is playing Armstrong all day.

Related reading
All Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)

Cool jazz pioneer?

Today’s New York Times crossword puzzle, by Brad Wilber and Doug Peterson, serves in a small way to rewrite music history. The clue for 46-Down: “Cool jazz pioneer.” The answer: TORME.

No, he wasn’t.

The basis for this clue appears to be a paragraph from the Times obituary for Mel Tormé:

But it was as a singer that Mr. Torme made his deepest mark. The critic Will Friedwald, in his book Jazz Singing, cited Mr. Torme as a pioneer of “cool jazz,” spun off from the pop crooning of the day.

Here is what Friedwald wrote:


[Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices From Bessie Smith To Bebop And Beyond (1996).]

What Friedwald says in this passage is not that Tormé was a pioneer of cool jazz, but that his singing reflected that music. Indeed, Friedwald describes the so-called vo-cool style as coming into its own as “cool instrumental jazz,” or what most listeners would call cool jazz, began to fade in popularity.

I ran the clue for 46-Down (minus the rest of the puzzle) past my dad, who defers to no one in his love of Tormé’s music. His guess: YOUNG, as in Lester. I would have guessed DAVIS, as in Miles. As for the characterization of Tormé as a cool jazz pioneer, my dad calls it “a stretch.” Perhaps the characterization results from someone’s attempt to create a novel clue, something other than “Crooner Mel” or “Melodious Mel” or “The Velvet Fog,” all of which have appeared in Times puzzles. Mel Tormé was a terrific singer, and he’s always crossword-worthy. But he wasn’t a pioneer of cool jazz.

*

Here’s what happened when I wrote to the Times.

Related posts
All crossword posts (Pinboard)
A Mel Tormé story
Tracts, tides, and drunks

[You can search for the history of a word or clue at XWord Info.]

Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity

Worth at least a three-hour drive: Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, at the Art Institute of Chicago. This exhibition gives us art devoted not to cathedrals, haystacks, and water lilies, but to well-dressed men and women (mostly women). Clothes in these works seem to both mask and reveal the human subject: one is what one wears. The studio portrait gives way to what appears to be a moment of everyday life (titles often carry a year): someone is reading a newspaper, someone is trying on a hat.

For Elaine and for me, the great discovery of this exhibition is James Tissot. His work seems more Pre-Raphaelite than Impressionist. I wish I had realized while still in the museum that Tissot’s The Circle of the Rue Royale depicts Charles Haas, the model for Proust’s Swann:

And yet, dear Charles Swann, whom I knew so little when I was still so young and you so near the grave, it is already because someone whom you must have considered a little idiot has made you the hero of one of his novels that people are beginning to talk about you again, and perhaps you will live on. If people talk so much about the Tissot painting set on the balcony of the Rue Royale Club, where you are standing with Galliffet, Edmond de Polignac and Saint-Maurice, it is because they can see there is something of you in the character of Swann.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003)

The perfect adjunct to the big show: Undressed: The Fashion of Privacy. Both exhibitions run through September 29.

[The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a gallery-by-gallery tour.]

Some rocks, some rocks

[“How to Keep Cool,” Zippy, August 2, 2013.]

I went a little crazy when I saw the middle panel of today’s Zippy. Because here is what I was planning to post today:


[From the Lassie episode “Rock Hound,” April 5, 1959. Lassie and Boomer Bates’s dog Mike visit a strangely similar memorial.]

If you’re wondering about “some rocks,” it’s a reference to the comic strip Nancy. Scott McCloud explains it, or them.

Please visualize these links in the form of a Venn diagram:

Nancy posts
Nancy and Zippy posts (with more rocks)
Zippy posts

[What is Zippy eschewing? His “usual styrofoam footwear.”]

Fragments from a musical

A little-known fact of musical-theater history: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music started as a very different show, What Is the Sound of Music?

From the surviving manuscripts, in black pencil and blue ink on lined yellow 8 1/2" x 11" paper:

A Buddhist nun is torn between her dedication to the liberation of all sentient beings and her love for a wealthy landowner whose family [illegible ] as a governess.

[This sentence appears to be a synopsis of the story.]

*

“What Is the Sound of Music?”
“This Acolyte’s a Problem in the Sangha”
“How Do You Solve a Problem Like Samsara?”
“The Lonely Lama”
“Climb Ev’ry Mountain in the Quest for
    Enlightenment”
“Old Advice”
“Worldly Vice, Worldly Vice, Every Morning You
    Greet Me”
“Do-Re-Mi”

[From what appears to be a list of working song titles. Three of the titles are struck through.]

*

Totally unprepared are you to face a world of Zen,
Timid and shy and scared are you of koans beyond
    your ken.

[Partial lyric, “Sixteen Going on Seventeen Days of Unceasing Meditation”]

*

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens,
Brown paper packages tied up with strings,
All are but fleeting, impermanent things.

[Partial lyric, “My Favorite Things Are All Utterly Impermanent”]

Perhaps you too, reader, have come across one or more manuscript fragments. Please, share your discovery in a comment.

[No disrespect to any tradition intended. It’s just fun.]

Store-brand cereals and their mascots

My friend Sara meditates on store-brand cereals and their mascots: “They’re A-Okay.”

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The Old Reader, about to disappear Maybe not yet.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, July 31, 2013.]

Says Hi, “Housewives used to dress up to greet their husbands when they came home from work.”

Yes, and houses used to have their kitchens not in the living room. See the three little windows? You can’t tell me that that door isn’t front. It’s possible that Hi has walked around the house and entered through the kitchen — which would make him a back-door man in his own damn house. But that’s still a front door. And yes, there aren’t enough chairs.

And why is Hi under the impression that Lois is a “housewife”? Wake up, Mr. Flagston: your wife has been working since 1980. A 1984 chart tracking the strip’s history marks the event: “Lois Joins the Women’s Movement and Gets a Job Selling Real Estate” — aka Etatse Laer.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

[The chart appears in Mort Walker and Dik Browne’s The Best of “Hi and Lois” (1986).]

Antique music, antique phonographs

From WFMU, a podcast worth your attention: Michael Cumella’s The Antique Phonograph Music Program, old music played on old machines. Try the July 16 show, which explores the differences between acoustical and electrical recording, with back-to-back records for comparison.

I like this podcast for the expertise of its host, for the unfamiliarity of (most of) the music, and for the chance to think about what people not that long ago found entertaining. And guess what — much of it is still entertaining.

A discovery by way of this podcast and YouTube: the Bratislava Hot Serenaders. Try “Crazy Rhythm” (after Ben Bernie) and “Happy Feet” (after Paul Whiteman). Hot indeed.

Thanks to Mike at Brown Studies for recommending this podcast.

Domestic comedy

“Isn’t that pretty?”

[Rolls eyes for comedic effect .] “Beautiful. Put it on Pinterest.”

“I found it on Pinterest.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard, not Pinterest)