"Why didn’t Ellington consider his music jazz?"

Kathryn Jean Lopez asks Terry Teachout, who says:

His problem was specifically with the word “jazz,” which for his generation (he was born in 1899) still had strongly sexual connotations. Ellington believed that such ostensibly vulgar labels would prevent jazz from ever being taken seriously by artists, critics, and scholars, so he tried to come up with a different way of referring to the music. At one point, the label he preferred was “Negro folk music.” Needless to say, it never caught on.

Here's Teachout's new book "Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington," which contains the sentence — Teachout's second favorite of his sentences, he says — “He talked not to explain himself but to conceal himself.”

Wisconsin outdoes Broadway.

Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal reviewing the current production of "All My Sons" (in Spring Green, Wisconsin:

Do it naturalistically and straightforwardly and you can't miss. Add a pinch of understated imagination and the results will be even better. William Brown's American Players Theatre production scores big on both counts....

The last revival of "All My Sons" that I saw was Simon McBurney's 2008 Broadway production, a criminally excessive exercise in postmodern stage prestidigitation in which Katie Holmes, John Lithgow and Dianne Wiest all sank beneath the roiling waves of Mr. McBurney's trickery. 

"Yawn, and then some. Will we never be rid of the snobby blight of the Bloomsberries?"

Terry Teachout, bemoaning the "2 entire walls... devoted to Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant" at the "Inventing Abstraction" show at the MoMa.

One of the many things triumphantly demonstrated by "Inventing Abstraction" is the sheer volume of second- and third-rate art... that was generated by the rise of the abstractionists. The imitability of so many key figures of the movement never ceases to fascinate me.

If I were in NYC today, I would scamper over to see the big show before it closes. But I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin, where the corresponding spectacle is "1934: A New Deal for Artists" at the Chazen Museum. Here's the museum's propaganda:

During the Great Depression, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised a “new deal for the American people,” initiating government programs to foster economic recovery. Realizing that Americans needed not only employment but also the inspiration art could provide, the administration created the Public Works of Art Project, the first federal program to support the arts. Although short-lived, the PWAP employed thousands of artists to paint regional, recognizable subjects—from portraits to cityscapes and street scenes to landscapes and rural life. These artworks were displayed in schools, libraries, post offices, museums, and government buildings, vividly capturing the realities and ideals of the era. 1934: A New Deal for Artists celebrates the 75th anniversary of the PWAP, presenting 56 vibrant paintings from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s unparalleled collection.

"Vividly" and "vibrant" are words. So are "dully" and "dreary." The one painting you can see at the link is far better than nearly everything else in the show, and I can only imagine the looks of the thousands of other paintings that were cranked out in this government jobs program and foisted on the schoolkids and library-goers of America. I moved quickly from one painting to the next, and — unfortunately or fortunately — I was alone, because much cynical mockery went unsaid.

I realize only now that I could have worn my iPhone with its headset and a recording app running and muttered my lines as if talking to someone by phone. Would that be wrong?

What would you prefer to have inflicted on you in the form of way too many paintings — New York City's snobbish adoration of the Bloombury Group or Madison, Wisconsin's politically medicinal devotion to FDR?

"I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me..."

"... to be born, or at any rate, bred, in a handbag, whether it had handles or not..."



Via Terry Teachout.