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ON MUSIC
This Year's Model
by David Hajdu
Elvis Costello
North
(Deutsche Grammophon)
Why don't we let rock stars grow up? The pop music domain is like a confederation of NeverNever Land and the Island of Lost Boys, where nobody can ever grow old and nasty behavior is the social code. It is some fifty years now since rock and roll began to emerge as a musical style and a cultural phenomenon, originally of a piece with the adolescent rebellion against postwar conservatism that the rebelled-upon used to call juvenile delinquency. The music's surviving originators --Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, most of them now septuagenarians--continue to make their livings singing the same raucous, primal tunes about high school, fast cars, and sex to aging fans who may not have experienced some of those things in a while. No matter that Berry would rather be performing Tin Pan Alley standards such as "I'm Through With Love," nor that Diddley is constantly writing new material few people care to hear, nor that Little Richard, an ordained Seventh-Day Adventist minister, prefers to sing gospel music. (Jerry Lee Lewis is congenitally delinquent, but that's another issue.) Rock and roll is here to stay put.
Disposed to more expansive conceptions of rock's potential, venturesome musicians of succeeding eras--such as Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Pete Townshend, and their heirs--have stretched and re-shaped rock and roll innumerable times, and many others, including Paul McCartney, Joe Jackson, and Stewart Copeland (the former drummer for the Police and no relation to Aaron Copland, though he refers to the composer as his "honorary uncle"), have dropped the genre--temporarily, as a rule--to experiment with classical forms such as the symphony and the oratorio and the opera. Still, we tend to prefer our rockers young and angry. We look cynically upon overt demonstrations of creative ambition as over-reaching, especially when popular artists dare to cross the chalk lines of category and genre. We dismiss as pretentious their efforts in musical styles positioned above rock on the artistic hierarchy, which is unfair regardless of the fact that McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio, for example, is indeed terminally pretentious. (A few of McCartney's less grandiose concert pieces, among them a tuneful piano study called "A Leaf," have a genial charm.) Many of us of the postwar generation submit to a kind of philistine elitism, rejecting the privilege of an artist successful in an informal discipline to attempt a formal art, because we see the latter as bourgeois and the interest in it as a betrayal of the anti-establishment ethic to which rock and roll still lays claim, decades after it became the music of the establishment. By the same token, we are quick to embrace the latest young group of rough-hewn bad boys (Pantera, Turbonegro) and to exalt them for their puerility and their crudity.
I suspect that thoughts of this sort have occasionally struck Elvis Costello, whose brave, mercurial career achieves a dénouement this month with the release of North, his twenty-fourth album, a collection of somber art songs in the vein of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Asked about the title, Costello has explained: "That's where I'm headed." Clearly he sees the project as a mark of his creative progress; he has noted that he wrote all the songs at the piano, like the composers in our mental image of the great masters, rather than on the guitar, historically the instrument of vernacular musicians. He also wrote the album's orchestrations for twenty-eight strings and nine horns (using a pencil on music paper, not a computer), and he conducted the orchestra himself. "I don't think the New York Philharmonic is going to call me up," he joked to Rolling Stone. Then again, Costello did not call Lorin Maazel. Twenty-six years after he borrowed
Huey Lewis's backup band to make his first album for a start-up punk-rock label called Stiff Records, Costello could assume the podium to lead a sizable orchestra on a recording for Deutsche Grammophon. To misquote the title of his famous second album, this year's is a luxury model.
The route that Costello has followed to northerly artistic territory has been serpentine, with pins all over the musical map. Raised in Birkenhead, across the Mersey River from Liverpool, he started in his teens as a pub-band singer and songwriter indebted to the Beatles and their influences--that is, to all of pop music history. His debut LP, My Aim Is True, which appeared in 1977, was an international hit of the punk/New Wave years, and permanently cemented his public image as a volatile nerd, somewhat obscuring the discipline and the sophistication already evident in songs such as "Alison" and "Watching the Detectives." Following a series of infectious, aggressively clever albums made with his deft little band, the Attractions, Costello took a hard turn westward and released an album of his favorite country tunes called Almost Blue, performed demurely, with reverence, in 1981. Costello's audience started looking for the exits.
In the 1980s, Costello reached his maturity as a pop songwriter, producing a fine collection of buoyant tunes about betrayal, duplicity, and related hazards of his romantic paradigm in Imperial Bedroom (1982), as well as a couple of near-equals in King of America (1986) and Spike (1989), the latter a wildly eclectic pastiche of things from several albums that Costello had abandoned. "By the time I got to my fifth album, by the early eighties, I wasn't listening to pop music--I was listening to all jazz," Costello told the music journalist Fred Schruers. "You can hear [that] the shape of songs starts to change." Though he was still writing in the pop milieu and would have a hit from time to time (such as Spike's "Veronica," co-written with McCartney), the growing subtlety of his lyrics (which relied less on gimmickry and shock value, and more on narrative detail) and the complexity of his music (which broke away from traditional popular-song forms and broadened harmonically to accommodate a diversity of guest musicians, including jazz bassist Ray Brown and the Dirty Dozen Jazz Band) were making Costello an increasingly specialized taste.
What had happened was that he was asking to be taken seriously, much to the puzzlement of fans who had always mistaken him for a musically gifted novelty act. Stage-named like a cartoon character and decked out like one in oversized horn-rims and pompadour, Costello allowed himself to be packaged as punk's delegate to the house of Spike Jones and Ray Stevens, and when he started crooning "Almost Blue" (a ballad highlight of Imperial Bedroom, not on the earlier album of the same title), his audience heard the second act of Pagliacci. What was so rattling about Costello's change was that he was not being ironic. Ever since McCartney started putting music-hall numbers such as "When I'm Sixty-Four" on Beatles albums, listeners have been primed to accept pre-rock styles only if they are used ironically--a generous misreading of the sentimental Paulie's likely intentions, I suspect.
Costello, who turned forty in 1994, spent most of the 1990s trying to figure out how to be a grown-up musician. For starters, he grew a beard, which in time became enormous. (My son has a theory that the self-seriousness of each of the Beatles' music was directly proportionate to the mass of his facial hair, and the evidence is persuasive.) Costello turned to styles and forms of music that are traditionally deemed more serious than rock, pop, or country: jazz and formal composition. He sang with the Jazz Passengers and the Mingus Big Band (adding lyrics to several Mingus compositions as well); and he accepted two commissions to compose orchestral scores, one in 1991 for the BBC television drama G.B.H., the second, four years later, for the BBC mini-series Jake's Progress. Both were written in collaboration with the prolific British screen composer Richard Harvey, who helped to translate Costello's melodies into musical notation.
Frustrated by his musical illiteracy but emboldened by confidence in his talent, Costello set out to learn how to read and write the music that he could always hear and play on the guitar. "I realized it was really self-defeating to maintain this mental block that I had about musical notation," he explained to the journalist Christopher Porter.
‘ I wasn't able to communicate very accurately to [the orchestra]. I had done some film music where I had composed the themes, but they'd always had to be orchestrated by other people.... I was very frustrated that some ideas were getting bent out of shape, so I enlisted some help ... and I got through this mental block [about notation]. ... It's a very foolish one to describe, but I got through it, and within six months I was writing four-part string parts. And now I just wrote [a] two-hundred-page orchestral score with a pencil. So, I learned really fast. I've always been able to hear harmony really clearly, so it wasn't a question of I didn't understand the music. I understood very well what I was doing. I just had no need to write it down [before].’
As Costello must have known, there is more to music theory than a gifted musician could intuit with the keenest ear for harmony (there are counterpoint and form, for instance), and composing orchestral music is as much a matter of learning notation as writing a novel is a matter of learning the alphabet. It is a marvel that the string-quartet settings that he composed in 1993 for The Juliet Letters, an album of songs featuring the Brodsky Quartet, are so lovely--simple and largely imitative, but gently appealing. Lyrically, the record was a nostalgic homage to epistolary expression, and it was the same thing musically; Costello had become enchanted with the act of putting pen to paper while the rest of world was lost in computers.
Costello gave his curiosity free rein over the musical landscape. Before he was finished with the 1990s, he had made a burnished album of ballads co-written with Burt Bacharach, the grand old lion of refined commercial pop; he had written songs with or for Aimee Mann, Johnny Cash, Roger McGuinn, Bonnie Raitt, and Paul McCartney (with whom he had started writing in the 1980s); he had composed an entire album of new tunes for the folkish British provocateur Wendy James; and he had performed with the uncategorizable American guitarist Bill Frisell--in addition to all his other work in pop, jazz, and formal music. A Google search of "Elvis Costello" and "eclectic" generates more than ten thousand hits, most of them involving his work in the last decade. Little of this genre-roving has sat particularly well with the pop audience, which prefers its explorers to cross borders of place rather than time. Costello's breach of rock protocol is his pursuit of musical styles associated with the past or with older people, such as country, classical music, Tin Pan Alley, folk-rock, and the rest, instead of contemporary musics of places such as Africa, Cuba, or the Middle East, which are seen as cool.
Costello (like Paul McCartney and Jerry Garcia) is the son of a big-band musician, and his childhood of singing standards in parlor musicales (as both McCartney and Garcia did with their fathers) has informed his own music (as it has or did in the cases of McCartney and Garcia, the latter of whom was named for Jerome Kern). Costello's father, Ross MacManus, a bebop trumpeter who became fairly well known in Britain as a vocalist for a Glenn Miller-style pop ensemble called the Joe Loss Orchestra, had used the pseudonym Day Costello--his grandmother's surname--when he did some moonlighting from his duties for Loss. (MacManus even had a minor hit under the Costello name, a rendition of McCartney's wholly unironic ballad "The Long and Winding Road," in 1970.) His son Declan's first words were supposedly "skin, mommy"--an entreaty to hear his favorite record at the time, Frank Sinatra's exultant rendition of Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin." In taking up rock and roll under a stage name, he became the Elvis of the Costellos; and, now approaching fifty – Ross MacManus's age when My Aim Is True was released--Costello is making much the same kind of music that his father was singing while he was establishing a musical identity of his own.
North begins well, with a gray-hued orchestral prologue reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms," and most of what follows remains in the Bernstein mode, straddling the poles of serious concert music and serious popular song. The former clearly exerts the stronger pull upon Costello these days, as it did upon Bernstein in his later years. Stephen Sondheim has said that his West Side Story collaborator contracted "importantitis," a condition to which age increases an artist's susceptibility; and Costello is apparently not immune to it. His latest music has a self-consciousness that tends to overwhelm its humor (mainly in the lyrics) and its spontaneity (care of the jazz soloists Lee Konitz on alto saxophone and Lew Soloff on muted trumpet).
There are ten songs on North, and purchasers of the CD also get individual passcodes to allow them to download one more selection--the title song, as a matter of fact. (I'm not entirely sure how this arrangement will work, but the gimmick seems moot, since the whole CD has already shown up on websites for free downloading.) The songs have a common sound: all are ballads, most of them exceedingly slow, and their style is an angular sort of quasi-recitative, out of tempo. They are much like the contemporary musical-theater writing of young composers such as Adam Guettel, in which melodic phrases wander, abruptly halt, jerk about, and take acrobatic leaps with little provocation, and in which the natural cadence of the words does not necessarily fit the music with the kind of precision fundamental to earlier theater-song craftspeople such as Guettel's grandfather Richard Rodgers and his main collaborators, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. Costello sings, "But ... if-I'd-only-known ... that this would BE the last lov-ING remark ... you left me IN the dark." In contemporary pop music, such erratic phrasing is the norm; indeed, it is arguably an essential attribute, part of the music's treasured rawness. I presume that Costello does not hear his jagged writing as untidy--or, if he does, that he prefers to keep things a little messy as a matter of generational pride.
Costello need not have explained that he composed all the pieces on North at the piano. Listening to the music, one can picture him at the keyboard, following the scales with his hands cupped in place. In "You Turned to Me," for instance, he moves down the scale in C major, making impressive-sounding augmented chords with small variations on simple triads. Costello has gone all mushy for augmented chords, which sound jazzy and sophisticated, and he is nearly as charmed by the Dorian mode, which can have an eerie quality. His mastery of these devices is still developing; at points Costello's harmony is arbitrarily complex, not yet organic. Compositionally, much of North sounds like exercises, although that is to Costello's credit, in one sense. (He and I are roughly the same age, and I find it progressively more difficult to get myself to do exercises of any sort.) That Costello has the wherewithal to try a new musical instrument and to learn a new set of skills is remarkable in itself, and the resulting music is far more interesting than hearing him play "Pump It Up" for the jillionth time. (Costello plays piano--in a manner so spare it is nearly absent--on two tracks of North, and his longtime keyboardist Steve Nieve plays much the same way on all the others.)
Lyrically, North has Costello's most disciplined writing--not his most dynamic (This Year's Model) nor his most imaginative (Imperial Bedroom), but his most conversational, his simplest. Habitually verbose, Costello barely sounds like himself here. Each song on North has fewer than half the words of a typical selection on any previous Elvis Costello album, and they are employed with uncommon restraint. Only once does Costello use Tin Pan Alley clichés, in "I'm In the Mood Again," and he does so with a theatrical wink: "I lay my head down on fine linens and satin/Away from the mad-hatters who live in Manhattan/The Empire State Building illuminating the sky/ I'm in the mood, I'm in the mood, I'm in the mood again." The language is mostly personal and intimate, with Costello assuming fewer roles than usual. He is singing as himself, celebrating love and bemoaning its futility, and ruminating on the passage of time: "I never did what I was told/I trampled though the amber and the burnished gold/But now I clearly see how cruel the young can be."
Modulating his voice to accommodate the material, Costello sings his sedate new songs in a more tempered version of the mellow baritone into which he has shifted for ballads since he crooned "My Funny Valentine" on the B-side of a single in 1978. Some of his old fans have belittled him for trying to be Frank Sinatra, but the classic pop singer to whom he is most indebted is Billy Eckstine, the original musically adventurous jazz-pop vocalist with a bad-boy reputation and a throbbing vibrato. I know Costello is an admirer of the late "Mr. B" because I saw him sitting with his mother and studying Eckstine in performance at the Blue Note nightclub in Manhattan sometime in the late 1980s. It was a strange, grim evening. Eckstine, while vigorous and in good voice, had fallen into disfavor and was struggling to reclaim his lost glory. As his finale, he fumbled through a pandering medley of recent pop hits far beneath an artist with his gifts--"Love the One You're With" and "Walk a Mile in My Shoes," I remember, and something else of that ilk, maybe "Gentle on My Mind."
North may be a flawed effort, but its defects are aspirational, and I would rather suffer them than watch another great artist go south.
David Hajdu's review of North in new book, Oct. '09
David Hajdu's review of North in new book, Oct. '09
Last edited by johnfoyle on Thu Nov 12, 2009 5:59 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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A rope leash
- Posts: 1835
- Joined: Fri Jun 13, 2003 6:47 pm
- Location: southern misery, USA
Northenol
"Suffer" is the right word. Still has been stuck in my head for three days now. I can't stay awake.
I'm going back to bed...
I'm going back to bed...
Not sure if I see the comparison to Brecht and Weil -- though Weil without Brecht makes some sense. (Brecht wasn't exactly a romantic for one thing, and the songs were far more jagged and up-tempo...more like rock, actually.)
http://www.forwardtoyesterday.com -- Where "hopelessly dated" is a compliment!
Re: New Republic Review of North
http://www.pbpulse.com/arts-and-culture ... p-culture/
August 17, 2009
David Hajdu, author of excellent books on Billy Strayhorn and the government’s prosecution of comic books in the 1950s, will publish an essay collection through Da Capo.
Heroes and Villains will include pieces on movies, comics and music, with topics ranging from Woody Guthrie, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell and Kanye West.
http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/dacapo ... 0306818337
Heroes and Villains
by David Hajdu
Oct 5, 2009
http://www.amazon.com/Heroes-Villains-E ... _rhf_p_t_1
August 17, 2009
David Hajdu, author of excellent books on Billy Strayhorn and the government’s prosecution of comic books in the 1950s, will publish an essay collection through Da Capo.
Heroes and Villains will include pieces on movies, comics and music, with topics ranging from Woody Guthrie, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell and Kanye West.
http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/dacapo ... 0306818337
Heroes and Villains
by David Hajdu
Oct 5, 2009
http://www.amazon.com/Heroes-Villains-E ... _rhf_p_t_1
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Jack of All Parades
- Posts: 5716
- Joined: Sun Apr 12, 2009 11:31 am
- Location: Where I wish to be
Re: David Hajdu's review of North in new book, Oct. '09
I am excited for this release-truly enjoyed both "The Ten Cent Plague" and "Positvely 4th Street"-both very well done and written in an engaging style-the right wing scare over comic books in the 50s and the Village scene of the early 60s with Dylan, Baez, the Farinas and Pynchon-thank you for bringing back the link to the early review of "North"-was always struck by Hajdu's ability to intelligently talk about the music right down to chord structures and still touch on the social, political aspects of the music at the same time-was particularly taken by his cogent analysis of the lyrics-particulary the fact that they work best in their elegant simplicity-avoiding the verbal mush that often time afflicts EC-trying to stuff each line with as many words and rhymes as he can conjure-an exercise that is often funny in the current thread on EC lines you like or dislike.
"....there's a merry song that starts in 'I' and ends in 'You', as many famous pop songs do....'
Re: David Hajdu's review of North in new book, Oct. '09
It's my horn, and I'm going to blow it (at least until I get a publishing deal):
http://everybodysdummy.blogspot.com/200 ... north.html
http://everybodysdummy.blogspot.com/200 ... north.html
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Jack of All Parades
- Posts: 5716
- Joined: Sun Apr 12, 2009 11:31 am
- Location: Where I wish to be
Re: David Hajdu's review of North in new book, Oct. '09
Thank you for sharing-enjoyed the Lester Bang's quote in your banner-best of luck with the publisher search-it has got to be difficult to get through the door-at least you are trying.
"....there's a merry song that starts in 'I' and ends in 'You', as many famous pop songs do....'
Re: David Hajdu's review of North in new book, Oct. '09
http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/ ... _hajdu.php
Miami Book Fair: David Hajdu
By S. Pajot in Miami Book Fair
Thu., Nov. 12 2009
Take a look at the biographical blurb and accompanying author photo on the back cover of David Hajdu's latest book, Heroes and Villains, and you'll discover that not only is Hadju a professor, but he looks like one. Smiling wryly behind frameless spectacles, the 54-year-old prof (and music critic for the New Republic) folds his arms across the front of his grey, long-sleeve, button-down sportshirt while his short, neat coif blows in the wind.
Yes, Hadju looks like an unassuming, mild-mannered academic. That, however, is not how he writes. Truth is, the professor is a very tough audience, a master of the cutting sarcastic remark, and a man of unyielding standards. (He really rips apart both Starbucks and late-life Joni Mitchell.) Although, for the most part, the writing in Heroes and Villains -- like that of Hadju's previous books Lush Life, Positively 4th Street, and The Ten-Cent Plague -- is generous with its criticism.
Whether covering jazz, '60s folk, comic books, Beyoncé, or Elmer Fudd, the prof never pulls a punch, but he also demonstrates a deep love and near-encyclopedic understanding of his material. Perhaps the most lovely (and least known) subject though in Hadju's book is Billy Eckstine, a black jazz singer who equaled Frank Sinatra's star power in the late 1940s before being undone and forgotten by a racist entertainment industry.
Now, this Saturday, rather than reading from Heroes and Villains, the professor will be playing music alongside his wife, Karen Oberlin -- a Bistro- and MAC-winning jazz vocalist -- in honor of Eckstine and a few other favorites.
New Times: What exactly do you have planned for your appearance at the Book Fair?
Karen Oberlin: David will be accompanying me on guitar for a number of songs, all related to articles in his book. We've always had a few tunes we could work up for an event. We played a few songs for the Positively 4th Street tour.
So this is something you've done before?
David Hajdu: We did just one smaller, less ambitious try-out of the program, in a bookstore in Pennsylvania, early this month, just to see how it might go -- and we had fun, so we decided to put together something bigger for the Book Fair. Karen sings prominently all the time. She's done four sold-out shows (with her septet) at the Iridium, the New York jazz club, this year, as well as three times as many other shows (with her trio) in a great New York club called the Metropolitan Room. She's the big-time music professional in our little act. I'm like the other guy in Wham!
I've been told you'll be performing "My One and Only Love," "Dream a Little Dream of Me," "Blackbird," and "A Case of You." Any additions?
Hadju: I know we're going to add "Mountain Greenery" by Rodgers and Hart. And we've worked up "Man in the Mirror" by Michael Jackson. Reason: I've written about Jackson recently, even though that piece is not in Heroes and Villains.
Oberlin: We might bring in another one or two, but they will remain a mystery until then! You'll just have to come and see.
David, when did you first discover Billy Eckstine?
Hadju: I saw Eckstine perform several times in his last years -- including once at the Blue Note, with Elvis Costello and his mother in the audience! And I interviewed him once, not long before he died, for my book, Lush Life, which was a biography of Billy Strayhorn, who was a friend of Eckstine's when they were kids. I'm intensely devoted to African-American jazz musicians from Pittsburgh named Billy. Seriously though, I think Billy Eckstine was immeasurably important for breaking racial barriers in American pop culture, and his story is simply one of the most tragic stories in pop music history.
A number of your essay subjects (Eckstine, Bobby Darin, Anita O'Day, Elvis, etc.) are, in one way or another, tragic figures. Are pop stars doomed to tragedy by money, pressure, and the industry?
Hadju: I don't think many of the figures in the book are tragic, at least not one-dimensionally so. Anita O'Day, for instance, utterly defied the cliche of the tragic drug addict. She was a triumphant drug addict, and the main point I tried to make in the chapter on her is heroin is one of the reaons for the euphoria in her music. Bobby Darin? He knew he was doomed to an early death by heart disease, and his response was to make a joke of death in his music. He laughed at tragedy and made it comedy.
Over what period of time were the other essays contained in Heroes and Villains written?
Hadju: They cover a period of about ten years, though most of them were written in the last several years, and a few -- such as the piece on open-source remixing and on Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Lucinda Williams -- are very recent. The pieces in the book represent only a fraction of the writing I've done over the past ten years. For instance, I've done well over a dozen major pieces for the New York Times, but I didn't include any of them in the book. I included only things that I think have relevance today, things that have something to say about the culture around us today.
The book covers pop, jazz, movies, comic strips, cartoons, and more. How important is it that critics maintain diverse interests?
Hadju: I don't know about anybody else, but I find it impossible to think in terms of strict categories anymore. Music and the visual arts and literature are all mashed up, and the old categories of "high" and "low" mean very little today.
Karen and David, any upcoming projects to report?
Oberlin: I have a current show at the Metropolitan Room in NYC, called, "Birds Do It: Songs of the Natural World." Basically, it's an ecclectic mix of songs inspired by the mother of all muses, nature.
Hadju: I'm working on a big book, a biography of Martin Scorsese. I expect it to take me at least six or seven years. So I don't expect to be back at the Miami Book Fair for a while, and I'm pretty cranky about that.
David Hadju and Karen Oberlin perform at the Miami Book Fair on Saturday, November 14 at 12:30 p.m. in Miami Dade College's Prometeo Theatre (Building 1, 1st Floor, Room 1101).
Miami Book Fair: David Hajdu
By S. Pajot in Miami Book Fair
Thu., Nov. 12 2009
Take a look at the biographical blurb and accompanying author photo on the back cover of David Hajdu's latest book, Heroes and Villains, and you'll discover that not only is Hadju a professor, but he looks like one. Smiling wryly behind frameless spectacles, the 54-year-old prof (and music critic for the New Republic) folds his arms across the front of his grey, long-sleeve, button-down sportshirt while his short, neat coif blows in the wind.
Yes, Hadju looks like an unassuming, mild-mannered academic. That, however, is not how he writes. Truth is, the professor is a very tough audience, a master of the cutting sarcastic remark, and a man of unyielding standards. (He really rips apart both Starbucks and late-life Joni Mitchell.) Although, for the most part, the writing in Heroes and Villains -- like that of Hadju's previous books Lush Life, Positively 4th Street, and The Ten-Cent Plague -- is generous with its criticism.
Whether covering jazz, '60s folk, comic books, Beyoncé, or Elmer Fudd, the prof never pulls a punch, but he also demonstrates a deep love and near-encyclopedic understanding of his material. Perhaps the most lovely (and least known) subject though in Hadju's book is Billy Eckstine, a black jazz singer who equaled Frank Sinatra's star power in the late 1940s before being undone and forgotten by a racist entertainment industry.
Now, this Saturday, rather than reading from Heroes and Villains, the professor will be playing music alongside his wife, Karen Oberlin -- a Bistro- and MAC-winning jazz vocalist -- in honor of Eckstine and a few other favorites.
New Times: What exactly do you have planned for your appearance at the Book Fair?
Karen Oberlin: David will be accompanying me on guitar for a number of songs, all related to articles in his book. We've always had a few tunes we could work up for an event. We played a few songs for the Positively 4th Street tour.
So this is something you've done before?
David Hajdu: We did just one smaller, less ambitious try-out of the program, in a bookstore in Pennsylvania, early this month, just to see how it might go -- and we had fun, so we decided to put together something bigger for the Book Fair. Karen sings prominently all the time. She's done four sold-out shows (with her septet) at the Iridium, the New York jazz club, this year, as well as three times as many other shows (with her trio) in a great New York club called the Metropolitan Room. She's the big-time music professional in our little act. I'm like the other guy in Wham!
I've been told you'll be performing "My One and Only Love," "Dream a Little Dream of Me," "Blackbird," and "A Case of You." Any additions?
Hadju: I know we're going to add "Mountain Greenery" by Rodgers and Hart. And we've worked up "Man in the Mirror" by Michael Jackson. Reason: I've written about Jackson recently, even though that piece is not in Heroes and Villains.
Oberlin: We might bring in another one or two, but they will remain a mystery until then! You'll just have to come and see.
David, when did you first discover Billy Eckstine?
Hadju: I saw Eckstine perform several times in his last years -- including once at the Blue Note, with Elvis Costello and his mother in the audience! And I interviewed him once, not long before he died, for my book, Lush Life, which was a biography of Billy Strayhorn, who was a friend of Eckstine's when they were kids. I'm intensely devoted to African-American jazz musicians from Pittsburgh named Billy. Seriously though, I think Billy Eckstine was immeasurably important for breaking racial barriers in American pop culture, and his story is simply one of the most tragic stories in pop music history.
A number of your essay subjects (Eckstine, Bobby Darin, Anita O'Day, Elvis, etc.) are, in one way or another, tragic figures. Are pop stars doomed to tragedy by money, pressure, and the industry?
Hadju: I don't think many of the figures in the book are tragic, at least not one-dimensionally so. Anita O'Day, for instance, utterly defied the cliche of the tragic drug addict. She was a triumphant drug addict, and the main point I tried to make in the chapter on her is heroin is one of the reaons for the euphoria in her music. Bobby Darin? He knew he was doomed to an early death by heart disease, and his response was to make a joke of death in his music. He laughed at tragedy and made it comedy.
Over what period of time were the other essays contained in Heroes and Villains written?
Hadju: They cover a period of about ten years, though most of them were written in the last several years, and a few -- such as the piece on open-source remixing and on Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Lucinda Williams -- are very recent. The pieces in the book represent only a fraction of the writing I've done over the past ten years. For instance, I've done well over a dozen major pieces for the New York Times, but I didn't include any of them in the book. I included only things that I think have relevance today, things that have something to say about the culture around us today.
The book covers pop, jazz, movies, comic strips, cartoons, and more. How important is it that critics maintain diverse interests?
Hadju: I don't know about anybody else, but I find it impossible to think in terms of strict categories anymore. Music and the visual arts and literature are all mashed up, and the old categories of "high" and "low" mean very little today.
Karen and David, any upcoming projects to report?
Oberlin: I have a current show at the Metropolitan Room in NYC, called, "Birds Do It: Songs of the Natural World." Basically, it's an ecclectic mix of songs inspired by the mother of all muses, nature.
Hadju: I'm working on a big book, a biography of Martin Scorsese. I expect it to take me at least six or seven years. So I don't expect to be back at the Miami Book Fair for a while, and I'm pretty cranky about that.
David Hadju and Karen Oberlin perform at the Miami Book Fair on Saturday, November 14 at 12:30 p.m. in Miami Dade College's Prometeo Theatre (Building 1, 1st Floor, Room 1101).
Re: David Hajdu's review of North in new book, Oct. '09
Only just spotted this -
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... nter0f-20/
My Standards
Karen Oberlin
October 15, 2000
Includes Shipbuilding
Now, this Saturday, rather than reading from Heroes and Villains, the professor will be playing music alongside his wife, Karen Oberlin -- a Bistro- and MAC-winning jazz vocalist -- in honor of Eckstine and a few other favorites.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... nter0f-20/
My Standards
Karen Oberlin
October 15, 2000
Includes Shipbuilding
Re: David Hajdu's review of North in new book, Oct. '09
http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/news/356
An April Fool's Day obituary from Prof. David Hajdu
April 1, 2011
Prof. David Hajdu has been writing about music for more than 30 years. He is the music critic for The New Republic, where he writes a weekly column.
Last Friday, April 1, he wrote something a bit out of the ordinary.
http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-famous-door ... -pan-alley
It was an obituary about Jameson "Nick" Hathaway, a forgettable, fictitious musician — an homage to April Fool's Day, as was subtly stated at the end of the piece.
The blog includes an illustrated portrait of Hathaway, video clips of real musicians playing Hathaway's songs and a reference to Bob Dylan once quoting Hathaway's lyrics. Hajdu even posted a Wikipedia entry for Hathaway, which gave a full description of the legendary but obsolete musician. (It has since been updated to reflect the joke.) And although some, including Entertainment Weekly and The Daily, understood this was an April Fool's stunt, many did not.
"I wrote it as a parody of myself, and it pokes fun mainly at the inclination to self-aggrandizement that critics pass off as benevolent advocacy or mastery of arcana," said Hajdu. "When I saw how quickly the piece took off — and how widely it was taken so seriously — I was pretty shaken up. An awful lot of people responded to the thing without reading it or thinking about it."
The videos Hajdu created to accompany the fake obituary have been viewed more than 700 times at the time this story was posted.
The Hathaway piece was a highly intricate undertaking, Hajdu explained. He wrote most of the words to "Ooka Dooka Dicka Dee," while Jill Sobule and John Doe wrote the music they're singing in the video, and Jon Weber wrote the music for both his video and Geoff Muldaur's. Prof. Stephen Edwards in Columbia's computer science department also provided technical assistance.
Also, Hajdu recently participated in a two-day conference titled “Bob Dylan and the Law.”
An April Fool's Day obituary from Prof. David Hajdu
April 1, 2011
Prof. David Hajdu has been writing about music for more than 30 years. He is the music critic for The New Republic, where he writes a weekly column.
Last Friday, April 1, he wrote something a bit out of the ordinary.
http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-famous-door ... -pan-alley
It was an obituary about Jameson "Nick" Hathaway, a forgettable, fictitious musician — an homage to April Fool's Day, as was subtly stated at the end of the piece.
The blog includes an illustrated portrait of Hathaway, video clips of real musicians playing Hathaway's songs and a reference to Bob Dylan once quoting Hathaway's lyrics. Hajdu even posted a Wikipedia entry for Hathaway, which gave a full description of the legendary but obsolete musician. (It has since been updated to reflect the joke.) And although some, including Entertainment Weekly and The Daily, understood this was an April Fool's stunt, many did not.
"I wrote it as a parody of myself, and it pokes fun mainly at the inclination to self-aggrandizement that critics pass off as benevolent advocacy or mastery of arcana," said Hajdu. "When I saw how quickly the piece took off — and how widely it was taken so seriously — I was pretty shaken up. An awful lot of people responded to the thing without reading it or thinking about it."
The videos Hajdu created to accompany the fake obituary have been viewed more than 700 times at the time this story was posted.
The Hathaway piece was a highly intricate undertaking, Hajdu explained. He wrote most of the words to "Ooka Dooka Dicka Dee," while Jill Sobule and John Doe wrote the music they're singing in the video, and Jon Weber wrote the music for both his video and Geoff Muldaur's. Prof. Stephen Edwards in Columbia's computer science department also provided technical assistance.
Also, Hajdu recently participated in a two-day conference titled “Bob Dylan and the Law.”