Classical Piano and the Importance of Good Grooming

Last night i caught Leif Ove Andsnes, the norwegian pianist, at disney hall. (here he is, right, after, presumably, chopping an entire nordic forest.) he played a set of janacek, brahms, mozart and schubert, with violinist christian tetzlaff. (a fine story on the celebrated duo here.)

great concert, by the way. while the ballade in the janacek was nearly heart-stopping, my favorite was the brahms sonata no. 3. (a wonderful unfashionable composer, a true genius of melody and delicate small scale pieces, on whom more another time.)

but the appearance reminded me (chin-stroking music please) of classical music's image problem. as someone who grew up with rock n roll and later the very photogenic era of mid-century jazz, i was amazed as i started to get into chamber music in the mid-90s just how dowdy a bunch classical players tended to be.  and then things started to change a bit: leif ove spoke to me for this piece in the LATimes from a few years back. every time i see a picture of that hedgehog james levine i think of it. 

could it be that classical music is more "deep" than pop music, which has become enslaved to youth and  image? dont forget, these days, even philosophers have style. what do my esteemed readers think?

 

Photo credit: Flickr user 13 

Gastropubs and Highland Park

The other night i went to the reasonably new "gastropub" in the formerly rundown-- now thriving -- area of los angeles called highland park. an english friend, who i sometimes go pub-hopping with near his home off the hampstead heath, grumbles these days when his beloved victorian watering holes "go gastro," in his words.

but i'm in favor of the trend, partly because english pub food, and most american bar grub, is so ghastly. especially when you outgrow buffalo wings or "crisps" as the brits call them.

the place in highland park, The York, reminded me why the trend is so heartening. it's not as ambitious as the great british gastropubs like the Anchor & Hope on london's south bank (where i had a memorable meal after an '07 tate modern visit). but it not only serves one of the best burgers i know (with harissa and pickled onions no less), hand cut fries, etc, but a very fine shrimp bruschetta, an excellent mixed greens with beets and goat cheese, tasty grilled vegetable sandwich, etc.

of course, a pub is largely about drinks, and here the place comes through quite well. the york is primarily a beer place, but their wines go way beyond the usual unholy trinity of over-oaked chard, flaccid melot and overpriced cab here. there's usually, for instance, a very fine white rhone on the list -- when's the last time you've seen that on a pub menu? -- and that still-underrated red, cabernet franc, by the glass as well.

beer-wise there is too much to get into here... i'll say only that along with delights like stone pale ale and fat tire on draft (and rogue and allagash in bottles) they serve my current favorite: craftsman brewing company's old-school ale, which is cask-poured and the kind of thing you usually have to go to britain to get.

the place also also an excellent historical-reuse design that makes good use of old brick and a vaulted ceiling that was not exposed in the place's former life, with very modern lighting.

from my limited visits, i'd say the york offers the best of several worlds: well-rendered contemporary cuisine that a skinny woman can eat without guilt, decent wine list, wide range of traditional ales, and a warm, friendly neighborhood spirit -- very different than the forced booziness of a sports bar -- that can be very hard to find in this most private of cities. great jukebox too.

(By the way, this picture is not of the york but a place basically under london bridge called Market Porter. it is not, for what it's worth, really a gastropub, but it's across from a great farmers market that has been going, i think, since roman times, and right next to a grilled sausage place that i'll wager is of much more recent vintage.)

Photo credit: SRT

LA PHIL VS RADIOHEAD

Just back from a LA Philharmonic press conference which is the most elaborate i've seen from any arts group, including i think the getty's launch a decade ago... they're very excited about Gustavo Dudamel, the 27-year-old venezuelan who kicks off his first season here in the fall. the one concert i saw him conduct, which included a berlioz, was as good as the considerable hype. (i have vowed to call him "the dude.")

so we're all looking curiously forward to the guy's arrival. i was disappointed, though, that esa-pekka salonen was not at the shindig -- his time as music director kinda of defines not only my time in LA personally, but i think a period where the city's culture become vastly more sophisticated, unpredictable and hybrid. (i did get to bump into california composer john adams, who is directing a very cool festival of west coast music that includes frank zappa and his own "the dharma at big sur," more on him later.)

anyway what i mean by hybrid, mostly, is a union of fine and pop culture that has been part of LA's genetic makeup for a long time, but which really developed in the last few years. one of my favorite conversations with salonen involve his interest in rock n roll. i'm quite impressed with it, especially if you think of what terrible taste in music most continental europeans have. i mean, italo-pop anyone?

Photo credit: Flickr user 12

BARRY MANILOW AND THE END OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

Don't know about your private hell -- remember orwell's "room 101"? --  but mine is to be locked in a room and made to listen to barry manilow croon "i write the songs..." 

turns out it actually happens, in at least one town in colorado -- strikes me as a new chapter of the "scared straight" franchise. the story was buried a bit in today's LATimes, but it's an interesting and cautionary read about cruel and unusual punishment.

my interest in the topic -- and the relationship between aesthetics and politics is almost always interesting -- goes back to a piece i wrote for the same paper a few years back: it concerned the use of classical music as "bug spray," in the words of one of my sources, to keep ruffians from gathering.

it sent me on this excursion on the place of classical music and by extension high culture itself in these post-highbrow times. i discuss the difference btw classical music and elevator music, the notion of "cool," pavarotti's voice, and the way classical music has become something new, in the terms of ucla's Robert Fink, now that it's not "classical" anymore.

Photo credit: Superstock.com and Flickr user 11

BARACK OBAMA AND EZRA JACK KEATS

Amazing amount of excitement, anticipation, and i expect resentment and suppressed fear right now around the obama inauguration... i will try to avoid getting too deeply into politics in this blog despite my fascination with it -- i've learned the hard way over the years that there is actually some wisdom to the old warning about talking about politics and religion across the dinner table.

but obama's arrival has me thinking about someone else: old-school children's writer ezra jack keats. we learned about him as children, as the first writer to bring black characters into mainstream kid lit -- i guess i assumed he was black himself. but turns out he was of polish-jewish descent -- his dad's last name was "katz."

so first off, i love the fact that the offspring of european jews took the surname of england's greatest romantic poet (who was himself a cockney and spoke that weird rhyming slang) and created a character who resembles, both physically and in his habits of mind, the nation's first black president. (born just a few months before keats' best book was released.)

by that i mean that the protagonist of "the snowy day," 1962, who lives in that keatsian world of brooklyn-ish brownstone pastoral, shares not only a haircut but an introspective, analytical temperament with the nation's soon-to-be-leader. there are several scenes, including one of peter in from the cold, soaking in the bathtub, where there are virtually no words on the page and we see him >thinking<: it's among the few images i know from kid lit that show characters in the act of reflection or imagining. (peter also shows up in another book i like, "whistle for willy.") there's a wonderfully simple illustration of his footsteps across the white snow that reminds me of the work of alt-comic artists like seth.

it's too soon to tell how obama will govern, and how he will handle this incredibly bad economy and a demoralized nation -- i will not make any predictions... but i think it's fair to say it's been a long while since we've had a president with this reflective, even poetic, temperament that we find in keats' books. (there's probably a counter-argument here that what we need is "a man of action." let's table that for the moment.)

so my final irony here is that my son ian, a blond, blue-eyed two-year-old living in the hills above 21st century los angeles, can respond so fully to the tale of a black kid walking in the snow, almost five decades ago, in a city my kid has never visited and a season he has never really experienced. the book gives ian a glimpse into a world he's never seen before.  through his enthusiasm, he's taken me there too.

Photo credit: Ezra Jack Keats Foundation

CELEBRATING THE HADEN FAMILY + ..... GREAT BREAKUP LPS

I want to talk for a minute about los angeles' Haden family: you could define true musical eclecticism as the ability to dig all the branches on this multigenerational family tree. jazzheads know missouri-reared bassist charlie haden for his ability to match the country twang on ornette coleman's early (and best records) -- charlie grounds free jazz stuff that might otherwise be rootless: some of CH's solo stuff is awesome too: lester bangs once called him "hypnotically inventive."

the new haden family LP, "rambling boy," includes the whole gang, which means rachel and petra haden, both of whom made that dog's "retreat from the sun," from 97, one of the best sunny-LA records since brian wilson cracked up. (petra's all-chick-a-capella version of "the who sell out" must be seen to be believed.) tanya is violist for let's go sailing, another fine LA group, and -- fun fact -- she and hubbie jack black camped in the hospital virtually next to my wife and me and had their first kid the same week we had ours. (i did not say hi.)

but my favorite member of the haden family these days is Josh, whose band Spain is one of the great lost groups of the 90s. in the dark days before xmas i found my old copy of "she haunts my dreams" -- 10 years old this year!! and let's just say it has actually haunted my dreams. some of what i wrote about in the 90s sounds dated today -- this has only gotten better. (here they are at the getty, btw.)

listening to it now, it's striking how much it pulls from the haden tradition of stripped-down, plainspoken, ozark mtn country music: it's also a cousin to such wonderfully bittersweet records as the scud mountain boys' "massachusetts" and the works of LA's Acetone, Radar Bros, and the career of gene clark, the great, yearning, semi-tragic byrds singer/songwriter. (and now we are back in missouri.) spain's "spiritual" was covered by johnny cash.

"she haunts my dreams" is also one of the BEST BREAKUP RECORDS of all time. it begins with the simple, heartsick repetition of the song "i'm leaving you," and just gets deeper and deeper into its theme... anyway, if you think LA music is all about shallow narcissism or studio trickery or hipster bs, check this one out on a dark night of the soul... 

WONDERING: what do my distinguished readers consider the other great breakup albums??? i'm thinking richard and linda thompson's "shoot out the lights," beulah's "yoko," beck's "sea change"... and anything  by quasi, a great band that actually >is<> a divorced couple.

Photo credit: Flickr user 9

 

GREAT OVERLOOKED NOVEL

Over the last couple years i covered books, mostly novels, almost exclusively, and there's no way anyone can read everything. but let me call james howard kunstler's "world made by hand" my favorite undersung novel of '08, or something along those lines.

the book is the tale of a little village in upstate new york in a world suspiciously like ours, but after resources have run out almost entirely. the residents have returned to a kind of rustic 19th century simplicity -- they homebrew beer, shop for stuff in an elaborate town dump, wish they had electricity, worry about some religious zealots wandering up from down south, etc... alan weisman, who wrote the wonderful/chilling "the world without us," called it "a poignant, provocatively convincing novel," which sounds about right.

i can just add that nothing i've read captures so well the tone of life after the economic meltdown. it's not exactly reassuring, but shows how life can and will go on, in ways both better and worse. here is a NYT essay (not by me) on this and its precursor "ecotopia."

kunstler is a left-leaning social critic (and longtime novelist) and i must say, i had all the reasonable fears of a novel penned by such a fellow. (i mean no disrespect -- some of my best friends are lefty social critics.) but i was completely unprepared for how lyrical and gently persuasive the book is -- for me certainly more affecting (sorry, cormac mccarthy) than the grim and powerful "the road."

the author's earlier books include the acclaimed, "the long emergency," which is an important jeremiad about the coming collapse of oil, environmental devastation, etc -- well written, tirelessly researched, etc, but kind of relentless as a read. this one is like, i dont know, dylan's john wesley harding record or "music from big pink" or something.

but dont take my word for it -- "world made by hand" just came out in paperback.

Photo credit: Grove/Atlantic and Flickr user 8