A New Man

Well if you can't beat 'em, join 'em as I say. Sure, things didn't turn out as I had hoped this November and come January 20, our country will turn back the clock and return to a time that about 50 percent of the electorate hoped and prayed was gone for good.

So be it. I've made an early new year's resolution to stop caring. Of course, like all resolutions, don't hold me to that. In that vein I decided to wean myself from my former daily regimen of reading, watching, listening and talking about politics. Instead of reading for example the New York Times, The Atlantic, and my other once go-to sources of information about the world outside my door, I've only been reading about sports.  I've also given up the habit of automatically tuning in to the local NPR affiliate on the radio, instead I have my dial set to a station that plays nothing but Christmas music 24/7.  I've also given up discussing politics on social media and have turned my attention there solely to watching cat videos. And instead of watching news and political commentary on TV, I've turned to watching nothing but Italian soap operas.

The problem is that never before in my life do I remember a bleaker time for Chicago sports teams. So listening to endless stories about the futility of the prospects for all the hometown teams I've rooted for my entire life, does little to alleviate my depression of the thought of... 

Well, you know.

While I still love Christmas, for reasons I care not go into, the holiday has lost much of its sparkle for me. Consequently, the din of sleighbells, ho ho hoing and perfunctory cheer tends to induce more melancholia than merriment these days. 

And subjecting myself to hours of cat videos makes me seriously question what I'm doing with my life.

All I can say is this: thank God for streaming TV and Italian soap operas. 

Anyway, in the midst of decking the halls with mistletoe while rockin' around the Christmas tree, I did sneak in an NPR break. And on what subject were they reporting? Christmas music of course.

The story reminded me of a Christmas long ago and a conversation my brother-in-law and I had with our very Catholic father-in-law. As was their tradition, our wives' parents had non-stop Christmas music playing on the radio. I think it was just to pull his chain more than anything else, but both my brother-in-law and I brought up the fact that most of the Christmas music we were hearing that day was written by Jewish composers. 

Our in-laws, whose annual Christmas decorations consisted of a wreath on the front door and sign on the window that read, "Put Christ back in Christmas", were incredulous. 

But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. For starters, the percentage of Christmas music written by Jewish composers closely reflects the percentage of Jewish composers of popular music.

As the popular music industry is above all. a business, success means having your songs played a lot, which naturally translates to sales (a difficult subject these days in the music industry) and everything that entails. Now think of all the pop songs that actually make money compared to the total number of songs that are written and recorded in a given year. I have no idea what that number is, but it has to be extremely small. And when a song does become a hit, meaning one of the most listened to songs of a particular moment, that moment is the window of opportunity to make serious money. And that window opening, unless the song becomes a major hit, is fairly short lived. 

Now imagine writing and recording a hit Christmas song. If it catches on with the public, not only is there a window of opportunity to make beaucoup bucks soon after the song is released, but also during every subsequent holiday season. 

But I never realized HOW lucrative Christmas music can be. The NPR piece pointed out that at this writing, the top five songs on the Billboard hot 100 (the industry standard for determining the most popular songs of a given week), are all Charismas songs, some of them recorded over 60 years ago.

I don't have anything to back this up, but I imagine Paul McCartney has made more money on his insipid (to my ears)  Wonderful Christmastime, than he has on Hey Jude. According to this article about the public's enduring ambivalence to his holiday song, McCartney makes between 400 and 600K per annum for all the times WC gets played between October 31st and December 24th in all the Walmarts, Shopcos, and Piggly Wigglies across this great land of ours, and their equivalents around the world. 

But that number pales in comparison the reported 2.5 million dollar royalty check Mariah Carey gets every year for what has become the most popular Christmas tune of all for the umpteenth year, All I Want for Christmas is You. 

And it seems that the really successful Christmas tunes if anything, gain traction over the years, so the window of opportunity for them to make scads of money only becomes wider every year. Who knows what Mariah and Macca (by then in his nineties) will be making on those songs in ten years!

So the moral is, if you want to be a pop songwriter, try your hand at writing Christmas tunes. Cha ching, you just never know.

The other not surprising in the least thing about non-Christians writing popular Christmas music is that the vast majority of it is not religious at all, and probably a majority of the non-religious stuff is not even about the holiday. Much of it centers around winter, and all the fun things you can do in the snow such as riding in a one-horse open sleigh. Or if that doesn't float your boat and you find the weather outside frightful, you can stay inside where it's warm and delightful, and go wherever your imagination desires, while resigning yourself just to let it snow. One wonderful, racy and to today's ears somewhat controversial song is the 1944 Frank Loesser diddy Baby I'ts Cold Outside, which doesn't even leave to the imagination what you can do inside.

One of my favorite pop music Christmas songs that really is about Christmas is the 1943 classic, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, written for the film Meet Me in St. Louis by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine. It's about the very real pain of celebrating the season during a time of suffering and loss, made especially poignant as the song was written and originally released during the middle of World War II. Of course, that sentiment runs contrary to all the feelings we're supposed to feel this time of year, so the song's lyrics were altered several times over the years to make it "less depressing." Today it remains one of the most popular Christmas songs that you'll hear played incessantly along with Holly Jolly Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Jingle Bell Rock, and the rest at your local Target.

Heck I'm going there now, oh boy!

Which brings up one final thought. 

The web is filled with articles about surveys of people's favorite and least favorite Christmas songs. Should anyone be surprised that the same songs are on both lists?

While I wouldn't put it on my list of least favorite Christmas songs, by the third or fourth time I've heard Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas played on the same shopping trip in the same store, I wouldn't mind never hearing it ever again. That goes for a lot of songs that at one time I really loved. 

You can guess how I feel about the Christmas songs I've never loved in the first place. 

So what do folks like me who love Christmas, just not the same 20 songs played again and again every holiday, listen to by choice?

Sometimes songs are popular for a reason and finding good alternatives can be a little challenging. 

One way is to match artists with material you wouldn't automatically associate them with.

When you think of Christmas, the last person you might come up with is Screamin' Jay (I Put a Spell on You) Hawkins. Halloween yes, Christmas no. In preparation for this post, I discovered with great joy and expectation that he does indeed have a Christmas song.

Unfortunately it really sucks.

I listened to the whole thing expecting a payoff at the end, but it never came. Screamin' Jay really should have stuck to Halloween.

The cool cats go for kitsch and what could be better than the Queen of Kitsch herself, Marlene Dietrich? Here she is, singing Little Drummer Boy, in German no less. 

Not bad but a little maudlin in my book. Like Sreamin' Jay's Christmas song, perhaps the idea of it is better than the song itself.

But five years ago I found it, my perfect Christmas song. It's a song we all know, sung by two wonderful artists who while not being as far-removed from the idea of Christmas as say Screamin' Jay, or even Marlene, nonetheless are a little out of their element here. 

That's why it works so bloody well. 

And it truly captures the spirit of joy of the season as well as any song I can think of, heck I wouldn't even mind hearing it a thousand times a year. 

The best part is that I will never have to. Here's Leon Redbone and Dr. John, together singing Frosty the Snowman: 

The video isn't so bad either.

Anyway, Christmas the secular holiday that is, will be over in a couple of days and along with it all the popular holiday music. Then the real Feast of the Twelve days of Christmas will take place and with that, the sacred Christmas music which in my book never grows old, will continue.

Then will come January 20 and with that who knows, Armageddon perhaps? 

Let's hope not.

Communque, avremo ancora la televisione italiana, e non vedo l'ora. 

Buon Natale a tutti!

Whiplash

Here's another one for the day late and dollar short file.

At my daughter's suggestion, we watched a movie I could have sworn was only a year or two old. Wasn't it just recently that I saw J.K. Simmons accepting the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as the abusive (to put it mildly), music teacher in the film Whiplash? No, my wife said having looked it up, the movie was made in 2014. So either the pandemic is really messing with my sense of time, or it's my age. Probably both.

Anyway, Whiplash has received many accolades as being a contemporary classic. On this site it is ranked as the 298th best movie of all time. You can take that or leave it. Judging by the list's top twenty two movies which includes zero movies NOT made in Hollywood, and top thirty six films which were NOT made in this century, I prefer to leave it. But the film must have been very well received critically to rate so highly on a list of the best movies ever made since the year 1900!

Does it deserve all the praise? 

Whiplash is a tightly directed (by Damien Chazelle who also wrote the screenplay) and edited (by Tom Cross) psychological thriller featuring two outstanding performances by Simmons and Miles Teller in the lead role as Andrew Neyman, a talented young musician enrolled in a fictional New York music academy.

The premise is this: Andrew, a drummer, becomes involved in the school's premier jazz band led by the Simmons character, the notorious Terrence Fletcher. Fletcher is mean to everybody, but really seems to have it in for drummers, especially Andrew. But Andrew is fiercely driven to be the next Buddy Rich, (yes Buddy Rich) and willingly puts up with the abuse, accepting it exists only for the purpose of teaching him to be the best drummer he can possibly be.

Given that setup, you can probably fill in the rest of the plot and get it about ninety percent right, as it has been a formula for countless stories told over the ages.. 

It's the remaining ten percent that makes the film worth watching.

If by chance you haven't yet seen this eight, check that, nine-year-old movie and still plan to see it, you may want to stop reading now as much of what I have to say from here on contains serious spoiler material.

OK GOT THAT? 

Don't say I didn't warn you. 

My first criterion for what makes a good movie is that I think about it long after the closing credits. One way of doing that is being left with more questions than answers. Whiplash is open ended, it doesn't leave you with a sense of resolution at the end, even though it has a closing scene for the ages.

Films with premises such as this one, at least American ones, usually end in one of two ways. Either the Andrew character despite all the heartbreak, struggle, and fits and starts along the way, triumphs over adversity and in the end, sometime later, thanks his mentor for all the "tough love" making him what he is today. Or he triumphs despite the mentor who gets his comeuppance in the end. In both cases, the Andrew character gets the girl, and they live together happily ever after, at least until the sequel.

Does any of this happen in Whiplash? Well, with the exception of what happens with the girl, we don't know, it's up to us to decide.

Just like real life. 

It turns out, I seem to have a much different take on the story than many folks, including my family. After having digested the movie for a day or so, I asked my wife, daughter and son if they thought the movie had a happy ending. To a person they said yes.

I said no, I didn't think so. 

OK, HERE"S YOUR LAST SPOILER ALERT.

If you're still reading this, I'm assuming you've either seen the film or don't care. So this is how the movie ends, last chance, here goes:

With a band directed by Terrence Fletcher, Andrew performs a prolonged, no-holds-barred drum solo at Carnegie Hall which leaves everyone, including Fletcher, in awe. When he finishes, Fletcher gives the band it's cue for the closing chord, then the screen fades to black.

Andrew wins, he has proven to his abusive mentor that he's truly got what it takes, he has earned his rightful place in the pantheon of musicians, and presumably what he expressed a desire for earlier in the film, a shot at being remembered long after he's gone. More important perhaps as many have pointed out in reviews, in the end Andrew proves that he is the equal of Fletcher. 

On that last point I agree.

But what did he have to give up getting to that point and in reality, in which direction did he have to go to get there?

My view is that Andrew did not climb the heights in order to achieve equal status with Fletcher but rather, sank deeper and deeper into the depths to get there. In other words, in my view Whiplash is a modern-day Faust story, where the protagonist sells his soul to get something he desperately wants. 

So, if Andrew is Faust in this updated version, does that make Fletcher the Devil? 

It isn't until the last reel (so to speak) of the movie that you realize Fletcher is truly an evil character. Up until that point he is simply an asshole who despite sociopathic tendencies, may actually give a rat's ass about his students. He does show a trace of humanity in a scene where he expresses what seems to be genuine grief after the tragic death of a former student. And outside of class he displays a bit of charm at times.

After their student-teacher relationship ends, Andrew runs into Fletcher as he's playing a gig at a New York jazz club. After his set, Fletcher explains to Andrew that there should be no hard feelings because he uses his controversial techniques only to achieve perfection in his students' work, pushing them to places they never expected to go. Despite having just finished playing what to my ears anyway, was an insipid set of music, Fletcher explains to Andrew that the real enemy is mediocrity. The most memorable line in the movie comes at this point when Fletcher justifies his methods by telling Andrew:

There are no two words in the English language more harmful than "good job."

Fletcher then invites Andrew to join him and his new band at the aforementioned Carnegie Hall gig.

Before going on stage, Fletcher tells his band that this could well be the make-or-break performance of their careers. The man's true nature becomes apparent the next scene when on stage, Andrew discovers that Fletcher has intentionally tripped him up by giving him the wrong score. Just before the band begins the number that Andrew didn't rehearse, on stage Fletcher reveals he knew all along it was Andrew who anonymously testified at a hearing against his former teacher, thereby costing him his job at the academy.

Does that make Fletcher evil?

Looking at his actions toward Andrew before that final scene, I'd say yes. Not a man of many layers, in my opinion, Fletcher is not a particularly complicated character. 

Fletcher recognizes Andrew's talent because upon hearing him play for the first time, he invites the new student to sit in with his elite band, when one would assume that normally, prospective band members would come to him. Before the first rehearsal, Fletcher acts as if he's taking the new member under his wing by expressing interest in Andrew's family, information he would soon use to humiliate Andrew. Fletcher learns that Andrew was brought up by his single father, a writer whose day job is high school literature teacher.  His mom left the family shortly after her son was born. Fletcher concludes the scene by telling the young man to take it easy and most of all, to "have fun." 

The easy-going manner continues briefly during the rehearsal, even after the first few times Fletcher stops the band, noting that Andrew is messing up the tempo. As Andrew continues to be not quite up to Fletcher's impossibly rigorous standards, the tide turns quickly and after about five starts and stops, Fletcher hurls a chair at Andrew's head. He then gets in Andrew's face, berates him, slaps him, and brings up for all to hear, the boy's family history, claiming his mother left her husband because he was a loser. 

Beyond the horrifying way in which the teacher hazes the pupil, it's a brilliant scene. As Fletcher picks up on mistakes in the band that are imperceptible at least to untrained ears, it gives the viewer the idea that while his methods may be way out of line, the guy sure knows his stuff, and that his perfectionism may in some way, justify his actions.

It's not until after the credits roll, when you realize that's nonsense. Well at least, in my opinion.

Putting everything together with a bit of dime store psychoanalysis, Fletcher is all about power, manipulation, control, and nothing else. From the outset Fletcher sees three things in Andrew that he could use to his own ends: his talent, immense drive, and perhaps most important of all, his vulnerability.

As we would learn later, Fletcher himself is no great shakes as a musician. Knowing that, in retrospect his comments on Andrew's father being a failure were really a reflection on himself. It's not a stretch to imagine that he despised Andrew because he knew form the start that his student had far more potential than he did. 

So, the extra "attention" he gave Andrew would result in one of two things, it would either turn the young man into a successful musician, which would look great on Fletcher's resume, or it would destroy him. Either way, Fletcher wins.

It's worth pointing out here that the student whose death inspired some human emotion from Fletcher, turned out before his death, to be a success story, a member of Wynton Marsalis's band, "first chair" no less. In retrospect, it's hard to imagine a less successful student eliciting that kind of response from Fletcher. It's also worth pointing out that the former student did not die in a car accident as stated by Fletcher, but rather took his own life, which some attributed to his experience with the monstrous teacher. 

In an interview, writer/director Chazelle, admitted that his character Fletcher had no redeeming qualities. 

Indeed.

Andrew's character is more complex, which also becomes apparent as the movie progresses. His vulnerability is on display early on when we see him work up the nerve to ask Nicole, the girl behind the movie theater concession stand, played by Melissa Benoist, out for a date. After he falls deeper and deeper into the clutches of Fletcher, he coldly dumps Nicole when he realizes his obsession, which at one point in the film nearly costs him his life, trumps everything else. 

In another telling scene, Andrew makes some snarky comments to his cousins at the dinner table, which seem out-of-line with the character we met at the opening of the film before he falls under Fletcher's spell.

Superficially, neither of these scenes make Andrew appear likable, no doubt, the influence of Fletcher. But like everything else in Whiplash, there is another side. As my wife pointed out, the comments to the family members, nasty as they may have been, were not undeserved. And as my daughter pointed out, beyond the obvious differences in their approach to life, there was little chemistry from the get-go between Andrew and Nicole. Come to think of it, he was doing her a great service by breaking up with her right to her face, rather than simply ignoring her, which I'm afraid is what most guys would do.

So in a sense, Fletcher's influence on the young man was not altogether negative.

No, it wasn't those two scenes that defined Andrew losing his soul as I thought at first. It was that damned drum solo at the end of the movie.

When Andrew is humiliated for the last time by Fletcher, he leaves the Carnegie Hall stage and runs into the arms of his father waiting for him in the wings. He then summons up the courage to return to the stage to take over the performance. "Follow me now" he says to the band which they willingly do, much to Fletcher's wrath.  

He then goes on to give a performance filled with bluster, death-defying velocity, theatrics, and pyrotechnics. In short, he does everything humanly possible on a drum kit except play with the sticks between his toes while standing on his head.

Maybe I'm tipping my hand here but to me, the only thing worse than a one-minute drum solo, is a two-minute drum solo. And the only thing worse than a two-minute drum solo is... well you get the idea. I have no idea what the running time of the last scene of the movie was, but it seemed to go on forever. In that sense, it was a fitting and even brilliant depiction of the conflict between the two main characters. 

But was it good music?

Well...

It probably doesn't matter as Whiplash isn't about music at all, as countless YouTube videos of real-life musicians commenting on the film testify. So it probably doesn't matter that any teacher no matter the discipline in the 21st Century using Terrence Fletcher's methods of humiliation, degradation, and emotional and physical abuse bordering on violence, wouldn't last a week in an academic setting, not even the great Wynton Marsalis himself.

And it probably doesn't matter that that kind of teaching style wouldn't produce the intended results anyway. Maybe that was the point. Fletcher's anecdote about (Chicago) Joe Jones throwing his cymbal at Charlie Parker's head, nearly decapitating him, is bullshit. What really happened was during a jam session with members of the Count Basie Band in the thirties, to express his dissatisfaction with a solo performed by the then very young Bird, Jones dropped a cymbal to the floor. Did that humiliation make Charlie Parker, Charlie Parker as Fletcher implied? 

I doubt it. 

That's not to say there isn't a tremendous amount of hard work, dedication and sacrifice that goes into becoming a successful musician. And yes, there is blood shed at times, usually from popped blisters, not the copious amounts the film would have us believe.

What I missed in a movie that is ostensibly about making music, is the real motivation behind all the hard work and sacrifice of musicians: the love and pure joy of making music. You see it in the faces of nearly all decent musicians as they perform, from the humblest to the most accomplished, from pop to the avant guarde, and everything in between.

It isn't until the end of Whiplash that you see that look on Andrew's face. But the way the film is cut, it's obvious that his satisfaction comes not from the music he's making, but the fact that he has finally gained the favor and acceptance of the monster whose spell he is under. And the look on the monster's face at that very moment says he's satisfied, having gained another victim. 

At the dinner table scene mentioned above, Andrew reveals his true motivation by recalling the Charlie Parker anecdote to his family. His father, beautifully underplayed by Paul Reiser, points out that Parker, a heroin addict, died at 34. He said that wasn't exactly his definition of success, but what do fathers know? It didn't matter to Andrew who claimed defiantly that he'd rather die young and be remembered than live to a ripe old age and be forgotten. 

What that comment brought to my mind was the fact that nearly 60 years after his death, the name Lee Harvey Oswald is more remembered today than that of practically every jazz musician, living or dead. It might have been a good comeback line for the dad if only he had thought of it in time.

But I digress.

Like I said, Whiplash is not at all about music but it does hint to what's important in life. What really made an impression upon me having thought about it for quite a while was that Terrence Fletcher's idea of success, (which would also become Andrew's), is fleeting and superficial.

We are left at the end of the move, with the two of them, Fletcher and Andrew, being one, hardly a happy ending, for me at least. 

Whatever happens after the final chord, one can only guess. Perhaps Andrew follows the path of Fletcher's other student who makes it big only to hang himself. Perhaps Andrew gets Fletcher's old job at the music academy and picks up where his mentor left off, beating the crap out of new, vulnerable students. Or perhaps Andrew and Fletcher, now BFFs, team up to take their maniacal act on the road.   

On the other hand, maybe Andrew leaves music altogether and follows the lead of another of the talented Mr. Simmons' many characters, the avuncular insurance salesman in those Farmers adds. 

Considering the other options, THAT would be a happy ending.

The White Album Revisited

Fifty years ago last month I celebrated my tenth birthday. To celebrate that momentous occasion my parents gave me a record player. In case you don't know what that is, ask your grandparents.

I bring it up because right around that same time, November 22, 1968 to be exact, either one of the greatest, or one of the most over-rated albums in the history of popular music depending upon your point of view, was released. Its official title was simply "The Beatles", but given the sparse design of the cover, pure white both front and back, broken up only by name of the album and its eponymous band embossed on the front, the album since its inception has been popularly referred to as The White Album

I was completely oblivious to its release. Like many Americans, my first encounter with The Beatles (the band) was leading up to February 9, 1964, when they appeared live on the Ed Sullivan show during their first trip to America. I remember the buildup for that show and all the hubbub surrounding the group and their premier American performance, but was less than impressed. My mother it turned out quite liked the Fab Four but I took my father's side on the subject as I usually did in those days. There were no older siblings around to influence my musical taste, so my father for better or worse filled that role. Interestingly enough, most of my friends at the time also did not have older bothers and sisters so they too listened to the same music as their parents. Consequently my personal soundtrack of the sixties, the music I actually listed to during that seminal period in the history of popular music, was middle of the road to say the least. To give you an example, the albums I received with that record player included recordings by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, and hands down my favorite band at the time, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

We moved to the suburbs shortly before my tenth birthday and I soon came in contact with a new group of friends who actually listened to music that kids listed to. That was when I discovered Top 40, and began buying 45rpm singles (again ask your grandparents), featuring recordings of the most popular songs of that particular week. Thumbing through a list of the 100 most popular songs of the year 1970, I can pick out a number of songs that I owned as singles:

War, by Edwin Starr
Band of Gold, by Freda Payne
Hitchin' a Ride, by Vanity Fair
The Love You Save, by the Jackson Five
Cracklin' Rosie, by Neil Diamond
Ball of Confusion, by the Temptations
Patches, by Clarence Carter
My Baby Loves Lovin', by the White Plains
and I kid you not:
Gimme Dat Ding! - by The Pipkins

You may have noticed, still no Beatles, even though they made a number of appearances in the top of the pops that year. It was in 1970 that I made the aquaintance of the person who to this day I still consider my best friend, a person who has influenced my life in more ways that I can name. He was years ahead of me in all things including music, and I would love to give him credit for my ongoing passion for the Beatles, but I cannot. Credit for that has to go to my mother.

I'm guessing it was the summer of 1970 when she bought a stereo console for our house, a piece of fancy furniture that doubled as a record player and radio. They were all the rage in those days. Anyway, along with that purchase she also bought several albums. Two that I remember were Bridge Over Troubled Water, by Simon and Garfunkel, and Blood Seat & Tears, by the band of the same name. I liked both of those well enough but the two albums she bought that changed my life forever in that pivotal year were Meet the Beatles and Abbey Road. Unbeknownst to her at the time, those two particular albums represented the alpha and the omega of the Beatles' Capitol years *, covering the time shortly before their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, until the band officially broke up, also in 1970.

There were several songs on both albums I instantly recognized, by then the ancient I Want To Hold Your Hand,  I Saw Her Standing There, and All My Loving from the first album, and the recent hits Come Together and Something from the last. What struck me was how different those two albums were. From the music to the appearance of the Fabs, it was hard to believe the two albums were made by the same group only five and one half years apart. Of course, those were eventful years.

The songs on Meet The Beatles were all about girls, dating, dancing, falling in love, and other yucky stuff that I was just beginning to appreciate as an eleven year old boy. That's no doubt the real reason I had no interest in the band as a five year old. By contrast, Abbey Road begins with John Lennon's gibberish filled, drug inspired, slowed down tribute to Chuck Berry with the oh so cool groove, Come Together. George Harrison came next with his sublime mature love song, Something, a Beatles song even my father could love.  Paul McCartney's first tune on the album is an upbeat ditty about a mischievous boy with homicidal tendencies named Maxwell. After Paul pulls out all the vocal stops with Oh Darling, we get a rare original Ringo Starr composition, this one waxing poetic about of all things, a cephalopod's lair, Octopus’s Garden. John finishes off side one with an ironic love song, I Want You (She’s So Heavy) featuring primal screams and an outro  comprised of a series of not altogether mellifluous guitar arpeggios that repeat seemingly forever, until they just stop mid-phrase. Side two is a veritable smorgasboard of songs that run together, some with no discernable beginning or end.  In a song appropriately titled The End, after Ringo's only bona-fide drum solo during his enitre time with the Beatles, comes a three way guitar solo with the remaining three members of the band trading off two bars in the lead before John's highly distorted triplet strumming brings the instrumental break to its sudden conclusion, leading into Paul singing what could be the words of the bands' epitaph:

And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.

Clearly Abbey Road was a long way from the Beatles' lovable moptop, yeah yeah yeahing, twisting and shouting, hand holding days. I was instantly hooked and my mission for the next four years or so, was to connect the dots between Meet The Beatles and Abbey Road, collecting every Capitol release, even the hard-to-find two record narrative of the band's history up until 1964, called The Beatles' Story. It's not an exaggeration to say that during those years I listened to nothing else. Despite being late to the table, I became an unrepentant Beatlemaniac. To this day I still know way more about the group and its members than I care to admit. 

Yet my knowledge pales in comparison to truly rabid Beatlemaniacs as I discovered while revisiting The White Album just after its fiftieth anniversary. In commemoration of that anniversary, a new "Super Deluxe" version has been released containing preliminary sketches for the songs, alternate takes, out-takes, as well as remastered versions of the original thirty songs that comprised The Beatles (the album). Weighing in at six CDs and a hefty price tag to go along with it, "The Beatles Super Deluxe Edition" is a must for Beatle "completists" with 150 bucks or so burning a hole in their pocket. In case you're wondering, in the words of one of the multitude of reviews I read about the set, a Beatles completist:

is a collector with deep pockets and unlimited willingness to max out any variety of credit cards for the best sound and every available version of a limited amount of tracks, no matter how negligible.

Well you know that you can count me out on that distinction.

One of many issues that listeners with a critical ear have expressed over the past fifty years is their complaint that the double-disc White Album was too long. That argument was expressed by no less an authority than the late George Martin who produced the lion's share of Beatle music over their career:

I thought we should probably have made a very, very good single album rather than a double. But they insisted. I think it could have been made fantastically good if it had been compressed a bit and condensed. 

If you google as I did, "Is The White Album too long?" you will come across a number of sites where folks who answer that question in the affirmative, offer up their opinions on what should stay and what should go. Looking at these lists however, it turns out that it's all a matter of personal taste. With one notable exception, which should be obvious to anyone who knows the album, there is little consensus on what should get the boot.

Some folks believe that all of Paul's upbeat, happy, and frivolous songs like Ob La Di, Ob La Da, Martha My Dear, Honey Pie, I Will and Rocky Racoon don't hold a candle to his more rocking numbers such as Back in the USSR, Birthday, and Why Don't We Do It in the Road, all three of which of which also received goodbye votes (obviously from different folks). Same with John's lighter fare such as Dear Prudence, Bungalow Bill and Cry Baby Cry.  There were lots of votes to jettison Ringo's clunky Don't Pass Me By and all of George's tunes with the exception of While My Guitar Gently Weeps which is one of the few songs on The White Album to receive nearly unanimous praise.

I was a little surprised that John's Revolution 1 has its share of detractors. It may be the most familiar tune on the album as the more energetic, rocked-out, three minute version of the song was released on a single as the B side of Hey Jude. and became a monster hit in its own right months before the release of The White Album. The laid-back original concept for the song which opens side four of The White Album to me anyway, better suits the true spirit of the lyrics which rather than being a shout out for changing the world at any cost as some folks assume it is, is a  word of caution about being careful what you wish for. After the release of the single, Lennon was excoriated by the Left who called the song reactionary and its writer a traitor to the cause. John was always ambivalent about the song and clearly moved by the criticism. In response, before The White Album was released he tweaked the recording, dubbing the word "in" right after the word "out" at the end of the line that goes:

...but when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out, (in).  

I was also surprised that several of John's hard rocking, cynical and abstruse songs like Happiness is a Warm Gun, Yer Blues, and Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey, also made many hit lists.

However I was not the least bit surprised that John's most challenging contribution to The White Album, Revolution 9, is nearly universally panned. The experimental sound piece that comes near the end of the album consists of over eight minutes of bits and pieces of disparate recordings, both archival and original, tape loops, sound effects and the like. played forwards and backwards, ranging from bits of classical music to street sounds, to random bits of dialog uttered by John, George Harrison, Yoko Ono and others, all spliced together in a seemingly random fashion. Lennon commented that he was "painting a picture of revolution using sound." The effect is controlled chaos and while the piece was certainly a huge departure from the rest of the album, it is not particularly ground-breaking nor original, but part of a long tradition of avant guarde music and art, of which Yoko Ono was a vital cotributor. The track is dissed by rock fans as being too long, too tedious, and much too pretentious, and by serious music people as not quite measuring up to those pretensions.

I bought The White Album during the height of my love of the Beatles, c. 1972, at our local Sears after school one day with my afore-mentioned best friend. He may have been a little beyond them at the time, but still wholeheartedly supported my passion. I have fond memories of opening up the package with him on the way home and discovering a folded up poster inside featuring on one side a collage of random snapshots of the Beatles made over the years, and on the other, the lyrics to all the songs on the album. But as they say in the infomercials, that's not all. Also included were four full color 8 x10 glossies of iconic headshots of each member of the band looking much different than the people who graced the cover of Meet the Beatles. Those photographs still hung on the wall of my parent's basement the day John Lennon died in 1980. They would remain there until my parents moved out of that house in 1986.

I have a vague recollection of the two of us, my friend and I, ending up back at my house where we listened to the album front to back. That was most likely the one and only time I ever listened to my vinyl copy of White Album in its entirety. Unlike CDs, vinyl recordings have two sides meaning you have to physically flip the record over to listen to the other side. To ease that terrible inconvenience, automatic record changers were built into most record players enabling you to play a number of albums without have to get up to flip over the record to hear more music when it reached the end of a side. Instead you would stack your records one on top of the other on a spindle, and when one record finished playing, the needle arm would automatically lift and move out of the way so the next album in the stack could drop down onto the previous album on the turntable in position to be played. This process repeated until all of the records in the stack had finished playing. Then you would typically flip over the entire stack and repeat the process. Record changers reeked havoc on the lifespan of the delicate LPs and audiophiles would never think of using them. But they sure were convenient. I used mine with reckless abandon back then which is why the sound resulting from the inevitable scratches on the surface of the discs became for me as much a memory of those songs as the songs themselves.

The upshot of the changers is that you would not typically listen to two sides of a record in succession, rather you'd listen to one side of an album followed by one side of another album, and so on, for however many albums you had in the stack.

The sequence of songs on most recordings back then was designed with that in mind, consequently each side of an album had its own distinct character. The White Album was no exception. If I had to characterize The White Album by each side I would say that in a nutshell, side one is irreverent, side two is playful, side three is disturbing, and side four is, well, revolutionary.

There are exceptions to that of course, and part of the magic of The White Album is that it is filled with surprises, as there is always an extreme stylistic and mood change from one song to the next. 

I'm probably not the best person to write a critical analysis of The White Album nor any work by the Beatles. I know their music far too well as it was truly the soundtrack of my formative years. To this day it carries the baggage of all the collected memories of my life that go along with listening to the music over and over and over again. But like my friend, I did manage in time to move beyond the Beatles, and in roughly forty years of developing a very eclectic musical taste, I believe I'm able to put their music into context, well, sort of. The truth be told, I'm still biased.

My vinyl copy of The White Album is long gone but we do have a CD copy at home which in preparation for this post I listened to for the first time in about a dozen years, yes front to back. As a matter of fact, I'm listening to it right now.  YOU SAY IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY....

Anyway, here are some thoughts, forty six years after first hearing The White Album for the first time. Keeping in mind what I just said about biases, you can take these thoughts with a grain of salt.

Much like the editing of a film, a lot of thought goes into the sequencing of songs on great albums. This is especially true of the Beatles, where their albums are not merely a collection of songs, but like the band itself, the whole of them is greater than the sum of their parts. Sgt. Peppers Lonely Heart's Club Band, the album that preceded The White Album **  is particularly known for the care that went into the sequencing of the songs which in some cases dissolved (to use a cinematic term) into the next song on the album. If you know SPLHCB, think of the transition between the title track which opens the record, and With a Little Help from My Friends.

The White Album takes these transitions even farther, where almost every song either dissolves into the next one, or has some intermediate transition to bridge the two, sometimes for a chilling effect. The WA in my opinion, opens with the best one-two punch of all the Beatle albums. The first thing we hear on side one is not of an instrument or a voice, but the recorded sound of a jet engine which opens up Paul's sendup of Chuck Berry via the Beach Boys, Back in the USSR. That up-tempo rocker concludes with the shrill jet engine again, dissolving into John's gentle Travis-pattern guitar picking on the opening of his beautiful Dear Prudence.

Like I said, the transition from virtually every song on The White Album to the next one is by design, a contrast often to the extreme. After Dear Prudence's dreamlike outro gently fades into a very brief silence, that calm is abruptly broken by two loud snare drum beats followed by staccato guitar chords that open John's self-referential Glass Onion. 

Another White Album track that is almost universally despised is Wild Honey Pie, a multi-tracked Paul-only song (some may be hard pressed to even call it a song). McCartney described it as improvised and experimental, two components that don't necessarily add up to a pleasant listening experience. This track which could be described as the musical equivalent of The Creature from the Black Lagoon meets Freddy Krueger, is without question the most boldly unpleasant track on the album. One might argue that McCartney came up with WHP just to prove wrong the criticism that he could only write pretty songs. Yet there are a number  McCartney contributions to the album that do just that. My guess is that WHP is the perfect antidote for the (to some ears) sickly sweet Ob-La_Di Ob-La-Da which proceeds it, a cleansing of the palette if you will. Alan Pollack, a musicologist who painstakingly wrote a detailed analysis of every song the Beatles ever released called WHP a diversion...

...while the stage hands change sets, as it were, during the entr'acte separating Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da  from ... Bungalow Bill. The gesture represents a theatrical exploitation of the LP album qua "medium" that is not to be under-estimated.

As if WHP isn't enough of a diversion, it ends with a clip of a flamenco guitar cadenza, (uncredited and most likely not performed by any of the Beatles), followed again by something completely different, John's cheeky knock on macho values, The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill. That song ends with my favorite transition of all. A little outro featuring a bassoon playing the melody of the tune backed up by the applause of a handful of people slowly fades out, then you hear a voice, sounds to me like John's exclaiming something unintelligible, which leads immediately into the opening notes of George's While My Guitar Gently Weeps, curiously played on a piano.

Now up to this point, the album consists of five solid, well crafted songs, all tied together brilliantly including the Wild Honey Pie part which I consider an interlude rather than a bona-fide song. So far so good, the album is off to a rousing start but nothing about it yet is particularly earth shattering.

That's about to change dramatically.

George Harrison was a brilliant songwriter who was overshadowed by his two bandmates, Lennon and McCartney. He was usually relegated to one or two songs per Beatle disc which clearly irritated him. But truth be told, George simply was not the hit producing machine that John and Paul were. That became apparent during his solo career where many of the songs he released are unlistenable. But when he was on, he was really on and by and large his released material in the Beatles catalog, especially after 1964 is of the highest quality. While My Guitar Gently Weeps goes beyond that. It is a deeply moving song that delves into the human condition and its composer's disappointment with humanity's failure to live up to its full potential which he describes as "the love that lays sleeping.". The song also expressed Harrison's disillusion over what was going on with the Beatles at the time, who seemed to be going on thier separate paths after their trip at Harrison's urging, to study Transcendental Meditation (TM) in India. The song originally was underappreciated by his bnadmates, perhaps because some of the original lyrics they correctly saw as digs against them, such as these:

I look from the wings at the play you are staging

and

The problems you sow are the troubles you're reaping

But Harrison pulled a rabbit out of his hat. He invited in his friend Eric Clapton to lay down some guitar tracks, which gave the song instant credibility with his bandmates.

As with many of the songs on The White Album, While My Guitar Gently Weeps went through many iterations before it was completed. The final version featuring Clapton's uncredited lead guitar became an instant classic and time has proven it to be hands down, the most enduring song on The White Album. But the release years later of one of George's early acoustic versions of the song on the Beatles Anthology 3, prove once and for all that Harrison's song holds up on its own with or without the intervention of Clapton. For the record, I actually prefer the acoustic version.

Side one would have been classic had it ended right there but the band wasn't finished. Capping it off is what I consider to be one of the best songs on the record, John's Happiness is a Warm Gun. As with so much on The White Album, HIAWG is experimental, a clean break from conventional pop music song writing. The song is broken up into four, maybe even five distinct parts, lyrically as well as stylistically, stream of consciousness style. In that sense the song is a paradigm for the entire album. The payoff comes in the last section,  a camp version of a fifties style doo-wop number, where John elaborates on the song's title which was lifted directly from the cover of a gun magazine, which itself was a twisted appropriation of a phrase made popular by Charles Schultz in his beloved Peanuts comic strip: "Happiness is a warm puppy." The chilling power and irony of that song which was always there, only intensified twelve years later after Lennon himself became a victim of gun violence. 

 
OK so do I think that The White Album is too long? Absolutely not, but this post is certainly going on much too long. There's so much more left to talk about, the effect of the trip to India and the incredible creativity and hostility it inspired, especially Sexy Sadie, John's repudiation the founder of TM, (simply replace the song's title with "Maharishi" and you get the picture), the death of the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein, the beginning of the end of the band as evidenced by The White Album sessions, the most underrated song on the album, George's Long Long Long, and of course Helter Skelter. But I'm going to quit here and perhaps save all that and the remaining three sides for another day, or perhaps not.

The White Album as I said is a work unto itself, not merely a collection of songs. On Facebook the other day I posted a link to this piece from the New Yorker and made the comment that there wasn't much to argue about, The White Album was indeed the Beatles', magnum opus. Some friends took exception saying they preferred listening to this or that album much more than The White Album. To that I replied that more often than not I would probably choose to listen to any number of Beethoven sonatas over the great Hammerklavier sonata. Yet there is nothing as mind blowing in the entire piano repertoire as the Fuga, nor as sublime as the slow movement, which alone depending on the performer can be twenty minutes or longer.

As a testament to their talent, the variety, depth, breadth and mastery of disparate musical styles in the work of the Beatles has always been staggering, even in the early years, but especially in The White Album. It's kind of mind blowing that the same person,  Paul, is responsible for the tender love song I Will, as well as the demonic mother of all heavy metal, Helter Skelter, or that John, most famous for his acerbic wit, cynicism and capacity for being a fly in the ointment, could be responsible for some of the most beautiful and poignant songs on the album such as Julia and Cry Baby Cry. It's true that not every track on The White Album is equally meaningful or powerful, but that's really the point; it's not a greatest hits album, which in themselves are usually uninspiring by comparison. Another school of thought has it that judging by all the material from The White Album sessions that did not make the album, songs such as Hey Jude, Across the Universe and several other great songs that found their way onto other albums, one could say that The White Album could have been expanded to three discs.

In my humble opinion, Revolution 9 and Wild Honey Pie notwithstanding, The White Album is perfect just as it is. It may of may not be the most important album of all time, but it is without a doubt the most important album in my life.

Here I'll give Paul the closing word. In the film that accompanied the release of The Beatles Anthology set, at the conclusion of his comments on The White Album, he said exactly what needed to be said:

I'm not one to say, 

maybe it had too much of this or that, 

it's great, it sold, it's the bloody Beatles White Album, 

shut up.

*Capitol Records, a subsidiary of the Bristish company EMI, was the American distributor of Beatles recorded music for the bulk of the band's existance, however Meet the Beatles was not the first American issue of a Beatles record. That distinction goes to Introducing the Beatles, released by Chicago's own Vee Jay Records. The Abbey Road sessions were the last recordings the group made together as the Beatles, however Let It Be, recorded earlier in 1969, has the distinction of being the last album of original Beatles music to be released.

**Magical Mystery Tour was a Capitol Records, US issued LP released in 1967 between Sgt. Pepper and The White Album. However it was not recorded to be a stand-alone album, rather it came about as a compellation of songs from the sountrack of a BBC television program of the same name, (side one) and other songs that were released as singles that year (side two). That said, some of the Beatles' greatest songs can be found on that album such as I Am The Walrus, Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever and All You Need Is Love.

Aretha Franklin

They called her "The Queen of Soul", an apt title to be sure. But at the same time it's woefully inadequate, kind of like calling the land formation in northern Arizona, The Grand Canyon. It is a canyon to be sure, and it's grand, there's no denying that, but it's so much more.

Consider this: in 1965 Otis Redding, the man called "The King of Soul" by many, wrote and recorded a song called Respect. In his hands it was a straight-ahead playful little number about a man asking his woman for a little respect when he comes home after a hard day's work, He didn't care what she did during the day, heck, she could even "do him wrong", as long as she gave him his due when he got home. The hook in Redding's version is his cheerful "hey hey hey" playing off a nine note riff from the horn section in the refrain. Granted it's not Redding's best work, for him it's almost a throw-away song, although it did become a hit.

When Aretha Franklin got her hands on the song a couple years later, she turned it on its head. She didn't ask her partner for respect, she demanded it.

The new hook was the call and and respnse between the lead and the backup vocals provided by Franklin's sisters Carolyn and Erma. All my years in the darkroom listening to oldies music provided me the opportunity to learn the backup vocals (I'd never dare sing the lead) to a point where I was convinced that I could have filled in for Carolyn or Erma should the need have ever arisen during one of Aretha's tours.

If you'll just indulge me for a moment:

Aretha: all I'm askin' is for a little respect when you get home: 

Carolyn, Erma & me:  just a little bit 

Aretha: Hey Baby,
Carolyn, Erma & me:  just a little bit,

Aretha: when you get home 

Carolyn, Erma and me:  just a little bit,

Aretha: Mister 

Carolyn, Erma and me:  just a little bit, 

etc...

Of course the poor schmo the song is addressed to doesn't get the point so Franklin, her sisters and I have to spell it out for him:

Aretha: R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me.R-E-S-P-E-C-T,take care, TCB, oh

Carolyn, Erma and me: sock-it-to-me sock-it-to-me sock-it-to-me sock-it-to-me sock-it-to-me 

Aretha: A little respect 

Carolyn, Erma and me: sock-it-to-me sock-it-to-me sock-it-to-me sock-it-to-me sock-it-to-me  

Aretha: Whoa, babe 

Carolyn, Erma and me:  just a little bit, 

Aretha: A little respect 

Carolyn, Erma and me:  just a little bit,

Aretha: And I ain't lyin' 

Carolyn, Erma and me:  just a little bit, 

Carolyn, Erma and me: Re, re, re, re 

Aretha: Start when you come home 

Carolyn, Erma and me: Re, re, re, respect 

Aretha:  Or you might walk in 

Carolyn, Erma and me:  just a little bit,

Aretha:  And find out I'm gone  

Carolyn, Erma and me:  just a little bit, 

etc...

Like every song Aretha Franklin ever performed, she made this one entirely her own. In interviews she insisted Respect was nothing more than one half of a dialog between a woman and her man, but her fans knew better. In her hands, Respect instantly became an anthem both for the women's movement as well as the Civil Rights movment.

I'm not aware if Aretha Franklin ever sang an overtly political song, (although she did cover Sam Cooke's great lament A Change is Gonna Come). She didn't have to. Just like Respect, people got the message when she repeatedly cried out the word "Freedom" in a song she wrote titled simply, Think.

As we've been celebrating her life that we lost this week, listening to songs she recorded during her amazing career, so many of them bring back memories and could easily be considered my essential Aretha Franklin song. It was hard to pick out one to feature on this post but I came up with a song that turned out to be her breakout number from 1967. Hard to believe but by that time, still only 25, Franklin had already recorded nine albums for Columbia Records, none of them commercially successful. The impressrio at that label, John Hammond, who was largely responsible for making the careers of folks like Count Basie, Billie Holiday, and Bob Dylan to name a few, just couldn't quite get it right with Franklin, perhaps trying and failing to make her fit into a mold that worked so well for him before. When Franklin's Columbia contract expired, she signed with Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records who made the wise decision of letting her be herself and exploit the solid Gospel music background that formed the backbone of her prodidgious talent.

She brought this song, written by Ronnie Shannon to her first session at Atlantic which took place at the storied FAME recording studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The story goes that Franklin sat down at the grand piano and the session pianist Spooner Oldham was so taken by her playing that he moved over to the electric keyboard. You can hear him in the opening bars of the tune. Among the other session players who played with Franklin on her first album for Atlantic (also named I Never Loved a Man the Way that I Love You) was the great King Curtis on tenor sax.




Like any great performer of popular music no matter what the genre, Franklin is able to directly touch the heart of her listener. This song in particular, she lays bare just about every conceivable emotion from pain, agner and sadness, to joy and exultation. Anybody who has ever been in love with someone in a difficult relationship (and aren't they all?) can instanntly relate. There are other versions of this song but I have no interest in hearing them as I can't imagine anyone bringing more to it than Aretha Franklin did.

My first memory of Aretha Franklin was alomst fifty years ago to the day, August 26, 1968 to be exact. My family was in the process of moving and during one of our numerous trips between Humboldt Park in the city to our new digs in the suburb of Oak Park, her voice came over the radio as she sang the Star Spangled Banner to officially open the Chicago Democratic National Convention, yes that one. Like every song she ever sang, she made it her own, much to the consternation of several in the hall and elsewhere who were not used to a soulful rendition of that song, including my dad who was mildly appalled. Strangely enough, as we were so engrossed in our move, it is my only direct memory of that turbulent time in my city's history.

By that time, still only 26, Aretha Franklin had already been proclaimed the Queen of Soul, and that performance, admittedly not her best as she flubbed some of the lyrics, didn't slow down her career one bit. In fact her status as American royalty, or as close to it as you can get, meant that she was asked to perform the national anthem dozens of times for significant occasions during her illustirous career. The last time was on November 24, 2016 in her hometown, during the tradional Detroit Lions  nationally televised Thanksgiving Day football game. Despite being advanced in age and already diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Franklin's voice was hardly diminished as she performed perhaps the longest and most soulful rendition of that song ever. Again she had her detractors but I think the general mood of the country by that time was that Aretha Franklin represented this country and what it stands for better than the first verse of an an overwrought ballad with racist tones set to an English drinking song.

Taking a very basic survey asking two people, one of a generation older, my mother, and the other, a generation younger, a colleague at work, I came to the conclusion that Aretha Franklin's is not a timeless voice in the way that say Ella Fitzgerald is or perhaps the Beatles are. Hers is the voice of a particular time and place. Picking a song to represent her may have been a challenge, but it's no challenge to pick the essential voice of my generation. In an era filled with notable candidates, a pantheon of performing artists whose work could easily be chosen to fill the role as the voice of a generation, and will gladly tell you so themselves, one voice stands above the rest. Aretha Franklin's powerful, unrelenting voice was the heart, the soul and the consciousness of  my generation who came of age during the sixties and early seventies.

No mere pantheon of music's greatest stars could ever contain Aretha Franklin, she was that good.

Carlos Kleiber

Here is another bit of information unintentionally gleaned while perusing the internet. My interest in orchestral music began long ago, probably back in elementary school when I first played clarinet in the school band and orchestra. It became an on and off passion after I put down the licorice stick after high school and began playing the piano in college. Since that time I've attended many concerts in Chicago and elsewhere, and was privileged to have seen in person a number of the great conductors of the 20th and 21st centuries. Those I haven't seen live, I've been made aware of, watching numerous performances on TV, and listening to the local radio station, WFMT, one of the few remaining broadcast stations in the country devoted to classical music. But one major conductor eluded me all those years, until now.

It wasn't that I was unaware of the name Carlos Kleiber, or never heard recordings of his performances. It's just that those recordings were so rare, and the discussion of his work so sparse, that I never bothered to give him a second thought.

The other day I was on YouTube, searching for performances of Beethoven symphonies. Say what you will about YouTube, but the fact remains that you can find on that site, along with every last bit of detritus the world has to offer, some of the most edifying, magnificent, elevating, and life affirming videos as well, despite the annoying commercial breaks inserted at the most inopportune times. This is what I found:

I may have heard Kleiber conduct but until last week I had never seen him at work. It's obvious from this film made in Amsterdam, I'm guessing in the eighties, that the folks in the "cheap seats" behind the orchestra had the best seats in the house. No they couldn't hear the "proper" balance of sound intended for the folks in the auditorium, but they got to see the maestro in all his glory, not just his backside.

No conductor, it has been said, had a firmer grasp or understanding of the music he directed than Kleiber. Many consider his recordings of the Brahms and Beethoven symphonies (especially the odd numbered ones in the case of the latter), and selected operas of Wagner to be the quintessential performances of those works. His tempi and dynamic range to some may be a bit excessive, but to my ears anyway, at least in the pieces I'm familiar with, his pulling out all the stops brings out the power, passion and the emotion of the music without being just for show, as it might have in lesser hands.

It's one thing to close your eyes and listen to the music, it is another to watch the maestro as he conducts. Kleiber had to be one of the most idiosyncratic conductors of his time. In contrast to the rigid sytle of his father, Erich Kleiber, a notable mid-century conductor, Carlos used his impossibly long arms to great expressive effect, sometimes in long, fluid motions, at other times generating tremendous velocity while conducting at his signature breakneck speed. And sometimes he barely moved his arms at all as he does at the beginning of the major theme of the first movement of the Beethoven Seventh, preferring to keep time with his hips, dancing along with the music, inspired by Scottish folk tunes. At times, the younger Kleiber while conducting looks as if carrying on a conversation with his players with his left hand on his hip or even his pocket while the right hand with the baton continues to keep time.

But the most distinctive part of Carlos Kleiber when he conducted was his face.

Many classical musicians, especially in their performances of the early and mid-nineteeth century Romantic repertoire, are given to excessively contorted facial expressions as if to convey the enormous profundity of the task at hand. Not so with Kleiber; his face conveys pure joy, It could be a knowing grin at one of the players as is they were sharing a secret, a bawdy laugh as if he were having a beer with several of his closest friends, or a broad smile of deep satisfaction, almost to the point of ecstasy as if he were, well I think you get the idea. In all my years of watching conductors, I've never seen a more honestly expressive face. Clearly the performance of music for Kleiber was not purely an academic endeavor, although it was that to be sure, but an exercise examining every emotion that life has to offer from the depths of the deepest sorrow to the soaring peaks of triumphal exultation. He wholeheartedly embraces the music he directs and if we are paying the slightest bit of attention, we embrace it along with him.

Here is a rare video of a Kleiber rehearsal:



It is said that few conductors set such high standards for their work and rehearsed their orchestras more thoroughly. But if Klieber was indeed a taskmaster as his reputation suggests, he did so with kindness and humor rather than what was customary for the era, authoritative detachment. As you'll see, pure joy comes through in the rehearsal as well as in the performance.

Yet few conductors worked as sporadically as Kleiber. Despite being one of the most sought after conductors of his time, Kleiber over the course of his career averaged only about two or three symphonic performances and ten operas per annum, a pittance compared to his peers . Turning down prestigious directorships, and gigs with the most celebrated orchestras and opera companies in the world, Kleiber liked to joke that he only conducted when his freezer became empty. He never accepted students or gave interviews.

He was an enigma to say the least.

There were at least two film documentaries made of his life. One was called "I Am Lost to the World" (the title of which alludes to a song by Mahler), and the other, "Traces to Nowhere" the beginning of which can be seen here:

Both films were made after the conductor's death in 2004 at 74, an age when many conductors are still in the prime of their careers.

We'll never know why Klieber who profoundly loved what he did, was so reticent to perform. Some speculate that his perfectionism got the better of him and that he could never achieve the music on stage that he heard in his head. Others claim that he was plagued with debilitating self-doubt while others said he just became bored with the whole thing. I find the last one hard to believe at least by watching his performances even late in life. His is not the expression of a man filled with that "ol' ennui" as Cole Porter once put it.

In a 2011 BBC Music Magazine poll of contemporary conductors asking them to list their greatest influences. Carlos Kleiber came in first with Leonard Bernstein coming in a distant second. There seems to be nearly unanimous agreement as to where Kleiber stands in the pantheon of great conductors of all time.

But he does have his detractors. In this article, published shortly after the conductor's death, the author, Norman Lebrecht waxes poetically about Kleiber's work at first, in marked contrast to the provocative title of the piece, Carlos Kleiber: Not a Great Conductor(!), (punctuation mark, mine), but in the end takes pains to burst the Kleiber myth, not altogether convincing in my opinion. 

The comments on the first YouTube video I posted are particularly enlightening. Reacting to the slew of hagiographic tributes, one comment on the video of the Amsterdam performance of the Beethoven symphonies, a woman named Svetlana writes:

Beautiful, charming, but moribund Europe. Yes, it is a decadence. Do you want God to give Carlos back to you, sirs? No, Carlos Kleber (sic) will never come back from Heaven. He was too tired here....

Perhaps that's true. We should just be thankful that God gave us Carlos Kleiber, albeit in small doses. And that we have YouTube to remember him.

CODA

One more video I just discovered of a Kleiber rehearsal including a rousing performance of a very familiar song. Enjoy:

Brush with Greatness II

Many years ago I was at the kind of establishment that we old timers used to call a "record store" in Chicago's Loop. At the time this particular store had the most complete selection of recordings in the city and was THE place to go for just about anything recorded on vinyl, but especially for their extensive catalog of classical music. On that particular day, it so happened that a very famous violinist was there, signing albums of his which customers purchased in the store. It was at the end of his ordeal (at least that's how I would describe it from the look on his face) when a young boy, maybe eight years old, after waiting his turn as the last person in line, finally made it to the table where the famous violinist was sitting. The boy was carrying his own violin and it was obvious that the man sitting at the table was his idol. "Mr. Famous Violinist..." (not his real name), said the little boy, "...would you please play something on my violin?" The way the world famous violinist looked at that little boy, you'd have thought the child asked him to slit his own throat. "No..." the famous violinist said to the little boy, "...I can't do that.". That was that, and off into the sunset went the famous violinist, leaving a crushed little boy and his violin behind in the dust.

How that incident ultimately affected the boy I'll never know, but it sure gave me pause about the thought of meeting celebrities whom I admired. Even though my relatively few encounters with famous people have ranged (with the exception of this one) from pleasant to downright inspirational, I still have the nagging thought in my head that given the chance, I'd rather take a pass on meeting someone I truly admired, lest the impression of my idol would be forever tarnished by the fact that the person is actually a jerk.

But a couple weeks ago I was offered a chance I couldn't pass up, to document the visit of a very famous musician, and someone I've always admired, to the school where I have been photograping for the past three months.

Like the famous violinist in the record store, from all outward appearances, this musician projects a gregarious, friendly, public demaeanor. That made me all the more suspicious; could his public face really be just an act?  Could this famous musician, perhaps the most recognizable classical music artist in the world at the moment, really be a jerk, just like the famous violinist? 

Like famous people often do, the musician kept us waiting. The school's orchestra and concert band were on hand for the event and filled up the music room to well beyond capacity. Members of the Chicago Civic orchestra were also there, personally mentoring the student  instrumentalists. No one knew exactly what to expect from the famous musician, would he give a lecture, would he treat us to a small performance, or would he just sit regally up front, privileging us with his mere presence?

Eventually there was rumbling in the room. "He's coming, he's coming.." the adults wispered in admiration, much like the members of the orchestra in the cartoon whispered "Leopold, Leopold..." as Bugs Bunny impersonating the great conductor Leopold Stakowski walked up to the podium.

"Find a chair..." someone whispered, "...he wants to sit in the cello section."

Like all important people, the great man had an entourage who preceeded him. Members of a film crew hired by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra were on hand filming a documentary Then came an assistant who carried in the famous musician's instrument.

Finally, in came Yo-Yo Ma who took his seat among the cellists as he sat in with the band...

Now I don't necessarily believe that every picture is worth a thousand words, or that one can read into the soul of a person simply by looking at a photograph. But I think these pictures testify to the fact that my trepidations of Yo-Yo Ma were put aside the second he entered the room and began playing music with the students.

The combination orchestra/band with their new second cellist played an excerpt of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and an arrangement of Dave Brubeck's Take Five. After the music was finished, there was time for the students to ask questions. When the orchestra director opened the floor, there was the typical few seconds of awkward silence, followed by a few giggles coming from the assembled, including the guest of honor. Finally someone worked up the courage to ask why Mr. Ma originally chose the cello. He told the kids that the instrument he really wanted to play was the double bass, because it was the biggest instrument in the orchestra. But being only four at the time, and a smallish four at that, the double bass was not a practical choice. 

Yo-Yo Ma exchanging thoughts with students at Nicholas Sean High School

Then someone (not a cellist) asked if he ever got tired of playing the cello. That question gave Mr. Ma pause to think and become philosophical. He said that while practice can become mundane and somewhat tedious, it paves the necessary path to be able to connect with the music written over the centuries, be it written by Tchaikovsky or Dave Brubeck, two wildly divergent composers, or any of the other composers from the baroque to the current day in his remarkably varied repertoire. Then he added that the true joy of his work is connecting with other musicians, such as those assembled in that room, in the effort to in turn, connect with people gathered to listen to the music. That, he said, is where the magic comes in.

After a few more questions, his assistant came back to retrieve Mr. Ma's cello. A few kids asked if they could take selfies with the maestro, who gladly obliged. After trading a few pleasantries with the orchestra and band directors, both of whom confided with me that they got no sleep the night before, Mr. Ma was gone, leaving the room filled with musicians young and not so young, with a feeling of exultation.

I can't say for sure quite how many of the students assembled in that room knew of Mr. Ma before being introduced to his work by their teachers before he came to their school. but they're all serious musicians so the meaning of his visit was not lost upon any of them. A couple of the kids I talked to, with tears in their eyes, were moved beyond words. That said, everyone was swept up by the tremendous generosity of his spirit and I think it's fair to say that not a soul in the room, Mr. Ma included, will forget that magical day anytime soon.