End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival Is Undermining Its Rise, by Carl Minzner (Oxford University Press; 296 pp., $29.95). Back in the 1980s, there was reason to hope that China would succeed in reforming, or at least softening, its authoritarian political system to bring it more in line with the capitalist world. This...
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Your Pink Hat Is Transphobic
If Madonna were a standard white person, her appearance at the August 2018 MTV Video Music Awards—at which she delivered a rambling, self-referential soliloquy about the influences she’d absorbed from Aretha Franklin while costumed in an alarming getup that might, in Hollywood parlance, be described as “Bride of Frankenstein Meets Ancient Egyptian Concubine”—would have brought...
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Teddy Wilson and the Swing Era Vocalists
Midway through Billie Holiday’s plaintive 1941 recording of “Jim,” there is a short piano solo barely 25 seconds in length—not even a full 32-bar chorus—by Teddy Wilson. “Jim” is largely forgotten today, but Wilson’s lightly swinging interpretation of the melody is typical of his elegant, rhythmic playing, exemplary for its Swing Era sensibility, and neatly...
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Tom Wolfe, R.I.P.
When Tom Wolfe’s debut novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published in November 1987, the book was greeted with effusive praise and became a best-seller, although some literati seemed offended by Wolfe’s highly descriptive prose, the hyperbole, exuberant punctuation, and occasional sound effects. After film rights were sold for $750,000 that winter to Peter...
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Monumental Stupidity
There is a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest in which the characters look out at a brooding Mount Rushmore from the dining-room terrace of the Sheraton-Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota (since renamed the Hotel Alex Johnson). There are Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt peering back, and shortly after...
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John di Martino
In the early days of his career in 1982, jazz pianist John di Martino was a member of the house trio accompanying such internationally famous vocalists as Billy Daniels and Keely Smith at Steve’s Lounge and Elaine’s Lounge, two of the show rooms at Atlantic City’s Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino. He also played electric...
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Unlovable Losers: The Left in Perspective
Not long after last fall’s presidential election, an entire wall in New York City’s Union Square subway station was plastered with hundreds of protestors’ Post-it notes, hailed by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration as “subway therapy” for the losing side, but more akin to a billboard for the demented, all berserk with rage, contrived hysteria,...
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Alex Smith
Just after 6 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday, February 7, 2016, a tuxedo-clad Alex Smith sat alone on stage at a grand piano near the 50-yard line in Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, set to accompany Lady Gaga as she sang the National Anthem to introduce the championship game between the Carolina Panthers and...
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For Those Who Have Ears
For some time now, Ted Gioia has been one of our leading jazz and music critics. He, along with Gary Giddins, Bob Porter, Marc Myers, Bill Milkowski, Will Friedwald, and several even younger critics and historians like Ricky Riccardi, has gradually taken over the important and tricky work of chronicling America’s music, a mission first...
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Not Your Mother’s Weasels
At the United Nations in the fall of 2009, Barack Obama acknowledged, with customary self-regard, “the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world,” no doubt referring to his pledge about the receding oceans, healing the planet and reviving the animal kingdom, and the unprecedented wisdom of his associates and himself. Sure enough: The Russian...
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Tommy Flanagan
Early one evening in the mid-1980’s, jazz pianist Walter Bishop, Jr., who in 1951-52 had performed and recorded with star bebop alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, was having a bad first set at Bradley’s, New York City’s premier jazz piano bar. Bishop’s sense of time was off, he was missing notes, and he even seemed disoriented...
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A Master Accompanist
Few jazz pianists are “accompanists” as gifted in knowledge, technique, and taste as Norman Simmons, able to back vocalists with consummate skill in chording, passing notes, and background lines, but also wise in the use of space. “A pianist is a piano player—that’s different from accompanying,” Simmons said recently, as he approached his 85th birthday. ...
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Jimmy Rowles
In person, jazz pianist Jimmy Rowles was a cutup, a card, a madcap presence, a piece of work. After coming east from California in 1973, he would appear often, sometimes for weeks at a time, at Bradley’s, The Cookery, The Knickerbocker, Michael’s Pub, and other top New York City piano rooms, usually in duos with...
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Herman Foster
Late in 1961 the pop-jazz singer Gloria Lynne was booked into one of New York City’s top jazz supper clubs, Basin Street East, on Manhattan’s East 48th Street, where she was to record her first live album. The emcee announced, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, Basin Street East proudly presents a young artist who was...
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No Apologies for Jazz
When the 30-year-old blind British jazz pianist George Shearing came to America for good early in 1949, he ran into fellow transplanted Brit Leonard Feather, a prominent critic, producer, promoter, and songwriter, who suggested that the pianist enlarge his trio to quintet size by adding vibes and drums. Feather’s idea was that piano-bass-drums trios were...
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No More Blues
Where is the blues in jazz when we need it? Throughout most of its history jazz was a blues music, at least until the avant-gardists of the 1960’s tried to burn down the cathedral in their trumped-up revolution against American society, playing music unfocused in concept, unmusical in sound, and unpleasant in performance. They made...
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Forgotten French
Last October, the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to French novelist J.M.G. Le Clézio, the 13th French writer to win since the award’s inauguration in 1901 and the first to win since avant-garde novelist Claude Simon in 1985. Some of the earlier French winners, such as Albert Camus, André Gide, and Jean-Paul Sartre...
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Boogaloo Down Broadway: The Charade of Liberal Change
Here it is 2008, and everything else is old news. The provisional and absentee ballots, recounts, scores, and statistics of 2000-2007 are all in the history books, along with Afghan and Iraqi elections and constitutions, insurgencies, hurricanes, disgraced mayors and governors, and Supreme Court, lobbying, earmark, wiretapping, and energy and cartoon ruckuses. Since Barack Obama...
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The Diner’s Refrain
With former president Bill Clinton settled into his new headquarters on New York’s 125th Street, in central Harlem, the danger for the culinary crowd is that he may now take to hanging out at Sylvia’s, the famous soul-food restaurant barely three blocks away on Lenox Avenue near 126th. For almost 40 years, the family-owned restaurant...
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Renaissance Frauds
Former Vice President Al Gore distinguished himself by a number of colorful claims, including his invention of the internet, his status as inspiration for the plot of Love Story, and his crime-busting investigations that pulled the covers off Love Canal and the villainy of both the internal-combustion engine and flush toilet. During last year’s presidential...
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Jazz Standards
The new millennium brings with it the formal end of jazz’s 20th century, although serious historians recognize that some elements of the music trace back to roughly two-thirds of the way through the 19th. Yet even with the undeniable brilliance of much that was produced during the Dixieland, swing, bebop, and subsequent eras, as the...
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Storytellers and Fakers
A writer, asked during a literary party what her new novel was about, turned on the questioner with an expression combining irritation, indignation, and pity, and replied, “My novels aren’t about things!” Some time later, this same writer would denounce Stephen King in print for hogging the marketplace and for his alleged role in censoring...
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Great—and Famous
The late 1940’s and early 1950’s were the heyday of rhythm-and-blues. Singers like Charles Brown, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Amos Milburn, James Brown, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and others like them were becoming acknowledged masters of the genre, all with readily identifiable musical personalities, while such older big-band blues shouters as Wynonie Harris, Jimmy Witherspoon, Eddie...
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A Hothouse of Goofiness: The American Book Industry
The renowned American jazzman Charlie Parker, introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre in a Paris club during the 1949 jazz festival, reportedly said, “I’m very glad to have met you, Mr. Sartre. I like your playing very much.” According to writer Boris Vian, who also played trumpet and often served as master of ceremonies at the club,...