TT 529: Stanley Cowell's JUNETEENTH

The recording is ten years old

Stanley Cowell (1941—2020) was a pianist of remarkable accomplishment, someone nearly neck and neck with Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett in terms of modern jazz fluidity, but with added skills in the old school stride-to-swing department.

Cowell also had serious ambitions as a composer, and at least one piece, “Equipoise,” has entered the repertoire.

Like so many, Cowell was underrated and remains unheralded. But I think the time of his 2015 Juneteenth Suite will come. This work is ambitious but it is not too ambitious, comprised of nine tight sections running half-an-hour. The themes are rich and fully developed, and everything is written beautifully for the instrument.

1 Introduction

2 Proclamation

3 Really Dreams Echoes

4 Anticipation Of The Coming Of Freedom

5 Commentary On Strange Fruit

6 Nostalgia For Homelands

7 Proclamation Interruptions

8 Darkness Transforming

9 Finale

While the word Juneteenth has a lot of emotional associations, Cowell’s temperature is mild, resigned, and subtle. Many European composition devices are used; indeed, as far as I can tell, it is almost all fully-notated. While there are a few enjoyable stylistic references to gospel and the blues, most of the music is in its own bag, with certain leitmotifs returning again and again.

One track, “Reality Dreams Echoes,” is a crazy-quilt of Americana themes including “Dixie,” “Swing Slow, Sweet Chariot,” and “By the River,” concluding with “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The most conventionally “jazz” movement with a bit of obvious improvisation is “Nostalgia For Homelands,” with a kind of repeating odd-meter cycle that undulates like modern R ‘n B.

A pianistically advanced set of variations on “Strange Fruit” is the longest and most elaborate movement.

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The recording is perhaps not packaged that well, for in my view, Juneteenth Suite should stand alone, not sandwiched between other worthy but “normal” piano tracks. In Juneteenth Suite Cowell delivered a masterpiece, and in retrospect perhaps even a final magnum opus.

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(Footnote: I am open to collaborating with a talented youngster—or someone older who has time to transcribe—with the aim of generating a published score to Juneteenth Suite suitable for other pianists to play in concert.)

TT 528: Nat Hentoff Centennial

brief note on JAZZ IS

The late Nat Hentoff would have turned 100 on June 10. Although some might argue that the main part of Hentoff’s legacy is political—as a champion of the First Amendment and author of countless pointed columns at the Village Voice and other places—he also did a tremendous amount for jazz, especially when he was young. Reading early Hentoff clarifies just how mainstream jazz was at midcentury. While this was a hit music that swept America, not every listener understood the price paid by its major practitioners. As a jazz critic, Hentoff strove to honor his gods and goddesses. A perfect example is one of the best jazz TV shows of all time (put together by Hentoff, Whitney Balliett and others), The Sound of Jazz from 1957, where Billie Holiday, Lester Young, and Coleman Hawkins and many others are all are captured in prime form.

But Hentoff was also a poet of the esoteric modern movement. He wasn’t a musician, but he understood the progression, and wrote important early appreciations of key avant-gardists. As a magazine editor he helmed a few wonderful years of the Jazz Review; he even produced classic Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and Cecil Taylor records for his record label, Candid.

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The Hentoff book I know best is Jazz Is from 1976, where philosophical and metaphorical essays about various legends act in counterpoint with powerful quotes from the community and evocative black and white photos by Bob Parent.

There’s no good reason to be in this profession unless you have an essentially romantic relationship to the heroes of the music. Jazz Is was my gateway drug and a fabulous introduction to the mythos.

Hentoff could write prose well, but he also strove to include the voices of the musicians. The chapter on Charlie Parker in Jazz Is (“The Great Speckled Bird”) is introduced by two pages of provocative commentary from Cootie Williams, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, John Lewis, and Ralph Ellison.

His jazz critic peers rarely addressed the topic of race, but Hentoff tries to get in there, for example in this chapter on Charlie Parker, which ends up partly a meditation on how being black must have interacted with Bird’s self-destructive behavior. It’s all pretty strong stuff even today, let alone in 1976.

Inevitably, Jazz Is has some dated passages, and as much as I love how Hentoff quotes his heroes, at times there are just too many quotes within a chapter. (Not the only time this happens in Hentoff.) However, his essential reverent relationship with the music is absolutely correct, and the technical and aesthetic judgements about his favorite musicians are essentially correct as well.

Jazz history would be immensely poorer without Nat Hentoff’s passionate contribution.

selections from the library of Mark Stryker, another Nat Hentoff fan

TT 527: THE REHEARSAL, Season two

plus MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE -- THE FINAL RECKONING and THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME. Airplanes are the leitmotif.

There are six episodes of Nathan Fielder’s latest, a second season of The Rehearsal. While the first season was absolutely wonderful, the second is simply beyond the beyond. I suppose if you woke me up in the dead of night, put me under an interrogation lamp, and roughly demanded to know the greatest thing I have ever seen on television, I’d have to answer, “The second season of The Rehearsal.”

Fielder is making truly challenging art that directly interfaces with the current condition. The conventional literary idiom “doubling down” proves to be insufficient when discussing the progression from the first scene to last. We need a new phrase—perhaps a phrase that alludes to unchecked exponential growth—to describe Fielder’s commitment to unlikely and unexpected behavior.

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Plane travel is part of The Rehearsal. Plane travel is also part of Mission: Impossible— The Final Reckoning. However, compared to the chills and thrills of The Rehearsal, the current M:I is a decidedly lukewarm affair. I even sort of zoned out and stopped paying attention during the long climatic plane chase, maybe I was thinking about when to do my laundry or something.

The submarine sequence was admittedly pretty good.

In the end, the complete and utter deification of Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt as a Jesus Christ-level savior is hard for me to take. Everything else in the movie is also so on the nose, with no hint of thematic or emotional complexity. All details were adjusted through a focus group. It is as smooth as a ball bearing. “Can every single frame of this very long action movie be understood by everyone instantly?”

The film is not very funny, either. The previous installments directed by Christopher McQuarrie seemed a bit more amusing.

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The budget for Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning was 400 million dollars. The budget for Wes Anderson’s latest, The Phoenician Scheme, was 30 million.

Looking at the two review threads on Reddit (Mission: Impossible, Phoenician), one gets the general impression that Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning has received better reviews than The Phoenician Scheme. In at least one case, that is exactly what happened: Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave M:I 5 stars and Phoenician 3 stars. Again, one cost 400 million and the other 30 million, which suggests that Bradshaw is conflating price with quality.

Perhaps M:I is “too big to fail,” or perhaps corporate group think can actually be attractive to the critical establishment.

In conversation, Glenn Kenny pointed out that the complaint “Wes Anderson films are all artifice and therefore lack emotion” has become an active trope.

Glenn is right. From the Reddit review page of Phoenician:

“….At no point did any part of the plot touch me on an emotional level...”
“…Its flurry of mid-century design and rapid-fire exchanges feels like layers of painstakingly applied lacquer over human figures left barely visible by the process…”
“…Ratchets the whimsy to such an extent that you feel a much greater distance from the goings-on…”
“…A sleepy, drippy affair with no emotional centre at its core…”
“…For all its exquisite boxes-within-boxes compositions and cleverly designed sets, this whole movie unfolded for me as if behind a thick pane of emotion-proof glass….”
“…Its major attraction is the whimsy with which it is decorated, or suffused, or infested...”
“…Drama, which is kept at such a vast ironic distance that it frequently disappears…”

Here on Substack, Sophie of The Final Scene (a critic I admire) bitterly complained: “For God's sake, Wes. We know you can center a shot. Now show us you still remember how to make us feel something besides déjà vu.”

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What can I say? I was weeping in the final scene of The Phoenician Scheme. Copious tears poured down my cheeks, and I sat through the credits in kind of a stunned awe.

Maybe I’m just a softy…or maybe some of the received wisdom of critical consensus is just being too hard on one of our greatest filmmakers.

Possibly it is a sort of flex. Critics can’t do much harm to the big franchises, but Anderson is potentially vulnerable, although he certainly isn’t costing the studio top dollar. As with the two other entertainments discussed here, plane travel is also a part of The Phoenician Scheme, and there are even three plane crashes. Eventually this becomes a recurring joke, but the point of impact is never filmed, the audience just sees a bit of wreckage lying around in the aftermaths, an inexpensive trick that went out of fashion decades ago. (The way Anderson treats plane crashes as a lo-fi throwaway—in 2025!—is amusing and on brand.)

Wes Anderson has never once attempted to please a committee. Is there some aspect of jealously involved? One of the last successful auteurs needs a spanking? (Even Tarantino seems to be more part of a studio process.)

Or maybe the haters are just genuinely tired of the aesthetic, which I guess is fair. However, in my view, we are just lucky that Wes Anderson is still making Wes Anderson movies. He does what he does, and God bless.

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Musical note: The Phoenician Scheme boasts the most Stravinsky ever used in a mainstream film score. The source is mainly Firebird, there’s a little Petrushka, but Apollo also gets devastating play.

Business Blast

pianoFORTEpianoFORTE! this weekend and my James P. Johnson videos

Saturday:

Concert is at Klavierhaus, Saturday June 14, at 7:30. Beth Levin will be playing Mendelssohn, and Kathleen Supové will be playing her own music + Tom Flahery and Randall Woolf. $15 at the door, benefit for the ACLU.

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I'll be playing James P. Johnson including "Keep Off the Grass," "Snowy Morning Blues," "The Mule Walk," "Worried and Lonesome Blues," "Jingles," "Blueberry Rhyme," and "You've Got To Be Modernistic."

Two of my best YouTube videos are of James P. Johnson repertoire. “The Charleston” is from years ago at Smalls, part of the marathon concert The Last Rent Party, where we raised money for James P. Johnson’s tombstone. (The anonymous lowercase comment, “sounds great. just like the original” is a superb troll.)

During the pandemic, I spearheaded a project where Aaron Diehl, Sullivan Fortner, Mathis Picard, and I all played “Carolina Shout” online. (Here, as a unexpected bonus, the great jazz pianist Richie Beirach quite seriously goes off on me in the comments, and we have a little public back-and-forth.)

The pianoFORTEpianoFORTE! concert is a chance for me to run a suite I’ll be playing all the third week in July for the Mark Morris Dance Group. “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic” is part of Program A at the Joyce Theater. (The Mark Morris concerts will probably sell out.)

Stride piano was an update of ragtime, and heard everywhere in Harlem in the 1920’s. They called James P. Johnson “The Father of Stride Piano,” but he preferred to be known as “The Dean of Jazz Pianists.” Johnson is well-established in the jazz history books for his peerless piano playing, documented on record beginning in 1923, while the general audience remembers him for penning several hit songs, including “If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight,” “Old Fashioned Love,” "A Porter’s Love Song to a Chambermaid,” and an anthem of the Jazz Age, “The Charleston.”

For the Mark Morris suite “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic,” I transcribed favorite performances and then arranged them to be suitable for any qualified pianist. While there are a few new transitions and endings, the score is generally very close to Johnson’s original recordings, with one drastic exception: His most famous piece, “The Charleston,” has been placed in a meter unknown in social dance, 5/4, an intentionally “modernistic” touch. —Ethan Iverson

In the realm of piano technique, stride piano is its own topic. Since the Last Rent Part 15 years ago, I’ve been working on it. Progress is possible! Playing the suite for Mark Morris—with an uptempo left hand part that is just like James P. (more or less)—is feeling like a final exam.

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When dealing with all this music—and different approaches to all this music—I repeatedly look to Jaki Byard for inspiration. My essay, “The Genius of Jaki Byard,” was posted for his centennial a few years ago.

TT 526: RIP Frederick Forsyth

two later books, THE DECEIVER and AVENGER

Both the NY Times and Guardian obituaries focus on the first Frederick Forsyth novels from the early 1970s that made him a household name, The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File.

No one seems to be making an argument that the author also improved over time, but perhaps they should be. In early 2024 I read The Deceiver (1991) and Avenger (2003). While I doubt I’d share many opinions with the late author when seated around a dinner table, Forsyth’s “I’m a failed imperialist!” perspective proved to be unexpectedly fresh and enjoyable when placed in the service of escapist entertainment.

What follows is a freshly-edited reprint of my thoughts from a year ago.

The Ian Fleming spy novels featuring James Bond was the first postwar series to catch fire. The audience was ready for this kind of casual espionage tale, where a handsome and rugged Englishman fought outsized enemies with fancy technology and bare fists.

John Le Carré’s dour world of subtle treachery was the original alternative. Some see the Le Carré tradition as more realistic than Fleming, but dumpy George Smiley is just as much of an aspirational figure as James Bond.

In the early 1970’s, Frederick Forsyth arrived on the scene with The Day of the Jackal. It was a new path: instead of joining the ranks of authors imitating either Fleming’s excitement or Le Carré‘s sophistication, Forsyth’s books read like a collection of after-action reports, displaying an immense amount of technical and geopolitical detail.

It was all true, more or less. Forsyth had served time in the military, had been a reporter on the ground in war-torn Biafra, and even took a turn as a low-level informant for MI6. The Day of the Jackal is told in two halves, with the first half being essentially journalism, the factual account of an attempt to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, while the second half is a fictional imagining of a follow-up assassination plot.

(The hit movie starring Edward Fox was better than the book; recent reboots have included a movie with Bruce Willis and a streaming series on Peacock.)

Forsyth’s second novel, The Odessa File, is also quite journalistic in nature and includes an appearance from genuine Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Apparently the film of The Odessa File even provoked the flight of real-life Nazi Eduard Roschmann from Argentina to Paraguay. (Wikipedia article.)

Forsyth wrote well, but perhaps not much more than that. If his novels are receding from collective memory, it may be simply because Forsyth tries hard to tell the truth, like any good reporter should, and the result can be a bit dry. (The true greats in this field keep me up all night, whereas it is pretty easy to put down a Forsyth when it’s time to go to sleep.)

Still, Forsyth holds an important place in the canon, and he was also reasonably prolific. Last year I judged it was time to look at two later novels, The Deceiver and Avenger. Somewhat to my surprise, they were both much better than The Day of the Jackal or The Odessa File.

(While The Day of the Jackal is one of the great titles of all time, at some point Forsyth settled in and produced a shelf of books with similar and hard-to-remember names: The Shepard, The Negotiator, The Deceiver, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan, The Fox. This uninspired choice may suggest to the casual observer that the author just churned out the same book over and over, but that’s not true: The ones I’ve read are all quite different from each other, built from the ground up with fresh research. The Shepard is a true outlier, being a splendid illustrated ghost story for young adults.)

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The Deceiver (1991) is a nice addition to the short list of worthy postwar novels recounting straightforwardly pro-British tales of espionage. The book is actually comprised of four long short stories connected by a hero, retiring SIS officer Sam McReady. These plots were first filmed for television as Frederick Forsyth Presents. I haven’t seen those episodes—as far as I know they are obscure—-but perhaps Forsyth was inspired by the brilliant Ian Mackintosh television production The Sandbaggers. If you like The Sandbaggers, you’ll want to track down the easy-to-find The Deceiver, it is very much in that sort of idiom, where internal Whitehall politics do their best to get in the way of justice.

Forsyth is a patriot through and through, and there is never any doubt that our hero is doing what is required for Queen and country. However, like all good military men, the author also sympathizes with the other side. The conclusion of “The Price of the Bride” suddenly sees the conflict from the opposing viewpoint, and the result is moving.

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In Avenger (2003) Forsyth takes his reporter’s eye to America, although there’s also a long episode set in Vietnam during the war, and quite a lot about the Bosnian conflict. Our hero this time is Calvin Dexter, the avenger of the title. This ex-military New Jersey lawyer is essentially a stock vigilante character, but Forsyth works hard to make Dexter somewhat plausible. Now in his fifties, Dexter has trouble still doing his triathlon, and after he leaves home and goes undercover to stalk his prey, every quotidian routine is listed and explained.

The trolley problem—whether to sacrifice one or few to save a larger number—is a standard ethical question in escapist entertainment. In Avenger, Forsyth wants us to love and support the hero, and expends much literary effort painstakingly setting up the backstory of every character in order to make a final Mission: Impossible-style confidence trick seem “possible." (Again, there can be something a bit unstylish about all this; at times reading Forsyth feels like reading a newspaper.)

Since the history of the story is real history—some of the characters are even real people—it turns out our hero’s victory provokes a much greater loss. The final pages of Avenger are unexpectedly complex, and perhaps even turn the book into a minor masterpiece. A good reminder: There’s a lot of escapist creativity to be explored and exploited in stories that lack an easy definition of right and wrong.