Got my NYC tix! -- suggested reading -- tour pics -- comment on THE MALTESE FALCON
miscellany
This weekend, the New York Philharmonic with Thomas Adès and Yuja Wang offers the charismatic Einojuhani Rautavaara piano concerto + Ives, Saariaho, and Adès’s troubling America: A Prophecy. Rob Schwimmer sits in on theremin for a paragraph of the Ives!
Next week, Timo Andres and Aaron Diehl sit down together for a terrific two piano program at Zankel. This is the future of American music! Just awesome. Finally!
Marc-André Hamelin is playing a mixed recital at 92nd St Y in February. For long-time fans, the Wolpe, Medtner, and Rachmaninoff are Hamelin “classics” and it will be thrilling to hear them live.
Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of Josef Hofmann’s birth. Great overview of the legend from Mark Ainley. The scientists get more and more out of the early Hofmann recordings, and this was already one of the most astonishing discographies even before recent audio improvements.
Hofmann and Art Tatum share something in common in terms of pianistic control and tone.
More and more are digging into their artistic passions on Substack:
Jacob Garchik on the end of American tubas. (Only Garchik could have written this incredible post!)
Brian Lynch on John Hicks. (This is a rare post on a jazz legend where I knew not a single recording referenced! Welcome to Substack, Mr. Lynch!)
Marcus J. Moore: Austin Peralta Was Listening to the Future
Evan Goldfine on the late Ralph Towner
Scott Alexander on the late Scott Adams. (I read and enjoyed Dilbert as a kid and was only vaguely aware of his convoluted later history)
In Austin, Vinnie Sperrazza and I met Ted Gioia, the undisputed king of music Substackers.
Recently I have been reconsidering The Maltese Falcon. When Donald E. Westlake made a top ten crime novels list, The Maltese Falcon was his choice for the Dashiell Hammett slot. Previously I considered that a rare lapse in judgment, for it seemed obvious that both The Glass Key and Red Harvest were even greater. However, I am surprising myself by coming around to Westlake’s point of view. The plot and characters are so unlikely and fantastical—and now I can see all this absurdity not as a weakness, but a strength. Of course, the movie is so great as well. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s by Otto Freiderich has a substantial chapter on Humphrey Bogart—specifically, Bogart in The Maltese Falcon—full of breathtaking insight:
Bogart often spent all night drinking, then appeared at the studio fully ready to work. His portrayal of Sam Spade embodied all that. It was the portrait of a man who had been up all night, a man with a determination to get a day’s work done, a man whose wife had stabbed him in the back and might do so again.
Last week in San Francisco I did all the tourist stuff I never did before.
I strangely enjoyed the Hammett search, so a week later I dropped by the Monk plaque in Rocky Mount, NC. FWIW, the town seemed to be doing a bit better today than a few years ago when I was there for the Thelonious Monk Centennial. Naturally, I listened to the solo albums while driving enroute, and when Sphere started “Everything Happens to Me,” I burst into tears.
More tour pics:
In a somewhat unexpected development, Delta Airlines is repeatedly including Marian McPartland’s 1950’s record of “Love for Sale” as part of their “time to board and get seated” playlist. Nice track. Her chords are fairly thick and dissonant, more Tristano than Shearing…
Caption for three substackers:
...said to have vanished from Alcatraz Island September 12, 1963, months after its closure. Focused, and unaware of evacuation, pianist and drummer's unplanned basement rehearsal slipped the final guard sweep, the critic incorrectly (unusual) telling guards, "that's a cassette playing, of an unrecorded Art Pepper tune." Goia also lost track of time, and the keys out of the remote compound, remaining as the evacuation concluded. Months later the trio floated to safety, separately. How is a story waiting to be told. Two musical lookalikes established themselves in NYC, with some small notoriety. Goia hasn't been heard from since, though a San Francisco dead-letter postcard, September 18th, 1963 displays the terse message, "Goia is Gioia". Thanks for the Hammett profile.
The Maltese Falcon is Hammett’s leanest and tautest novel, imho. I read Red Harvest at 12 or 13 and found it incredibly exciting, — I credit it with my lifetime of reading and writing, but it’s a blunt work, and to me The Glass Key never quite comes into focus — I never find the central relationships credible, and movie versions haven’t helped. The Dain Curse is meta-fun, Hammett describing himself for a crucial character, but slight, and The Thin Man another thing entirely, a comedy. But ah, Huston’s Falcon, with the perfectly cast players, top to bottom (Bogie, Mary Astor and the conspirators, of course, but also Jerome Cowan, Lee Patrick, Gladys George, Barton McLane, Ward Bond and uncredited, Walter Huston stumbling in carrying “you know”).