TT 83: Dances with Baryshnikov, RIP John Le Carré, God bless Meredith D'Ambrosio, holiday gift guide
As part of their Dance On! Video Vault, the Mark Morris Dance Group has put up some remarkable archival footage from the era when I was first working for this great company. Wow!
All the choreography is by Mark Morris, and it all features Mikhail Baryshnikov. I’m the pianist on three of the four selections.
“Ten Suggestions,” danced by Morris and Baryshnikov, music by Alexander Tcherepnin, Bagatelles.
“Three Preludes” danced by Baryshnikov, music by Gershwin. (Rehearsal tape, I am not the pianist on this one, although I played it for Mark a few times on other occasions.)
“Three Russian Preludes,” danced by Baryshnikov, music by Shostakovich. I believe both the Tcherepnin and the Shostakovich are from the same 1998 concert, a one-off. I’m pretty sure this was the only time I played either of these pieces publicly.
“The Argument” danced by Tina Fehlandt, Marjorie Folkman, Ruth Davidson, Shawn Gannon, Morris and Baryshnikov, music by Schumann, Five Pieces in Folk Style. 1999 at BAM with Yo-Yo Ma on cello. I remember when we flew into LAX to play the Irvine Barclay Theatre, someone handed me the local paper with the short capsule listing, “MARK MORRIS DANCE GROUP with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Yo-Yo Ma, and Ethan Iverson.” LOL!
There’s a nice review of the BAM evening by Deborah Jowitt called “Depths of Memory” — certainly an appropriate title for my emotions looking this video…
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My latest Chronology for JazzTimes is about Meredith D’Ambrosio. “The second Meredith D’Ambrosio album from 1981, Another Time, is a perfect object, absolutely one of a kind.”
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Latest DTM is a holiday gift guide; includes Charlie Parker, Kevin Whitehead, Daniel Pinkwater, Sarah Deming, Alex Ross, Nancy MacLean, and Isabel Wilkerson.
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RIP John LeCarré. A quick and opinionated overview:
Le Carré began strong with a A CALL FOR THE DEAD (1961), a tricky espionage tale that owes a lot to Ambler and Maugham. George Smiley was his lead, a fussy and dumpy spy with a big mind, the antipode to James Bond.
In terms of genre, Smiley seems less of a spy than a great detective. As it turns out, he inhabits that role completely in the relatively non-espionage A MURDER OF QUALITY (1962), which investigates "Town vs. Gown" in Oxford.
The first two stories have their share of cynicism, but that world-weary attitude is much stronger in the next two books. THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (1963) made Le Carré's name, and remains a masterpiece. Smiley is ethically compromised, almost the villain.
THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR (1965) is the lowest point emotionally of the early Le Carrés with Smiley. It's all a black comedy, nothing matters. Strong stuff, innovative, and perhaps a shade pretentious. (I liked it more when I was younger than I do now.)
In both A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY (1968) and THE NAIVE AND SENTIMENTAL LOVER (1971) the grinding of gears is apparent as the author tries to break the bonds of being tied to George Smiley. Neither is ranked highly by serious Le Carré fans.
TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY (1974), the first of the Karla trilogy, is Le Carre's most famous book and probably his best. Smiley is back as a proper flawed hero and each character is memorable. There's a fair amount of "I'm writing a 'great novel' now" -- Le Carré's most problematic style tic -- but since TINKER, TAILOR *is* really great the author pulls it off.
Less successful is THE HONORABLE SCHOOLBOY (1977), where the "deep-down" character development of the title character dwarfs spy plot. Still, many great scenes, especially Smiley wrangling Whitehall.
The Karla trilogy comes to a strong finish with SMILEY'S PEOPLE (1979). In some ways this is the lightest of Le Carré's books emotionally, as good conquers evil in reasonably straightforward fashion. Our side wins! And hardly anybody feels bad about it!
The end of the cold war was hard on spy novelists: his one true competitor, Len Deighton, got out of the game completely. Le Carré's books would always have strong sentences, but the ideological underpinnings would come to the fore.
Noam Chomsky is relevant: Chomsky is a sage but that kind of political attitude is not necessarily a good fit for a rip-roaring spy tale. It's also a weird bedfellow for the author's quest to write extremely literary novels powered by navel-gazing self-examination. (See: A PERFECT SPY (1986), which some literary types acclaim as his best but I think is just awful.)
As he got older, Le Carré wrote sexier and sultrier women, much more like Ian Fleming et al. than earlier. It's a weird mix that I never warmed up to: The cocktail of Chomsky-ian politics, naked literary ambition, and hot takes on hot women in later Carré could make me shake my head in frustration.
That said, I read every book, because he was always the grandmaster. The best of the later Le Carré's might be THE TAILOR OF PANAMA (1996), a dark comedy that explicitly references one of the author's influences, THE MAN FROM HAVANA by Graham Greene.
Sadly, the late return of Smiley in A LEGACY OF SPIES was a low point. That came out in around the time of BLADE RUNNER 2049, and I almost wrote a think-piece about how terrible it is to give a new fully-authorized ending to a beloved earlier story.
The essential Le Carré will remain THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and the Karla trilogy. While even these masterpieces have flaws, they are also pure coin of the realm; the highest expression of genre; the greatest spy novels ever written.