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Tuesday 25 September 2012

Some Books About... BOOKS


Allison & Busby, 1984

 

 

Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (1984) by ANTHONY BURGESS

The author of A Clockwork Orange (1962) and the underrated masterpieces Nothing Like The Sun (1964) and Earthly Powers (1980) offers his selection of the best novels published in the English language between the outbreak of World War Two and 1983.  Each book is discussed in a pithy one page essay which explains the key points of its plot (without giving it away) and why, in Burgess's view, it deserves to be included on his list.  While the majority of his choices –– Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940), Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day (1948) –– are works which now form the cornerstones of modern Western literature, at least half the book is devoted to books – Saul Bellow's little read 1947 second novel The Victim, Erica Jong's 1977 bestseller How To Save Your Own Life – which might best be described as 'Literary Oddities' or what is often dismissed these days as 'Middlebrow Fiction' (ie. not literary enough to win the Booker Prize and not sadomasochistic enough to become a record shattering bestseller).  Burgess's style is erudite but entertaining, while his own tremendous skill as a novelist ensures that his insights are never anything less than incisive, intelligent and consistently thought-provoking.  

 

Ninety-Nine Novels is currently out of print. 




 

Carcanet/Millennium Ford edition, 1997

 

 

The English Novel (1930) by FORD MADOX FORD
 

This brief guide to the development of the English novel was written by one of its finest practitioners, the author of The Good Soldier (1915) and the World War One tetralogy Parade's End (1924–1928, recently adapted for television by playwright Tom Stoppard).  Ford was at the forefront of literary Modernism – he collaborated with Conrad, knew Stephen Crane and Henry James, advised Joyce and Ezra Pound and 'discovered' DH Lawrence, Hemingway and Jean Rhys via his editorship of The English Review and its Paris-based successor the transatlantic review (its title was deliberately printed in lower case to emphasize its role as the unofficial journal of Modernism).  Ford's book is a delightfully biased explanation of the development of the English novel as he saw it, beginning with Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and ending with Henry James and Conrad and covering most things in between, all packed into just 142 easy to read, generously spaced pages.  It's an eccentric, idiosyncratic book and, at times, a very illuminating one as Ford flits from one author to another and back again, not forgetting to include a few of his own literary (and not-so-literary) reminiscences along the way –– something he was to do at greater length in his equally fascinating memoirs Return to Yesterday (1932) and It Was the Nightingale (1933).

 

 

Dalkey Archive Press, 1998

 

 

Nine years after The English Novel Ford published an infinitely more ambitious work titled The March of Literature (1939) –– his attempt to trace the development not only of the novel, and not just of the English novel, but of the entire course of world literature from Ancient Egypt up till what was then the present day.  It was a mammoth undertaking and it's a mammoth book although not, by any means, a portentous or dauntingly academic one.  Ford's aim in writing it –– it was his last published work and his eightieth book since publishing his first in 1891 was to identify and celebrate the literature of every continent and culture, written, as he put it, by 'an old man mad about writing.'  Its composition also represented an astonishing feat of memory on the part of its sixty-five year old author.  It had been years, in some cases decades, since Ford had last read many of the books he discusses and he supposedly wrote The March of Literature entirely from memory without once referring to notes, making his achievement (if the story is true, something which can never be automatically assumed in Ford's case) that much more remarkable. 

 

The March of Literature may still be available from the Dalkey Archive Press, as may The English Novel from its UK publisher Carcanet. 

 




Vintage Classics/Random House UK, 1999

 

 

Collected Essays (1969) by GRAHAM GREENE

This book is worth seeking out if only to read The Lost Childhood, its brilliantly incisive introductory essay written in 1947.  Few writers have written so eloquently about the role that reading and the discovery of books play on the emotional development of an impressionable child.  But that is far from being the only reason to seek out this collection.  Greene writes just as eloquently about the authors –– Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, W Somerset Maugham, Georges Bernanos, François Mauriac and RK Narayan, among others –– who influenced his own work as a novelist and, in the cases of Mauriac and Narayan, were also his literary contemporaries.  Nor is he ashamed to cast a critical eye on the work of so-called 'minor' writers – Frederick Rolfe, George Darley and Simone Weil to name just three –– whose books, in his opinion, deserve to be more widely known than they are.  Collected Essays also includes his famous 1933 essay about the work of Beatrix Potter, in which he analyses the literary techniques she used to create classic children's tales such as The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903) and The Roly-Poly Pudding (1908).  Potter hated the essay and promptly sent him a letter saying so, explaining that the 'emotional disturbance' he claimed she had been enduring while writing The Tale of Mr Tod (1912) was nothing more than a severe headcold.  

 

Collected Essays is currently out of print. 


 

Penguin Books UK, 2006

 

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree (2006) by NICK HORNBY

The author of Fever Pitch (1992), High Fidelity (1995) and About A Boy (1998) writes about the books he buys (too many), the books he reads (not enough) and why both activities are so important to him and ought to be to you and I as well.  These pieces, which originally appeared as a regular column titled 'Stuff I've Been Reading' in the North American magazine The Believer, cover everything from Blake Bailey's biography of Richard Yates to books about Issac Newton and how to stop smoking to the (then) latest novels of Jonathon Lethem and Lionel Shriver.  They are not so much reviews as attempts to prove, in an amusing and honest way, his theory that what we read plays a formative role in making us who and what we are.  Hornby never shies away from controversy either, happily debunking modern literature's 'obsession with austerity' and the commonly-held belief that it's an intellectual sin to read things like graphic novels and sports biographies because they're not serious enough to merit the attention of a literate, intelligent adult.  But his best advice is that life is too short to waste even a tiny part of it slogging your way through a book you're not enjoying, whether it be a universally acknowledged classic or a pop star's trashy warts-’n-all autobiography.  Hornby is obviously saying what a lot of people want to hear because his new book, published in August 2012, is another collection of his latest 'Stuff I've Been Reading' pieces titled More Baths, Less Talking. 

  

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree is still available from Penguin Books, as are the individual volumes it collects from North American publisher McSweeney Publishing.

 
 



Vintage Classics/Random House UK, 2001

 

Ten Novels and their Authors (1954) by W SOMERSET MAUGHAM

This book came into being because the editor of Redbook magazine asked Maugham to name what, in his opinion, ranked as the ten best novels ever written.  The subsequent article –– in which Maugham suggested that it was perfectly acceptable, even advisable, to skip the boring parts of allegedly 'great' novels if doing so made them more enjoyable to read –– resulted in him being approached by a publisher who wanted to reissue the ten books he had selected in new editions personally abridged by him.  

Thankfully, Maugham declined this offer to re-invent the classics but, intrigued by the idea of what makes a great novel truly great, decided to expand his original comments into ten separate essays in which he discusses, in his usual clear-sighted way, Tom Jones (1749, Henry Fielding), Pride and Prejudice (1813, Jane Austen), Le Rouge et le Noir (1830, Stendhal), Le Père Goriot (1835, Honoré de Balzac), David Copperfield (1850, Charles Dickens), Madame Bovary (1857, Gustave Flaubert), Moby Dick (1851, Herman Melville), Wuthering Heights (1847, Emily Brontë), The Brothers Karamazov (1880, Fyodor Dostoyevsky) and War and Peace (1869, Leo Tolstoy) –– all, with the exception of Tom Jones, classic nineteenth century novels which can still be read today by anyone willing to visit a library, a bookstore or their preferred digital download site.  What makes Ten Novels and their Authors unusual is Maugham's insistence that the circumstances of an author's life directly influence their style and his fearlessness in citing what he sees as being the major defects of the works he places under the microscope.  He never allows his obvious admiration for the ten novels in question or the novelists who wrote them to blind him (or the potential reader) to the fact that the aim of fiction should be 'not to instruct, but to please.'  

 

Ten Novels and their Authors may still be available as a Vintage Classics paperback. 


 


Simon & Schuster first US edition, 2008

 

 

Books (2008) by LARRY McMURTRY

Books is Larry McMurtry's reflection on his lifelong love of reading and virtually every type of book (not just fiction), beginning with the 'bookless' childhood he spent on his father's ranch in Texas and continuing into his student years at Rice University and eventual emergence as a popular novelist and screenwriter who, in later life, successfully combined these seemingly incompatible professions with a new career as a secondhand bookseller.  He shares many fascinating anecdotes about his book loving habit along the way – how not owning or having access to many books as a child fuelled his need to buy so many (and even steal a few) as an adult, his then unfashionable interest in collecting erotic comics and other examples of frowned upon mass market non-literature, the many buying trips, successful and unsuccessful, he undertook over the years to find stock for his stores.  Written in an easygoing confessional style, without a trace of apology or self-consciousness, McMurtry makes you feel like you're listening to an old trusted friend tell you why books still matter and why finding the time to sit down and read one is an activity we should all be making a lot more time to engage in.  

 

 

Simon & Schuster first US edition, 2009

 

 

In his second volume of memoirs Literary Life (2009) McMurtry relates his love of books and reading to his development as a writer, explaining how certain books and authors influenced his desire to become 'a man of letters' and informed the choices he made about his work and even in his daily life.  Like its predecessor, Literary Life is a must read for anyone concerned about the imminent demise of the traditionally printed book and everything –– the publishing industry, the bookselling trade, the world's literary heritage and perhaps the very idea of authorship itself – that we as a society are so blithely discarding in our relentless pursuit of ever newer, ever shinier technology.  Books and Literary Life are both available in paperback, but if you want to buy them – in fact, any new traditionally published book –– my advice is not to dawdle.  The literary memoir is an endangered species and certainly won't be able to compete for shelf space with the likes of EL James's Fifty Shades of Grey (now the bestselling paperback of all time, outselling even the ubiquitous Harry Potter series) and what will no doubt be Ms James's inevitable avalanche of imitators for too much longer.  

 

The third volume of LARRY McMURTRY's memoirs, titled Hollywood and dealing primarily with his time as a screenwriter, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2010. 






Book Club Associates, 1972

 

 

Literature and Western Man (1960) by JB PRIESTLEY

What can the author of the 1929 bestseller The Good Companions and the 1945 humanist play An Inspector Calls possibly tell us –– the ultra-hip users of Twitter and Instagram –– about the history of Western literature that we don't already know?  And why should we care that he went to the trouble of writing such a book on such a dull and irrelevant subject anyway?  The answer to these questions is, respectively, 'A lot' and 'Because the past never stops being part of or influencing what happens in the present and the future.'  

For decades JB Priestley was one of the English-speaking world's most popular authors, a novelist, playwright and essayist who unashamedly wrote for ordinary people rather than highbrows and intellectual snobs.  His exhaustive survey of the development of Western literature (not unlike Ford Madox Ford's in The March of Literature), beginning with the invention of the printing press and ending with a sympathetic analysis of the work of Thomas Wolfe, is written with the same mixture of intelligence and unpretentious, plain-spoken common sense that characterized every word he published for close to sixty years.  

Priestley's aim, it seems, was to demystify literature and eliminate the fear that names like Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Zola, Faulkner and Virginia Woolf provoked (and still do) in the minds of people who feel –– wrongly, in his view (and mine) – they lack the brainpower required to investigate and appreciate their work.  Priestley was a lifelong believer in the ennobling power of literature (in a time when people still believed that books and the people who wrote them were of vital cultural importance) and felt it had a crucial role to play in restoring the hope and dignity crushed by the invention of the atomic bomb and the post-war world's ongoing obsessions with greed, self-interest and mindless consumerism.  While he's not always fair or accurate in his assessments –– he claims, for instance, that Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and John Osborne's groundbreaking 1956 play Look Back In Anger are about nothing but sex –– even his presumptions are interesting for the light they shed on his belief that literature was one way 'to challenge the whole de-humanizing, de-personalizing process, under whatever name it may operate, that is taking the symbolic richness, the dimension in depth, out of men's lives, gradually inducing the anaesthesia that demands violence, crudely horrible effects, to feel anything at all.'  Encouraging the reader to feel something, Priestley wants to remind us, is every bit as important as finding new ways to keep them engaged and entertained.  

 

Literature and Western Man is currently out of print.

 

 

 

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Last updated 19 May 2023 

 

Tuesday 18 September 2012

Jazz is for Jazz 005: SARAH VAUGHAN



SARAH VAUGHAN
c 1949




 

It's singing with soul that countsWhen I sing a tune, the lyrics are important to me.  Most of the standard lyrics I know well.  And as soon as I hear an arrangement, I get ideas, kind of like blowing a horn.  I guess I never sing a tune the same way twice.

 

SARAH VAUGHAN
DownBeat 
May 1957




 
Her fellow musicians called her 'Sassy' or 'Sass' or sometimes 'Sailor' because they claimed she drank and swore like one when they rode the tour buses with her throughout the 1940s.  To her fans, particularly in her later years, she was reverentially known as 'The Divine One' – a title bestowed on her early on in her career by Chicago disc jockey Dave Garroway which proved, in the end, to be more prescient than anyone could have imagined at the time.  She was blessed with a voice that could do things which the voices of less-gifted singers were simply incapable of doing, moving from a tender 'little girl lost' wispiness to dramatic, almost operatic grandeur with a seemingly effortless sense of elegance and swing.  She was, despite the many public statements she made to the contrary, a jazz musician whose instrument of choice happened to be her astonishingly soulful voice.

 
Sarah Lois Vaughan was born in Newark, New Jersey on 27 March 1924.  Her parents were amateur musicians – her father Asbury played guitar and piano while her mother Ada sang in the local Mount Zion Baptist Church choir –– who quickly recognized their daughter's burgeoning talent and arranged for her to take piano lessons.  The Vaughans were a deeply religious family and Sarah first sang with her mother in church where, as she grew older, she was occasionally asked to fill in on piano when the congregation's regular pianist was unavailable.  (For many years she thought of herself as being primarily a pianist and later regretted that she had lacked 'the guts,' as she put it, to make an all-piano LP as other piano playing vocalists like Nat Cole and Blossom Dearie had done.)  It was this early grounding in gospel music, combined with her love for and deep understanding of the pop, jazz and blues tunes she heard on the radio and in the local clubs she secretly began sneaking into as a teenager, that gave her voice its suppleness, range and unmatched emotive power.  Newark proved to be the ideal city for a would-be singer to grow up in during the 1930s and 1940s, being only a stone's throw away from New York and its many nightclubs, cabarets and dance halls.
 
 

SARAH VAUGHAN, c 1943
 
 
 
When she was eighteen, Vaughan persuaded her friend Doris Robinson to enter the famous 'Amateur Night' contest held each week at Harlem's Apollo Theatre, sweetening the deal by agreeing to accompany her on piano.  (The contest had already launched the careers of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and would, in time, also launch those of James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey and Lauryn Hill among others.)  Robinson won second prize and, encouraged by her success, Vaughan herself entered the contest the following week –– not as a pianist, but as a singer.  She performed Body and Soul and won first prize – the chance to open for Ella Fitzgerald, who was booked to appear at the same venue the following weekend.  Her unusual vocal style also caught the ear of Billy Eckstine, the male vocalist in the band of pianist Earl 'Fatha' Hines who happened to be in the Apollo audience that night.  

 
Thanks to Eckstine, she received an offer from Hines in April 1943 to join his band as its featured female vocalist.  Eckstine himself soon left the Earl Hines Orchestra to form what would become his own groundbreaking big band and in 1944 he offered the twenty year old Vaughan a job as its female vocalist.  Vaughan accepted the offer and never looked back, gaining the opportunity to play with many of the musicians –– Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Kenny Dorham, Dexter Gordon and Art Blakey –– who were creating an exciting new sound some critics were now calling be-bop.
 
 
 

SARAH VAUGHAN, 1950
 
 
 
Vaughan made her first recording with the Eckstine band – a pretty ballad titled I'll Wait and Pray that was well-suited to the wistful mood of wartime North America –– and the song did well enough to encourage critic/producer Leonard Feather to offer her a contract to record four more tunes under her own name for the Continental label.  The success of her Continental recordings encouraged her to leave the Eckstine band and pursue a solo career, which officially began in May 1945 with the release of Lover Man and three more tunes recorded –– with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker backing her on trumpet and saxophone –– for the Guild label.  Her relationship with Eckstine, whom she considered her mentor as well as one of her closest friends, was unaffected by her decision to pursue a solo career.  They had already recorded several popular duets together and would sporadically continue to do so into the 1970s.
 



REMEMBER
SARAH VAUGHAN & BILLY ECKSTINE
with orchestra
One of their loveliest 1950s vocal duets
 

 
The late 1940s saw Vaughan really begin to hit her stride as a performer, not only in the commercial sense with hits like It's Magic and Nature Boy which she recorded for the Musicraft label, but also as a musician whose instinctual sense of swing, timing and melody easily matched that of any of the up-and-coming be-bop musicians who served as her accompanists.  Although she suffered from stage-fright (a condition which plagued her all her life), her voice became much stronger during these years, allowing her to do more with it than most other singers were capable of doing even had they wanted to explore the uncharted vocal territory she was beginning to map out as her own.  Her fan base also expanded during these years to incorporate the so-called 'jazz purists' who would, in time, come to be among her most fervent admirers.  While all this was happening, her new husband George Treadwell –– a trumpet playing producer who was quick to spot her thus far untapped potential as a hot commercial property –– set about re-inventing her as a pop singer for a recording market still dominated by white artists, albeit a sophisticated and increasingly elegant pop singer who continued to enjoy hit after hit up until the time she left the Musicraft label in 1949 to sign a new contract with Columbia Records.  

 
Vaughan would stay with Columbia until 1953, notching up more pop-oriented hits for the label like That Lucky Old Sun and I Cried For You, combining chart success with a steady schedule of live club dates and appearances on early TV variety programs including Stars on Parade.  Nevertheless, she recorded very little actual 'jazz' for Columbia — a 1950 small group session with Miles Davis and Bennie Green being a notable exception — despite her consistent topping of the polls as 'Best Female Jazz Vocalist' in magazines like DownBeat, Metronome and Esquire.
 
 


EmArcy Records, 1956
 
 
 
In 1953 she left Columbia, Treadwell gaining her an unprecedented contract with Mercury Records that would allow her to record pop material for it while simultaneously allowing her to record exclusively jazz-oriented material for its subsidiary label EmArcy.  The LPs she made for EmArcy –– which included ultra-tight trio albums like Swingin' Easy as well as acknowledged masterpieces like Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown and Sarah Vaughan in the Land of Hi-Fi – are now considered by critics and fans alike to be among the pinnacles not only of her career but of 1950s vocal jazz.  (This was no small feat, given the competition she faced during this period from artists like Anita O'Day, June Christy, Chris Connor, Nina Simone and her own EmArcy label mate Helen Merrill.)  She stayed with Mercury until 1959, when she signed to Roulette Records, her marriage to Treadwell having ended in the meantime with no more to show for all her years of success than a house in Newark and $16,000 which they agreed to split evenly between them. 
 



POLKA DOTS AND MOONBEAMS
SARAH VAUGHAN & HER TRIO
SARAH VAUGHAN [vocal]
JOHN MALACHI [piano]
JOE BENJAMIN [bass]
ROY HAYNES [drums]
From the 1954 EmArcy LP  
Swingin' Easy  


 
Vaughan's finances (and more) were to take another beating when, in 1959, she married Clyde 'CB' Atkins and decided to make him her new manager despite his almost total ignorance of how the music industry functioned.  The marriage was not a happy one –– Atkins was a drinker and gambler who mentally and physically abused her – and when it ended in 1963 Vaughan discovered that she was $150,000 in debt as well as owing the Internal Revenue Service a significant amount in unpaid taxes.  Her financial situation wasn't improved by the fact that she now had an adopted daughter to raise or by Roulette's less-than-honest version of creative accountancy.  She re-signed with Mercury that same year, hoping to repeat her earlier success with the label, but sadly this wasn't to be the case.  Although her second stay with Mercury yielded the excellent 1963 live album Sassy Swings The Tivoli it was not, on the whole, a productive or financially rewarding reunion.  The company dropped her in 1967 and for the next four years, as rock music increasingly dominated the charts, the singer found herself in the unhelpful position of being unable to find a record deal.
 

 
THE SHADOW OF YOUR SMILE (1967)
SARAH VAUGHAN [vocal] with orchestra on Swedish TV



 
The 1970s and 1980s were difficult years for Vaughan in the professional sense.  She signed to Mainstream Records in 1971, but a contractual dispute saw her once again without a record deal by 1974.  It would take her three years to secure a new contract with Norman Granz's Pablo label, during which time she continued to tour the world and began to branch out, performing with white pop acts like Godley and Creme (on their 1977 Consequences album) and later Barry Manilow (on his 1984 jazz pastiche album 2 AM Paradise Cafe).  Her personal life also continued to have its ups and downs, including another romantic entanglement with an inexperienced manager and a relationship with a trumpeter sixteen years her junior whom she married in 1978 and divorced three years later.  Thankfully, none of this seemed to affect the generally high standard of her work or her ability to find gigs, which now began to include concerts backed by full symphony orchestras –– a pairing she'd been eager to pursue since the outset of her career.
 
 
    
SARAH VAUGHAN, c 1984
 
 
 
The late 1980s saw an overdue resurgence of interest in Vaughan and her music, with her coming to be viewed as one of the last surviving 'elders' of modern jazz –– one, more importantly, who could still sell out nightclubs and concert halls wherever she performed.  In 1989, while appearing at the Blue Note in New York, she was diagnosed with lung cancer.  She returned to California, her home for the past twenty years, to be treated for the disease and died there on 3 April 1990 at the age of sixty-six.  Fittingly, her final recording was a scat duet with Ella Fitzgerald which appeared on Quincy Jones' 1989 album Back On The Block.  It had been Fitzgerald she had won the right to open for at the Apollo Theatre after winning its amateur night contest in 1942.     
 
 
Unlike too many of the jazz musicians of her generation, Sarah Vaughan's legacy did not die with her.  She continues to be an influence on many of today's top female jazz and non-jazz artists, including Dianne Reeves, Teena Marie, Chaka Khan, Dee Dee Bridgewater and the late Amy Winehouse.  She would have been proud of that.  As she once said of herself:
 
there's a category for me.  I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste.
 
She was certainly that and much, much more.    

 
 
 
Use the link below to listen to more great music by SARAH VAUGHAN:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.   

 
 
 
 
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Last updated 2 October 2021 §