[Dixielandjazz] Glenn Gould, Bach and Jazz Musicians

[Steve Barbone]

CAVEAT: NOT OKOM.   However, most serious jazz musicians I know are
enamoured with J.S. Bach and Glenn Gould's 2 versions of his The Goldberg
Variations. Interesting read if you are into Bach and his relationship to
jazz. And/or if you are interested in how the minds of some musicians work.

Not a good read if your view of jazz is limited to toe tapping happy music.

Cheers ,
Steve Barbone

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NY TIMES - October 20, 2006 - By JAMES R. OESTREICH

Films About Glenn Gould Arrive, Providing a Path Into the Mind of a Musician

³For Glenn, music was a mental process,² says Bruno Monsaingeon in his new
film, ³Glenn Gould: Hereafter.² The film will carry you deep inside Mr.
Gould¹s musical mind: an awesome place to be, and not always a comfortable
one.

³There have been many occasions when I¹ve rehearsed something and have come
into the studio at 10 o¹clock on a Monday morning and really been in 16 ‹
not just 2 different minds but 16 different minds as to how it should go,²
Mr. Gould says at one point, reveling in his own musical brilliance. ³And
this sense of options is really quite a marvelous luxury.²

Reveling at another time in misanthropy seemingly fueled by paranoia, he
says: ³I detest audiences. Not in their individual segments but en masse, I
detest audiences. I think they are a force of evil.² At least he had the
courage of those convictions: he abandoned a flourishing concert career in
1964 and holed up in his native Toronto with what he calls ³a kind of Howard
Hughesian secrecy.²

The film, beautifully made, will receive its New York premiere tonight at
the Walter Reade Theater, kicking off a monthlong festival of films, ³Glenn
Gould Unveiled,² presented as part of Lincoln Center¹s Great Performers
series. It has also recently been released on DVD by Idéale Audience.

It will be followed tonight by another film directed by Mr. Monsaingeon,
with Mr. Gould playing Bach¹s ³Goldberg² Variations in 1981, the year before
his death. Mr. Monsaingeon, a Canadian who is also represented in other
films in the Lincoln Center series, knew Mr. Gould well, having by his own
accounting in the booklet notes directed seven films ³with Gould as hero² as
well as having put together a series of 23 television programs and written
four books on him.

To call Mr. Gould the hero of ³Glenn Gould: Hereafter² is an understatement.
The film is pervaded by an air of quasi-religious adulation, voiced mainly
by an odd cast of characters whose lives Mr. Gould touched posthumously but
profoundly ‹ if that is the word for, among other things, an elaborate
tattoo. (Oops, shouldn¹t have said that; the director calls this character
the Young Woman With a Secret. Well you won¹t learn here what or where that
tattoo is.)

This sort of reverence, replete with talk of priests, prophets and links to
God, palls quickly, even for a viewer who was deeply moved by Mr. Gould ‹
specifically, by CBS¹s more rhapsodic second recording of the ³Goldberg²
Variations, also from 1981. (It was the first recording, in 1955, that made
Mr. Gould famous.) But one is willing to grant the Russian woman Mr.
Monsaingeon calls the Moscow Propagandist her description of Mr. Gould as ³a
kind of mythic, mystical figure.²

Mr. Monsaingeon, in one of his more arguable statements, says that ³there
was never anything artificial² about Mr. Gould. In fact, Mr. Gould¹s whole
public persona in his later years seems, if not artifice, at least a
carefully calculated artifact.

He was always being filmed, even while making a film, and he doted on the
attention. When a photographer approaches him in a studio, asking, ³How do
you feel about pictures?,² Mr. Gould protests too much, petulantly snapping,
³Must I?²

It is tempting to see the later Mr. Gould¹s whole public life ‹ such as it
was ‹ as a performance, with all the world as his audience: detested by him,
perhaps, yet avidly courted. He plays a sort of air piano on a train,
fingering Chopin with one hand ‹ gloved, as usual (because of poor
circulation, it was said), and looking like a sock puppet. He conducts and
sings Mahler before zoo elephants.

But inevitably, the heart of the film lies in Mr. Gould¹s musical
performances, however fragmentary most of them are. That fragmentary nature,
in fact, more or less jibes with the Gouldian aesthetic that produced
sweeping and coherent recordings from innumerable snippets meticulously
selected and assembled.

It is wondrous to see how much music Mr. Gould carried around in that
teeming mentality, if not at the tips of his fingers, without need of a
score. (Music from Strauss¹s densely orchestrated opera ³Elektra,² complete
with a vocal line ardently wailed? No problem.) The most astonishing moment
comes when Mr. Gould fluently wends his way through the climactic section of
the unfinished final fugue from Bach¹s ³Art of Fugue,² spouting thematic
analysis and quoting Albert Schweitzer as he goes.

With allowances made for peculiarities, as there must always be in anything
having to do with Mr. Gould, ³Glenn Gould: Hereafter² is a masterly, rich
distillation of Mr. Monsaingeon¹s work on him over 35 years. And at Lincoln
Center, it is only the beginning.