[Dixielandjazz] Terminal performances--WSJ Terry Teachout

[Norman Vickers]

To:  DJML

Here is a column  from Wall Street Journal of 9-19.  I sent this also to
National H. L. Mencken list and a local Mencken list—don’t recognize his
name?, then do internet search.  There is an official Mencken website and
numerous others dedicated to him. He was a serious amateur classical pianist
as well as author, publisher and critic.—

 

Our listmate Frederick J. Spencer, M. D. has written a book entitled “ Jazz
and Death:  Medical Profiles of Jazz Greats.”  U. of Miss. Press ©
2002—still available a booksellers.  Dr. Spencer went to great lengths to
get data, death certificates and other information to close the chapters on
their lives.

 

Permit me on anecdote about meeting the widow of trumpeter/cornetist Wild
Bill Davison.  I was in Los Angeles for a jazz event and the late Floyd
Levin introduced me to Mrs. Davison.  Mrs.  Davison was a trim  attractive
lady who appeared to be in her well-preserved 70s with  gray hair, a black
sheath dress and one string of pearls.  I was aware that Wild Bill Davison
had led a somewhat dissolute life which included alcohol and tobacco.  He
died at 83 after return from a foreign tour.  Mrs. Davison had married him
in later life and had taken it upon herself to travel with him to try to
preserve him by limiting his alcohol and tobacco abuse, among other things.

He had surgery for an abdominal aortic  aneurysm—serious surgery for someone
in reasonably good health and  very serious for one in poor health.  

However, unoperated, if the aneurysm ruptures, it’s sudden and certain
death.  Likely the surgeons explained that fully prior to the surgery. He
died post-operatively.

 

Levin:  Mrs. Davison, I’d like to present Dr. Norman Vickers

Mrs. Davison:   The doctors killed my husband!

Vickers: (somewhat taken aback by her response)  I’m sorry Mrs. Davison;  I
wasn’t there.

Then the conversation proceeded normally as though the  previous exchange
had never happened.

 


Here is a 9-19 WSJ column by Terry Teachout. Teachout, as I hope all of
you know, wrote a recent biograpy of Mencken “Skeptic.” He said he’d
planned on a three year project which turned out to be ten.

Lots of opportunities to mention musicians performing up to the last—but it
would have made the column too long.

John Phillip Sousa wanted to died on the bandstand while conducting. He
almost got his wish, as he had a heart attack shortly after conducting his
band.

Pianist/bandleader Count Basie had a cancer of pancreas and he accompanied
Ella Fitzgerald in a concert while terminally ill. He died a day or two
later.

Column is a nice tribute to Erich Kunzel.

SIGHTINGS
<http://online.wsj.com/search/search_center.html?KEYWORDS=%7C+BY+TERRY+TEACH
OUT&ARTICLESEARCHQUERY_PARSER=bylineAND> | BY TERRY TEACHOUT 

New York 

Erich Kunzel conducted the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra on Aug. 1, a month
before he died of pancreatic cancer. The audience, which knew of Kunzel's
illness, was by all accounts profoundly moved by his determination to
perform in public one last time, and cheered him to the echo.

Such occasions are extremely rare, and masterpieces created by artists who
are about to die are rarer still. To be sure, many great works of art have
dealt with the subject of death—but surprisingly few of them turn out to
have been created by artists who knew they were dying. "Aubade," Philip
Larkin's joltingly honest poem about an old man who wakes up in the middle
of the night and reflects that being brave / Lets no one off the grave, was
actually written in 1977, eight years before he died.

Why are deathbed masterpieces so unusual? Mainly, I suspect, because
prettified Hollywood-style deaths, in which the sudden disappearance of
makeup is the only outward sign that a terminal illness has reached its
denouement, are so uncommon. Movie stars live forever or die nobly, uttering
famous last words and expiring with a brave little smile. None of the gory
details ever seem to make it into the final cut. In real life, by contrast,
most dying people can barely summon up sufficient energy to read a book,
much less write one. To create a large-scale work of art under such dire
circumstances is almost always beyond the power of even the most determined
of artists.

Performing artists, on the other hand, occasionally manage to do the
impossible, and their final battles with fate can be deeply moving. Edward
G. Robinson, for instance, knew that his time was up when he filmed his
death scene in "Soylent Green," which was shot just 12 days before he died.
Charlton Heston, who appeared in the scene with him, described Robinson's
performance as "awesome" in his 1995 autobiography, "In the Arena." "I've
never heard of an actor playing a death scene in terms of his own true and
imminent death," Heston wrote. No less awesome were the performances of
Billy Strayhorn's "Blood Count" that the great jazz saxophonist Stan Getz
gave when he was dying of cancer, one of which was filmed and can be viewed
on YouTube. "Blood Count" is itself a miniature deathbed masterpiece, a dark
minor-key ballad written at the very end of Strayhorn's own life, and Getz
played it with a keening desperation that speaks with terrible eloquence of
that which was to come.

When creative artists like Strayhorn do manage to eke out enough energy to
make art in the face of death, their creations are almost always modest in
scale, if not in significance. "Blood Count" is a musical vignette that
speaks volumes in its four harrowing minutes. So do "Judgment Day,"
"Parker's Back" and "Revelation," the short stories that the 39-year-old
Flannery O'Connor finished writing in the Georgia hospital room where she
was battling the lupus that killed her in 1964, long before her time.

Why do these works exert so strong a hold on our imaginations? One reason is
that most of us want to know what to expect at the end of our own lives, and
look to art to shed light on that dark encounter. But true artists, unlike
the Hollywood kind, don't always tell us what we want to hear. The
91-year-old Pablo Picasso's last self-portrait (which is owned by Tokyo's
Fuji Television Gallery) is a horrible vision of decay in which a wrinkled,
unshaven man stares with crossed eyes at . . . what? The viewer? His own
sordid past? The grim reaper himself? No one knows, but it is hard to look
upon that gaunt, fearful face without trembling.

On the other hand, some deathbed testaments offer comfort—of a sort. Dmitri
Shostakovich, who spent the whole of his adult life living in the shadow of
Soviet terror, had already looked long and hard into the abyss when he wrote
the viola sonata on which he put the finishing touches mere days before his
death in 1975. Like so many of the compositions that he produced in his
later years, it blends sharp-edged anguish and slate-gray resignation to
unsettling effect. But the tranquil last movement, into which Shostakovich
wove enigmatic quotations from Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata, speaks of
something more than mere fear of death—and it ends in a major key.

Still more comforting, even reassuring, are the floral still lifes that
Édouard Manet painted in the weeks immediately preceding his death in 1883.
Manet, who was dying of syphilis, was racked with pain so excruciating that
he had to sit in a chair to paint these 16 gem-like studies of bouquets in
glass vases. Yet "Vase of White Lilacs and Roses," which now hangs in the
Dallas Museum of Art, bursts forth from the canvas with a quiet élan that
speaks of the prospect of final renewal under the aspect of eternity.
Perhaps it is not quite right to call "Vase of White Lilacs and Roses"
hopeful, but in me, at any rate, it inspires something not altogether unlike
hope.

And what about Erich Kunzel? It seems that he brought his career to an end
with a medley from "The Sound of Music," followed by an audience sing-along
on "God Bless America." Even from a pops-concert conductor, one might have
hoped for something more edifying, but at least Kunzel sent his last
audience home happy. I can think of worse ways to go out.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other
Saturday and blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at
tteachout at wsj.com.Printed <mailto:tteachout%40wsj.com.Printed>  in The Wall
Street Journal, page W18 

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