Media

...Forever...

...The team has a nicely ambivalent approach to magic...

...As somebody 6nce said about Jerry Lee Lewis, "Anytime he takes the stage, it's a comeback...

...Jazz critics, including, I hope, the immensely gifted Gary Giddins, are going to assess his astonishing career, and his almost unprecedented influence on the course of American music---that's jazz music (of which rock is a part...

...I have no doubt that within the year some dummies, somewhere, will start a cult...

...And it was a language--now you have to forget all the "Prince of Darkness" stuff I just told you--of heartbreaking plangency and lyricism...

...The ones that made it to the stage seemed to enjoy themselves immensely...

...Rot in Hell, a new show apparently full of familiar Penn & Teller material, was the first of the team's productions I have seen in the theater, but I had the feeling that I was surrounded by Penn & Teller groupies of all ages...

...A final line about the characters' flying to safety at Pearl Harbor got an uncomplicated laugh from the audience...

...At his best--and there was/is a lot of that--he made you feel that you were listening to a brilliant conversationalist thread his way through an elegant, impromptu argument: How does this idea go with what I said before...

...God knows how many players, from the tragic Chet Baker to the overrated Wynton Marsalis, picked up on that gorgeous and sad voice...

...The musical numbers in Song of Singapore are both lively and clever and the parody plot is amiably outrageous, but the appeal of the show lies in its setting...

...m writing this on September 29, 1991...

...GERALD WEALES MEDIA THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS MILES DAVIS, R.I.P...

...so they took an allusion to that bit of history simply as a joke, which was proper since the fall of Singapore is not to be taken any more seriously here than the melodrama...

...And Miles was yin to their yang...

...But that's not the point...

...Sneers Miles: "Doin' what...

...I'm not sure...

...Jazz, for a lot of us, is The Only Music That Matters...

...That word, and all the psychic baggage behind it, weighed against my memory of Bird and Miles playing, and my--not conviction, but knowledge, the way you know it's raining outside--that these were great souls whose mere presence on the planet was a blessing...

...I know that I do, although I like my magic in very small doses...

...It just happens to be the case...

...On the night I was there, a chubby enthusiast bounced in her chair expectantly, eager to get the plot out of the way so that she could get back to her feet...

...If you trust the jazz grapevine, and it's much more reliable than, say, a presidential press conference, he was not very loved, but widely, deeply, feared and--is this a word?----awed...

...This is not Privates on Parade, in which real bullets stop the musical review...

...And Miles knew that, and refused to stop being angry about it...

...I would also prefer Penn & Teller at less length...

...And it's all so off the point...

...Listen to him, anytime in his long career: with the transcendent Charlie Parker in the forties, with Gerry Mulligan in the late forties, when he virtually invented "cool" jazz, with John Coltrane in the fifties and sixties when he virtually invented "hard bop," or even in the seventies and eighties with his electronic groups, and you hear--music historians and liner-note-hype notwithstanding---essentially the same Miles Davis...

...And his celebrated "innovations" never really touched that core...

...FRANK McCONNELL 25 October 1991:617...

...The audience, who can come early for food and drink, are in fact the night-club patrons the show asks them to be, and there is recorded forties' music for their dancing pleasure before and after the show and during intermission...

...How can I bring it all round into something that made sense as a whole...

...LIVE/EVIL / 616: Commonweal one of his jazz/rock fusion albums was entitled, and that encapsulates the mystique of the man...

...Maybe this is the point: America has produced one imperishable and absolutely original art form, and it's called jazz, and its essential creators have always been African Americans, and because of that it has never, in the establishment or the academy, achieved the recognition and veneration that are its due...

...And he was, off the stand and out of the recording studio, a very scary, wrong guy...

...And started, at my teacher's urging, listening to guys with names like Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins and Miles Davis and Erroll Garner...

...I use that most hateful of words because, when I saw the photo of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis together, that was the word that came into my head, and as it came in my head I knew that something was terribly wrong with it...

...He changed his "image," he changed his musical surroundings--like Mailer, apparently driven by some demon who absolutely forbade his repeating himself--but, in a heroic kind of way, he never changed, not even in his last and most successful years when, for my money, he aligned himself with schlockmeister players with electrified horns...

...Teller is a small man with a befuddled look who seldom speaks and who is constantly menaced by the dangerous looking devices in their acts...

...The comic appeal of Penn & Teller presumably lies in the personae they assume and in the whisper of nastiness that underlies much of the show...

...Members of the cast and the costumed staff lure reluctant customers to the dance floor on occasion, but by the time the show is over the floor fills whenever there is a break in the proceedings...

...He couldn't play like Diz, so--first haltingly and then with growing and finally angelic authority--he developed a language of his own for trumpet...

...Really...

...Not bloody likely...

...Middle range, middle volume or softer (did anybody before Miles know that muted trumpet was an entirely different horn...

...So what do I--who never met the man, who never played trumpet (tenor saxophone is what I failed at), and who didn't really much care for the stuff he played for the last fifteen years of his life--what do I have to add to the mourners' chorus...

...Once in a while, even in those days--I saw him live for the first time last May--he would blow a flurry of notes or work through a ballad--like Cyndi Lauper's "Time after Time"--and there he was again: Miles...

...There is fun in their mockery of the portentousness of the standard magician, but I suspect that audiences really want to be baffled and that they like all that old-fashioned nonsense of rabbit-filled top hats, cloaks full of plastic flowers, and unending strings of knotted handkerchiefs...

...As in: an out-of-work player sees Miles on the street and says, "Hey, Miles, can you get me a gig...

...He is the closest jazz has come to the thrillingly satanic figure of Liszt in the nineteenth century...

...And then one day--this is strictly trne--I went to the local public library and, for the hell of it, took out a book on jazz to see what my heroes looked like...

...When he began playing, in the first great post-World War II explosion of bebop, jazz trumpet was dominated by the stunning, high-register, lickety-split pyrotechnics of Gillespie...

...How can I best bring these two ideas into congruence...

...p enn & Teller, like more conventional magicians, call on volunteers from the audience and, although it is better than even money that they will get the rough edge of Penn Jillette's tongue followed by his more abrasive apologies, the audience is full of willing victims...

...These guys were doing things--I didn't know much about music--but these guys were doing things that stunned and frightened me and took me places inside my head that, I didn't even know those places had been there...

...the more acts, the better the chance to get into one...

...The State Department send Miles on a tour of what used to be the USSR...

...But that's not the point, either...

...Not so with my fellow playgoers, I think...

...He made righteous music, music that made you proud to be a human being, music that, if this wasn't a proof of the existence of God, then we might as well trash the concept...

...Everything about how I saw the world changed...

...I never figured out whether the attraction in this number--and in the whole show--lay in the possibility of blood or the audience's certainty that Teller was only in illusionary danger...

...And anybody who ever knew Miles--he knew a lot of people, and he managed to hurt almost all of them--is going to be able to dine out on anecdotes about the Prince of Darkness (yeah, they really called him that) for years to come...

...In the final number, "King of Animal Traps," in which Penn describes his youthful passion for collecting lethal traps while the dexterous Teller plays in and out of the jaws of those on exhibit, the concluding bit is a snapping bear trap that punctures a fake arm and shoots stage blood at the audience...

...And they were niggers...

...I'd never heard anything like it...

...This is entertainment, plain and simple...

...Actually, since the Song of Singapore is both a real and a fictional club, it is more affluent looking than the circumstances call for...

...He was sixty-five when he died, and given the lifestyle he records, with brutal honesty, in his 1989 autobiography, that itself is miraculous...

...His whispered, monosyllabic cruelties have been legend for two decades...

...Naturally, I assumed they were all guys who looked like Spencer Tracy...

...Just like saying that the Norman Mailer of The Naked and the Dead is the same Norman Mailer we hear in Harlot's Ghost...

...At the end of the show, the performers move out through the audience as the characters escape Singapore before the Japanese arrive...

...With a show half as extended as Rot in Hell, I could admire Penn's power of verbal obfuscation and Teller's use of silence as a disarming device without being worn down by the essential sameness of the very different numbers...

...Like I say: listen...

...I know: heresy...

...The young couple sharing my table clearly did not know that the invading Japanese came down the peninsula on bicycles...

...If jazz had never seen anything quite like his crossover celebrity in the seventies and eighties, it had certainly never seen anything quite like his threatening, chilling, and absolutely unignorable persona...

...The morning paper says that Miles Davis died last night...

...Penn is a very big man, a nonstop talker, bad-mouthing the audience, professional magicians, and fake psychics (he would say all are fakes...

...It threads its way through the night-club show numbers that have a nice forties' feel to them and that are performed by a band that is a great deal more talented than one that might have washed ashore in the supposedly sleazy setting...

...Her excitement is the best indication of the kind of fun-and-games going with Song of Singapore at the Song of Singapore...

...Or maybe this is the point: I was raised racist...

...And Miles--this is part of the secret of his genius-~tidn't have the chops...

...And at age twelve (I'd seen The Glenn Miller Story) decided I wanted to learn tenor sax...

...I'm only sure that mourn I must, and that aloud...

...Okay, wrong with me...

...There are going to be retrospectives and memorials about Miles up the hoo-haw...

...There had been Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and--still alive, thank God--Dizzy Gillespie, all of them (whatever their hidden scars from racist America) radiant ambassadors of goodwill and incarnations of the pure joy of making music...

...and even at fast tempos reflective, musing, as self-conscious as James Joyce on his best day in the week...

...Their stock-in-trade is to perform familiar routines, exposing the trick of the tricks in the process, but they also do tricks--for instance, a couple of variations on Harry Houdini, whom they admire as a fellow psychic-buster--in which they mystify the audience in the best tradition of stage magic...

...And none of them ever got it quite the same...

...This was Louisville, Kentucky, in the fifties, and I got their records from a mail-order house that sent them out in plain, flimsy wrappers, no photos...