Southern Bookman

Epix's "Laurel Canyon" looks back at creative music scene of late 1960s

The rock musicians who wrote songs, smoked dope and had sex with other in Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon lived in a bubble during the late 1960s and early '70s, photographer Nurit Wilde says in the Epix's "Laurel Canyon"

The two-part, three and a-half hour documentary looks back on the rock idols' gilded hippie lifestyle, which flourished from 1966 through 1972.

Directed by Alison Ellwood, the film uses home movies, interviews, vintage concert film and photos to evoke the era in which guitars rang from the hills in a continuous party.

Along with Wilde, photographer and musician Henry Diltz is the primary storyteller, the keeper of the flame. Their photos of the young stars 50 years ago drip with baby-boomer nostalgia.

As Vietnam War protests raged and the civil rights movement progressed, the musicians turned their attention to the outside world, with songs like Stephen Stills' "For What It's Worth." But the documentary depicts a group of self-entitled, hedonistic young people adored by fans and despised by "the Silent Majority."

Revered Mothers of Invention leader Frank Zappa began the rock musicians' migration to Laurel Canyon.

The easy-going rustic scene close to Los Angeles' entertainment district attracted David Crosby, Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman, Stills, Neil Young, Richie Furay, John Phillips, Cass Elliot, John Phillips, Michelle Phillips, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, Jim Morrison, Peter York, Micky  Dolenz, and Arthur Lee. A second wave brought Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Glenn Frey, J.D. Souther, Lowell George, Bonnie Raitt and Don Henley.

The documentary traces the changing fortunes of the Byrds, the Buffalo Springfield, the Doors, Love, the Mamas and Papas, Little Feat, the Monkees and the Eagles. Moving freely among each other's houses, the doors never locked, the young stars wrote songs and performed together.

Clubs like the Troubadour launched the performers' careers. As the musicians' success grew, they pursued more opulent lifestyles. Professional and personal jealousies rose.

Prominent stories include the formation of Crosby, Stills and Nash, later joined by Young, and the creatively fertile relationship of Nash and Mitchell. The good vibes are belied by conflicts roiling the Mamas and the Papas, especially the volatile marriage of Michelle and John Phillips.

After John Phillips discovers Michelle's affair with the Byrds' Gene Clark, he kicks her out of the band.

To rejoin the group, Michelle has to humiliate herself before Phillips, bringing a tortured reconciliation. As she reflects, male rock stars didn't believe free love encompassed women.

While Stills, Young and Furay's Buffalo Springfield fall apart, the Byrds survive the exit of Crosby by turning toward country, led by Gram Parsons. While the addition of Clarence White is not mentioned, the virtuouso guitarist also fueled the success of the Byrds' "Sweetheart of the Rodeo."

The documentary details Parsons' later success with Hillman in the Flying Burrito Brothers, but ignores his solo albums with Emmylou Harris.

Nor is Parsons' death by a drug overdose mentioned, although Morrison and Elliot's deaths are fully examined.

Elliot is remembered as the prime den mother of the Laurel Canyon bacchanal. Morrison's rise and fall as the leader of the Doors is the documentary's most tragic story.

In the second segment, the young Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt take center stage, along with the rise of the Eagles. The band's founders, Glenn Frey and Don Henley, got their start playing in Ronstadt's band, and she encouraged them to form the group. Browne and Frey co-wrote one of the band's early hits, "Take It Easy."

The popularity of the Eagles, who along with Crosby, Stills and Nash and Ronstadt began playing in stadiums, marks the end of Laurel Canyon's cozy scene.

A facile marketing scheme for the band’s “Desperadoes” album in which they pose as Old West gunfighters reflects the rise of contrived self-indulgence and decline of spontaneity.

Manager David Geffen and his partner Elliot Roberts are shown at the start of their careers, which brought them immense wealth. When established companies refuse to give their clients contracts, they form Asylum Records.

"Laurel Canyon" strikingly contrasts with Epix's other summer documentary, the six-part "Helter Skelter: An American Myth," which revisits the Charles Manson Family's murderous rampage in the summer of 1969.

Manson failed to achieve the rock star lifestyle carried out in Laurel Canyon, and the ebullient musicians fostered the family spirit that he defiled.

The Manson Family makes an appearance in "Laurel Canyon," with Love's Arthur Lee describing a visit from Manson follower Bobby Beausoleil, a  former bandmate.

Beausoleil, given a life sentence for the murder of Gary Hinman under Manson's direction, tells Lee about living at the Spahn Ranch. When Lee expresses an interest in visiting, Beausoleil warns him not to because of Manson's racism.

The murders ended Laurel Canyon's free-spirited way of life, putting a pin into the bubble, one resident recalls. Crosby remembers buying a shotgun after hearing about the crimes.

Other pressures closed in. The music's soaring popularity and big money made groups unwilling to share their songs. Cocaine was a destructive force after marijuana and LSD, which the film sees as benign. Soon after Woodstock, the peace and love ethos crashed with the violence at Altramont inflicted by the Hells Angels, hired by the Rolling Stones to provide "security" for the rock festival.

Plus, the scene got old. In the film, Michelle Phillips recalls how happy she was to leave Laurel Canyon for Bel Air with her husband, John Phillips, despite their volatile marriage. Michelle says they were still hippies, but rich hippies. She adds they were now part of the establishment.

 

 

Pete Hamill's death brings sorrow for lost era of American literature

Pete Hamill, who died this week at age 85, was the last lion of a great age of American literature.

Hamill and other writers who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s were known for their "new journalism," in which novelistic techniques were employed in the reporting of actual events. But they also wrote novels, short stories and essays, following Gore Vidal's dictum that writing is writing, and a good writer should be proficient in every genre.

The era brought abuses; New Journalism stars were accused of inventing scenes and dialogue in presenting situations believed to be factual. But, overall, the era raised journalism to a high literary level, and energized the novel.

Hamill, and his sometimes competitor, sometimes colleague Jimmy Breslin, raised the literary quality of New York newspapers, especially the now struggling tabloids The New York Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton, and the Daily News. Before owned by Rupert Murdoch, who ousted Hamill as editor, the Post was a literary liberal daily, owned by Dorothy Schiff. 

Before writing for New York tabloids, Breslin was a star of the old broadsheet Herald-Tribune, which despite its star writers succumbed to the New York City newspaper strike of the 1960s. That strike killed off a number of New York papers. For years a bastion of liberal Republicanism, the Herald-Tribune gave beneficial competition to The New York Times.

I was amazed at reading in Hamill's obituaries that he published short stories in The New York Post and Daily News, like Isaac Bashevis Singer contributing Yiddish stories to the Jewish Forward.

While the New York Times sometimes publishes fiction, it's hard to imagine a writer today finding a steady outlet for short stories in a newspaper.

Along with Hamill, like Breslin best known for his newspaper columns, the era gave us New Journalism pioneer and Herald Tribune stalwart Thomas Wolfe, novelist and ground-breaking journalist Norman Mailer, cultural critic Dwight MacDonald, jazz critic and free speech champion Nat Hentoff, political journalism chronicler Timothy Crouse, columnist Murray Kempton and the satirical gonzo malcontent, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Along with courageous reporting on the Vietnam War, racial discrimination, economic inequities and American and international politics, a dazzling group of rock critics emerged: The Village Voice's Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs of Creem and Rolling Stone, and Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph J. Gleason who shifted from jazz to rock, especially covering the San Francisco psychedelic scene.

Along with Thompson and Crouse, Rolling Stone developed writers like Joe Eszterhas, Cameron Crowe and P.J. O'Rourke, who evolved into a compelling conservative/libertarian critic.

The scene was hetero-male-dominated, but Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Mary McGrory, Eve Babitz, Vivian Gornick, Ellen Willis, Jill Johnston and others broke through the boys' club.

For those of us longing for literary glory in stifling Southern towns, magazines and newspapers from New York City were like oxygen tanks sent to those drowning beneath the sea.

Harold Hayes' Esquire, Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone, Willie Morris' Harper's, Clay Felker's New York magazine, Dan Wolf's Village Voice, I.F. Stone's Weekly and George Plimpton's Paris Review allowed us to claim membership in a hip, urban community.

While my conservative alma mater LSU swung to frat parties on football weekends and a general complacency, it offered outlets for European films, avant-garde music and literature beyond the bounds of our English course curricula. (My French teacher, a nice Southern lady, was shocked when I asked about Rimbaud.)

Vietnam Moratorium Day brought out a surprisingly large crowd, filling the Parade Grounds where compulsory ROTC cadets drilled in years past. Withstanding the taunts of flat-topped frat boys, many held small wooden crosses in support of anti-war speakers.

Even after the slaying of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and the election of Richard Nixon, those writers gave us hope for a better America. My sadness at Hamill's death is intensified by the knowledge that those dreams crashed. But even in these dark days, the heroic life of Hamill inspires us to keep the flame alive.

 

 

Jazz pianist Bill Charlap returns to performance

A New York Times article about jazz pianist Bill Charlap's return to live performing left me longing for the pre-pandemic days of open culture.

Charlap after canceling a full summer schedule decided to give a solo concert at the rustic Deer Head Inn, "the oldest continuously running jazz club in the country," according to its web site.

After initially declining to perform at the Deer Head Inn, Charlap decided to travel to the hotel in Delaware Water Gap, Penn., in the Poconos Mountains near the Appalachian Trail. The club, which has drawn a stellar list of jazz artists, boosted Charlap's career when he started out.

Charlap performed alone  and wore a mask throughout his two sets. His audience was more than six feet from the stage, and practiced social distancing. But Charlap still took a risk in returning to live performance.

John Marhese's article stirred my nostalgia for the days when we could attend concerts, plays, movies and art exhibits without fear. In that now vanished era, my wife and I saw Charlap's trio perform at the Atlanta History Center in the spring of 2019 during the Atlanta Jewish Music Festival. Earlier, we saw Charlap's wife, Renee Rosnes, play at the Village Vanguard in New York City.

We also saw one of Charlap's most notable musical partners, Tony Bennett, in concert at Atlanta Symphony Hall in February, which turned out to be our last public gathering before the covid-19 shutdown. We had been scheduled to see Wynton Marsalis and the Atlanta Opera's "Porgy and Bess."

Such public events appear more and more distant as the virus surges across the country, and the Trump administration gives little hope of controlling the outbreak. The Times also had an article about the Boston Symphony's canceling of its Tanglewood  summer concerts, a New England tradition.

Unlike in the United States, Western Europe has reopened without a resurgence of the coronavirus. Here, events like Charlap's Deer Head Inn performance appear increasingly endangered.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jazz will live again at Village Vanguard, with live-streaming of Billy Hart Quartet

Music will return to the Village Vanguard, through live-streamed performances by the heralded Billy Hart Quartet.

The acclaimed drummer and his group will perform at the Village Vanguard beginning at 7 p.m. June 13 and 2 p.m. June 14 , the jazz cathedral announced. While the small club's packed seats will remain empty, a worldwide live-streaming audience will share in the Vanguard's storied ambience. Tickets cost $7.

Other New York City mucic clubs closed by the coronavirus pandemic also are live-streaming performances, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Hart, who will perform along with tenor sax player Mark Turner, pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Ben Street. told the WSJ that when he comes to the Village Vanguard, he feels the presence of past performers. That aura will inspire his performance, he said.

Such live streaming offers a promising model for cultural events after the pandemic ends. The Metropolitan Opera, which recently announced the cancellation of its fall season, shows productions on movie theaters around the country, a model not yet followed by Broadway shows. Live-streaming would make cultural events available to a much wider audience.

 

Van Morrison masterpiece illuminates Boston's counterculture in "Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968"

Boston psychedelic bands "Ultimate Spinach," "Orpheus" and "Beacon Street Union" never came close to the national fame of San Francisco's Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead.

While Boston's "Bosstown Sound"appears as ludicrous today as one of its participants, Chevy Chase, remembers, the birthplace of the American Revolution played a significant role in the 1960s counterculture, as Ryan H. Walsh details in his wide-ranging "Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968."

San Francisco veered from the Summer of Love to the Monterey Pop Festival, and Los Angeles's era of drugs and celebrity crashed with the Charles Manson killings. Not as prominent nationally, Boston also had a long, strange trip.

A key moment was Irish singer Van Morrison's move to Boston and Cambridge in 1968 to flee mobsters threatening him over a record deal to follow up on his hit "Brown-Eyed Girl."

Walsh examines how Morrison developed songs for his album "Astral Weeks" while playing in small Boston clubs. Neglected when released in 1968, the album is now recognized as one of the era's masterpieces. Walsh portrays Morrison as an antisocial, mystically obsessed egoist striving for perfection with a revolving cast of supporting musicians.

Walsh ranges far beyond his account of Morrison's stay in Boston. From the early 1960s to the counterculture's demise in the disco era, Walsh explores an impressive variety of personalities and historic events.

A major theme is the strange saga of the Manson-like cult the Fort Hill Family, an offshoot of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, which gained a national following with its innovative folk-rock songs and stars like Geoff and Maria Maldaur. Kweskin's turning away from pop stardom led to the formation of the cultish Fort Hill Family, as Walsh details.

Leaving his music career, Kweskin built a successful construction business associated with the Fort Hill Family. After years away from music, Kewiskin returned to performing in recent years with jug band alums like the Muldaurs.

Mel Lyman, renowned for his virtuoso harmonic playing as a jug band member, gained control of the Fort Hill Family through Manson-like apocalyptic visions and psychological manipulation with LSD. The story of Lyman and the family ends up playing a larger role in the book than Morrison's development of "Astral Weeks."

Under Lyman's control, the Family built a self-contained complex in Boston's predominantly black Roxbury section and pursued various economic ventures, including an alternative newspaper.

Unlike Manson, Lyman didn't exhort his followers to commit murder, but the group worshiped him as a messiah. Lyman died in 1985 - Walsh dispels rumors that he's still alive - but the family continues. Walsh interviews a number of family members about Lyman and their lives outside the mainstream.

One of the bizarre stories of the family is how Mark Frechette was discovered on Boston's streets to play the lead role in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point," one of the 1960s' biggest bombs. After a bizarre bank robbery attempt, Frechette hung himself in jail, a purported suicide victim.

Frechette's also unknown "Zabriskie Point" co-star, Daria Halprin, joined the family for a while before leaving and marrying Dennis Hopper.

Walsh also looks at Timothy Leary's LSD experiments at Harvard in the early 1960s and the transformation of Leary's colleague Richard Alpert into the spiritual leader Ram Dass.

The Boston Strangler receives attention, along with a vibrant cast of obscure musicians, writers and film-makers briefly touched by fame.

In the book's most dramatic passage, Walsh looks back on James Brown's concert in the Boston Garden following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Brown's performance, shown on Boston's public TV, is credited for saving Boston from the rioting that decimated other American cities after King’s slaying.

Walsh interviewed a number of participants in Boston's countercultural scene. He gives compelling accounts of visiting them 40 years after their wild youths.

Peter Wolf, eventually a superstar as the leader of J. Geils band and as a solo performer, played in Boston's clubs before making it big. He was a frequent companion of Morrison during his months in Cambridge and Boston. The singers' friendship began when Wolf was an all-night blues DJ for a local radio station, and Morrison began calling him to make requests.

Wolf at the start of the book mentions an audiotape of a Morrison performance in a Boston club.Walsh's efforts to hear the tape are thwarted until the last part of the book. Hearing it is like the end of a quest.

Astral weeks had returned from "another place, another time."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Ellis Marsalis Jr.

New Orleans pianist Ellis Marsalis Jr. represented a different musical tradition from the rhythm and blues of Dr. John, Fats Domino and Professor Longhair.

Marsalis died Wednesday at age 85 from pneumonia caused by the coronavirus, according to news reports, one of several musicians who have died from COVID-19 in recent days.

A master of the restrained bebop style, Marsalis like fellow New Orleans maestro Allen Toussaint found his greatest success as a performer late in his career.

While Toussaint in his later years moved toward Marsalis' style as a pianist after penning R&B hits like "Mother-in-Law" and "It's Raining So Hard" and producing a number of New Orleans records, Marsalis remained loyal to the cerebral tradition of Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner and Oscar Peterson. Now Bill Charlap and his wife, Renee Rosnes, and a few others keep the genre going.

Standing outside traditional Dixieland and R&B, Marsalis played with refined control, a classical style more associated with New York City and Philadelphia than New Orleans. Marsalis brought cool jazz to the birthplace of hot jazz.

In contrast to the rollicking exuberance of New Orleans R&B, Marsalis displayed quiet precision, crafting delicate patterns of notes on jazz standards and his own compositions. Eschewing electric instruments and fusion concepts, the elegantly dressed Marsalis gave performances each week with an acoustic trio at Snug Harbor on Frenchman Street. He mostly played with young players adept at cool jazz.

When his style of jazz lost popularity with the rise of rock and roll, Marsalis turned to teaching, influencing New Orleans musicians Terence Blanchard, Harry Connick Jr., Nicholas Payton, Donald Harrison, Victor Goines and Reginald Veal. His  esteemed academic career included founding the University of New Orleans' prestigious jazz program.

Marsalis also shaped the careers of his sons, Wynton, the acclaimed trumpeter and director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, saxophonist Branford, trombone player Felfeayo and drummer Jason.

Before turning to an academic career, Marsalis did his time playing at New Orleans' Playboy Club, in a Marine band and accompanying the tourist-friendly Dixieland of Bourbon Street trumpeter and showman Al Hirt. When required by audience demands, Marsalis showed he could play the R&B classics.

Starting out, Marsalis collaborated with sax players Cannonball and Nat Adderley. Turning away from New Orleans' rowdy bar music, Marsalis formed a bebop combo with Alvin and Harold Batiste, members of another famous New Orleans family. The Marsalis-Batiste collaboration continued through the years. Pianist Jon Batiste shows Marsalis' influence.

The huge success of Marsalis' sons brought national recognition to his playing, and he recorded several albums and performed in New York City and elsewhere.

Marsalis' late emergence helped revive cool jazz, long seen as endangered. As a new generation of jazz musicians moves further into experimentation, fusion and abstraction, Marsalis' career looks like the twilight of an era.

 

 

World War II anthem offers hope for coronavirus battle

The mobilization to stop the coronavirus has been compared to war. Each American war has had songs associated with it, and the pandemic crisis likely will be the same.

Already, Cardi B's message to her fans expressing concern about the virus has been made into a popular rap song. Spirit-lifting songs with a vibrant beat will gain popularity as those quarantined at home listen to the radio or streaming services.

Ed Sheeran's "I See Fire," written for the 2013 film "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" expresses the urgency of the coronavirus outbreak. Those with dark humor will point to Billie Eilish's James Bond theme, "No Time to Die."

The Civil War had "The Battle Cry of Freedom," or "Rally Round the Flag, Boys," "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "Dixie." George M. Cohan's "Over There" boosted optimism as American troops headed to France during World War I.

World War II brought a number of morale-boosting songs. The most famous was British singer Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again." In the United States, "It's Been a Long, Long Time," recorded by artists ranging from Harry James and singer Helen Forrest to Bing Crosby, expressed the joy of soldiers returning home.

"We'll Meet Again," ironically used by Stanley Kubrick for the finale of the Cold War satire "Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," still stirs the soul for the long battle against the virus.

We'll meet again
Don't know where
Don't know when
But I know we'll meet again some sunny day
Keep smiling through
Just like you always do
'Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away

 

So will you please say hello
To the folks that I know
Tell them I won't be long
They'll be happy to know
That as you saw me go
I was singing this song

 

We'll meet again
Don't know where
Don't know when
But I know we'll meet again some sunny dayT

Sargent's "Portrait of Madame X" enhances poignant "This Is Us" episode

My heart melted when John Singer Sargent's "Portrait of Madame X" appeared on Tuesday night's "This Is Us."

Sargent's alluring 1884 portrait was revealed as the painting Rebecca Pearson had longed to see since she first viewed it at New York City's Metropolitan Museum as a little girl. The episode details Rebecca's thwarted attempts to see the painting during later trips to New York City with her Pearson family.

In one of the show's dazzling twists, we discover that the little Rebecca was mesmerized by a woman looking at the painting for hours as much as the artwork itself. The woman in firs and a pillbox hat epitomizes New York City glamour in the early 1960s.

The show ends with the now aging Rebecca seeing the painting at last. Suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's, she stares at the work, seeking to recapture her early revelation of feminine glamour and sophistication. Sargent's "Portrait of Madame X" reflects that vision of beauty.

Unfolding like a series of New Yorker short stories, the episode examines aging, family love and conflict, the appeal of art, mental illness and the shadow of death. The recent storylines about Kevin's relationship with Rebecca have raised the show's already excellent writing to an even higher level.

New York City's romance and elegance glow during the episode. it's a valentine to the city and its hallmarks, from the subway to its hotels, parks, museums and restaurants. Even the city's street-food stands have symbolic resonance.

The "This Is Us" episode was the latest moment in the cultural spotlight for Sargent. His portrait, "Dr. Pozzi at Home" adorns the cover of Julian Barnes' recently published "The Man in the Red Coat," a biography of Dr. Samuel de Pozzi, a leading physician during Paris' "Belle Epoque" era from the late 19th century until the start of World War I.

A member of the sophisticated upper classes captured in Proust's novels, Pozzi was an obstetrician known for his medical innovations. He also gained a reputation as a sexual pirate from his many affairs with women, including the actress Sarah Bernhardt.

Sargent was also a member of Paris' dazzling high society. His "Portrait of Madame X," showing the young wife Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau, caused a scandal with its revealing dress and her voluptuous figure, a shock even for sophisticated Paris. The artist was forced to move to London, where he was a close friend of Henry James and Oscar Wilde.

I fell in love with Sargent's work when I saw his beautiful portrait of "Lady Agnew of Lochnar" at the Frick Museum in New York City several years ago. The painting's sumptuous colors made me want to look at it for hours, like the lady in "This Is Us."

Later, I was amazed at viewing Sargent's World War I battlefield drawings in an exhibit at Nashville's Frist Museum. The drawings capture the brutal reality of battle as well as Goya's "Disasters of War." Moving away from the vivid colors of Sargent's portraits, the World War I pieces have a somber tone that reveals the horror of soldiers' life in the trenches.

Sargent's reputation declined with the advent of modernism and abstract painting. In recent years, appreciation of his work has grown. He's a master whose haunting portraits capture the fragility of human life, ravaged by time.

Haruki Murakami's story "With the Beatles" evokes lost innocence of 1960s

Haruki Murakami covers several flashpoints of Baby Boomer nostalgia in his story "With the Beatles."

Revealing how pop music enhanced adolescent lives in the 1960s, the story in the current New Yorker presents an era of innocence and young love, free from the political and social turmoil that later shook the decade.

Going beyond simple longing for the past, Murakami reflects upon time, memory, aging, grief and regret. The wistful mysticism of Japanese society co-exists with "Beatlemania" and the emerging dominance of international culture.

Philip Gabriel's translation gives the story the radiance of New Yorker classics by John Updike and John Cheever. Several factual digressions into 1960s films and music accent rather than impede the narration. The tragedies of JFK's assassination and the Vietnam War receive no mention. Japanese guilt over World War II is also absent, replaced by an Americanized prosperity. Yet, an inner desolation brings one character's mental turmoil and another's suicide.

Murakami's focus on "With the Beatles," the Fab Five's second album, evokes a time before the Beatles and the world turned to political rebellion and social protest. A phenomenon from the cute Mop-Tops' first surge of popularity, the album in the story symbolizes youthful sexual longing before the advent of drugs and free love.

The first-person narrator mentions that a young girl he briefly encounters in a high school hallway holds the British version of the album, rather than the Japanese or American releases. He points out that the record's title was changed to "Meet the Beatles" in the United States, a subtle sign of cultural differences.

A discussion of the album's black and white cover showing the Beatles' faces in light and shadow highlights the rising artistic brilliance of popular culture. Astrid Kirchherr's photograph was one of the first images of a new, iconic style.

The Beatles would later produce songs like "Norwegian Wood," evoked in a memorable Murakami novel. "With the Beatles" registers what was lost from the time when the world listened to "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tony Bennett thrills Atlanta fans with masterful performance

Valentine's night, romance in the air, and Tony Bennett on stage.

The audience at Atlanta's Symphony Hall couldn't ask for anything more. Beaming with joy at 93, Bennett transported his adoring fans through a history of American popular songs, much of which he himself lived.

Wearing a stylish suit and flashing his trademark crooked grin, Bennett generated a rare outpouring of love between performer and audience. From couples of Bennett's generation to millennial hipsters, the well-dressed crowd clapped hands, snapped fingers and erupted with frequent applause.

An audio clip of Frank Sinatra praising Bennett began the performance, and Bennett showed that only his old compadre stands with him as an interpreter of the jazz and theatrical standards called "the American songbook."

Bennett like Sinatra explores the interplay between music and lyrics. As Bennett reveled in his tight band's presentation of the famous melodies, he caressed each song's words. While his weathered voice has lost some of its suppleness, Bennett like a great actor found the songs' dramatic depths.

With a range of gestures and a few spontaneous dance steps, Bennett put his stamp on a full repertory of classics from Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer and other songwriters.

Some in the audience might have registered his performance of Hank Williams' "Cold Cold Heart," one of Bennett's first hits in the early 1950s, showing the crossover appeal of what were then called "hillbilly" songs. Bennett and his quartet sizzled on a jazzy arrangement of the evening's most contemporary song, Stevie Wonder's "For Once in My Life."

In one of the evening's magical moments, Bennett turned Sinatra's melancholy signature "One for My Baby and One More for the Road" into a joyful anthem of resilience. The narrator in his rendering of the Arlen and Mercer classic looks ahead to new adventures rather than looking backward with regret. Bennett also evoked Sinatra with a spirited, if fragmented, performance of Bart Howard's "Fly Me to the Moon,"

While pianist Tim Ray, bassist Marshall Wood and drummer Harold Jones laid down the patterns of a classic jazz trio, guitarist Gray Sargent added a virtuosic dimension. Bennett several times shared the stage with Sargent, whose acoustic guitar solos accented Rice's stylings and Jones and Wood's pulsing rhythms. While Sargent held the spotlight, Jones's brushwork stood out on several numbers.

Bennett's performance of the Gershwins' "Our Love Is Here Today" seemed to move from an expression of personal experience to a universal affirmation of faith and endurance.

After the inevitable finale of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," Bennett basked in his audience's adulation. He returned several times to the stage, saluting in response to the standing ovation,  as his band performed a reprise of "Fly Me to the Moon." Then he left for the last time, and his fans headed into the chilly night with a warm glow.