I recall an interview with the great Betty Carter in which she was asked to name her "favorite singer." She replied, "No comment." Which I always felt was her amusing and diplomatic way of saying, "Me Me ME."
With one exception, I saw Betty Carter 'Live" more than any other single performer. At her peak, she could have an audience in the palm of her hand before the first song was concluded. A dynamic, take-no-prisoners, hit-the-ground-running, charismatic artist who could even have won over a crowd of Lennon Sisters fans who might have wondered into one of her club dates by mistake. On the other hand, I once gave a Carter CD to a much-more-conservative, but nonetheless quite fine singer friend of mine. (No names puh-leese.) She had never heard Carter. I called her a couple of days later to ask what she thought of it. My friend said that she'd become so immediately overwrought by the experience of listening to the recording to the point of ejecting the disc and throwing it out of the car window and onto the Jersey freeway on which she was traveling. Oh, well as the liner notes to one of Carter's CDs correctly observe, "One man's jazz singer is another's Robert Goulet."
One time I saw Carter in performance at NY's Town Hall, and when she began singing "Round Midnight," using Bernie Hanighen's set of lyrics to the Monk tune, who should've begun shouting at her from the audience but singer Babs Gonzales. He then proceeded to leap up on the stage to begin singing his own---and much more obscure---lyrics to the bop anthem. Carter just stepped aside with a look on her face that read, "Oh, that Babs!" and let him complete the number. Unlike the heckler at a recent Stresand concert, definitely NOT a plant.
If the gardenia was Billie's signature, Carter's was (at least "live") off-the-shoulder dresses which exposed only one shoulder, always the left. That undulating exposed part of her upper torso was definitely a part of her act.
Avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor once told me with an absolultely straight face, "I feel so sorry for Betty Carter." "Why?," I bit. "Because her husband's favorite singer is Nancy Wilson." Oh well, as the saying goes, "One man's jazz singer. . .."
Monday, November 06, 2006
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Ellen McIlwaine alert
My longtime friend Ellen McIlwaine has a brand new CD. Here is the info on it. In the near future I will be posting on this blog a long career article about Ellen.
Friday, November 03, 2006
Cruze/Cruise Control
The return of Cat Blog Friday. . .sort of
EX-CLU-SIVE: Tom Cruise to Revive Edsel
Cruze Bustamante: "I'm not fat. Vote for me!"
Cruising in Colorado Springs:
"I've never had a gay relationship in Denver." ---Ted Haggard.
As one local wag recently remarked (like, this morning across the breakfast table): "You could drive a truck through that statement."
My own reaction to fundies like Haggard is that they give the ineffable/unknowable a bad name. I wonder if he's entered rehab yet? No changes to his web site so far. If, however, you would like to "arrange an interview" with Haggard, here's the email address: mbritton@newlifechurch.org .
I used to be an announcer on a religious radio station. ("Dr. Chilledair, is there anything you haven't done in your long and colorful career?") And nearly every fundamentalist minister I met there was a closet case. ("Why Reverand Hissom, just What Kind of a boy do you think I am?")
Have you had a good look yet at the the screamer who's replacing Haggard? If he's not a queen, I'll eat my copy of Judy at Carnegie Hall at high noon in the Castro.
EX-CLU-SIVE: Tom Cruise to Revive Edsel
Cruze Bustamante: "I'm not fat. Vote for me!"
Cruising in Colorado Springs:
"I've never had a gay relationship in Denver." ---Ted Haggard.
As one local wag recently remarked (like, this morning across the breakfast table): "You could drive a truck through that statement."
My own reaction to fundies like Haggard is that they give the ineffable/unknowable a bad name. I wonder if he's entered rehab yet? No changes to his web site so far. If, however, you would like to "arrange an interview" with Haggard, here's the email address: mbritton@newlifechurch.org .
I used to be an announcer on a religious radio station. ("Dr. Chilledair, is there anything you haven't done in your long and colorful career?") And nearly every fundamentalist minister I met there was a closet case. ("Why Reverand Hissom, just What Kind of a boy do you think I am?")
Have you had a good look yet at the the screamer who's replacing Haggard? If he's not a queen, I'll eat my copy of Judy at Carnegie Hall at high noon in the Castro.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Dr. Chilledair's Dept. of Amplification
Here's a post on this blog from January 12 of this year WITH one important addition (see below)
"Gladys Bentley was a man!," Frances Williams insisted to me, when the subject of the ostensibly female, cabaret singer-pianist and court jester to the Harlem Renaissance was raised. I interviewed the late actress-activist Williams, perhaps best-known as "Miss Marie" on the TV series Frank's Place for my 1998 book, Hot from Harlem (republished this year by McFarland Press).
I was reminded of Bentley (1907-1960) and my interview with Frances because today is Gladys' birthday.If anyone should have known about Bentley, it was Williams. She was there at the time."Even when Frances was confronted with Sisters of the Renaissance, a publication containing information to the contrary [the passage on Bentley in 'Harlem' continued] she stuck to her guns: She shot a look that signaled case closed.. ..end of discussion.
Certainly, Bentley gave good cause for Williams to suspect she might be all man: Gladys worked entirely in male drag and sang double-entendre songs and parodies that often as not alluded to and/or celebrated the joys and perils of gay romance. But that was later on; here is Langston Hughes' description, in his The Big Sea, of Bentley in action "before she got famous, acquired an accompanist, specially written material, and conscious vulgarity: Miss Bentley sat, and played a big piano all night long, literally all night without stopping-singing songs like 'The St. James Infirmary': from ten in the evening until dawn, with scarcely a break in between the notes, sliding from one song to another, with a powerful and continuous underbeat of jungle rhythm."
He goes on to describe the ample, ebony, and deeply butch performer as "a perfect piece of African sculpture." Novelist Carl Van Vechten was similarly taken with her (or him); in his Parties, he writes of an unnamed character who is clearly Bentley: "There is a girl up there now you oughta hear. She does her hair so her head looks like a wet seal and when she pounds the piano the dawn comes up like thunder." In her Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s, Daphne Duval Harrison suggests that it wasn't only Frances Williams who felt that this woman imitating a man might have, in fact, been-shades of Victor Victoria-a man (gay, at that) imitating a lesbian pretending to be man. She describes Bentley as a "tough-talking, singing piano player who some believed to be a male transvestite and others a lesbian."
In Gay New York, George Chauncey recalls Bentley as: "[An entertainer] who performed in a tuxedo and married her lover in a much discussed ceremony."If, in fact, Bentley was a lesbian, she recanted her sapphic ways for good in 1952 in a magazine article entitled "I Am a Woman Again. She then married a sailor in San Diego and spent the remainder of her years writing her (yet to be published) memoirs. If ever there was a subject who cried out for further research it is Bentley who may have singlehandedly engineered the gender-bendingest hoax ever perpetrated on Cafe Society."
AND HERE IS THE IMPORTANT ADDITION. JUST NOW, RECALLING THAT SOMEONE ONCE TOLD ME THAT BENTLEY HAD MADE AN APPEARANCE ON GROUCHO'S "YOU BET YOUR LIFE," I ENTERED BENTLEY'S NAME IN THE SEARCH BAR ON YOUTUBE. AND WHADYA KNOW! THERE SHE WAS. THIS MIGHT WELL BE THE ONLY EXTANT FILM FOOTAGE OF THIS CRUCIAL HARLEM RENAISSANCE PERFORMER. HERE ARE GROUCHO MARX AND THE EQUALLY ONE AND ONLY GLADYS BENTLEY.
"Gladys Bentley was a man!," Frances Williams insisted to me, when the subject of the ostensibly female, cabaret singer-pianist and court jester to the Harlem Renaissance was raised. I interviewed the late actress-activist Williams, perhaps best-known as "Miss Marie" on the TV series Frank's Place for my 1998 book, Hot from Harlem (republished this year by McFarland Press).
I was reminded of Bentley (1907-1960) and my interview with Frances because today is Gladys' birthday.If anyone should have known about Bentley, it was Williams. She was there at the time."Even when Frances was confronted with Sisters of the Renaissance, a publication containing information to the contrary [the passage on Bentley in 'Harlem' continued] she stuck to her guns: She shot a look that signaled case closed.. ..end of discussion.
Certainly, Bentley gave good cause for Williams to suspect she might be all man: Gladys worked entirely in male drag and sang double-entendre songs and parodies that often as not alluded to and/or celebrated the joys and perils of gay romance. But that was later on; here is Langston Hughes' description, in his The Big Sea, of Bentley in action "before she got famous, acquired an accompanist, specially written material, and conscious vulgarity: Miss Bentley sat, and played a big piano all night long, literally all night without stopping-singing songs like 'The St. James Infirmary': from ten in the evening until dawn, with scarcely a break in between the notes, sliding from one song to another, with a powerful and continuous underbeat of jungle rhythm."
He goes on to describe the ample, ebony, and deeply butch performer as "a perfect piece of African sculpture." Novelist Carl Van Vechten was similarly taken with her (or him); in his Parties, he writes of an unnamed character who is clearly Bentley: "There is a girl up there now you oughta hear. She does her hair so her head looks like a wet seal and when she pounds the piano the dawn comes up like thunder." In her Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s, Daphne Duval Harrison suggests that it wasn't only Frances Williams who felt that this woman imitating a man might have, in fact, been-shades of Victor Victoria-a man (gay, at that) imitating a lesbian pretending to be man. She describes Bentley as a "tough-talking, singing piano player who some believed to be a male transvestite and others a lesbian."
In Gay New York, George Chauncey recalls Bentley as: "[An entertainer] who performed in a tuxedo and married her lover in a much discussed ceremony."If, in fact, Bentley was a lesbian, she recanted her sapphic ways for good in 1952 in a magazine article entitled "I Am a Woman Again. She then married a sailor in San Diego and spent the remainder of her years writing her (yet to be published) memoirs. If ever there was a subject who cried out for further research it is Bentley who may have singlehandedly engineered the gender-bendingest hoax ever perpetrated on Cafe Society."
AND HERE IS THE IMPORTANT ADDITION. JUST NOW, RECALLING THAT SOMEONE ONCE TOLD ME THAT BENTLEY HAD MADE AN APPEARANCE ON GROUCHO'S "YOU BET YOUR LIFE," I ENTERED BENTLEY'S NAME IN THE SEARCH BAR ON YOUTUBE. AND WHADYA KNOW! THERE SHE WAS. THIS MIGHT WELL BE THE ONLY EXTANT FILM FOOTAGE OF THIS CRUCIAL HARLEM RENAISSANCE PERFORMER. HERE ARE GROUCHO MARX AND THE EQUALLY ONE AND ONLY GLADYS BENTLEY.
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