Bluebird

Genius

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Baby’s Got Bass

Culture, Women's Fashion

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By ROBERT SULLIVAN

| August 18, 2011, 12:00 am

Photograph by Alice O’Malley. Styled by Susan Winget. Fashion assistants: Tasha Cain and Jessica Dell. Hair by Chuck Amos for Bumble and Bumble at Jump. Makeup by Asami Taguchi at L’Atelier NYC.RHAPSODY IN PINK — The jazz virtuoso, who thinks nothing of crisscrossing musical styles, in a Valentino dress, $5,500, and shoes, $745. Call (212) 772-6969. Dior Fine Jewelry earrings, $3,700. Call (800) 929-3467.

The contrast between the Esperanza Spalding that you see onstage and the offstage Esperanza, jazz bassist and singer, was not immediately apparent at breakfast the day after her big sold-out show at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the kickoff of her summer tour. Onstage she is luminous, a major chord of exuberance, swinging behind her stand-up bass, eyes closed, singing to the lights, an evangelist of joy in various cool time signatures. At breakfast, meanwhile, she was soft-spoken and contemplative, almost demure.

Granted she was rushed, due to fly promptly to Paris, and then on to Prague and Montreux, Switzerland, where old jazz heads and new were already buying tickets to catch her live, performing from “Chamber Music Society,” the album that made her the first pure jazz musician to win the Grammy for Best New Artist.

“Excuse me, but you were phenomenal,” the woman sitting at the next table said to her. “No really, I mean just wonderful.”

“Oh, thanks!” Spalding said, a little surprised. “That’s nice of you to say.” Spalding was fairly conspicuous in the Hyatt’s breakfast lounge, less so for her trademark hair, which was tied up in a blue-and-white print scarf, than for her smile, more Zen than a 26-year-old should be allowed. When the fan exited, Spalding shook her head. “I mean, I just can’t tell anymore.” The concert, in fact, could easily have been just so-so; rust threatened the players. “We faced a little bit of pure air, if you see what I mean,” her piano player, Leo Genovese, said afterward. Genovese is an Argentinian composer and a hot bandleader himself, of the Chromatic Gauchos. “We hadn’t played together for weeks!”

They had opened, as usual, with “Little Fly,” a William Blake poem Spalding put to music; it’s the album’s hit, beginning with violin and Spalding, the bassist, combing out just a few silky chords, while her singing on top was impossibly tranquil. The crowd melted during “Inútil Paisagem,” an Antonio Carlos Jobim composition that Spalding sang in Portuguese. At some point, she closed her eyes. “I can concentrate better on sound when I’m not using up my brain space with sight,” she said with a laugh.

After two encores and a couple of standing ovations, the band was backstage, relaxed and relieved, and Spalding was navigating streams of well-wishers. “Here comes my Brazilian family!” Spalding said.“There’s gonna be a lot of crazy hair!” By Brazilian family she meant the family of Milton Nascimento, the legendary Brazilian vocalist — he sings on “Chamber Music Society.” If you substitute the phrase “Brazilian jazz” with “opera,” then this is like having Pavarotti’s family travel to a distant city to hear you sing. Thus, postshow greeting and chatting wasn’t over till after midnight, and by morning, when she should have been packing, she was uncharacteristically lazy. Suddenly against plan, she ducked out to the rooftop of the Hyatt, to imbibe the sweet summer air. It was then that I saw the other Esperanza — unnoticed by fans, all by herself. She had taken off her blazer and was wearing a black tank top, her long, bass-conditioned arms pointing out from the corner of the concrete-heavy hotel. With her almost mystical smile, she resembled nothing less than a bowsprit, leading, for a glorious Montreal morning, anyway, the crazy ship of jazz.

NOTE WORTHY — Spalding grew up in Portland, Ore., the daughter of a single mother who was also a music lover. Oscar de la Renta dress, $13,990. At Bergdorf Goodman. Call (800) 558-1855. KC Designs earrings, $10,000. AtFragments. Call (212) 334-9588. Jimmy Choo shoes, $795. Call (866) 524-6687.

NOT THAT SHE’S QUIET, REALLY, especially when you get her revved up — on the what-is-jazz-anyway issue. “Nobody has the guts to say it to my face, but some people in the jazz community don’t think I am doing real jazz,” Spalding said, a little perturbed. This comes from the old anti-jazz prejudice: if it is popular, it can’t be jazz — a reason they recategorized Norah Jones from jazz to pop when she got popular. But Spalding is jazz, all right. In terms of genetics, her bass playing, classically articulated, is a lot like her voice: light but strong, not afraid of melody or happiness. Nor is she averse to pure scat — scat being that ancient (20th century) form of wordless vocal improvisation that the young people who watched her beat out Justin Bieber for 2010’s best new artist might have mistaken for a new kind of tweet.

Notice, by the way, that Esperanza Spalding doesn’t do a lot of tweeting. She is lo-fi and low-key, the kind of person who relaxes by doing some laundry and cleaning at home, one place in the West Village, one in Austin, Tex.

Notice too that she did not come out of nowhere; she has been working in the trenches for her entire adult life. She grew up in a tough neighborhood in Portland, Ore., in the ’90s, when Portland was having a rough time. She was partly home-schooled but also spent time at Northwest Academy, a prestigious private school. “The point being that our life was determined by the circumstances,” she said. “We pressed through a lot of things, good things and bad things, and that’s O.K.”

She believes that music first got into her head at home via the holiday albums of Harry Belafonte and Stevie Wonder. She remembers listening to their Christmas albums way past the season. Then there was her mother, a music lover and single parent of two. “She would make up songs for everything: if you fell she’d sing a song, or if you hurt yourself, she’d sing a song.”

Eventually, the young violin student ended up with a G.E.D. and at 16 got a spot at Portland State University, where she studied bass in the classical program and moved out on her own. In Portland, a quiet jazz oasis, Spalding was tutored by the likes of Thara Memory, a composer and trumpeter who has done time with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to the Commodores. “I’m either playing music or I’m doing a bunch of stuff that I don’t want to be doing,” she told a reporter at the time.

She won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music, in Boston, and in 2005 was named an instructor, one of its youngest ever. In 2008 her album “Esperanza” was warmly received. Vibe magazine punned on her sporty surname: Spalding’s “got game — and has no hang-ups about showing it.” In 2009, she recorded “Chamber Music Society,” a jazz record with strings attached, as well as a large universe of influences that has as much to do with the orchestral arrangement of Gil Evans as it does with the pop songs of Bobby McFerrin. John Schaefer, host of WNYC’s “Soundcheck,” featured Spalding before, as in pre-Grammy. “She really does represent that coming together of different types of musical genres that we used to think of as discrete,” Schaefer said. “It’s not that she’s crossing over borders. It’s that she’s saying, ‘I’m not even going to acknowledge that these borders are even there.’ ”

“She’s extremely intelligent,” said Terri Lyne Carrington, the drummer on “Chamber Music,” who played with Herbie Hancock as a young protégée herself. “I am a whole generation ahead of her and I learn all the time when I am around her.”

Spalding has a healthy criticism of her own bass playing. “I’m not a master of my craft. I am still a student. I have achieved a certain level of efficiency,” she said. “Some things are not together, which is O.K. because I’m young, because I will get this together.”

HOW DO YOU FOLLOW UP A GRAMMY for a semi-experimental jazz CD? Part 2 of the same double CD. Spalding explained: “Everything is scheduled something like two years ahead, and back at the beginning of 2009, I had this idea for a double album. And I thought, On one CD there will be these radio songs, songs with a chorus, a hook, a little more friendly maybe to the uninitiated listener. And on the other, there would be these more experimental compositions.” As it went, the second one was released first, the opposite of what most marketers would have advised, though fortuitous-seeming now. “I think my label thought that was a huge mistake to put out the first one,” she said. Even she had her doubts. “I thought, Oh, well, at least we can go to France and play some French festivals.”

She defines a radio song biographically. “You imagine a 14-year-old girl who is driving with her sister, just diggin’ it,” she said. You also imagine it jazz tinged. A model from an earlier time: Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark,” the album with David Crosby and Graham Nash singing harmony, and Joe Sample (from the Crusaders) playing jazz piano, or Mitchell’s live album “Shadows and Light” with Michael Brecker on sax and Pat Metheny on guitar. You imagine a radio song being vaguely Stevie Wonder-esque, and in fact, though most of the songs are written by Spalding, one is a cover of a Wonder tune on which Joe Lovano solos. “I had an older brother and a mother who loved music, and when we would drive somewhere the radio would be on,” Spalding said. “And I think that’s how people my age experienced music.”

She has played at the White House, at a concert honoring Wonder, one of her heroes (“Did you know Herbie Hancock plays the Fender Rhodes on ‘Songs in the Key of Life?’ ” she said), and then played again at President Obama’s Nobel award ceremony. “The president was just very sweet — I would just like to point that out.” She would open the Paris show with her de rigueur flourish. For her Grammy performance, she wore a jacket designed by Suno, but onstage in Montreal, just before the curtains opened, under a small spotlight at stage right, she took off a trench coat to sit down in a little living room, a prop. In high-waisted and tapered linen trousers and a sleeveless blouse, she poured a glass of wine, took off her shoes, then made her way slowly to the bass and microphone, the backlight working a halo effect in her free-style hair.

“I sort of start with quirky sophisticated,” she said. “It’s a play off the idea of chamber music. And then I take the coat off. I think that for a lot of people, going to a concert is at the end of the day, and it’s their winding-down space.” At some point, she took off her trademark dangling red bracelet, picked up in the West Village. “That’s from the shop around the corner from me in my neighborhood,” she said. “The lady there told me that some people in Tibet can’t afford coral, which is supposed to bring you success and happiness, so they use glass. So this is a poor man’s good luck charm. I give them to all my friends.”

She is quiet about her dating life, but suffice it to say she is not big on wild nights out on the town, either in New York or in Austin, where she spends part of the year. “I’m not a partyer,” she said. “The most I ever do is go to a concert or see a movie.” She Skypes with friends on her computer, and reads; she’s in between “Staying Alive” by Vandana Shiva, the eco-feminist, and the poems of Emily Dickinson. She is a certified homebody, who, yes, enjoys practicing. “I’m a pretty introverted person,” she explained. “I mean, I like to be by myself. The identity of me, the personal me, outside of work is, you know, being a musician. So my life fuels my work.”

Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesCENTER STAGE — Spalding, performs a tribute to Prince in 2010.

DURING A WEEK that she booked in the studio, working hard to wrap up vocals on “Radio Music Society,” due out in February, Spalding spent her nights at Iridium Jazz Club in Times Square, doing a gig with Mike Stern, the guitarist. It was Stern’s show — Spalding was the bass player — and Stern was great, a powerhouse guitar player, magnanimous and infectious, who started at 22, with Blood Sweat and Tears, and then in the ’80s played with Miles Davis. Stern was charmed to play with Spalding — the gig was booked before the Grammys, and when she insisted on laying back, Stern pushed her to play more. “She swings her ass off, man. I mean she’s got great timing.” he said. “And I love her electric playing — I think it’s really happening.”

There was one song, a Stern composition entitled “Wishing Well,” on which Spalding played electric bass and sang, and the audience looked as if it would faint from happiness. For his part, Stern was blown away in the dressing room before they even got onstage. They had been talking Bach. “My mom used to play Bach on the piano around the house,” Stern said. Spalding asked him about a particular fugue, playing the bass part. “I don’t recognize it,” Stern said. At that point, Spalding simultaneously played the bass part and sang the top part, a feat.

“She’s special, I’ll tell you,” Stern said, chuckling. “That really knocked me out. We were all really quite impressed. She’s very cool.”

Courting serious spark

Hollywood Bowl concert focuses on Joni Mitchell's jazz side

'She's got a special way,' Herbie Hancock says of the singer-songwriter. He's on the 'Joni's Jazz' bill with Wayne Shorter, Kurt Elling and many others.

1968: Joni Mitchell's songs became progressively jazzier in the next decade. (Getty Images)

By Scott Timberg, Special to the Los Angeles Times

August 14, 2011

An eclectic group will assemble onstage Wednesday night at the Hollywood Bowl to riff on the work of Joni Mitchell. Oddly, one thing many of these artists — who range from jazz to folk to indie rock — have in common is that they arrived late to the music of the flaxen-haired troubadour.

"I didn't really pay much attention to anyone from rock 'n' roll, pop, folk, once I started to play jazz," says Herbie Hancock, Los Angeles Philharmonic creative chair for jazz, who was classically trained before taking up jazz piano. "I was also very into instrumental music — I didn't pay much attention to lyrics."

Saxophonist Wayne Shorter, similarly, says he was "not a huge listener" of Mitchell's music in her breakthrough period in the late '60s and early '70s. And alt-rock songstress Aimee Mann admits she goes "not very far back" with Mitchell. "My exposure to music was pretty random," she says. "A baby sitter turned me on to Neil Young. When Joni was in her heyday, I wasn't listening to the radio yet."

But like anyone who's been born again, each of these latecomers also has a conversion story. In the case of Hancock, who was eventually steered to popular music by his employer, Miles Davis, he got a call to join her for a session in 1979. "And I got a chance to see what a great musician she was," he says. "Eventually I began to listen to her lyrics."

He was immediately struck by her distinctive musicality. "She's got a special way; she hears things that go well beyond mainstream pop harmony," Hancock says. (He refers to the way she alters standard tuning of her strings to change pitch in a way that allows her, like musicians such as Robert Johnson and Keith Richards, to get unusual harmonies.) "She has to tune her guitar differently for every song — she's hearing things she can't get with standard tuning."

Shorter, for his part, remembers being introduced to the singer-songwriter while walking down Sunset Boulevard to see a show at the Roxy in the late '70s. Either Clive Davis or Miles Davis introduced them; he can't recall.

What the saxophonist does remember is that "talking to her, it seemed like she had the fighting spirit." Though he admired what he knew of her music, it was the force of her vision and her defiance of the record business that attracted him the most. "So it's more about going against the grain. I like to be with fighters — someone who won't be steered. She stayed on her path."

1970s time frame

Wednesday's "Joni's Jazz" concert will concentrate on the mid-to-late '70s, what Hancock calls "the time she started to make the transition, incorporating jazz artists and jazz ideas into her band." Perhaps appropriate for an elusive artist who draws from the folk, rock, blues and jazz traditions without being entirely comfortable in any of them, Mitchell, 67, whose last record, "Shine," came out in 2007, is not scheduled to appear.

One of those jazz-inflected records — "Mingus," the 1979 tribute to the great jazz bassist and bandleader who died a few months before its release — was quite explicitly a jazz album. Another, 1975's daring and idiosyncratic "The Hissing of Summer Lawns," which employs a Moog synthesizer and African rhythms, will be performed in its entirety.

By the time Mitchell, who was born in western Canada in 1943 and later moved to L.A., began to record these jazz-accented records, she'd become a sensation with the spare, deeply internal album "Blue" and poetic hits like "California," "Both Sides Now" and "Woodstock."

Her turn to jazz — she employed players such as Shorter, Hancock and bassist Jaco Pastorius — was in some ways a return to roots. "I found out later," says Hancock, "that Joni's listening background was in jazz — she heard Billie Holiday at 9 years old. She heard jazz around the house." Hancock recalls her telling him that she broke in through folk music because she wanted a forum for her poetry and in 1960s Canada "the folk scene was a way in."

Jazz vocalist Kurt Elling, who will sing several of her songs, including "Black Crow" and "Edith and the Kingpin," says that he immediately thought of Mitchell as a jazz artist of sorts when he first heard her. And not just on her jazz albums.

"I thought of her as someone fantastically hip, from a jazz point of view," he says. "At several points in her career, she's told her stories from an improvisation standpoint." Her whole career, he says, has been "beyond genre," and "she's now more of a jazz singer" than she was on those '70s records.

Shorter says Mitchell's style of recording has a lot to do with her work as a painter; she's always trying for new and startling colors. She's been in the spirit of jazz, he says, for much of her career. "Jazz is supposed to be open," he says. "On the road to discovery. That's what Joni is talking about."

The connection between jazz and Mitchell's entire career was made explicit in 2007 when Hancock released "River: The Joni Letters," an album festooned with guest stars including Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones and Mitchell herself that was both a critical and popular success. It also was the first jazz recording in more than 40 years to take the best album Grammy.

Eclectic lineup

Wednesday's concert comes in some ways out of Hancock's album, though the personnel is a bit different. The Bowl show will include R&B singer Chaka Khan, jazz crooner Cassandra Wilson and Irish folk-rock singer Glen Hansard, who, as half of the Swell Season, made a riveting Bowl appearance last summer. (Drummer Brian Blade and pianist Jon Cowherd will handle the arrangements with an ensemble including such stalwarts as Tom Scott and Mark Isham.)

With such an odd lineup — and such a stubbornly individual artist — it's anybody's guess what this will be like. "I think they'll be pretty faithful to the arrangements of the record," Mann says. "I don't think anybody is going to bust out a metal jam."

But Mann says "it's pretty impossible" to sing like Joni Mitchell. "All her songs I've practiced, I've had to take down at least a third." In some cases, Mann, who will interpret the title tracks from "Court and Spark" and "Hissing," moved the songs into "keys that are impossible to play saxophone over. Let's hope for the best."

Elling emphasizes that in the spirit of jazz, the concert needs to take the music somewhere. "Otherwise," he says, "you might as well stay home and spin the records."

Still alive

Etta James is alive, son says, despite Twitter, Internet reports

Etta James is not dead, her son said Thursday, contrary to a flurry of Twitter and Internet reports that stated that the great blues and R&B singer had passed away.

“She’s fine. I just saw her last night and she was fine," said son Donto James.

The 73-year-old singer remains seriously ill and is being cared for at her suburban Riverside home.
James has been diagnosed with dementia and is undergoing treatment for leukemia; she has been in and out of the hospital over the past two years.

Hollywood Star Walk: Etta James

James’ husband and sons currently are locked in a court dispute over control of the singer’s medical care and her $1 million in savings. All parties involved have said their only concern is providing James with the proper medical care.

James is best known for her bluesy riffs and smoky nightclub ballads, including "At Last" and "Tell Mama." She overcame drug addiction and weight problems and was on tour just three years ago. She is credited with being an inspiration for a vast lineup of singers, including Janis Joplin and Bonnie Raitt.

R.I.P. Jazz Pianist Ray Bryant

Ray Bryant, Jazz Pianist, Dies at 79

By NATE CHINEN

Published: June 3, 2011

 

Ray Bryant, a jazz pianist whose sensitivity and easy authority made him a busy accompanist and a successful solo artist, beginning in the mid-1950s, died on Thursday. He was 79.

Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos

Ray Bryant performing at Town Hall in New York in 1998.

His wife of 20 years, Claude Bryant, said he died at New York Hospital Queens after a long illness. He lived in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Mr. Bryant had a firm touch and an unshakable sense of time, notably in his left hand, which he often used to build a bedrock vamp. Even in a bebop setting, he favored the ringing tonalities of the gospel church. And he was sumptuously at home with the blues, as a style and a sensibility but never as an affectation.

All of this contributed to his accomplishment as a solo pianist. His first solo piano album was “Alone With the Blues,” in 1958, and he went on to make a handful of others, including “Alone at Montreux,” “Solo Flight” and “Montreux ’77.” His most recent release, “In the Back Room,” was yet another solo album, recorded live at Rutgers University and released on the Evening Star label in 2008.

Raphael Homer Bryant was born on Dec. 24, 1931, in Philadelphia, and made his name in that city during its considerable postwar jazz boom. Along with his brother, Tommy, a bassist, he played in the house band at the Blue Note Club in Philadelphia, which had a steady flow of major talent dropping in from New York. (Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were among the musicians they played with there.) In short order Mr. Bryant had plenty of prominent sideman work, both with and without his brother.

One early measure of his ascent was the album “Meet Betty Carter and Ray Bryant,” released on Columbia in 1955. It was a splashy introduction for him as well as for Ms. Carter, the imposingly gifted jazz singer. It was soon followed by “The Ray Bryant Trio” (Prestige), an accomplished album that introduced Mr. Bryant’s composition “Blues Changes,” with its distinctive chord progression.

That song would become a staple of the jazz literature, if less of a proven standard than “Cubano Chant,” the sprightly Afro-Cuban fanfare that Mr. Bryant recorded under his own name and in bands led by the drummers Art Blakey, Art Taylor and Jo Jones.

Mr. Bryant had several hit songs early in his solo career, beginning with “Little Susie,” an original blues that he recorded both for the Signature label and for Columbia. In 1960 he reached No. 30 on the Billboard chart with a novelty song called “The Madison Time,” rushed into production to capitalize on a dance craze. (The song has had a durable afterlife, appearing on the soundtrack to the 1988 movie “Hairspray,” and in the recent Broadway musical production.) He later broke into the Top 100 with a cover of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” released just a few months after the original, in 1967.

But Mr. Bryant’s legacy never rested on his chart success or his nimble response to popular trends. It can be discerned throughout his own discography and in some of his work as a sideman, notably with the singers Carmen McRae and Jimmy Rushing, and on albums like Dizzy Gillespie’s “Sonny Side Up,” on Verve. “After Hours,” a track on that album, begins with Mr. Bryant and his brother playing a textbook slow-drag blues.

Along with his wife, Mr. Bryant is survived by a son, Raphael Bryant Jr.; a daughter, Gina; three grandchildren; and two brothers, Leonard and Lynwood. Mr. Bryant’s sister, Vera Eubanks, is the mother of several prominent jazz musicians: Robin Eubanks, a trombonist; Kevin Eubanks, the guitarist and former bandleader on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno”; and Duane Eubanks, a trumpeter.

The best of Paris in the 1920's

Decoding Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’

Roger Arpajou/Versitil Cinema & Gravier Productions, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Owen Wilson, left, is Gil, who travels back in time to 1920s Paris, and Marion Cotillard is Adriana, a fictional mistress of Picasso's who catches Gil's eye. More Photos »

By JOSEPH BERGER

Published: May 27, 2011

Many a writer or artist has longed to travel back in time to the sizzling Paris of the 1920s, to sip absinthe with Hemingway at Les Deux Magots or dine on choucroute garnie with Picasso at La Rotonde. Imagine the conversation! What has beguiled audiences about the new Woody Allen movie, “Midnight in Paris,” is that the protagonist, Gil, a disenchanted Hollywood screenwriter played by Owen Wilson, gets to live exactly that fantasy.

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Allen Abroad

Clip: 'Midnight in Paris'

Associated Press

F. Scott Fitzgerald, center, with his daughter Scottie, left and his wife Zelda in Paris in 1925. More Photos »

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Roger Arpajou/Versatil Cinema & Gravier Productions, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Alison Pill and Tom Hiddleston as Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald in "Midnight in Paris." More Photos »

 

Associated Press

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in 1934. More Photos »

The New York Times

Ernest Hemingway, around 1937. More Photos »

 

Associated Press

Salvador Dalí in 1971. More Photos »

 

Associated Press

Cole Porter, around 1910. More Photos »

He runs into Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald at an elegant soiree, where he hears Cole Porter crooning “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love).” He gets writing advice from a laconic Hemingway, persuades Gertrude Stein to read the manuscript of his novel, and falls in love with Picasso’s mistress. He meets Salvador Dalí, T. S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Josephine Baker, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray and others in the enormously talented cast of expatriates and bohemians that peopled Jazz Age Paris. Reeling from the folly of World War I and so offering fodder for novels and paintings dripping with disillusionment, Paris was the center of the artistic universe then, and those legends really did converge on Paris around the same time.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast," Hemingway wrote in “A Moveable Feast,” his memoir that was posthumously published in 1964.

The movie sometimes assumes viewers know the details of these luminous lives, so it may be helpful to understand some of the complicated relationships that made Paris in that era both a dream and often something less.

In 1922 Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, took a two-room flat near the Sorbonne that had no hot water and no indoor toilet. He also rented a room around the corner to write, something like the “attic with a skylight” Gil craves. It had a view of the smokestacks and rooftops that Mr. Allen captures in worshipful shots of the city.

Hemingway also discovered Shakespeare & Company, a bookstore near the Jardin du Luxembourg owned by Sylvia Beach that became a crossroads for Americans in Paris. It’s where he borrowed books by Turgenev and Tolstoy, and it makes a cameo in the film.

Gil meets Hemingway in a run-down cafe not unlike the legendary Dingo, where Hemingway’s less than beautiful friendship with Fitzgerald began with the latter’s drunken near-blackout. Hemingway, who is parodied in the film with dialogue like “no subject is terrible if the story is true and if the prose is clean and honest,” was envious of the seemingly effortless lyricism of Fitzgerald’s writing in works like “The Great Gatsby.” In “Midnight in Paris,” Hemingway tells Fitzgerald that Zelda, a writer herself, sees her husband as a competitor. But “A Moveable Feast” offers a more full-throated account. Hemingway grew to despise Zelda, partly because she had betrayed Fitzgerald with a French aviator and partly because he blamed her decadent tempestuousness for ruining her husband’s productivity.

Picasso and Matisse, who appear in the film, also had a rivalry, barely acknowledged in the film, with the two artists echoing — some critics say swiping — each other’s themes. Both gained the attention of the art collector Leo Stein and his sister, Gertrude. In the film Gil hears that Gertrude Stein has bought a Matisse for 500 francs and, in the hope of making a time-bending killing, asks her if he could pick up “six or seven” Matisses as well. The twice-married Picasso was famous for mistresses, and in the film Marion Cotillard plays Adriana, a capricious, if melancholy stand-in for all of Picasso’s lovers, models and muses. She claims to have been the lover of Modigliani and Braque as well. In actuality, Picasso’s mistresses were relatively constant. Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was 17 when she met Picasso, was with him for eight years, bearing him a daughter, Maya. Dora Maar, whom he met around 1935, was his lover for at least eight years as well.

The Indiana-born Cole Porter maintained an elegant apartment, where he gave hedonistic parties that were daring for their mingling of gay and straight friends. Porter met and married Linda Lee Thomas, a divorcée from Louisville who was eight years older and aware that Porter was gay. They set up an even more lavish apartment — walls covered in zebra hide — near Les Invalides, a home that seems like the setting for the on-screen party where Porter entertains his guests at the piano.

The film recounts how many Porter songs were hommages to Paris —“I Love Paris” and “C’est Magnifique,” among them — and indeed Porter wrote a musical, “Paris,” for the chanteuse Irene Bordoni. One of the show’s songs was “Let’s Do It,” with teasingly suggestive lines including: “In shallow shoals English soles do it./Goldfish in the privacy of bowls do it.”

When Gil sits down in a cafe with Dalí and Man Ray, he confides to those artists his shock at being catapulted back in time. Man Ray is delighted with the idea, but Gil tells him that’s because “you’re a Surrealist and I’m a normal guy.”

Dalí, played here by Adrien Brody, first visited Paris in 1926, grew the mustache that would become his trademark, and met his idol and fellow Spaniard, Picasso. Experimenting with many forms, Dalí fell in with a circle of Surrealists in Montparnasse whose members were probing the Freudian depths of their psyches for what they regarded as a new expressive frontier. He met his future wife, Gala, who was inconveniently married to a Surrealist poet.

 

 

 

 

 

This one's for Stephen...in case he some day grows more facial hair

The Tipsy Diaries

Sweet on Tiki, Flower of Cocktails

Evan Sung for The New York Times

Adam Kolesar, known as Tiki Adam, shows off his custom Airstream bar and all the Tiki accoutrements, at his home in Brooklyn.

By FRANK BRUNI

Published: March 31, 2011

There have been many changes in Adam Kolesar over the years, starting with his facial hair, to which he devotes an agitated, overzealous attention described less aptly as grooming than as absurdist art project. He has made geometric patterns with it. He has dyed it blue. In its current, uncolored form it crawls in five bands, separated by shaved skin, from his cheeks to a point just a few inches below his jaw line. It’s a stylized but scraggly marvel.

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• Boîte: Riff Raff’s Tiki Bar (March 31, 2011)

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Evan Sung for The New York Times

A true Mai Tai.

He loves and listens regularly to music but arrived late at an appreciation of country, an evolution that has caused his wife, Susan, a corporate lawyer, even more dismay than his beard does. “Had he told me when we met that he would become a fan,” she said dryly and without any obvious sarcasm, “we would not be married.”

But the most surprising transformation, or at least the one with the most thorough impact on their lives, concerns what and how he drinks.

On their first date 11 years ago Mr. Kolesar had a solitary beer, then switched to iced tea, having exhausted his minimal interest in alcohol and surpassed his usual quota for the month. Today, at his behest, the living room of their apartment in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn is dominated by one of the most eye-catching and elaborate home bars I have ever seen, a gleaming aluminum approximation of the rear end of an Airstream trailer, complete with glowing red taillights and mock license plate. It is outfitted with four stools; equipped with every kind of mixing and fizzing and grating and straining apparatus imaginable; festooned with kitschy swizzle sticks; and stocked with 50 different spirits.

That’s just what fits. Elsewhere around the two-bedroom apartment are additional bottles of booze, bringing the total to more than 150, including at least 60 varieties of rum, which are essential for his particular passion: tiki drinks. He makes highly specialized, utterly obscure ones for the friends he frequently invites over. He goes on the hunt for classic tiki — that’s the pretend Polynesian genre epitomized by Trader Vic’s and Singapore Slings — around the country. In certain New York cocktail circles Mr. Kolesar is known as Tiki Adam and considered to be one of the great characters of the city’s bar scene, not least because he didn’t care at all about cocktails until shortly before his 40th birthday. He’s 47 now.

As soon as I heard tell of him, I hunted him down, determined to use this column on occasion to introduce drinkers of eccentric note. We first met at the restaurant Prime Meats, also in Carroll Gardens, whose bar he visits at least twice a week, usually between 8 p.m., which is just after he has helped put his 4-year-old daughter to bed, and 11, when his wife, working on her laptop at home, calls it quits. It wasn’t tough to spot him. In addition to the beard there are the tattoos. They cover his arms and include detailed likenesses of two of his five motorcycles.

Other people search in vain for a hobby to embrace. Mr. Kolesar has scads. He hunts (sober), fishes (less so) and plays bass guitar in amateur punk bands, one of which was called Johnny Bubonic & the Black Death. It’s hard to see how he finds any time for work, but he has a profession, and it’s as unusual as the rest of him.

“I’m a feeding therapist,” he said, clearly anticipating and then enjoying my baffled expression. Feeding therapy, he explained, is an offshoot of speech therapy, and it’s for young children, usually 2 to 4, who have trouble moving past soft, puréed foods or eating anything that isn’t the same bland color. They need to be coached to branch out and sometimes even to chew. He has a private practice devoted to that.

In college at the University of South Carolina Mr. Kolesar majored in theater. But when you’re contemplating a career as an actor, he said, “there’s an apprehension about having some measure of control over your destiny.” He talks like that: in formal cadences and with elevated diction that seems to contradict the biker-dude aesthetics. He’s one surprise atop another.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/dining/01tipsy.html