Tony Outhwaite

Latest by Tony Outhwaite in Chronicles

• Reviews

  February 2020

  Books in Brief

  End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival Is Undermining Its Rise, by Carl Minzner
  and
  Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities, by Vaclav Smil

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• Society & Culture

  March 2019

  Your Pink Hat Is Transphobic

  If Madonna were a standard white person, her appearance at the August 2018 MTV Video Music Awards . . . would have brought the leftist brownshirts snarling like rabid coons into the streets and onto the Sunday talk shows.

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• Society & Culture

  September 2018

  Teddy Wilson and the Swing Era Vocalists

  Midway through Billie Holiday’s plaintive 1941 recording of “Jim,” there is a short piano solo barely 25 seconds in length—not even a full 32-bar chorus—by Teddy Wilson.

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• Editorials

  July 2018

  Tom Wolfe, R.I.P.

  When Tom Wolfe’s debut novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published in November 1987, the book was greeted with effusive praise and became a best-seller, although some literati seemed offended by Wolfe’s highly descriptive prose, the hyperbole, exuberant punctuation, and occasional sound effects.

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• Society & Culture

  June 2018

  Monumental Stupidity

  There is a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest in which the characters look out at a brooding Mount Rushmore from the dining-room terrace of the Sheraton-Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota (since renamed the Hotel Alex Johnson).

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• Correspondence

  January 2018

  John di Martino

  In the early days of his career in 1982, jazz pianist John di Martino was a member of the house trio accompanying such internationally famous vocalists as Billy Daniels and Keely Smith at Steve’s Lounge and Elaine’s Lounge, two of the show rooms at Atlantic City’s Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino.

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• Society & Culture

  November 2017

  Unlovable Losers: The Left in Perspective

  Americans are smarter, more intuitive, than many conservatives may think. As time goes by, polls show that they have little tolerance, let alone enthusiasm, for the concepts of “microaggressions” or “safe spaces” or harebrained initiatives to provide “protection” for the fiddlehead fern, nor do they support the notion that dogs and cats are “slaves” to be “liberated.”

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• Society & Culture

  February 2017

  Alex Smith

  Just after 6 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday, February 7, 2016, a tuxedo-clad Alex Smith sat alone on stage at a grand piano near the 50-yard line in Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, set to accompany Lady Gaga as she sang the National Anthem to introduce the championship game between the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos.

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• Reviews

  November 2016

  For Those Who Have Ears

  In jazz as in other serious forms of music—and jazz is most definitely a serious musical form—it is hardly elitist to suggest that it should be not a performer’s attire or jewelry that matters but the music itself.

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• Society & Culture

  July 2016

  Not Your Mother’s Weasels

  At the United Nations in the fall of 2009, Barack Obama acknowledged, with customary self-regard, “the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world,” no doubt referring to his pledge about the receding oceans, healing the planet and reviving the animal kingdom, and the unprecedented wisdom of his associates and himself.

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• January 2016

  Tommy Flanagan

  Early one evening in the mid-1980’s, jazz pianist Walter Bishop, Jr., who in 1951-52 had performed and recorded with star bebop alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, was having a bad first set at Bradley’s, New York City’s premier jazz piano bar.

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• Vital Signs

  March 2015

  A Master Accompanist

  Few jazz pianists are “accompanists” as gifted in knowledge, technique, and taste as Norman Simmons, able to back vocalists with consummate skill in chording, passing notes, and background lines, but also wise in the use of space.

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• Vital Signs

  July 2014

  Jimmy Rowles

  Given his devil-may-care nature, it’s easy to overlook Jimmy Rowles’ status as one of the most gifted and technically versatile pianists of his generation. His initial inspirations were Tatum, Mary Lou Williams, and Teddy Wilson, and he once said that he almost never traveled without several cassettes of Tatum’s playing.

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• Vital Signs

  November 2013

  Herman Foster

  Late in 1961 the pop-jazz singer Gloria Lynne was booked into one of New York City’s top jazz supper clubs, Basin Street East, on Manhattan’s East 48th Street, where she was to record her first live album.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  April 2011

  No Apologies for Jazz

  When the 30-year-old blind British jazz pianist George Shearing came to America for good early in 1949, he ran into fellow transplanted Brit Leonard Feather, a prominent critic, producer, promoter, and songwriter, who suggested that the pianist enlarge his trio to quintet size by adding vibes and drums.

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• Vital Signs

  January 2010

  No More Blues

  Throughout most of its history jazz was a blues music, at least until the avant-gardists of the 1960’s tried to burn down the cathedral in their trumped-up revolution against American society, playing music unfocused in concept, unmusical in sound, and unpleasant in performance.

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• Vital Signs

  June 2009

  Forgotten French

  Last October, the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to French novelist J.M.G. Le Clézio, the 13th French writer to win since the award’s inauguration in 1901 and the first to win since avant-garde novelist Claude Simon in 1985.

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• View

  October 2008

  Boogaloo Down Broadway: The Charade of Liberal Change

  Since Barack Obama is talking “change,” everything else must be passé, right? Wrong! In the Democratic Party and the foggy, insular world of paranoia that is today’s left, the boogaloo beat of the jungle tom-toms goes on night and day, just as Cole Porter predicted.

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• View

  August 2002

  The Diner’s Refrain

  With former president Bill Clinton settled into his new headquarters on New York’s 125th Street, in central Harlem, the danger for the culinary crowd is that he may now take to hanging out at Sylvia’s, the famous soul-food restaurant barely three blocks away on Lenox Avenue near 126th.

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• View

  June 2001

  Renaissance Frauds

  Former Vice President Al Gore distinguished himself by a number of colorful claims, including his invention of the internet, his status as inspiration for the plot of Love Story, and his crime-busting investigations that pulled the covers off Love Canal and the villainy of both the internal-combustion engine and flush toilet.

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