January 2011

The Museum of Modern Art/Abrams, 208 pages .

The curators who assembled this hook and the exhibition it complements gathered strong, classic photographs of politicos at work—making speeches, getting heckled, holding generations of babies, enjoying moments of relative quiet. The black-and-white plates begin with John Quincy Adams in 1843 and proceed through to the ascendance of Bill Clinton, with intervening views of everyone from Fiorello La Guardia in firefighting gear to President Calvin Coolidge, Gov. Al Smith, and New York City’s Mayor Jimmy Walker all in Native American headdresses. The Socialist leader Norman Thomas stands under a hail of hecklers’ eggs and vegetables; Thomas Dewey, in his suit and tie, handles a cow’s underbelly.

by John W. Reps, with modern photographs from the air by Alex MacLean, University of Missouri Press, 342 pages.

This book tours Mississippi river cities of the nineteenth century from New Orleans to St. Cloud, Minnesota, as captured in bird’s-eye views by traveling artists beginning in the 183Os. All of Hannibal, Missouri, lies packed onto its square plain in one early lithograph; in others the white stone riverfronts of Memphis and Vicksburg look perfectly Venetian. In this beautiful collection, prints, perspective maps, panoramas, town plans, and written observations accompany the aerial views to create a memorable impression of early life on the river. The text chapters work chronologically, even as the scores of pictures follow the river from town to town.

directed by Charlotte Zwerin, Warner Home Video, 90 mins.

The special character of this portrait of the bebop piano genius Thelonious Monk is clear from its opening seconds. As the rest of his jazz quartet performs a slow blues, Monk performs an odd, slow spin onstage before sitting down to play something disjointedly melodic. He is slack-jawed at the sound he makes, and so will you be, for the music in this documentary is truly haunting. The filmmakers lucked into a substantial amount of unseen black-and-white footage of Monk shot in the sixties, and they have arranged their documentary around these candid moments.

Monk is the most enigmatic of the revolutionaries who changed jazz in the forties and fifties; we see him muttering during a recording session, joking at the Village Vanguard, dozing on a plane, and playing the piano with off-kilter certainty in baggy suits, raincoats, dark glasses, phony spectacles, and a wide array of cool hats. “Do your caps influence your music?” a Danish reporter asks him. “I don’t know,” says Monk. “Maybe.”

A&E Home Video, 50 minutes each: “Mount Rushmore” “Empire State Building” “Grand Coulee Dam” “Panama Canal”

The Arts & Entertainment cable-TV channel recently aired these four stories of great works of American engineering. Two of the projects—the Grand Coulee Dam and the Panama Canal—were backed from the first by popular Presidents. The others, one of the world’s great sculptures and its then tallest building, began as local efforts that gradually acquired national symbolism. Mount Rushmore started as a scheme to lure vacationers to the byways of South Dakota, but the sculptor its backers enlisted, Gutzon Borglum, was such a dreamer he even wanted to carve Presidents’ complete torsos and a fivehundred-word statement about America.

directed and written by Melissa Peltier, A&E Home Video, 4 hours, boxed set .

“To my mind, the world of today woke April 15, 1912,” wrote the Titanic survivor Jack Thayer, quoted in this ambitious and absorbing four-part documentary about what remains the century’s most shocking disaster. The story of the great doomed liner emerges from living witnesses and historians of the tragedy, and over the film’s four hours the fascination only grows. The idea for the ship was dreamed up over after-dinner brandy by the White Star line’s owner, J. Bruce Ismay; its construction took four years. For the few easy days of its maiden voyage from Southampton, in April 1912, the Titanic ruled the seas as the biggest, most elegant liner in the world.

St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin, conductor, RCA Victor Red Seal 09026-61699-2 (one CD) .

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Neeme J․rvi, conductor, Chandos 9253 (one CD) .

If America’s musical legacy seems deficient anywhere, it’s in nineteenth-century works in the European classical tradition. Well, here’s an 189Os symphony better than you probably thought any American ever composed. Chadwick was born in Massachusetts in 1854 and trained at the New England Conservatory; he is said to have been an influence on Dvorák, but unlike that composer, he wanted little to do with Native American and black folk music. Nonetheless, his music is anything but stuffy; the symphony is cheerfully energetic and optimistic-sounding, a bit like Brahms here and Dvorák there, and all-American in its expansiveness. It couldn’t ask for a better introduction to modern listeners than this engaging recording.

I did find it interesting that one of the things that I would consider to be in the top five for effecting change in the last forty years was not emphasized. This is the air conditioner. My family is from Oklahoma, so obviously the change air conditioners made in the Sun Belt is rather obvious to me. However, the air conditioner also affected American education and American politics as well as the national state of mind. Washington, D.C., I believe, changed incredibly. What was in effect a Southern town has been converted to a Northern one through air conditioning.

Cincinnati Philharmonia Orchestra, Gerhard Samuel, conductor, C. C.M. Percussion Ensemble and Chamber Choir, Centaur CRC 2205 (one CD) .

The Cleveland Orchestra, Christoph von Dohn․nyi, conductor, London 443 172-2 (one CD) .

Nina Deutsch, Piano, VoxBox CDX 5089 (two CDs) .