Inverted Garden

Irwin Corey stars at the Vanguard's Birthday Bash

Last night, New York's jazz elite gathered to toast 75 years of that quirky basement space at 178 Seventh Avenue South known as the Village Vanguard. The assembled included impresarios (Anzic's Colin Negrych, festival kingpin George Wein), writers (Gary Giddins, Ashley Kahn, Ben Ratliff), radio hosts (Phil Schapp, Josh Jackson), and, of course, musicians (Paul Motian, Jimmy Heath, Ravi Coltrane, Bill Charlap, Anat Cohen). The event was decidedly low-key—trays of ribs and wings for dinner, Lester Young records instead of live entertainment—which was fitting: even as the Vanguard has become the "Carnegie Hall of jazz" its retained the traces of its Village speakeasy roots. (That's "speakeasy" as in "illegal joint that serves swill to drunkard poets" rather than "trendy bar that serves cocktails to bankers, PR bunnies, and hipsters.")

The highlight of the night may have been an impromptu (and brief) stand-up routine by "Professor" Irwin Corey (pictured), an irreverent 95-year-old comedian who was a frequent Carson guest and a one-time presidential nominee (the 1960 Playboy ticket). While the Vanguard crew tried to fix the sound on a short documentary assembled by Deborah Gordon (the club's crown princess), Corey shuffled to the front and began to rant. I couldn't make out a word he said, but he clearly relished hamming it up like it was, oh, say, 1942.

Gary Giddins talks shop

One the rare occasions when critics get interviewed, they’re usually asked to weigh in on their subject of expertise, but hardly ever asked to discuss their craft. Charlie Rose will call on David Denby to talk about the top movies of the year, for instance, but Rose won’t ask Denby the kinds of probing questions about “process” that he would of a novelist or filmmaker. Modern critics, by and large, have been lumped into the opinion category alongside “talking heads," far beneath their august cousins in the arts. Many critics deserve this treatment—they’re shouting hacks or preening pundits—but a subset has always ranked among out best writers and deserve a more open forum to discuss their work.

That’s why I was so happy to see this lengthy interview with jazz critic Gary Giddins on the very worthwhile (and somewhat mysterious) website, Big Think (shorter clips from the interview are here). Giddins is the most prominent active jazz critic, having covered the music for 30 years at the Village Voice before transitioning to a life of occasional New Yorker essays and books on jazz history. Given Giddins’s forty-year jazz immersion, I figured he’d spend the interview talking about, well, jazz; but, much to my delight, he spends it talking about his bigger passion: writing.

Throughout the interview, especially in its first half, Giddins sets out to correct the notion that a critic is primarily an expert on his subject. A critic is a writer first, Giddins says, and an expert decidedly second. “I think all of us begin as writers,” he says, “you pick a subject that allows you to express yourself as a writer.” Listening to the music is important of course, Giddins adds, but the key to being a good critic is to “read voraciously” and to read “classic criticism.” It’s all common sense stuff, but it’s reassuring to hear a big-time critic state that he’s no musicologist and that his authority comes not from his grasp of music theory but from his capacity to describe music with precision and clarity.

Dispatch from the vocation of unhappiness: One of the most popular videos on Big Think is a clip from an interview with novelist John Irving entitled “Advice to Aspiring Novelists: Don’t Shoot Yourself.” That would be mildly depressing, but more depressing (and more deliciously ironic) is that Irving offers no such advice. He tells aspiring novelists that, if he were in their shoes, he might very well shoot himself.