It doesn’t happen often, but periodically an artist emerges who can say great things in more than one art form.
Leonard Bernstein, for instance, wrote brilliant musical theater and sparkling prose (“The Joy of Music,” “Six Talks at Harvard”); James Thurber penned hilarious short stories and acerbic cartoons.
Considering the degree of intellect and creativity that Woody Allen has brought to his films for roughly three decades, one might think that he, too, would be just the sort of towering figure whose talents could not be contained by a single art form. But Allen’s shortcomings as a musician, shown all too clearly in the new documentary “Wild Man Blues,” reveal a great deal about the gifts required for an artist to flourish in more than one idiom — and the embarrassments that can occur without them.
As any Allen devotee knows, for years the revered film director played his clarinet Monday nights in Michael’s Pub, in Manhattan, where he fronted a traditional New Orleans jazz band (after that club closed, he moved his act to The Cafe Carlyle). He has been so committed to his music, in fact, that when his film “Annie Hall” won four Academy Awards — including one for Best Director, in 1977 — Allen skipped the ceremony and held onto his night gig (though he never has been a fan of the Oscars). Newspapers across the country the next day ran photos of Allen happily tootling his horn while Hollywood sang his praises.
Until Friday’s release of “Wild Man Blues,” one could have considered Allen’s musical life a mere diversion — the fellow has meant to do nothing more than amuse himself and any listeners who wished to indulge him. But in the film, which documents a European tour by Allen and his New Orleans Jazz Band, Allen steps onto some artistically thin ice — and plunges through it.
At first, however, the signs are more encouraging. The film, directed by Barbara Kopple (whose crew followed Allen and entourage throughout the tour), shows Allen early on acknowledging that the clarinet is merely “a hobby of mine.” On the plane trip to Europe, Allen voices his self-doubts more explicitly, in conversation with his then-girlfriend (now wife) Soon-Yi Previn and his sister, Letty Aronson.
“A big problem is that I’m not a sufficient enough musician to hold (the listeners’) interest,” laments Allen in his classic, self-deprecating mode. “If you have a concert, and you have a real artist out there who can play — if this was, you know, a Sidney Bechet or John Coltrane, then just to hear them play, you don’t need anything else, they’re endlessly creative and great. But that doesn’t obtain here. This has a different quality to it.”
Indeed, as the footage of Allen’s performances in Europe quickly demonstrates, it would be an exaggeration to call Allen even a talented amateur. His pinched and often shrill tone, wobbly vibrato, wrong notes, limited technique and inability to genuinely improvise point to an individual who may love music but who has no real flair for creating it.
Still, the man has a right to perform for anyone willing to pay to hear him, and judging by the film, audiences from Milan to London couldn’t wait for the opportunity. So far, so good — until Allen begins to speak about jazz (his own and others’), revealing how little respect for the art form he really holds.
“There is nothing between you and the pure feeling of the playing — there is no cerebral element to it at all,” he says, an astonishing statement on at least two counts.
First, genuine musicians working in any jazz style bring considerable cerebral powers to every phrase they play. In fact, it is the specific choices of pitch, harmony, rhythm and color that distinguish the amateurs from the pros, the mediocrities from the visionaries.
Worse, does Allen truly believe that early New Orleans jazz musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Joe “King” Oliver, Jimmie Noone and the like brought “no cerebral element” to their work? If so, then Allen has failed to comprehend the genius of early recorded solos by all the aforementioned musicians. The miracle of their work lies, in part, in the intellectual depth that these musicians brought to meticulously conceived solos, despite the comparatively simple harmonies and phrase structures of the period.
As the audience adulation intensifies during the course of the tour, the man’s opinion of his own musicmaking skyrockets.
“We sounded great last night,” he says in Geneva. “I mean, we really sounded like one of those bands. I don’t think Preservation Hall would have done any better last night.”
Allen refers, of course, to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, a New Orleans outfit that was formed in the 1960s and, in its early days, featured first-generation jazz musicians such as trumpeter Percy Humphrey and his brother, clarinetist Willie (both of whom have since died).
For Allen to compare his playing — or even that of the capable, professional musicians backing him — to Preservation Hall musicians suggests that the man does not hear the sounds coming out of his horn. Comments such as these, in tandem with dubious musicmaking, place Allen firmly in the realm of the ambitious dilettante.
That’s a pity, for Allen — more than any recent director, with the possible exception of Clint Eastwood — has gone to great lengths to make jazz and swing music integral to the tone and texture of his films. The glorious Gershwin tunes that form the sonic backdrop for “Manhattan” (1979), the Dick Hyman arrangements that glisten in Allen films such as “Radio Days” (1987) and the classic songs that drive “Everyone Says I Love You” (1997) speak well for the man’s musical tastes.
So why does Allen feign the part of a musician throughout his European tour and “Wild Man Blues” (its title is a reference to a famous composition by Morton and Armstrong)? That’s open to speculation, though some might conclude that Allen allowed Kopple to film him in Europe in the hopes of repairing a public image tattered by his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn (the adopted daughter of former Allen companion Mia Farrow). Certainly the brief, on-camera interviews with audience members who gush about Allen’s musical abilities lend credence to the point.
But there may be something deeper at work here. Allen’s music represents a kind of artistic alternative to the work that made him famous — an escape into another world of expression.
That would be fine if the artist in question had had the good sense to keep his private doodlings from public view. Unfortunately, Allen and many more had the hubris to bring their hobbies out of the closet and the clout to display them to the world. Meanwhile, some audiences — hungry for any morsel from their heroes in a celebrity-driven culture — gobble up virtually any product tossed their way.
Moonlighting artists such as Allen are not Renaissance men on the order of Bernstein or Thurber.
By daring to present themselves as if they were, they prove that outside a very specific artistic arena, they are mere mortals like the rest of us.
