BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Let’s face it: you’d be hard-pressed to find a friend who doesn’t enjoy dressing up in ’20s garb. Dresses that flow with lengthy tassels, hair accessories boasting beads and feathers, or suspenders for that old-time look? Never was there a more stylish period.
Now that we’ve got that settled, you can start planning your fancy outfit for Echoes of the Jazz Age. The event at the City Recital Hall unites pianist Simon Tedeschi with actors John Bell and Blazey Best to return to the ’20s of a century ago.
The event is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay of the same name, and explores the Jazz Age of the 1920s. Here’s what Simon has to say about this incredible (and incredibly stylish) era.
Simon, great to chat with you. With Iron in the Blood having just taken place (based on the book The Fatal Shore), the City Recital Hall is really celebrating all things literature as we open the new decade. Tell me what the essay Echoes of the Jazz Age means to you, and why you wanted to present a performance based on literature.
John [Bell] and I had already performed two shows based on the intersection of literature and music: Bright Star, based on Keats/Schubert; and Enoch Arden, by Tennyson/Strauss. It was John’s idea to take this formula further, to America. I am known for playing Gershwin and both of us love American writing, so it felt like a great fit.
Echoes of the Jazz Age feels to me like a kind of emergence into the hyper-modern world we know and love: a world of different nationalities, cultures, views, and paradigms all buzzing with a sense of newness and optimism. It was this land of the free — the home to so many immigrants and their songs, poems, and stories that they brought with them to retain a sense of their homelands — that encapsulated America.
Then, of course, there is the dark side of the United States and the Jazz Age — the immense suffering of African-American people, itself an incubus for some of the greatest music ever written.
This event features some fantastic works from the true greats of the Jazz Age. How did you curate the music on this program?
Intuitively. There was no way we could possibly present anything resembling a comprehensive portrait of the mechanised madness that was the early 20th-Century USA — nor did we want to turn this into a lecture — so we went with our ears rather than our intellects.
John’s original idea — a superb one — was that our guiding force or thread should be Fitzgerald’s essay on the Jazz Age and thus, the music chosen by me was akin to being a cook: I had to choose the right ingredients from the right foods, as opposed to a smorgasbord.
I recently watched you in a wonderful video in which you talk about the differences between jazz and classical music styles. Why is it that you like crossing into both paths? It’s more common to choose one performance style!
Because I feel it’s the duty of every artist to remain curious and open to different forms, in the same way that I love Renaissance art but also some aspects of abstract expressionism.
In the last 50 years, jazz has become an ‘art music’ as much as any symphony, and the conversation between classical and jazz forms has been integral to both for well over a century.
I am by no means the first classical pianist who likes jazz — Andre Previn being one example. After all, Bernstein’s own dictum was that there is no such thing as high or low music — just good and bad (and there is plenty of bad music).
Nowadays, most great jazz players are accomplished classical players (Keith Jarrett, Brad Mehldau), and the movement to be adept as a classical musician who can also improvise has been growing steadily since the 1970s after a long break since late Romantic times. Gunther Schuller was the big groundbreaker there.
Beyond the way you cross into different styles of music, your Echoes of the Jazz Age also contains another artform altogether: acting. You team up with John Bell quite a lot. How come?
I am most certainly not an actor, but as anyone who has attended my recitals will know, I enjoy speaking to the audience about what the music means to me as a person and pianist. I simply see this show as being an extension of that.
I leave the true acting to the masters like John. In this show, there is some scope for me to adopt a character of sorts, but really, it is just me having a good time and imbuing the performance with the same sense of drama that I do in any concert.
Whenever a musician gets on stage, they are always acting, in a sense. Otherwise, I’d just be doing the show in my tracksuit.
Blazey Best will now be hitting up the stage with you, too. What’s her role in the show?
Blazey, as well as singing, will be channelling some of the most brilliant and outrageous female performers and personalities in American history. A true actor, like John, she has many hats to juggle, and does it effortlessly.
So, talk us through this concert. What are you putting together for us?
The thread will be Fitzgerald’s essay on the Jazz Age. With this as the narrative, the three of us will explore the highs of idealism and the lows of nihilism that punctuated this fascinating period in history.
There will be poetry, humour, ego, one-liners, naughtiness, sadness and nostalgia. There will be music by Gershwin, Joplin, and Fats Waller as well as poetry by Eliot.
It’ll be a snapshot of this age that in many ways can only be shown, not described.
Beyond the music and quotes, how will this concert educate its audience about what life was like in the 1920s?
Both me and John try not to educate as much as to illustrate. I tend to get tired of shows that are too didactic and don’t appeal to the imagination of the audience. That said, one learns the most from breadth and colour, both of which I feel this show has.
In one Mencken quote or one line of Eliot, one can epitomise the high drama of an age in which change was itself changing. This is what I feel this show — admirably crafted by John — does.
Could you have survived in the Jazz Age?
I believe so, as this was a time when artists were glorified, especially in the United States. However, my relatives wanted to escape Europe to a place even further away from their homelands — so they chose Australia. But of course, in any time, one sees both good and bad, and artists are usually at the forefront of both — their work distills the extremes of society.
As this concert is themed ’20s, what do you think our generation’s ’20s holds?
My constant hope is that art — fine art — remains a dominant force in society, despite all the efforts to scream it down with noise and populism. At this time in society, we face unique challenges that the Jazz Age, even though it was seemingly so long ago, was a portent to.
Human beings have such capacity to create miraculous art, but it is also our intelligence that sometimes can be so destructive. In many ways, the challenges of the Jazz Age mirror our one — we are faced with changes that affect the very fabric of humanity and our planet.
Even though art is not necessary for life, it is necessary to a satisfying life. I think that classical music, literature, jazz music, visual art, and film play a vital role in a society that is, increasingly, becoming wholly automated and polarised.
See Echoes of the Jazz Age on February 6 at the City Recital Hall.
Images supplied
