O song, what will become of me when spring
brings its sweet renewals, every part
of heaven down-raining love on all the earth,
if, in this frozen dearth,
love, that spares all the rest, still wrings my heart?- Dante, Canzone XI, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers
Hullo, all. I'm not exactly out of my cave, but poking my head through the entrance now and then.
My winter? A glimpse of it over
at chrysanthemum.
One of my favorite revelations from Nat Hentoff's
At the Jazz Band Ball is chapter 34, which is devoted to "The Jewish Soul of Willie 'The Lion' Smith." I haven't listened to the show yet, but
this NPR writeup covers the basics of Smith's music career. Hentoff zooms in on a memory of seeing Willie's business card, which was printed in English and Hebrew -- which Hentoff later discovers is not "Willie's antic wit at play" but a manifestation of the pianist's Judaism, which included a bar mitzvah in Newark, a stint as a cantor in Harlem, and being fluent enough in Hebrew to become irate at a guest singer. From page 173:
Once Duke [Ellington] said to me: "You ever heard an Irish woman sing 'Eli, Eli'?"
"No."
"You're going to hear it."
I've forgotten her name, but she was Irish and I could never figure the tongue she was singing the number in, because it sure wasn't Hebrew. She would sing "Eli, Eli" (O Lord, why has thou forsaken me?), but I got in a fight with her because I told her she shouldn't be singing the song if she didn't know what the words meant. I talked Jewish to her but she didn't understand a thing.
An unexpected benefit of becoming interested in The Lion's story was finding his biography in
Harlem Renaissance Lives via GoogleBooks, which led me to the realization that the book also contained
my essay on Frederick Ashbury Cullen. A new item for the brag shelf and resume! (The piece was written for hire for
a larger project, which is
still soliciting writers for the online edition...)