Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

 Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is only partially a movie about music, but the music is excellent (Branford Marsalis composed/arranged most of it), and the blues really speak to me, though I'm about as white, racially and culturally, as you can get (well, not quite, since some people don't think Jews are white). It's based on a play by August Wilson, and was probably better on the stage than on screen. On the stage you expect scenes and dialogue to be artificial, but in film you expect less talk and more natural situations. Despite its artificiality, I'm very glad I saw the movie.

The actor who played Ma Rainey, Viola Davis, was extraordinary both as a singer (I assume she really sang, but maybe I was fooled) and an actor, completely convincing. After the movie, Netflix screened a trailer with the actors and production staff speaking about the movie and what it meant to them, and that was more interesting than the film. It was a pleasure to hear intelligent, articulate African-Americans talk about what the music meant to them. I have to admit I was surprised to hear Taylour Paige, a beautiful young woman, who plays a nutty slut in the movie, speak with cogency when she was interviewed for the trailer. She played the role so convincingly, I forgot she was an actor!

I intend to listen to more of Ma Rainey. I am, of course, familiar with Bessie Smith, her successor as queen of the blues, and I've listened a lot to the Louis Armstrong performances recorded in the late 1920s. I have always marveled that oppressed and exploited people managed to find and express so much joy in music,

What Can You Do About a Genius?

Recently the Carmel Quartet, an excellent Israeli string quartet, gave a concert, with commentary by the violist, Yoel Greenberg, who is a professor of musicology as well as a fine performer. The concert consisted of two string quartets: one by Fanny Mendelssohn and the other by Felix, composed after her untimely and unexpected death. Yoel's commentary was so interesting to me that I started reading Mendelssohn and his World. I had long known that according to the late musicologist, Charles Rosen, Mendelssohn was the most gifted child prodigy in the history of Western music. By all accounts, Felix was a universal musical genius: composer, pianist, and conductor. He was also a gifted painter and knew a lot of languages. Fortunately for him, he was raised in a family that appreciated and encouraged his gifts, and was wealthy enough to provide him with every possible opportunity.

Reading about Mendelssohn's talents and intelligence, and his many accomplishments in a short life, I wonder why I bother playing music at all. But then I remind myself that Mendelssohn could not have done without the merely excellent musicians who performed his works. You don't have to be a genius to play violin in an orchestra, just very, very good. And, even more obviously, you don't have to be a genius to enjoy the music written and performed by geniuses (and merely excellent musicians).