Al DiMeola. I’m sorry, but rapid technical flash is pretty vacant without a feel for making music from the heart. Something I wish he’d been able to learn from his bandmate Chick Corea. Al, the watchword should be “Don’t fake the funk!”
Franz Winterhalter. He clearly exhibits the difference between a merely good artist and a great artist. He masterfully captured the luxuriant fabrics and fashions of Empress Eugenia’s court—but his human subjects look as vacant as department store mannequins.
Contrast with how a great artist shows a person: Whistler’s White Girl, a bit rough around the edges, has this undeniable presence that grabs you.
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Thanks for the instructive examples.
Liberace strikes me as someone who practiced a lot to be a great pianist, then he kept practicing, not to play better, but to make it look easy. He can play, and turn his head to face the camera, flash a megawatt smile as if to say “I’m not even trying very hard”. I want my musicians to try hard. I want that Bruce Springsteen style where it looks like you’re pouring your whole body and soul into the music.
I thought of another example. It’s not a performer, it’s a piece of music; Rhapsody in Blue. It’s supposed to be inspired by jazz; loose and relaxed. I have a recording of a modern performance done to the original score and arrangement, for an 18-piece jazz band, I think. It’s fantastic. Unfortunately, it seems like everybody wants to turn it into some grand, full-orchestral piece, and the jazziness gets lost. The L.A. Olympics opening ceremony had a performance on 84 pianos. Why? 84 people, having to play in unison, can’t swing. I heard it done by a sextet in Prague, and they were good players, but I sat there thinking it would have been better if they’d all had a couple glasses of really good Czech beer before the performance.
Mannheimi Vanilli. What a ripoff! Have they no shame? The allusion to Haydn’s Farewell Symphony would have been brilliant if they had been really playing. But what you describe is something out of a David Lynch movie. Specifically, Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. “¡No hay banda!”
Many great singers wrote very few songs, or no songs at all. Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dionne Warwick, Ethel Waters, Tony Bennett, and Dusty Springfield wrote very little. Great singers are great artists regardless of whose songs they perform.
You can say that about the entire “Academic” style that dominated 19th-Century European art. There’s a reason the Impressionists hit the art world like a claymore mine.
To each their own. I think his work is very subtle, but it packs an emotional punch. I saw his latest, the Phoenician Scheme, in the theater last month, and I was crying by the end (and no, not from boredom).
I’d suggest that Liberace’s artistry, such as it was, came from his costumes, his candlelabras, his sequins, his mirrored piano, his personality.
Technically, he was amazing. I remember seeing him on Johnny Carson one night. He played a boogie-woogie number, and if you’ve ever tried to do the same on a piano (and I have), you know that it’s 8 beats to the bar. He did a fine job, but then he turned to the audience and said, “Now I’ll do the same, only in 16.” And he did. And my jaw hit the floor.
If Liberace spent his career in black tie, playing classics, which he easily could have; he would have still have had excellent technique, but there would be no artistry. Not that costumes and such indicate artistry, but the fact that he was willing to experiment with boogie-woogie in 16, and show that it was an effort (and it obviously was), and do it well enough to make it look easy in front of a national TV audience, indicates (to me anyway) that there was some kind of artistry there.
You’re certainly a more sophisticated live music consumer than me. To me that style just looks like a ham hamming it up to eleventy. As cliche as William. … Shatner … Playing … Himself.
At the time I thought it a cute gimmick and assumed they’d been playing for real for the whole concert and at least part of this song and the sound guys had somehow cleverly sequed from live to Memorex mid-tune. Was that my naievete or the truth? I sure don’t know.
In any case, after the lights were up, the musicians came back on stage for bows & applause and the crowd seemed happy overall, not feeling stiffed. As we all filed out and dispersed there was lots of excited chatter form everyone around us.
You’re discounting the possibility he actually captured them perfectly, and they just were that devoid of personality.
Kincade and Malmsteen immediately came to mind when I read the thread title. And I’ve certainly sat through plenty of classical concerts that were artistically brilliant but emotively flat (a lot of Yo-Yo Ma’s stuff hits this way for me).
And I don’t even want to get into Mannheim Steamroller and its spiritual heir the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
I have to say that I rather like the Bela Fleck version. It doesn’t “swing” (I mean, banjos don’t really swing) but it’s got a certain earthiness to it that appeals to me.
I can kind of see your point, but I consider Return to Forever’s Romantic Warrior as one of my favorite albums of all time, largely due to his presence. I also wore out Mad Hatter when it came out. That being said, he did incorporate a few cheesy 70’s licks every once in a while that I found a bit cringe, but that was the disco era.
Remembering that this was a depiction of some very elite people …
If you look at current magazine advertisements of rich goods for rich people, and especially rich women, you’ll find the models are made up until their faces are clearly unnatural masks. And the poses and facial expressions adopted generally denote something between haughty detachment and subtly sneering disdain for the world around them. Which in an ordinary person are generally not seen as attractive expressions.
None of that is by accident and the advertisers know that look works to attract the kinds of people who actually can / will buy their goods.
I will suggest that Winterhalter knew exactly how those courtiers wanted to be seen. And in fact they’d made themselves up to look as much like a living mannequin as then-current makeup & hairstyle tech allowed. He just “airbrushed” them to be better than real for the realism of their day and station. To widespread acclaim by his target audience: the people so depicted. The ones who could commission additional works by him.
Bob Ross is an interesting one. Here’s the thing, Ross essentially did fantasy art. The paintings he did on his tv show looked like landscape paintings, but make no mistake, he wasn’t looking at light dappled vistas out the studio window or looking at photographs of nature scenes. He was making those scenes up off the top of his head. Ross was teaching a painting technique called ‘alla prima’ where he put wet paint on wet paint. It allows an artist to produce a painting in a matter of minutes where hours or days would be required if waiting for paint to dry was involved. Ross didn’t invent the technique, merely popularized it. As far as subject matter goes, he may have made scenes up out of whole cloth, but really he simply combined groupings of natural elements together that one sees repeatedly in landscape paintings. So…let’s put a pond in the forefront…then we’ll put the setting sun in the upper left corner and add some clouds near it….now let’s put a cluster of trees on the right hand side…next let’s add a small cottage in the distance…
Neither original nor creative. Definitely deserved a mention on this thread.
Or as Ella Fitzgrald put it: Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”
Another example is Linda Ronstadt (although she did write a few songs herself, her artistry is in her performance of others’ tunes).
mmm
ETA: Intended as a reply to @Cardigan two posts up and his thoughts on Bob Ross.
Once photography existed and painting was no longer predominantly seen as a form of archiving the real world around us, that opened up a lot of room.
The nature of a lot of art after then isn’t to paint that tree, but rather a plausible tree. The tree succeeds or fails in the eye of the viewer on authenticity, not accuracy.
Ross lived on that recognition. Each of his elements were beleivable examples of [whatever]. A bit telegraphic / sketchy, but that is the nature of oil painting with a 1/4"+ width brush.
Where his compositions failed or at least fell short was at the macro level: trees and craggy mountains and a stream and a pond and some clouds and a sun and … The “Bob Ross look” was a pastiche of a few too many overly dramatic elements. Any one of which could plausibly be found in the real world, but almost certainly not all together.
There was a famous landscape painter of the 1800s during the opening of the US West who was (in)famous for exquisitely rendered but similarly exaggerated scenes of the West’s majestic beauty. Every scene looked like Eden or Arcadia; just too perfect and stuffed like a turducken with excess drama. I was thinking it was Frederic Remington, but just now looking at samples of his work, IMO that’s not him. Anyone?
Jascha Heifetz. A virtuoso violinist without question, but with a tendency toward the cold and mechanical.
Any number of candidates can be found from the Hudson River School. Albert Bierstadt was probably the most prominent.