Snowbound with Ferrante and Teicher

Today to Howard's and my astonishment we sold the second record in a week from our record shop on Etsy, The Old House Downtown.

We sold a lot over Christmas but after Christmas Day you would think it would die down, the world not being privy to the fact that Christmas actually extends until Candlemas which is Feb. 2.

Perhaps the world is privy to the fact!

One record we sold had a Christmas theme, sort of. It was Ferrante and Teicher's "Snowbound."

That video is all well and good however the art is distorted. The record cover in reality is beautiful.

I will tell you one thing, listening to that YouTube recording I am bitterly regretting selling that record.

"Snowbound ... we're snowbound ...." That is amazing. Alas, the record I sold looked so perfect that I did not want to listen to it and maybe scratch it or something.

Anyway, now I am hoping.

Perhaps people are celebrating Christmas into January!

Perhaps they still have their trees lighted, as I do, and they were listening.

We have the art store on Etsy and that is the one I have been paying the most attention to. But I would like to make the record store a success too. On account of it can dovetail with the book about Leonard Pennario. If I run the world's most successful record shop that adds to my cred.

I will tell you one thing, I have learned a lot from being a record dealer. That was how I thought of it when I worked for The Buffalo News. I would leave after a long day at work and then remember my alter ego, as a record dealer. It was fun to switch gears.

And you learn a ton dealing in records. I love Capitol Records because that was Leonard's label, and face it, it was the coolest label. Founded by Johnny Mercer, need we say more?

But I also love the other labels at the time and the records they made. When I list one I will look up information about the artists involved, and the artists who designed the covers -- because of all my years at The Buffalo News, I learned to turn over rocks. You learn so much. When a big album of Leonard's came out, it is fascinating to see the world it entered. Who else was recording what. What else was going on.

Records are the greatest. I wish I had kept "Snowbound"!

Sleepless at the computer

A lot of today went into working on my Leonard Pennario project.

Come heck or high water I am going to have it done and out by this fall. I will have something out by then anyway. It might be more than one volume.

There is one thing I can do that always gets me psyched and that is listen to him. Today I tapped into Pennario performing the Rachmaninoff Second. 

The only trouble is, it is amazing and distracts me.

Just the opening chords. Did any other pianist get them perfect like that? Every one builds on the one before, so perfectly.

Pennario!!

He is just so great!

Well, I got through some work anyway. I should mention this work began at 5 a.m. I was up early! I could not sleep and so I got up.

May I say that sleepless that I was I managed to work for two hours without spilling coffee all over the computer keyboard as Howard did this morning when he sat down at it after a full night's sleep. You should see me trying to type this now. Not pretty!

While Howard was working on his stuff and spilling hs coffee I went for a walk in the park to wake up. The sun was out!

There are worse times to do editing, which is pretty much what this has come down to, than when you have not had much sleep. You are a little impatient and tend to cut stuff more willingly than when you have slept soundly. Do not worry however. It is like clothes bound for Amvets. They sit in the car trunk for a few days to give me time to reconsider.

Things that are deleted may always return.

In the meantime things are going well. It helps not working this huge job, you know? You have a little more time to think. Also, I have to say this, I love to write about music. I love to draw too, and I do not have to cut that out, I cannot. But I can do both.

Speaking of music and art is that not a dandy portrait of Pennario on the cover of that album?

The maestro!

I can hardly wait for the book!

Ich backe - I bake!

Yikes, almost all I did all day was cook and bake!

My friend Lizzie posted something about baking on Facebook that has stuck with me. It was some joke going around and the punch line was "Procrasti-baking." That is baking when you are supposed to be doing something else. We have all been known to do that!

Everyone except my sister Katie who for some reason -- get this! -- does not like baking. Imagine that! I cannot. She must be the only person in the world who does not like baking. It is unimaginable.

But whether or not I like baking I have to do it on Saturday because Sunday is the church coffee hour. And that is my ministry. It is my donation. I bake.

The Prince of Wales' motto is "Ich dien." I serve.

I want a German motto too! Mine could be "Ich backe." I bake.

Hmmm. The pianist Wilhelm Backhaus, whose Beethoven I love, his name must mean bakery. Bill Bakery.

Bakery should be my last name!

Today I made blueberry muffins, utilizing my historic Buffalo George Urban muffin tins. And spice muffins, a bigger size because I do not like everything on the buffet looking alike.

I also made banana bread from bananas that my friend Lizzie left with me when she had to fly down to Florida a few days ago. Haha, that was funny. Because Lizzie had had these bananas for weeks and kept talking about them. She was going to make chocolate chip banana bread because our friend Oscar likes that, and she was going to make normal banana bread, and then there was a loaf that she made that did not turn out to meet her extremely high standards, and --

And then, you guessed it. I was taking Lizzie to the airport and what did she toss into my trunk? The bananas. I just burst out laughing. After all that!

So, banana bread. What else? I also made a pumpkin cranberry bread with pumpkin I had frozen a couple of months ago. It is autumn's last gasp before we head into the -- hurrah! -- Easter season. And I made Whiskey Squash Cake in my Bundt pan. That sounds rather decadent for Lent but though it is delicious -- I have made it many times, with different twists -- it is really not that boozy.

I also made soup. The kitchen was alive with both Crock Pots and the bread machine all in play. And in between I took care of some Leonard Pennario correspondence with Capitol Records. But that also is a story for another day.

So I guess the entire day was not baking after all. I did get some other stuff done.

It was not all Procrast-Baking!

Concerto at Amvets

One of the many highlights of my week was finding Leonard Pennario's Grieg and Rachmaninoff record. He plays Grieg's Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Erich Leinsdorf and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

I found the record at Amvets!

That is it pictured at the top. Study the picture so you will know this record if you see it. But you will not! It is a rare score.

You never find Pennario records at thrift shops, not even his best-selling "Concerto Under the Stars." People hold on to these records. As Howard said they are heirlooms.

And the beautiful thing was, I had stopped into Amvets after work, to chill before I got home. That is a strategy I have had for years. Other people have it too by the way. I always see people in office clothes, walking around looking at stuff, just unwinding.

One woman in office clothes, we got talking a few weeks ago by the cake pans. She was trying to decide between one Bundt pan and another. One was a style I had had my eye on, and I explained to her why it was superior.

Then she bought it! And she went away all happy and beaming. And I was thinking, Why did I talk her into buying that pan??

I wanted that pan!

Oh well, I do not need another cake pan.

But I always need another Pennario record! And it was funny, before finding the record the other day, I had been stressed out, antisocial. I had even been on the fence about staying in Amvets another five minutes. And suddenly everything changed.

In the checkout line I realized: It changes you to be holding a Leonard Pennario record. You become graceful and smart and inspired and you smile.

That is a wonderful thing to happen to you.

And for just 99 cents!

Rhapsody at Amvets

I went to Amvets over the weekend. It could not be helped! I walked in looking for something sensible but I wound up heading inexorably toward the records.

Amvets has something like 100 boxes of records, lying around on the floor and on tables. Looking through all of them is a task of Biblical proportions, like looking through all the grains of sand by the sea. The impossibility of the task makes it relaxing to flip through one box, then another box. There is always the hope you will find something great.

I did find great things this time around. One of which was Pennario's "Gershwin By Starlight" ...

... in its later re-release on Angel.

It is rare to find any Pennario at thrift shops and this is an especially great find because No. 1 I did not have it and also because in my obsessive reworking of this biography I was at exactly the point where this record appeared. Also this weekend brought this Gershwin concert at the Buffalo Philharmonic.

When I got home, I wanted to put the record right on the hi-fi, but I hesitated, this will sound dumb but it was because the cat was sick. He is fine now -- but he was not then, and he was asleep and I did not want this big brash Gershwin to come pouring out and wake him up.

Meanwhile, because I had a yen to hear this, I got on YouTube out of curiosity to see if any of these performances had been posted. It was silly because I had checked very recently.

And lo! A couple of them had! One was this tremendous take on the Second Rhapsody.



 These clips had been posted just this weekend!

It is funny when things line up like this. I said to myself: "I think he wants me to listen to his Gershwin."

Ya think?

Record haul

At Amvets the other day I bought so many records that they had to bend their No Carts in the Parking Lots rule for me. They let me bring a cart to my car. They had pity on me!

The reason being, I fell victim to Great Men of Music.

That is this Time/Life series put out in the 1970s. That is a picture of them up above! They are big colorful box sets, each devoted to a different composer. And at Amvets, there was a big bunch of a dozen in a box, and I was drawn to them because they looked in such pristine condition. Then I kept finding more Great Men of Music nearby. Also the record prices at Amvets are the best of any thrift store, in my not so humble opinion.

The recordings are good, although on the Internet you find nerds arguing over the sound quality and such. This particular series uses EMI recordings so you would think they would include a Pennario recording or two but I will not hold my breath, I will tell you that right now. Pennario is always forgotten and shoved aside, fie on people's ignorance.

But here is the thing. My friend Gary hipped me to the idea that you buy box sets like these for their booklets.

The booklets are generous and well written and they include pictures you rarely find anywhere else. For instance one of these booklets is where Gary found his picture of Debussy fallen asleep after dinner with an empty bottle of wine in front of him and a woman in a turban next to him. I have the Debussy set of Great Men of Music....

... and  I will have to check to see if that picture is in there.

It is kind of a Collect Them All situation. There are something like 30 Great Men Of Music and I have something like 18.

The search is on!

Record highs

What with all the other exciting things going on I forgot to say how I celebrated Black Friday. TGIBF! That is what Howard wrote on Facebook that day.

I went record shopping!

I spent $20 for 40 records. Something like that. The records at Goodwill are 50 cents each.

It is a funny thing about records. My record player and records make me feel so hip. One thing is, my nieces were over on Thanksgiving. One of them is 15 and the other is I think 11. They are the prettiest and most stylish little girls in the world but all they care about at my house is the record player.

They have organized all my records and they go and select a few of them and they want to play them. Then I have to coach them through getting the temperamental record player going. It is a challenge sometimes but that is part of the fun. And the thing always does work.

This is my cute Sputnik record player we are talking about, that I bought memorably in the far reaches of Tonawanda -- remember, when I walked in and the stereo was playing Pennario's Chopin waltzes.

I used to keep the stereo in the front room ...

... but now it is in a new location in the living room where we can all get at it better.

The nieces went and found a stack of Christmas records. They chose one of the Firestone records, with Julie Andrew. And the classic Sinatra Christmas album. And the Vince Guaraldi Charlie Brown Christmas.

After that I got to appreciating my record player all over again and later on, as I was doing the dishes, I played Placido Domingo's '80s era Christmas album. One side is really good, with "O Holy Night" and "I'll Be Home For Christmas." My dad used to say about Lauritz Melchior singing show tunes, "He sounded as if he could eat the song." That is what Placido Domingo sounds like in "I'll Be Home For Christmas." These Wagnerian tenors! I am telling you.

Now we are all on a vinyl kick. My mother made me move her record player so she could get at it better. We put it on a table by the window.

My friend Michelle came over and we drank wine and listened to Carmen Dragon's great Capitol Records Christmas album.



Then we opened another bottle and listened to the Roger Wagner Chorale.



The Roger Wagner Chorale rocked!

I know I am jumping the gun on Christmas music by the whole of Advent but sometimes that cannot be helped.

Now Michelle wants a record player. We are going to look around and find her a dandy one. Except Howard says it will be difficult because no matter which one we find we will want to keep it. Plus I will have to find her extra copies of the Carmen Dragon and Roger Wagner Chorale Christmas albums.

Vinyl fever!

It is catching!

Into the vaults

Yikes, I fell behind over the weekend and am going to have to do some catch-up again. The last two weeks have been mayhem with the book and with work but the next couple weeks should be more on an even keel.

One thing I did recently was call Capitol Records. They have some of Leonard Pennario's recordings still in the vaults and I wanted to inquire about them. I am at the point as I craft my, ahem, masterpiece when I am working on tying up a lot of loose ends. 

It was funny because this guy I reached, it sounded as if he was not used to getting phone calls. He answered in a way that made you think he was hiding something. That is the way you behave when you are answering the phone in a vault! Once I worked in Manufacturers and Traders Trust's Safe Deposit Vault and that is the way I answered the phone too.

Hahaha! I was a temp when I worked at M&T and they put me in that powerful position. On my first day they were training me on how to answer the phone, what to say, what to do, in the remote chance that it rang. They are carrying on in utmost seriousness and in the middle of the training, to my shock, the phone rang! This phone, deep in the vaults, in the middle of nowhere.

"Go ahead. Answer it," the suit who is training me says.

She and the other woman fall silent, waiting to see what I say, how I deal with it.

So I pick up the phone. "M&T Safe Deposit Vault," I say.

And all I hear is this laughing.

It was my brother George!

Hahahaha! George and I had a joke back then about tracking each other down no matter where we were. And this was before cell phones, when it was challenging. Well, the woman training me at M&T was not amused. 

But back to the guy in the Capitol vaults. I pictured him in some windowless office somewhere. Just him and one of those old black phones.

I explained who I was and what I was up to and he listened in silence.

Then he said, "Don't hold your breath."

Haaahhhaaa!!

That has to go in the book!

Later I realized I had emailed this guy about a year ago and he had never replied. That is OK. I am glad I am not the only one who drops the ball on stuff. I am ready to go forward. In our phone conversation the other day, which was brief, he asked me to send him an email with recording dates and numbers and everything. Which I did, that same day. 

Now I am following his instructions and not holding my breath.

Perhaps they are overworked there in the Capitol Records vaults. All I can think is, Pennario fans are clamoring constantly at the gates.

But I do think things will work out with Capitol, or EMI I should say, because they are part of EMI. They are still their own division though. That is nice. I have various ideas and questions I floated in my email and I do believe this book is a good project and something the world needs. Things work out with it. People who were lost turn up. Things I am looking for come my way. Pieces fall into place.

Remember the Divine Assistance? I think that I feel it.

And if you can say that on a Monday morning, it must be there!