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Amazing gracefulness

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Every once in a while among those who communicate for a living, a wholly new voice appears or - just as exciting - a familiar one reappears with a stunningly sparkling freshness. Carrying as ever her message of hope over adversity, Judy Collins this week appeared in a most unaccustomed venue - New York's Cafe Carlyle - and showed an audience made up, certainly on opening night, of influential communicators in their own turn exactly how to leaven determined social activism with wry humor - and above all with grace and exquisite harmony.

Media eminences like TV correspondents Mike Wallace and Pia Lindstrom, "new journalism" writer Gay Talese and his publisher wife Nan Talese, novelist Erica Jong and playwright Mark Hampton were all treated to pared-down arrangements, often greatly enhanced by the new simplicity, of Collins songs drawn from throughout her career. The male side of the Talese table gave a one-man standing ovation after Who Knows Where the Time Goes? - which Collins had introduced as dating in her repertoire from 1968, a year when a hated war still raged and when capable and honorable leaders were lost to assassins' bullets.

Collins' three-week season began just as America is marking the birth of its first assassinated president, Abraham Lincoln, and I was accordingly struck by the collaborativeness, and often sheer coincidence, of effort involved in making human progress through the generations - along with the inevitable, and often destructive setbacks. It's a notion on which playwright Tom Stoppard is continually riffing; "We die on the march", he wrote in Arcadia. "We shed as we pick up".

The night before Collins' opening, on The Great Emancipator's actual birthday, I'd heard Britain's visiting Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain (who coincidentally confesses to being "a lifelong Judy Collins fan") share a New York podium with another determined social activist, Paul Robeson Jr.

The idea was to highlight Britain's own abolition of the slave trade two hundred years ago this month, while aptly celebrating Robeson's legendary father as - besides a powerful singer and radical campaigner - a staunch friend to leftist causes in Britain, and especially in Wales, where Hain is also Secretary of State (in a unprecedented doubling-up of government portfolios). Paul Robeson senior, his son recalled, once famously used a Manhattan radio studio to send a live message to a Welsh gathering by transatlantic cable, during the McCarthyite persecution which robbed him of a passport for travel outside the US - and so delighted thousands of South Wales workers, not least the redoubtable Welsh Labour Party leader, Aneurin Bevan.

(Hain, by the way, looks poised to pull off a once-unthinkable achievement in his Northern Irish bailiwick - getting the fiery Protestant extremists' leader Rev Ian Paisley to sit down and share government with Gerry Adams and the rest of the IRA's political wing - a challenge perhaps as fraught as Lincoln's task of re-uniting his "house divided" after the US Civil War.)

By way of contrast, Collins was wearing her politics lightly - there was just the odd sly partisan dig, and one sharp climate-change reference to "the good old days" when snow used to fall in Connecticut - which she innocently employed to set up a "recovery-from-lost-love" song The Blizzard, written in the East but set in her long-adopted snowy mountains of Colorado.

 

THE NATION'S CAPITAL, THOUGH, COULDN'T REMAIN far from the minds of the news-hounds among us, and former Washington Post-er Carl Bernstein, my table companion along with his wife Christine Kuehbeck and my wife Melissa Bellinelli, later fell to discussing the Lewis "Scooter" Libby perjury trial, and what it has exposed about the deep embeddedness of DC journalists within the Bush White House.

 

Bernstein was amused at the expunging of familiar, friendly expletives during the courtroom replay of the taped phone-call between his former Watergate-cracking cohort Bob Woodward and ex-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. The much less plodding half of the "Woodstein" investigative duo agreed with me that his old partner's line of questioning sounded a little slow on the uptake. On the tape, Armitage is heard taking three tries to sell Woodward the Administration's smeary line about CIA operative Valerie Plame (Courtesy of the Associated Press, we can all hear the evidence or read the transcript.) The Neo-Cons' propaganda machine, embracing even a relatively tame "believer" like Armitage as well as hard-core "Vulcans" like Dick Cheney and Libby himself, was clearly spinning in the highest gear possible, almost out of control.

But the trial's revelations took us back to Lincoln again - and the hope offered by Honest Abe's (possibly apocryphal) reassurance, supposedly given during an 1858 speech in Clinton, Illinois, that ... rather indisputably ...

 

"you may fool all of the people some the time; you may even fool some of the people all of the time; but you cannot fool all of the people all the time".

 

 

 

THE LATEST JUDY COLLINS RECORD, "Portrait of an American Girl" includes, you'll hardly be surprised, a bold musical and textual salute to Lincoln. But she ended her live set with Amazing Grace, the song on which she's set her own widely-acclaimed stamp as an anthem of redemption and progress. She delivered it with a clarity, in the almost cramped intimacy of the Carlyle, that I'd never quite heard before in all the many pure and limpid performances I've been present for.

Beforehand she reminded us that the song was written as a hymn by a former slave-trader, John Newton, whose own redemptive acts, besides this composition, included working with William Wilberforce to (as Peter Hain had recalled 24 hours earlier) put an end to the British-run slave trade. I remembered that, in another bicentennial chime, Amazing Grace (the movie) opens nationally on February 23rd. Directed by Michael Apted, noted for the 7 Up series of documentaries, The Coal Miner's Daughter bio-flick and many more, the film tells the combined story of Wilberforce (played by Ioan Gruffudd), Newton (played by Albert Finney) and the ex-slave Olaudah Equiano, whose 1789 memoirs were so crucial to the abolition campaign (he's played by the steel-and-velvet-voiced singer from Senegal, Youssou N'dour in his acting debut).

The final note of Amazing Grace (the song) - the "see" of "Now I see ..." - was held long and thrillingly by Collins, piercing and yet somehow gentle. It rang in our ears as we stepped out onto a Madison Avenue suddenly crusted with Valentine's Eve snow. New York sidewalks "sparkled like diamonds", as on the roads in Collins' Colorado mountain song. A night of hope.