00 Notes.txt
JONATHAN WINTERS
"Another Day, Another World"
Verve V-15032 (stereo was V6-15032), 1962
LP rip (128 kbps mono) by Dick Baker, January 2015
Side One
1. OPENING--CALIFORNIA 5:20
2. IGOR AND THE MONSTER 5:12
3. THE LOST ISLAND 7:07
Side Two
1. NEW FRONTIERS :46
2. CIVIL WAR :34
3. TV COMMERCIALS and AMERICAN IN PARIS 3:59
4. MOON MAP and IVY LEAGUER 6:03
5. HUMAN TORPEDO 2:33
6. SAIL CAT 1:40
7. MY SCHOOL DAYS 2:10
Production supervised by George Spota
Produced by Jim Davis
San Jose, California, is a blossoming city, caught between the dynamic of an
exploding population and the static of deep California history. One does not think of
it ordinarily as a concert or show business town, but when Jonathan Winters appeared
at the San Jose Civic Auditorium January 23, 1961, for the first of his concerts on
the West Coast, it seemed a good idea to go down there to hear him.
It was more than a good idea. It resulted in one of the most marvelously
entertaining evenings I have ever spent; one that made the long ride in the cold night
air more than worthwhile.
It was not only that Winters was really "on," and pushing for his best
performance to start the series, but the audience was with him. The other acts
lingered in the wings to hear him and even in the intermission there was a crowd
around Winters backstage as he talked with the show's producer, Enrico Banducci, the
beret-wearing owner of the San Francisco night club the hungry i, at which Winters had
made his California debut.
Jonathan Winters is a clown, perhaps the greatest we have had in this country
and like all great clowns in history, from Grimaldi through Grock to Emmett Kelly, he
combines sadness and joy, laughing to keep from crying, laughter through tears.
Jonathan Winters is one of the great American humorists, the real heir to Will
Rogers and totally unique. He is in a class all by himself, with almost no
relationship to the other leaders of the New Wave of Comedy: Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman
and Lenny Bruce.
He produces the same response from his audiences as the great clowns have done:
pure unadulterated joy. Although he continually refers to himself as a child (and
adds, "we're all children"), and speaks of a world peopled with clowns ("we're all
clowns in different ways'), Jonathan Winters's permanent character is The Rube on
Broadway, the Great American Boy. And that is what is so marvelous about him. The
Great American Boy, simple, homespun, talking to the sophisticates and the would-be
sophisticates and to those who are only at once removed from the American Boy world
themselves. This is his link to Will Rogers.
But even in his most simple role, Jonathan Winters is deeply complex. His vocal
accent is that of the wheat field, his vocabulary comes from TV and "the people" and
his frame of reference is the great area covered by the mass experience of America:
the Army, the movies, cops, baseball, television, spacemen, etc.
His basic tools are an ear for American regional speech and idiom unequaled on
the stage today, a sharp eye for the pompous and the fraudulent in manners and
attitudes, a mobile face that must be the envy of all character actors and a mind
whose stream-of-conscious rambling is like a wild space missile.
His ability to create illusion rests not only on that magnificently mobile face,
but upon a variety of sound effects (all made by hand-clapping, finger-snapping, mouth
sounds and exploitation of the microphone) which are incredible as well as incredibly
funny. When he gives you the slap of a ball in a mitt or the whoosh of a rocket going
into secondary orbit, he creates an illusion of frightening reality.
But though he is concerned with the paradoxes of modern life (and is himself a
paradox), Jonathan Winters's view of human beings is humane and full of compassion,
for all his wild talk.
He has the great comic posture going for him, too. He is funny as soon as he
comes on stage, before he says a word. By his simple boy pose, he appeals directly to
the audience and takes the audience with him as they both observe the madness of life.
His humor is anecdotal, full of bright images of American life (the clay class and the
fruit pickers on this LP are two excellent examples) and really never vicious. He's
as far from a "sick" comedian as one can get in today's culture and thus he stands in
the mainstream of American humor, an oral reincarnation of the great, Grant Wood
American humor, classic in its applicability to whatever is going on right now.
Perhaps one of the reasons he is so appealing is that he speaks directly to the
child in all of us, to the simple, uncomplicated human for whom all the impedimenta of
the mass media and the space age are a maze of puzzlement and make up a world where
the real and the unreal are indistinguishably mixed.
His canvas is the broadest aspects of American life and because of this, there
is a strong suspicion that his work, as preserved in these albums, may well have a
longer life than that of his contemporaries. At the least, he is surely a great
American humorist.
--Ralph J. Gleason
|
|