C14| Saturday/Sunday, March 28 - 29, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
H
ans Holbein the Youn-
ger, the northern Re-
naissance’s master
portraitist, preserved
faces from the 16th-
century court of England’s King Henry
VIII. But it took the novelist Hilary
Mantel to bring the people themselves
back to life.
Over the course of three novels,
starting with “Wolf Hall” in 2009 and
concluding earlier this month with the
publication of “The Mirror and the
Light,” Ms. Mantel, 67, has imagined
the personal and political machina-
tions of Henry’s court through the
eyes of Thomas Cromwell, a lowborn
FIFTY YEARS AGO THIS MONTH,Co-
lumbia Records issued Miles Davis’s
churning “Bitches Brew,” confronting
two genres of music and crystallizing
a third, jazz-rock fusion. It was a po-
tent cauldron: a quicksilver leader and
12 younger musicians improvising
over rock and funk rhythms, semi-
jams as long as 27 minutes, cutting-
edge editing techniques, and a dream-
like Afro-futurist cover. Bold,
transformative and bestselling, this
double record marked a milestone for
Davis and American music.
Most innovative artists make their
breakthroughs in their 20s and spend
the rest of their careers exploring
and burnishing their new approach.
Like Picasso, Stravinsky and Frank
Lloyd Wright, Davis—subject of a re-
cent PBS/BBC documentary—repeat-
edly shed his style to create a new
paradigm. “Isn’t it great that you can
experience surprise through music?”
the influential trumpeter mused to
writer Kiyoshi Koyama for a set of
abandoned liner notes...to what al-
bum, it’s not clear.
Davis started his career in the
1940s playing bebop, innovated a
counter-bop style known as cool jazz,
then became a mainstay of earthy
hard bop. In the late 1950s he pio-
neered a modal approach in jazz, and
in the 1960s he stretched further
matically over a one-chord vamp and
a James-Brown-like funky bass-and-
drums dance groove.
Whether in a studio, nightclub or
concert hall, jazz’s ethos was real-
time recording. This album made a
radical departure from that norm.
With Davis’s approval, producer Teo
Macero added echo and delay and—
like tape loops and cinematic jump
cuts—cut and reordered passages to
produce a remarkable instance of
studio art. “I had carte blanche to
work with the material,” Macero told
Wire magazine writer Joel Lewis.
Credited only as producer, Macero
was also a kind of co-composer.
Without the undersung Macero, thereBYJ.S.MARCUS
Jazz Meets Rock in
An Intoxicating Potion
MASTERPIECE|‘BITCHES BREW’ (1970), BY MILES DAVIS
lawyer who became the king’s chief
minister. The trilogy traces Cromwell’s
vertiginous rise and subsequent fall
from power, concluding with his be-
heading in 1540.
Holbein (1497/98-1543) painted or
drew most of the major characters in
Ms. Mantel’s trilogy, including Henry;
Thomas More, the statesman and
Catholic martyr; Jane Seymour,
Henry’s third wife; and Cromwell him-
self, whose portrait hangs in New York
City’s Frick Collection. Those images
have inspired Ms. Mantel throughout
her 15 years of work on the books,
which have won two Man Booker
Prizes and been adapted for television
and the stage.
“I was very much guided by him,”FROM TOP: THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON; THE FRICK COLLECTION, NEW YORK; ELS ZWEERINKAbove, Hans Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ (1533). Below left, Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell, the
protagonist of ‘Wolf Hall,’ ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ and ‘The Mirror and the Light’ by Hilary Mantel (below right).REVIEW
and her husband, Gerald McEwen,
bought a print of the painting for their
first house. “We took it about the
world with us, as my husband moved
for his job as a geologist,” Ms. Mantel
says. “It hung in two houses in Bot-
swana, then in four different houses in
Saudi Arabia, came home with us to
Windsor in 1985, and has followed us
through every move since.”
There is an air of mystery sur-
rounding Holbein’s portrait of Crom-
well, which survives in three versions.
Some scholars believe that the origi-
nal, probably painted just after Hol-
bein settled in London, disappeared
following Cromwell’s death, and that
the Frick’s is a copy in the artist’s own
hand. Others think the Frick’s may be
the real deal. “Is there a lost original?”
asks Xavier Salomon, the Frick’s chief
curator. “Or is the Frick painting the
original?” We may never know for
sure, he says, but recent analysis of
the work’s wood panels confirms that
“ours is definitely painted by Holbein.”
Ms. Mantel compares Holbein’s at-
tempt to paint Cromwell with her own
attempt to conjure him in words.
Cromwell’s sitting for the portrait is
recounted in “The Mirror and the
Light,” where, she says, Holbein
“grumbles about Cromwell as a recal-
citrant subject”—echoing Ms. Mantel’s
own attempt, over more than 1,700
pages, to dramatize the man and his
times. “I suppose Hans stands in for
me,” she says.says Ms. Mantel of the German-born
Holbein, who settled in England in- “It is he who has given the world
the image of Henry that everyone
knows, and the only images of Crom-
well we have. He peoples the early Tu-
dor court for us.”
Ms. Mantel has a reproduction of
Holbein’s 1537 portrait of Henry VIII,
crownless but regal, in her home in
Devon on England’s southwestern
coast. Her extensive research, which
has won kudos from Tudor historians,
led her to Windsor Castle, where she
was shown folders of Holbein draw-
ings that are part of the Royal Collec-
tion. “When you inspect them,” she re-
calls, “You can see how he noted the
colors of the sitters’ garments in very
small writing along a fold or seam. It
is so intimate that it made my heart
race—you feel as if you are in the
room with him.”
Ms. Mantel regards Holbein as the
Tudor court’s “reliable witness,” and
went so far as to include him as a
character in each of the three novels.
In creating him, she drew on details
from his biography but was equally in-
spired by his self-portrait, painted in- “I kept looking at his own face,”
she says, adding that Holbein appears
“eminently practical,” “down-to-earth”
and “skeptical.”
Holbein, the son of the Bavarian
painter Hans Holbein the Elder, cata-
pulted himself into the cosmopolitan
heart of one of Europe’s leading Re-
naissance courts. He was closely tied
to Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son who
became the Earl of Essex a few
months before his execution. Each was
a self-made man, and there is an ele-
ment of self-invention in Ms. Mantel’s
own story. Raised in an English mill
village east of Manchester, she can
still express surprise that she has
been able to make it as “a working-
class writer.”
Ms. Mantel’s affinity with Holbein
long predates her Cromwell books.
Holbein’s 1533 double portrait, “The
Ambassadors,” depicts two French
diplomats at the court of Henry VIII
surrounded by an enigmatic array of
objects, including a lute, two globes
and a sundial; in the foreground of the
painting is a distorted image of a hu-
man skull. In the 1970s, Ms. Mantel
ICONS
To write her trilogy of novels about Thomas
Cromwell and Henry VIII, Hilary Mantel turned to
the portraits of Hans Holbein for inspiration.Portraying
The Tudors,
Then
And Now
BYJOHNEDWARDHASSE away from jazz’s conventional ap-
proach to harmony.
In 1969, two decades after making
his innovative “Birth of the Cool” re-
cordings, and one decade after his
landmark “Kind of Blue” album, the
ever-restless Davis was experiment-
ing with such electronic instruments
as electric piano and electric bass
and adopting groove—the rhythmic
architecture or “feel” of a tune—in-
stead of harmony, as an organizing
principle.
The young audience for jazz had
been shrinking as both rock and soul
music drew listeners in droves. With
big ears and eyes, the 43-year-old
Davis was digging such acts as Sly
and the Family Stone and Jimi Hen-
drix, intrigued by their electronics,
rhythms, fashion, youth appeal and
popular success.
In August 1969—just after the
Woodstock Festival—Davis assem-
bled his band for three daily sessions
in which there were no separate
takes, just a continuous run of the
tape recorder. The players, each
tightly miked, sat around Davis, who
pointed at a player to start or stop. “I
told the musicians that they could do
anything they wanted, play anything
they heard...,” said Davis to writer
Quincy Troupe, “so that’s what they
did.”
The recording doubled most in-
struments: two players each on key-
would be no “Bitches
Brew.”
The album sparked
an uproar, much as an-
other Columbia Records
artist, Bob Dylan, had
when he went electric in- Davis’s turn to
electronics, distortion
and rock beats scandal-
ized his old-guard fan
base.
But “Bitches Brew”
vaulted him into the
youth market and such
rock venues as the Fill-
more, which paid hand-
somely. The players on
the project—a wag
called them “sons of
‘Bitches Brew’”—went
on to power such fusion
bands as Weather Report, Return to
Forever, the Headhunters and the
Mahavishnu Orchestra.
If you come to this album anew
from such acoustic Davis recordings
as “Porgy and Bess,” you may have to
listen with a radically different sensi-
bility. If you approach via rock or
soul music, you’ll have to suspend
any expectation of lyrics, brevity or
true lead guitar. Whatever your lis-
tening experience, you’ll find
“Bitches Brew” bracing.
A half century on, “Bitches Brew”
continues to fizz and fascinate.
Mr. Hasse is curator emeritus of
American music at the Smithsonian
Institution. His books include “Be-
yond Category: The Life and Genius
of Duke Ellington” (Da Capo) and
“Discover Jazz” (Pearson). REDFERNSboards, reeds, bass,
drums and percus-
sion. As well as one
guitar and, on two
tracks, a third key-
board. His stunningly
gifted sidemen in-
cluded electric pia-
nists Chick Corea,
Larry Young and Joe
Zawinul, soprano
saxophonist Wayne
Shorter, bass clari-
netist Bennie
Maupin, bassist Dave
Holland, drummers Jack DeJohnette
and Lenny White, and guitarist John
McLaughlin.
The album takes you on a trip to
unexpected, even mysterious places.
With its layers of rhythm, collective
improvisation and hard-to-detect
song structures, it is always unpre-
dictable. And it rewards relistening.
The title track—with echoing
trumpet, thrashing drums and dense
rhythms—is dark, multilayered and
abstract. “Spanish Key” has some of
Davis’s and Mr. McLaughlin’s best
playing on the album. Wayne
Shorter’s “Sanctuary” is as close as
the album gets to a ballad, the lonely,
pensive sound of Davis’s trumpet
hovering over the rhythm section, al-
ternately quiet, busy and loud. The
least outré cut, “Miles Runs the Voo-
doo Down,” has Davis soloing dra-Davis onstage c. 1961/62; he
pioneered several styles of jazz,
including fusion.