Tag: jazz
Duke Ellington and race in America
by Chris on May.13, 2010, under culture, history, music
Black, Brown, and Beige
Duke Ellington’s music and race in America.
Duke Ellington in front of the Apollo Theatre, New York, 1963. Photograph by Richard Avedon.
- The basement club was cramped, and the bandstand was so small that, by the drummer’s measure, it could hardly hold a fight. The clientele included mobsters, musicians, and star performers from the nearby Broadway shows, slipping in among the crowd from the time the band appeared, at about ten o’clock, straight on “until.” The banjoist who provided the schedule could elaborate no further about how long the night went on: “Until you quit. Until period.” After 3 A.M., you couldn’t get a seat. In the fall of 1926, the craze for Negro music was already sending savvy white New Yorkers up to Harlem, but the Kentucky Club, on West Forty-ninth Street, had the hottest band in town. Trumpets, trombone, saxes, clarinet, tuba, banjo, and drums—nine or so players, huddled on the stand beneath the pipes that ran along the ceiling, plus the handsome young piano player who led the group while dancers surged around him on the floor. But the band did more than keep the temperature high and the dancers moving; its arrangements were so startling that even a familiar number like “St. Louis Blues” sounded new. Variety capped a gushing review of the “colored combo” by noting that the club’s patrons—transfixed “jazz boys” and civilians alike—spent a remarkable amount of time just sitting around and listening.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/17/100517crat_atlarge_pierpont#ixzz0nouFKFUY
by Claudia Roth Pierpont May 17, 2010
Duke Ellington and race in America : The New Yorker.
Pops: Culture-Changing Genius
by Chris on Feb.03, 2010, under music
Louis Armstrong was one of the greatest figures in 20th century music. His music is unsurpassed, its influence is immense. The smiling entertainer is only part of it: the man’s artistry was -is- awesome (CH)
Terry Teachout’s Pops: Culture-Changing Genius
Terry Teachout’s fine reconsideration of the man called “Pops” solidifies Louis Armstrong’s standing as not just the greatest horn player since the angel Gabriel, but an all-transforming artist at the level of James Joyce or even Shakespeare, and a black American freedom fighter of character and conscience, too.
Louis Armstrong’s power to astonish was never in doubt. Hoagy Carmichael, the songwriter of “Stardust” and “Georgia,” dropped his cigarette and gulped his drink the first time he heard Louis, barely out of his teens, in 1921. “Why,” Hoagy moaned, “isn’t everybody in the world listening to that?” Over the next 50 years the whole world heard Louis, and marveled, but there were always questions, too: Could honky-tonk music from red-light New Orleans get standing, really, with Schubert and Bach? Was Louis in artistic decline after the Twenties? Was he an Uncle Tom in all that Satchelmouth clowning?
All the modern answers as Terry Teachout documents them are over the top now in favor of Louis Armstrong. Listen to the testimonies his fellow horn players Ruby Braff and Wynton Marsalis gave me on Louis’s legendary centennial, July 4, 1900: that if Louis wasn’t actually God, he was at least proof of God. His grandeur, complexity and consistency as man and artist seem now beyond question. Harold Bloom, keeper of the cultural canon and an astute jazz listener, too, pairs Armstrong with Walt Whitman as the greatest American contributor to the world’s art, the genius of this nation at its best. It turns out we could believe our ears after all.
Read ( and listen) to more via Radio Open Source » Blog Archive » Terry Teachout’s Pops: Culture-Changing Genius.
Miles Davis: So What x 2
by Chris on Apr.29, 2009, under music
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So What..(1) (c. 1959)
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So What (2) (1964)
