How (Not) To Listen To Early Jazz
Jazz listeners may admit that early music got things to where they are now, similar to how the Model T made the Lamborghini possible. Most just prefer not to drive anything too old. For most listeners, early jazz remains an esoteric and even a strange experience.
Perhaps it's all that monochromatic footage of tuxedoed fox trotters. ...
Steve Brown: Atlas Slapped
The word bass means bottom. It means support. That's the prime requisite of a bassist, support. Architecturally, it has to be the lowest part of the building, and it has to be strong, or the building will not stand. Musically, it is the lowest human voice. It is the lowest musical voice in the orchestra. It's ...
Love Is Just Around The Chorus
In Lost Chords (Oxford University Press, 1999), Richard M. Sudhalter describes a humorous but powerful image of the working class jazz musician circa 1933:
That most broadcast work was surely, in [Artie Shaw's] words, “boring, mind- numbing garbage" is more than substantiated by a photograph recently unearthed by the Institute of Jazz Studies, at Rutgers University. ...
Turn Up Those Footnotes!
Even if the names William Shakespeare and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ring some bells for contemporary audiences, chances are Thomas Marlowe or Giovanni Paisiello might not get a chime. Yet, Marlowe's plays drew droves of theatergoers in Elizabethan England, and Paisiello's operas packed 18th century houses.
It doesn't take an English scholar or the Metropolitan Opera's management ...
Blackboard, Lit Screen and Red Hot Jazz
Teachers must find it hard to leave their job in the classroom, like Olympic runners find it hard to take their time. The best teachers educate out of reflex, and for Michael Steinman that reflex transcends classroom or course listing. Whether it's English at Nassau Community College or hot jazz on the World Wide Web, passion ...
Vince Giordano: Toe-Tapping and Timeless
Welcome to the inaugural column “Jazz That Scratches, Swings and Pops
We've all heard King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and Bix Beiderbecke on the Smithsonian Jazz Collection. We know the names because they're “important," but do we ever listen because they're just plain good?
What about Papa Celestin, Red Nichols or Jabbo Smith? Not exactly ...
