Word: accordionists
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This month Cooder began an eight-week tour round the U.S. with his friend Randy Newman; after that, he will get down to serious work on his next album. The contents remain uncertain, but Cooder is currently fascinated by the work of a Tex-Mex accordionist named Flaco Jimenez. He has also just returned from a trip to Hawaii, where he and some Hawaiians spent two weeks making and taping some music of the islands -"not really antique stuff," he says, "just Hawaiian drinking-and-good-time songs from before the war, the kind of thing you never hear back...
...Manhattan-born son of a Viennese accordionist, Hamlisch as a boy was nicknamed "Fingers" because he avoided sports to guard his hands. He went to work at 19 as a rehearsal pianist for Broadway shows, beginning with Funny Girl in 1964. He squeezed in night school too, graduating cum laude from Queens College. In 1968, at a Broadway party, the pianist met Producer Sam Spiegel, who chatted about a film he was planning to make from John Cheever's short story The Swimmer. Three days later Hamlisch handed him the completed theme for the movie...
...watching Jean Pace (Brown's wife) smile like the girls in Vogue wish they could and dance like the priestesses in Aida definitely should. But the LP blesses the ear with her Brown Baby and Afro Blue. It also offers Oscar and a Brazilian wizard named Sivuca (pianist, accordionist, guitarist, world's funkiest falsetto) singing and playing a small treasury of other inter-American gems...
...slower here; pedestrians wait for the signal light before crossing. Steinway, a commercial street in the working-class area, could pass for the main avenue of a decaying Middle West town. On this stage, all parts of the overture sound simultaneously: an ersatz locomotive clangs and toots; an accordionist squeezes out The Sidewalks of New York; a sound truck emits the appropriately upbeat Buckle Down Winsocki...
...brought along their own touch of music-hall gaiety. George Bernard Shaw loved them. So did Actor Charles Laughton, who used to gather a group around him in their favorite pub, the Black Swan, and buy them sandwiches and a barrel of beer. Buskers basically are drifters, as Accordionist Tony Turco admits: "You have got to be a performer or else you are nothing but a disguised beggar...