Word: armstrong
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Smith, Bing Crosby, Ethel Merman, Ginger Rogers--in their early prime, making the music that made them famous. The tunes sound fresh, the interpretations supple. A melody can suddenly improv into Rhapsody in Blue or Chopin's Funeral March or 'Deed I Do. Half a century before rap, Louis Armstrong was already sampling...
...Fred Waller directed Ellington's Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1934) with artful lighting of black laborers, and moody shadows caressing the young Billie Holiday. Aubrey Scotto set most of A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932) in a cleaning man's dream kingdom, Jazzmania, where Armstrong scats among soap bubbles and disappears into a whirlpool of multiple exposures...
Scotto could be the D.W. Griffith of musical shorts, not so much for his story-telling vigor as for his love of racial stereotypes. He bedecks Armstrong in a leopard-skin tunic, harem pants and body glitter; he urges his black actors to grimace grotesquely and gives them fearful patois to spout ("I run until I's black in de face," says a man fleeing a Latin American revolt in the 1931 Be Like Me). He was not alone in caricaturing African Americans. Crosby, whose crooner inflections owed much to black musicians, wears blackface in the 1932 Dream House...
DIED. ADOLPHUS ("Doc") CHEATHAM, 91, late-blooming trumpeter; in Washington. Once an understudy for Louis Armstrong, Doc became a leading sideman of the swing era. His buttery lyricism and witty improvisations played better with age. By his seventh decade, he had grown into his trademark stance--trumpet held high, pointed to the heavens...
...whippersnapper sly wit (and an occasional bent for theatrics); both have a sweetly teasing way with a melody. Cheatham's talk-singing on 10 of the 14 tunes may be an acquired taste. On the continuum of singing horn players, he's probably closer to Dizzy Gillespie than to Armstrong, but listeners with generous ears will be charmed...