Word: babbittism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Jazz," Composer Milton Babbitt once said, "isn't necessarily just what is improvised after 4 a.m. on 52nd Street." To prove it, he accepted an invitation from Brandeis University last summer to write one of six jazz compositions for the annual Brandeis arts festival. Also represented: Composers Harold Shapero and Gunther Schuller, Jazzmen Charlie Mingus, Jimmy Giuffre and George Russell. Their efforts are now presented by Columbia on an album entitled Modern Jazz Concert. The selections range from Russell's blues-favored All About Rosie, "on a motif taken from an Alabama Negro children's song game...
...Night Session (Hampton Hawes Quartet; Contemporary, 3 LPs) seems designed to prove Composer Babbitt wrong, and to show once again that real jazz must be improvised. Pianist Hawes, Guitarist Jim Hall, Bass Player Red Mitchell and Drummer Bruz Freeman turned up at the studio one night and piled into Jordu and Groovin' High, and from there on "we just played because we love to play." The result is one of the few genuine jam sessions on LPs. The quartet offers some effervescent readings of blues and ballads, including four numbers composed on the spot by Pianist Hawes. For listeners...
...Vogue. T.T., a sort of Bolshevik Babbitt with a strain of a Good Soldier Schweik of the Class War, is the central figure in a series of events which would seem like fantasy were not each episode matched by a solemn quotation from Soviet pronouncements. By Soviet standards, T.T. is highly fortunate-he has a television set, a Pobeda automobile, a plump stomach and a talented teen-age daughter named Simochka. Yet there comes the dreadful day when it is reported from Simochka's university that she has been overheard making anti-party statements. This is serious business-only...
...lean and resourceful as a hungry wildcat. Above all, West was not parochial, did not advocate political or social systems. He was one of those men in whom pity must take the form of anger, but his anger was not anything as simple as anti-American or anti-Babbitt; it was anti-human nature...
...Goethe's Werther and Byron's Childe Harold as handy symbols of romanticism, on Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Ibsen's Nora to stand for the restless "modern" woman, on Hemingway's Lady Brett to personify the Lost Generation, on Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt to embody a generation that resolutely refused to get lost. Now a new literary symbol has emerged, a character who is a kind of poor relation to the rich, left-wing intellectual of the brilliant Huxley 'aos. He has started not only a new literary trend in Britain...