Word: ballades
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Political Activist. Not quite. There is still a lot of Peterson to be heard when Craig's fingers embellish a tender ballad with filigree tinsel. But there is a lot of Mozart in early Beethoven too, and nobody complains much about that. As a pianist, Craig lacks only the maturity that age will bring. And nobody in the music world doubts his ability to get exactly what he wants...
JERRY JEFF WALKER: MR. BOJANGLES (ATCO). A zestful romp of a first album by a 27-year-old graduate of the rock group Circus Maximus. The boundaries of Walker's country style are broad enough to take in rock, ballads and the blues. The Ballad of the Hulk, though a little long and repetitive, is an object lesson in how to protest without falling into a dreary drone. His targets include the Vatican, divorce and the draft ("I have but one country to give for my life"). The spirit is so infectious that even squares may applaud the lines...
Angela Lansbury, a doll who refuses to be anything but living, plays the Madwoman as if the character existed in the script and score. She nearly makes it in the first act, and in the second, she takes flight (with some help from a Herman ballad, the only song in the show that works). Frocked in costumes that look like mountains of lace and sporting a crazy carrot-colored wig, Miss Lansbury still cannot help but be beautiful. Despite the unhappy things she has to do in Dear World, you have to love...
...Edmund Muskie, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, used the same tactic this year with more success. And at a rally last week, Nixon made the best of a sticky situation by giving opponents an opportunity to criticize without heckling. He allowed 1,200 Syracuse University students to sing a ballad to counter his campaign, and even silenced his supporters who tried to interrupt them. The song the students chose was Simon and Garfunkel's The Sounds of Silence, a theme that has hardly marked the 1968 campaign...
...wander off key in every bar, yet the song's content remained pure and intense. Andrews is ten times the musician Lawrence was; her voice never varies a hemisemidemiquaver from the written notes. In the exuberant comic numbers, person and impersonator coincide. But when Julie attempts a bittersweet ballad, like Do, Do, Do or My Ship, the styles collide. Lawrence always suggested a melancholy sensuality; Andrews continually gives the feeling that beneath the lyrics, everything is just supercal-if r agilisticexpialidocious...