Word: banjo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...never strayed into the far-out realms of atonality or mechanical idiosyncrasies. His serious musical education started late, but he learned fast. As a boy on Manhattan's upper West Side, Schuman was totally uninterested in anything long-haired. He had a passing fling with jazz, played the banjo and the violin in a jazz band he formed in high school, and wrote, with Frank Loesser, such pop songs as In Love with the Memory of You. Baseball was his enduring passion: "Had I been a better catcher, I might never have been a musician." His only opera...
...Rhythm came naturally; his father was a lyricist and vaudeville performer, his mother a pianist and singer who organized and led a 15-piece, all-male dance band. Father Dustin, who never wanted to be any thing but a priest, nevertheless departed for a seminary at 15 with his banjo on his knee. Assigned after ordination to the Holy Redeemer Church in Detroit, he took to playing his repertory of 250 jazz standards at high school dances, benefits, meetings of the Holy Name Society and the Altar Society...
Because "a rectory with 16 priests is no place for banjo practice," Father Dustin warms up in a flower shop across the street - an arrangement so mutually satisfactory that the florist has sold 300 of the Father's albums since July. Father Dustin humbly attributes this success to an order of cloistered nuns who, "when they get the time, say a prayer for the success of the album. Not many records have that help going for them...
Although some fellow priests regard with disapproving coolness Father Dustin's jazz success, he does not mind. All the income from his banjo-concert fees and record royalties-goes to the order, for its missions in Thailand and Brazil. Furthermore, Detroit's musical priest thinks he has an excellent precedent: St. Alphonsus Ligouri, founder of the Redemptorist Order (in 1732) was a cool man on the harpsichord...
Described by one critic as ''a sort of do-it-yourself urban folk music." trad rests mainly on the standard instruments-clarinet, trumpet, trombone-but now and again tosses in a banjo for such provincial classics as Waiting for the Robert E. Lee. Chris Barber's Jazzband founded the movement with a bestselling version of Sidney Bechet's Petite Flew, and now the trad bands are so popular that they play everywhere-not only for jazz clubs and festivals, but also at debutante parties, society dances, on trans-Channel steamers, even waist-deep in swimming pools...