Word: condonable
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They called it "A Salute to Eddie Condon," the famed, feisty guitarist who has reigned for some 25 years as public defender of "old style" Dixieland. Staged at midnight in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, the event had all the makings for a Great Moment in jazz history. Bob Crosby and Johnny Mercer came in from the West Coast. Woody Herman and his 16-piece band were bussed uptown between shows at a Times Square jazz emporium. All told, 43 musicians gathered to pay homage, many of them the founding fathers of "hot jazz," ragtime's carefree child born...
...Condon was the first to insist that Dixieland jazz was worthy of being lifted out of the dingy cellars and onto the concert stage. He helped inspire the whole cult of jazz critics, who could spin out columns on the flittering trumpet solos of Bobby Hackett. To prove his point, in 1942 Condon promoted a highly successful series of jazz "concerts" at Manhattan's Town Hall. During cool jazz's dominance, Condon doggedly ran his own club in Greenwich Village. He organized the bands, promoted Dixieland indefatigably, arranged for the recording sessions...
...Leapin'." At Carnegie Hall, Condon appeared to lead his crusty cronies through some "up and leapin' music." "Eddie's the guy who got us the jobs when we needed them," says Bass Player Bobby Haggart. The Carnegie Hall "salute" was, in fact, a benefit for Condon, 58, who will use the proceeds ($2,700) to help pay his hospital bills for a recent operation. "The youngest guy at Carnegie's Hole," says Condon, "was the doorman. There are not many young guys around who are interested in playing the old unconfined jazz. Music has survived some...
John Knowles is a precisionist and a sharp contrast to the ebullient undiscipline of Condon and Heller. His first novel, A Separate Peace, is brief and limited in the breadth if not the depth of the experience it describes. Its author is always in perfect control of style and structure. Its theme is the death of innocence; a prep-school boy moves to the disillusion of adulthood by causing, in a half-willed way, the death of his best friend. It is a book that rings in the mind long after the reader has finished it, whose reverberations fill...
...Richard Condon is also technically a comic novelist (although purists fond of wedging hyphens between split hairs might call him a serio-comic or even a calamito-comic novelist). He is the author of The Manchurian Candidate, a comic eruption that simply as comedy ranks with the best funny novels done recently in the U.S.-that is, with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Richard Bissell's 7½ Cents and Peter De Vries's Comfort Me with Apples. But Condon is something more. He is a comedian who throws his custard pies in black anger, with intent...