Word: eatonized
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...mimeograph and the price of some postage stamps is in business. Newsletters breed with such leporine rapidity that any nose count is outdated as soon as begun; in any given month, two dozen newsletters may spring into being, and a dozen others die. In 1943, when the Whaley-Eaton American Letter reached its 25th birthday, the editors undertook a census of their imitators, got bored and stopped counting after the total passed...
Headed by Clarinetist Bill Smith and Pianist Johnny Eaton, the Jazz Ensemble prides itself on being "bilingual," e.g., mixing cool jazz with rigorously difficult modernist works by Roger Sessions, Darius Milhaud, Eaton himself. Whatever it plays, the ensemble likes to force its instruments to their outer limits. When at tacking modernist music, Eaton, for instance, favors dissonant jumps from one end of the keyboard to the other, violently plucks at the piano's innards to get a harp effect. Smith has developed a technique of aiming his clarinet directly at the piano strings to create weird and ghostly harmonics...
...ensemble's cool jazz style is less weird, but technically just as adroit. With his left leg swinging, Pianist Eaton may toy with harmonies and tempi, bounce themes to the fluid clarinet, trade solos with the limpid trumpet. Underneath it all is a rock-solid bass. Last week the boys wound up with Long Ago and Far Away and a driving Summertime. The palazzo shivered, and the audience applauded. "An intellectual Newport," said a delighted U.S. composer as he made his way from the hall...
Study in Contrasts. Except in their musical tastes, Co-Founders Eaton and Smith are as much a study in contrasts as last week's program. Son of a Methodist minister, Pennsylvania-born Johnny Eaton. 26, started composing and playing the piano as a youngster, but he went to Princeton to prepare for a law career. Work with Roger Sessions, and the success of a couple of fine jazz albums that he cut for Columbia with his own student combo, changed his mind. After touring the U.S. with Flutist Herbie Mann and a jazz combo, he settled down to serious...
California-born Bill Smith, on the other hand, prefers chamber works to vocal compositions, has written some highly praised pieces (Divertimento for Norvo, Concerto for Clarinet and Combo) for chamber jazz groups. Juilliard trained and, like Eaton, a Roger Sessions pupil, Smith, 34, was a fellow student with Dave Brubeck at Mills College and a charter member of the original Brubeck Octet. He is still under contract to Brubeck, is on leave from his teaching post (composition) at U.S.C...