Word: ellington
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cotton Club" really was a Harlem nightclub that popped up during the prohibition era. This infamous speakeasy partied socialites, mobsters and movie stars; gang wars were Hemingway's "lost generation" found themselves in the tunes of performers like Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson...
...section of jazz reviews that ends the book enables Larkin to thresh out his quarrel fully with modernism. He writes warmly about his youthful passion for the likes of Armstrong, Beiderbecke and Ellington, but charges that Bebop Saxophonist Charlie Parker destroyed it all with music that gave "the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously." Parker thus joins Pound and Picasso in Larkin's unholy trinity of decadent experimenters, and jazz's evolution becomes a capsule version of the "degeneration into private and subsidized absurdity" that he believes is overtaking all the arts. What...
...only prerequisite for Music S-54, "Introduction to Jazz." is, according to the catalogue, "varied listening experience." Who ever thought summer school could be this good--spend class time listening to and discussing the major works of jazz greats like Ellington, Armstrong, and Goodman...
Basie was not the compositional innovator that another of jazz's crowned heads, Duke Ellington, was, nor an instrumental virtuoso on the order of the Earl, "Fatha" Hines. Rather, the Count's talent lay in his knack for organizing the tightest, swingingest bands in the land; populating them with some of the best sidemen ever to grace a dance floor or a recording studio, including Tenor Sax Player Lester Young, Trumpeter Buck Clayton, Drummer Jo Jones and Blues Singer Jimmy Rushing; and later backing the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. Although his elliptically eloquent, spare style...
Throughout his career, Basie was constantly being compared to Ellington. Typically, his modesty precluded such notions. Once, when the Basie and Ellington orchestras combined for a recording, the Duke asked Basie to solo in Take the "A" Train. "You know what I did? I ran for the door," said Basie. But he could always look back with pride at one night in Kansas City in 1936, when the two bands battled for the first time. As Rushing recalled, the Count outswung the Duke...