Word: elliott
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Manhattan's Basin Street last week, Don Elliott was so versatile that he sometimes seemed like a case of musical split personality. When he played It Might as Well Be Spring, he played the trumpet with a soft, low, fuzzy tone and a stammering swing that was as intimate as if he were whispering into a pretty ear. When he played Moonlight in Vermont, he played the vibraphone with soft-headed sticks, rolling out arpeggios as pretty and cottony as a cumulus cloud. When he played Makin' Whoopee, he played...
...ELLIOTT Out of the jungle with two vibes...
...French horn. It sounded wild and slightly clumsy, as indeed this instrument should, but it did swing after a fashion; it smeared its way up into the attic, noodled around insinuatingly in its middle register, and grunted low down. Then, when it seemed as if Virtuoso Elliott had done everything, he picked up a vibraphone stick in one hand and the mellophone in the other and played the tune on both simultaneously...
...Elliott (real surname: Helf-man), 30, such versatility is perfectly natural. The son of a Somerville, N.J. pianist-arranger, he started playing the piano at four. When his father died three years later, Don made up his mind to "sort of carry on what my father had done." At eight he was taking accordion lessons, at 13 he was studying the big baritone horn to play in his high-school band. He picked up the trumpet without help, and the mellophone was no trouble at all after that, since it has the same fingering and a similar embouchure...
Last week the weekly trade magazine The Billboard front-paged some corroborating statistics. Three major labels, Columbia, Mercury and MGM, devoted the largest part of their summer releases to modern works, e.g., Aaron Copland's Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, Elliott Carter's The Minotaur. With several other companies contributing, 50 contemporary compositions were released this summer. This brings the impressive total of 20th century compositions on records to some 1,500, with about 240 composers represented. By comparison, there are only 776 works represented by 48 composers of the first half of the 19th century...