Word: gourdfuls
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...state occasions he waves a baton three times as long as Toscanini's. He dresses his men in lustrous Cuban silks and colored lights. His music, tinted to the romantic debutante's taste, features Latin violins rather than brasses. It contains just enough subtle tropical pounding and gourd rattling to give it pith, not enough to ruffle the polite suavity of an expensive hot spot. Four weeks ago Cugat added a mixed chorus of twelve singers to his ensemble, let them breathe discreet wordless harmonies over the throbbing of the band...
Most popular and distinctive of samba instruments is the large, roundish cabaca, a gourd around which rattling beans are strung on loose strings. Other noisemakers include the reco-reco (sounds like running a stick along a picket fence), the cuica (a dull squeak). Above them the syncopated samba tunes run their jerky course...
...audience liked better the slinky, tuneful, banal choros and dances which were played by gourd-rattling Romeo Silva and his orchestra, familiar to many a visitor to the New York World's Fair. It liked better still a tall, dark soprano, Elsie Houston, who in a green dress looked and sounded like some jungle bird...
...Paris in 1923, he did not go to get polished. "I didn't come here to study," blurted he. "I came to show you what I have done." When he had finished showing them his blunt, smoldering music (much of it written for Brazilian tom-toms and gourd rattles), the Parisians decided he was a sort of musical William Saroyan. His Paris apartment became a rendezvous for admiring Left-Bankers. Villa-Lobos, who couldn't afford to keep open house, threw them out, told them not to come back unless they brought their own food. Even on those...
...commerce, anthropology. He bought 60,000 books, hired 17 assistants. For a time he worked 100 hours, ate only one large meal, read at least seven books each week. He married twice on Christmas Day. He left one invention, the gourdcumber, "a cucumber as drought-resistant as the Spanish gourd"; and many lengthy treatises, the last of which was The New Deal vs. The New World. His ambition, unfulfilled at death, was to find a formula for a race of supermen...