Word: grof
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...another Paderewski, he drifted off to Hollywood. As a friend of the late George Gershwin, he became successively a: 1) cinemactor, 2) assistant to a producer of Westerns, 3) composer of cinema scores, 4) one-hit tunesmith (Lady Play Your Mandolin), 5) one-piece piano virtuoso (the famed Gershwin-Grofé Rhapsody in Blue), and an intermittent pupil of famed Arnold Schönberg, who taught him how to write complicated high-brow music. When, nine years later, he returned to Manhattan to conduct and arrange music for shows by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, Oscar Levant was jack...
...Philadelphia's Convention Hall, Ferde Grof e led the Philadelphia Orchestra through some of his own symphonic jazz, featured such radio soloists as Jane Pickens, Lucy Monroe, Lucille Manners, the Four Southernaires. Young Donald Dickson of the Metropolitan sang a song from The Vagabond King. Of the $7,000 raised by this concert, part went to Mayor Wilson's Milk Fund, part to the Orchestra's summer concerts at bosky Robin Hood Dell. Two days later, with dark Spanish Jose Iturbi on the podium, the Dell concerts officially began...
Less impressive than Middleton's recitative were: a Scottish Suite by Adolph Deutsch, Whiteman's short, bespectacled chief arranger; the now familiar cacophonies of Ferde Grofé's Tabloid; Deutsch's Essay on Waltzes wherein the hybrid orchestra pieced together remnants of Beethoven, Gounod, Delibes, Tchaikovsky, George Evans, Chopin, Franz Lehar, Oscar Strauss and Johann Strauss. A blues clarinetist leaped into a long, screaming, upward run; Roy Bargy followed with incredibly nimble piano work and splashed hot chords into the Rhapsody in Blue. Beaming, Paul Whiteman about-faced, took many bows, and the All-American jazz...
Newspapermen knew that Grofé had been persuaded to write Tabloid by his friend George Clarke, restless, hard-driving city editor of the New York Daily Mirror. Grofé visited the Mirror offices, devised a scenario which called for typewriters to click out hectically the routine news of the day, for a harp to represent the society editor calling for a copyboy, for a big bass horn to bellow like the managing editor. A sob sister had her maudlin, banal bit. Piccolos and traps described the comic-strip antics of Mickey Mouse. Revolver shots expressed murder headlines. Drums drummed...
...earlier in the evening had come on stage grinning and bowing, sat down at one of the three pianos which had 'been pushed in front of the orchestra, and proceeded to solo in a suite called Night Club. Johnny Green's music was as blatantly programatic as Grofé's. It described tables being set in a speakeasy still reeking with smoke from the night before. Revelers drifted in. Two lovers sat in a corner oblivious to the noise around them. Hot, reeling couples packed the dance floor "not much bigger than a dime." Corks popped...