Word: idiom
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...call its own. There were ballads, popular and folk songs, and some symphonic music by American-born but European-oriented composers. Bubbling in the New Orleans melting pot, however, was a disreputable mix of African, Spanish, French and Protestant revivalist musical influences that would mature into a uniquely American idiom. Black music had wandered away from its African grandparents, picked up a few hymn tunes, worked in fields and on railroads, and been sung to make slavery endurable. Around 1900, in the honky-tonks and whorehouses of New Orleans, it became jazz...
...iron in a facade. Today the buildings are cavernous and filthy, half-empty, with successive impastos of paint flaking from their arched windows and delicate, rusting Corinthian capitals. But SoHo is a kind of museum of the style, containing some of the best buildings that were made within that idiom anywhere in the 19th century-strong-boned, forthright in detail, free of pomp and fuss...
Brash and Incisive. At first sight, it does not look like a theater at all. Johansen designed it in terms of distinct units-blocks of raw concrete with brightly painted steel cladding, connected by tubes and catwalks. Nothing could be more remote from the idiom of the theater as temple-massive portico and formidable foyer suggesting, in the manner of Lincoln Center, that the audience is going to be vouchsafed a peek at the altar of some crushing god named High Culture. The Mummers Theater, by contrast, with its simple materials and modest scale, does not try to stimulate...
...pianist; in Toronto. From the 1950s through the mid-'60s, Kelly was a catalytic figure in a number of groups featuring such improvisational superstars as Dizzy Gillespie,Miles Davis and the late Wes Montgomery. Kelly was credited with providing a vital blues-tinged version of the modern jazz idiom...
Death? Life? You've heard some of this before? Fair enough. But there are some different things going on here-Beatrice is no ordinary mother. Certainly, on one hand, she is well within the idiom, badgering and torturing her offspring. pushing those around her to the brink of insanity as casually as another mother might pass the potatoes. But there is wit and laughter in her nastiness: Beatrice's rantings are too full-blooded to be taken all that seriously-and, when the chips are down, she is ready to support her daughters with awkward and unsentimental gestures of love...