Word: idiom
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...other blues merchants such as Joe Turner, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker are the idols after which the big-beat groups from the Beatles on down have fashioned their music. That the U.S. pop-music market so readily adopted the synthetic British translation of a purely American idiom made Brown see red. To promulgate "the real thing," he organized the James Brown Show, a barnstorming caravan of 40 singers, dancers and musicians. The message got through. On the road 340 days last year, he grossed more than $1,000,000, played to audiences of 11,000 in Los Angeles...
...course, is neither. Lewis' happy, finger-snapping, foot-tapping music harks back to the early 1950s; in the funky, blues-rooted idiom that is his forte, he is an accomplished but by no means a revolutionary stylist. His attack is clean, straightforward, unsophisticated-basic stuff by the standards of modern jazz. Where he does excel is in imparting a freewheeling, come-join-the-party feeling that, he candidly admits, is the only way to make jazz "a salable item that people will understand, enjoy...
...backstage but the Premier himself. Said Eshkol after toasting the cast: "Nu, nu, it's not exactly Sholom Aleichem, but I have never enjoyed an evening in the theater so much in my life." Israel's most formidable critic, Chaim Gamzu-whose last name is now the idiom for "roast"-naturally complained that the musical "is sunk in cauldrons of schmaltz." So what else did he expect, bubbled Joe Stein, who wrote the Broadway book: "Schmaltz is not exactly a Japanese invention, you know...
...ORDER AND THE NEW, by Wilfred Fowler. A novel about the end of British rule in an African state, written in a very different idiom from most modern fiction-terse, laconic, sinewed prose...
...reissued The Violent Land, which was last published in the U.S. 20 years ago. It is worth reviving as one of the best of Amado's books, which have been published in 31 languages, ranging from Icelandic to Persian. Though he writes in a far more contemporary idiom, Amado is properly considered the Mark Twain of Brazil, and he shares Twain's passion for small-town manners and morals, for scoundrels and card sharps, and for the pomposity of backwoods society, and its pitiable efforts at a cultural life...