Word: idioms
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Bourgeois Negroes at first winced at Charles's almost burlesque use of Negro idiom: it seemed embarrassingly clear that no white man could ever sing the songs his way. Today, though Charles still sings the same "race music," there is no modern singer who has not learned something from him. His touches turn up in other singers' styles; his trademark phrases, such as "What'd I say" and "Don't you know now" and "That's all right," poke out from everybody's rhythm choruses like passwords to success. But the man himself remains...
...critics, however, understood his idiom perfectly. "Aïda all' Americana" (Aïda American style), said La Notte, "everything bigger and better than anybody else's." Only the singers noticed that the reviews barely mentioned them at all. "I looked like my grandmother in that ancient costume," said Tenor Bergonzi, "but I don't mind if the directors get the glory today. Opera cannot go on without singers, but it can manage quite well without directors...
...Freedom. However much the classicists have tried, the collision of jazz idiom and classical technique has been mainly the work of jazzmen. Dave Brubeck has been an ardent explorer of quiet waters, but the classic case of the Juilliard blues afflicts John Lewis, whose fascination with the baroque and the commedia dell' arte has led his Modern Jazz Quartet into music of great cerebration and even greater anemia. Lewis' music often seems too fragile even to be called jazz; but now a new group of jazz composers has arrived with the claim that they are uniquely "serious...
...Trollopean sense of the importance of what people wear, the houses they occupy, the jobs and property they get and lose, and the inherent drama of the tables of consanguinity. To this concern she adds a truly female tongue for the arts of conversation and a grasp of the idiom of appearances...
...hero to abstract painters and to beat generation poets because of his spare, free language and his steady devotion to the American idiom. In the U.S., many considered him the most influential of the poets' poets, but in Europe, he remained a mystery. Verses like