Word: jazz
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...chosen for him by his manager, rang for tea but, knowing no English, failed to make the waiter understand. He shrugged his shoulders, sat down at the piano, played Tea for Two, got what he wanted. His first Manhattan night was spent in a Harlem cabaret listening to brazen jazz which he adores, his second at a musicomedy. Then he started on a tour, played first with the Philadelphia Orchestra, went into Canada, then through the Middle West...
Radio Music Co. has another function. It intends to discover new music, encourage new composers. It is tired of jazz, wants melody. Its President Edwin Claude Mills† last week said: "We are not interested in 'reform.' We are not trying to get ourselves into such a rarified atmosphere that nobody could live in it with us. . . . We have had perhaps too much of jazz and it seems about time for some one to assume leadership in a movement away from the cacophony of most music of the day. I think we should get back to melody...
...Montagne, then three Manhattan premières-First Airphonic Suite for RCA Theremin* and Orchestra by Russian Joseph Schillinger; Overture to a Don Quixote by Jean Rivier, 33-year-old Parisian; and New Year's Eve in New York by Werner Janssen, 30, Manhattan jazz pianist and composer. Critics paid scant attention to the first half of the program. The Chabrier was tame, the d'Indy lovely but pallid. The Clevelanders played well, but the last half agitated some critical pens...
...like to think of a populace at the mercy of this fearfully magnified and potent tone that Professor Theremin has brought into the world. The radio machines are bad enough, but what will happen to the auditory nerves in a land where super-Theremin machines can hurl a jazz ditty through the atmosphere with such horribly magnified sonorities that they could deaden the sound of an automobile exhaust from 20 miles away...
There are some bright spots that might have contrived, with a passable book, to make a good show. Emmerich Kalman's music, alternating suave romantic themes with reputedly Chicagoan jazz, is generally of high quality, though it lacks any real hits. "Look in my Eyes" and "Hands across the Sea" come closest to that category...