Word: jazz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Puff Daddy's pop hip-hop is a direct descendant of Hammer's Las Vegas-style rap. The Spice Girls may not be the apex of musical evolution, but they do have their links to Cole Porter. It is in this endless cross-fertilization of country and blues, jazz and heavy metal, rap and alternative rock that the unpredictable genius of popular music can be found...
...Guglielmo Marconi had worked out the essentials of radio. The phonograph was fast evolving into the basis for a recording industry. By 1912, 5 million Americans a day were attending a new entertainment called movies. New Orleans echoed with the sounds that were jumbling together gloriously as jazz. Denizens of Tin Pan Alley were polishing the wit and jaunty lyricism of the pop song and revamping European operetta into an original American theater form: the musical...
...actor, not the camera, did the acting in his films. Never a formal innovator, Chaplin found his persona and plot early and never totally abandoned them. For 13 years, he resisted talking pictures, launched with The Jazz Singer in 1927. Even then, the talkies he made, among them the masterpieces The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952), were daringly far-flung variations on his greatest silent films, The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and City Lights...
...across the bandwidth, a kind of musical hangover from the Eisenhower era. Rock 'n' roll had erupted dead in the heart of Ike's easeful America. In the Kennedy years, when the world started to shake and rattle, the music suddenly turned as thick and sweet as a malted. Jazz had the power, but jazz was for grownups, and its impact was largely instrumental. Anyone who wanted to listen to a song, and take something away from it that would last a little longer than a good-night kiss, turned on to folk...
...black women, Aretha is the voice that made all the unsaid sayable, powerful and lyrical," the writer Thulani Davis once observed. "She was just more rockin', more earnest, just plain more down front than the divas of jazz...Aretha let her raggedy edges show, which meant she could be trusted with ours...