Word: jazz
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...brighter brights, whiter whites, and have a nice day, O.K.? No other people in history have placed a greater premium on sheer, sunny perkiness than mid-20th century Americans. In the objects they buy and make, that post-Puritan inclination has been expressed by splurges of color. From the jazz age onward, pop culture has gone polychrome in a big way: color, brilliant and various, has been almost obligatory in all things, from clothing to kitchen appliances to automobiles to furniture. What was not cotton-candy pink was smile-button yellow; if not sunset orange, then avocado green. Black, however...
...Santa Fe Opera last week, two important premieres demonstrated just how potent eclecticism can be. John Eaton's The Tempest, with a libretto after Shakespeare by Music Critic Andrew Porter of The New Yorker, is a rich blend of Renaissance music, jazz and electronics that is surrounded by an uncompromisingly modernist microtonal framework. Another happily eclectic work, Hans Werner Henze's The English Cat, takes an anthropomorphic tale by English Playwright Edward Bond, based on Balzac, and sets it to music that freely ranges from kitschy consonance to acerbic dissonance. Both operas have the kind of unquestioned stylistic integrity that...
...guitar and electric bass represents the bestial Caliban (Mezzo Ann Howard), and his drunken revels with Trinculo and Stephano are celebrated with some exquisitely low-down jazzrock that closes the first act in a brilliant theatrical burst. (Eaton, 50, a professor of composition at Indiana University, was a successful jazz pianist in his younger days...
Despite the evident musical versatility that has enabled Marsalis to collaborate with such a variety of celebrities, his upcoming Sanders Theatre concert (organized by Boston jazz programmers Water Music/Mainstage) will be a 90-minute long performance of pure jazz...
...those of you without access to VH1, here’s a quick and dirty history of popular music from the mid-’90s: The legendary hip-hop collective A Tribe Called Quest were producing socially conscious, jazz-inflected rap, and people were still pretending to care about “electronica.” There was also “The Macarena,” but the less said of that the better...