Word: jazz
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...EUROPEANS CAN SAY they changed American jazz. But with his innovative electronic-piano playing and composing, most notably for Miles Davis in the 1960s, Vienna-born keyboardist Joe Zawinul pioneered the electrified genre of jazz fusion. He wrote the title song on Davis' first electric-jazz album, In a Silent Way, and later co-founded the seminal jazz-rock band Weather Report, which he led for 15 years. Zawinul...
...character likes to narrate stories: "There are stories the man recites quietly into the room which slip from level to level like a hawk." This is also Ondaatje's own literary secret. Over the years, his material has been almost absurdly diverse - he's written about Billy the Kid, jazz musician Buddy Bolden, his own family's history, contemporary Sri Lanka - but his idea of how to structure a book has been reasonably consistent: start a story that whets the reader's appetite with exquisite metaphors and sharp observations of psychology and society, then abruptly slip into another story, which...
...producers were smart enough to realize that to compete they had to take more chances, and that made him more receptive to some of the era's most groundbreaking new talent. George Carlin and Richard Pryor were little-known stand-up comics performing in the folk and jazz clubs of Greenwich Village in 1965 when scouts from Griffin's show discovered them just weeks apart and booked them on the show. Griffin gave both of them multi-show contracts and had them on regularly for the next year, giving them their first sustained TV exposure and a major boost...
...Eizo Matsumura, a photographer who has known Murakami since his jazz-club years, tells a story of that voice. Due to a hearing difficulty, Matsumura usually needs to read lips in conversation, except with close relatives and friends, but he can hear Murakami perfectly. "I don't know how to explain it," he says. "Maybe it's the vibrations, maybe it's something else." It almost seems too perfectly poetic, like something out of, well, a Murakami story, but the joy that rises in Matsumura's face can't be faked. "I can hear his voice," he says. "I always...
...ADVENTUROUS Art Davis saw little value in modesty. He called himself the "world's greatest bassist," and many jazz giants, notably John Coltrane, agreed. The classically trained genre hopper ("It all sounded good to me," he said), who turned to jazz after encountering resistance in his early searches for classical jobs, accompanied singers from Lena Horne to Bob Dylan, played in TV and Broadway orchestras and backed Coltrane on such recordings as Olé Coltrane and Ascension. In the '70s, his unsuccessful discrimination suit against the New York Philharmonic got him blacklisted, so he added a new profession...