Word: jazz
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...Shanghai, at a time when the "Paris of the East" was largely under the control of Western powers. With close to 4 million inhabitants, 1930s Shanghai was the fifth-largest city in the world and the most cosmopolitan place in China. To reflect the era's gin-and-jazz culture, Shanghai's architects turned their backs on the pompous colonial edifices of yesteryear and embraced the modern sophistication of Art Deco. It was a prolific but short-lived phenomenon. When Mao Zedong's communists seized control of the country in 1949, the clampdown on Shanghai's foreign influences was total...
Diana Krall fans might breathe a sigh of relief. U.S. Marines in Iraq play and sing plenty of music in George Gittoes' documentary Soundtrack to War (2004)-from gore metal to gospel, thrash to rap-but the Canadian songbird's contemporary jazz is not included. "We support you, Diana," says one soldier in the film. "We just can't listen to you when we roll." It's one telling moment in a movie filled with them. Another is the scene where a gospel choir in U.S. Army fatigues breaks off its outdoor rehearsal because of enemy fire: "That...
Students in the Adams House dining hall can ignore the noise of people eating and remind themselves of jazz and blues by looking at the newest painting on the wall. A portrait of music scholar Eileen Jackson Southern was unveiled yesterday night in an event sponsored by the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations and the Association of Black Harvard Women (ABHW). In 1976, Southern became the first black woman to receive tenure at Harvard. She held a joint appointment in the Music Department and in the Afro-American Studies Department, which she chaired from 1975 to 1979. Knafel...
DIED. Whitney Balliett, 80, dean of jazz criticism, mostly for the New Yorker, whose vivid, sensual and impressionistic writing on the exploding medium mirrored the exuberance and cadence of the music itself; in New York City. His prose made palpable the styles and physicality of performers like drummer "Big Sid" Catlett (whose "huge hands ... reduced the drumsticks to pencils") and trumpeter "Doc" Cheatham (whose solos were "a succession of lines, steps, curves, parabolas, angles and elevations"). Defining his role as appreciative witness as opposed to stern judge, he and writer Nat Hentoff in 1957 put together TV's The Sound...
DIED. Frankie Laine, 93, iconic pre-rock-'n'-roll singer, dubbed "Old Leather Lungs," who entranced teenagers of the 1940s and '50s with his booming, rough-hewn voice on hits like Mule Train and Ghost Riders in the Sky; in San Diego. As a young jazz singer, Laine caught the eye of bandleader Mitch Miller, who brought him to Columbia Records. The burly Laine, who said he liked to use his voice "like a horn," sold more than 100 million records and drew new fans in the early '60s for singing the theme to TV's Rawhide...