Word: jazzed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wade through the frothy odds and ends to find anything of more than trifling musical interest. Even banking on past reputations one is likely to collide with Bob Crosby's excellent band providing background music for a paltry vocal trio. Or one finds Benny Goodman, the synonym for jazz to perhaps too many these days, experimenting to find something new, in dance music, as his publicity announces, and coming up with two of the most profoundly horrisonous (an obsolete word which must be taken out of mothballs for the occasion) vocalists of our generation...
Fortunately, however, there are some old dependable still around. The reissues continue to bloom amid the weeds, with the Louis Armstrong Earl Hines album perhaps the best of a satisfying list including a couple of old Teddy Wilsons and Decca's third Gems of Jazz set, which may have escaped someone's notice over the summer. Victor has been producing a Duke Ellington coupling every week or two. 'Twas said Ben Webster's Kansas City tenor sax wouldn't fit in with the highly sophisticated Ellington arrangements, but Duke is building backgrounds for Ben to improvise against, and on "Just...
Louis and Earl (Columbia's album). More fine jazz reissues of Armstrong and Hines, and a previously unissued master discovered in Columbia's "archives"-the remarkable trumpet-piano duet Weather Bird...
Leaving a discussion of the misadventures of jazz in Hollywood to a later column, I am afraid that Broadway has paid even scantier attention to hot music than the film capital. But at least, the stage has not tried to commercialize all music as the movies insist on doing. It would seem that the greater powers of realism, within limits, and of characterization which the theatre still possesses would offer an opportunity to tell a convincing story in which something of the essence of jazz might be reflected. The great obstacle, of course, has been the inclusion of jazzmen, obviously...
...after a few weeks the pristine enthusiasm over the idea faded and no more was heard of the matter. But apart from the brief appearance of Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman in a minor extravaganza entitled "Swingin' the Dream," which caught at best a fleeting glimpse of Broadway, jazz and its exponents have not since been given a chance to ennoble the buskin'd stage...