Word: jazzed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Joseph Schillinger, an energetic little Russian, bustled into the U.S. to teach his "scientific method" of music composition, he hit it just right. The harassed jazz composers and arrangers on the frenzied production lines of Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood and the radio studios were looking for somebody just like him. George Gershwin became a steady customer; so did his buddy, Oscar Levant. Soon many able musicians (Jesse Crawford, Benny Goodman, Vernon Duke) were juggling rhythms and harmonies into endless combinations. Long-haired music schools eschewed Schillinger and all his works: their students had plenty of time to court...
When Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald died at 44, in Christmas-week of 1940, he left behind a handful of brilliant novels and collections of short stories (This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tales of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby) and an unfillable gap in the ranks of Postwar I's "lost generation." Wrote Novelist Glenway Wescott, "he was a kind of king of our American youth...
...legal princesses on Sarawak, his three daughters continue to be dubbed Princesses Gold, Baba and Pearl. Leonora Margaret (Princess Gold) pleased her father when she became the second wife of the late 2nd Earl of Inch-cape. Less pleased was the Raja when his daughter Elizabeth (Princess Pearl) married Jazz Bandleader Harry Roy, and his youngest daughter, Nancy Valerie (Princess Baba) married Wrestler Bob Gregory, who later divorced her because "she is always somewhere else...
When Rhapsody in Blue was first played -with young Composer George Gershwin at the piano and Paul Whiteman's big, brassy band shattering the serenity of Manhattan's Aeolian Hall-neither audience nor critics liked their first taste of concert jazz. The Herald Tribune objected to its "complete lifelessness." Most audiences, if not critics, have changed their tune in the 21 years since then...
...serving ginmill blues to highbrow audiences, Gershwin made a lady out of jazz. For this he was richly rewarded in his lifetime; royalty checks for his works (an estimated $100.000 a year at least) still exceed those of most of his living contemporaries...