Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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There was little jazz left on 52nd Street. Even the customers had changed. There were fewer crew haircuts, pipes and sports jackets; more bald spots, cigars and paunches. Said an old swing musician : "It was a pretty rugged street to start off with and you couldn't hurt it much. But it's lost its charm...
...wasn't swing: toothy Stan Kenton had already pronounced that "dead, gone, finished." Some doubted that it was even jazz: it had a shifty beat (and sometimes none), little-if any-form, and even less improvisation. Most of it sounded like Duke Ellington with the D.T.s. But when Kenton's band got to pushing out such huge, screeching blotches of sound as Artistry Jumps and Message to Harlem, the fans ripped the place wide open. They listened to his newest and most pretentious masterpiece;, Prologue Suite in Four Movements, in a state of glassy somnam-bulance. When Kenton...
Kenton is a 6 ft. 4½ in. Californian who at 36 has the same ambition Paul Whiteman had in the '20s: to marry classical music and jazz. In Whiteman's case, what emerged was pseudo-symphonic-a blend of Tin Pan Alley and Tchaikovsky. In Kenton's, it is a driving, nervous (and technically skillful) wedding of swing and Schonberg. Kenton started his outfit in 1941, got ahead fast by getting up early to sign autographs, and looking up disc jockeys whenever he hit a new town. For the past two years, his musicians have been...
Stan Kenton considers his "progressive jazz" just what the psychiatrist ordered. Last month, he sat down with a Down Beat reporter (Harvardman Mike Levin), gave him a 62-column interview that sounded sometimes like a seminar in psychology, sometimes like a talk with Father Divine. Said Kenton: ". . . The human race today may be going through . . . nervous frustration and thwarted emotional development which traditional music is entirely incapable of not only satisfying, but representing...
...Were Meant for Me (20th Century-Fox). The life & works of jazz musicians offer material for a fine movie. Some day the moviemakers may take intelligent advantage of the fact. But You Were Meant for Me isn't even as good as it was six years ago, when Fox made a similar picture called Orchestra Wives...