Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Other jazz records...
...Frank Morelli, baritone sax; Terry Pollard, piano; William Austin, bass; Frank Gant, drums; Argo). A quintet given to spicing the group sound with finger cymbals, a one-stringed rebab, and a scraped ram's horn turns its talents to exploring Leader-Composer Lateef's oriental-flavored jazz fancies. Morning and Let Every Soul Say Amen may be too exotic for some tastes, but the easy-swinging sax flights of Gillespie's Woody'n You ought to set any pulse to bouncing...
...show brings back just about everything that ever belonged to the girl who was the toast and tattle of France, whose sexy, banana-girdle routines led the Lost Generation through the rhythms of le jazz hot. There is a showboat Cakewalk, some St. Louis blues, a song of Harlem in hard times and of Negroes in Paris; there is a flash of the old Folies and the new ballets; there is Josephine doing a Gypsy ballet and "The Charleston Forever" in black gold-spangled tights...
There is a school of thought which holds that bullfight bores are more deserving of ball-bat anesthesia than jazz bores, but this school is wrong. A bullfight bore may re-enact Manolete's death spasms, but a jazz bore will replay the same Charlie Parker record, with contrapuntal commentary, until his woofer melts. The public ear has been grievously bent, and therefore any novel about jazzmen that is fresh, authentic and ungummed by cultism is an achievement...
Playwright Garson (Born Yesterday) Kanin (rhymes with rain in), a jazz saxophonist during his knockabout days, has managed this much. His novel is cast in the form of a onetime saxman's fond, moody reminiscence of the hard-blowing early '303. Jogged by a telephone call from one of his old partners, the narrator recalls the rise and fall of the combo they formed. The group begins as a trio, built around an astonishingly good young trumpeter. Then the saxman finds a pianist at a Harlem rent party, and the trio sounds even better as a quartet. Bookings...