Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Back in the era when the loudspeaker was edging out the speakeasy among U.S. pastimes, a pair of second-rate jazz singers stood before a microphone at NBC's WMAQ in Chicago, shifted into heavy Negro dialect, and gave birth to a national institution. Within two years the Amos 'n' Andy show of Freeman Gosden (Amos, Kingfish et al.) and Charles Correll (Andy) was radio's first great popular craze, so captivating that U.S. telephone calls soon fell off 50% between 7 p.m. and 7:15, and movie theaters stopped their films to pipe...
...Jazz Groups: Dave Brubeck Quartet...
Running Hard. Johnny and Manager Noga are playing the big time with all the care and finesse of deep-sea fishermen hooked into prize tuna. Johnny has abandoned his ambition to be a pure jazz singer ("not profitable"), has carefully cultivated the delicate art of wooing local disk jockeys. So far, he has been seasoning himself in small clubs, avoiding the gaudier barns on the theory that "I haven't yet got the ability of a Lena Home to take a thousand people and bring them down to the size of a fist...
...follows with an essay on the West Coast anti-academics (the Beat and breathless generation)--a hand-dangling series of observations on San Francisco press agentry. Wyman, and a good many of Audience's poets, seem mildly awed at the energy of the Beat mystique--and profoundly amused by jazz-and-poetry miscegenation and technological bogeymen...
...Today they puts jazz into college and they writes books about what Pete used to play; and they 'civilize' the stuff, but they change it too- 'cause you can't feel the blues from reading no book. And you can't spell Bach with a small 'b' and make Basin St. from it. Not that it ain't music or ain't good-but it's different, and some don't know it. And they tell you what jazz is and what it ought to be and I start to thinking that maybe I gone crazy or had too much...