Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DIED. Joe Venuti, eightyish, peerless jazz violinist whose daring experiments in swing were matched only by his outrageous practical jokes; in Seattle. Trained in the classics, Venuti played second violin in the Philadelphia Orchestra but longed to improvise. He played with Dance Band Leaders Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman, teamed up with Guitarist Eddie Lang to make hundreds of vintage jazz recordings and then formed his own band. An energetic performer who worked high jinks with his bow to play four strings at once, Venuti enjoyed a renaissance in the past decade and was still performing in jazz spots last...
...fluttery delicacy of a flute, the finespun song of a violin, a bassoon's dark, melancholy air. His playing refuses to sound well-schooled. Even Mozart runs take off so spontaneously that Stoltzman might almost be improvising-as he often does. He recently took part in a jazz workshop at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and let fly with some big-band solos. Says he: "I told them that I'm basically a classical musician, but that I love jazz...
Stoltzman, in fact, came to the classical clarinet by the unorthodox route of jazz. During his childhood in San Francisco, he and his father, a railroad man with a passion for the tenor sax, would im- provise hymns at Presbyterian Sunday school. "We'd play the main-line melody and then just float in and out of harmonies," he recalls. "That freedom not to play all the notes exactly as they were written was the beginning to me of making music...
...high school, he "played with the dance band for money and with jazz groups for fun." Ohio State University came next, after Stoltzman was rejected by Eastman School of Music and Juilliard. At Ohio he majored in math and music, and even considered a career in dentistry. "I still thought that classical music was somebody sitting in a symphony and playing things that you didn't understand," says Stoltzman. But after some lessons with Clarinetist Robert Marcellus of the Cleveland Orchestra, he decided on graduate work in music at Yale...
...some terrific blues singing, get out to Beverly to see Ernestine Anderson, Tiny Grimes and Bob Pilsbury. at Sandy's Jazz Revival...