Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...best tactic to hide the lockjaw of his shrinking genius was to become the personality of our time." Fitzgerald, on the other hand, was not much of a self-promoter He even seems to have taken a sad pleasure in his role as the unstrung harp of the jazz age. "I talk with the authority of failure-Ernest with the authority of success," he wrote in his Notebook. His difficulties with alcohol and his desperate need to duplicate his youthful successes often drew harsh responses from his old friend Hemingway. In a letter to Maxwell Perkins, their editor at Scribner...
...Davis snapped in 1934. His own vision of America as subject was much broader. It took in "wood-and ironwork of the past; Civil War and skyscraper architecture; the brilliant colors on gasoline stations, chain store fronts and taxicabs," as well as "Earl Hines' hot piano and Negro jazz music in general." His desire, he wrote, "is to construct formal souvenirs which are an agreeable emblem" of the "speeds and spaces of the American environment." In its voracious inclusiveness (admitting, as subject, anything American from landscape to 5 and 10? store kitchen utensils), Davis' imagination cast long shadows...
...French art, other than Leger, resembled Davis' syncopated images of urban life. The blaring posterish color- yellows, scarlets, blacks, emerald greens, a high obtrusive fuchsia - and the writhing knots of line, the words blinking like neon signs, the beat and pulsation of the space: this was visual jazz, American-style, and in deed some of Davis' titles, like The Mellow Pad, 1945-51, were couched in the musicians' argot...
...MATHER HOUSE Drama Society's production of the play updates the action to the Paris of the 1920s. This seems to be a device to allow for several vaudevillian dance numbers, easy costuming and great jazz interlude music from a three piece combo led by Anthony Patera on piano...
There are some other nice touches in the production, particularly the two dances and the peppy Tom Lehrer-esque number which closes the play. the set and lighting are fairly standard; there is no striving for any exotic effects. The drummer for the jazz combo is terrific; go early so you can hear him work...