Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Music is everywhere. Cajun zydeco and cool blues vie with big bands and hot jazz. There are marching bands and washboard scratchers, as well as beer hall oom-pah-pah and big-name oomph. Concert performers will run the scale from Willie Nelson and Linda Ronstadt to Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern. Naturally, Al Hirt and Pete Fountain will also drop by to blow a few notes on behalf of the local talent...
...Count") Basie would say. "I'm a pacesetter." When he died last week of pancreatic cancer at 79, the man from Red Bank, N.J., Kansas City, Mo., and the swing clubs of New York had indeed set the pace for one of the century's most accomplished jazz bands...
Basie was not the compositional innovator that another of jazz's crowned heads, Duke Ellington, was, nor an instrumental virtuoso on the order of the Earl, "Fatha" Hines. Rather, the Count's talent lay in his knack for organizing the tightest, swingingest bands in the land; populating them with some of the best sidemen ever to grace a dance floor or a recording studio, including Tenor Sax Player Lester Young, Trumpeter Buck Clayton, Drummer Jo Jones and Blues Singer Jimmy Rushing; and later backing the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. Although his elliptically eloquent, spare style...
...formed in 1935 in Kansas City, a wide-open town where the beat went on 24 hours a day. Basie, who had been stranded there seven years earlier after the breakup of a vaudeville show he had been traveling with, put together a nine-piece combo. Discovered by Jazz Critic and Record Producer John Hammond shortly thereafter, the Basie band went to New York in 1936. The next year the release of the bouncy One O'clock Jump made the Count a celebrity...
DIED. Frank ("Machito") Grillo, 76, Cuban-born bandleader whose 1940s Afro-Cuban dance bands wedded advanced jazz harmonies, big-band instrumentation and pulsing Latin rhythms, helping create salsa and change the course of modern jazz; of a stroke; in London. After World War II, such bebop jazz artists as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker adapted his Afro-Cuban sound to small-group jazz and often performed and recorded with Machito...