Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Enter DJ Craze, bearing a turntable. You won't find him performing at Carnegie Hall. Like the early jazz musicians, who performed in speakeasies and brothels, he plays for an audience that's out for a good time. Like the early novelists, his primary source material is in the drift heaps of mass culture. But from those things he produces work that's not just enjoyable but also edifying: his abrupt couplings of borrowed sound--a riff sampled off an old 45, a scrap of dialogue from an old movie--point us to connections we've never made before...
...comes from men and women who have thought hard about the past and whose work builds ingeniously but simply upon it. The choreographer Susan Stroman is a living repository of Broadway dance history. The excellence of Cassandra Wilson is a function of her mastery of the canon of the jazz vocal that she so beautifully extends...
...after she had been in New York City for almost 10 years, the Mississippi woman known as Cassandra Wilson made a recording titled Blue Skies and set herself ahead of all other jazz singers, except for the longtime giants Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Betty Carter. With a sensuality too purely adult and far too lyrical to be confused with either the mush or the vulgarity that defines too much popular singing, Wilson remakes standard songs as though none of the lessons laid down by the greats have been lost...
...prepared for these achievements in her hometown of Jackson, Miss., where she was born in 1955 and began singing at age five. Her local experience was varied, but she didn't settle on jazz singing until her early 20s. When she arrived in New York in 1982, Wilson worked in Harlem clubs with names like the Red Rooster and Small's Paradise...
...18th century English, not an easy patois for slapstick--Ben Franklin gives people electric shocks as a bar trick, and George Washington gets high on the hemp from his own farm and speaks Yiddish. In Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop engages in a Malcolm X-assisted dive into a jazz-club toilet bowl that puts Trainspotting to shame. And in V., the New York City department of sanitation has a division arming men to kill the alligators in the sewers...