Word: jazzmen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bogus, how beguiling, that in the midst of the Depression, Hollywood erected Art Deco penthouses for swells with nothing better to do than dance the night away. Did audiences rebel at this fantasy vision? No, they wanted escape--escape into elegance. Nearly everyone opted for that patina. Gangsters and jazzmen went to their gigs in cool dark suits; gas-station attendants wore bow ties. To look natty was to buy into the Hollywood myth. Mr. DeMille might never come to Podunk, but Middle America was always ready for its close...
Like the modern jazzmen who were his contemporaries, he helped define cool for postwar America. He had hoboed across the country as a teenager, got into movies taking anonymous horse falls and survived a setup drug bust (he described jail as "just like Palm Springs without the riffraff"). Stardom, he implied, was just another of life's little absurdities to be sardonically observed and fatalistically played out. As the best of his screen characters did. There's a marvelously stunned stoicism in his confrontation with the inner furies that haunt him in Pursued. And when he turned to outright psychopathy...
Altman's movie won't be released for two months, but the sound track is already here, on a just released Verve CD. As the jazzmen of yore might've said, it's a gas. The mix of 21 musicians includes veteran players whose stylistic roots go back to Kansas City and beyond--alto saxophonist David ("Fathead") Newman Jr., drummer Victor Lewis--and younger stars who actually seem to enjoy paying their respects to tradition--tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, guitarist Mark Whitfield, bassist Christian McBride. On track after track, soloists of different generations find a common groove. On Froggy Bottom...
...wise, then, that Parker's Mood, a tribute album to Parker by the Roy Hargrove-Christian McBride-Stephen Scott Trio, takes such an intriguingly indirect approach to its subject. The three young jazzmen record some of the tunes Bird made his own but with one key difference--there is not a saxophone to be heard on any of these songs (Hargrove is a trumpeter, McBride a bassist, Scott a pianist). The result of their duplication by subtraction is an album that instead of being haunted by Bird's ghost is infused with his spirit...
...playwright and former opera singer, Quinn uses his love of stage and song to leaven the weekly mix of prime ministers and corporate titans with a sprinkling of actors, jazzmen and radio stars. "He lobbies hard for the most obscure people, then does them proud," says assistant editor Sidney Urquhart. "Sometimes we have to remind him that a head of state has passed away and we don't have room for that long-forgotten mimic...