Word: levant
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When pudgy, pugnacious Oscar Levant went to Manhattan from his native Pittsburgh in 1922 with a copy of Romain Holland's Jean Christophe under his arm, he expected to start a heavyweight musical career. Earning a living playing the piano in speakeasies and theatres, he spent his leisure studying with famed Music Teacher Sigismund Stojowski...
...years went by and Pianist Levant showed no signs of becoming another Paderewski, he drifted off to Hollywood. As a friend of the late George Gershwin, he became successively a: 1) cinemactor, 2) assistant to a producer of Westerns, 3) composer of cinema scores, 4) one-hit tunesmith (Lady Play Your Mandolin), 5) one-piece piano virtuoso (the famed Gershwin-Grofé Rhapsody in Blue), and an intermittent pupil of famed Arnold Schönberg, who taught him how to write complicated high-brow music. When, nine years later, he returned to Manhattan to conduct and arrange music for shows...
...summer of 1938 Radio Director Dan Golenpaul asked him to appear as a guest star on NBC's Information Please program. Levant astounded radio listeners by answering glibly and accurately the most abstruse musical questions the quizzers fired at him. Soon he was engaged as a regular feature, today enjoys a reputation as U. S. music's public brain...