Word: lowdownness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fast and vastly exuberant piece in a weak-and-strong two-beat, with barnyard sounds reproduced by cornet, clarinet and trombone. From there, the album ranges over various jazz styles-blues, swing, cool-and reaches a high point with Fats Waller's full-chorded, stomping piano playing and lowdown comic singing. Decca's four-record Encyclopedia of Jazz covers much the same ground, with one LP devoted to each of the last four decades. Among its best offerings: a 1927 recording of Johnny Dodds's Black Bottom Stompers in Wild Man Blues, displaying Trumpeter Louis Armstrong...
...tradition and culture as well as of rum and rumbas, manned their typewriters again last week. This time the assault was on film: the sequence in Guys and Dolls that shows Gambler Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando) and friends living it up with Havana bawds and bravos in a lowdown nightspot...
...much of a bust. It is so warm-hearted about a cold world, so high-minded about its lowlifes as to emerge mere hootch-coated butterscotch. Its bawdyhouse seems about as sinful as Saturday night in a Y.W.C.A.; when its mugs and molls carouse, what is meant to be lowdown seems more like a hoedown. And it is not just the madam who has a heart of gold; with all of its characters' hearts, Pipe Dream shows a positive Midas touch...
...played vignettes of adolescence by Actors Sal Mineo and Pat De Simone. Then Composer Leonard Bernstein took over for a splendidly lucid primer on the world of jazz. Pointing out that blues are based on a rhymed couplet in iambic pentameter with the first line repeated, Bernstein developed a lowdown blues song from Shakespeare.* Bernstein looks like a young Burgess Meredith, speaks with extraordinary clarity and intelligence and is always able to demonstrate precisely what he is talking about...
...playwriting, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? often badly slithers; and as satire, it is too often a mere family joke. More surprisingly, the sap in Playwright Axelrod's spoofing suddenly turns to syrup. Kidding the blonde siren at the start, Will Success offers a lowdown but lively Monroe Doctrine; championing the playwright at the end, it provides a weirdly solemn Declaration of Independence. (By this time, in Hollywood plays, integrity should be seen and not heard.) And in all the final putting things to rights, there is no trace of irony. If Hollywood filmed Faust, Faust might be expected...