Word: musician
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...true, however, that the glorification of a few outstanding colored players promises little yet for the less talented Negro musician. Even the best colored bands, as Basie's experience shows, have difficulty getting jobs, although their musical ability may be far greater than that of the stereotyped white bands which feather their nests with the proceeds of their successful mediocrity. Then too, once they hit the limelight, colored stars, like too many white players, are wont to sacrifice their playing styles to impress the multitude, as Eldridge is doing now. No matter how many Negro players are featured with white...
Goodman himself has been one of the first to grant the colored musician equal opportunity to star in the big time. Ever since Teddy Wilson joined him in 1935 he has had one or more Negroes occupying important places in his organization. Wilson and Lionel Hampton, the versatile vibraphonist and demon of the two-fingered piano, both gained so much publicity that they have now broken off and launched their own bands. And now Charlie Christians and Cootie Williams, two other colored virtuosi, are performing with Goodman's sextet...
...swing fad did, however, have more permanent effects than the Big Apple and the Suzie Q, in that it brought many people nearer a kind of music they hadn't understood before. The growth of popularity of improvised jazz, built around the individual self-expression of the musician, has been a direct result of the interest of people who looked behind the jump-jump and the jive, and the screeching horns and shimmying drummers, but it still has a long way to go. Writing in the Sunday Herald Tribune a couple of weeks ago, Benny Goodman hit the proverbial nail...
Last week in Manhattan, at considerable personal expense, after great personal effort, a musician conducted an orchestra to prove to the world that he is not crazy. There have been worse reasons for a concert. Many people suppose that all musicians are more or less wacky.* But hulking, six-and-a-half-foot Otto Klemperer, exiled German conductor, had lately been pictured as something worse...
Conductor Klemperer, able musician but a Jew, was ousted from the Berlin State Opera in 1933, became leader of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Two autumns ago he was given a leave of absence after undergoing a brain tumor operation, which left him partly paralyzed and shambling-gaited. Last autumn he resigned. Soon he found another orchestra over which to wave his enormous, expressive hands: the New York City Symphony (WPA). He quit this job in January, after a row over whether to play Wagner's Siegfried Idyll in its original 15-instrument version (as he wished), or with...