Word: musician
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Sandbox, a short play which Albee wrote in memory of his grandmother, is a burlesque of the death ritual. Mommy and Daddy dump Grandma in a sandbox and await her death while a musician plays a guitar and a muscular young man performs calisthenics behind the sandbox. A sense of futility and emptiness pervades the play. We are made conscious of the play as an art form and the theater as a building: Mommy shouts into the wings at the musician, "You-out there! You can come in now"; and later, after an off-stage rumble puzzles Daddy, Mommy explains...
Jazz fits in amidst virtually any surroundings because it is a primarily personal rather than primarily formal kind of music. There is another side to the coin: since jazz is based upon improvisation and the inspiration of the moment, the environment in which the musicians play is bound to affect their music. The hospital-room atmosphere of a recording studio can help keep a musician's high spirits in check, just as a Monday-night jam session at Birdland can bring them...
...atmosphere of the Newport Jazz Festival is unique. Jazz especially modern jazz, is usually played indoors, in a big city, before a small audience. At Newport, the musicians perform under an open sky; the town itself is technically a city, but it is suburban in feeling; and the audiences are huge. In addition, the festival is as much a social event as a musical one for the performers, most of whom know each other. The whole affair has something of the spirit of a great big family reunion in the country. When Clark Terry steps out on the stage...
...factors besides the convivial atmosphere of the Festival affect the music that is played there. So many performers must take the stand during a given Festival concert that none of them gets a chance to play for more than an hour; some have less than thirty minutes. For a musician who is a slow starter, a tiny time segment can be fatal. Even groups which swing from the moment they start to play need time to establish their own mood. The size of the crowd precludes any real give-and-take between audience and artist beyond the mass-meeting variety...
Sunday night's concert was the most uniformly excellent event of the Festival. It began with the American debut of a fine French pianist, Martial Solal. Solal showed that a solid classical background can be a great asset to a jazz musician. Harmonically, he is strongly influenced by modern European classical music. Otherwise, his main influence seems to be Bud Powell, who now lives in France. Solal avoids the "funky" cliches of jazz piano, but preserves a real jazz feeling. Working out his ideas with both hands, embellishing his phrases with trills, he created some wonderfully elegant improvisations...