Word: musicians
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Tribute & Applause. The Fascists did their best to make a great musician of Pietro Mascagni, and he cooperated. In 1926, he was appointed Arturo Toscanini's successor as director of Milan's La Scala. He obliged by composing a Hymn of Labor. The obedient Fascist press hailed his 1935 opera Nero, a musical tribute to Mussolini's Italy, but it flopped anyway...
...hour was musician's midnight (9 a.m.). Hulking, disheveled Roger "Brick" Fleagle-an ace arranger for such name bands as Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford-lumbered into the studio, stared at his unshaven assemblage and lazily "sparked" (alerted) them with his pinkie finger. They played a few tired bars to warm up. Then Brick, his barrel-stomach protruding under a striped sweat shirt, gave his final orders: "We'll take SOS [Same Old Sheaves]. On the last two bars, Charlie, make it bumpa, bumpa, some Charleston, then a brrrrooom. O.K., we're rolling...
...orchestra's four winter and six summer concerts are free. This open-handed policy, the judge figures, has cost him some $20,000 over the years for scores, supplies, and an occasional pair of pants or a dinner for a broke but promising musician. As he nervously, conscientiously whips his musicians through the hoops, his courtroom manner vanishes : "I raise hell with them ... I work myself into a wreck . . . but I keep my dignity...
...polka-addicts look on. The week was nothing special for brash, 36-year-old Romy Gosz, who has made some 35 records for Columbia and Decca, and turned down various offers from bigtime bands. He prefers to stick with his own six-piece group ("five men and one musician") and his regular circuit of small Wisconsin towns. Six nights a week he plays hot, fast and loud for dances attended by Dutch, Bohemian, Belgian, German and Polish groups. In Wisconsin, no one has ever disputed the "King's" title...
...brighter than anything the Max Factory can contrive. Robert Young, as the disfigured veteran, combines his genuine manliness and sympathy with stylized sentimentality in perfect proportions; and Makeup Artist Maurice Stedman helps him give his uglier moments a pathos at once living and restrained. Herbert Marshall as the blind musician (Mr. Marshall is certainly Hollywood's No. 1 Man Next Door) and Mildred Natwick as the clairvoyant do their hammy tasks well and from the heart, as befits good craftsmen. The one note of viciously painful reality in the production is the moment when Richard Gaines, as the hero...