Word: musicians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...light on the jazz life. The real meat of Jazz Lives lies in the words of its less celebrated subjects. Many readers will find most of the names unfamiliar, but none of them are second-rate, and they speak with authority and often with charm. Only remember that every musician in this book has made it, one way or another, in a world where talent is only part of success. The American jazz life demands that many more, equally talented, go on paying dues and hoping for a break what will never come...
DIED. Annunzio Paolo Mantovani, 74, mood-music maestro whose lush, homogenized sound made him the first musician to sell a million stereo albums in the U.S.; after a prolonged illness; in Tunbridge Wells, England. The Venetian-born, British-educated son of a Covent Garden concertmaster began his own career at 16 as a classical violinist. Though he conducted London's Hotel Metropole Orchestra and his own Tipica Orchestra in concerts, BBC broadcasts and on records in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, and later became music director for Playwright Noel Coward, Mantovani was little known outside of Britain...
...SETTING OF Blue Devils--a series of "reunion" jazz parties Ricker organized at the Musician's Mutual Foundation, Kansas City's old Black union hall--recalls No Maps On My Taps, which revolved around a similar reunion of old jazz dancers, but Blue Devils has little of the sadness and sentimentality that are at the heart of Taps. As Ricker is quick to point out, the golden years of Kansas City were good, happy times for jazz musicians, and the surviving Kansas City jazzmen have learned how to deal with the disappointments of the intervening years; when they get together...
...Often it's a major task to determine the subject of a song, and it may take weeks of intense listening to discern any coherence. But the songs deepen with each newly-discovered phrase, and the rewards are great; I wouldn't work that hard for any other contemporary musician...
...least analytic of musicians, Rubin stein is unilluminating about his technique and repertory. "Compositions," he says, "were immediately clear to me through my born musical instinct. The music simply spoke to me." What it told him, he has already conveyed in his extraordinary performances and recordings; he has little to add here. He is better on his fellow musicians, particularly those whom he does not wholly admire. He proudly plays his new recording of the Grieg concerto for the sardonic Rachma ninoff, whose sole comment is "Piano out of tune." Jascha Heifetz patronizes him musically but seeks his advice...