Word: musicians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When he was in high school, Eric Liu labored desperately not to be defined by his race. He made himself into a "Renaissance boy"--a wrestler and musician, prizewinning scientist and newspaper editor--all to avoid the stereotypes commonly affixed to young Asian-American males. As Liu writes in his new book, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (Random House; 206 pages; $23), his effort to distinguish himself didn't always work: "In the eyes of some, I suppose, I was simply another Asian 'overachiever...
...black women vocal stylists, including Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald and R.-and-B. singers like Aretha Franklin. Although Holiday, who counted Bessie Smith among her most important musical influences, was not a blues singer per se, her music was deeply rooted in the blues tradition. As a jazz musician working primarily with the idiom of white popular song, Holiday used the blues tradition to inject suggestions of perspectives more complicated than those the lyrics themselves contained...
From 1920 on, he was hell on two feet if somebody was in the mood to challenge him. Musicians then were wont to have "cutting sessions"--battles of imagination and stamina. Fairly soon, young Armstrong was left alone. He also did a little pimping but got out of the game when one of his girls stabbed him. With a trout sandwich among his effects, Armstrong took a train to Chicago in 1922, where he joined his mentor Joe Oliver, and the revolution took place in full form. King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band, featuring the dark young powerhouse with...
Clement Leslie, himself a musician in his freetime, says that when his son told him he wanted tobe a musician, he did not support the decision...
...would be best, of course, if you were a player, a singer, a fellow musician. But with luck and fine timing, you could also be a casual guest, a dinner companion, a colleague's spouse--even, if the furies were snoozing, a journalist. In 1988 Sinatra, the paragon of show-biz sangfroid, told Larry King, "I swear on my mother's soul, the first four or five seconds, I tremble every time I take the step and I walk out of the wing onto the stage, because I wonder if it will be there when I go for the first...