Word: musics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...days before, The Long Run, an adept and insinuating work by the regents of California pop, had already crossed the ocean, penetrated cultural barriers where some resistance might have been anticipated, and found a snug home for itself. Besides being a reminder of the international power of American pop music, hearing The Long Run in Blandford helped to take the Eagles out of cultural context. It lifted them from the category of stainless-steel Los Angeles pop, in which they are usually confined on their home turf, and let their music stand free of preconceptions. It sounded good...
...music business dropped off earlier this year and economic panic spread, investments of both high hopes and hard cash were being made in Tusk. Like the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac was the kind of "monster" group that was expected to pull the business out of the doldrums. Both records, indeed, seem well up to such heavy hauling, especially since the runaway success of In Through the Out Door, Led Zeppelin's album of surprisingly graceful power, has cleared the road and got rock fans to reach for their wallets again...
...Dark of the Moon's characters are hollow, the stage atmosphere compensates and redeems Music director David L. Reiffel, however, has turned an already obvious plot into a play that has the subtlety of a bulldozer. You know when somebody says something prophetic (thunder claps in the background) and you know when the witches are coming (bizarre piano medleys screech behind the gauze curtains). The best musicians, meanwhile--banjo and fiddle players Thornton Lewis and Matthew Brown--make one stage appearance and, sad to say, disappear...
...Jazz Makers, at least, does not try to assess the contributions of famous musicians within a single contrived framework. Nine writers worked independently to produce 21 profiles; the editors stress the absence of a predetermined formula. Appropriately, most of the writers chose to place much emphasis on the extra-musical lives of the musicians. A few well-chosen biographical details can often shed more light on the highly personal art of jazz creation than pages of technical dissection. For instance, A.B. Spellman's Black Music: Four Lives, a classic in the field of jazz literature, was conceived largely...
...find much better books about jazz. For literary merit, read LeRoi Jones's uneven but occasionally brilliant Black Music. For biography and oral history, read Spellman's Four Lives. For comprehensive approach and an up-to-date discography Frank Tirro's Jazz: A History is among one of the best. But if you know nothing about jazz and want to learn, spend your money on records instead...