Word: musics
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sure, you can't look at West Side Story totally removed from the era that produced it. When it opened, in 1957, Broadway musicals were almost all comedies, set in sentimental fantasylands, whether exotic (The King and I), nostalgic (The Music Man) or contemporary but cartoonish (Guys and Dolls). Here, instead, was an effort to use the musical form to explore serious contemporary social issues: urban slums, race prejudice, the scourge (ah, the '50s!) of "juvenile delinquency." It was also a groundbreaking marriage of pop entertainment and "high culture": choreography that featured classical ballet moves, a score with elements...
...around, it doesn't sound all that glorious. I count 28 musicians listed in the program, but the orchestra sounded both undermanned and overmiked, sometimes drowning out the singers; in a couple of the early numbers, I couldn't be entirely certain they were working from the same sheet music. What's more - a heresy to even suggest - I wonder if this score really belongs in the very top rank of American musicals. The jazzy, modernist, Gershwinesque rhythms of some of Bernstein's music - "The Jet Song," "America" - are still striking and original. But is there a duller love ballad...
...tour operator has found a way around the problem, by bringing visitors straight into the living rooms of some of the city's best jazz musicians. Part township tour, part music- and social-history crash course, and part intimate jam session, the four-hour Cape Town Jazz Safari, developed by a local outfit called Coffeebeans Routes, aims to overcome the city's notorious social fragmentation by making its rich cultural diversity more accessible. (See 10 things to do in Chicago...
Apartheid may have collapsed 15 years ago, but the forced evictions of blacks and mixed-race people from the city center during the 1960s left its mark as much in music as in everything else. Even now, musicians living on the Cape Flats, the massive expanse of gritty slums and working-class townships to which nonwhite Capetonians were removed, find themselves isolated from the city and from each other. "What we're doing through music and culture is trying to contribute to our urban regeneration," says Coffeebeans Routes co-founder Iain Harris...
...into a minivan and embark on a cultural treasure hunt across the Cape Flats, stopping at the homes of various musicians - among them guitarist Pokie Klaas. Sitting on an old crate in a bare room with a cement floor, Klaas riffs gently on his guitar and talks about the music school he is setting up for local kids in his backyard...