Word: phils
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Steelmen and steelworkers made little progress toward ending the strike. President Truman, determined not to invoke the Taft-Hartley law, had called Government mediators out of the negotiations. Both sides were still deadlocked over Phil Murray's insistence on the union shop, although there were some signs that management's opposition to this was cracking. Bethlehem Steel, which had been the first to break management's front in the 1949 strike, offered, then hastily withdrew, an informal compromise on the issue...
...gotten off the track, both the latter-day Dixielanders and the bopsters, who seldom let you hear the tune. "These kids, now, all on a 'progressive' kick, don't know what they're listening to because they don't know where it came from." Phil Napoleon is doing what he can to set things straight by taking the young crowd back to first principles: "This music we're playing, it's so old! I had to work hard to remember...
...Waif's Home"). At 16 he formed his own Original Memphis Five, soon found himself proprietor of one of the most popular little outfits in the U.S. For a while, a youngster named Bix Beiderbecke, who was to die at 28 and become a jazz immortal, carried Phil's horn for him, listening and learning. Between 1917 and 1925 the Memphis Five made 3,011 records...
...symphonic" bands were the rage. Napoleon organized one of his own. Among its 15 members were Glenn Miller, Russ Morgan, Joe Venuti, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and Artie Shaw. It anticipated the age of swing by half a dozen years, but never caught on outside of Brooklyn. Phil Napoleon left the jazz business and became a trumpeter-of-all-work at N.B.C. There, for 22 years, he played "Stravinsky one hour, soap opera the next." Finally he decided he was ready to quit playing...
...older crowd has been turning up too, people who once courted to Phil's music, and can hardly believe he is the same man. "They forget I started so young," Phil says. For them he blows the old tunes-That's A Plenty, Milneburg Joys, High Society, Tin Roof Blues. For the departed jazzmen whose music he is reviving, he has a special thought: "I keep thinking of that good band up there with Gabriel. Of course Gabriel's the greatest-Bix is probably playing second horn up there-it must be a wonderful band...