Word: phonograph
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...world's virtuosi, none was more certain of his art than Phonographist Joe Warfield. Maestro Warfield's instruments were three phonographs and 300 or so records-and he played them with an artist's rapt care. Warfield was a disquaire, a man who played the phonograph, and he took a witch doctor's grave delight in his work. "I create a mood like a painting," he would say I can make the people dance. I can make them sit down." Awe-struck by such commanding art, a newspaper columnist once told him: "Warfield, if only...
...offers its customers nothing more than hour after hour of phonograph records and a chance to dance where there is no room to breathe. Having such creatures as null Sagan, Porfirio Rubirosa and Yves Saint-Laurent under his electrified baton was excuse enough for the Pavlovian power Warfield felt, but like all pioneer artists, he was misunderstood in his time. Last week, for all his genius, he was fired on the implied charge that he was turning the Princesse into a laboratory for psy-chomusical research; he had become a power-crazed, prima donna player of the phonograph...
...remaining disquaires are generally less inspired than Warfield, but their ranks are deep and growing. France has at least 200 discothèques, and the Jet Set has spawned carbon copies in Manhattan, providing ample opportunity for great phonograph players to practice their subtle art. In control rooms off the dance floor, they preside over the music, nimbly switching from turntable to turntable to spin new records. Some discothèques allow their patrons to suggest tunes to the disquaire, but at many such an impertinence would be unthinkable-like asking Pablo Casals to play Melancholy Baby...
...Paris entrepreneur who opened a club called La Discothèque 14 years ago and is still riding the boom. When he began, he detested musicians ("They play for perhaps twelve minutes, then go to the bar and swill down drinks for half an hour"), but now he detests phonograph records with the cold fury that comes from marrying a machine. This week Merle will close down his discothèque for a month or two, and when he reopens, it will be with the help of a live piano player-an anachronism, perhaps, but a man with no delusions...
Just ten years ago, 340 singers of classical song were pleased to find their names in the roomy pages of a catalogue called the Schwann Artist Listing, which named all available LP phonograph records according to performer, from Licia Albanese to Silvana Zanolli. Many of the 340 have long since been weeded away, but in the new Artist Issue out this month, 97 squinty-type pages are devoted to the recordings of 2,330 singers, from Bruce Abel to Erich...