Word: pianist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when they travesty them, they are delightful. The Piccoli take-off of a red-hot Negro jazz band going into spasms and contortions of rhythm is brilliant burlesque. So is their exaggeratedly alcoholic and rumba-ridden picture of a Havana nightspot. And the temperamental concert pianist, frenziedly pounding away at the Second Hungarian Rhapsody, affectedly fiddling with his coat tails, orchidaceously turning the pages of his music, is not only a miracle of string-pulling, but a hilarious parody of 1,001 humbugs who have infested the concert halls of the world...
...Orleans Negro liquor dealer, Jelly started playing guitar and singing spirituals at funerals, then switched to the piano when he heard a male pianist at the French Opera House. Until then he had assumed that the piano was a woman's instrument. He took some lessons at a Catholic school, but considers his real mentor an eight-fingered virtuoso named Mamie Desdume, "good-natured, a fine dresser, and extremely popular with the sporting crowd." Mamie played the first blues Jelly ever heard, and she is gratefully recalled in the album by Mamie's Blues...
...interested in boogie-woogie that he took time off from writing detective stories to study boogie-woogie piano, under High-Priest Ammons. Last week he showed himself so proficient at boogie-woogie that the pale young critics who heard him rated him a mere notch below his teacher. Said Pianist Paul ponderously: "[Boogie-woogie] is a kind of modern Bach, in so far as the left hand does not play a mere accompaniment but a distinct theme that is woven in with the theme of the right hand in a definite counterpoint style, with Bach-like improvisations on the themes...
Fortnight ago Ouida Rathbone was at it again. So was the weather. It poured. But that did not stop 54 guests, representing most of Hollywood's international elite, from streaming into the plush-conditioned Rathbone mansion. Occasion was a party in honor of Polish:born Pianist Artur Rubinstein. London-born Conductor Leopold Stokowski, and Poland...
Chief cook and bottle-washer is Eli Oberstein. He is vice president, general manager of his own company, raises its capital, signs its artists, tells them how and what to play. Himself a former pianist, trumpet, trombone and tuba player, he chooses his performers with a canny ear, is well able to and does give them pointers on how to toot their own horns. He spends all his evenings In night clubs, cabarets, bars, movies, musical shows, on the lookout for new bands and new tunes. His admiring associates think he can pick a hit more unerringly than any other...