Word: pianists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Arthur Rubinstein's career was a gaudy parade of superlatives. After Vladimir Horowitz, he was the 20th century's most famous classical pianist as well as a world-renowned bon vivant on speaking terms with everyone from Henry James to Golda Meir. In old age he wrote two best-selling memoirs that recounted a Kennedyesque sex life. He played his last concert in 1976 at the age of 89--then left his wife for another woman...
...bulk of The Rubinstein Collection is given over to later performances that too often are cautious, occasionally even bland. But the first 11 discs, recorded in the '20s and '30s and exquisitely remastered by Ward Marston, sizzle with the devil-may-care brio that made Rubinstein the best-loved pianist of his generation...
...stints with the bands of Miles Davis and Charles Lloyd put him at ground zero of the jazz-rock fusion movement. Then, in the 1970s, he unplugged his keyboards and started giving the totally improvised, all-acoustic solo concerts that established him as the most individual (and successful) jazz pianist of his generation. The '80s saw him recording arrestingly fresh versions of pop ballads with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette--as well as Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier on piano and harpsichord...
Besides the quartet (pianist Alan Broadbent, drummer Larance Marable and tenor saxophonist Ernie Watts, along with Haden), there are guest vocalists on a few of the cuts (Shirley Horn and Bill Henderson) and a chamber orchestra on others. But it is Haden's spooky, unpolished vocal on Wayfaring Stranger, the closing track on this superb album, that provides a surprising but characteristically intrepid coda, a valedictory from a musical explorer who can find new territory anywhere he wanders...
...mimicry but also for the sophistication of their musical commentary. A jazz lover, Freberg fought a rearguard action against rock 'n' roll, which he considered undisciplined and musically simplistic. Only Freberg would have had the idea to satirize the Platters' Great Pretender by focusing on the hipster studio pianist who's forced to play the boring "clink clink clink" accompaniment. His critique of mush-mouthed rock 'n' roll culminated in 1960 with The Old Payola Roll Blues, in which Freberg takes on the whole ethos of rock and dismisses it as a fad that will pass once payola ends. Satirists...