Word: pianists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...also consume arrowroot cookies with ketchup, voraciously take tranquilizers by the dozen and spend hours on the telephone calling anyone at anytime just to talk. In his elliptically eccentric little film, director Francois Girard composes a series of thirty-two short compositions that capture the intense peculiarities of the pianist's insanely tortured and brilliant life. The director's minimalist documentary style, while ostensibly unassuming, is as intense as the Gouldian world it unfolds for us on the screen. The film's fragments wrap us up and then just as quickly unwind--the detached psychological probing is as disorienting...
Born in Harlem in 1924, Earl Powell was, on the evidence, something of a prodigy. His father was a building superintendent but also had some skill as a stride pianist, and he started giving his son lessons at the age of three. By the time Bud was seven, his father claimed, neighborhood musicians would come by and take the boy out so everyone could admire his chops. At 10 he could play Fats Waller and Art Tatum. While he was still in his teens, Powell fell in with Thelonious Monk, who after a time would even let Bud take over...
...most poignant song, Gulf Coast Highway, written with pianist James Hooker and guitarist Danny Flowers, has this refrain: "And when he dies he says he'll catch/ Some blackbird's wing/ Then he will fly away to Heaven/ Come some sweet blue-bonnet spring...
Levin is an internationally known pianist who has played with Christopher Hogwood, Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Seiji Ozawa and other famous musicians. A composer as well, he is famous for his "completions" of fragmented Mozart works...
...American musical culture is untouched by Joplin's influence. Stride piano, boogie-woogie, Dixieland, Big Band swing, blues, soul and rock 'n' roll -- to some degree, all these forms were adumbrated in Joplin's works. But Joplin's achievement transcends pop music; indeed, the soft-spoken, neatly dressed whorehouse pianist was a master melodist who would rightly be called an American Schubert...