Word: pianists
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When Marcus Roberts titles an album Blues for the New Millennium (Columbia), it's no casual gesture. Having played regularly with Wynton Marsalis, the pianist shares with his former bandleader a taste for pedagogy, historicism and sheer ambition. Roberts' two most recent albums were a song cycle about romantic loss and rebirth, and a jazzman's reclamation of Rhapsody in Blue. The new disc begins with basics--covers of Robert Johnson and Jelly Roll Morton--and then branches out with 12 self-penned numbers. The climax, Roberts writes, "symbolizes what the whole record is about...our belief that jazz (blues...
DIED. STEPHANE GRAPPELLI, 89, exuberant jazz violinist; in Paris. Grappelli started out as a pianist for silent films but switched to strings for the swing standards he loved. America had Ellington, but Europe got the Quintet of the Hot Club of France in the 1930s--the chamber group-cum-jazz ensemble that featured Grappelli and guitarist Django Reinhardt. The quintet broke up during World War II, but Grappelli played on--recording more than 100 albums...
...Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra gave its second subscription concert of the year to an audience expecting the regal waves of sound and emotion displayed in the orchestra's first performance. Featuring works by 20th-century composer Luigi Dallapiccola, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, the intricate program additionally benefited from the presence of pianist Randall Hodgkinson. Though listeners may have been mystified by the opening pieces, it wasn't long before the nation's oldest continuously performing symphony orchestra revealed the source of its longevity--the quality and enthusiasm of its talented members...
From the moment that pianist Suzanne MacAllister stepped on stage and began to play "Infant Holy, Infant Lowly," the Radcliffe Choral Society impressed with its delivery and precision. In Benjamin Britten's "Missa Brevis in D," the women, under the direction of Marvin, achieved a beautiful blend of harmonies and melodic progressions. It is a difficult piece, but the group pulled it off with wonderful mastery--particularly in the "Sanctus," with its unusual layering of voices progressing up a scale. Alto soloist Kate Kraft acquitted herself well in this movement...
Harry Connick Jr. has long viewed himself as something of a Sinatra for the '90s. Although he broke into jazz a decade ago as a solo pianist influenced by Bud Powell and Art Tatum, his career veered sharply toward big-band and string-arranged music after his 1989 sound track, When Harry Met Sally, went multi-platinum. When his version of the classic It Had to Be You--with Connick singing--became a hit, he began moving his repertoire closer toward pop, writing, as he did on 1991's Blue Light, Red Light, jaunty big-band tunes that echoed...