Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cheng also says he observes a competitivestreak in some Asian parents that leads them toforce their children to piano competitions, applyfor elite colleges and strive for other standardsof excellence...
Playwright August Wilson -- who wrote The Piano Lesson and Fences -- begins his new play with a scene in which a group of friends are mourning the death of Floyd Barton, a blues guitarist and singer whose career was about to take off when he died. The rest of the play, about Barton's rocky life, is "enormously promising and filled with colorful sketches of dialogue and very appealing characters" says TIME critic Bill Tynan. As the end of the play approaches, however, both the "plotting and the ideas get muddy, so it isn't as moving as it should...
Just hearing these early recordings, one takes pleasure from Taylor's sheer audacity. He does what all musicians at some point dream of doing: going on stage and banging on the piano with hands and fists, like a film technician simply searching for the neat sound effect. But as Taylor's recordings from the 1960s show, his music is much more profound than that...
...only Taylor's piano technique, but his stamina itself is astonishing by the 1960s. The mental stamina needed to keep a group together in a period when he couldn't possibly make a living playing his music is matched by the physical stamina of a true athlete: Taylor's all-out assaults on the piano have both arms moving at a rate of hundreds and hundreds of machinegun rounds per minute; and he solos for up to thirty minutes on a stretch. The volume and intensity level of these performances is not merely the result of turning an amplifier...
Taylor's innovations rest upon the foundations of awe-inspiring piano technique, as arpeggios spiral off effortlessly in opposite directions, while in other passages, glowing chords are teased from the piano with the light touch of a Bill Evans or a John Lewis. This technique creates an ongoing well-spring of creativity which cannot possibly...