Word: pianos
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There aren't many people whose work runs the gamut from drafting reports on race relations at Harvard to tracking down piano tuners, but after nine months on the job, no task fazes Jeanne Gibson...
...most successful and respected figures, Robbie Robertson of The Band, explaining in his own slightly hackneyed way the group's decision last year to stop touring. The Band--Robertson (lead guitar and covals), Rich Danko (bass and vocals), Levon Helm (drums and vocals), Garth Hudson (keyboards) and Richard Manuel (piano and vocals)--did what few groups, successful or struggling, have ever managed to do: they quit while they were still ahead...
...Last Waltz has some minor flaws other than this somewhat self-indulgent tone. The opening and closing scenes feature a schmaltzy waltz, played by The Band. The music is reminiscent of a player piano in an Old Western saloon. The visual accompaniments--particularly the closing shots of The Band, alone on a strangely-lit stage, playing the insipid theme--attempt to evoke a feeling of free-floating nostalgia. This final scene adds an untoward note of solemnity to the affair; Scorsese would have been better off closing with the final number of the concert, the full-company rendition...
When he signed his first recording contract in the '20s, Thomas ("Fats") Waller demanded an unusual rider: there had to be a fresh bottle of gin on his piano when he arrived in the morning and another to take home when he left in the afternoon. But then there was nothing usual about Fats. "He was a man of gargantuan appetites and talent," says Murray Horwitz, Ain't Misbehavin's associate director. "He was 100%. When he was with you, he didn't hold anything back. Everything he had was yours, his heart and whatever else...
Smith and James P. Johnson, two masters of "stride piano," in which the left hand carries the beat and the right hand takes the melody, By the time he was in his early 20s, Fats, who at 250 Ibs.plus had already earned his nickname, was well known among musicians; before he was 30, he was on nationwide radio. He developed a style all his own, and his music was marked by a constant vitality, good humor and an inimitable, natural ease. The songs he composed had the same ebullience. "There isn't a dead bar in his music," says...