Word: quartets
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Amidst all the talk about blues singers, jazz artists, and Koussevitzky lovers, the concert to be given November 10 by the Budapest String Quartet has been almost ignored. This is a great pity, for no instrumental organization in this country quite compares with the Budapest in consistent quality of execution...
...Mooney campaign. He coaxed musicians, bandleaders and managers into making the trip to Paterson to hear "the most exciting musical unit in the U.S. today," devoted nine columns to Mooney in Down Beat, started his fellow editors worrying that their trade paper had gone goofy about an accordion quartet. Last week they had stopped worrying...
...Mooney four last week came up with more fresh musical ideas in an evening than most full-size bands get in a season. Bandsmen like Duke Ellington and players from other orchestras dropped in after hours to listen. Not since the wonderful first days of the Benny Goodman quartet had they heard the unit discipline that keeps all four men inside the same melodic scheme, yet leaves each musician free to create a succession of original and often exciting figures...
...Mooney himself who makes the quartet spark. He does the arrangements they start from, writes many of the tunes, provides every cue during the improvisational passages, and sings the vocals in the soft style of Nat (King) Cole. Sometimes he switches from accordion to piano, astonishes fellow musicians by playing contrasting figures with right and left hand simultaneously. The other three members of the quartet watch Mooney closely, and with evident admiration. (He cannot watch them: he is blind.) Their cue from Mooney is often merely a smile or change of facial expression...
...week's end the quartet was as hot commercially as its own playing of Wild...