Word: riffs
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...into the Suez Canal last week plowed the 9,424-ton freighter Katoomba, bound for Marseilles with a distinguished prisoner. Sixty-six-year-old Abd el-Krim, who had brilliantly led Berbers and Arabs against Spaniards and Frenchmen in the Riff country of Morocco a generation ago, was exchanging the 21-year exile of Reunion Island, in the Indian Ocean, for the milder exile of a villa on the French Riviera. Or so the French Government expected. Instead, when the Katoomba reached Port Said, Abd el-Krim, now portly and grey of beard, walked ashore and placed himself...
...Krim, bearded, limping Riff chief who nearly drove the Spaniards out of Morocco in the '20s (before France's Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, put in charge of combined Spanish and French forces, went down and whipped him), finally got the answer he wanted to a letter he has been sending to Paris every year. He could now get off Reunion Island, a muggy spot in the Indian Ocean to which he had been exiled (with two favorite wives and many relatives) back in 1926. Abd el-Krim decided to move to the French Riviera...
...title came out of an old burlesque theater drunk skit. Jack McVea, leader of a small West Coast Negro jazz band, had heard the skit years ago-and the phrase stuck. Last summer on a rainy day in Portland, Ore. he wrote a simple riff tune for it and later recorded it-leaving out the references to whiskey. Disc jockeys in Los Angeles started plugging it last month, and soon McVea's record had sold 300,000 copies, mostly on the West Coast. As soon as it caught on, McVea heard from the lawyers of John Mason...
...Midnite at Eddie Condon's" and "Inside on the Outside" clarinetist Ed Hall pulling for the old timers and Charley Shavers for the new-have a seesaw tug of war over a weird New Orleans type of riff intricately decorated by Dave Tough's exotic drumming. Joe Sullivan's piano solo on the second chorus of "Honey Suckle Rose" is an imaginative recollection of Fats Waller and "Wild Bill" ploughs a safe and sane path through the final chorus of "Sentimental Baby." It almost sounds as if, God forbid, he was reading it off a score, there...
...Cadet Franco got his Army commission at 17, served with distinction in the endless Riff campaigns, got to be a major at 23 and the youngest general in a standard European army at 32. His fortunes sagged for a time under the Spanish Republic, then brightened when a Rightist Government came into power in 1935 and his friend, War Minister Jose Maria Gil Robles (now exiled leader of the Catholic CEDA) made him Chief of Staff...