Word: rocks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Liu Yuan started playing the sax, jazz was still seen as bourgeois and chord charts were hard to come by. Raised by folk-musician parents, he performed with Cui Jian, the father of Chinese rock, before dedicating himself--under the influences of John Coltrane and Miles Davis--to jazz. Now Liu's East Shore is the most promising venue in Beijing's budding jazz scene. Located on the banks of Lake Houhai, East Shore is a refuge from the trinket sellers and gaudy bars along the crowded shore. Its large windows give clear views over the water, and leather...
...upscale, largely white) folks who usually fill the orchestra seats. It's a crowd that Broadway has been chasing for years. Hair was the first show to really tap into the sensibility and musical tastes of a young generation, and plenty of musicals since then have tried to bring rock (or at least rocklike) music to the land of Stephen Sondheim and Jerry Herman. None, however, were as successful as Rent, which has grossed more than $280 million on Broadway, helped by a fervent audience of kids, many of whom saw the show multiple times...
...Broadway is about to welcome two more unconventional shows from off-Broadway that are hoping to reel in the sort of people who have traditionally turned their noses up, and their iPods off, at show-tunes-style musicals. One of them, Passing Strange, is an idiosyncratic mix of rock concert and theatrical bildungsroman, presided over by a Los Angeles-based alt-rocker named Stew. The other, In the Heights, is a Latin- and hip-hop-flavored love letter to the Hispanic neighborhood of Washington Heights in upper Manhattan. The two shows have little in common except that neither could...
...their heart of hearts," says Stew (real name: Mark Stewart), the creator and composer of Passing Strange, "I think every rock-'n'-roll guy who always laughs at the American musical in truth wants to write a musical. You don't want to be with a touring band every night. And it gives you a chance to tell a story." A native of Los Angeles who has been recording albums and doing cabaret shows with his band, the Negro Problem, for the past 10 years, Stew, 46, had seen only one musical--How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying...
...padded (shorter stays and another stop on this tour might have helped), but musically, it's original and extraordinarily winning. Stew, a bald, bespectacled guitarist who leads the band and narrates, is a professorial presence onstage whose flat, prosy singing voice gives an ironic grounding to the lyrical, gently rocking melodies. He's a model of a new kind of stage composer, one neither steeped in Broadway tradition nor reacting overtly against it. "Without casting any aspersions," says Stew, "I don't think most of the so-called rock onstage sounds like anything my friends and I would listen...