Word: saxophonists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...movement; of liver cancer; in Southampton, N.Y. After studying the old masters in Paris, Rivers injected ironic humor into the earnest, Abstract Expressionist-dominated art world of the 1950s, with such works as Washington Crossing the Delaware, a parody of the famous American painting. A saxophonist, writer and sometime actor (appearing in the Beat-era underground film Pull My Daisy), he was both self-promoting and self-deprecating. Hospitalized once in the '80s, he envisioned his obituary headline as GENIUS OF THE VULGAR DIES...
Along with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, the legendary tenor saxophonist Lester Young is considered one of the seminal figures in the history of jazz. From his first recorded solo in 1936 through his small group sessions with Billie Holiday and his memorable stint with the Count Basie Orchestra, Young (known as "Pres," short for "President of the Tenor Saxophone") created some of the most memorable recordings in American music. Douglas Henry Daniels, a professor of History and Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has spent more than two decades investigating the legend of Lester...
...Daniels' whole treatment of Young's relationship with his father seems skewed by his desire to appease Young's family, who provided him with much of his material, by portraying the saxophonist's father in as charitable a light as possible, when it's clear even from Daniels' muted account that Willis was an abusive parent whose constant beatings drove Young to run away several times in an attempt to escape the abuse...
...jazz at its most Mozartean," and Daniels' take on this assessment is revealing. "The critics' Eurocentric emphasis - as when they likened Young to Mozart, for example - was also troubling? both in and of itself and because it carried such bald connotations of racial superiority in the suggestion that the saxophonist was worthy of comparison with this or that European master." I'll tell you what - rather than troubling yourself plowing through this pompous and dreary academic tome, why don't we both do something more interesting? I'll listen to my Lester Young CDs, while you try and find...
...four notes as he was of including more than one of those notes in a single bowing. His frantic, headbanging sawing on “Lie In” was unquestionably high energy and exhilarating at times, but was not nearly as articulate as the taut, focused solos of saxophonist Leroi Moore...