Word: simon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...HORSEMAN RIDING BY by R. F. Delderfield. 1,151 pages. Simon & Schuster...
PLUM PIE by P. G. Wodehouse. 252 pages. Simon & Schuster...
Apart from a probing sketch of Dorsey, Simon provides little that is fresh on such familiar figures as Miller, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington, but he gives appropriate recognition to some of the brilliant though now largely forgotten ensembles of the period: the sizzling band headed by tiny, hunchbacked Drummer Chick Webb, featuring Ella Fitzgerald, which triumphed at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in a 1937 battle of the bands with Goodman's group; the lush, colorfully textured Claude Thornhill band; the showmanlike Jimmie Lunceford unit, whose buoyant two-beat style influenced such latter-day bands as Billy...
...Burps. Simon also squarely faces a fact often obscured by sentimental hindsight: a great many bands of the era were inevitably cheap, slick or inept. He quotes Arranger Gordon Jenkins, after an evening of listening to the radio in 1937: "I heard 458 chromatic runs on accordions, 911 'telegraph ticker' brass figures, 78 sliding trombones, four sliding violas, 45 burps into a straw, 91 bands that played the same arrangement on every tune, and 11,006 imitations of Benny Goodman...
...girls at home and the boys overseas were equally lonely, equally sentimental," writes Simon. "The time was ripe for the singers, with their more personalized messages. In December 1946, almost a dozen years after Benny Goodman had blown the first signs of life into the big-band bubble, that bubble burst. Inside of a few weeks, eight of the nation's top bands broke up. The world that was once theirs now became the property of their most illustrious graduates-the singers...