Word: soloed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There was none of the improvised Dixieland so familiar to festivals; nor were there many personal appearances by such great solo showmen as "Satchmo" Armstrong or Gene Krupa. Instead, classics-minded young jazzmen concentrated on the brassy new progressive jazz and the slightly atonal West Coast styles, and played their well-rehearsed arrangements with the cool elegance of conservatory students. Even Stan Kenton's 18-piece (including bongo drums) orchestra had its own smooth brand of progressive beat. But the real stars of the festival were the small, intimate combos that played jazz with a new maturity and subtlety...
...alto sax) made each number sound like a theme and variations. The quartet usually started with well-known tunes (These Foolish Things, St. Louis Blues), then varied the tempo (from 4/4 to 5/4 and back to 3/4) as it injected its own sometimes loud, sometimes soft designs. The solo lead flew like a badminton bird from one musician to the other...
Mark Twain Tonight! The white-mustached, white-suited, cantankerous old hu' morist burns as pungently as his own stogie when Hal Holbrook brings him to life in a brilliant solo...
...remaining items on the program were three works for solo piano, played by Bruce Archibald. Schoenberg's Six Short Piano Pieces, Opus 19 (1911), come from a period when the composed was tired of post-Romanticism but had not yet concretized his twelve-tone technique. After close acquaintance, they still impressed me as no more than undergraduate improvisation despite Archibald's careful rendition...
...Garner, Dorothy Dandridge, Johnny Mathis. Regulars remember how Eleanor Caccienti refused to ring the cash register when Dizzy Gillespie was talking for fear she would miss a joke. (Now the cash registers have no bells.) They recall the night a trombonist lost his pants in the middle of a solo, and the time Drummer Art Blakey belted a cymbal so hard that it bounced onto a ringside table where (according to Gleason) "two worshipers were sitting with eyes closed. They went six feet in the air, straight...