Word: songe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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CHARLIE PARKER (1920-1955) With startling impact, the musical quantum leap known as Bebop shook the jazz world in the mid-1940s. Its prime energy source was sax man Parker. Unhinging improvisation from song melody, jumping into dissonances and spinning out complex lines, Parker created the sound that dominated postwar jazz. His 1953 recording Jazz at Massey Hall catches this revolutionary in full flight...
...into the basis for a recording industry. By 1912, 5 million Americans a day were attending a new entertainment called movies. New Orleans echoed with the sounds that were jumbling together gloriously as jazz. Denizens of Tin Pan Alley were polishing the wit and jaunty lyricism of the pop song and revamping European operetta into an original American theater form: the musical...
...popular music from sheet music, performed in Victorian theaters and parlors, to disks that spread thousands or millions of copies of a given performance across the landscape (and across radio's airwaves). The original 78-r.p.m. record was just that--a passive record of a three or four-minute song. In 1948 the l.p. accommodated longer pieces as well as the arrangement of various tracks according to a unifying theme. Soon, as with the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album became an electronic creation in its own right, impossible to duplicate in performance. These days, when...
...rooted in the nationalistic school that drew inspiration from Russia's beautifully expressive folk music. His father was an opera singer who performed in Kiev and St. Petersburg, but his greatest musical influence was his teacher, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. The colorful, fantastic orchestration that Stravinsky brought to his folk song-inspired melodies was clearly derived from Rimsky-Korsakov. But the primitive, offbeat rhythmic drive he added was entirely his own. The result was a music never before heard in a theater or concert hall...
Those are legends and home truths, passed along in song, that became part of a cultural vocabulary and an ongoing American myth. Hundreds of songs; more than 500 and counting. Forty-three albums; more than 57 million copies sold. A series of dreams about America as it once and never was. It was folk music, deep within its core, from the mountains and the delta and the blacktop of Highway 61. Rhythm and blues, too, and juke-joint rock 'n' roll, and hymns from backwoods churches and gospel shouts from riverside baptisms. He put all that together, and found words...