Word: swing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most people (including Griffey and Sosa) suspect, will set the record this year, it won't last 37 years, as Maris' did, or even 34, as Ruth's. Griffey is young, and the record is most likely to be his someday. He has one of the most perfect swings in baseball history: a long, smooth, straight, upper-body cut that makes McGwire's short, compact, hip-driven swing look like a shot put. Griffey's swing is the learned, refined movement of someone who grew up in major league dugouts. "Junior's never lifted a weight that I can remember...
...career, nobody thought of Sammy Sosa as a legend chaser. The amiable but erratic Chicago Cubs outfielder was better known for throwing to the wrong bases and stealing at impractical times. Same thing at bat: flailing wildly, the power hitter seemed to go for the fences with every swing. Result: last year he struck out more than anyone in the National League...
...uprising that began when Louis Armstrong blew his first hot notes grew into a revolution. Continually shifting--Big Band, bebop, cool--and propelled by the sorcery of improvisation, jazz absorbs, transforms, discards, but always replenishes itself. Here are some of the other cats who made things swing...
...genius from New Orleans whose sensitivity and passion were epic in completely new terms. In his radical reinterpretations, Armstrong bent and twisted popular songs with his horn and his voice until they were shorn of sentimentality and elevated to serious art. He brought the change agent of swing to the world, the most revolutionary rhythm of his century. He learned how to dress and became a fashion plate. His slang was the lingua franca. Oh, he was something...
Louis Armstrong was so much, in fact, that the big bands sounded like him, their featured improvisers took direction from him, and every school of jazz since has had to address how he interpreted the basics of the idiom--swing, blues, ballads and Afro-Hispanic rhythms. While every jazz instrumentalist owes him an enormous debt, singers as different as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye have Armstrong in common as well. His freedom, his wit, his discipline, his bawdiness, his majesty and his irrepressible willingness to do battle with deep sorrow...