Word: took
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
Rodgers and Hammerstein did not, of course, collaborate until they were well along in their careers. Rodgers was born on June 28, 1902, on New York's Long Island to a doctor and his wife. He took to music at an early age. The teenage Rodgers spent his allowance going to Saturday matinees of musicals. Thus he grew to idolize Jerome Kern...
Hammerstein was born in New York City on July 12, 1895. His father William was a theatrical manager; his grandfather Oscar I, a legendary impresario who took on the Metropolitan Opera by building his own opera house. The young Oscar was stagestruck from childhood, and by the time he attended Columbia University, he was performing and writing amateur routines. It was after the Saturday matinee of a college varsity revue that he first met Rodgers, whose older brother brought him to the show. Years later, remembering this meeting, Hammerstein wrote, "Behind the sometimes too serious face of an extraordinarily talented...
...time Rodgers and Hammerstein were discussing the Hart crisis, the 46-year-old Hammerstein was considered something of a has-been. He had a string of flops to his name. Famously, after the successful debut of Oklahoma! he took an advertisement in Variety listing all his recent catastrophes with the punch line: "I've done it before and I can do it again...
...urged her to try television. CBS was interested in Ball, but not in the fellow with the pronounced Spanish accent she wanted to play her husband. To prove that the audience would accept them as a couple, Lucy and Desi cooked up a vaudeville act and took it on tour. It got rave reviews ("a sock new act," said Variety), and CBS relented...