America’s great vernacular songwriter Frank Loesser was born 100 years ago today. To celebrate, cable tv network TCM is showing the film of his Pulitzer Prize winning musical How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, and Neptune’s Daughter which features Loesser’s evergreen duet “Baby It’s Cold Outside” (see and hear below, I hope — much […]
Archives for June 2010
Fred Anderson, Chicago jazz hero, appreciated
As a teenager in pursuit of the avant garde, I took tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, who died June 24 at age 81, as a hero upon first hearing him in 1966. It was at a Unitarian Church-run coffee house in downtown Evanston near Northwestern U., and attention clearly had to be paid to the long, fierce, unreeling, knotty […]
Miles’ beyond jazz, today and tomorrow
Miles Davis is still at it — in Prospect Park, the Highline Ballroom, (le) Poisson Rouge, Carefusion Jazz Festival’s Carnegie Hall concerts, also overflowing the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, as per my City Arts – New York column and enriching the glorious Festival International de Jazz de Montreal (June 25 – July 5). Though he died of […]
Why of the Jazz Journalists Assn’s Jazz Awards
Why give Jazz Awards? See my new column in City Arts re the event Monday 6/14 at City Winery in NYC, produced by the Jazz Journalists Assoc. (Full disclosure: I’m deeply involved — as left, last year presenting Kurt Elling his statuette for Best Male Vocalist, photo by Enid Farber. See us this year, streaming […]
Robert Johnson on speed
Musicologists are convinced blues icon Robert Johnson’s recordings as released are 20% faster than he performed in two solo sessions in 1936 and 1937. It’s unclear whether they were sped up intentionally (to push their excitement, which seems hardly necessary) or accidentally at some point in the chain between microphone and pressing plant. What is […]