{"id":4099,"date":"2018-10-03T11:47:12","date_gmt":"2018-10-03T18:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=4099"},"modified":"2018-10-03T14:51:00","modified_gmt":"2018-10-03T21:51:00","slug":"the-emergence-of-billy-strayhorn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2018\/10\/the-emergence-of-billy-strayhorn.html","title":{"rendered":"The Belated Emergence of Billy Strayhorn"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[contextly_auto_sidebar]<\/p>\n<p>ONE of the great hidden figures in musical history is Billy Strayhorn, who seems to be a bit less invisible every year. When I was getting hard into jazz in the early &#8217;90s, haunting record stores and hoarding Coltrane and Mingus records right after college, Joe Henderson&#8217;s <em>Lush Life<\/em> album came out and electrified the jazz world: One of the greatest saxophonists of the &#8217;60s was re-emerging with a tribute to an Ellington confrere I may not have even heard of at that point,<\/p>\n<p>That record, and the David Hadju biography &#8212; as well as digging into great Strayhorn numbers like Blood Count and Day Dream (so hauntingly covered by Chet Baker near the end of his life) &#8212; made clear to me and others that the Duke&#8217;s arranger (gay, introverted, modest) was a serious figure of his own.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re now a few decades into the Strayhorn revival, and we&#8217;re now about to get a new theater\/dance piece, based on the artist&#8217;s life and work, at REDCAT\/ Disney Hall. I enjoyed meeting David Rousseve, the choreographer behind <em>Halfway To Dawn\u00a0<\/em>; he comes from Louisiana Creoles,was raised mostly in Houston, broke in as an artist in the &#8217;80s East Village, and had a lot to say about the way culture, ethnicity, and artistic scenes work.<\/p>\n<p>In any case <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment\/arts\/museums\/la-et-cm-billy-strayhorn-20181003-story.html\">here<\/a> is my Los Angeles Times piece on Strayhorn and <em>Halfway To Dawn<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/220px-Billy_Strayhorn_New_York_N.Y._between_1946_and_1948_William_P._Gottlieb_08211.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-4100\" src=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/220px-Billy_Strayhorn_New_York_N.Y._between_1946_and_1948_William_P._Gottlieb_08211.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"220\" height=\"226\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[contextly_auto_sidebar] ONE of the great hidden figures in musical history is Billy Strayhorn, who seems to be a bit less invisible every year. When I was getting hard into jazz in the early &#8217;90s, haunting record stores and hoarding Coltrane and Mingus records right after college, Joe Henderson&#8217;s Lush Life album came out and electrified [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30,29],"tags":[788,944,718,945],"class_list":{"0":"post-4099","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-los-angeles","7":"category-west-coast","8":"tag-dance","9":"tag-duke-ellington","10":"tag-jazz","11":"tag-redcat","12":"entry","13":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4099"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4103,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4099\/revisions\/4103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}