Ella at 100: virtuosity, joy and swing 5
arts·meme jazz critic Kirk Silsbee excerpts his liner notes to the new four-CD set, Ella Fitzgerald: 100 Songs For a Centennial (Verve 2016-00957) At first blush, one hundred songs from any artist seem like overkill. In the case of Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996), whose recordings number in the thousands, one hundred is just about enough to ...
Martha Graham Dance Company to live music from Wild Up
She was in her fifties during the forties — maybe that’s why this by-then mature artist was creating a litany of masterworks, nearly all to commissioned scores that got live delivery in performance. In an honoring of that dance history, the Graham Company will perform a fully loaded program of three Graham ballets — you ...
Death of a dancer: Gary Bates 9
In this image from the Los Angeles dance troupe, Eyes Wide Open Dance Theater, Fred Strickler (top) and Gary Bates (bottom) appear in “Don Quixote,” choreographed by Bates to the music of Steve Reich. Bates, who was a cornerstone member of the Los Angeles dance community, passed away on April 15, 2017. Bates’ contribution to ...
Greek tragedy in Alphabet City: the death of Lee Morgan
Trumpeters have the most tragic lineage of any instrument in jazz history. Car accidents, mental illness, congenital defects, drugs and alcohol have claimed some of the greatest players. But the murder of trumpeter Lee Morgan in 1972 was a laceration on the music that never healed. That a great but floundering musician regained his footing ...
Singer/swinger Jennifer Keith’s winning act at Vibrato Grill 1
Mar
12
2017
Styling retro-singer Jennifer Keith doesn’t just look the part — although she really looks the part! With her full-skirted, fifties dress, flowers in her hair like Billie Holiday, she echos the vintage ‘girl’ singer of the big band and swing era. But she delivers too. Keith and her boys, a swinging sextet under the leadership ...
Hendrix gives free concert @ The Grammy Museum
In the photo, the great Jimi Hendrix performs a free concert in the Panhandle, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, June 1967. This seminal image is among sixty now on view as the GRAMMY Museum celebrates one of the most pivotal years in music — and the photographer who captured it, in Jim Marshall’s 1967. Jim ...
Who was Horace Tapscott?
Horace Tapscott (1934–99) was an important but underappreciated jazz musician and community activist blacklisted in the 1960s because of his political affiliations. A poetic new film HORACE TAPSCOTT: MUSICAL GRIOT is a meditation on Black music, art, and activism and the history of Los Angeles. According to the film, during the Watts Rebellion of 1965 ...
Must see, must hear: Maria Schneider big band at VPAC 2
Maria Schneider’s ascendance is a Cinderella jazz story of sorts, albeit a long one. It surprises no one when she’s on the cover of Downbeat these days. But she first appeared as Best Original Composition award winner in the magazine’s 1984 student competition. Subsequently she’s become one of the most distinctive and evocative contemporary composers. ...
Mozart’s magic to mend regrettable U.S.-Cuban cultural rift
Jan
19
2017
A truly inspirational story on the cusp of Inauguration Day comes from Sony Classical music. It’s a new album release, April 21, by pianist Simone Dinnerstein playing Mozart concerti with the Havana Lyceum Orchestra. In June, the Orchestra will also make its American debut in a series of concerts, the first time an orchestra of ...
‘Hollywood a Go Go’ mystery dancer ‘backs’ Marvin Gaye 1
Boogieing with insouciance, without so much as a glance at the performing artist — that would be Marvin Gaye — is arts·meme friend Steve Vilarino. Steve has his moment in the Zelig world as a studio dancer on Hollywood A Go Go, the short-lived television teen dance program dating from the mid 1960s. Steve’s aged ...