Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved The Gil Evans CD contained four LP’s, only three of which were actually by Gil Evans. In 1960 he signed a contract with World Pacific for two albums, New Bottle, Old Wine and Great Jazz Standards , both of which reflected Evans’ interest in the jazz of the past. In fact, New Bottle, Old Wine counts as a virtual capsule history of jazz, starting with W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” and Jelly Roll Morton’s “King Porter Stomp” and moving through Fats Waller’s “Willow Tree,” Louis Armstrong’s “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” Count Basie’s and Lester Young’s “Lester Leaps In,” and then moving into the modern realm with Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight,” Dizzy Gillespie’s “Manteca” and Charlie Parker’s “Bird Feathers.” This album was dismissed by Don Heckman in Jazz Review as a “relative failure” because it featured Julian “Cannonball” Adderley as soloist and Heckman felt Adderley’s “dissociation from...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Right now Ilm listening to Women in Jazz , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHE4UTFDlL0 , a compilation on YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHE4UTFDlL0 ) of the great women jazz singers – not only the famous names (Billie Holiday – represented by her Decca remake of “Them There Eyes” instead of her far superior Columbia original – Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Lena Horne, Dinah Washington, Kay Starr, Pearl Bailey) but the near-greats that had at least cult careers (Anita O’Day, Carmen McRae, June Christy, Betty Carter, Annie Ross, real-life couple Jackie Cain and Roy Kral, Nellie Lutcher – doing an infectious vocal version of the Dixieland standard “That’s A-Plenty” – and Helen Forrest, whose career never recovered from the trauma of being dumped by her employer and lover, Harry James, when he married Betty Grable instead and Forrest learned about it the way the rest of the wor...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night I played for my husband Charles and I a recording of the complete score for the 1930 George and Ira Gershwin stage musical Girl Crazy, a simple tale of a young rich scapegrace named Danny Churchill whose dad ships him off to a ranch in Arizona to make a man of him. While there, he falls in love with the local postmaster, Molly Gray. Predictably, she has no interest or desire in him at first, but he gradually wears down her resistance. There are also several supporting cast members, including a man named Sam whom Danny knew in New York and whom Molly uses to date in order to make Danny jealous. The original Broadway cast featured Allan Kearns as Danny, Ginger Rogers as Molly, and Ethel Merman as local girl Katie, who stopped the show with the score’s big hit, “I Got Rhythm.” (For the Columbia compilation CD From Gershwin’s Time, released in 1999 to commemorate the centennial of George Ge...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved The last thing my husband Charles and I istened to was the extraordinary but also frustrating 1960 album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, an awkward title forced on Roach because two years earlier Sonny Rollins had recorded an instrumental album called Freedom Suite on which Roach had played as a sideman. We Insist! Freedom Now Suite was among the first records n which major jazz musicians addressed the nascent civil-rights movement of Black Americans – though as early as the 1930’s musicians like Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday had written, played and/or sung songs dealing with racial intolerance. We Insist! Freedom Now Suite opens with its most powerful track, “Driva Man” (“driva” as in “slavedriver,” the man at the otner end of the whip used to beat recalcitrant slaves and bludgeon them into submission), with a powerful vocal by Lincoln (her last name is all too appropriate here!) and a scorch...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved In lieu of watcvhing one or more Lifetime movies – wth the holidays over they’re back to doing the usual “pussies in peril” crap but I wanted lighter fare – I was inspired to dig out the 1980’s recordings of the complete scores of the George and Ira Gershwin musicals Of Thee I Sing (1931) and Let “Em Eat Cake (1933). Of Thee I Sing was a huge success and won the Pulitzer Prize for best play – the first time it was given for a musical, though since the Pulitzers didn’t give a prize for music for another decade the prizes went to George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind for the book and Ira Gershwin for the lyrics, but not to brother George even though the score is among the Gershwins’ best. > Of Thee I Sing concerns the Presidential candidacy of John P. Wintergreen, whose campaign song featires the refrain, “He’s the man the people choose/Loves the Irish and the Jews.” (One wonders about that line...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Throughout the last two weeks CBS had been promoting the special they were going to show last night about the singer Adele. It was billed as “Adele: One Night Only” and was a live show that took place in front of the iconic Griffith Observatory in Lous Angeles, where much of the film Rebel Without a Cause was shot. She performed on the famous steps where Sal Mineo’s character is shot in the movie and a little man in a suit, played by director Nicholas Ray, shows up at the end to open the observatory. The show promised a concert by Adele as well as an interview of her by Oprah Winfrey, and from that I was hoping that it would be the full interview and then the concert. Instead it was a ghastly format in which Oprah’s interview with Adele, filmed in the garden of Oprah’s estate, was cut up into segments and kept intruding itself into the performance. Through the two-hou9r length of the show Adele got...

Stunning Musical Performances Overwhelm the Silent Films He was Accompanying by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved My husband Charles and I just returned from the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park, where for the last two days a quite spectacular theatre organist named Mark Herman has been performing. On Saturday, October 30 he closed out this year’s Monday night organ festival concert – though this one was moved to Saturday, October 30 so it would take place before Hallowe’en instead of afterwards – which was the venue’s traditional “Movie Night,” an annual event in which they show either a silent feature or (as this year) a program of silent shorts, with the organist supplying live musical accompaniment. This, mind you, is how silent films were shown “in the day”: the very largest theatres had full orchestras, the next rung down had organs, the theatres below them had string trios (piano, violin and cello) and the c...