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Post by artraveler on Jan 27, 2021 18:11:57 GMT -8
Music of America
The music of America is different from other countries. Yes, we have a classical tradition inherited from Europe and there are Americans who compose for large symphony orchestras. However, they are a minority of artists. The best known are Elmer Bernstein and George Gershwin. Both are excellent composers and musicians. Their music is not the classical music we hear with complex contrapuntal phrasing and in the classic three or four movement formats.
The music of the American people is very different and has its roots in the music of two very diverse cultures. The first of these arrived on our shores in the 17th century with settlers who quickly shook off the restraints of the cities and moved into the hill country of the Applications. Music made with string and wind instruments, violins/fiddles, guitar, and banjo. The melodies were Welsh, Irish, and Scotts borderers. The music they brought had complex and active tones suitable for dancing and singing. This music form in our day is recognizable in bluegrass and country and western music. The rethemes of dulling banjos owe their origins to these highlanders.
Not long after the Scotts Irish landed on our shores the first African slaves arrived. The slaves carried a music that was heavy on repeating rethemes and tones. Over time it picked up the wind instruments and kept the drums. In the gathering places of the deep south. Slave, master, and freedmen drank and danced to exciting new tunes and by the late 19th century a new and novel form of music appeared in New Orleans. It was fast innovative and for the first quarter century was never written down. Indeed, it was believed that it could not be written in regular music notation. We call it jazz.
As jazz developed into the 20th century it developed several different forms. There was the NO style rich in trumpet, but also Chicago, Kansas City, and New York stylings. As jazz grew up it specialized into different forms. Blues, Broadway show songs, swing and later rock are all spinoffs of jazz. When you listen to your favorite Neil Diamond, Al Jolson, or Frank Sinatra you are listening to jazz. Moreover, elements of jazz can be found in the music of Ted Nugent, and Michael Jackson. Or the piano of Scott Joplin and ragtime, which briefly took the nation, Maple Leaf Rag once was the most popular music in the country. Of course, Elvis made the transformation of jazz and rock. Throughout all of this the one American music style that has few, if any, roots in either jazz or bluegrass has remained a minority form. Hip-hop and rap remain outside most American music forms.
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kungfuzu
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Post by kungfuzu on Jan 30, 2021 12:08:43 GMT -8
Here is some American music by an extremely talented musician. Note, this is live thus what you are hearing is not some put-together job picking and choosing good parts and deleting bad parts, which is very common in the recording business. I have a couple of his albums from the 1970s and 1980s. If this doesn't pick you up, nothing will.  George Benson Here is the same concert with video. It was in Montreux, Switzerland 1986. If it doesn't immediately play keep clicking and fooling around with it. It will eventually come up. Montreux |
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Post by kungfuzu on Mar 14, 2021 15:57:46 GMT -8
I didn't realize Mark Steyn had this section on his blog. I listened to a couple of the videos and found them very entertaining. Steyn knows his stuff and it is fun to hear someone like Randy Bachman tell how he came up with "You ain't seen nothing yet." Steyn on music |
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 9, 2024 19:48:27 GMT -8
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 20, 2024 17:56:37 GMT -8
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Post by kungfuzu on May 20, 2024 18:51:42 GMT -8
Most of those clips were from the 1960s. Hard to believe the difference in our concept of beauty.
Then
Or
Today
Or
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Post by kungfuzu on May 20, 2024 19:35:56 GMT -8
When I looked at this guy
It made me think of this guy, but in drag
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 21, 2024 7:03:40 GMT -8
Coincidentally (are there really any coincidences?), last Saturday I watched 1954's Private Hell 36. Had that been named after the movie's runtime of 81 minutes, I would have understood the title. As it is, I forget what the 36 refers to. Howard Duff plays good-married-cop Sgt. Jack Farnham. He's fine in the role. Steve Cochran plays easily-corrupted-single-cop Sgt. Cal Bruner. Dean Jagger plays their soft-spoken boss, Capt. Michaels. Ida boom-boom Lupino plays the ambitious nightclub singer, Lilla Marlowe. She wants nothing less than the good life with lots of cash and bobbles. In the midst of an investigation for robbery and murder where a large amount of cash was stolen, Sgt. Bruner becomes infatuated with Lilla, and she somewhat returns the affection. But on an honest cop's salary, he knows he has little to offer. Solution? Become a dishonest cop. Sergeants Duff and Bruner chase down a guy who they suspect was involved in the robbery. In the midst of the car chase, the bad guy's car lunges down a hill and he is killed. The cops find a box full of money. Bruner starts to stuff his pockets with some of it while Duff is incredulously looking at him. Not able to turn his partner in, he gets involved and becomes dirty as well, something he can't live with. He wants to confess to Dean Jagger, but Bruner resists and even threatens violence toward his partner. All this might sound like a good plot but the action and interest is lukewarm after the major plot points are constructed in the first half of the movie. One subtle (I think it was subtle, at least in terms of this movie) plot point was that Lilla boom-boom Marlowe gets a look at the happy domestic life of Sgt. Duff and his wife (and child) and begins to wonder if perhaps there is more to life than chasing a career and having expensive tastes. But very little is realized from this point and the movie devolves to complete inanity, if you ask me. Still, you can watch it for free on Tubi TV (along with a lot of other noir movies) and decide for yourself. And Jagger in the end is thrust into a dumb role. Instead of going all medieval on his corrupt cops, he seems to approach it (he suspects they took some money) as the gentle Ward Cleaveresque father figure toward his wayward sons. It doesn't really work, although Jagger is one of my favorite actors otherwise. He's simply outstanding in Twelve O'Clock High, a movie that, as I remember it, really made his career. He's good in Dark City, White Christmas (playing his iconic mix of hard-ass and soft-spoken as the ex-general), and The Nun's Story. He did a lot of classic 60s/early 70s tv as well, including Columbo (a supporting character in a Robert Culp episode). As far as I know, he never appeared in drag. I like this one reviewer's observations about the car crash: |
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Post by kungfuzu on May 21, 2024 8:05:45 GMT -8
I had a look at IMDb's blurb on the movie and noticed that a number of well known character actors were also in the film. Lumpy's father, from Leave It To Beaver was one of them.
I never heard anything about Jagger appearing in drag, but when I saw that perv in the picture, I immediately noted a resemblance to Jagger, who was not a feminine-looking man. To my mind, that picture of the putz in pink parading in a peruke was the perfect portrait of pernicious perversion pervading our population.
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 21, 2024 10:02:29 GMT -8
Lumpy's father. Richard Deacon? It's funny, I don't remember him in the film. It must have been a small part.
Speaking of pernicious perversion pervading our population. I find frequently far-flung feminized freaks, fruits, and ferries fomenting furor and fanaticism.
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Post by kungfuzu on May 21, 2024 11:29:16 GMT -8
It was. He, and a number of other faces which most of us would recognize, played an uncredited role.
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 21, 2024 19:45:33 GMT -8
I just finished He Walked by Night which I found on Amazon Prime although you may find it elsewhere. A quite young Richard Basehart plays the killer. The only other actors I recognized were Whit Bissell (who I will forever associate with the TV program, The Time Tunnel) who plays the owner of an electronics company that buys Basehart's inventions. And Jack Web plays the police lab technician. This is billed as a documentary-style procedural drama, which it is. But, goodness gracious, I don't think the cops come out of this looking like the brightest bulbs even though the whole set up of the movie is to show how the cops ramped things up to catch this particularly clever crook. Oh, yes, and there are small parts for John Dehner (he of the great voice who you might not recognize by name) and Frank Cady, best known for his role in Green Acres and Petticoat Junction but who did have some nice bit parts in various movies (Rear Window, Ace in the Hole, The Asphalt Jungle, The Bad Seed, Broken Arrow, and lots of television including Rawhide, Hawaiian Eye, Perry Mason, The Untouchables, The Virginian, Cheyenne, The Real McCoys, Wagon Train, and Gunsmoke). This is the movie that Dragnet was spun off of or was an inspiration for. And it's easy to see why. They are quite similar. The movie itself was well worth watching. It has a sewer chase scene reminiscent of, and probably better than, the one in The Third Man, which I watched just before this. Someone had pointed out this fact about the sewer seen in a review of The Third Man. I had seen He Walked by Night before, but long enough ago to watch it again. |
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Post by kungfuzu on May 22, 2024 12:45:21 GMT -8
I like to see a lot of such character-actors. They are, generally speaking, better at their craft than many "stars" and they are interesting in a way many stars are not. Perhaps they are more human, which is important as the big screen often has a way of making things less than real.
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