Lively history by free-lance jazz-journalist Rosenthal of a brief but important musical era falling between post-Charlie Parker jazz and Stevie Wonder-style tunes. Today, Rosenthal explains, hard bop is heard only in revivals as the neo-bop fabrication of feelings of another era. But as musician Henry Threadgill complains: ``For the first time in the history of jazz, many young artists have become virtuosos of styles that have passed....Are we so nostalgic that we need virtuosos of the graveyard?'' Bop grew out of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell, elided into its second generation (and perhaps its finest flower) with effervescent, feelingful trumpeter Clifford Brown. Where classic bop had bubbled with ebullience, Rosenthal says, hard bop sprang from a cooler, more laid-back yet hard- swinging spirit, as exemplified by Miles Davis's seminal ``Bags' Groove.'' Davis had come into being with Parker, with a modest middle-range style of which Rosenthal does not think highly. It was only after a four-year bout with heroin that Davis returned with his ringingly inventive major style, the biting but full-toned phrasing of pieces like ``Bags' Groove'' and ``Cookin' '' and with synergies drawn from working with the emerging John Coltrane. Hard bop's most tragic figure is best seen, going by Rosenthal, in trumpeter Lee Morgan, who began recording with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers when only 18, winnowed an overactive style down to notes well weighed, worked up ``a timbre that seemed to convey a mixture of bitter irony and sorrow,'' and then, in 1980, was shot dead at age 30 by his spurned mistress at a jazz club on N.Y.C.'s Lower East Side. And at that point, hard bop and the milieu that buoyed it up—``ghetto life with jazz at its center''—vanished under Motown, soul, and ``concept albums.'' An original and compelling assessment.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-19-505869-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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