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Miles Davis vs. Don Draper
Source:
Miles Davis Online
Definitely worth a read. Good stuff.
Yet, for all of its strengths, Mad Men wouldn't be nearly so appealing if not for the fact that it is set during a time when America was neatly divided between the hip and the square. It's important to point out, though, that during the early '60s, the time period that Mad Men is set, people like Don Draper and his colleagues would most certainly have been regarded as undeniably square.
Cats like ...
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Red Norvo's Spotlight Band on Film
Source:
Jazz Lives by Michael Steinman
The distinguished jazz film scholar Mark Cantor offers another cinematic mystery:
“In Back Beats and Rim Shots, Warren Vache and Johnny Blowers discuss a band put together by Red Norvo, under the sponsorship of Coca Cola, for an overseas tour during World War II. The tour never happened, but before the band broke up a film --called THE VICTORY PARADE OF SPOTLIGHT BANDS -- was made of (in Johnny's words) “the show." At least one performance from this film is ...
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L.A.'s Jazz Bakery Still Homeless but Alive This Week at the L.A. Premiere of New Film, "The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi"
Source:
Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing) by Carl L. Hager
The Jazz Bakery, one of Los Angeles' most revered jazz establishments, is still homeless after closing its doors last spring, but it is still alive and living off the fat of the land. Running a non-profit jazz club that features big national acts and low ticket prices 7 days a week ain't easy. When your philanthropic landlord dies and the new owner(s) announce they're turning your club into a furniture store, you need to be imaginative.
What Owner/Chief ...
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Devil May Care: The Bob Dorough Movie
Source:
The Business Musician by Craig M. Cortello
We've written about Bob Dorough several times here before. Bob is a unique and wonderful jazz singer/songwriter, but he's best known as the musical director of Schoolhouse Rock, the cartoon vignettes set to music that taught children Grammar, Math, Science, Multiplication, History. Economics, and Environmental lessons. Bob composed such wonderful songs as “Conjunction Junction" and “Three is a Magic Number," and through DVDs his music is being passed along to future generations. He continues to perform well into his 80's. ...
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A Haunting Miles Davis Film Score
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Riffs on Jazz by John Anderson
Louis Malle's 1958 film Ascenseur pour l'échafraud (Elevator to the Gallows) is legendary for a number of reasons. It helped usher in the French New Wave film movement, it made Jeanne Moreau a star, and it has a haunting score by Miles Davis. The film is a crime drama about two lovers, Florence (Moreau) and Julien (Maurice Ronet), who plot to murder her husband and run off together. After killing the husband, Julien becomes trapped in the building's elevator, leaving ...
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Jerry Garcia Film on the Way
Source:
JamBase
WHO SHOULD PLAY JERRY?
Jerry Garcia Variety is reporting that a Jerry Garcia film is in the works. Amir Bar-Lev, director of the documentaries The Tillman Story and My Kid Could Paint That, has signed on to direct a biopic focusing on Garcia's pre-Dead years. The film will reportedly be based on Dark Star, an oral history of Garcia's life written by Robert Greenfield. According to director Bar-Lev, the “daring script does justice to Garcia and steadfastly resists cliche." There ...
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Mad Men and the Wall St. Journal
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
When I was a college intern at The New York Times in the late 1970s, I worked for the editors of the Op-Ed and editorial pages. One of the editorial board editors was architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who had already won a Pulitzer Prize. [Pictured: Jon Hamm as Mad Men's Don Draper]
Each day I'd bring Ms. Huxtable a stack of new architecture books that publishers had sent over for her to peruse or review. And each day she'd ...
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The Queen's Suite - a young jazz musicians dream to play to the Queen of England
Source:
Corine Dhondee
'The trailer on Kickstarter is most easily the most inspiring thing I have seen in my adult life.' What is the Queen's Suite? The Queen's Suite is about Peter Edwards, one of Britain's most promising jazz arrangers and his dream is to perform Duke Ellington's Queen's Suite (which was written in 1959 for the current British Monarch) to the Queen at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The film follows Peter as he puts together his band, rehearses them and negotiates with ...
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