These selected highlights from Broadcast Music Inc.’s one-time print periodical, BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music, reflect a particularly vibrant time in music and the arts. BMI’s back pages document a wide range of artistic works and public events, some of which have not been sufficiently recorded in history.
This eclectic historic mix — brought to you by BMI, the world’s leading performing rights organization — functions, essentially, as Zero to 180’s Spring Beach Read 2026.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
At the request of the United States Information Agency, BMI supplied 15,000 copies of “Concert Music USA – 1966” for selective distribution at the Warsaw Book Fair, the Poznan Trade Fair and the Budapest Trade Fair in May and June. The booklets were placed in a special audio corner of each United States exhibit where American music was featured. Past combined annual attendance at these fairs has been well over one and a half million people.
We Insist!, the prize-winning 15-minute documentary, based on the Max Roach and Oscar Brown Freedom Now Suite, was shown during the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in April. Made in Italy by Gianni Amico, the film illustrates through the use of pictures and music the status of the Negro, past and present.
Country music took over Carnegie Hall on April 23. Robert Shelton, in his review for The New York Times, said:
“About 2,000 persons attended the show, which was marked by professionalism throughout.
“Don Gibson had the honored closing spot. One of the ablest of the Nashville-based composers, Mr. Gibson offered songs that stressed the sad side of love in a large, true and listenable baritone.
“Bobby Bare made a pleasing impression in a singing and writing style that is even closer to the folk vein than the country. His ‘Detroit City‘ is an insight into the problems of rural immigrants.
“Don Bowman, a songwriting comic, did some dryly amusing talking blues, a parody of ‘Big Bad John‘ and a satire on the uniformity of housing projects, ‘I Got in the Wrong House Last Night.’ “
The Wiltwyck School for Boys, an interfaith, interracial, residential treatment center, was the beneficiary of a folk song concert at Carnegie Hall on May 11.
Reviewing the concert for The New York Times, Robert Shelton wrote:
“Pete Seeger and Len Chandler shared the task of master of ceremonies . . . Carolyn Hester had some buoyant new material of her own and led a bright sing-along spiritual. José Feliciano displayed his dextrous guitar technique and some affecting Spanish and blues songs. The Womenfolk, a polished and musical quintet, did a competent bit even though one of its members was absent.
“After intermission, Mr. Chandler sang some of his warm and imaginative songs in a wide range of moods . . . Norma Tanega . . . sang and played some of her hits . . . Mr. Seeger closed the program.”
“After a 15-year vacation from movie-making, cowboy singer Tex Ritter is back in the business and enjoying every minute of it,” Pat Welch wrote in The Nashville Tennessean recently.
“Furthermore, the business has moved from Hollywood to Nashville. He sees it as an ‘infant industry, just about where the record industry was here 20 years ago,’ and ‘one that has a great future here.’
“Tex has a role in a feature-length movie called The Girl From Tobacco Row. He plays the part of a country preacher . . .
The cast includes Earl (Snake) Richards [and] Gordon Terry [as well as Ralph Emery, Johnny Russell and Walter Haynes] . . . with others ‘conscripted out of the country music industry,’ Ritter said.
“Ritter made some 80 films for five companies in Hollywood before the low-budgeted, ‘quickie’ Western bit the dust. Now he’s happy to have a part in one of the first Nashville-made motion pictures to have a ‘real plot—not just “stand up and sing.”‘
“Next he’ll make a picture for 20th Century-Fox.”
Filming began in late April on The Buck Owens Story, starring Buck Owens and the Buckaroos.
Chet Atkins, Archie Campbell, Porter Wagoner and Boots Randolph competed in the Pro-Am portion of this year’s P.G.A.-sanctioned Colonial National Invitational Golf Tournament, May 18-22, in Fort Worth, Tex.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
Dave Brubeck is preparing a religious work to be premiered during the fall season at the Unitarian Church in Westport, Conn.
One theme from this major work-in-progress was performed by the Brubeck Quartet during a recent concert at Philharmonic Hall, New York City. “The Sermon on the Mount,” a section of the work, was given first readings by The [Fred] Waring Workshop Chorus — made up of over 100 professional church musicians from 21 of the United States and from Canada — during the 1966 Fred Waring Choral Workshop, August 3-4, at Delaware Water Gap, Pa. Brubeck attended the readings, conducted by Dr. Lara Haggard.
Music filled the summer air in New York City. A record-breaking number of outdoor musical events crammed the calendar during the warm weather months. Indeed New York was a summer music festival.
The Rheingold Central Park Music Festival concerts, covering a wide range of popular music styles, were given at the park’s Wollman Memorial Skating Rink in the recently completed 4,200-seat amphitheater.
Overflow crowds were the rule at each of the concerts, for which admission was one dollar for seats and standing room. The talent presented during the July 1-September 5 season included Theodore Bikel, the Roy Bryant Trio, Bo Diddley, the Bill Evans Trio, the Stan Getz Quartet, Lionel Hampton and his orchestra, John Lee Hooker, Joy ’66 with Oscar Brown Jr., Gary Lewis and the Playboys, the Thelonious Monk Quartet, Wes Montgomery, Arthur Prysock, Otis Redding, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Mongo Santamaria and his band, Patrick Sky, the Jimmy Smith Trio, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Muddy Waters and Jackie Wilson with King Curtis and his band.
Award-winning composer-arranger Oliver Nelson taught three courses as part of an “In-Music of the Mass Media” program at Washington University, St. Louis, Mo., during June and July. As part of his classes, he brought New York jazzmen Clark Terry and Phil Woods, among others, to perform at a July concert. Nelson composed and arranged several new works for the occasion.
The school has long had special significance for Nelson. He attended the university in the late 1950’s, while pursuing a studies program with special emphasis on music. His principal teacher there was Robert Wykes. Earlier this year, Nelson created an entirely new book of arrangements for the Buddy Rich big band. He has also signed a contract with Danish Radio to compose and arrange for its resident jazz band.
“How do you feel,” Don Gibson was asked, “about blues people — mainly Ray Charles— doing your songs?”
“I feel honored,” Gibson told J. Heil in an interview printed in the June issue of Country Song Roundup. “Ray Charles has done four of my songs: ‘Oh, Lonesome Me,’ ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You,’ ‘Don’t Tell Me Your Troubles’ and ‘Who Cares.’ My biggest thrill was when he did ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You.’
“I first heard Ray Charles when I listened to Ray Charles in Person in 1960 . . . the other guys in Nashville…. thought I was crazy when I said I wanted to do songs with that piano style . . .
“‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’ . . . was an amalgamation of country and pop music . . . But what’s country and what’s pop? I don’t like labels. On songs or on people. I like to hear a person say, T like all kinds of music.’ It’s not ‘what’s country and what’s pop.’ It’s ‘what’s good and what’s bad.’ ”
“One of the most popular pop composers in the U.S. today is a Hamburger. He is a German named Bert Kaempfert who lives in Hamburg, tools all his music for the American public and has visited the U.S. fewer than a dozen times,” a recent profile in Time announced. “Yet his latest song, ‘Strangers in the Night,’ as recorded by Frank Sinatra … headed straight for the top. Sinatra’s version has already been matched by no fewer than 85 other performers who know a winner when they hear it.
“Kaempfert, 42, has written many tunes, but he has had nothing like ‘Strangers’ going for him before. Still, he is no stranger to the bestseller parade. While most Americans have never heard of him as a personality (he never performs in public), they have bought a remarkable 10 million copies of his schmaltz-laced albums.
“Kaempfert cultivated his taste for ‘foreign music’ when he led a sextet in a U.S. Army officers’ club in Bremerhaven. By cribbing from the jukebox, he learned all the popular American songs, soon developed a skill for arranging and composing foxtrotting tunes in the big-band idiom. Since his ‘music that does not disturb,’ as he calls it, is geared for U.S. audiences, he is virtually unknown in his own country. But Kaempfert does not care; last year he grossed $950,000. ‘Strangers’ ought to make him a millionaire. ‘Maybe then,’ says his wife, ‘they will pay attention to Bert even in Germany.’”
“Thirty years ago, Memphis Slim knew the first name of every hobo on the L & N Railroad.
“It wasn’t much better in Chicago, where for years he sang the blues for ‘rent money and grits.’ ”
Now, according to a recent spread in Ebony, the blues veteran “has found la bonne vie” in Paris. He is so busy he can name every train schedule to the provinces and other capitals of Europe.
Memphis Slim told Ebony: “Sometimes the boys get real intricate with their music, and the people can’t understand the bag they’re in. But they can really pick up on the blues. They have a ball together, because if you make one step toward the people here they’ll make two steps toward you. . .If a blues singer can’t make it in Europe, it’s his own fault.”
Summer in the City, a new revue assembled by Oscar Brown Jr. and featuring 40 numbers, some familiar, some new, by Brown, opened at the Harper Theater on Chicago’s South Side on the last day in June.
“It must be credited to Brown’s taste and goodwill that the show stays cool, well out of the discomfort index,” Michaela Williams said in her Chicago Daily News review. “Indeed, it is like a hammock, neatly laced together and meticulously hung, that invites nothing more taxing than two hours of swinging relaxation.”
The central figure in the show, Chicago poet Kent Foreman, recites his poetry “between, around and through [the] 40 numbers.” The central theme is the city. Twelve new performers comprise the show’s cast.
“Not the least element in the show’s combination was Brown’s songwriting,” David Noble commented, writing in Chicago’s American. “. . . after the intermission it was one triumph after another. Starting with one of the evening’s best songs, ‘Summer in the City,’ the show ran on rails through ‘B Train,’ ‘Brown Baby’ and ‘I’ll Be Back.’”
Joy ’66, another Brown revue in which he starred, enjoyed a lengthy, successful run at Chicago’s The Happy Medium before closing on August 7.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
The Jazzmobile, celebrating the second year of its successful existence, transported leading jazzmen through the streets, parks, playgrounds and housing projects in the New York area this summer. Over 40 outdoor concerts were given from the red, white and blue mobile bandstand, under the sponsorship of the Harlem Cultural Council, the Music Performance Trust Fund in cooperation with Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians and P. Ballantine and Sons.
From July 7 until September 1, the Jazzmobile made its way around the metropolitan area, carrying a new group each night, Monday through Friday. Each concert drew large crowds. “The key to the Jazzmobile’s success,” the project’s president Billy Taylor said, “is that we go to the people. We bring very talented musicians into areas where they would not normally appear.”
Among the participants were the Roland Alexander Sextet, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, the Donald Byrd Sextet and Voices, the Kenny Dorham-Joe Henderson big band, the Art Farmer Quintet and the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet with James Moody.
Also, Lionel Hampton’s Inner Circle, The Freddie Hubbard Octet, The Milt Jackson Quintet with James Moody or Jimmy Heath, The Clifford Jordan-John Gilmore Sextet and The Roland Kirk Sextet.
In addition, the Charles McPherson Sextet, the Blue Mitchell Quintet, the Lee Morgan Quintet, the Harold Ousley Sextet with Dave Burns.
Jazzmobile All Stars
Big bands included Duke Pearson, Mongo Santamaria and Tony Scott.
The Clark Terry Quintet, the Lucky Thompson Octet, the Stanley Turrentine-Shirley Scott Trio, the McCoy Tyner Sextet and the Cedar Walton Sextet featuring Curtis Fuller also joined the Jazzmobile.
The already pulsating Fire Island (N.Y.) scene was made even more vibrant this past summer by the continuing presence in a leading local bistro of the songwriting and singing team of Tony and Siegrid [Visconti].
Billboard’s Mike Gross reported about the duo: “They are an attractive couple which makes them as easy to look at as to listen to. They fit their style to the rhythm of the evening making each set an entity. . . .
“Their compositions are in the Simon and Garfunkel and Lennon and McCartney groove. The songs are musically effective and lyrically meaningful.”
Critics applauded the September 21 opening of A Hand Is on the Gate at New York’s Longacre Theater. An evening of poetry and folk music, it was presented by a cast of eight, including Leon Bibb, Roscoe Lee Browne, Gloria Foster, Moses Gunn, Ellen Holly, James Earl Jones, Josephine Premice and Cicely Tyson. The music was arranged by Bill Lee and Stuart Scharf. Some of the music is by Bibb and Alan Lomax.
Delving into Negro folklore, past and present, via poetry and music, the offering provided “a moving and beautiful evening of stirring lyric grandeur,” Richard Watts Jr., New York Post reviewer, commented.
“Most worthy first offering of the new season,” C.B.S. critic Lee Jordan added. “Aside from being a most entertaining show it is a great contribution to interracial understanding.”
“If there ever is such a thing as ‘folk-rhythm-and-blues,’ Little Stevie Wonder will be in the vanguard,” Susan Szekely said in her syndicated New York Post column recently. She traced the career of the young composer, now 16. Quoting Stevie on The Beatles, he admires “their writing ability,” and on James Brown, “The cat’s fantastic, he definitely is the king of rhythm and blues.”
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
His real name is Dick Dershem, but he’s better known as Richie Nashville, the Covington, Ky., singer-composer.
Richie, 31, who has been blind since the age of 7, learned to play piano, bass and guitar at a school for the blind.
As a composer, he sets new tunes and lyrics in his mind and writes them out in braille. He dictates them to someone who transcribes the notes to lead sheets.
Richie Nashville‘s sole waxing – c. 1966
Co-written/produced by Shad O’Shea
In a recent interview in Ohio’s Miami County Daily News, Richie, who has just cut his first record, one side of which has him singing his own song, admitted that he has had an uphill struggle in the competitive recording field. “It all depends,” he says, “upon how well I do on this first one and how many doors are opened to me.”
Groups headed by guitarist George Benson and John Handy, pianist Pete Johnson, blues singers Sonny Terry and Joe Turner and gospel singer Marion Williams will headline the “From Spirituals to Swing – 1967” concert at Carnegie Hall, January 15.
One of the offerings in the “Jazz in the Great Tradition” series, produced jointly by Rutgers University’s newly acquired Institute of Jazz Studies and Carnegie Hall, it will be an updating of the famed “Spirituals to Swing” concert presented at Carnegie Hall in 1938 by John Hammond. All the concerts in this particular series will reflect important jazz events that have taken place at Carnegie Hall in past years.
Special country music segments are being broadcast as part of the Voice of America’s Breakfast Show, a daily, English language broadcast beamed worldwide. Future shows will feature performances by and interviews with Chet Atkins, Johnny Cash, Jimmy Dean, Bill Denny, Bobby Lord, Kirk McGee, Tex Ritter, Marty Robbins, Carl Smith, Jack Stapp, Bill Williams and Hank Williams Jr.
Music Canada, an eight-part CBCTV series, was introduced to audiences in October. The first show, “Prelude to Expo,” was filmed against the backdrop of the Expo ’67 site on Montreal’s St. Helen’s Island. The Oscar Peterson Trio, which headlined the show, performed three extracts from Peterson’s “Canadian Suite” — “Wheatland,” “Laurentide Waltz” and “Hogtown Blues.”
A re-edited version of the blues program of last season is scheduled for a December 28 date on Music Canada. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Willie Dixon, Jesse Fuller, Mable Hillary, Sunnyland Slim, Big Joe Williams, Booker White and Muddy Waters and his group are featured.
The United States Information Agency is preparing an American folk music exhibit for Montreal’s Exposition ’67. It will include the effects of several country luminaries.
Sonny James has agreed to have one of his guitars exhibited. Earl Scruggs will have his banjo on display. Other leading country performers and songwriters are expected to be represented.
Blues artist Jack Dupree, now a resident of Great Britain, performed in Scandinavia for a month before touring the English countryside. Following a month in Germany, making appearances at American air bases, country entertainer Hank Locklin moved on to Britain for a series of October commitments. As the month came to a close, Maxine Brown launched her 17-day British tour.
The blues were sung and played throughout Europe this fall when the American Folk Blues Festival made its fifth annual tour.
Blues veterans Sleepy John Estes, Little Brother Montgomery, Jack Myers, Yank Rachell, Otis Rush, Roosevelt Sykes, Big Joe Turner, Sippie Wallace, Junior Wells and Robert Pete Williams comprised the troupe.
The festival’s itinerary included England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Holland, Denmark, Finland and Sweden.
Hawaii’s first Festival of the Arts included the world premiere of George Barati’s “Festival Ode: The Waters of Kane.” Held in conjunction with the first Governor’s Conference on Culture and the Arts, the festival began a preview of the Honolulu Symphony’s new concert programing. The concert at the Honolulu International Center’s Concert Hall in September featured the premiere.
Barati, who is music director and conductor of the Honolulu Symphony, received a special commission to compose a work for the conference, an event which attracted leaders in the arts from Hawaii and the mainland.
The All-State Hawaii Chorus, consisting of singers from all of the Islands of Hawaii, performed.
In his notes for the occasion, Barati said: “I have used Hawaiian elements in this piece; however, they will not be too obvious, as the work is essentially symphonic. The score makes use of one authentic Hawaiian instrument, the puili (a percussion instrument made of split bamboo), and also employs certain hula rhythms.”
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
Patrick Sky has written songs and background music for film documentaries released by the Films for Conservation Foundation.
“The result,” Cash Box said, “is a lovely thing that combines modern folk and rock.” The magazine notes that the teaching of conservation through music goes back to the “wonderful songs of Woody Guthrie.”
The Far East was the setting as jazz brought two heads of state closer together in October. During President Johnson’s Asian trip, he stopped off in Thailand to visit with King Bhumibol and, with Mrs. Johnson, hosted a state affair in honor of the king and his family at the American Embassy in Bangkok.
Knowing King Bhumibol’s predilection for jazz, the President summoned tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, a frequent White House performer.
With Gary Burton (vibes), Chuck Israels (bass) and Roy Haynes (drums), Getz entertained following the dinner. The result — satisfaction on the part of all concerned. United States Ambassador Graham Martin cabled the State Department from Bangkok: “Embassy considers warm rapport established between Getz and royal family very advantageous.”
The Thai king, an amateur jazz instrumentalist and composer, subsequently invited Getz and his colleagues to play at a private party at his palace, following the departure of the Johnsons.
While in Thailand, the Getz quartet played for servicemen at four military installations. They also played in Vietnam before flying across the world for a 15-day tour of Europe, beginning November 4.
Twenty-seven groups and soloists from 12 countries performed at the third International Jazz Festival, held in Prague, Czechoslovakia, October 5-9. In the American contingent were pianist Paul Bley, trumpeter Carmell Jones and members of the American Folk Blues Festival troupe, including Big Joe Turner.
The Intercollegiate Music Festival, a national competition for college musicians and vocalists, will be held this spring at Miami Beach [broadcast in the US on the ABC radio network and overseas on Voice of America].
Finalists will be selected at participating festivals to be held in Little Rock, Mobile, Salt Lake City and at Villanova University.
Among those named to the festival national advisory board were Dave Brubeck, Al Hirt, Brenda Lee, Peter Nero, Ward Swingle, Cal Tjader and Gerald Wilson.
The Advisory Committee on the Arts has issed a report to Congress and the public on the Cultural Presentation Program of the Department of State. It covers the 1965 fiscal year. Cited in the report were Steve Addiss and Bill Crofut, folk singers who toured 45 cities in Southwest Asia, Kenya, the Seychelles Islands and Vietnam. Their repertoire of traditional and contemporary folk songs often was supplemented by songs of the host country, generally learned the morning of their concerts.
Time reported them “hopscotching around the outlying villages in war-torn Vietnam. Armed with a banjo, two guitars, a flute, a French horn and a 16-string Vietnamese zither called a dan tranh, they sang in schools and hospitals, in the streets and rice field . . . In one remote mountain village, their performance ended up in a woolly hootenanny with the loinclothed montagnard tribesmen chanting and playing along on gongs and flute.”
At a ceremony held April 2, 1965, President Johnson said, “This morning I have invited to the White House two talented, dedicated and very modest young men who epitomize the Volunteer Generation. They are Stephen Addiss and William Crofut. They laid aside their careers and went into Vietnam — as they had done for us before in Africa and the Far East.
“… by what they did, above and beyond what could be asked of them, Steve Addiss and Bill Crofut served America and Freedom in the very finest and proudest way.”
Addiss & Crofut‘s Eastern Ferris Wheel LP
Record World‘s Dec. 1, 1968 issue
What do you call a group like this?
Broke in their act on the road from Korea to Kenya.
Received rave reviews from critics like … farmers in Vietnam and the late Robert Kennedy.
Learned a native song in each country they visited.
What do you call an album like this?
Native songs in Vietnamese, Japanese, Portuguese.
An adaptation of Dave Brubeck’s latest work – played by Brubeck, accompanied by Joe Morello and Addiss and Crofut.
A pop arrangement of a Charles Ives classic.
The National Center for School and College Television in Bloomington, Ind., is making available Sing, Children, Sing, an elementary telecourse in music, conducted by Tony Saletan. In this series, second and third graders learn songs and are made aware of tone quality, pitch discrimination, rhythmic movement and how instruments work. In addition, they’re taught instrumental improvisation and folk dancing.
“. . . [Bob] Dorough‘s countrified exterior hides one of the hippest and most engaging entertainment talents in America,” Gene Lees said in a recent issue of HiFi/Stereo Review.
“A pianist, singer, composer and lyrist with a gift for surprisingly felicitous lines, Dorough has an almost negligible voice, which he uses with a bluesy stylistic mastery. Rhythmically, he’s astonishing…”
Lees noted Dorough’s latest album is “not one of the best vocal records of the month — it’s one of the best of the year.”
“If all avant-garde concerts were as much fun as the one Cathy Berberian put on last night [October 25] at Carnegie Recital Hall, a public might develop,” Howard Klein wrote in The New York Times. “Miss Berberian . . . with her platinum hair swirled and piled high and her shoulders visible through a little black lace cape, looked as if she was ready to go on in the Empire Room.”
During the evening she presented the first American performance of her own “Stripsody,” which was, as Hubert Saal wrote in Newsweek, “a phonetic monologue using the sounds and sights of comic strips, [in which] she jumped from language to language, from song to speech, from speech to pure sound. With amazing virtuosity, she moved up and down the ladder of registers, bursting from melody or recitative into weeping, laughing, shouting, growling, until she had conveyed almost every sound capable of expressing emotion.”
Miss Berberian’s program also included the John Lennon-Paul McCartney songs “Michelle,” “Ticket to Ride,” arranged by her husband Luciano Berio, and “Yesterday,” arranged as a “pure Bach trio sonata and quite amusing” by Peter Serkin.
Beatles manager Brian Epstein has booked several American stars, Chuck Berry and Garnet Mimms among them, for appearances February 19 and February 26, respectively, at London’s Saville Theatre.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
The Modern Jazz Quartet — John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath and Connie Kay — made a by-popular-request return guest appearance with The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, December 9. The program at Cincinnati’s Music Hall, conducted by Max Rudolf, was played to a sold-out house that “liked every vibrant, swingy, sonorous minute of it,” Henry S. Humphreys reported, writing in The Cincinnati Enquirer. “They showed it, too, by vociferous and prolonged applause.”
Two works were performed for the first time — Yugoslavian composer Miljenko Prohaska’s Concertino for Jazz Quartet and Strings (published by MJQ Music, Inc.) and John Lewis’s Jazz Ostinato, a development of a theme from the composer’s incidental music for the William Inge play Natural Affection.
“. . . pleasant listening, and replete with displays of virtuosity for two members of the quartet — Milt Jackson, vibraphonist, and Connie Kay, drums,” Humphreys said of the Prohaska piece. The critic found the Lewis composition “rewarding . . . hypnotic, deftly put together and scored.”
The Cincinnati Orchestra and the M.J.Q. also combined in the performance of William O. Smith’s “Interplay” and Lewis’s “Spiritual.”
In a December 27 presentation before a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in New York, Alan Lomax and a group of his associates at Columbia University explained the newly developed system of Cantometrics.
The aim of the system is to provide a simple and understandable way of describing song style. Songs are rated on the following bases: the text load, the degree of repetitiousness, precision of enunciation, the degree of melodic ornamentation, the conformity to strict tempo, the importance of wide and narrow intervals, the presence of vocal constriction, the presence of rasp, the presence of nasality, the degree of choral integration, the relation between leader and chorus, the level of loudness and other features.
Among the findings of the team of anthropologists, which has rated some 3,000 songs over the past four years, were these:
Very repetitive performances with slurred enunciation employing generally wide intervals occur with the highest frequency among hunters, fishers and food gatherers. These features gradually disappear and are replaced by a heavy text load and more precise enunciation in more complex economies.
The use of harsh or raspy voices is shown to be the result of childhood training for independence or assertion. The use of nasality is most frequent in societies where anxiety over socialization is at its peak in childhood training. Relaxed voices are most common in societies where permissive sexual sanctions are the rule.
Hillbillies in a Haunted House, another new film featuring country personalities, began rolling in Florida in December. Included in the cast are Merle Haggard, Ferlin Husky, [Don Bowman] and Sonny James. The Barney Wollner production for Hollywood’s Producers Studio also stars Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine and Jayne Mansfield.
Charlie McCoy and the Escorts and Roy Orbison were among the country headliners who appeared in the annual “Toys for Tots” Show, December 11, at Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium. Admission was $1.50 or a toy of equivalent value. The proceeds were distributed through the city’s fire department to parents of underprivileged children.
Another show, starring Buck Owens and His Buckaroos, was given for the same cause at the Bakersfield (Calif.) Auditorium five days later. The talent line-up included Kay Adams, Merle Haggard, Freddie Hart and Red Simpson.
The “Toys for Tots” program originated in Los Angeles in 1947. Since that time more than five million toys have been collected annually for distribution in over 200 cities.
Kenny Clarke has left the Blue Note club in Paris after six years as resident drummer and group leader. He intends to devote his time to teaching percussion — he has over 200 students — and to playing with and composing for the Francy Boland-Kenny Clarke big band.
Following a series of appearances on the Continent, multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk played a three-week engagement at London’s Ronnie Scott Club, beginning January 9. Kirk has had several engagements at Scott’s in the past.
Other American jazz attractions set for stands in British clubs include Ray Bryant, Bill Doggett, Lou Donaldson and Yusef Lateef.
Country music went to Vietnam for the Christmas holidays. A show headed by Hank Snow toured for 18 days, beginning on December 13. The Snow troupe included the Rainbow Ranch Boys, his son, the Rev. Jimmy Rodgers Snow, and the latter’s wife, Carol.
Singer Don Ho, one of the artists primarily responsible for exposing the songs of Kui Lee, gave a memorial concert in honor of the late Hawaiian composer, December 20, at Honolulu’s Shell Auditorium. The proceeds from the benefit were donated to the Kui Lee-University of Hawaii Scholarship Fund to aid students majoring in theater arts.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
Lalo Schifrin created an “insect symphony” for the National Geographic Society special “The Hidden World” on CBS-TV, December 13.
Using electronic organ, a Chinese gong, amplified harpsichord, a xylophone made from patio flooring, and a piano, six musicians created background sounds for scenes of insect life.
Jack Gould of The New York Times declared it was a program “to be seen by viewers of all ages.”
“[Sex In Today’s World],” a survey of the American sexual revolution, was the presentation of the ABC Stage 67 series on January 12.
The hour-long documentary featured interviews and filmed sequences. The original music score was composed and performed by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
“One of . . . new music’s sharpest spearheads is Karlheinz Stockhausen, 38-year-old German composer,” Walter Arlen wrote in The Los Angeles Times on the occasion of the composer’s December visit to California.
“The [musical] trend, in Stockhausen’s mind, is toward multiplicity. A typical opus of the new sort can include electronic music existing on tape only, unaltered sounds of instruments and voices in live performance and such sounds after being selectively processed by electronic means. But is this music? All sounds are music, Stockhausen insists. Music using all sounds is the music of today, not tomorrow, in our space age, where the movement, direction and speed of sounds are calculated elements of a composition. The object is to refresh and renew our known world of sound with the available means of our time, just as every period … has done.”
“Monk in Perspective” was a January feature of London’s Jazz Journal in which Ian Carr profiled the pianist¬composer Thelonious Monk.
Regarding Monk as a composer, Carr said, “[He] seems to accept the values of earlier eras, while his method points to the future. . . .There isn’t a superfluous note or line or color in a Monk composition. Furthermore, his work has powerfully constructed innards. It is not just that the melody is good, that the bass-line and rhythms are strong; it is that a Monk composition . . . has an important harmonic core. …
“Perhaps the most striking single characteristic of Monk’s compositions…is their honesty.”
Carr concluded the piece with:
“Monk has all the jazz virtues. He has relentless depth; he swings powerfully. He may perform indifferently but he is never facile. We get the impression that there is a tremendous mind at work, but there is also the feeling of sensuous enjoyment … he feels jazz with his big body.”
Earle Brown conducted the world premiere of his “Modules I and II” in Paris, February 7. Commissioned by L’Orchestre National de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française and performed by that aggregation, the composition was one of several in the Festival of American Music, given at the Theatre des Champs Elysées.
Included in a concert in the Musique Vivant series, February 27, at the Théâtre de l’Atelier, was the first performance of Brown’s “Calder Piece.” The Percussion Quartet of Paris, which commissioned the work, played it.
A seven-foot-high mobile, designed and constructed by Alexander Calder expressly for this composition, was placed in the center of the percussion quartet. “It functions both as a source of sound and as a kind of conductor,” Brown explained.
“Calder Piece” is scheduled for performance by the same forces at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris, March 6 and at La Maison de Culture, Amiens, March 7 [the following year, Earle Brown would be composer-in-residence at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory].
One of the major jazz events of the new year took place at Carnegie Hall on January 15. “John Hammond’s ‘Spirituals to Swing— 1967’ . . . was a marvelous, multivoiced celebration. The living celebrated themselves . . . The living celebrated the dead . . . And it was a stunning celebration of the blues; aside from several standards and a couple of gospel numbers, the entire program was blues,” Whitney Balliett declared, writing in The New Yorker.
Guitarist George Benson and his group opened the program. Gospel singer Marion Williams followed, “with a big, irresistible personality and a voice filled with the power of judgment day itself. Hands were clapping in no time, and the excitement was building,” The New York World Journal Tribune‘s William Bender noted.
A segment featuring the Cafe Society All-Star Band came next. Blues shouter Joe Turner, accompanied by pianist Ray Bryant, appeared with the group and made a decided impact.
“His voice rang with the same effortless but imposing authority that it had 30 years ago as he dug into the old bag of blues verses that he has used over and over and which have been picked up by innumerable other blues singers over the years,” The New York Times‘s John S. Wilson commented.
The second half of the show began with the John Handy Sextet, which “made a strong impression,” Bender reported, “with the second of his two numbers — a wild 15-minute Mediterranean affair called ‘Señorita Nancy’ that was almost Ivesian (Charles, that is) in its poly-everything (counterpoint, harmony, etc.) and that recalled pleasantly the Tijuana days of Charlie Mingus.”
Big Mama Willie Mae Thornton came on next to closing. Accompanied by the Cafe Society All-Star Band, “she sang five blues that had all the mountainous intensity of Turner’s blues,” Balliett explained. For the finale the Basie band took to the stage, then was joined by Turner and members of the Cafe Society group.
“They jammed for 15 or 20 minutes. It was great in itself. Beyond that, it was the ideal way to end the evening . . . Carnegie Hall’s new series, ‘Jazz in the Great Tradition,’ couldn’t have had a more auspicious beginning,” Bender concluded.
Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records, was master of ceremonies for the event, produced by John Hammond. The concert’s stage manager was George Wein, Newport Jazz Festival impresario.
A 13-week Merle Travis junket through the Far East currently is in progress. Travis begins a 17-day European swing on May 5.
Brenda Lee gave a 90-minute, onewoman show on Japanese television last month—her third special there.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
ABC presented “The Songmakers,” an hour-long survey of today’s popular music scene, in late February [that aired only once]. The documentary showed its audience how hit music is born and introduced some of those who make it. A number of pop artists showed “how their music, from folk to folk-rock to blues to evergreen standards to movie themes, evolves from the mind of the songmaker and is shaped into a finished hit.” The program, a follow-up to last year’s highly acclaimed “The Anatomy of Pop,” was produced and directed by Stephen Fleischman, who wrote the show with Frederic Ramsey Jr.
Among the stars who appeared were The Byrds (Jim McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman), The Blues Project (Danny Kalb, AI Kooper, Roy Blumenfeld, Andy Kulberg, Steve Katz), Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, The Mamas and the Papas (John Phillips, Cass Elliott, Michelle Phillips, Dennis Doherty) and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.
A number of BMI writers have been among guests at the White House for state dinners and receptions. Eddy Arnold and his wife, Sally, were present at the function given in honor of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, on February 14.
When President and Mrs. Johnson paid tribute to the creative life with a White House dinner and entertainment for the National Council on the Arts in December, the guest list included Dave Brubeck and Mike Nichols.
Hank Snow and his Rainbow Ranch Boys, who entertained in Vietnam during the Christmas season, returned to the Far East in March. They performed in Japan, Formosa, Okinawa, Thailand and Vietnam.
Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, discussed this American folk form with The Nashville Banner‘s Red O’Donnell and The Nashville Tennessean’s Jack Hurst in interviews published late in January.
Monroe explained: “Bluegrass is a blend of gospel music and pure blues as interpreted by the Southern Negro; it has a lonesome sound and a touch of the Scottish bagpipe in its makeup. If it doesn’t, it isn’t authentic bluegrass.”
The writer of over 250 songs in this idiom, Monroe explained that it is a music “with none of your drums or electric instruments…A bluegrass group should have a fiddle, mandolin, banjo, bass fiddle and rhythm guitar. . .[and] a good lead singer. . . .”
He went on to point out that most of leading bluegrass musicians, including Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Jimmy Martin, Clyde Moody, Sonny Osborne and the late Carter Stanley learned about this music in his band.
“Bluegrass music doesn’t have to be and probably isn’t, in the true sense, beautiful-to-hear music,” the creator of bluegrass declared, “but it should be earthy. And above all, it should have drive—or even overdrive.”
How did the 28-year-old style of music get its name? “Well, I was from Kentucky, the Bluegrass State, and I was proud of it and I wanted to represent it, so I started using the name bluegrass,” Monroe concluded.
The Monday night feature at Slug’s, the jazz center in New York’s East Village, is a 10-piece jazz unit headed by pianist-composer Sun Ra. For the past dozen years, he and his band have been playing “space-age jazz.” He describes his current style as “infinity.”
The present Sun Ra unit includes trumpet, piano, bass, drums, percussion and five woodwinds. The sidemen also play a wide array of odd instruments. Their uniforms are golden pullovers and yellow straw and cloth hats. Ra is identified by his long, golden robe and two golden bands encircling his head.
John S. Wilson, writing in The New York Times of Sun Ra and his men, reported: “Mr. Ra’s space-age jazz was essentially a preview of free-form approaches and discordant sounds that Sun Ra have been adopted by the jazz avantgarde. Unlike other gardists, Mr. Ra supplemented the strange sounds . . . with showmanship . . .
“His approach to infinity is much the same except that much of what he plays now is comprehensible to ears outside the avant-garde. By infinity, Mr. Ra means he is not only creating a jazz of the future, but also covering the jazz of the past.
“As a result,” he continued, “a Sun Ra composition that offers twittering bird calls rubbed from a pair of single-stringed Chinese fiddles, a vast, percussive orchestral hullabaloo of grunts and squawks and a hot solo on a ram’s horn will dissolve into Fletcher Henderson’s arrangement of ‘King Porter Stomp.’ Mr. Ra’s men then develop it in light, driving riffs that recall ‘jump’ bands like the Savoy Sultans …
“Despite the superficial eccentricities, this is a tightly organized, well-rehearsed group of skillful jazz musicians that has cohesion and vitality even when Mr. Ra is reaching into the more cosmic areas of his imagination.”
With Clint Eastwood of TV fame in the starring role, A Fistful of Dollars tells the tale of a taciturn gun-for-hire who cleans up a corrupt town. Motion Picture Daily found Ennio Morricone’s score “haunting, singable,” and The Hollywood Reporter called it the film’s strongest asset . . . highly theatrical. The music gives the film whatever dramatic impact it has …”
John LeCarre’s Call for the Dead has come to the screen as the Columbia release, The Deadly Affair. Directed by Sidney Lumet, the film stars James Mason, Simone Signoret, Maximilian Schell and Harriet Andersson.
Unfolding to a Quincy Jones score is the story of a middle-aged career intelligence officer who resigns his post to unravel the mystery surrounding a suicide and, thereby, uncover a spy network. Woven through the film is the tale of his own marriage-on-the-rocks. Keying in this aspect is the theme “Who Needs Forever?” with lyrics by Howard Greenfield sung by Astrud Gilberto.
The attractive young lady who plays tenor saxophone nightly on stage at New York’s Broadhurst Theater is Jan Mink. A member of the all-girl Dixieland combo, appearing in the John Kander–Fred Ebb hit musical Cabaret, she doubles as a songwriter.
Miss Mink, who attended the Berklee School of Music and the New England Conservatory, Boston, Mass., has headed her own group and worked with an all-girl rock group in Las Vegas and throughout the East.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
American modern jazz was introduced in the Soviet Union in May when Charles Lloyd and his quartet appeared at the Tallinn Jazz Festival in Estonia. It marked the first time that Americans had been invited to participate in a Soviet festival. Not only is Lloyd the first modern instrumentalist-leader to play for the Soviets, he is the first jazz composer [who] has been presented to audiences there.
Before concluding their European stay at the Bergen (Norway) Festival, June 7, the Lloyd quartet (Keith Jarrett, piano; Ron McClure, bass, and Jack DeJohnette, drums) will play in Scandinavia and in other countries.
Live At The Tallinn Jazz Festival
Before concluding their European stay at the Bergen (Norway) Festival, June 7, the Lloyd quartet (Keith Jarrett, piano; Ron McClure, bass, and Jack DeJohnette, drums) will play in Scandinavia and in other countries.
The North Texas State University Lab Band received the personal congratulations of President and Mrs. Johnson, following its recent tour of 22 cities of Mexico. The 28-day junket was arranged by the State Department.
Band director Leon Breeden and the entire ensemble visited with the Johnsons at the White House for an hour and a half, March 18. In the capital to be honored by the Texas State Society of Washington, the band and its three vocalists were presented awards for “exceptional achievement” at a Texas Society brunch at the Shoreham Hotel. Cactus Pryor was M.C.
Also during the band’s stay in Washington, it gave a concert at the embassy of Venezuela.
Included in the band’s library are arrangements and/or original compositions by Dee Barton, Walter Benton, Dave Brubeck, Willie Dixon, Vince Guaraldi, Jimmy Heath, Bill Holman, Antonio Carlos Jobim, John Lewis, Thelonious Monk, Oliver Nelson, Sammy Nestico, Lennie Niehaus, Don Rader, Freddie Redd, Johnny Richards, Sonny Stitt and Jean (Toots) Thielemans.
Previewing a special program in the NBC Experiment in Television series, during which Marshall McLuhan spoke his mind. The New York Times excerpted some of the professor’s views from his book The Medium Is the Massage.
front & rear covers
Among them: “Popular music beginning with jazz in the twenties, was a return to speech and speech rhythms. Popular hit-parade music is still very close to speech patterns. One of the things about The Beatles [Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr] music, for example, that is so effective, is that they were the first, as far as I know, to put English popular speech — popular lower-class British cockney rhythms and Liverpool rhythms — into musical form. The English have never had a music directly related to popular speech before. When you make a music that is related to popular speech, it enables the singer to put on the whole audience – the public – as a mask and wear it as a mask of power. The Beatles are powerful.”
The case for the universality of jazz is proven by Josef (Joe) Zawinul, pianist-composer, formerly of Vienna, Austria. Only eight years removed from the waltz capital, he has worked with the Maynard Ferguson band, as accompanist for the late Dinah Washington and for the last six years as pianist with the Cannonball Adderley group.
His most expansive recognition as a composer came suddenly earlier this year via his “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!” “Zawinul, a casual and unpretentious man of 34, is as surprised as anybody by the jet-like take-off of his simple, blues-rooted piece,” Leonard Feather commented, writing in his Los Angeles Times syndicated column.
“I wrote it out for Cannon’s group, and we first played it at a tourist place near Boston last summer,” Zawinul reported. “Everywhere we went after that, since I hadn’t bothered to title the tune, people would come up and ask us to ‘Play that tune you don’t have a name for yet!’ ”
Since then, the composition has become a national and international hit. But it reveals only one aspect of Zawinul’s talent. According to Feather, “he has written many works that are…much more subtle harmonically.”
A new VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) documentary was released by the Office of Economic Opportunity in March. The half-hour color film features an original score by guitarist Charlie Byrd.
The film deals with life in two small Arizona towns. For the footage on the Negro community, Byrd scored for electric guitar, flute, bass and drums. For the Spanish-American community sequences, he used Spanish guitar, mandolin, bass, recorder and marimba.
From the underground, pop artist Andy Warhol has created The Chelsea Girls. The title comes from the Chelsea Hotel, where all the characters are supposed to be living. Warhol shows their activities on side-by-side screens, in black-and-white and in color, hop-scotching the sound track from one to the other. The film score, written by Lou Reed, is published by Three Prong Music, Inc.
Writing in Newsweek, critic Jack Kroll noted:
“Sad, bad, mad, glad world, caught in the convolutions of its own put-on. But The Chelsea Girls is one of those semidocuments that seem to be the most pointed art forms of the day. It is as if there had been cameras concealed in the fleshpots of Caligula’s Rome. Film societies and universities should have a look at this movie, which touches more nerves than a multifariously perverse world will ever admit.”
John D. Loudermilk, Gunther Schuller and BMI board chairman Sydney M. Kaye appeared before the Senate Copyrights Subcommittee in a public hearing in late March to present the point of view of their fellow creators of music and the attitude of the performing rights licensing organization in proposed copyright revision, S. 597. In 1965, Kaye, accompanied by Roger Sessions and Avery Claflin, made an appearance before a House committee on a similar revision bill.
“I am in favor of broadening the base of communications, of making available to the public the best that our artists can create, and to extend our efforts to make education and the enjoyment of music available to all people,” Schuller told the Subcommittee which was presided over by Senator Quentin Burdick of North Dakota.
“But worthy as these ends may be, let us not attempt to achieve them by a ruthless preemption of the rights of creative people. We manage to find the vast sums needed to buy engineering equipment for educational broadcasting stations, to build schools, to pay for the services of musicians and other performers. We would not be hurting the cause of education or culture by finding the small additional monies needed to make compensation to the creators of music without whom the same performers could not even begin to function. On the contrary, were we to enact such legislation [licensing of music on noncommercial programs], we would place ourselves on record to the effect that we value creative genius and the product of the mind as highly as technical skills and the products of industry.”
Addressing himself to the removal of the jukebox exemption from performing rights, Loudermilk said: “From what I’ve observed about the jukebox people . . . they are interested in only one thing — getting the public to put money into their machines. The fact is that the public makes the hits. If I don’t write what the public wants, I don’t sell any records. And, if the jukebox owners don’t put the tunes the public wants into their machines, the jukebox owners don’t nab the dimes and quarters they bank. I think the songwriters who furnish the jukeboxes of America with the music that makes them profitable are due some return. I think the jukebox industry’s 58-year-old free ride should come to an end.”
Urging repeal of the jukebox exemption, and opposing Section 111, the CATV clause, BMI chairman Kaye said: “The bill contains a number of provisions which have been accepted by authoral interests with great reluctance, but the bill represents a definite forward step.
“The efforts to erode this bill come from persons who have never paid and who don’t want to pay, and from people who have never bargained and are afraid to bargain … I trust you will prevent these unjustified erosions of the bill from taking place.”
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
Expo ’67
“The fountains splashed softly and the guests seemed to hold their breath as a man with a six-foot pair of scissors cut a white ribbon to officially open the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum,” Pat Welch said.
The Nashville Tennessean’s reporter was one of numerous TV, radio and newspaper reporters on hand to cover the formal opening and dedication of Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on the evening of March 31. The following day the Hall of Fame and Museum, which houses and preserves the “sight and sound” of country music, opened to the public.
Governor Buford Ellington of Tennessee, Nashville Mayor Beverly Briley and Congressman Richard Fulton officially welcomed 500 guests to the dedication and opening.
Among those on hand were Eddy Arnold, Chet Atkins, Owen Bradley, Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, Frank Clement, Bill Denny, Dave Dudley, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Red Foley, Tompall Glaser, Harlan Howard, Merle Kilgore, Buddy Killen, Hubert Long, John Loudermilk, Charlie Louvin, Webb Pierce, Mrs. Mary Reeves, widow of Jim Reeves, Wesley Rose, Hal Smith, Carl Smith, Jack Stapp, Justin Tubb, Hank Williams Jr. and Faron Young.
Also present were Robert Sour, BMI president; Theodora Zavin, BMI executive vice president; Frances Preston, BMI vice president and Country Music Association vice president; Harold Moon, general manager, BMI Canada; Jo Walker, C.M.A. executive director; Paul Cohen, C.M.A. president, and Roy Horton, C.M.A. board chairman.
Mrs. Preston was TV commentator. She and air personality Eddie Hill spoke to various dignitaries and brought the color of the event to the television and radio audience
Porter Wagoner was talking to reporter Jack Hurst of The Nashville Tennessean, who noted that the singer’s lyrical stock-in-trade are the great themes of poverty and wealth, failure and success, sin and redemption and that he favors songs in which recitation monologues play a major part.
While he doesn’t like songs that are “too morbid,” he leans toward songs which are strong on the unpleasantries of life—songs like “Everything She Touches Gets the Blues,” “I’ve Enjoyed As Much of This As I Can Stand” and “Skid Row Joe.”
Wagoner recalled how it was back in 1949, traveling to his first singing dates in a ’37 Chevy.
“The tires on it were so slick, you could run over a dime and tell whether it was heads or tails. I was working for WKTO in Springfield, Mo., then, and I couldn’t book myself anyplace more than 70 miles away because the old Chevy wouldn’t make it.”
Nowadays, Wagoner travels to his appearances (about 130 a year) in a $62,000 luxury liner bus.
He has an RCA Victor recording contract, a weekly TV show and makes frequent appearances at [the] Grand Ole Opry, which he joined in 1957.
He summed it all up for Hurst by saying, “In no other place but America could this have happened.”
Norman Dello Joio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, was in Nashville in April to study music education methods at Peabody College, as part of the work he is doing for the Ford Foundation. While in that city, he attended a performance of the Grand Ole Opry.
Jack Hurst, The Nashville Tennessean reporter, interviewed Dello Joio. He based his article on the composer’s response to country music and the Grand Ole Opry.
“To a total stranger, this is a very moving thing,” Dello Joio said, following his visit to Grand Ole Opry. “One of the most striking things about it is the obvious meaning it has for these people who come to see and hear it played. I saw a mother with three children; they were sleeping on a bench while she was watching and clapping her hands in time to the music. You just don’t see this anywhere else. …
“Everything in its sphere has a certain validity, and this has the righteousness of being a people’s music,” the composer said of country music. “I wish that music . . . with which I deal — classical music — could establish such a direct, individual, personal appeal with its audience.” ‘
Speaking of country artists, Dello Joio pointed out: . . they are so unconscious of how good they are — they have a sort of tremendous modesty that I like.” He also commented on why, in his opinion, country music was achieving increasing popularity in the face of snowballing urbanization in America.
“There is a real nostalgia about this music,” he declared. “It has a yearning quality.” He further commented that Grand Ole Opry and the music that has made it an institution are distinctly American. “It makes you say, ‘That’s America.’ ”
Jackie Gleason devoted a March show to an all-star salute to country music.
For the hour-long special, the comedian assembled Buck Owens and his Buckaroos, Homer and Jethro, Roy Clark, Boots Randolph, Sue Thompson, The Collins Kids and Roy Acuff.
Bill Bryan, who serves as director of WCBS-TV’s (New York) educational series Around the Corner, wrote “The Subway Song,” dealing with the complexities of the city’s underground system, for a May segment of the series.
The National Gallery of Art in the nation’s capital presented its 24th American Music Festival on successive Sunday evenings, from April 9 through May 14, in its East Garden Court. Among the composers represented on the six programs were David Amram, Arthur Custer, Halim El-Dabh, Gene Gutche, Charles Ives and Leon Kirchner.
Composers and educators from colleges in the far western portion of the country gathered at the University of California, Davis, March 29-April 1, for the Western Student Composers Symposium 1967.
A concert-lecture by Karlheinz Stockhausen, visiting lecturer of music on the Davis campus, was one of the highlights of the first day. The presentation focused on the German composer’s recently completed electronic work, “Telemusik.”
A concert on the closing day at the same site, Freeborn Hall, included compositions by Larry Austin, Luciano Berio and Robert Erickson.
Ulysses Kay, visiting professor for the 1966-67 academic year at U.C.L.A., was one of the composers who attended the symposium.
“Inside Pop — The Rock Revolution,” a documentary special exploration of the composition, beat and meaning of the popular music scene, was an April 25 CBS feature. Written and produced by David Oppenheim, the program investigated the current sound, with Leonard Bernstein as cicerone for the first portion.
A feature was an appearance by Janis Ian, about which Pat Pearce wrote in The Montreal Star:
“Bernstein sorted out today’s ‘pop’ music, opening adult ears to the beauties, the swinging urge to freedom, to be found in much, if we listen, don’t just react. He introduced an astonishing 15-year-old, Janis Ian, in her astonishing and exquisite song, ‘Society’s Child.’ ”
Among Bernstein’s comments:
“Keep listening to the lyrics of the songs. They are telling you something. They are voicing the thinking of millions of our young people. They are expressing their views on many subjects: civil rights, peace, alienation, mysticism, drugs and, first and foremost, love. .. .
“We must listen to it and to its makers. We must take it seriously as both a symptom and a generator of this very real revolution. . . .
“I think it is all part of an historic revolution, one that has been going on for 50 years.
“Only now these young people have gotten control of a mass medium — the phonograph record. And the music on the records, with its noise and its cool message, may make us uneasy, but we must take it seriously.
“Perhaps by learning about them, we can learn something about our own future.”
In addition to Janis Ian, the program featured Tim Buckley, Jim McGuinn of The Byrds, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Frank Zappa of the Mothers of Invention.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
The First Chamber Dance Quartet, slated to guest with the Cincinnati Summer Opera, will perform Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.
Using the music from the Orff work, director Marco Pogacar created a dance piece for his San Francisco Festival Dance Theater, which was programed in the city’s Veterans Auditorium on March 31.
Another Orff cantata-ballet, Catulli Carmina, choreographed by John Butler and starring Carmen de Lavallade, is to be presented this summer at the Caramoor (N.Y.) Festival.
The Ohio State University Dance Group presented concerts on campus, March 3 and 4, including performances of Anna Sokolow’s Odes. The work is to music by Edgard Varese.
Critic Robert Shelton, in a story to The New York Times, covered the recent second annual Swarthmore (Pa.) College Rock ’n’ Roll Festival which, he said, “seems destined to make a bit of its own academic history.”
A two-day event, including “swinging seminars, big-beat baccalaureates, lab work in psychedelic lights and some advanced study in the theory and practice of applied blues,” it featured several major speakers. Composer David Amram was one of them.
“The David Amram talk on the ‘music of then and now’ was clearly a highpoint of the weekend,” Shelton said. “The 36-year-old composer and musician spoke about his own student days, 1948 to 1952, when the bebop musicians were beginning ‘the breakaway that was to become the spiritual vanguard of what is happening now.’ Amram spoke with considerable eloquence on the totality of pop-folk-rockjazz musical innovation as a sociological as well as musical phenomenon, placing the new musical expression in the center of a larger, arts-drug-social action context. Mostly, he offered the students the concept that what they were doing in establishing a rock ’n’ roll festival was not an isolated phenomenon, but an event that had its traditions and its future.”
Amram’s opinions and discussion of his experiences as a French horn player, composer and conductor will be included in his first book, The Concord of Sweet Sounds. It is tentatively scheduled for publication by Macmillan in the summer of 1968.
Time, in its May 12 issue, reviewed the concert of quarter-tone music offered early in May by the Syracuse University music faculty.
“The familiar chromatic scale used in Western music is made up of half tones (the difference in pitch between two adjacent keys on the piano). Quarter tones are twice as close together, and thus produce an octave with 24 notes instead of the usual 12. Such fine gradations of pitch are old stuff in the music of Asia and the Middle East, but only since the turn of the century have Western composers exploited the more complex, close-cut melodies and harmonies that quarter tones make possible,” the item ran.
“The Syracuse concert — in which the two pianos were tuned a quarter tone apart — was a repeat of a program put on by the Contemporary Music Society at Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum, where it was such a success that Columbia Records decided to record it. Three young New York composers — Teo Macero, Calvin Hampton and Donald Lybbert — wrote new scores for the occasion in which colliding lines sometimes sent out strangely affecting shivers of dissonance. But the most musical moments were heard in three piano pieces by the late eccentric genius of 20th-century American music, Charles Ives, who used quarter tones with a naturalness that suggested he had written them all his life (which he hadn’t). Ives neatly captured such effects as tinny ragtime and plaintive New England hymns, framing them in a style that encompassed melting lyricism as well as the craggy melancholy of a wild, rock-rimmed seacoast.”
That divisional lines are fast disappearing and that the many worlds of music are moving closer together are indicated in the work of a number of jazz and contemporary pop groups.
Gary Burton, leading jazz composer and instrumentalist, is participating in this musical cross-pollination process. He now heads a unit, featuring guitarist Larry Coryell, which blends elements of folk, country and rock with modern jazz.
“Burton is supremely confident that the new music … of his group will emancipate jazz from the stale image that has lost many of its aficionados to the folk and rock colonies,” Leonard Feather said in a recent column, which he devoted to the young vibraphonist.
“When we began developing our own ideas on how to sound . . . and when the audiences responded so wildly,” Burton told the critic, “I felt like I’d struck yet another blow for freedom. ..
“All of us in my group are in our early 20’s. Our music is not radically different, but it’s our own.”
One of Burton’s most recent recordings renders evident his basic direction. He combines jazz with country sounds, using country repertoire.
“The sound of the country folk adlibbing on their fiddles and the jazzmen hooting with glee is a happy one — not many recording sessions seem to be this much fun,” Rex Reed declared in HiFi/Stereo Review ” . . . this is an educational event that also swings. It strikes a chord of reality in me that I haven’t heard in music for some time, and it deserves wide exposure.”
Bill Anderson will be featured on a segment of an NBC-TV country music special. The program, a documentary dealing with country music’s impact here and abroad, is the first of its kind that the network has attempted.
Network film crews joined Anderson and his band, The Po’ Boys, during their June tour of United States bases in England and Germany.
Other facets of country music and those who make it will be revealed in films taken during Roy Acuff’s recent tour of Vietnam. Film crews are slated to be on hand during Eddy Arnold’s performances at the Illinois State Fair and with Flatt and Scruggs on dates in Pennsylvania.
A segment concerned with the opening of the Country Music Museum and Hall of Fame in Nashville already has been completed. On NBC’s filming schedule are the Grand Ole Opry and more on-the-road footage, featuring leading country artists.
The show is tentatively scheduled for broadcast in September.
In the late nineteen-thirties Alan Lomax, working in the Folksong Archives of the Library of Congress, began to realize that many folksongs were coming out of the Depression and believed that a collection should be made of them. Woody Guthrie, then an unknown folk singer and composer, got together with Lomax to construct the book. Pete Seeger transcribed songs by Guthrie and others. John Steinbeck agreed to write the foreword. However, no publisher was forthcoming. The war shelved the project.
In 1961, Irving Silber of Sing Out! magazine found some of the original manuscript and believed that it still would be a book worthy of publication and began reconstruction. A second copy of the original turned up, seemingly dropped by Guthrie in his wanderings. This was worked over for the recently published book Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, an Oak Publications release.
“A small slice of history was relived here . . . when one of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest exponents, New Orleans pianist Fats Domino, made a long overdue . . . debut at the Saville Theater,” British reporter Michael Clare said, writing in Billboard.
Domino and his eight-piece band played a six-day season at the London theater beginning Easter Monday, marking his initial engagement in the island nation.
Fans “converged at the theater all week,” Clare added. On the first night, “a large contingent of rockers … responded with a tumultuous reception,” Chris Welch noted in Melody Maker.
“His opening, the classic ‘Blueberry Hill,’ got a tremendous ovation. Soon the audience was pleading for every song Domino had ever recorded,” Clare continued. “He included ‘The Fat Man,’ . . . ‘I’m in Love Again,’ ‘My Blue Heaven,’ ‘Hello Josephine’ and ‘Walking to New Orleans.’ ”
Domino followed his Saville stand with a concert tour of Germany.
Mongo Santamaria and his sextet were featured on the April 30 stanza of CBS-TV’s series Dial M for Music. Hubert Laws Jr. and Robert Porcelli were on sax and flute; Rodgers Grant, piano; Carmello Garcia, timbales and drums; Victor Venegas, bass, and Ray Maldonado, trumpet, comprised the group for the TV jazz session.
Opening night was May 24 at New York’s Garrick Theater. On stage: a musical entitled Absolutely Freeee, with music and lyrics by Frank Zappa. The stars: The Mothers of Invention (Zappa, Ray Collins, Don Preston, Jimmy Clark Black, Bunk Gardner, Billy Mundi and Roy Estrada).
The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen MacDonald pointed out: “The Mothers apparently have their roots in the West Coast rock and roll of the fifties, and their best numbers are nonpolitical, affectionate parodies of those days . . .
“If you have tried 1967-style pop music and are horrified by it, or if you’re horrified even thinking about it, the Mothers of Invention aren’t going to change your mind. But they are part of a social phenomenon . . . and an evening at the Garrick is emphatically instructive. Maybe more.”
“As pure sound,” Dan Sullivan of The New York Times said, “some of this approaches genius. From an electrified kitchen of percussion, saxes, guitars, flutes, etc., they produce a thick, black sound shot through with odd treble sunbursts and pinwheels — the exact aural equivalent of the nervous, ever-changing abstract projections flashing on the screen. . . .”
Jerry Tallmer of The New York Post added: “. . . the music remains — and the musicianship — which just possibly is brilliant verging on great. It may beat your brains out but it has the beat and, more than, that, a lot of true (loud) invention, (loud) subtlety, (loud) variety. All the music and words . . . are by head mother, Frank Zappa, who has a lot of talent.”
A recording and the score of Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 4 are on display at the Music Pavilion of Montreal’s Expo 67. A special section of the pavilion is devoted to displays by 35 countries, each including recordings and scores of two major works by each nation’s leading contemporary composers.
May 28, 1967, is a day Chet Atkins will remember for some time to come. In Nashville, a city whose musical tradition and influence he has done so much to foster and develop, and throughout Tennessee, by proclamation of Governor Ellington, the day was set aside in his honor.
The tribute took form that evening when the guitarist-composer-recording man was paid homage by the music industry and his friends, at Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium.
The occasion marked Atkins’s 20th years as an RCA Victor recording artist and his 10th anniversary as head of the company’s operations in Nashville. “Furbelows and Fanfare,” a project of the junior board of the Florence Crittenton Home, sponsored the event. It was directed by Elmer Alley and John Loudermilk.
More than 8,000 people flocked to the auditorium to give the well-liked man of music two standing ovations. “The greatest dad-burned day I’ve ever had,” Atkins said, obviously touched by the warmth that issued forth from the audience, which included some of the top names of country music. “I’ll go on picking this . . . guitar as long as I’m able. I’ve had a wonderful life and I’m grateful.”
Before Atkins closed the evening by playing a medley of tunes from his most famous recordings and joined with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra under Arthur Fiedler, conductor of the Boston Pops, Chet and the audience heard and saw an all-star parade of entertainment.
Jimmy Dean, who flew in to serve as master of ceremonies for the salute to his friend, opened the program, singing “Are You From Dixie?” He was followed by Archie Campbell, Floyd Cramer, Homer and Jethro, Boots Randolph, Loudermilk and Dottie West.
The second half featured the symphony and Fiedler. Dean praised their performances but felt that the rhythm guitarist (Atkins) “needed some improvement.” Atkins came forward, performed with Mother Maybelle and the Carter Family and was praised by Lowell Blanchard, who gave him his first job; by Jack Stapp, president of Tree Publishing Co., Inc. and by Norman Racusin, vice president and general manager of the RCA Victor Record Division.
Blanchard presented Atkins with the first in a newly created series of awards Atkins on stage from the Gretsch Guitar Company for “outstanding guitar virtuosity.” A plaque, honoring Atkins for his completion of 20 years with RCA Victor, was given to him by Racusin. It is inscribed with the names of 50 artists with whom Atkins has worked closely during his association with RCA Victor. While on stage, Stapp read telegrams from various dignitaries and friends who could not attend.
Atkins then singled out the people in the audience who had been important to his career. He thanked everyone, apologizing for his plain manner of speaking and seemed particularly choked with emotion when he was about to introduce his father.
At a climactic moment before Atkins’s closing number, Cramer and Randolph brought him a black, jewelstudded stool. Atkins played “Tennessee Waltz” and a memorable event was concluded.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
The Collective Commission for Gramophone Campaigns (C.C.G.C.) of the Netherlands announced its 1967 Edison popular music awards early this summer in Amsterdam. The grand gala, during which the awards will be made, is scheduled for next February or March.
Among the albums singled out by a panel of five judges are John Coltrane‘s Ascension, Donovan‘s (Donovan Leitch) Mellow Yellow, Revolver by The Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr) and Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys (Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine and Mike Love).
The last two weeks in June marked an unprecedented tour by the Hamburg State Opera. It performed in the Salle Wilfrid Pelletier in Montreal as part of Germany’s participation in Expo 67‘s World Festival of Entertainment and then at the new Metropolitan Opera House in New York’s Lincoln Center.
Its repertory consisted almost entirely of 20th-century works, four of which never had been staged in the Western Hemisphere by a professional group.
In Canada, the company offered Lulu, by Alban Berg (“. . . a success from every standpoint,” Hubert Saal, Newsweek); Jenufa by Leos Janácek (“. . . a wonderful presentation . . . held the audience spellbound,” Harold C. Schonberg, The New York Times), and Mathis der Maler by Paul Hindemith (“. . . a triumph that sent the audience into waves of cheering ecstasy,” John Kraglund, The Globe and Mail of Toronto).
The company’s New York repertory included the Berg, Janácek and Hindemith works, together with Giselher Klebe‘s Jacobovsky and the Colonel and The Visitation by Gunther Schuller.
The Klebe work is taken from the Franz Werfel play, which had a 417-performance run in New York during World War II. It centers on the relationship between a Polish colonel and a Jewish refugee fleeing the 1940 German advance into France.
A prime event of the engagement was the North American premiere of Schuller’s The Visitation. When it was unveiled in Hamburg last year it received a 20-minute ovation and almost 50 curtain calls. “[It is] Schuller’s most responsible work so far,” The Boston Globe‘s Michael Steinberg said, following the world premiere.
In the tradition of The Beatles in their first film, A Hard Day’s Night, Sonny (Bono) and Cher play themselves in the comedy Good Times. The film features music composed and conducted by Bono. Nine songs in all weave together the story of the couple’s first movie offer, from arch screen villain George Sanders. Cher couldn’t care less, but Sonny dreams of himself in such roles as Tarzan, a fighting frontier sheriff and a private eye (As Johnny Pitzicatto, he has a closet full of trench coats — “Decisions, decisions.”).
A Columbia Pictures release, the film was directed by William Friedkin.
What Am l Bid? had its world premiere in Nashville on July 28, and the town honored star Leroy Van Dyke and Gene Nash, who wrote the music, scripted and directed the film.
Featuring cameo roles by Al Hirt, Tex Ritter, Johnny Sea and Faron Young, the film tells the tale of a young sailor (Van Dyke), son of a one-time country music star, who launches a skyrocket career on one chance appearance at the Hollywood Bowl.
Billboard‘s Claude Hall called the film “Class A . . . . especially as far as the music is concerned.
“. . . the movie does a highly commendable job at showing the world that modern country music is quality music. No goer will fail to be entertained.”
What Am I Bid? is a Liberty International production, released by Emerson Film Enterprises.
Jim McGuinn and Chris Hillman of The Byrds penned the title tune for Tony Curtis‘s latest, Don’t Make Waves, and the group (McGuinn, Hillman, Gene Clark, David Crosby and Jim Dickson) is heard on the soundtrack. The film is a spoof on the “body beautiful” cult of Southern California. Claudia Cardinale stars, and Edgar Bergen and Mort Sahl make brief appearances.
A Stu Phillips score powers Hells Angels on Wheels, a U.S. Films release about the notorious motorcycle gang of California. The “photography and music are outstanding” (Linda Scarbrough, Daily News) in this story of a cyclist who loses his job and joins the gang for an action-packed weekend. Richard Rush directed. Adam Roarke stars as the newcomer, and Sabrina Scharf is the love interest.
The man with no name rides again, this time in For a Few Dollars More, as Clint Eastwood teams with Lee Van Cleef to wipe out a batch of Mexican bank bandits. Writing of the score, published in the United States by Unart Music Corporation, John Mahoney of The Hollywood Reporter said:
“Perhaps the strongest component of the film is the score by the continually praiseworthy Ennio Morricone, whose work here is even more elaborate than his contribution to the first ‘ Dollars’ film. It is a heavy score, one which often leads, but manages to give continuity to the film’s weak spots. Many sequences seem to have been choreographed to the music, and the recurring motif of the theme introduced via the musical pocket watch originally owned by the dead girl is hauntingly employed. . . .
“[Morricone] continues to expand the use of period instruments . . . Here he uses a recorder both solo and in simulation of an ocarina, classic and amplified guitar, harmonica, player piano and what has become known as a juice harp. He also makes interesting percussive use of choral grunts and chants . . . he is a master of tenuous interludes, which heighten silences with a sense of foreboding,” critic Mahoney concluded in his review.
“A profound, beautiful, bitter contemporary poet for whom every human experience, no matter how seemingly trivial, has meaning and implications if one can just find them,” The Montreal Star‘s Joan Irwin wrote about Leonard Cohen. The story followed Cohen’s recital at the Cafe Dansant in the Youth Pavilion at Expo 67 in July. Prior to this appearance, Cohen had been at the Newport Folk Festival and on various campuses. A New York Town Hall concert is scheduled for the fall.
“His music consists chiefly of changing chords repeated for several bars each, an almost monotonous accompaniment to the all-important words . . . his words go straight to the heart of loneliness, the core of seeking.”
The Rheingold Central Park Music Festival, a mixed bag of pop, folk, country and western, blues and jazz, kicked off June 23. Some 42 concerts were offered at the Wollman Rink through July and August.
Among the performers: Theodore Bikel, The Blues Project, The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Jerry Butler, Len Chandler, Leonard Cohen, Neil Diamond, José Feliciano, (Lester) Flatt & (Earl) Scruggs, Jesse Fuller, Stan Getz, The Bennie Green Sextet, Richard (Groove) Holmes, John Lee Hooker, Son House, Ahmad Jamal, The Ramsey Lewis Trio and The Charles Lloyd Quartet.
Also, Peter Nero, Lou Rawls, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Pete Seeger, Jimmy Smith, Stevie Wonder, Junior Wells’s Blues Band and Doc Watson.
A Concerto for Xylophone, Marimba and Vibraphone by Oliver Nelson, commissioned by the American Wind Symphony, had its world premiere, June 1, in Ashland, Ky. The Wind Symphony under Robert Boudreau and soloist Tatsuo Sasaki performed it there and throughout a river tour of cities in Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania which opened on June 1 and closed July 14.
John Coltrane, whose restless musical spirit did much to shape the direction of the avantgarde movement in jazz, died July 17.
“The tragedy of his passing is heightened by the fact that he was only 40 years old,” Mort Fega said in Cash Box. “Who is to say what manner of music we might still have heard from him?”
Newsweek declared: “His legacy was and is his music. He had his own sound — flat, hard-edged, driven in a torrent of notes by his inexhaustible purpose and energy. Though his art kept ripening, it always retained a profoundly confessional feeling that at times grew almost desperate in its attempt to find new ways of speaking.”
A great variety of experience led Coltrane to his own path. He began playing in the mid-forties and worked with Eddie Vinson, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Hodges, Earl Bostic, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis.
Writing about Coltrane in The New York Times in 1961, John S. Wilson noted: ” Until about five years ago, Mr. Coltrane appeared content to be a journeyman jazzman. Then, while he was a member of the Miles Davis Quintet, he began an exploration of . . . his [tenor] saxophone that led him to performances filled with long, hard-bitten, rapid, rising and falling runs that had the cumulative effect of an aural battering ram.”
What Coltrane was working on with Monk, Davis and later with his own unit helped change the course of jazz. By playing at great length and investigating all the possibilities of material, by progressively breaking away from chordal and modal restraints, he created a freer music, which was paralleled and colored by a new unrestricted manner of playing by his rhythm section.
Coltrane left Davis in 1960 so he might further his explorations. He organized a group which included McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison (bass) and Elvin Jones (drums). His music kept changing; it became increasingly complex.
As his music evolved, he experimented with instrumentation, adding and subtracting players, depending on the kind of feeling he desired to project. In the process, he introduced many avant-garde musicians. His concern for diversification and change also resulted in his playing and reviving interest in the soprano saxophone.
Coltrane had little fear of losing his audience because of the increasing complexity of his music.” The real risk is in not changing,” he told Newsweek.
Coltrane’s compositions, particularly the essentially improvisatory, extended form works such as “A Love Supreme” and “Ascension,” mirrored his unending search for complete expression. It seems he had to seek, find, move on. There was no time for rest or coasting.
At the time of his death, Coltrane was working on something new. When asked by a New York club owner if he wanted to work, he disclosed he was not ready to perform in public. He was practicing. “When Trane talked about practicing, it meant all day, not a few hours or even an afternoon. It meant every waking hour,” Michael Zwerin has observed.
Coltrane was a deeply religious man who found realization in his faith. He was firmly convinced of the power of music to do good.
Coltrane was paid homage by his friends and fans on July 21, at New York’s St. Peter’s Lutheran Church. Over 1,000 people attended the service, conducted by the Rev. John G. Gensel. Calvin Massey, a long-time friend, read Coltrane’s poem “A Love Supreme.” The Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman groups played. ” Rarely have so many musicians congregated in one place,” Rev. Gensel said.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
“With the possible exception of the late John F. Kennedy, no American is more popular in East Europe than Willis Conover,” Newsweek asserted.
Who is Willis Conover? He is jazz’s most powerful radio voice. He presides over the Voice of America‘s Music – U.S.A., heard for an hour and a quarter, six days a week, in every country on the globe. It is said that the show—probably the world’s most popular radio program—reaches an estimated 30 million people every night, 10 million of them in Eastern Europe alone.
“The Conover formula — first-class jazz interspersed with cool, no-politics commentary — has paid off handsomely,” Newsweek said.
“For me,” Conover explained, “every program has a reason for being. It relates to itself or to other programs in the week or month. I try to put jazz in perspective — a little history, a little about who is playing and who wrote it, a little about what feels solid to me.”
Proof of Conover’s impact is easy to find. In Eastern Europe, for example, he “has been showered with gifts in Prague, deluged with flowers in Warsaw and whisked through customs in Bucharest as if he were a Very Important Politician,” Newsweek reported. “His photograph is treated like an icon, his autograph like a collector’s item. And his comments are quoted with respect even in Soviet propaganda magazines. ‘If they were electing a president of the world,’ one bearded Russian university student said, ‘I’d vote for Willis Conover.'”
A long-time jazz fan and commentator, Conover has a great love for the music. It comes across in his presentations. “Jazz is a language that all nations of the 20th century speak,” he told a group of enthusiasts in Estonia recently. ” It is a language of discussion and argument. Musicians can perfect this international language only if they have the opportunity to speak it with their neighbors across the street or across the ocean. There must be crossfertilization.”
A summer festival of top names in folk and country music at Statesville, N. C., caught the ear of Time, which came away impressed with folk singer guitarist Arthel (Doc) Watson.
“Husky, easygoing and seemingly unperturbed by the fact that he has been blind ever since early childhood, Watson, 44, is a regular country-music Segovia. His casual, clean-cut virtuosity on the ‘fiat-top’ (nonelectric guitar) is little less than awesome,” the magazine noted.
Folklorists point out that Watson’s stylings are far from pure. He readily admits his songs and techniques were as much copied from early listening to the radio and records as they were derived from the folk around his Deep Gap, N. C., birthplace.
When he was 11, his father (” a pretty fair country picker”) made him a fretless banjo. At 17 he was listening to country greats like guitarist Merle Travis and duplicating his individualistic finger-picking style, in which the forefinger touches the strings and plucks out the tune while the thumb plunks out a moving bass.
Time concluded: “Watson is located dead-center in the forward thrust of country music toward highbrow as well as lowbrow respectability. The very impurity of his style, coupled with the exhilaration his work generates, goes a long way to accomplish this aim. Like a select few before him (John Jacob Niles, Travis, Clarence Ashley), he forms a bridge between America’s primitive folk heritage and the sophisticated listener.”
“DanceMobile,” a five week all- boroughs schedule of appearances by the Eleo Pomare Dance Company, was a summer project of New York City’s Harlem Cultural Council.
The troupe, presented by the Hoffman Beverage Company, was accompanied by the Clifford Jordan Quartet in open-air performances.
Included in the program was a solo by Pomare called Junkie, danced to the Charles Mingus tune “Better Gît It In Your Soul.” Also heard were various tunes by Leadbelly, among them: “Dick’s Holler,” “Take This Hammer” and “Silver City Bound.”
For the sixth consecutive season, the Rebekah Harkness Foundation Dance Festival was a late summer attraction in New York. The nine-program event featured leading dancers and companies in the Central Park series.
Among the works presented were Congo Tango Palace (music by Miles Davis and Gil Evans), Montgomery Variations (music by Davis and Charles Mingus) and Toccata (music by Lalo Schifrin, played by Dizzy Gillespie), all choreographed by Talley Beatty and danced by his company.
The Eleo Pomare troupe offered his Las Desenamoradas (music by John Coltrane) and Blues for the Jungle (music by Oscar Brown Jr. and Mingus). One work by the Lucas Hoving unit was his Has the Last Train Left? set to music by Henk Badings.
“I’m really in this business more by accident than anything else,” Charlie Louvin told Charles Jackson during an interview in “The Sunday Showcase” of The Nashville Tennessean. “I’ve been a barber, a postal clerk and a cotton mill worker, and in each of them I was just trying to find a way of making a living that was easier than farming.”
Alabama-born Louvin feels the ballad bears a close relationship to the religious hymns that form a great part of the musical heritage of rural America.
“I get the same feeling out of singing ‘See the Big Man Cry‘ as I do some of the great songs of inspiration, and I think a well-written love song can reach and help more people than a hymn can. It’s pretty hard for a hymn to reach the guy sitting in a bar.”
“Perhaps,” wrote Jackson, “rural America’s old Calvinistic sense of the ‘troubles of this world’ has a connection with this deepness of feeling, for Louvin said that he can sometimes genuinely ‘ feel’ the loss of things he, in his own personal life, never actually lost.”
Louvin explained:
“I never sing a song about somebody that lost something without feeling sorry for myself, like a song about somebody losing his wife and his home. And yet I’ve been married for 18 years and have three children, and if I was to sit down and write for a month about all the happiness they’ve brought me, I couldn’t do them justice.”
Leon Kirchner, a visiting composer at the Marlboro (Vt.) Music Festival, shared in a memorable moment following a concert late in August.
Stepping in for Pablo Casals, who was recovering from a cold, Kirchner directed the Marlboro Orchestra, a chorus of 75 singers and Rudolf Serkin, the pianist, in Beethoven‘s “Fantasia” in C minor.
“That was a beautiful, beautiful performance,” Casals exclaimed after the concert. He then embraced and kissed Kirchner and several of the performers.
Henry Raymont of The New York Times, writing from Marlboro, noted that Kirchner “has been a major influence here in interesting talented young performers who play modern music. He is Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard University and this year won the Pulitzer Prize in composition.”
Under the title “Charles Ives: Music Big as Life,” Eric Salzman, writing in the August issue of HiFi/Stereo Review, commented on the composer.
“Ives was not (repeat: not) an untrained American primitive writing unplayable scores in a snowbound log cabin by Walden Pond; nor was he totally unknown 25 or even 40 years ago. The time has come to discard all that silly and misleading Ives mythology. Ives did anticipate practically anything you can think of in modern music, but even that fact goes only part way toward explaining his extraordinary relevance today. Ives’s really revolutionary idea — the one that still astonishes and even outrages people (when they realize its implications) — was the overthrow of the old notion of ‘manner’ or ‘style’ and the bald acceptance of all kinds of experience as valid material for a far-reaching and, yes, even profound conception of musical relevance. Until recently, we have been bound to the traditional (European) notion of just what a work of art is and what artistic experience can be — i.e., a personal expression, historically determined, made consistent and unified by technique through style,” music critic Salzman continued.
“Baloney! says Ives. Life is bigger and truer than that, and so art should be. Ives wanted to break down the traditional barriers between art, life and nature so that life could flow across into art and vice versa.”
Ives, whose Symphony No. 3 was awarded the 1947 Pulitzer Prize in Music, died May 19, 1954, at the age of 79.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
How to Steal an Election opened in New York City’s Pocket Theater, October 13. The satire — with a book by William F. Brown and music and lyrics by Oscar Brand — is a look at the history of the American presidency on the seamy side and a primer in dirty politics. The revue is replete with slides and films.
Reviewing for The New York Times, Richard F. Shepard said: “There are pertinent and good songs — ‘The Right Man,’ ‘Down Among the Grass Roots‘ (about the need to work futilely with a politician’s lowest form of life, the average voter), ‘Get Out the Vote‘ and a wistful reproach, ‘Mr. Might’ve Been,’ addressed to Senator Eugene J. McCarthy.”
The production was staged by Robert H. Livingston.
The Savage Seven (American International) is a Dick Clark production that is set in today’s West. It brings two minorities together — a band of motorcycle outlaws and a village of Indians — to fight off the gang oppressing the villagers. Mike Curb and Jerry Styner provided the music. Robert Walker stars. Reviewing for The Hollywood Reporter, John Mahoney noted:
“Mike Curb’s score is more varied than some of his prior work, especially good in its love theme and under scenes of Indian town life.”
You Are What You Eat (Peppercorn Wormser) — “the 8 1/2 of the younger set” (Renata Adler, The New York Times) — featuresTiny Tim, Father Malcolm Boyd, Paul Butterfield, Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary) and a number of rock groups, including Harper’s Bizarre and The Electric Flag.
The film was directed and produced by Barry Feinstein. Among the tunes sung by Tiny Tim: “Be My Baby,” by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Phil Spector. Eleanor Baruchian joins him for Sonny Bono‘s “I Got You Babe” [musical backing on both of these songs by 4/5 of The Band] and Tim is heard in voice-overs of Chuck Berry‘s “Memphis, Tennessee.”
“A Square High in Hip Circles” was the title of Joyce Haber‘s recent Los Angeles Times profile of Harry Edward Nilsson. The story traced him from Brooklyn (where he was born on June 15, 1941) through careers as pop singer, singer of commercials, data computer supervisor in a Van Nuys bank to his present status as film scorer, songwriter and recording artist — and favorite of critics in the underground press who write things like, “Nilsson seems to be expanding in dozens of directions, a renaissance composer and singer,” they declare.
Reporter Haber noted: “The role Nilsson plays in pop music is definitely up and coming, and in contradistinction to faddists. He will, according to the Free Press and free souls, be Very Big as a composer someday.”
Nilsson, who has just completed scoring Otto Preminger’s Skidoo, got an audition — and the job when the director’s aides told him about a talented young fellow named Nilsson. Commenting on the way success goes in Hollywood, the songwriter said, “It’s gotten to the point where someone says, ‘Let’s get someone like Nilsson.’ Then they ask, ‘Who’s like Nilsson?’ And someone answers, ‘Why not Nilsson himself?’ And they call me up.
“And they’re pretty surprised, I’ll tell you, when they get through to me.”
Harold Seletsky‘s “Phantasy for Clarinet, Tabla and Koto,” described by The New York Times critic Allen Hughes as an “East-meets-West hybrid,” was given its first New York performance, September 18. The concert, featuring this work, took place at Town Hall.
Kurt Weill‘s “The Seven Deadly Sins,” in its new concert version, had its world premiere, August 24, at a London, England, Promenade concert. It was programed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Colin Davis, with singer Evelyn Lear as featured artist. The work is published in the United States by Schott/AMP.
With maestro Leopold Stokowski on the podium, the American Symphony Orchestra began its seventh season, October 7, with a concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall. The first local performance of Carlos Surinach‘s “Melorhythmic Dramas” was one of the features of the program.
“…an ambitious project in seven movements, [it] churned up considerable acoustical excitement,” The New York Times‘s Donal Henahan noted.
“The Changing Language of Music,” a 10-part study course for the layman, is being offered by the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.
Gunther Schuller, president of the conservatory, provided an intensive introduction to the course in the form of three consecutive lectures in October. Other lecturers set to speak on various aspects of contemporary music include Milton Babbitt, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Leon Kirchner and Seymour Shifrin. Schuller will present a general summation, February 18, at the final meeting of the class.
“Does Music Belong Only to the Privileged?” was the question posed in a Larry Austin article which appeared in The New York Times, September 1. Among the observations by Austin – who is the editor of the magazine Source – were these:
“From my own experience, I saw that the music education we perpetuate in the schools today is not real music education, but an education about music functioning as a socio-historical phenomenon. If we accept the thesis that music is art and that we should educate our children about music as art — as a growing, ever-changing creative phenomenon — then we are educating our children improperly. Real art is concerned with social utility only as a by-product, not as its essence.
“Important art achievements have always come about through rejection of past assumptions and proven ways, through radical innovation. With intimidating historical models built into every music course, historical procedure and scholarly analysis are taken by the students to be directly applicable to the creation of music! The result is often the abortion of original ideas about art in favor of yet another academic syndrome — neoclassicism. I don’t advocate ignorance of the past artistic accomplishments of man, but I do advocate the overthrow of the 19th-century academic cult of worship of past musics, the end of 20th century excesses of musical erudition, and the return to the music education of the young primarily as artists.
“What I hope for is that we can teach our children to have an open ear for all music — of the past, of the present, of our own culture, of other cultures. Instead, the masterpieces of the past are presented as the music of today’s cultured and moneyed elite: the opera-goers, the symphony-goers, the owners of expensive sound systems. Children are impressed constantly to aspire to this sort of ‘good music’ as a cultural reward of the ‘good life.’
“The irony must be cruel for ghetto children when they’re told by their teachers and others that they should appreciate and cultivate a taste for ‘good music.’ Understandably intimidated and confused, they return to their homes and the ‘bad music’ of their transistor radios, adding yet more bitterness to their lives and toward ‘the society of the good life.’
“Though music educators won’t — can’t — admit it, most realize that the music of our culture is not the music of the privileged classes in the concert halls. On the outside in the real world, a synthesis of the music of diverse cultures is taking place—mass-culture music. Our children are acutely aware of this phenomenon and are keen to be associated with it. By turning a small dial, they can experience classical Indian music, jazz, folk songs of Appalachia, hard rock, blues bands, the Nashville and Detroit sounds, gospel music, slick commercial music, Latin and African music, anything. This music has relevance to our children. It can’t be ignored or called ‘bad music.’ “
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
James Brown was the recipient of the Humanitarian Award for 1969, presented by the Music and Performing Arts Lodge of B’nai B’rith. The award ceremony took place, May 25, in the Trianon Ballroom at New York’s Hilton.
On this occasion, he also was given a portfolio of letters written by members of the Civil Rights Task Force of the Democratic Study Group. The letters cited Brown as an outstanding black leader in the fight to achieve a level of dignity not only for blacks through the country, but for bringing equal recognition to other minority groups as well. Among the leading figures whose letters are contained in the folio are the Honorable Hubert H. Humphrey, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm (New York) and Senator Charles E. Goodell (New York).
Bob Austin, publisher of Record World, presented Brown with the Humanitarian Award. Congressman William L. Clay of Missouri gave the black artist the portfolio.
On his graduation day from the Michigan School for the Blind, Stevie Wonder was done honor by the state. He received a House of Representatives resolution, guided through the legislature by Rep. George Edwards. The performer-songwriter was cited for ” an awe-inspiring life which he has so brilliantly and outstandingly lived each and every day of his life.”
Charles Lloyd – Journey Within is a documentary of the jazz musician produced, directed, photographed, edited and recorded by 22-year-old Eric Sherman. Variety noted that Sherman “may have produced the best jazz documentary ever made in this hour-long study,” and called the film “an intense — and highly successful — attempt to get to the essence of the man and his music.”
Che! (20th Century-Fox) is the story of the life and death of Che Guevara, ranging from his part in the Cuban revolution and the missile crisis to his end in Bolivia. Omar Sharif plays the title role, and Jack Palance plays Fidel Castro. Richard Fleischer directed. Reviewing the film, Variety noted: “Most outstanding work done for Che! was by Lalo Schifrin, whose brilliantly various score, mixing Latin and electronic-sounding themes with heavy use of percussion, suggests all the ambiguity of Che Guevara.”
The Girl on a Motorcycle (Claridge Films) stars Alain Delon and singer Marianne Faithfull. Directed and photographed by Jack Cardiff, the story tells of the girl’s repeated travels from the world of her cuckolded husband to that of her paramour via her 1207cc Harley Davidson motorcycle. Don Musco (The Hollywood Reporter) wrote: “Les Reed‘s pulsating score, interweaving brass and strings, adds to the excitement of the action scenes on the highways and roads up to the final denouement, communicating the feeling of frenzy felt by the devotees of speed.” The score is published by Peyotl Music.
Welcome to Come, a short film by Fred Camper, a sophomore at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was reviewed briefly by Variety. Among the comments: “…looms as one of the most successful tours de force ever promulgated on the United States screen. Running no more than two minutes, the pic consists of only one shot — a long zoom which begins inside a house, continues to a window and then concludes outdoors.” Variety called the film “a prospective small classic” and cited the astute use of the Beach Boys recording “Well You’re Welcome,” written by Brian Wilson.
The Maltese Bippy (MGM) stars Dan Rowan and Dick Martin in a satire about werewolves in Flushing. Among the feature players: Carol Lynley, Julie Newmar, Mildred Natwick and Fritz Weaver. Norman Panama directed and Nelson Riddle wrote the score.
The Cincinnati Ballet Company, now in its sixth year and operated by the College-Conservatory of Music at the University, presented a program late in April. Held in the campus’ new Corbett Auditorium, it was one of the events in the University of Cincinnati ‘Man and Arts’ series and part of the university’s sesquicentennial celebration.
One of the works danced was D*i*l*e*m*m*a*s M*o*d*e*r*n*e, to music by Elliott Carter. It is based on a poem titled “Triads, Chairs, Mirrors and Things.” Carmen DeLeone, assistant conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, conducted an ensemble out of that organization. Dr. Roberta S. Gary, associate professor of organ at the university, was the soloist.
Saturday Review dance critic Walter Terry was particularly impressed with the company and its artistic director, David McLain, “who has made student dancers seem professional . . . and who is himself a choreographer of distinction. Amazing!”
Dilemmas also was done, July 2-6, by the David McLain Dance Theater — a company of 14 dancers from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music — during its debut season at the Beaupré Ballet Festival. The performances were given in the Beaupré Creative Art Center, Stockbridge, Mass.
Bruce King‘s one-man show, March 31-April 1, at New York’s Cubiculo Theater, included works to scores by Paul Hindemith, Alan Hovhaness, Edgard Varèse and Anton Webern.
The Margaret Beals and Sally Bowden recitals at the same site, April 13-15, featuring Fiebre Y Fiebre,”a duet to Miles Davis . . . both exciting and savory,” Dance Magazine‘s John Dowlin declared. Miss Beals was “twirled, slung and nicely manhandled by John Harris.” Also on the program: Three Dances, showcasing Sally Bowden; she danced to music by Otis Redding, Steve Cropper and Bob Dylan.
In a June 30 recital of solo dances by Gertrude Talcott and Leslie Martin, Miss Talcott performed to four songs by Aretha Franklin during a work titled Going Down Slow. She portrayed in dance terms “the situation of the individual reaching out for some form of human companionship,” Don McDonagh noted in his review in The New York Times.
Prince, the Singing Poodle was a spring presentation at New York City’s Studio 58 Playhouse. The play, with music by Sylvia Flory and lyrics by Lilian Espenak, opened in February and played to audiences weekends through May. Singer-narrator for the show was Barbara Reisman, Flory was the pianist and Jerry Iger drew the animations. Reviewing for Show Business, Barbara Allen called the show “a delightful addition to children’s theater,” and went on to add that “the music (a real plus) is tuneful, particularly such songs as ‘Popocatepetl‘ and ‘Lullaby.” In all, the production featured 16 tunes, including “Space Song” and “My Puppy Went to the Moon Today.”
The first official performance of “A Concerto for Piano, Drums and Orchestra” by Charles Bell, the jazz pianist and educator, took place the afternoon of May 30, on New York’s Central Park Mall.
Karl Hampton Porter conducted the 75-piece Harlem Youth Symphony Orchestra. The featured artists were Bell (piano) and his 8-year-old son, Charles Jr., better known to his friends as “Poogie.”
“It is a very attractive 15-minute piece that rings subtle changes on a simple melodic theme and strong rhythmic base,” The New York Times‘ Raymond Ericson commented. “The composer has given himself and his son room for extended improvisation, and Poogie went at his with an energy and skill that seemed born into every vibrating muscle of his small body.”
“Mantra,” a multimedia composition with music by Peter Phillips, was offered for the first time, May 18. The site of the performance: the Seattle (Wash.) Opera House. Created under the auspices of the Seattle Opera Association through the Title III Puget Sound Arts and Sciences Program, it was one of several pieces presented that evening by Allied Arts and underwritten by the Seattle First National Bank.
Resident talent worked on structuring this effort. In this number were Doris Chase (sculptor), Mary Staton (choreographer), Robert Brown and Frank Olvey (filmmakers), the Retina Circus (a light-painting ensemble) and Henry Holt (music director and also conductor).
Thirty-eight minutes in length, this fusion of music, dance, liquid light and kinetic art also featured a rock trio, jazz trio, chamber orchestra and three 200-pound fiberglass circles. Diverse musical elements came into play during
the work, including rock, jazz, blues and contemporary symphonic techniques and sounds.
Composer Phillips told Wayne Johnson of The Seattle Times: “In ‘Mantra,’ we’ve tried to bring all the various disciplines together so that all the forces serve a central conception. It is a juxtaposition of new and current elements, not as ends in themselves but rather as media that can carry the whole feeling of the piece.”
“…the evening belonged to Phillips,” Rolf Stromberg said in The Seattle Post Intelligencer. His work “is religious, it is sensual and it is musical.”
Phillips has been in Seattle since last fall on a Ford Foundation grant to work with Barbara Reeder of the Seattle schools on a new text for general music courses in junior high schools.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
Sixty Canadian songwriters and 36 Canadian music publishers were honored May 6 in Toronto for their contributions to Canadian music. The second annual Awards Dinner to honor the writers and publishers of 54 songs in the pop music field was held by BMI Canada Limited at the Royal York Hotel. Among the BMI officials present were president Edward M. Cramer and William Harold Moon, general manager, BMI Canada.
It was during Cramer’s visit to Toronto that he and Moon met with the legendary Lonnie Johnson to present him with BMPs Commendation of Excellence for “long and outstanding contribution to the world of rhythm and blues.” (Johnson died June 16.)
The Fisherman and His Wife, a new opera with Gunther Schuller’s music, set to “an excellent libretto” by John Updike, had its first performances, May 6-10, at the Savoy Theater in Boston.
Based on a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, this work, commissioned by the Junior League of Boston in 1967 as a 60th anniversary gift for the children of the city, was performed by the Opera Company of Boston, under the artistic direction of Sarah Caldwell [later, the first woman to conduct the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra].
The story centers on the boundless greed of the fisherman’s wife. Her husband catches a fish who is really an enchanted prince. He promises to throw the fish back if the fish-prince grants his wife three wishes. The wife pushes her luck, asking for a castle, then expresses her desire to be king, emperor, Pope and finally Lord of the Universe. In disgust, the fish-prince returns the couple to their original squalor.
“An opera for children is a risky project,” The New York Times’ Raymond Ericson pointed out. “To be worth doing it has to find the right balance between simplicity for the young and at least some sophistication for parental endurance…. To a large extent, it succeeds in its aim.”
Updike’s “language is clear and singable, lightly touched with poetry and wit,” Ericson added. Schuller’s score, written for a relatively small orchestra, incorporates elements of jazz and rock and places emphasis on instruments familiar to schoolchildren of the current generation. Free performances are planned for Boston schoolchildren.
All the King’s Men, another [Richard Rodney] Bennett-[Beverly] Cross operatic collaboration, this time in one-act, was given its first United States performances, March 19 and 20. A work for children, it was presented by the Ninth Grade Class of Potomac School, McLean, Va., with students from the fourth through eighth grades. The site of the presentation: the Potomac School.
The Washington Post’s Paul Hume said: “Under the direction of Dingwall Fleary and Robert Henderson, with David Long as producer, Bennett’s opera about the episode that gave birth to Humpty-Dumpty during the British Civil War of 1643 comes off nicely. It is unpretentious yet full of good tunes.”
The New York premiere of the Stanley Silverman opera, Elephant Steps, was given at the Hunter College Opera Theater in New York City, April 24. An Opera Theater Production presented by the Hunter College Opera Association, “it is a mixed-media extravaganza, using singers, dancers, a small chorus, films, graphics, a rock group, electronic sound, incense, and strong lights shining into the eyes of the audience,” Harold C. Schonberg explained in The New York Times.
Silverman collaborated with author Richard Foreman on this melange of “crazy words” and music in multiple varieties. The work centers on elephants, elephant angels and a mysterious man named Reineheart. Obscurity runs rampant.
“. .. in its crazy way, Elephant Steps keeps moving along, and the eclecticism, the wonderful irreverence of the music, provides a perfect commentary,” Schonberg added. “In this work, surrealism lives. Maybe it does not have to have a meaning, no more than life has to have a meaning.
“…it was quite an evening, in all. How can Mr. Silverman ever top it?” New York magazine’s Alan Rich concluded: “…avant-garde as hell and also beautiful …. it was the best piece of new music I’ve heard in concert all year.”
The Me Nobody Knows, based on the book Voices From the Ghetto by Stephen M. Joseph, opened at New York’s Orpheum Theater, May 18. Voices was a collection of poems, songs, anecdotes and stories all written by schoolchildren, most of them black or Puerto Rican, ranging in age from 7 to 18.
Reviewing the show for The Record of Bergen, N. J., Emory Lewis wrote:
“Composer Gary William Friedman, lyricists Herb Shapiro and Will Holt, choreographer Patricia Birch and director Robert H. Livingston have taken this rich, affecting material and turned it into a stunning, bold, loving rock musical happening.”
Clive Barnes (The New York Times) called the show a “dark and lovely rock-folk musical” and found it “vivid and honest” and Friedman’s music “eloquent.” He noted: “…as I left, the audience was cheering and it was not cheering gloom, but the victory of the human spirit over circumstances. For the slums these kids find themselves in may be squalid, but the kids are beautiful. And the show, assertive and passionate, reflects that beauty.”
A concert of electronic music put on by the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was given May 6. Presented at the McMillin Theater on campus, the recital had the assistance of the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia in cooperation with the music departments of Columbia and Princeton Universities and the Group for Contemporary Music at Columbia. Included during this evening was the world premiere of Charles Dodge’s “Changes” (1970).
“Steve Reich, a composer in his mid-30’s, has for some years been trying to evolve a music based on the relationships of pulses and on drones,” The New York Times’ Donal Henahan noted.
Insight into Reich’s methods and general posture was provided by two evenings of music. They were presented by the Guggenheim Museum on its New York premises, May 7 and 8.
Two Reich efforts, “Phase Patterns” and “Four Organs,” had their first performances. The participating musicians Steve Chambers, Jon Gibson, Art Murphy, the composer (electronic organs, “Phase Patterns”); Chambers, Philip Glass, Murphy, the composer (electronic organs, “Four Organs”). Gibson played maracas on the latter work.
“Nueve—A Ritual for Double Bass and Orchestra” (1970) by José Serebrier had its world premiere, April 19. Commissioned by the Plainfield (N.J.) Symphony in celebration of its 50th anniversary, it was programed in that city by the orchestra, the composer conducting, during a gala concert, supported by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. The soloist was Gary Karr, a well-known virtuoso.
“Unlike any other double bass concerto written before, this one included poetry readings, choirs, screens, projections, strobe lights, jazz drummers and audience participation,” Serebrier said. “While this is my first multi-media work to come to life, it is not my first try … My interest with multi-media comes from a very simple principle, trying to involve the audience from every possible angle, and attacking all the senses at once. It also has to do with bringing people back to the concert halls. Many passages were conceived especially because of the effect they would have on the speed, color and intensity of the Synchroma images. I find it impossible to describe the marvel of finding one’s aural perceptions literally translated into images on the screen.”
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention combined with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta in a Contempo ’70 concert, May 15, at Pauley Pavilion on the U.C.L.A. campus.
One of the highlights of the evening was the world premiere of excerpts from 200 Motels, a Zappa work put together over several years during the Mothers’ road trips. The Philharmonic and the Mothers jointly performed the hour-long work.
The work “reveals the rock matriarch as a serious craftsman of undeniable skill and imagination,” Los Angeles Times music critic Martin Bernheimer reported.
The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Erich Kunzel conducting programed Bernd-Alois Zimmermann’s “Music for the Suppers of King Ubu,” April 24, at its home base, Music Hall in the Ohio city. It marked the first time that the Zimmermann work, originally for a ballet, was heard in the United States.
“…a contemporary piece of music that is full of satire, wayward and willful, a ‘Valkyrie’ with wrong notes, a grab bag of musical laughs,” The Cincinnati Post & Times-Star critic Eleanor Bell reported. “Even the musicians grinned as they played.”
The work is published in this country by Schott /Belwin-Mills Publishing Corporation.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
A highlight of Nashville week was the Nashville Songwriters Association First Hall of Fame Banquet and Awards Dinner. It was held at Vanderbilt Holiday Inn on October 12 and presided over by President Eddie Miller of NSA.
The NSA, with a motto reading “For a Better World of Music,” unanimously voted a number of songwriters to their Hall of Fame. They were Gene Autry, Johnny Bond, Albert Brumley, A. P. Carter (deceased), Ted Daffan, Vernon Dalhart (deceased), Rex Griffin (deceased), Stuart Hamblen, Pee Wee King, Vic McAlpin, Bob Miller (deceased), Leon Payne (deceased), Jimmie Rodgers (deceased), Fred Rose (deceased), Redd Stewart, Merle Travis, Floyd Tillman, Ernest Tubb, Cindy Walker, Hank Williams (deceased) and Bob Wills.
Princeton University has a new song, words and music by Robert B. Sour, ’25, former president of BMI. Titled “There’s a New Look to the Tiger,” the song was presented earlier this year at the Princeton football team’s annual banquet. It had its first public airing—in a special orchestration by Billy May—at the Harvard-Princeton game, November 7. Words and music for the song, published by the Richmond Organization, were reprinted in the program for the game, at Palmer Stadium, Princeton, N.J.
The world premiere of Donald Erb’s “Klangfarbenfunk I” was the highlight of a Detroit Symphony Orchestra concert, October 1, at Detroit’s Ford Auditorium. The work, commissioned by the Symphonic Metamorphosis, a group of eight symphony members who synthesize rock and classical idioms. Scored for orchestra, rock band, electronic tape and light show, the 15-minute composition was conflicted by Sixten Ehrling. Writing of the piece, Erb noted that the title, meant to be bilingual, roughly translates to “Funky Tone Colors Number One.”
“As for the manner in which I wrote the piece, I would have to use a term applied to the Alaskan bush pilots who fly ‘by the seat of their pants.’ Much experimenting took place at the Symphonic Metamorphosis’ rehearsals and when something seemed right, we kept it.”
Reviewing for The Plain Dealer, Wilma Salisbury wrote:
“Musically, the work’s primary interest lies in Erb’s treatment of textures. Beginning with a single melodic line, he progresses to a thick collage of indistinguishable timbres, returns to the original sound structure, gradually expands the sonic web once more, interrupts it for a rock-band cadenza and ends in a chaotic eruption of all available sound sources. In between these textural extremes, individual tone colors are combined so skillfully and mixed so well that, at times, everything comes out gray — a complex sea of integrated sounds.”
Collins George (Detroit Free Press) called the work “the most charming, the most delightful thing” about the concert and added that it was also the “silliest which somehow managed to be irrelevant, irreverent and fun.”
John Handy’s “Concerto for Jazz Soloist and Orchestra,” with the composer as soloist, was performed July 16 at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco by the San Francisco Symphony under Arthur Fiedler.
Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia,” commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary, was originally premiered October 10, 1968. A new, revised version of the work was premiered October 8, by the orchestra in New York’s Philharmonic Hall. Reviewing for The New York Times, Raymond Ericson noted that Berio added a fifth movement to the work last year and went on to say:
“In its original form, the ‘Sinfonia’ had a strong, rather neutral opening. Its second section, a tribute to the memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was quietly repetitive, a threnody that sometimes became a kind of keening. The long third movement was an enormous musical collage, built on the third movement of Mahler’s ‘Second Symphony.’ The materials included excerpts, sometimes plain, sometimes distorted, from pieces by Ravel, Richard Strauss, Berg, Debussy and others, plus the sung and spoken texts that filtered through the mouths of the Swingle Singers. Aside from its ingenious workmanship, the movement had fascinating ambiguities and hinted meanings that such juxtapositions have.
“Thereafter, the brief, relatively quiet fourth movement seemed anticlimactic leading nowhere. The new conclusion transforms the rest, balancing the first in length and giving the ‘Sinfonia’ symmetry. The finale’s power is derived from dramatic percussive punctuation and an increase in tension which occasionally relaxes but never as much as it grows, until it reaches a climax and then finally fades away.”
“Sinfonia” is published in the United States by Universal Edition/Theodore Presser Co.
The American premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen‘s “Shortwaves” for piano, viola, tam-tam, organ, shortwave radios and technician was heard October 16 at a concert by the New Music Ensemble of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Under the direction of Howard Hersh, the concert took place in the Hearst Court of the M. H. de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park. Alexander Fried, writing in The San Francisco Examiner, found it “a lucid score, leaving considerable silence as an environment for its exceptionally imaginative shatters, wails and tam-tam scrapes.” The work was performed by Howard Hersh (tam-tam). Robert Moran (electric organ), Patrick Krobtoh (amplified viola), Joseph Kubera (piano) and Ivan Tcherepnin (electronics).
Newsweek recently updated the Fats Domino story in its “Where Are They Now?” feature. “Fats Ain’t Blue,” the news magazine led off, pointing out that “…although he hasn’t had a hit in 10 years, Domino is still very much in demand on the nightclub circuit, where he is booked solidly through next year. And although he now appears in the lounge while bigger names work the main room, Fats still packs them in wherever he appears.
“His style remains as unchanged as Liberace’s … He opens every set with ‘Blueberry Hill.’ pounding the keyboard with his stubby fingers and wailing into the mike as he fills the room with the big-beat sound of the 50’s. And the audiences, both the nostalgic over-30’s crowd and the rock-oriented young, soak it up.
“Domino admits that he did try for a while to bring his sound up to date. ‘I bought an electric piano, but I eventually gave it to my son. All them guitars and everything are so loud today, you can’t hear what they’re saying. I like people to hear what I’m saying. People said I should follow the trend, but I’ve got an original style and that’s what I’ve got to do.’”
Although Domino spends 10 months a year on the road, he maintains a 16-room home in New Orleans where he lives with his wife of 23 years and their eight children. His current business interests include a Florida-based chain of fried chicken stands.
The updating ended with:
“Refreshingly, Domino feels none of the bitterness that usually characterizes the fading star. He is both optimistic about his newest release (‘New Orleans Ain’t the Same Now’) and philosophical about the past. ‘I’ve been a millionaire two or three times and I may be one again. But it doesn’t matter. People want you to be natural, to be yourself,not putting on like something you’re not. As long as I’m working,
Hollie I. West (The Washington Post) talked recently with Roland Kirk about the Jazz and People’s Movement, the protest organization that has disrupted a number of late-night television shows over the exclusion of black artists, particularly jazz musicians, from the medium.
In each case of disruption, demonstrators obtained tickets to the shows and once inside blew whistles and horns once it was underway.
Kirk noted that the demonstrators have studiously avoided violence. “If we’d used violence, they (the networks) would be more resistant than they are.
We’re prepared to go to jail, but our weapon is music. So we don’t go there with violence on our minds.
The Jazz and People’s Movement seeks a number of concessions in its negotiations with the networks:
- Establishment of an educational program series about the history of black music.
- More extensive use of jazz musicians on television, including appearances on game and quiz shows and soap operas.
- Credits given for special solos or musical arrangements.
- Interviews with jazz musicians on talk shows in addition to having them perform.
- Better promotion of black talent in media and trade advertising.
Kirk says: “A lot of musicians don’t like this form of protest. Many feel television is not the place to present their music. A lot of them don’t realize it’s not just about their music. They don’t realize it’s about the whole spectrum of black music — from the people down in New Orleans to the latest creation.”
The jazzman reports he’s had offers to appear on TV but has turned them down.
“I don’t want it said I’m doing this just for myself. But I’m going to take some things eventually. First, though, I want something to come of this (confrontation), and I think something will,” Kirk concluded.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
John Hartford, in Nashville to promote a volume of his verses (Word Movies, Doubleday), spoke with Jack Hurst of The Nashville Tennessean.
Among his comments:
“The only place you can hear real country music these days is at the folk music festivals. And now they’re moving the Grand Ole Opry — that’s the sickest damn thing I ever heard of.”
The bearded Hartford, “one of the world’s best banjo players,” noted Hurst, was most influenced by the Grand Ole Opry’s Earl Scruggs.
“When I first came to Nashville in 1965, I was a disk jockey from Missouri and I couldn’t see why I couldn’t play [Lester] Flatt & Scruggs records and Dave Brubeck records on the same radio show. People are doing that now. One of the biggest changes going on now is that all music is moving away from classification. People are just playing what they feel and let other people put labels on them. Like Doug Kershaw being called hard rock, for instance.”
Hartford describes the music he now plays as “grass rock.”
“Everybody thinks that refers to m@rijuana. Actually, it’s just a fusion of the old bluegrass I grew up on and hard rock.”
Chet Atkins, Peter Nero, George Shearing, Mason Williams and the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, whose members include Brian Corrigan, Martin Fulterman, Michael Kamen, Clifton Nivison and Dorian Rudnytsky, are among the artists currently featured in a NET-TV series titled Evening at the Pops. The 13 hour-long specials were filmed by the Boston Pops Orchestra, under a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Peter Nero is seen in an all-Gershwin program with the Pops, under Arthur Fiedler. Mason Williams performs a number of his own worlds. The New York Rock and Roll Ensemble offers a program which includes Bach and original works. George Shearing plays Mozart and popular selections, and Chet Atkins offers a pop guitar program.
“Super Plastic Elastic Goggles” was the January 30 presentation of NBC Children’s Theater. The special was an hour-long multi-media look at color.
Among the guest artists: Judy Carne, Tom Poston, James Earl Jones. Songs heard during the show included [“Super Plastic Elastic Goggles“], “A Pretty World,” “Light Show Man” and “We All Live on a Rainbow,” written by Edward Newmark and David Larue; “Colors of the Mind” and “Looking at the World Through Goggles,” by Newmark, and “Start of a New Day,” by Dave Spinozza and Rod McBrien. All tunes are published by Bates-Many Fraus Music.
A highlight of last season’s National Educational Television programing was the NET Playhouse drama, Trail of Tears. The play, an account of the Cherokee Indians’ forced removal from their lands in Georgia and the resulting civil war that ravaged the Cherokee nation, starred Jack Palance as President Andrew Jackson. Johnny Cash, himself one-eighth Cherokee, played the role of Cherokee Chief John Ross in making his dramatic debut. The special was written, produced and directed by Lane Slate. Among the featured players: June Carter, William Redfield and Pat Hingle.
Banjo virtuoso Earl Scruggs is the focus of a 90-minute National Educational Television special currently being seen. The show, entitled “Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends,” was shot in Nashville, North Carolina, New York and California.
The opening concert in the WNYC (New York) annual American Music Festival at Carnegie Hall, February 12, included the world premiere of Jimmy Giuffre’s “The Quiet Blues” — a sequel to his famed “The Quiet Time.” The New York University Jazz Group performed the piece under the composer’s direction.
“Fugue,” a Giuffre composition, vintage 1953, was given its first New York exposure by the same group, with the writer on the podium. The work is remembered by veteran fans, as recorded by drummer Shelly Manne and an all-star unit featuring Giuffre (baritone sax), Bob Cooper (tenor sax), Bud Shank (alto sax), Joe Mondragon (bass) and Marty Paich (piano).
Also during this concert, the New York University Jazz Ensemble — to be precise, eight members thereof — gave the first New York performance of Lee Konitz’s “Cork and Bib,” arranged and conducted by Giuffre. The unit offered, in addition, a performance of Giuffre’s most widely known work, “Four Brothers.” The latter achieved fame via a Woody Herman recording in the late 1940s.
This concert marked Giuffre’s debut as a conductor.
Lalo Schifrin’s “Pulsations for Electronic Keyboard, Jazz Band and Orchestra,” commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, had its world premiere, January 21. The 43-minute work was played by the Philharmonic, under Zubin Mehta, and some of Hollywood’s most accomplished jazz musicians. The composer was at the electronic keyboard (the Electone EX-42). The site of the event: the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center in Los Angeles.
The Wolf Trap American University Academy for the Performing Arts, on campus at American University in the nation’s capital, opens its first annual session on June 28. It closes August 22.
Dr. Esther Ballou, a member of the university’s music department, is co-director of the academy’s Composers Residency Program. She also will teach during the session.
Among the composers thus far committed for guest seminars of one or two days are T. J. Anderson and Milton Babbitt.
Donald Byrd, the well known trumpeter, composer and teacher, recently was named chairman of the department of jazz studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C. “When I started there in 1968,” Byrd recalled, “I had three classes: music history, a jazz seminar and jazz band.
“The next semester, I added arranging. I’ve continued to expand; there are six [courses] now, and ultimately I plan to offer as many as 18.” Among the courses recently introduced is “Legal Protection of Literature, Music and Art,” primarily dealing with copyright. Only one other school, according to Byrd, offers a course of this kind: the University of Southern California at Berkeley.
Also in line with the expansion of the department, Byrd recently hired two people to share the load: former Down Beat editor Bill Quinn and attorney Joe Clair.
Until settling in at Howard, Byrd not only had a full playing, writing, recording and study schedule, but taught at Rutgers, Brooklyn College and at two other centers of higher learning. “All I needed,” he pointed out, “was a car at each airport.”
Still a man who always is on the go, he travels to various countries of the world to dig into their music. Of particular interest to him is hearing black music at its source. Recently Byrd flew to Haiti for further insight into that nation’s musical contribution.
Byrd continues to play and compose, to occasionally lecture outside the university, to find a sense of realization in doing many things well. “Activity and diversification are my life blood,” he said.
As for aspirations at Howard: “It’s my dream,” Byrd declared, “to have the finest ethnomusicology department in the country.”
The newly launched Institute of Black American Music offered music seminars at the second annual Black and Minorities Business and Cultural Exchange (Black Expo) in Chicago, November 11-15.
Quincy Jones was named the first chairman of the Institute at the opening of the seminars. The purpose of the Institute, according to Jones, is “to reveal to the nation our culture and our contribution to the development of music.”
The seminars were organized by Jones and Julian (Cannonball) Adderley, the latter is co-chairman of the program. They were assisted by Indiana University’s David Baker and Lena McLin of Chicago’s Kenwood High School.
Many musicians who are consultants for the Institute acted as clinicians to visiting music department directors, music teachers and students. Included in this number were Ray Brown, Howard University’s Donald Byrd, Les McCann, Roberta Flack, Herbie Hancock, the New England Conservatory’s Carl Atkins, and Ben Branch, who is the director of the Operation Breadbasket Band.
The majority of the consultants to the music seminars performed at Black Expo in the company of such headliners as Flip Wilson, Isaac Hayes and Stevie Wonder.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
Pianist-composer-singer Ray Charles was honored on his 25th anniversary year in show business with the world premiere performances of Quincy Jones’ “Black Requiem” February 22, at Prairie View (Tex.) A. & M. College, and February 23, at Houston’s Jones Hall. The latter performance was one in a Foley’s “Sounds of the 70’s” series.
Presenting the work was the Houston Symphony, under A. Clyde Roller and Jones, and featured in the performance was the Prairie View A. & M. College Chorale under Dr. Robert A. Henry. Charles himself was highlighted as narrator/singer/pianist and was surrounded by a select group of sidemen, among them trumpeter Joe Newman, drummer Grady Tate, Toots Thielemans, guitar and harmonica, Ray Brown, bass, and Billy Preston, organ.
Reviewing in The Houston Chronicle, Craig Palmer noted that Jones composed the work in Charles’ honor and the critic found it “packed with energy.
“And styles. Jones has synthesized and condensed a short music history of styles and forms. He taps the deep well springs of Black folk culture with the same knowing ear he scores contemporary passages of orchestral and choral improvisation.
“He orchestrates with a dry, individualistic sense of color for the orchestral sections and prepares fertile soil for his jazz sidemen.
“Old and new are reconciled in a striking contrast in the middle movement of the ‘Requiem.’
“The orchestra and the chorale are given passages of free improvisation that produces an ominous pillar of organized sound that looms up before the audience in a bitter, animated rage. The chorale shouts and jeers madly and gestures not only at the audience, but among its own membership. It verges on music as theater.
“And then, in an ingenious stroke of timing, Jones switches to the sticky, quiet Sunday morning mood of a little country church. It’s probably Baptist. Charles is the pastor and as he intones his sermon to the reverent discreet encouragement of the organ, the congregation — the chorale — responds with a gospel ‘Yes, Lord’ or ‘Amen’ as their music, like church programs, flutters, keeping away imaginary flies and beads of religious sweat.”
The text of the “Requiem” is adapted from the works of various Black poets, and the names of various leaders that have played pivotal roles in the Black civil rights movement — W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King — are invoked.
Carl Cunningham (The Houston Post) concluded his review with:
“Jones’ ‘Requiem’ was noteworthy as the most genuine and serious endeavor to combine popular and symphonic idioms yet heard on this Foley’s series. One of its more individual musical effects included the lonely sound of a microphoned harmonica against a soft background of strings. By and large, it achieved a successful consistency of musical speech among its diverse musical forces.”
A work composed by Tupper Saussy especially for the Nashville Symphony Orchestra’s 25th anniversary season was introduced by that aggregation under Thor Johnson. Titled “Natchez Trace,” this piece for rock group, chorus and symphony orchestra was performed February 13, at the War Memorial Auditorium in the Tennessee city.
“’Natchez Trace’ is a cycle of five related songs describing a boy’s search for himself,” the composer explained. “It’s really about life. ‘Natchez Trace’ is a symbol from which the boy is trying to escape: his parents are separated
and he’s spent his younger days commuting from Natchez Trace to Nashville to see them.”
The other key participants in this premiere were the Fisk Jubilee Singers, representing “the population,” and the Ragnation group, including Buzz Cason, Henry Strezlecki, Paul Tabet, Lannie Fiel and Saussy.
“Modules I and II,” by Earle Brown, had its American premiere March 3 in a concert of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under Sergiu Comissiona at the Lyric Theater.
Writing in the Baltimore Evening Sun, critic Sam di Bonaventura described the music and the event:
“Composed in 1966, the composition is scored for a large orchestra under the direction of two conductors. All music is actually written down, but the conductors may superimpose the sound-groups and modify their duration and loudness at will during performance.
“Messrs. Brown and Comissiona, each commanding a designated portion of the orchestra, indicated by the fingers on their left hands which part of the module was to be played. The two musicians operated seemingly independent of the other, yet each was mindful of the total effect being achieved.
“The work had spatial and sonorous interest, as the superimposed blocks of sound produced alternating consonant and dissonant combinations.”
“Little Big Horn,” a rock oratorio by Aram Schefrin and Michael Zager, was premiered March 14 at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Ten Wheel Drive performed the work with members of the American Symphony Orchestra under Stephen Simon and a small chorus. Genya Ravan, of Ten Wheel Drive, sang all of the solo portions.
Francis Thome’s “Song of the Carolina Low Country,” commissioned by John Henry Dick in 1968 to Commemorate the 300th anniversary of South Carolina, was given its world premiere, February 13. Lucien De Groote conducted the Charleston Symphony Orchestra. The Choraliers were under the direction of James Edwards. The site of the performance: Municipal Auditorium, Charleston.
A work in two movements, the first built on a traditional Negro spiritual, the second featuring words by Dr. Charles A. M. Hall, the eminent theologian, it was reviewed by Claire McPhail, The News and Courier (Charleston). “…this reviewer found much merit in the work. Mr. Thorne had some fine musical ideas,” the critic declared.
The Association of Hungarian Musicians, celebrating the 90th anniversary of the birth of Béla Bartók, invited Halsey Stevens, author of the authoritative work on the composer, The Life and Music of Béla Bartok, to attend the commemoration. It took place March 24-25 in Budapest. Stevens chaired one of the conference sessions and lectured on “The Sources of Bartók’s Rhapsody for Violoncello and Piano.” During his European trip, Stevens also spoke to the Danish Contemporary Music Association on “American Music Today,” and to the Danish Musicological Society and the music faculty of Copenhagen University on “Bartok and Liszt.”
The composer, too, lectured in London the first week in April.
What Craig McGregor describes as “The New Wave,” in The New York Times (March 7), is that group of black performers, poets, preachers and songwriters “who are defining the black experience in songs as powerfully as black writers have defined it in literature. They are the pop parallels to the avant-garde jazzmen — Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Sunny Murray, the late Albert Ayler — who have performed the same task in non-verbal music. Not many have broken through to a white audience yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”
But, McGregor points out, one of this group has broken through. He is Swamp Dogg (Jerry Williams), who changed his recording name after he had made 16 records with no particular success. There had been regional hits including the 1964 “I’m The Lover Man” on Loma and the 1965 Calla recording of “Baby, You’re My Everything.”
As he told John Morthland of Rolling Stone late last year, “I played the chitlin circuit—the lower chitlin circuit. Cleveland, Detroit, Norfolk, Long Island. Never had any real success, though; $150 a night was the best I ever did. But I always managed to get a record on the charts in some dinky little city, and even though it was never a big hit, I was always able to put out records at a steady pace, so I kept in work.”
About his new recording name, Williams has said: ‘‘Swamp Dogg: he’s a whole lotta people and things. Swamp Dogg can explore all possibilities of doing any kind of song as raunchy as he wants. Jerry Williams can’t do that; he’d have to do it straight, like Eddie Floyd. Swamp Dogg can sing about Venetian blinds if he wants; Jerry Williams can’t.
“That’s why Swamp Dogg is better than Jerry Williams. Jerry Williams got tired of his mohair suits. Swamp Dogg can go out in bermudas, no shirt and a cap, and he’s not trying to appeal to the broads, or be pretty or cute. Swamp Dogg exploits part of Jerry Williams; he’s Jerry Williams’ own newspaper, with daily circulation.”
Now well into a recording career with a new name, Williams has also been collaborating with Gary (U.S.) Bonds among others, and hitting the press around the country.
As he told McGregor: “I’m writing for people up in Harlem and Watts. An’ all the time I’m hittin’ him, I’m gettin’ to him slowly with the social stuff, y’dig? It’s gonna take time. Like man, it’ll take me about as long to get to black people as it took B. B. King to get to white people.”
His new album, McGregor writes, “shows Swamp Dogg in zany dude gear astride a white rat, and the songs have some of the wry, irresistible humor of the man himself. As he says on the liner notes to his first album, ‘Swamp Dogg would have all the earmarks of a winner if he would change his name to something catchy and clever, for instance Jerry Williams.’ ”
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
The names Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson resounded several times at the Hollywood Palladium, March 22, during the sixth annual awards presentation of the Academy of Country and Western Music.
Haggard was honored three times — as entertainer of the year, top male vocalist and for heading the best touring band, Merle Haggard’s Strangers. Also a big winner last year with five awards, he has received a total of 13 awards from the Academy.
The Kristofferson song, “For the Good Times,” earned three awards — a pair for singer Ray Price (best single and best album of the year) and one for Kristofferson (song of the year). Two other Kristofferson songs were nominated for song of the year honors: “Sunday Mornin’ Cornin’ Down” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”
Among the other award winners were Johnny Cash (TV personality), Roy Clark (top country comedy), Lynn Anderson (top female vocalist), Tex Ritter (pioneer of the year), Billy Graham and Doyle Holly (best bass guitarists [tie], All-Star Country Band), Floyd Cramer (best pianist, All-Star Country Band) and Billy Armstrong (best fiddle player, All-Star Country Band).
Dick Clark served as master of ceremonies for the presentation.
B B. King’s Tokyo press conference was covered in a recent issue of Cash Box, which quoted the blues great speaking to assembled newsmen:
“To come to Japan has been my long-cherished desire. I had several opportunities in the past, but to my disappointment each of them fell through. So I’m very happy to be here at last, and I plan to give my best. I have been doing blues for 25 years, but only in the last two or three years has the world come to listen to my music. One of the reasons, I guess, is that music has undergone a great change since the appearance of The Beatles, and people have come to find pleasure in the poetic side of music. We owe a great deal to British groups like them for playing an important publicity role. Some people say that I don’t speak out against racial discrimination, but I believe there are many ways of resistance. For my part, I make my quiet appeal through music, and I’m willing to do this as many times as necessary. I believe music is a wonderful instrument to talk directly to the heart, beyond the language barriers. I’m an American citizen and I’m proud of America. I aim to use all my efforts toward the development of the blues.”
Halim El-Dabh’s Opera Flies, commissioned by the Hawthorne School, Washington. D.C., was offered for the first t:me the evening of May 5, then repeated the next evening at the school, a few blocks from the Capitol.
Performed by students attending Hawthorne: a cast of about 50, featuring seven main singers, three choruses and an orchestra of 10 — chiefly winds and percussion — this 90-minute theater piece is based on the killing of the four students at Kent State University a year ago.
“The opera action is seen as viewed through a prism,” The Washington Post‘s Joan Reinthaler explained. “Things do not happen chronologically. They are, instead, layers of reflection upon the pivotal event, the slaying of the students.”
Critic Robert Evett commented in The Evening Star (Washington, D.C.):
“I doubt the piece would be the thundering success at an American Legion Convention that it was … at the Hawthorne School. It is the kind of show that assumes the composer, the performers, the audience and the angels are all on the same side. Within these conditions, it is most effective….”
The following weekend (May 8 and 9), the opera was presented by the same forces in evening and afternoon performances at Kent State University (Ohio), where El-Dabh is a professor of music and teaches courses on African music and cultures. Subsequent performances were planned: June 2 and 3, Brooklyn Academy of Music; and June 4 and 5, Anderson Theater, New York City. All proceeds go to the Kent State Medical Fund.
The Moon, a musical fantasy in one act with music and libretto by Carl Orff, was presented by the Houston Grand Opera at Jesse H. Jones Hall in the Texas metropolis, January 12, 15 and 17.
Written in 1938 and first performed a year later, the work is based on a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. “According to the tale,” Alfred R. Neumann said in the program notes, “the moon was originally a lantern in a small town, stolen by four fellows who conned their town into paying them a retainer for maintaining the light of the moon. As each of them died, he took a fourth of the moon to his grave, and the moon was finally reassembled in the land of the dead. This in turn caused the dead to waken and to revel in a type of Walpurgisnacht, until St. Peter removed the moon from the land of the dead and hung it in Heaven. There a small child, humanity’s innocence, discovered the moon one fine night, and so it came to be a heavenly body!”
Charles Rosekrans conducted the Houston Symphony which, for this occasion, added instruments so as to play the Orff score: harmonium, pitched glasses, small reed organ, bells, chimes, castanets, ratchet, gong, harp, celesta, assorted drums and cymbals, five timpani and a zither.
Avant Garde 4, a concert given at the First Unitarian Church, Nashville, Tenn., on April 3, included the first showing of two films: Laserset and Citizen Kane 11. The former has music and oscilloscope patterns by Gilbert Trythall. The latter features electronic music created by the composer.
Still another 16mm film, this one done by Don Evans of Vanderbilt University and titled Pigmee Daddy, was introduced during a multi-media concert, April 22, in Hill Auditorium on campus at Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville. Trythall also provided the music for this picture.
On April 29, Trythall’s “Nova Sync (Op. 22)” for band and electronic tape was programed for the first time. The Peabody Wind Ensemble, under Henry J. Romersa and L. Howard Nicar Jr., included the piece in its concert during the Southern Division Convention of the Music Educators National Conference in Daytona Beach, Fla.
The Eastman Theater, Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, was the site, May 9, 1970, of the Chuck Mangione “Friends and Love” concert.
Several Mangione works, written alone and in collaboration with others, were introduced by the Rochester Philharmonic (plus additional personnel) under the composer’s direction. The soloists, most of them jazz-oriented, included Marvin Stamm (trumpet), Gerry Niewood (soprano and alto saxophone and flute), Stanley Watson (guitar), Don Potter (guitar and voice), Bat McGrath (guitar and voice), Gap Mangione (electric piano) and Chuck Mangione (flugelhorn).
The premieres were “Hill Where the Lord Hides” (Gerry Niewood, soloist), “And in the Beginning” (featuring Gap Magione), “Songs From the Valley of the Nightingale” (by Stanley Watson) and “Friends and Love Theme.” The latter is a Mangione-McGrath-Potter-Watson collaboration.
Critic Leonard Feather in Down Beat commented: “The abiding impressions left by this inspired series of works were that sincere emotions and constructive directions were involved.
“Mangione…drew on a number of moods, forms and idioms to provide a complete concert experience.”
Robert Moran‘s “Hallelujah: A Joyous Phenomenon With Fanfares,” a three-hour mixed-media spectacle, was introduced, April 23, with the city of Bethlehem, Pa., and Lehigh University the stage for this event.
Combining to convert the city and campus into a giant, sense-provoking show on that evening were 40 church choirs and carillons, 20 bands and rock groups, gospel singers, brass ensembles, ballet dancers, multiple radios, a “zappolin” player and Moog synthesizer, among other things.
Searchlights, fireworks—on a small scale—weather balloons and other forms of light displays, including the basic oxygen furnaces of Bethlehem Steel, provided the visual stimuli. Moran masterminded the entire phenomenon, combining the major components of the community as represented by the five points of the city seal — religion, industry, education, music and recreation. On commission from the Lehigh University Globus Series, whose benefactor is New York investment banker and arts patron Morton Globus, Moran wrote the music which was the central theme of the festival. It is based on an old Moravian hymn by Christian Gregor and dedicated to the late, much admired composer Charles Ives.
Moran was assisted in coordinating the spectacle by Professor Richard Redd, chairman of Lehigh’s fine arts department; Professor Jonathan Elkus, of the department of music; Harry K. Trend, general secretary of the Chamber of Commerce; Joseph K. Mangan, director of parks and public property; Dr. Edwin H. Frey, executive director of the Council of Churches; and the Rt. Rev. Frederick J. Warnecke, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem.
The event was sponsored by Lehigh University’s Globus Series in Creative Arts and produced in cooperation with the Bethlehem Area Chamber of Commerce, the city’s Bureau of Parks and Public Property, the Bethlehem Council of Churches and the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem.
The purpose of this “Urban Phenomenon,” according to the composer, was to dissolve differences and prejudices between ethnic groups. It is something of an adventure, he feels:
“You don’t know exactly what is going to happen. It’s like a circuitry type thing, you plug in and hope the plug¬ins have been correct.”
The response to this happening, in which everyone was a participant in one way or another, was excellent. You became part of the event by merely tuning your radio to WGPA-FM, which broadcast a “mix” of renditions of Moran’s “Hallelujah” music by marching bands, rock groups, church choirs, etc.
Gregg Fales, reporting for the Allentown Morning Call, summed up the feeling created by this enormous show:
“…there was excitement in the airpeople smiled, laughed, talked in groups, or just enjoyed a walk down busy sidewalks. It was an urban collage of people participating in their own enjoyment.”
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
On July 1, the Asolo State Theater (Sarasota, Fla.) Summer Company presented the first performance of The Puppet Prince, a fantasy for children with an original score by David Ward-Steinman.
The score, according to Ward-Steinman, quoted in an interview by Edith Anson in The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, was created right at home with the help of the composer’s family. Contributing: his wife, Susan, and two children, Jenna, 9, and Matthew, 6.
“If you had seen it, you wouldn’t have believed it,” the composer said. “The room was filled with chimes, bells, flute, recorder, piano interior, prepared piano, zither, gong, tambourine, elephant bells, tom-toms, wind chimes, Indian bells, microphones and cables — and the Putney Electronic Synthesizer right in the middle of the mess!”
The family “composed” the score, working with the script of the play.
“On the whole,” noted Ward-Steinman, “The Puppet Prince was a freewheeling improvisation which was finally accepted by my two children as being ‘right.”
The bulk of the music, with the synthesizer as the basis for the score, came from various “home” instruments which the Ward-Steinman children found or had made for themselves for games. Nothing was planned, so if something had a nice sound, they used it.
The Puppet Prince was presented in matinee performances through August 5.
“Putney One,” a work in progress for electronic music synthesizer, piano interior and tape by David Ward-Steinman, was introduced by the composer, May 30, at the Asolo Theater in Sarasota, Fla. It was included in “An Informal Recital With Commentary,” featuring music composed, performed and discussed by Ward-Steinman.
At Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.,”Programmatic Sensorium” was presented for the first time on May 7. It featured electronic music by Gilbert Trythall for a translucent geodesic dome and slide and film projections created by Don Evans of the Vanderbilt faculty. The audience reclined inside the dome.
John Watts‘ “WARP” for brass quintet, tape and ARP Synthesizer was presented for the first time — in this case without the synthesizer — on May 12 at the New School for Social Research in New York. The concert, presented by The Composers Theater of which Watts is director, was part of the organization’s annual May Festival. The Iowa Brass Quintet was featured.
Gary Burton, the vibraharpist and composer widely known for his jazz work, joins the faculty at the Berklee College of Music, Boston, with the advent of the fall semester.
An alumnus of the college, Burton will teach Advanced Improvisation, Composition and Scoring in the Jazz, Rock and Contemporary idioms. He also will give a course in mallet instruments and conduct workshops in small group performances.
Michael Kamen, composer and pianist with the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, and well-known operatic soprano Rosalyn Tureck combined in a lecture-demonstration-debate titled “Bach and Rock,” July 15.
It took place at the Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts, New York City. The event was the seventh in this season’s International Bach Society series.
Michael Babatunde Olatunji taught a special course, “Musical Practices in Africa,” at the Summer School of the Manhattan School of Music in New York City. The course, given by the famed African percussionist, opened on July 1 and concluded on July 30.
William Schuman addressed the 1971 graduating class of the Peabody Conservatory of Music (Baltimore, Md.) on the afternoon of May 30 in Peabody Concert Hall. During the ceremonial portion of the program, the distinguished composer and educator received the honorary degree of Doctor of Music.
On August 8, Schuman was honored again. He received the 12th Edward MacDowell Medal for “exceptional contributions to the arts.” Aaron Copland, the principal speaker at the presentation, said: “Schuman’s work celebrates America. A positive feeling comes from Schuman’s music. It is a celebration of life.”
The ceremonies were held on the lawn near Colony Hall, the MacDowell Colony, in Peterborough, N.H. The colony is a retreat for professionals in the arts.
The Fifth Inter-American Music Festival opened, May 18, with a concert at the Department of Commerce Auditorium in Washington, D.C., featuring the world premiere of Sergio Cervetti‘s “Plexus.”
Commissioned by the Organization of American States, co-sponsor of the festival, the work was performed by the Festival Orchestra under the baton of Antonio Tauriello.
“…the evening’s greatest find,” The Washington Post‘s Alan M. Kriegsman declared.
“The Windhover,” a concerto for bassoon and orchestra by Robert Evett, commissioned by Robert Bialek of Washington’s Discount Record Shop, had its world premiere, May 20, at Lisner Auditorium.
National Symphony bassoonist Kenneth Pasmanick, for whom the work was written, played the central role, with support from the Festival Orchestra under the direction of Jose Serebrier. The program during which the Evett concerto was played was one in a series presented under the Fifth Inter-American Music Festival banner.
“This is a soft-spoken, delicate score in which the composer tries to capture in sound the subtle poetry of a Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet about a soaring bird. The dancing, irregular rhythms, the sweet modal progressions, the lovely lyric lines of the solo bassoon, the sensitive orchestration all combine to make this one of Evett’s most attractive works,” Irving Lowens said in The Evening Star (Washington, DC.).
During the First Ohio Composers’ Symposium, sponsored by the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and presented at the Ohio Theater, May 19-21, in Columbus, Memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy by Arpad Hegedus was heard for the first time.
A work in three movements — “Lament,” “Candles of Europe” and “Eternal Light” — Memory is described as “a live chronicle of the days following the assassination of the President.” It was programed during one of the open rehearsals or reading sessions. Then at the final concert (May 21), featuring works selected by a panel of judges, its final movement was played by the orchestra under music director Evan Whallon.
The composer teaches at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
The Clowns (Levitt-Pickman) is Federico Fellini‘s nostalgic documentary on the funnymen of the circus. Originally presented as a 90-minute TV special in Europe, where it was filmed, the feature has a score by Nino Rota which “underlines the gamut of emotions considered” (Stephan Klain, Motion Picture Daily). The score is published in this country by Edward B. Marks Music Corporation.
Cold Turkey (United Artists) is a comedy that concerns a town in Iowa trying to win a $25,000,000 prize — which depends upon everyone giving up smoking. Dick Van Dyke stars and supporting players include Tom Poston and Bob Newhart. Randy Newman wrote the score.
You Can’t Win ‘Em All (Columbia), scored by Bert Kaempfert, stars Tony Curtis and Charles Bronson in a tale of gun runners in Turkey in the closing days of the Ottoman Empire. They are charged with transporting a strange cargo of gold- plated lead bars, jewels, a governess and her charges, and a special copy of the Koran. The score is published by Screen Gems-Columbia Music, Inc.
Who is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (National General) tells the story of a pop writer (Dustin Hoffman) and his gradual descent into paranoia. Jack Warden, Gabriel Dell, Barbara Harris and David Burns are featured. Shel Silverstein wrote the original score.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
Jazz came to Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for the first time late in September. A series of three evening and two afternoon presentations — nine hours of music in all — took place in the Center’s 2,700-seat Concert Hall. The September 25-27 jazz event, produced by Willis Conover [who also served on the White House Record Library Commission], was titled “The 1971 House of Sounds Festival.”
The opening program was highlighted by the performance of Maryland’s Towson State College Band under the direction of Hank Levy. Described by Down Beat editor Dan Morgenstern as “an impressively well-drilled organization with a great deal of brassy power,” it exclusively plays scores by Levy, who also writes for the Stan Kenton and Don Ellis bands. Also on hand: the Count Basie band, featuring trombonist Al Grey, among others, and the New York/D.C. Band which, at one point, supported brassman Clark Terry. Terry, pianist Don Friedman, bassist Milt Hinton and drummer Grady Tate comprised the house unit that provided musical transitions between acts.
Subsequent shows included the Julian (Cannonball) Adderley Quintet; Frank Wess; a jam session with such notables as David Amram, Zoot Sims, Clark Terry, Bill Watrous, Carmen Leggio; the Ornette Coleman group, with Charlie Haden on bass; the Dave Brubeck-Gerry Mulligan unit; a guitar workshop, with Charlie Byrd and his quartet, Washington favorite Bill Harris, George Barnes, Bucky Pizzarelli; and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis orchestra.
The critics singled out multi-instrumentalist Ira Sullivan, a “notably fresh wind,” The New York Times‘ John S. Wilson said. During his set, this musician engagingly moved from flute to tenor sax to flügelhorn to soprano saxophone, backed by a full rhythm section. He and guitarist Joe D’Orio also combined talents in several duets.
“His playing,” Morgenstern reported, “is a model of both musicianship and musicality, and remains in the jazz tradition even as it reaches out for new frontiers.”
Also noted: the program featuring The Alec Wilder Winds. The ensemble performed two new works by Wilder: “First and Second Suites for Baritone Saxophone and Woodwind Sextet” and “Suite for Baritone Saxophone, French Horn and Woodwind Quintet“; a new piece by John Carisi, “Counterpoise“; and “Windfall” by Manny Albam.
The Wilder ensemble, headed by French horn player Jimmy Buffington, was comprised of two French horns, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, baritone saxophone, bass and drums. Gerry Mulligan was the central artist.
One of the prime audience pleasers of the festival was Muddy Waters and his Blues Band. On the final program, he rewarded those who came that night “with an energetic session that had some of the younger listeners jumping and shouting in their seats,” The New York Times said.
On September 28, in special ceremonies at Gardner-Webb College, Boiling Springs, N.C., Johnny Cash was awarded an honorary doctorate of humanities.
The ceremonies were held after a noon luncheon honoring Cash. The luncheon followed a morning concert that drew more than 10,000.
Lloyd C. Boist, chairman of the college’s board of trustees, noted:
“Today we have met to honor one of the princes of American country music for his humanitarian activities on behalf of the humble and the poor, those who are victims of drugs and alcohol, and the thousands locked behind prison walls.”
Accepting the doctorate, Cash said:
“Anything legislative bodies of the world may do, with all their committees and all their speeches, is not worth two Doctorate for Cash cents unless you care for people.”
He gave a brief account of his first prison concerts of over a decade ago in California. He emphasized the importance of the help given him by the members of his troupe — The Tennessee Three, Carl Perkins, The Carter Family and The Statler Brothers — who, like Cash, performed without pay.
“If these people,” Cash said, ” hadn’t been willing to do what they have done, we couldn’t have done all those things I got all the credit for.”
Dr. E. Eugene Poston, president of Gardner-Webb, explained that the degree was suggested by North Carolina country singer Arthur Smith, a member of the college’s board of trustees.
The Hunting of the Snark, a children’s opera based on a Lewis Carroll poem, was performed 12 times at the Whitney Museum of American Art in September. Then, it was mounted eight more times in November at the Mannes College of Music Auditorium, also in New York’s borough of Manhattan.
Presented by Systems Theater, Inc. — a showcase for playwrights and experimental theater experiences — the opera has a libretto, adapted from the Carroll poem, by Bill Tchakirides. The music was composed by Edwin Roberts.
Written in 1874, the poem tells of a voyage of 10 unusual characters to an uncharted place in an uncharted sea in search of the Snark, a marvelous and mysterious monster. The opera follows the same story line. It was performed by a cast of 10, under the direction of Tchakirides and Roberts.
The Yale Repertory Theater, New Haven, Conn., presented The Big House on October 21. The farce, revolving around a prison takeover, was directed by Robert Brustein and starred Dick Shawn as the con leader, Wolfgang Amadeus Gutbucket. Lonnie Carter wrote the book and Maury Yeston composed the music.
Reviewing for The New Haven Journal-Courier, Florence Johnson wrote:
“Throughout the performance there is an accompanying patter of music from the past by Maury Yeston who is working on his doctorate at the Music School.”
Citing the work of Elizabeth Parrish, “who out-dowagers Margaret Dumont,” Edward Woodyard (The New Haven Register) added: “She performs a hilarious, showstopping song-and-dance routine with Shawn half way through the first act. The number is so outstanding that the rest of the act is anticlimactic.”
BMI president Edward M. Cramer has been nominated to serve as a member of the board of trustees of the Ford’s Theater Society, Washington, D.C. The appointment was made by Secretary of the Interior Rogers C. B. Morton in concurrence with Ralph G. Newman, chairman of the board of trustees.
Serving as America’s national historic theater for the performing arts, Ford’s Theater is operated by the United States Department of the Interior’s National Park Service. The Society, long responsible for keeping the theater on sound financial footing, resumed artistic control this year. In an effort to keep Ford’s constantly lit, the Society has scheduled a series of short-run attractions in addition to six major productions during the current season.
Larry Austin was guest composer during “Electronic Music Plus,” four concerts of electronic music, plus performers and/or media. They were held, with the assistance of a grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, November 12, 13 and 14 in Hill Auditorium, Peabody College, Nashville, Tenn.
Evolution (National Film Board of Canada), a 12-minute animated film produced by Mike Mills, was named the best film for children at the annual animated film festival held in Annecy, France. There is no dialogue, and the score was written by Doug Randle. Originally, electronic music was planned but eventually the score was written for honky-tonk piano and banjo, in keeping with the mood of the film.
Bless the Beasts and Children (Columbia), directed by Stanley Kramer, is the story of a group of alienated youngsters and their attempts to free a herd of buffalo from slaughter. Perry Botkin and Barry DeVorzon wrote the original score [title track sung by The Carpenters], along with the title tune for the picture.
The Last Movie (Universal) is a film about a film, exploring the effects of a movie company on the near primitive natives in the Peru shooting location. Dennis Hopper stars and handled the direction. Heard in the score are songs by Kris Kristofferson and Leonard Cohen.
Soul to Soul (Cinerama) is a documentary of the ” birthday” concert filmed at Ghana‘s 14th Independence Day celebration, held in the capital city of Accra, March 6. Among those featured in the concert: Wilson Pickett, Ike and Tina Turner and Eddie Harris as well as The Staples Singers. Songs featured in the score include those written by Donny Hathaway and Leroy Hutson, Ike Cargill, Don Robey, Lester Christian, Chris Kenner and Fats Domino.
“His music is country, but funkier, free of the polish and sophistication of much of today’s Nashville sound … His fiddle, backed by guitars and accordion, can sound like bagpipes or churn out melodies with the resonant simplicity of a carousel. His most famous song is ‘Louisiana Man,’ with its pumping rhythm, exuberant sound and the simple honesty of its poetic lyric.”
The Newsweek subject — Doug Kershaw who, following his recent appearance at Los Angeles’ Troubadour, the publication called “the fastest fiddle in the West.” A Cajun from the swampland of Louisiana, a direct descendant of French settlers, the colorful, vividly attired Kershaw—he wears velvet suits and fancy shirts—came to music naturally in the bayou country.
“It was our way of life,” he told Newsweek reporter Marvin Kupfer. “It kept us happy.” Cajuns, in Kershaw’s words, relax by “playing music, dancing well, drinking a lot. I learned to do them all.”
Out of a fiddling family, Kershaw initially turned to professional performance to help bring money to his family, after the suicide of his father. He first shined shoes and fiddled, always drawing a crowd. Then he went to work in clubs, accompanied by his mother. His brothers took turns on guitar, accordion and drums.
“It was then that he started writing songs,” Mike Jahn reported in Stereo Review. “He steadfastly maintains that he has written more than twenty thousand. He used to write a lot more than he does now — say 2,500 a year — but is down to around 900. When it was pointed out to him that 900 songs a year is about three a day, he said, ‘The day I wrote “Louisiana Man” it was the seventh song I had written that day.”
Because he needed a lot of material to play clubs, Kershaw got in the habit as a child of turning out a lot of songs. He stayed with the family group until, at 15, he and his brothers split away and formed a group called the Continental Playboys. By 1957, Kershaw and his younger brother, as a team, had worked their way up to the Grand Ole Opry.
“Louisiana Man” happened in 1960 and “the money poured in. And out,” Kershaw said in the Newsweek story.
“We were a couple of crazy Cajuns, who thought we had made it. I bought some cars, some houses, some women.”
By 1965 he had run through all of them and was forgotten.
Rediscovered on a 1969 Johnny Cash TV show, he’s been holding his audiences ever since with his own very specific brand of songs and entertainment, which thoroughly reflect his background and heritage.
“The songs are family,” he declares. “About the only way to survive the swamps was to cling to whoever was around and that was family. We were poor but we felt safe. I wrote a lot of my songs when I wanted to feel safe.”
The fiddler is keeping his nose to the grindstone. He has a book soon to be published, centered on Cajun philosophy. He performs regularly and records. If things go badly, which doesn’t seem likely at this juncture, Kershaw can always go back to mathematics; he earned a master’s degree in the subject at McNeese State College in Lake Charles while working nights.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
Hubert Saal, writing in a recent issue of Newsweek, celebrated the return of Ellis Larkins to the jazz scene, updating the story of the 49-year-old pianist.
Some 20 years ago, Larkins all but retired from performing after making his mark on the jazz scene.
“I got disgusted,” he told Saal. “Something happened to the clubs in the ’50s. They became joints. The audience listened, but they were strung out. I liked some of what was being played, Dizzy, Thelonious [Monk], Miles [Davis], Charlie Mingus. But a lot of the guys, I think, didn’t know where they were going. I guess maybe the way I played was too tame for the time. Everybody said I was a damn fool. Looking back on it you could say I was a little too particular.”
Baltimore-born, Larkins’ father played violin in a local orchestra and by the time he was seven, young Ellis was playing Mozart in public. He studied at Peabody Conservatory and for three years at Juilliard. To earn money, he played rehearsals and some jazz and, in the early ’40s, John Hammond offered the Billy Moore Trio a job at New York’s Cafe Society Uptown providing Larkins played.
For the next ten years, Larkins was very much on the jazz scene, playing clubs and backing singers.
Today, Larkins says, “Musically, I’m less inhibited. My improvisations are freer. Sometimes they work and sometimes not, but as Al Hall says, that’s what jazz is, making your mistakes mean something.”
Larkins doesn’t believe in straying too far from the melody. “I think of the lyric when I play. I’m painting a picture. What that lyric says, that’s what I’m trying to say. A good song has a heart and that’s what I’m after.”
Billboard recently featured an article on Ray Price, dubbing him Country Music’s Ambassador and noted a highlight in his career, a singing appearance with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Following the performance, Price called the DSO “one of the best country bands he had ever sung for.”
The background of his recording of “Danny Boy,” some time back, afforded Price the opportunity to discuss some of his basic feelings about country music.
He recorded the tune “because the jocks wanted it, saying that it would do something for country music.” After he’d cut the record “some of them struck out at me.”
Price feels that those who did the damning have never helped country music. “They are in the minority, fortunately, and they simply don’t know that nothing can exist without expansion. They overlooked the fact that the Country Music Association, at its annual functions, was using a 30-piece orchestra. They felt that country music had to stay in one bag, couldn’t dare expand, couldn’t be meaningful to all audiences. They wanted to keep it in one little groove. These minority jocks are snobs in reverse. They want to hold country music ‘in its place.’ ”
Price continued: “Hank Williams became best known for his songs when they went on to greater audiences, borrowed by the pop singers and others. He proved that country songs were not confined.”
Country music, said Price, “. . . ought to be played and sung by everyone. Why deny a symphonic audience when it wants to hear country music?”
Billboard noted that Price’s one bitterness is that people tend to do too much categorizing in music. “He is sick of country music being demeaned by anyone, particularly those in that field. He feels his audiences should be universal. He should appeal to the old and young, to all geographical areas and to all backgrounds.
“Country music,” Price concluded, “has to expand, or wither and die.”
The site of great excitement: Harlem’s Apollo Theater. The reason: Lady Soul, Aretha Franklin. “Onto the paladium’s ancient stage aflutter with beaming spotlights trotted the evening’s m.c. who said, ‘Once in a great while comes a moment really super in music. This is such a moment.’ ”
Michael Pousner sets the feeling, then probes the reasons for Miss Franklin’s depth of popularity, in and out of the black community, in a recent piece published by The New York Sunday News.
With the arrival of Miss Franklin onstage, “Pandemonium broke out. A contingent of mod-dressed brothers in the front rows tried to storm the stage. In the balcony, couples quiescent only a moment before were wildly thrashing through the yoke, a new dance.
“ . . . But while everyone else went stark raving mad, Aretha remained the consummate professional, aloof above the racket, isolated in the dignity of her giant physical bearing.”
“I look upon every performance as a big challenge and each song I sing as a smaller challenge,” she told Pousner. “I’m just not satisfied to give the audience the same rendition someone else did before or even the same way I sang it the night before.”
Her ability to link with an audience and to define feelings in decisive terms was apparent from the outset — when she began singing in the choir of the New Bethel Baptist Church (Detroit), her father [Rev. C.L. Franklin]’s pastorate, 16 years ago. Dinah Washington, the late, top singer of blues-infused music, was one of the first to take note of young Aretha’s talent and introduced her around as “a kid that is going to be somebody.”
Since 1967, and her affiliation with Atlantic Records, she has more than lived up to her potential, after a few false starts.
Ray Charles declares she has the kind of talent that comes along once every 25 years or so. Poetess Nikki Giovanni reports that she puts her colleagues “on notice,” and that her appeal to women is particularly potent.
And Aretha keeps testing and expanding her talent. She’s already into acting, having made a guest appearance on TV’s Room 222. Now she dances in her act and is getting into mimicry.
But it’s that singing and songwriting that moves us closest to her ample soul. According to Newsday pop critic Robert Christgau, she is moving in a new direction:
“She is singing for a mass of upwardly mobile black people who are looking for their own stance instead of emulating the white man, and who are causing black music to undergo the same sort of growing pains that white rock did in the early ’60s.”
That may well be. But considering the response to Aretha Franklin, it seems more likely she’s singing for all of us.
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
THE BMI VISION
In truth, Frances Preston [who wrote the liner notes to Sonny James‘ 1971 album, #1] has been central to BMI and its vision of the best of everything for the Country creator and publisher. A product of Nashville and one who loves and respects Country music, she has worked toward this goal in a dedicated manner. Supporting her feeling that Country is “a giant, persuasive force that has literally moved the minds and hearts of every human being in the world,” the lady who once helped answer Hank Williams’ fan mail for radio station WSM has given much of herself to allotting the Country composer “his rightful place in our cultural history.”
In a speech delivered at the Nashville Songwriters Association dinner in 1971, she revealed the extent of her commitment and intensity of feeling: “I am really proud of you because I sincerely believe that the Country music composer is the most original, the most inventive, the most creative, the most sensitive and certainly the most honest in the world. … You have set up examples of artistic integrity and codes of honor that will command young writers to emulate you for all time to come.
“Your grass roots heritage is strong and precious to you. It has been nurtured and preserved not only by your musical creations but by the open way your hearts have ruled your heads in an otherwise carnivorous world of business.”
EXTRAORDINARY CAPACITIES
Because of her extraordinary capacities, warm, honest, embracing personality, and the trust they engender, she has earned the respect of the entire community, for that matter, all of the music industry.
Record producer Robert (Bob) Ferguson said: “A very basic reason for the extraordinary respect that Frances Preston commands, in addition to her abilities and personality, is her having started in the business as a young girl. As Music City has grown up, so has Frances.”
Further insight into one of the few women corporate executives in Tennessee — she’s a BMI vice president and operations head of the Nashville office — is provided by songwriter Harlan Howard: “When I came to Nashville from California in 1960, and was struggling to get ahead, there were times when Frances had more confidence in my writing than I had,” he recalls. “She’s totally loyal to people in whom she believes. Frances has undying faith, and no one knows how many people she has encouraged.”
Most recent recognition of her capacities: election to the presidency of the Country Music Association.
At its third annual banquet, held October 15 at Nashville’s Airport Hilton, the Nashville Songwriters Association named five writers to its Hall of Fame.
Among the inductees: Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, Lefty Frizzell, the late Jack Rhodes and Don Robertson. Introduced by NSA president Clarence Selman, master of ceremonies Biff Collie, a United Artists executive, noted, prior to naming the inductees, the basis for their election:
“Each of the five electees to be honored here were elected unanimously, and it was agreed beforehand that they should be people who were engaged in the business of writing songs prior to 1955.”
For nine days in July, New York truly became a summer festival. “. . . the whole city . . . picked up the beat, as the Newport Jazz Festival . . . invaded the streets, the parks, the river, the halls of Carnegie and the Philharmonic,” a New York Times editorial declared. “The sound was everywhere, and nobody who heard it could keep feet from tapping and spirits from soaring like a slide trombone.”
Transplanted from the famed Rhode Island resort city, the festival has found a home in New York. First time out, an estimated 100,000 fans were beguiled by some 600 musicians, representative of jazz’s various styles. For several days it seemed as if New York was built around jazz. All went exceedingly well. Good feelings dominated. “This festival will be in New York forever,” producer George Wein said, shortly after Newport in New York opened. “I feel as though I’ve been reborn. New York is the jazz capital of the world.”
BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music
Jack Clement, Don Gibson, Harlan Howard, Roger Miller and Willie Nelson were named to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame at a special ceremony in Music City in October.
Clarence Selman, president of the Nashville Songwriters Association, announced the writers honored at a party attended by 450 people.
Those who presented the plaques to the new Hall of Famers, or if it was not possible for the writer to attend, his representative, included: Frances Preston, vice president, BMI Nashville, Eddy Arnold, Chet Atkins, Hank Cochran, Ralph Emery and Sam Phillips.
The Seventh Annual Country Music Awards at the Grand Ole Opry House opened a week’s festivities in Nashville in October. BMI-affiliates played a dominant role in the presentation, an hour-long special telecast over CBS Television.
Chet Atkins was named to the Country Music Hall of Fame in the Living category. “I really didn’t figure to win anything,” Atkins said. “I honestly thought one day I’d be in the Hall of Fame but thought it would be later on — when I am a has-been,” the writer-guitarist said.
It was a particularly big night for Charlie Rich and the Kenny O’Dell song, “Behind Closed Doors.” The 3300 members of the Country Music Association who select the finalists for the awards pinpointed the O’Dell creation as “Song of the Year.” The Rich version was voted “Single of the Year” and the album containing the song and carrying its title won as “Album of the Year.” Rich received a singular salute by being named “Male Vocalist of the Year.”
Rich “clearly was the sentimental favorite of the crowd of more than 3000 who jammed into the Opry House to witness the televised event,” Billboard noted.
Roy Clark was CMA’s “Entertainer of the Year.” According to the voters, he had the “act displaying the greatest competence in all aspects of the entertainment field in person, performance, staging, public acceptance, attitude, leadership and overall contribution to the Country music image.”
Last year’s “Entertainer of the Year,” Loretta Lynn, was voted 1973s “Female Vocalist of the Year” and shared the “Vocal Duo of the Year” award with Conway Twitty. The Statler Brothers won “Vocal Group of the Year” honors for the second consecutive year. Johnny Cash hosted the show. Entertainment was provided by Eddy Arnold, Glen Campbell, Cash, Roy Clark, Barbara Fairchild, Merle Haggard, Barbara Mandrell, Jeanne Pruett, Charley Pride, and Tanya Tucker.
The first Western composer to visit China in more than 25 years, Chou Wen-chung — born in China, now an American citizen — reported on his recent return to China in an article in The New York Times, September 9.
A composer of distinction and chairman of the Music Division of the School of the Arts, Columbia University, Chou Wen-chung said “. . . China is undertaking a bold experiment—fusing traditional Chinese music with Western music and thereby creating a totally new Chinese musical idiom . . . What is staggering is the government’s desire to bring the new music to the people, even in the most remote hamlets.”
There may soon come the day when the average Chinese will be more familiar with Western musical sounds than the average American man in the streets. “The Chinese can learn much from our technical advances, and we can benefit from their unique experiments, particularly those exploring the audience-composer relationship by sending composers into the ‘field.’ ”
At the invitation of the Swiss government, Oliver Daniel, BMI’s vice president, concert music administration, represented the U.S. as a delegate of the National Music Council at the International Music Council, Lausanne and Geneva, September 9-16. For BMI, he attended a Conference of Composers, Warsaw, September 27-29. Mr. Daniel continues as an individual member of the International Music Council, the only American designated.
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