Thursday, March 28, 2024

Quote of the Day (Pete Townshend, on the Ultimate Optimism of ‘Tommy’)

“I don’t want it to feel as though I think ‘Tommy’ needs to be treated only seriously. It has lightheartedness and joy. It has the idea that whether you’re an abused child or a healthy child, we prevail ultimately, by turning toward the light. That’s simplistic but it’s also powerful, particularly when set to music.”—Rock ‘n’ roll songwriter and The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, on the upcoming revival of his “rock opera” “Tommy,” quoted by Rob Tannenbaum, “Talking to a New Generation,” The New York Times, Mar. 24, 2024

It will be interesting to see the reviews following “Tommy”’s opening tonight at the Nederlander Theatre. But, however it’s received, the music’s place in rock ‘n’ roll history is secure.

The original LP’s release in 1969 climaxed a decade of increasing ambition and sophistication for rock ‘n’ roll, and pointed the way forward to how the concept album could become, as a November 2020 Spin Magazine article put it, “the first album to successfully blend exceptional storytelling with advanced production.”

Moreover, it was prescient in examining the cult of celebrity, and spiritual striving in an age of cultural fracture.

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Quote of the Day (Gunther Schuller, on the Exuberant ‘Creative Imagination’ of Sarah Vaughan)

“Sarah's creative imagination is exuberant. I have worked with Sarah Vaughan, I have accompanied her, and can vouch for the fact that she never repeats herself or sings a song the same way twice. Whether she is using what we call a paraphrase improvisation—an enhancement of the melody where the melody is still recognizable—or whether she uses the harmonic changes as the basis of the song to improvise totally new melodies or gestures, Sarah Vaughan is always totally inventive. It is a restless compulsion to create, to reshape, to search. For her a song—even a mediocre one—is merely a point of departure from which she proceeds to invent, a skeleton which she proceeds to flesh out.”— American composer, conductor, horn player, historian, educator, publisher, and jazz musician Gunther Schuller (1925-2015), “The Divine Sarah,” in Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (1989)

Today marks the centennial of the Newark, NJ-born jazz singer and pianist Sarah Vaughan (1925-1990), “Sassy” or “The Divine One” to her legion of fans. I blogged on her in this post from a decade ago, but her artistry is such that I thought she deserved another.

In this post seven years ago from the blog“Largehearted Boy,” music historian Elaine M. Hayes discussed six songs that shaped her biography Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan.

(The image accompanying this post is an August 1946 photograph of Sarah Vaughan at Café Society in New York, from the William P. Gottlieb Collection of the Library of Congress.)

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Quote of the Day (Rebecca Solnit, on Activists’ Anger and Love)

 

“Most great activists—from Ida B. Wells to Dolores Huerta to Harvey Milk to Bill McKibben—are motivated by love, first of all. If they are angry, they are angry at what harms the people and phenomena they love, but their urges are primarily protective, not vengeful. Love is essential; anger is perhaps optional.” — Writer, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit, “All the Rage,” The New Republic, October 2018

The image accompanying this post, showing Rebecca Solnit, was taken Sept. 10, 2010, by Charles Kremenak.

Monday, March 25, 2024

Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on the Impact of a Light)

"It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone." American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘My Little Chickadee,’ With Mae West’s View of the Law)

Judge [played by Addison Richards]: “Are you trying to show contempt for this court?”

Flower Belle Lee [played by Mae West]: “No... I'm doin' my best to hide it! “— My Little Chickadee (1940), screenplay by Mae West and W.C. Fields, directed by Edward F. Cline

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Quote of the Day (Janan Ganesh, on the 1960s, ‘The Last Pre-Global Decade’)

“The 1960s were the last pre-global decade. The 1970s would bring free-floating currencies and the opening of China. It would bring OPEC crises that smashed apart the highly managed economic order. The 1980s would go much further. For people who have found globalisation discombobulating (and you will have noticed there are a few), the 1960s must seem like the last stand of a more familiar world. In other words, a decade that has for so long been synonymous with breakneck progress is now idealised for exactly the opposite reason. The ‘meaning’ of the 1960s has slowly changed.” —British journalist, author and political commentator Janan Ganesh, “Remembering the Last Pre-Global Decade,” The 
Financial Times, Aug. 17-18, 201
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Spiritual Quote of the Day (Gerard Manley Hopkins, on Beauty From God)

“Glory be to God for dappled things—
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
       And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
 
“All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
      Praise Him.”—English Jesuit and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), “Pied Beauty