Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Jazz

Ross Amico Jazz WRTI Tonight

If you’ve never had the chance to hear Classic Ross Amico spinning the jazz, I’ll be donning the pork pie from 6 to 9 tonight on WRTI 90.1 FM in Philadelphia and at wrti.org. Stay cool, fools!

June 4, 2016
Henry Threadgill Wins Pulitzer Prize

The recipients of the centennial Pulitzer Prizes were announced this afternoon at 3:00 EDT. The final category to be addressed was that of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. And the winner is…

Henry Threadgill, for “In for a Penny, In for a Pound.”

Threadgill, 72, studied at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. He is a composer, saxophonist and flautist, whose compositions have pushed boundaries for the past 50 years. His orchestral, chamber, and solo instrumental works have been performed at BAM, Bang on a Can, and Carnegie Hall. Peter Watrous of The New York Times described Threadgill as “perhaps the most important jazz composer of his generation,” though Threadgill has distanced himself from any such easy categorization.

You can read a review of the recording here. Threadgill plays sax in the embedded video

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound-henry-threadgill-pi-recordings-review-by-mark-f-turner.php

Here’s another sample of his work (NOT “In for a Penny,” which has not, to my knowledge, been posted), this time with the composer on flute and sax, from the Library of Congress in Washington, DC:

And a conversation with Threadgill, also from the Library of Congress:

In other music news, Lin-Manuel Miranda was recognized with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his Broadway juggernaut “Hamilton.”

April 18, 2016
Richard Rodney Bennett at 80 A Neglected Genius

Today would have been the 80th birthday of Richard Rodney Bennett. Bennett could do it all, from twelve tone to torch songs, from film music to jazz. He was a brilliant musician who never really seemed to find his niche and continues to be undersold, despite the knighthood he acquired in 1998.

Bennett studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, with Howard Ferguson and Lennox Berkeley. Ferguson regarded him as perhaps the greatest talent of his generation, though lacking in a personal style – an assessment with which I happen to disagree, detecting the same fingerprints on his twelve tone works as on his compositions of more immediate appeal.

It’s interesting to note that Bennett also studied in Paris with Pierre Boulez, from 1957 to 1959. He had been exposed to serialism while attending summer courses in Darmstadt.

Bennett himself taught for a time at RAM (he was eventually the Chair of Composition there, from 1994 to the year 2000) and at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. For the last three decades of his life, he maintained a residence in New York City. He died there in 2012. His remains are buried in Brooklyn.

In all, he composed over 200 concert works, and 50 film scores, including music for “Far from the Madding Crowd,” ‘Nicholas and Alexandra,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Enchanted April” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

For 50 years, he was a writer and performer of jazz songs. He also arranged classics of the Great American Songbook.

The further his career progressed, the more tonal, melodic and ingratiating his concert music became. In point of fact, Bennett’s serialism had always been a personalized one. He later repudiated his serial works, stating, “I wouldn’t want anybody now to play my pieces from those days, when I was turning out that atonal stuff.”

Aside from his activities as a film composer and cabaret performer, he composed three symphonies, 17 concertos, five operas and dozens of chamber works. He had the attention and respect of his peers, with many of the world’s top musicians commissioning and performing his works, yet his music remains, somehow, less known than it should be.

Be that as it may, happy birthday, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett!

Here is the world premiere of his Symphony No. 2, in a concert broadcast from 1968:

His ingratiating “Partita for Orchestra,” from 1995:

Mov’t I: “Intrada” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRtZr4wdPNg

Mov’t II “Lullaby” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXDym-RkuB8

Mov’t III “Finale” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo6YheAcwLE

Richard Rodney Bennett sings torch songs:

Film music from “The Devil’s Disciple” (1959):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e2pCQpONV0

“Four Weddings and a Funeral” (1994):

“Murder on the Orient Express” (1974):

PHOTO: Bennett wrote this “Suite for Skip and Sadie” for his two cats

March 29, 2016
David Amram Celebrates 85 Years

David Amram turns 85 today.

Amram, born in Philadelphia in 1930, has always been equally at home in classical music, jazz, folk and world music. He’s composed over 100 orchestral and chamber works, music for Broadway and film (including scores for “Splendor in the Grass” and “The Manchurian Candidate”), and two operas. He’s also written three books, with a fourth in the works.

He was raised on a farm in Bucks County, where he was introduced to classical, jazz and cantorial music by his father and uncle. He took piano lessons and experimented with instruments of the brass family, finally settling on the French horn. Following a year at Oberlin, he lit out for George Washington University, where he studied history. While there, he performed as an extra hornist with the National Symphony. He also studied privately with two musicians in the orchestra.

Amram became a pioneer of the jazz French horn, as well as the New York Philharmonic’s first composer-in-residence (named in 1966). He’s worked with artists ranging from Dizzy Gillespie to Bob Dylan to Leonard Bernstein, from Jack Kerouac to Arthur Miller, from Christopher Plummer to Johnny Depp. He’s a musician without boundaries, who has always been open to new experiences.

Trailer for the documentary, “David Amram: The First 80 Years”:

Amram Horn Concerto:

Amram with Dizzy Gillespie:

Amram (at the age of 80) performing at the Philadelphia Folk Festival:

Happy birthday, David Amram, still going way strong.

November 17, 2015
Gunther Schuller A Third Stream Pioneer

He was a composer, a performer, a conductor, an educator, and an administrator. At 15, he played French horn professionally with the American Ballet Theatre. The next year, he became principal horn of the Cincinnati Symphony. Then he joined the Metropolitan Orchestra, where he played for well over a decade.

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, he was president of the New England Conservatory. He was also involved with Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony, for over 20 years, serving as its artistic director from 1970 to 1984.

He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1994.

In addition, he cofounded the Modern Jazz Society. He recorded with Miles Davis. He edited and gave the premiere of Charles Mingus’ final work. He wrote two major books on the history of jazz. To describe what he saw as “a new genre of music, located about halfway between classical music and jazz,” he coined the term “Third Stream.”

An American polymath, he was clearly a man who just loved music.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we honor Gunther Schuller, who died on June 21, at the age of 89.

We’ll hear his Bassoon Concerto from 1982. The work, more of a five-movement suite, manages to synthesize atonality, lyricism, blues and Baroque, with some sly quotations from “The Magic Flute,” “The Rite of Spring” and “Peter and the Wolf” along the way.

Schuller also loved the music of Scott Joplin and did much to contribute to the Joplin revival of the 1970s. He founded the New England Ragtime Ensemble, with which he recorded some bestselling albums of Joplin rags. We’ll hear highlights from Joplin’s opera , “Treemonisha,” which Schuller orchestrated for a revival at Houston Grand Opera.

I hope you’ll join me as we salute Third Stream artist Gunther Schuller, on “A Midsummer Night’s Stream,” tonight at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

June 28, 2015

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