Word: basse
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...this blasphemy? Technically not; but it is sometimes hard to determine where the fine line between bad taste and sacrilege is to be drawn. When God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, out booms a big, creamy bass voice that sounds like nothing so much as a TV announcer making a pitch for a local funeral home. At such moments it is impossible to avoid the impression that the moviemaker, no doubt without intending to, has taken the name of the Lord in vain...
...composer, Floyd has a Verdian flair for extracting the last drops of dramatic juice from many of his scenes. In the revival meeting, Susannah's dramatic pin nacle, the congregation sings a realis tic back-country hymn while Evangelist Blitch (Bass-Baritone Norman Treigle) rants in the foreground, and the music gradually transmutes and builds to shat tering climax. On the other hand Composer Floyd is sometimes seduced from the true path by his own melodies, nota bly when he sets Susannah (Soprano Phyllis Curtin) to singing the intermina ble verses of a pretty, folk-song-like lament just...
...that magic moment Ellington's Paul Gonsalves was ripping off a fast but insinuating solo on his tenor saxophone, his fancies dandled by a bounding beat on bass and drums (Jimmy Woode and Sam Woodyard). The Duke himself tweaked an occasional fragment on the high piano. Gradually, the beat began to ricochet from the audience as more and more fans began to clap hands on the offbeats until the crowd was one vast, rhythmic chorus, yelling its approval. There were howls of "More! More!" and there was dancing in the aisles. One young woman broke loose from her escort...
...those were two-fisted piano players," he recalls. "Men like Sticky Mack and Doc Perry and James P. Johnson and Willie 'The Lion' Smith. With their left hand, they'd play big chords for the bass note, and just as big ones for the offbeat, and they really swang. The right hand played real pretty. They did things technically you wouldn't believe...
...pair of 75? steaks, beer for a quarter, and have a quarter left for tomorrow." He did his own housework, including mending and pressing his tailor-made suits, always impeccably kept. Periodically, there was work for his five-man combo-Arthur Whetsel on trumpet, Otto Hardwick on bass and alto, Sonny Greer on drums and Elmer Snowden on banjo-but the real break came in 1927. "You know, I'm lucky," says Duke. "I'm lucky because I like pretty music-some people don't-and can write it down. And I was lucky when we auditioned...