Word: glissando
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...force to welcome Liberace to Madison Square Garden. While boxing fans withdrew trembling to the shelter of their favorite saloons, a near-capacity crowd of 15,000 jammed the Garden; about 80% were women.* With a roll of drums, the crash of a gong, and a harp glissando, Liberace bounced onto the stage, wearing a snowy-white dress suit (later he changed into a gold lamé jacket...
...Millerism. Sinatra, now 36 and still a skinny 135 Ibs., thinks he knows just what happened since the early '405 when bobby-soxers were curling their toes at his boyish glissando. Says he: 'I was weaned on the best popular music ever written. When I was bumming around with Tommy Dorsey and Harry James it was all good. Guys like Mercer and Berlin and Hammerstein were writing their best. In those days a singer was just another guy, and the one-nighters, listening to the band by the hour-this is the experience a singer needs. You learned...
When Jackie Cain, the girl singer, had released her last colorless bubble, and Charlie Ventura's band had slid over its last glissando and flattened its last fifth, the audience applauded politely. No one screamed; no one bounced; no one fell in a fit; no one left. The carefully disorganized music began again, the performers staring blankly at the audience, the audience staring blankly back. Bop was a very serious business-just as serious as swing used...
...Orchestra, Fritz Reiner conducting; Columbia, 10 sides). A wag once tried to describe this fustian piece: "It is he, the Hero, and he has been drinking again. He is in E flat, and his cuffs are soiled by numerous dissonances . . . Four plain-clothes detectives come in on a sharp glissando, and, seizing the Hero, throw over his head a dark-tasting chord . . ." Performance: good. Suite from Der Rosenkavalier (Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting; Columbia, 6 sides). Some of the pleasantest music Richard Strauss ever wrote, pleasingly played. Recordings: good...
...Once in a hotel in Birmingham, he told a Negro maid that his dummy keyboard (for limbering up between concerts) was a holy piano whose music could be heard only by the pure and sinless. Then he ran off a long, soundless glissando. When he looked up, the maid had disappeared...