Tag: cootie williams

Fiddle me this: violinists in jazz (part 2).
By January 18, 2014 0 Comments Read More →

Fiddle me this: violinists in jazz (part 2).

(left to right) Joe Venuti; a couple of fair fiddlers, Stephane Grappelli and Yehudi Menuhin; Frankie and Johnnie: Frank Zappa and Jean-Luc Ponty (continued from part 1) It wasn’t until the very late 1920’s that the first real jazz violinist showed up on records and—in a twist—he turned out to the very talented—but also very […]

Posted in: Jazz
Individuality: a lost art, part 3.
By February 10, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Individuality: a lost art, part 3.

We threatened to continue this diatribe, and so we will. Our contention is that creative American music all seemed to die at roughly the same time around 1980. We don’t mean that it disappeared. We simply mean that genres like jazz, country and rock all stopped evolving and either became repertory, classical forms, like jazz, […]

Posted in: Jazz, Rants
Individuality: a lost art, part 2
By February 5, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Individuality: a lost art, part 2

We mentioned in our last post that individual style, wherein a musician’s general sound is so unique and recognizable as to be unmistakably his alone, is a dead commodity in modern American music. We went on to say that one of the most fruitful periods and environments for this sort of individuality was that transitional […]

Posted in: Jazz, Rants