Yesterday I posted about the hard-kicking all-female big band Francis Carroll and Her Coquettes. Today we take a look at ‘The International Sweethearts of Rhythm’, who were believed to be the first racially-integrated all-female big band in the United States. Though they’ve been more or less lost to history–and that’s
The all-girl orchestra was generally regarded as something of a ‘gimmick’–an oddity that amused audiences due to the rarity of seeing women playing horns, saxes, basses and drums. Indeed, only singing, violin and piano playing seemed to be considered appropriate and not jarring for a woman to be seen playing.
.By 1958, Howard Hughes had become a recluse. His drug addictions resulting from his disastrous air crash in 1946 which I posted about yesterday were undoing him mentally, physically and emotionally. This once very public figure now cowered in a penthouse hotel suite in Las Vegas, hiding from the world, doing business
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhhZqKlO6wEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1aKNy7hBV4 Airplane pilots are always quick to tell you that 99 percent of all aviation accidents are due to pilot error. This is almost a religious incantation with them–they believe firmly in ‘trusting the machine’, which I imagine is the only way to get over the insane fact that they’re
This past weekend my son and I journeyed to the little town of McMinnville, Oregon, to see what is arguably the ninth wonder of the world; the biggest plane ever built and never flown. Howard Hughes ‘Spruce Goose’ is a flying boat that was intended to be used during the
Apropos of this weeks posts on non-French, non-Greek director Jules Dassin, here’s a lovely scene from his 1960 hit “Never On Sunday’, starring his wife Melina Mercouri. In an act of immense chutzpah, Dassin–who was essentially a non-actor–cast himself as the co-lead–an American who’s visiting Greece. He’s the gray haired
Apropos of yesterday’s post about the great non-French non-Greek but somehow French and Greek American director Jules Dassin, I though I’d post the legendary twenty-five (or so) minutes silent sequence of the heist scene in ‘Rififi’. Imagine my surprise when it failed to turn up on YouTube. Instead only tidbits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk_qX2VXycEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk_qX2VXycE. This weekend TCM showed Jules Dassin’s masterful ‘Rififi’ (1955) and I began a deep-ish dive into the enigmatic man behind the name. For years he was thought by many to be French–he did, after all, direct the premiere French noir crime-drama of the 1950s. But Dassin, in fact, was
It took three days to shoot the scene in which Judy Garland performs Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin’s haunting and highly unusual (in form) torch song ‘The Man That Got Away’, for the 1954 version of ‘A Star Is Born’. Above is a nifty split screen demonstrating two of the
As a jazz pianist, I’m less sensitive than most others of my ilk to people’s frequently (and freely) expressed negative opinions about the music that I love. This is largely due to my belief that when people say that they don’t like jazz they’re not really referring to jazz–they’re either