This is pure YouTube at its best. Apparently knowing of my admiration for the opening sequence of ‘All That Jazz’ which I posted yesterday, YT dredged up this extraordinary seven minute reel of raw footage of Fosse directing that very sequence and greeted me with it this morning. It must
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2e9acreKmQ Behold the first six minutes of Bob Fosse’s 1979 ‘All That Jazz’, a paean to musical theater, dance, creativity, life and death. To my eyes, the film looks better and better over time but nothing beats the above sequence. Edited within an inch of its life, it tells in
Dig this crazy/cool Fosse dance sequence from ‘Sweet Charity’. Set to the go-go-ized strains of ‘Big Spender, the dance known as ‘The Aloof’ is a masterful creation, Fosse at his most crypto-sexual and controlled, with a centerpiece dancer who is nothing short of phenomenal. (Who is she? Is she out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwbMr8bK45M YouTube sure takes care of its regular users well. Indeed they resemble nothing so much as the neighborhood ‘pusher’, supplying me with the stuff they know I’ll shoot up hungrily upon first sight. Apropos of yesterday’s post in which I mentioned reading Nick Tosches superb bio of Dean Martin,
I’ve been re-reading ‘Dino; Living High In The Dirty Business Of Dreams’, Nick Tosches’ majestic biography of Dean Martin. Calling it a bio of Dean, however, is reductive in the extreme; the book is a journey through the dark and relentless birth and progression of the American entertainment industry and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWdcPdYjGFE For those of you too young to remember K-Tel record commercials, they were ubiquitous and played so often that I can still recite some of the over-the-top sales pitches from memory. Above is a very nice video compilation of some of the best K-Tel commercials. Below is an excerpt
To close out this week’s obsessive pursuit of the movie and event known as ‘Riot On Sunset Strip’ here’s the excellent opening credit sequence featuring The Standells singing the theme. Given that it’s the mid-60s, they sound admirably ahead of their time, performing with a kind of proto-punk vibe. See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UkP6a2-IXM The Earl Carroll Theater, named after and operated by the eponymous Broadway showman of the twenties and thirties, opened on Sunset Blvd. between Vine and Gower in 1938. In 1954 it became the Moulin Rouge and in 1965 it became the Hullaballo, a club exclusively geared toward the burgeoning
In yesterdays post I discussed Buddy Rich’s musical analphabeta (i.e. he couldn’t read music). Today, thanks to some algorithm that I don’t really want to know about, the above video was waiting for me cheerfully in my Youtube queue. It’s a very funny five or so minutes from a 1974
Here’s a ‘drum-off’ between the legendary Buddy Rich and Ed Shaughnessy, the drummer for the Tonight Show band for two decades. The big band arrangement that kicks things off belongs to a genre of music I always think of as ‘heart-attack jazz’, a very specific over-wrought big band mayhem sound