Posts Tagged ‘Miles Davis’
“A phenomenon like Mozart remains an inexplicable thing”*…
And now there’s more of that extraordinary phenomenon to appreciate. Sonja Anderson, with big news…
A 12-minute piece of music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been discovered in a library in Germany. Researchers think the composer wrote the previously unknown piece—called Serenade in C—when he was a young teenager.
The composition was hidden in the holdings of Germany’s Leipzig Municipal Libraries—some 280 miles north of Salzburg, Austria, where Mozart was born in 1756. By the age of 5, he was a child prodigy who toured Europe performing for royals and aristocrats. As a teenager, he built a reputation as a composer, spending a few years in Salzburg and Vienna before moving to Italy in 1769.
Mozart probably wrote the recently discovered composition in the mid- to late-1760s, according to a statement from the Leipzig Municipal Libraries. Library researchers were compiling an edition of the Köchel catalog, a comprehensive archive of Mozart’s work, when they stumbled across a mysterious bound manuscript containing a handwritten composition in brown ink [pictured above].
The composition is attributed to “Wo[l]fgang Mozart.” The handwriting, however, is not Mozart’s, suggesting that the manuscript is a copy of the original composition. Researchers think it was made around 1780.
Serenade in C consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio (two violins and a bass), according to a statement from the International Mozarteum Foundation, a Salzburg-based nonprofit dedicated to Mozart’s life and work. The attribution to “Wo[l]fgang Mozart” indicates that the piece is from the composer’s youth, as he started regularly adding “Amadeo” to his name around 1769…
… In his early years… Mozart wrote many chamber works like Serenade in C, which his father recorded on a list of his son’s compositions. Many of these works were thought to have been lost to history, as Leisinger says in the statement. Fortunately, this particular piece was saved—thanks to the composer’s sister.
“It looks as if—thanks to a series of favorable circumstances—a complete string trio has survived in Leipzig,” Leisinger adds. “The source was evidently Mozart’s sister, and so it is tempting to think that she preserved the work as a memento of her brother. Perhaps he wrote the trio specially for her.”…
… The newly discovered Serenade in C has been renamed Ganz kleine Nachtmusik in the Köchel catalog (presumably in reference to Mozart’s famous serenade Eine kleine Nachtmusik)…
More than 250 years after a teenage Mozart wrote “Serenade in C,” a copy of the piece has surfaced: “This Lost Mozart Composition Hasn’t Been Heard for Centuries. Now, You Can Listen to It,” from @SmithsonianMag.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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As we listen, we might spare a thought for Miles Davis; he died on this date in 1991. Rolling Stone described him as “the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century.” Over a five-decade career (which began when he dropped out of Juilliard), Davis played bebop with Charlie Parker, paved the way for cool jazz with Birth of the Cool, pioneered hard bop, assembled a quintet (that included saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers) and yielded ‘Round About Midnight, led a jazz orchestra (that recorded Kind of Blue among other albums), worked with bassist Ron Carter, pianist Herbie Hancock, drummer Tony Williams, and saxophonist Wayne Shorter to create the post-bop genre, and created jazz fusion with Bitches Brew.
In discussing Birth of the Cool, jazz great Azar Lawrence said of Davis what countless others have said of Davis and his other contributions: “It was such a phenomenal expression of artistry. It was like something created by Picasso or Bach or Mozart, or somebody of that stature of expression. It’s a foundational work and a musical landmark.”
“Ain’t you heard/ The boogie-woogie rumble/Of a dream deferred?”*…
Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library just acquired this original pen-and-brush version of E. Simms Campbell’s nightlife map of Harlem, from 1932. The map, drawn by an illustrator who frequented many of the establishments he depicted, exudes an insider’s pride in the robust music scene in full swing during the Harlem Renaissance.
When he made this map, cartoonist Elmer Simms Campbell was at the beginning of a decades-long career in illustration and commercial art. (Here’s some of his other work, for advertisers and magazines.) Campbell was “one of first commercially successful African-American cartoonists,” writes Rebecca Rego Barry. “He steadily produced artwork for Esquire upon its launch in 1933, and his work was also published in Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker, and Playboy.” This map first appeared in Manhattan magazine, as a centerfold, and later showed up in Esquire.
Campbell was friends with Cab Calloway, whose band appears at the bottom left-hand corner of this map. Swann Auction Galleries’ Kir Jordan links to this clip from a 2012 PBS documentary, in which Calloway walks viewers through Campbell’s map, remembering how he “bombed” with his first band at the Savoy Ballroom, and how much he always liked to say the name of the club that called itself “The Yeah, Man.”
More– and a zoomable version of the map– at “An Affectionate 1932 Illustrated Map of Harlem Nightlife.”
* Langston Hughes
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As we tap our toes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that Miles Davis made his first studio recording. Working with his then-boss Charlie Parker and the other members of his octet, Davis backed singer Rubberlegs Williams. Two years later Davis led the same group of musicians in recording music released as from the “Miles Davis All-Stars.”
The young Miles Davis
Please, Please, Please…
He was “the Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” “the Godfather of Soul”– James Brown. Immensely popular with audiences from the mid-Fifties (when “Please, Please, Please,” above, was a hit), he was a tremendous influence on popular music, with admirers who included jazz greats like Miles Davis, and emulators like Sly and the Family Stone, Booker T & the MGs and “soul shouters” like King Curtis, Edwin Starr, and David Ruffin (of The Temptations). He was a famously-tough task master as a band leader; but it served his musicians well, as their education at his hands laid the foundation for several successful solo careers (e.g., Bobby Byrd, Lyn Collins, Vicki Anderson, Hank Ballard, Bootsy Collins, and Carlos Alomar). And he was the ur-source of Funk (e.g., admirer George Clinton cast Brown alumni Fred Wesley and Bootsy Collins centrally in the seminal Parliament-Funkadelic).
But Brown made what was arguably his most influential contribution with his feet: he was, as anyone who saw him perform can attest, an astonishing dancer. As a child, he’d earned pocket money buck dancing to entertain troops headed to Europe at the outset of WWII. Over the years he made that traditional form uniquely his own– inspiring performers like Michael Jackson and Prince, who modeled their moves on his, and prefiguring the current vogue of dance-centric pop performances.
James Brown died on Christmas Day, 2006. But happily, he left behind a guide to the moves that made him famous. The holiday party season, with its fraught occasions to dance, looms; but there’s no reason to fear, Dear Readers– just watch and learn. Michael Jackson did…
As we trip the light fantastic, we might recall that it was on this date in 1946 (when James Brown was 13 years old) that Walt Disney released Song of the South, a feature film based on the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris, in which live actors frame animated enactments of the adventures of Br’er Rabbit– like the story of “The Tar Baby.” The film won the Best Song Oscar for “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”; but, while the film was re-released theatrically in 1972, 1981, and 1986, and has been released to home video in Europe and Asia, it has never been released to home video in the U.S.— perhaps because Disney executives feel that it might be construed as racist.
James Baskett, who played Uncle Remus, was the first black actor hired by Disney to play a live role. He was unable to attend the film’s premiere in Atlanta, the event hotels there would not have him. (source)
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