Search Results for: music on money
Bali remixed and revisited
In May 2019 Songlines Magazine and the PRS Foundation launched a competition to find the best remix of David Attenborough’s recording of a performance of Balinese gendér wayang, a style of Indonesian gamelan that features a quartet of ten-keyed metallophones. Among the reactions of gamelan enthusiasts was concern … Continue reading
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Filed under Asia, Curiosities
Louis Jordan and “Caldonia”
In an interview, Louis Jordan recalled the background of his 1945 hit Caldonia: “Caldonia started a long time before I came to New York. There used to be a long, lean, lanky girl in Memphis, Tennessee, where Jim Cannon used … Continue reading
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Filed under Performers, Popular music
Lena Horne’s second act
“I was the first black sex symbol, the first black movie star, and the first black to integrate saloons…I had to take a lot of flak from my own people, and everybody else’s people.” Thus spoke the very … Continue reading
Filed under Performers, Popular music
Reverend Gary Davis and Miss Gibson
One day Manny Greenhill, Reverend Gary Davis’s sometime manager, received a desperate call from Wurlitzer, one of Boston’s most staid and respected music stores. A quavering voice explained that an elderly man, a minister of some sort, had seized … Continue reading
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Filed under Jazz and blues, Performers
Svend Asmussen and Benny Goodman
In 1948 Benny Goodman invited the Danish jazz violinist Svend Asmussen to consider coming to the U.S. to play in his band. Asmussen agreed, but he soon discovered that the U.S. Musicians Union had other ideas. To play in … Continue reading
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Filed under Jazz and blues, Performers
John Cage, visual artist
Best known as an experimental composer and performer, John Cage (1912–92) was also a visual artist who created an extensive body of prints, drawings, and watercolors during the last 20 years of his life. In all of his work, regardless … Continue reading
Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Visual art
Moroccan insult contests
A performance that occurred almost daily in a public square in Marrakech in the early 1980s traded on ethnic identity for fun and profit. The performance began with an Arab duo singing in Arabic; as a crowd began to gather … Continue reading
Filed under Africa, Curiosities, Humor
Women and gramophones
A letter published in the June 1925 issue of Gramophone noted the magazine’s general absence of women correspondents: “are the sweet little things too shy, or what?” A response published in August of that year dismissed the idea of … Continue reading
Filed under Curiosities, Reception
Jimi Hendrix’s asteroid prophecy
A timely prophecy remains hidden in the words of Jimi Hendrix—a connection between history and religions, linking the future with the past—that predicts the existence of an asteroid on course to impact the earth. Hendrix was an authentic Afro-American Cherokee … Continue reading
Filed under Curiosities, Popular music
