The News Review:
- Macy’s Music Fest Crowds Have Businesses Hoping for “Christma…
- The House That George Built – Wilfrid Sheed – Books – Review – New…
- Swiss hit a high note
Macy’s Music Fest Crowds Have Businesses Hoping for “Christma…
WCP – Jul 28, 2007
Technicians for the bands and singers that will hit the stage Friday night were already hard at work by mid-morning doing sound checks and other tests. Up on the plaza level at Paul Brown Stadium tickets were selling briskly for the music festival. Although the two days of rhythm and blues music is far from being sold out its promoter is pleased with sales ? and with the city’s attitude. Festival promoter Joe Santangelo tells 9News “I think it’s great the way the city is reducing parking [fees]. ” “They’ve really gone out of the way to eliminate that traffic problem through downtown a lot of times” said Santangelo. “Nothing is ever perfect but hopefully we can make it better this year. ” Downtown hotels were doing a brisk business Friday afternoon with many almost full.
The House That George Built – Wilfrid Sheed – Books – Review – New…
New York Times – Jul 28, 2007
The chemistry of Astaire singing Berlin he writes “added up to a third personality a city boy harnessed to a country boy in the cause of that magnificent anomaly American sophistication. ” More clearly than most music historians he recognizes the extent to which changing technology has shaped it all and the degree to which popular music is an immediate reflection of the time and place in which it is created. With the coming of the microphone in the 1920s he muses Caruso “the world’s biggest voice” was supplanted by Crosby “the world’s friendliest voice. ” Most of these new songs accommodated this microphone-ready conversational voice. Diving into his subject Mr. Sheed repeatedly comes up with pearls like his take on the blues which informed so many of these songs and which he calls “spirituals with a hangover… ” “My Fair Lady” is dismissed in one sentence as “the great un-American musical. ” There is no mention of “Gypsy. “His preference is for moodier blues-tinged songs with idiomatic lyrics like “Blues in the Night” that conjure a wild pioneering American spirit. About Ellington he imagines “black did not mean primitive but referred to something like a great lost civilization that was right now in the vibrant process of rediscovery. ” By contrast most of the songs Rodgers wrote with Hammerstein are “comfort music. “The bright light at the center of this universe is George Gershwin a charming show-off and supercharged artistic force whose generosity toward his songwriting peers solidified the community that glumly soldiered on after his death from a brain tumor in 1937.
Swiss hit a high note
NEWS.com.au – Jul 28, 2007
Music festivals that is. Between June and September Switzerland celebrates scores of music festivals and parades across the country from the shores of Lake Geneva in the far southwest to St Gallen in the northeast and right across the musical spectrum that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors. And there’s something for everyone — jazz classical rock country opera blues gospel traditional alpine music and scores of colourfully kitted-out marching bands all belting out their best in stunning alpine settings through narrow cobbled streets in stately auditoriums and beside some of the country’s prettiest placid lakes. This year has already seen Marilyn Manson at the Interlaken Greenfield Festival and Snow Patrol Kaiser Chiefs and Placebo at the big open-air gig in St Gallen each held in a spectacular alpine environment. Car-free medieval Raperswil the "Town of Roses" on the northern shore of Lake Zurich echoed with the sounds of New rleans jazz with its Blues ‘n’ Jazz Festival as did Ascona on the sunny shores of Lake Maggiore in the southern Italian-speaking Canton Ticino with its own New rleans Jazz Festival. n the last weekend in August European and international bands will gather for more New rleans jazz at Celerina in the Engadine Valley near St Moritz one of the most beautiful alpine regions in the country. But July is when most of the major events have taken place including Ticino’s Estival Jazz in Lugano and the Moon and Stars Festival in nearby Locarno where Pink and the Beastie Boys appeared.