Jazz fans will enjoy reading about some of the legendary players involved but might be disappointed if they expect an...
Skinner’s engaging if slight debut memoir, as told to Solan, recounts his time organizing the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in the unlikely town of Moscow, Idaho.
The Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival started out as the University of Idaho Jazz Festival in 1968, and Skinner took the reins in 1976, thinking it would be a one-year gig. It turned out to be a 31-year job—and the start of a lifelong friendship with legendary vibes player Lionel Hampton. Skinner wanted to move the festival forward and bring in bigger names. He brought Hampton in to perform in 1984, and he played every festival from then to 2002. In 1987, UI went one step further and named their music school the Lionel Hampton School of Music. That brought national news coverage to the school, and Hampton’s presence brought in a lot of talent, like Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Branford Marsalis, and Carmen McRae. The relationship was so close that when Hampton’s apartment caught fire in 1997, he called Skinner from the sidewalk while he watched it burn. Skinner tells his story in a fairly conversational style, illustrated with many photos of him with jazz legends. The bulk of the story is about how the festival expanded, adding more talent across more days, providing stage time and scholarships to area students and generally helping to keep jazz alive. Skinner devotes the rest of the time to stories about “Hamp,” as he calls him, and about his own education as a jazz fan and music teacher, ending, oddly, with the story of his tour of the Soviet Union in 1989. It’s clear there was a fine friendship between Skinner and Hampton, and there are some wonderful glimpses into Hampton’s personality, like his tendency to get lost in a jam with guests and go long. But as much as jazz fans might enjoy the book, they are getting only glimpses. Skinner never dives into a particular show to make the reader feel like they were there from beginning to end.
Jazz fans will enjoy reading about some of the legendary players involved but might be disappointed if they expect an in-depth look at Lionel Hampton.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62901-587-3
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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