A worthy project diminished by Catalano’s impressionistic approach and special pleading.
Clifford Brown's premature death deprived jazz of one of its greatest trumpeters—a loss that seems even more poignant some
forty years later. Born in 1930, in Wilmington, Delaware, Brown began playing in school bands and informal dance groups in his early teens. Encouraged by his parents and teachers, he practiced constantly and soon became a local star. An important influence was Fats Navarro, a brilliant bebop trumpeter whose life was cut short by heroin use. Taking warning from Navarro's fate, Brown became a model for clean living among his generation of jazzmen, and was noted for his amiable disposition. His playing blossomed as he gigged and jammed with top players in the jazz clubs of Philadelphia. After a series of record dates as sideman, and a European tour with Lionel Hampton's band, he returned to the US in 1954 and formed a seminal quintet with drummer Max Roach. In the two years before Brown and pianist Richie Powell died in a car crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, that group made a strong impact on jazz listeners. Unfortunately, Catalano (Performing Arts/Pace Univ.), assuming his readers are intimately familiar with Brown's music, relies primarily on verbal descriptions of his solos, providing only two passages of written music. A few of his other judgments are even more questionable. He takes several gratuitous potshots at Miles Davis, overlooking the possibility that even had Brown survived, he might never have rivaled the later success of the charismatic Davis. Nor did Brown's death send jazz into a tailspin, as Catalano implies; the music remained strong for nearly a decade before rock drove it from popular awareness. Still, the author’s enthusiastic and well-researched summary of Brown's career should send jazz buffs back to their record collections for serious listening.
A worthy project diminished by Catalano’s impressionistic approach and special pleading.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-510083-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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