A seamless blend of music, history, and biography.
A user-friendly guide to appreciating show tunes.
Composer/conductor Kapilow’s (What Makes It Great: Short Masterpieces, Great Composers, 2011, etc.) popular NPR program, What Makes It Great? inspired this lively and highly informative look at what makes musical show tunes great. Using 16 of his favorite songs by eight of Broadway’s greatest songwriters, he focuses on the “intersection between history and music,” employing a “close-focus musical reading” of each song to demonstrate how they are “deeply meaningful reflections of an evolving America finding its voice.” Kapilow includes basic musical notations to show how the songs’ notes, melodies, harmonies, and rhythms fit together to fashion masterpieces. Each chapter is a gem of explication and informed opinion. Jerome Kern’s “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” from Show Boat, “turns on the relationship between black music and white music.” The “landmark” show, Kapilow writes, “radically widened the dramatic range of the Broadway musical.” The final cadence in Kern’s “All the Things You Are,” from Very Warm for May, a “complete flop,” is “one of the most remarkable in the American Songbook.” George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” from Girl Crazy, with its gay, Jewish, and Native American sensibilities, is the “voice of a southern black community in a work that would ultimately become the quintessential American opera.” Harold Arlen “became famous overnight thanks to the success of a single song,” “Stormy Weather,” from The Cotton Club Parade of 1933. Before The Wizard of Oz film was released in 1939, studio head Louis B. Mayer wanted to cut out Arlen’s iconic “Over the Rainbow.” Kapilow considers Stephen Sondheim “one of the greatest innovators in the history of the musical theater.” The author also discusses Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rogers, and Leonard Bernstein, and the prologue contains useful information about minstrel shows, vaudeville, revues, operetta, ragtime, the blues, and jazz.
A seamless blend of music, history, and biography.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-029-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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