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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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