A dense and closely argued piece of work. Since van de Leur often proceeds by feel—many original scores are lost—his...
Jazz musician and historian van de Leur subjects Billy Strayhorn’s musical arrangements to deep scrutiny and credibly finds them original, undervalued, frequently misattributed, and tasting of the sublime.
There isn’t much music in van de Leur's prose, but there is a real intellectual hunger in this exploration to identify the unique glory and lasting contribution Strayhorn (1915–67) made to the art of jazz and to give credit to Strayhorn where credit is due. Readers unaccustomed to the patter of musical composition—“characterized by an ascending B[sharp] Aeolian minor scale that surprisingly leads to the major seventh, underscrored by a third inversion B[sharp]mi6”—will find themselves briskly and repeatedly treading water, but van de Leur is equally capable of conveying Strayhorn’s magic in less idiosyncratic language. The main concern here is to situate Strayhorn as he relates to Duke Ellington, with whom he worked for most of his professional life and by whom van de Leur feels Strayhorn is overshadowed. While the author wouldn’t deny the enormous influence Ellington had on the younger Strayhorn, nor their shared “fascination for orchestral sonority, harmonic richness, and formal balance,” he can find evidence of original Strayhorn fingerprints all over the work Ellington and his band played. They’re in his “temporary modulations,” his specific dissonance, choral choices, rhythmic figures. It might well be that Strayhorn and Ellington worked so well together because they were complementary: Strayhorn the tight-knit, Ellington the streetwise and striding. Along the way, van de Leur sticks it to a whole company of critics he feels have given Strayhorn a bum rap, perhaps because of homophobia, perhaps because they simply never appreciated the breadth of jazz that Strayhorn pioneered, such as subdued bebop.
A dense and closely argued piece of work. Since van de Leur often proceeds by feel—many original scores are lost—his attributions will doubtless be richly provocative to jazz fans. (Inventory of scores, compositions, and works on record)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-512448-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
