BWW Review: With THE GREAT JAZZ STANDARDS, Michael Feinstein Opens This Year's Jazz at Lincoln Center's 'Jazz and Popular Song Series' With Appealing Vitality
I hear music, mighty fine music . . . Host Michael Feinstein sings with pristine bass accompaniment, as Musical Director Tedd Firth's Big Band filters in musician by musician. The sweetest sounds I ever heard . . . he continues as a light saxophone joins syncopated rhythm. Then whomp! All 17 players swing. Rarely have I heard sound design so perfectly balanced, appropriately favoring vocals. Feinstein remains smooth and easy riding the wave. 'You may wonder about the role of jazz in popular song . . . ' our host begins at the start of Jazz at Lincoln Center's first of three segments of the Jazz & Popular Song Series in the Appel Room. At a time when popular songs came and went with alacrity, jazz artists meeting for improvisational jam sessions needed pieces they all knew. Thus jazz mined popular music creating an intersection of the two art forms. Aided and abetted by four very different featured guests, Feinstein illuminates by example, not narrative.
Harry Brooks Releases New Novel Featuring NFL, NYC and Hollywood
From the boardrooms in New York to Hollywood and behind the scenes in Las Vegas, meet bankers, politicians, con men and refuted mobsters in Harry Brooks' new novel Everybody Does Business. It is the larger than life, rollickingly funny, money-grubbing world of NFL wanna-be owners that Harry Brooks uses his poetic license on for this new must-read adventure on the cutting edge of modern American folklore in the making. Brooks' involving tale has brilliant proletarian appeal in its set of self-made characters battling in-bred American aristocracy for the attention of the great American public fascinated by big, husky men duking it out on the gridiron.
BWW Reviews: AIN'T MISBEHAVIN' at Clarksville's Roxy Regional Theatre
Where you could possibly find five more charming and engaging performers than the cast assembled by director/choreographer Ryan Bowie for his winning revival of Ain't Misbehavin' - now onstage through March 5 at Clarksville's Roxy Regional Theatre - is beyond me! These five dazzling entertainers deliver a musical jolt of electricity that completely enlivens the dark, frigid days of winter, taking audiences on a musical and historical journey through the Harlem Renaissance via the life and career of Mrs. Waller's bouncing 250-pound baby boy, Thomas - better known as 'Fats.'
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