From Broadway To 52nd Street
In the thirties one name was destined for stardom and it belonged to Ethel Waters. Growing up in a solitary and restless childhood in Philadelphia’s poor and violent 8th Ward, she quickly became distrustful of authority, wary of kindness or commitment but connected to the songs “her people” sang and the stories they carried with them. She began singing in black nightclubs and the on the Chitlin’ Circuit, belting out gutsy and raunchy songs delivered with impeccable diction.
Debuting on Broadway in an unsuccessful revue called Africana, she soon was playing Rhapsody in Black making an unprecedented $2500 a week. But it was a gig in Harlem’s Cotton Club in 1933 where she introduced a Harold Arlen/Ted Koehler tune Stormy Weather that brought her unique talents to a wider audience. Irving Berlin was in the audience and when he heard Ethel, he knew she was right for one of the bravest range of songs ever produced on Broadway.
A revue cleverly tied together by the device of pretending that each song and skit was derived from headlines in one imaginary newspaper, was the basis for a new musical, As Thousands Cheer. It opened on September 30, 1933 at the Music Box and held the stage for 400 consecutive performances.
But it was Irving Berlin who brought a vibrant and exciting young singer named Ethel Waters downtown from Harlem and centered two songs composed by Berlin that went on to establish themselves in jazz history. The first headline simply said “Heat Wave” in which a young woman starts a heat wave by letting her seat wave! The second headline read: Unknown Man Lynched By Frenzied Mob and behind Ethel Waters was the silhouette of a man with a rope around his neck hanging from a tree as she sang “Supper Time”.
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From Broadway To 52nd Street
The stage of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre opened its curtains on November 29, 1932 to the Gay Divorce. The musical starred once again Fred Astaire, this time in his last Broadway show, and teaming up with Claire Luce and Erik Rhodes. Although Gay Divorce ran for only 248 performances, Night and Day, composed by Cole Porter, emerged to become a jazz classic.
The Story: In this musical unfolds the story of a husband and wife who are having marital difficulties and in an effort to give her husband grounds for divorce, Mimi Pratt arranges to be caught with a paid co-respondent, by the name of Tonetti. But a young man named Guy falls for Mimi and manages to get himself confused with Tonetti; yet, amidst the confusion he pursues his courtship.
Broadway History: The theatre on Madison Square at the end of the 19th century was located at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue at W. 23rd Street. The Flatiron Building now occupies the site. By midway through the following decade, the street blazed with electric signs as each theatre announced its shows and stars in white lights. By the turn of the 20th century the street had an entirely different look with as many as sixteen theatres on Broadway itself and many others located on side streets or other avenues.
Broadway became much more than a mere twelve blocks. It started at 13th Street and wound its way a mile and a half up the avenue to 45th Street ending in the heart of Longacre Square. The first decade of the century also saw the construction of many theatres, most notably The New Amsterdam on 42nd Street in 1903 along with four others the same year that are still standing today. Longacre Square had the first moving electric signs and it was when the Times Building was erected in 1904 that Longacre Square ceased to exist. It was now known as Times Square.
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From Broadway To 52nd Street
The Band Wagon hit the stage on June 3, 1931 at the New Amsterdam featuring Frank Morgan, Helen Broderick and Fred and Adele Astaire in their 10th and final Broadway appearance together. This revue utilized for the first time on Broadway, a double revolving stage for both its musical numbers and sketches. Dancing In The Dark written and composed by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, remains a jazz standard.
The Story: The revue, which ran 260 performances, had Fred and Adele cast as two French children cavorting with hoops, riding a Bavarian merry-go-round and several other sketches.
Broadway History: Theater posters are probably as old as the idea of the poster, but they really blossomed as an art form during the Industrial Revolution, when lithographic printing was perfected and affordable. In Paris during the Belle Époque (1880-1914) such posters were everywhere, a feature of the city. It was then that theater posters first became popular as decoration and memorabilia at home. When color printing developed (chromolithography), poster artists became even more popular and individually famous – like artist Jules Cheret, whose beautiful poster-girls (literal pin-up girls) were called “Chèrettes.” More and more reputable artists started creating posters. Toulouse-Lautrec, for instance, created many famous ones – an important part of his career.
Since that heyday, artists have continued to experiment with posters, including posters for the stage. Posters are an interesting genre-blending fine art, illustration, graphic art, advertising, and typography – so poster design attracts artists from each of those fields, for a lively cross-pollination of styles and ideas. All of which make posters a particularly rich and exciting contemporary art form.
The poster is also a supremely timely and ephemeral art designed to be used this one time for this one show, making them a sort of limited-time-offer art. Added to posters’ artistic merit, their time-capsule quality and their commemoration of now vanished events (plus the inevitable rarity of a paper artifact surviving) make posters ideal collectibles.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joe Lee Wilson was born to farming parents on December 22, 1935 in Bristow, Oklahoma of African American and Creek Native American heritage. Attending a 1951 performance by Billie Holiday began his interest in a music-industry career. He studied in Los Angeles before touring the West Coast, where he sat in with Sarah Vaughan before heading down to Mexico. In New York in the 1960s, he worked with Sonny Rollins, Lee Morgan, Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders and Jackie McLean.
Wilson formed his band Joy of Jazz, to personify the life-affirming nature of jazz and blues. During the 1970s, Joe operated a jazz performance loft in New York’s NoHo district known as the Ladies’ Fort at 2 Bond Street. His regular band, Joe Lee Wilson Plus 5, featured alto saxophonist Monty Waters and Japanese guitarist Ryo Kawasaki, and hosted Archie Shepp and Eddie Jefferson as frequent collaborators.
Joe also sang with Eddie Jefferson, Freddie Hubbard and Kenny Dorham, recorded a 1972 live radio program at Columbia University’s WKCR-FM, which was released as an album, Livin’ High Off Nickels & Dimes, on the short-lived Oblivion Records. Wilson’s rendition of “Jazz Ain’t Nothing But Soul” was a radio hit on New York jazz radio in 1975.
While based in Paris, Tokyo, and the United Kingdom, he recorded regularly with the pianist Kirk Lightsey, and one of his last albums was an Italian recording with Riccardo Arrighini and Gianni Basso, Ballads for Trane.
Joe Lee Wilson was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in November 2010, where he gave his last public performance. The baritone gospel-influenced jazz singer, best recognized on several Archie Shepp albums, passed away on July 17, 2011 leaving behind a short but relevant discography.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Rita Reys was born into an artistic family as Maria Everdina Reijs on December 21, 1924 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. She grew up listening to classical music and as a teenager entered and won many local talent competitions.
In 1943, Rita met her first husband, jazz drummer Wessel Iicken, who introduced her to the jazz scene. Forming Rita Reys & The Wessel Ilcken Sextet, she regularly performed at the Sheherezade jazz club in Amsterdam and as her reputation grew began to tour and perform around Europe and Africa between 1945 and 1950.
In 1950, the then Rita Reys Sextet celebrated continued success in The Netherlands, played American army bases and dance clubs in England, and settled in Stockholm, the city known as the jazz center of Europe in the early Fifties. She made her first recordings there for the Artist record label, would follow up with a session with Ove Lind, and others such as Quincy Jones, Clifford Brown, Art Farmer. She would go on to meet Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson and Lester Young.
Reys accepted an invitation by Columbia record producer George Avakian to visit the United States and after arrival recorded The Cool Voice of Rita Reys with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers featuring Horace Silver, Hank Mobley and Donald Byrd. She had a swinging quality of her phrasing that opened the doors of the Village Vanguard for several performances. She has performed with Oscar Pettiford, Zoot Sims, Clark Terry, Herbie Mann, Milt Hinton, Osie Johnson, Jimmy Smith and Lester Young to name a few luminaries.
Vocalist Rita Reys has won France’s Juan Les Pins Jazz Festival; in 1969 she was the first Dutch jazz singer to perform at the New Orleans Jazz Festival, became a Citizen of Honor of New Orleans in 1980, won the Edison Award, the Bird award and has eight gold records.
Throughout the next three decades she would continue to perform, record and tour, returning to the Great American Songbook, paid tribute to George Gershwin and Antonio Carlos Jobim, has published her life story Rita Reys, Lady Jazz, has recorded nearly four-dozen albums since 1957, perform at festivals around the world and was named Europe’s First Lady of Jazz, a title she carries to this day. Vocalist Rita Reys passed away on July 28, 2013 in Breukelen, Netherlands.
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