Music History – Old Magazine Articles

Duke Ellington: Twenty Years in the Spotlight (Click Magazine, 1943)

The top man in Negro music climbed on the bandwagon when he and his band played a hot spot called the Kentucky Club. That was twenty years ago, in New York City’s Harlem. This year, Duke Ellington (1899 – 1974) made another debut, at Carnegie Hall, goal of the great in music…Piano lessons bored Ellington when he was six years old. He never learned to play conventionally, but he was only a youngster when his flare for improvisation reaped attention and landed him a job in a Washington theater…one by one, his compositions hit the jackpot: ‘Mood Indigo’, ‘Sophisticated Lady’, ‘Ebony Rhapsody’, ‘Solitude’, ‘Caravan’.

Ellington calls his work Negro Music, avoids the terms ‘jazz’ or ‘swing’.

Duke Ellington: Twenty Years in the Spotlight (Click Magazine, 1943) Read More »

Eric Satie Goes After the Critics (Vanity Fair, 1921)

There is little doubt that the French Composer Eric Satie had wished that the bellyaching dilettantes who were charged with the task of writing music reviews for the Paris papers had spent more time in school in order that they might show greater erudition in their writings. However, Satie recognized that we can’t change the past and so he took his critics out to the woodshed with this column.

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Erik Satie and Les Six (Vanity Fair, 1921)

This article was written by Erik Satie as a salute to six unique French composers who had been working in Montparnasse during the previous years.

To me, the New Spirit seems a return to classic form with an admixture of modern sensibility. This modern sensibility you will discover in certain ones of the Six -George Autic (1899 – 1983), Francis Poulenc (1899 – 1963), Darius Milhaud (1892 – 1974)…

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‘Porgy & Bess” (Stage Magazine, 1935)

Music critic and scholar Isaac Goldberg (1887 – 1938) reviewed the opening performance of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess for the editors of STAGE MAGAZINE:

Why the Jew of the North should, in time, take up the song of the Southern Negro and fuse into a typically American product is an involved question. Perhaps, underneath the jazz rhythms and the general unconventionality of musical process lies the common history of an oppressed minority, and an ultimately Oriental origin. In any case, the human focus of this particular type of musical Americanism has been, from the very first notes, George Gershwin.

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George Gershwin: Tin Pan Alley and Beyond (Magazine of Art, 1937)

An interesting two page article about George Gershwin (1898 – 1937), written within days of his death and filled with fascinating bits about his career, education and his instant popularity:

The Gershwin invasion of Tin Pan Alley came at a time when history was being made. The Broadway-Negro tradition that stemmed from Stephen Foster and the anonymous tune-smiths who wrote old minstrel shows, was being carried on by bards like Paul Dresser, Harry von Tilzer, and the amazing Witmark family. Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin labored in the Alley cubicles. Something called ragtime was in the air and jazz was about to be born.

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Leonard Bernstein (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

This Leonard Bernstein (1918 – 1990) profile is a real page turner – briefly explaining in four and a half pages all that this composer and conductor had been up to during the first thirty-eight years of his very productive life. The article appeared on the newsstands during the earliest days of 1957, when he was partnered with Stephen Sondheim on West Side Story and mention is made of his numerous other collaborations with the likes of Jerome Robbins (Fancy Free),
Comden and Green (On the Town), and Lillian Hellman (Candide).

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What is Boogie-Woogie? (The Clipper, 1941)

A 1941 article by the screenwriting, piano playing novelist Eliot Paul (1891-1958) who put-forth a sincere effort to define that popular 1940s music known as Boogie-Woogie.

Paul went to great lengths explaining the roots of Boogie-Woogie, the origin of the term and the finest performers and composers of the music:

First, one can say that Boogie-Woogie is an authentic, soul-satisfying genre of piano music, native to America and for which America is indebted to the Negro people…If you ask Al Ammons (1907 — 1949), one of the foremost exponets of boogie-woogie, what boogie-woogie is, he would smile, his eyes would light up, and probably he would say:

‘Man! It scares you‘

-and it does. There are deep reasons why it tugs at our memories and slumbering instincts.

What is Boogie-Woogie? (The Clipper, 1941) Read More »

Remembering George Gershwin and ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ (Creative Art Magazine, 1937)

By clicking the blue title link above, you will be treated to a postmortem appraisal of the American composer George Gershwin (1898 – 1937). The article was written by one of his contemporaries; Gershwin is admired in this article, but not idolized:

No one could have been more surprised than George Gershwin at the furor the Rhapsody caused in highbrow circles. He had dashed it off in three weeks as an experiment in a form that he only vaguely understood. In no sense had he deliberately set out to make an honest woman out of jazz.

Remembering George Gershwin and ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ (Creative Art Magazine, 1937) Read More »

Glenn Miller (Coronet Magazine, 1954)

Ten years after the death of Big Band legend Glenn Miller (1904 – 1944), it was found that his record sales were going through the roof at 16,000,000 per annum, and Hollywood had attempted to cash-in on his memory by releasing a (bland) Technicolor bio-pic, appropriately titled, The Glenn Miller Story(Universal) – with Jimmy Stewart starring in the title roll. The band leader’s popularity was obvious to everyone in 1944, when he was killed in the war, but no one could have predicted this.

Glenn Miller (Coronet Magazine, 1954) Read More »

Ignaz Paderewski (Stage Magazine, 1939)

Here is an article on the last American concert tour of Polish pianist (and composer, diplomat and politician) Ignaz Jan Paderewski (1860 – 1941). The article concentrates on the amount of money pulled-in by the performer, both on this tour as well as previous ones; his legendary generosity and his monumental reputation.

Click here to read more about Paderewski and other pianists of 1915…

Click here to see what the first car radios look like.

Ignaz Paderewski (Stage Magazine, 1939) Read More »