Author: George Gershwin Publisher: Faber & Faber ISBN: 9780571526772 Category : Motion picture music Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
A terrific collection of songs by George Gershwin that the composer has arranged as piano solos. Ideal for the intermediate pianist and a great insight into the mind of one America's greatest composers. Titles: The Man I Love * I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise * Do It Again * Fascinating Rhythm * Oh, Lady Be Good * Somebody Loves Me * Sweet and Low Down * Clap Yo' Hands * Do Do Do * My One and Only * 'S Wonderful * Strike Up the Band * I Got Rhythm * Who Cares? * That Certain Feeling * Liza
Author: Howard Pollack Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520933141 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 938
Book Description
This comprehensive biography of George Gershwin (1898-1937) unravels the myths surrounding one of America's most celebrated composers and establishes the enduring value of his music. Gershwin created some of the most beloved music of the twentieth century and, along with Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter, helped make the golden age of Broadway golden. Howard Pollack draws from a wealth of sketches, manuscripts, letters, interviews, books, articles, recordings, films, and other materials—including a large cache of Gershwin scores discovered in a Warner Brothers warehouse in 1982—to create an expansive chronicle of Gershwin’s meteoric rise to fame. He also traces Gershwin’s powerful presence that, even today, extends from Broadway, jazz clubs, and film scores to symphony halls and opera houses. Pollack’s lively narrative describes Gershwin’s family, childhood, and education; his early career as a pianist; his friendships and romantic life; his relation to various musical trends; his writings on music; his working methods; and his tragic death at the age of 38. Unlike Kern, Berlin, and Porter, who mostly worked within the confines of Broadway and Hollywood, Gershwin actively sought to cross the boundaries between high and low, and wrote works that crossed over into a realm where art music, jazz, and Broadway met and merged. The author surveys Gershwin’s entire oeuvre, from his first surviving compositions to the melodies that his brother and principal collaborator, Ira Gershwin, lyricized after his death. Pollack concludes with an exploration of the performances and critical reception of Gershwin's music over the years, from his time to ours.
Author: Walter Rimler Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 9780252081293 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
George Gershwin lived with purpose and gusto, but with melancholy as well, for he was unable to make a place for himself--no family of his own and no real home in music. He and his siblings received little love from their mother and no direction from their father. Older brother and lyricist Ira managed to create a home when he married Leonore Strunsky, a hard-edged woman who lived for wealth and status. The closest George came to domesticity was through his longtime relationship with Kay Swift. She was his lover, musical confidante, and fellow composer. But she remained married to another man while he went endlessly from woman to woman. Only in the final hours of his life, when they were separated by a continent, did he realize how much he needed her. Fatally ill, unprotected by (and perhaps estranged from) Ira, he was exiled by Leonore from the house she and the brothers shared, and he died horribly and alone at the age of thirty-eight. Nor was Gershwin able to find a satisfying musical harbor. For years his songwriting genius could be expressed only in the ephemeral world of show business, as his brilliance as a composer of large-scale works went unrecognized by highbrow music critics. When he resolved this quandary with his opera Porgy and Bess, the critics were unable to understand or validate it. Decades would pass before this, his most ambitious composition, was universally regarded as one of music's lasting treasures and before his stature as a great composer became secure. In George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait, Walter Rimler makes use of fresh sources, including newly discovered letters by Kay Swift as well as correspondence between and interviews with intimates of Ira and Leonore Gershwin. It is written with spirited prose and contains more than two dozen photographs.
Author: Michael Feinstein Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1451645309 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 326
Book Description
Michael Feinstein was just 20 years old when he got the chance of a lifetime: a job with his hero, Ira Gershwin. During their six-year partnership, Feinstein blossomed under Gershwin's mentorship and Gershwin was reinvigorated by the younger man's zeal. Now, in The Gershwins and Me, Michael Feinstein shares unforgettable stories and reminiscences from the music that defined American popular song, along with rare Gershwin memorabilia he's collected through the years. Includes an accompanying CD packed with Feinstein's original recordings of 12 Gershwins' songs.
Author: Anna Harwell Celenza Publisher: Charlesbridge ISBN: 1607340372 Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 34
Book Description
George Gershwin only has a few weeks to compose a concerto. His piece is supposed to exemplify American music and premiere at a concert entitled "An Experiment in Modern Music." Homesick for New York while rehearsing for a musical in Boston, he soon realizes that American music is much like its people, a great melting pot of sounds, rhythms, and harmonies. JoAnn Kitchel's illustrations capture the 1920s in all their art deco majesty.
Author: Salman Ahmad Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1416597697 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
"The story you are about to read is the story of a light-bringer....Salman Ahmad inspires me to reach always for the greatest heights and never to fear....Know that his story is a part of our history." -- Melissa Etheridge, from the Introduction With 30 million record sales under his belt, and with fans including Bono and Al Gore, Pakistanborn Salman Ahmad is renowned for being the first rock & roll star to destroy the wall that divides the West and the Muslim world. Rock & Roll Jihad is the story of his incredible journey. Facing down angry mullahs and oppressive dictators who wanted all music to be banned from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Salman Ahmad rocketed to the top of the music charts, bringing Westernstyle rock and pop to Pakistani teenagers for the first time. His band Junoon became the U2 of Asia, a sufi - rock group that broke boundaries and sold a record number of albums. But Salman's story began in New York, where he spent his teen years learning to play guitar, listening to Led Zeppelin, hanging out at rock clubs and Beatles Fests, making American friends, and dreaming of rock-star fame. That dream seemed destined to die when his family returned to Pakistan and Salman was forced to follow the strictures of a newly religious -- and stratified -- society. He finished medical school, met his soul mate, and watched his beloved funkytown of Lahore transform with the rest of Pakistan under the rule of Zia into a fundamentalist dictatorship: morality police arrested couples holding hands in public, Little House on the Prairie and Live Aid were banned from television broadcasts, and Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers proliferated on college campuses via the Afghani resistance to Soviet occupation in the north. Undeterred, the teenage Salman created his own underground jihad: his mission was to bring his beloved rock music to an enthusiastic new audience in South Asia and beyond. He started a traveling guitar club that met in private Lahore spaces, mixing Urdu love poems with Casio synthesizers, tablas with Fender Stratocasters, and ragas with power chords, eventually joining his first pop band, Vital Signs. Later, he founded Junoon, South Asia's biggest rock band, which was followed to every corner of the world by a loyal legion of fans called Junoonis. As his music climbed the charts, Salman found himself the target of religious fanatics and power-mad politicians desperate to take him and his band down. But in the center of a new generation of young Pakistanis who go to mosques as well as McDonald's, whose religion gives them compassion for and not fear of the West, and who see modern music as a "rainbow bridge" that links their lives to the rest of the world, nothing could stop Salman's star from rising. Today, Salman continues to play music and is also a UNAIDS Goodwill Ambassador, traveling the world as a spokesperson and using the lessons he learned as a musical pioneer to help heal the wounds between East and West -- lessons he shares in this illuminating memoir.
Author: Richard Perry Publisher: ISBN: 9781952106330 Category : Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
Anyone who feels a connection to the best music of the last fifty years-and who doesn't?-will revel in this uniquely American success story. Even at a young age, Richard Perry knew that his destiny was to bring music into people's lives. What he couldn't have dreamed was that his meteoric rise through the ranks of the music business would result in successful, ground-breaking, and award-winning collaborations with . . . Rod Stewart Ray Charles Barbra Streisand Ringo Starr The Pointer Sisters Carly Simon Diana Ross Ella Fitzgerald And many others, all of whom trusted him to shape the sound that made them great. In spite of Perry's numerous successes, he has had to overcome many adversities. After contracting Polio at the age of twelve, he wasn't expected to walk again. But Perry proved doctors wrong by excelling as a very successful high jumper on his track and field team. Forty-eight years later in 2003, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, and even though there is no known cure, he has continued to work and write. In this candid and page-turning memoir, Perry transports us through his eventful life, from his childhood in Brooklyn, where he played in bands, starred in musicals, and witnessed the birth of rock 'n' roll; through his sometimes rocky but always thrilling climb up the music-business ladder; and finally, into the studios and personal lives of the many superstars who provide our most enduring soundtrack. Throughout his story, Perry remains entertaining and fun-loving company, always awed by his own proximity to greatness and boundlessly enthusiastic about his contributions to our most beloved art form.
Author: Roy Decarava Publisher: Phaidon Press ISBN: 9780714841236 Category : Photography Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
This is the long-awaited publication of a moving masterwork by one of the greatest photographers of our time. Conceived, designed, written and made by hand as a prototype by master photographer Roy DeCarava (b.1919) in the early 1960s, yet unpublished for nearly half a century, The Sound I Saw has largely existed as a legend among the cognoscenti of the photography world. Presented as a stream of 196 soulful images interspersed with DeCarava's own evocative poetry, the book is, in its form and effect, the printed equivalent of jazz. "This is a book about people, about jazz, and about things. The work between its covers tries to present images for the head and for the heart and, like its subject matter, is particular, subjective, and individual," writes the author. DeCarava is a life-long New Yorker who from his immediate world creates images that transcend the specific to depict universal themes of joy, anticipation, pain and survival. Largely unpublished, he was first recognized for his images of daily life in Harlem (the subject of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, his 1955 collaboration with Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes) and portraits of musicians like Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. It is these two themes, Harlem and jazz, interwoven and inseparable, that are the ostensible subject of the book. However, the seemingly casual yet deeply felt compositions and the deep, rich tones of DeCarava's photographs stir emotions that resonate far beyond one neighbourhood and one era.
Author: George Gershwin
Author: Howard Pollack
Author: Walter Rimler
Author: Michael Feinstein
Author: Anna Harwell Celenza
Author: Salman Ahmad
Author: Richard Perry
Author: Roy Decarava
Author: Wikipedia contributors
Author: Ivy Press