Famous Musicians

The series of biographical sketches published by Brainard's Musical World between 1877 and 1889 is notable for the diversity of the musicians profiled and for the entertaining personal information provided. This period witnessed the establishment of musical institutions and attitudes toward music that have shaped American music to the present day. The biographies present a cross-section of American musicians in the late 19th century, including singers, instrumentalists, writers, teachers, and composers. Among the musicians included are some of America's most prominent conductors, such as Theodore Thomas and Leopold Damrosch; composers, such as John Knowles Paine and George F. Root; writers, such as John S. Dwight and Amy Fay; teachers, such as William Mason and Erminia Rudersdorff; and performers, such as Emma Abbott and Maud Powell. Scores of less familiar musicians who were also instrumental in shaping America's music are included as well. Originally intended for general readers, the biographical sketches,not only shed light on musical topics but also include personal information that is seldom found in a traditional dictionary and which speak to the attitudes and concerns of the late 19th century society.

Charles Mingus was one of the most innovative jazz musicians of the 20th Century, and ranks with Ives and Ellington as one of America's greatest composers. By temperament, he was a high-strung and sensitive romantic, a towering figure whose tempestuous personal life found powerfully coherent expression in the ever-shifting textures of his music. Now, acclaimed music critic Gene Santoro strips away the myths shrouding "Jazz's Angry Man," revealing Mingus as more complex than even his lovers and close friends knew. A pioneering bassist and composer, Mingus redefined jazz's terrain. He penned over 300 works spanning gutbucket gospel, Colombian cumbias, orchestral tone poems, multimedia performance, and chamber jazz. By the time he was 35, his growing body of music won increasing attention as it unfolded into one pioneering musical venture after another, from classical-meets-jazz extended pieces to spoken-word and dramatic performances and television and movie soundtracks. Though critics and musicians debated his musical merits and his personality, by the late 1950s he was widely recognized as a major jazz star, a bellwether whose combined grasp of tradition and feel for change poured his inventive creativity into new musical outlets. But Mingus got headlines less for his art than for his volatile and often provocative behavior, which drew fans who wanted to watch his temper suddenly flare onstage. Impromptu outbursts and speeches formed an integral part of his long-running jazz workshop, modeled partly on dramatic models like Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. Keeping up with the organized chaos of Mingus's art demanded gymnastic improvisational skills and openness from his musicians-which is why some of them called it "the Sweatshop." He hired and fired musicians on the bandstand, attacked a few musicians physically and many more verbally, twice threw Lionel Hampton's drummer off the stage, and routinely harangued chattering audiences, once chasing a table of inattentive patrons out of the FIVE SPOT with a meat cleaver. But the musical and mental challenges this volcanic man set his bands also nurtured deep loyalties. Key sidemen stayed with him for years and even decades. In this biography, Santoro probes the sore spots in Mingus's easily wounded nature that helped make him so explosive: his bullying father, his interracial background, his vulnerability to women and distrust of men, his views of political and social issues, his overwhelming need for love and acceptance. Of black, white, and Asian descent, Mingus made race a central issue in his life as well as a crucial aspect of his music, becoming an outspoken (and often misunderstood) critic of racial injustice. Santoro gives us a vivid portrait of Mingus's development, from the racially mixed Watts where he mingled with artists and writers as well as mobsters, union toughs, and pimps to the artistic ferment of postwar Greenwich Village, where he absorbed and extended the radical improvisation flowing through the work of Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Pollock, and Charlie Parker. Indeed, unlike Most jazz biographers, Santoro examines Mingus's extra-musical influences--from Orson Welles to Langston Hughes, Farwell Taylor, and Timothy Leary--and illuminates his achievement in the broader cultural context it demands. Written in a lively, novelistic style, Myself When I Am Real draws on dozens of new interviews and previously untapped letters and archival materials to explore the intricate connections between this extraordinary man and the extraordinary music he made.

A richly detailed & balanced portrait of the "King of the Blues."

As a composer, conductor, pianist and teacher, Leonard Bernstein managed to fit four lives into one. A nine-time Emmy winner, he composed both serious and popular music, including the well-known Broadway and movie hits, West Side Story and On the Town. C

Impeccably researched and written with a novelist's narrative mastery, this biography of the great conductor is a modern tragedy. Mitropoulos was a passionate advocate of difficult modern music and an early champion of Mahler; his emotionally charged performances brought the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra into the first rank of American orchestras. Generous and self-effacing, he was an innocent in the game of musical politics, unprepared for the intrigues and treachery in store when he became music director of the New York Philharmonic, "the orchestra that took no prisoners."

From his musical beginnings as a piano player in gambling houses and society cafes, Louis Horst (1884-1964) became one of the chief architects of modern dance in the twentieth century. Accepting a job as musical director for the Denishawn Dance Company in 1915, Horst set out on a remarkable career that would eventually embrace composing, theorizing, and teaching. He had an incalculable influence on many important dancers of the day, particularly Martha Graham, who was his student and intimate for decades. Horst's biography, recounted here in rich detail by Janet Mansfield Soares, constitutes a crucial and colorful chapter in the story of modern American culture. At the center of this story is Horst's relationship with Martha Graham. "I did everything for Martha", Horst said late in life. Indeed, as her lover, ally, and lifelong confidante, he worked with such conviction to make her the undisputed dance leader in the concert world that Graham herself would later remark: "Without him I could not have achieved,anything I have done". Drawing on the conversation and writings of Horst and his colleagues, Soares reveals the inner workings of this passionate commitment and places it firmly in the context of dance history. Horst emerges as a man of extraordinary personality and multifaceted talent. Soares shows how his dance scores, such as the one for Graham's Primitive Mysteries, became models for America's leading composers. She describes Horst's musical relationship with important figures such as Doris Humphrey and Helen Tamaris, as well as their German counterparts. She documents his founding and editing of the journal Dance Observer in an attempt to win recognition for American dance, anenterprise that established him as a leading critic of his time. Above all, Soares evokes Horst as a teacher. At the Neighborhood Playhouse, the Bennington School of Dance, the American Dance Festival, and Juilliard, he trans

Today, the saxophone is an emblem of "cool" and the instrument most closely associated with jazz. Yet not long ago it was derided as the "Siren of Satan," and it was largely ignored in the United States for well over half a century after its invention. When it was first widely heard, it was often viewed as a novelty noisemaker, not a real musical instrument. In only a few short years, however, saxophones appeared in music shops across America and became one of the most important instrumental voices. How did the saxophone get from comic to cool? Bandleader Tom Brown claimed that it was his saxophone sextet, the Six Brown Brothers, who inaugurated the craze. While this boast was perhaps more myth than reality, the group was indisputably one of the most famous musical acts on stage in the early twentieth century. Starting in traveling circuses, small-time vaudeville, and minstrel shows, the group trekked across the United States and Europe, bringing this new sound to the American public. Through their live performances and groundbreaking recordings--the first discs of a saxophone ensemble in general circulation--the Six Brown Brothers played a crucial role in making this new instrument familiar to and loved by a wide audience. In That Moaning Saxophone, author and cornet player Bruce Vermazen sifts fact from legend in this craze and tells the remarkable story of these six musical brothers--William, Tom, Alec, Percy, Vern, and Fred. Vermazen traces the brothers' path through minstrelsy, the circus, burlesque, vaudeville, and Broadway musical comedy. Cleverly weaving together biographical details and the context of the burgeoning entertainment business, the author draws fascinating portraits of the pre-jazz world of American popular music, the theatrical climate of the period, and the long, slow death of vaudeville. Delving into the career of one of the key popularizers of the saxophone, That Moaning Saxophone not only illuminates the history of this novel instrument, but also offers a witty and vivid portrayal of these forgotten musical worlds.