Podcasts about Louis Moreau Gottschalk

durée : 00:25:13 - Louis-Moreau Gottschalk, compositeur et voyageur - par : Anne-Charlotte Rémond - Compositeur atypique, l'Américain Gottschalk (1829-1869) passa autant de temps en Europe et dans les Antilles qu'aux États-Unis. Influencé par la musique de tous ces différents pays, il composa des pièces (notamment pour piano) d'une modernité étonnante dans leurs couleurs et rythmes. - réalisé par : Philippe Petit

Interview with Louis Michot, fiddler, songwriter, and lead vocalist for Grammy winners Lost Bayou Ramblers on his debut solo album Rêve du Troubadour. Rêve du Troubadour came from long months during the first years of the pandemic of Michot documenting musical ideas in his backyard a dry-docked houseboat named “Sister Ray, given to Louis by Korey Richey of LCD Soundsystem. Sometimes, waking up at 4AM, he'd have his parts nailed down before daylight. While recording, MIchot kept a pair of stereo mics live outside Sister Ray to capture the sounds of birds and insects; as the bird and bug population would change throughout the days and seasons, each song wound up with a unique environmental seasoning. More tracks were then added at Nina Highway Studios, a short walk from Michot's house, by Louis, his rhythm section and various guest musicians. The final track sequence is highly diverse. There are songs that incorporate poetic rapping to hand-laid beats, updates of vintage Acadiana, environment soundscapes, acoustic guitar driven ballads, and even Michot's interpretation of a seminal work by 19th-century Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. But they're all tied together beautifully by Louisiana French language and Louis' vivid storytelling throughout. Louis's Info

SynopsisIn the 1950s, if you said the words “Cuban music,” perhaps Desi Arnez, a.k.a. Ricky Ricardo, singing Babaloo might come to mind. These days, it's more likely the Buena Vista Social Club.On today's date back in 1932, George Gershwin had Cuban music on his mind when the New York Philharmonic premiered his Cuban Overture under its original title Rumba. Cuban dance music has always proved appealing to North American composers and long before Gershwin, the 19th century piano virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk toured Cuba and imitated some of the sounds and rhythms he heard there in his original works.In the early 1940s, a young hay fever sufferer named Leonard Bernstein escaped the New England pollen of Tanglewood for a time in Key West. There he was inspired by the Latin dance bands he heard on radio Havana to write a jaunty, little Cuban-style dance of his own that would resurface some 15 years later as the song America in Bernstein's hit musical, West Side Story.And in 1990, American composer Michael Daughterty composed his orchestral conga line entitled Desi—a symphonic tribute to Cuban bandleader Desi Arnez, in his pop icon role of, who else, Ricky Ricardo.Music Played in Today's ProgramGeorge Gershwin (1898 – 1937) Cuban Overture New York Philharmonic; Zubin Mehta, conductor. Teldec 46318Michael Daugherty (b. 1954) Desi! Baltimore Symphony; David Zinman, conductor. Argo 444 454

Hosts Nate Wilcox welcomes back Ned Sublette to continue the discussion about his book "Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo." This episode looks at Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the most popular and important 19th Century American composer who connected New Orleans to Havana. Buy the book and support the show. CHECK OUT THE NEW LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Louis Moreau Gottschalk - A Night in the Tropics: Festa CriollaHot Springs Music Festival Symphony OrchestraRichard Rosenberg, conductorMore info about today's track: Naxos 8.559036Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc.SubscribeYou can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, or by using the Daily Download podcast RSS feed.Purchase this recordingAmazon

La Session Live reçoit 2 trompettistes, Erik Truffaz et Yohan Giaume. Le premier rend hommage au cinéma avec des réinterprétations de Nino Rota, Michel Magne, Ennio Morricone ou Miles Davis. Le second est immergé dans la Nouvelle-Orléans du XIXème siècle pour discuter avec Louis Moreau Gottschalk, pianiste romantique louisianais. Pour son grand retour sur le label Blue Note, le trompettiste Erik Truffaz, figure incontournable de la scène européenne, révélé au grand public avec le succès crossover du diptyque The Dawn / Bending New Corners à la fin des années 1990, revisite quelques grands thèmes du cinéma signés Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, Michel Magne ou… Miles Davis, avec une élégance rare. Avec les voix de Sandrine Bonnaire et Camélia Jordana.Pour Rollin', Truffaz et son acolyte de presque toujours, Marcello Giuliani (qui coproduisent l'album, autant dire qu'ils le réalisent ensemble), ont d'abord couché sur papier un générique idéal. C'est un des trucs qui frappe dans la carrière de Truffaz, ce sens du casting - ne pas économiser sur les seconds rôles. Chacun de ses disques compose une troupe digne des Marvels, super-héros des textures et des carambolages esthétiques. Ici, en plus de la basse de Giuliani, qui s'en remet à l'acoustique, le groupe s'étoffe des anciens fûts de Raphaël Chassin, des claviers minés d'Alexis Anérilles et de la guitare monkienne de Matthis Pascaud. C'est ce gang très exactement qui descend en ville, qui réarrange le portrait à une collection de musiques photogéniques.Titres interprétés dans le grand studio- Quel temps fait-il à Paris ? (Les vacances de M. Hulot) Live RFI- One Silver Dollar (Camelia Jordana) César et Rosalie (Sandrine Bonnaire), extraits de l'album Rollin'- La Strada Live RFI.Line Up : Erik Truffaz, trompette, Matthis Pascaud, guitare et Alexis Anerilles, piano.Son : Benoît Letirant & Mathias Taylor.► Album Rollin' (Blue Note 2023).Puis nous recevons un autre trompettiste Yohan Giaume pour son nouveau projet Whisper of a Shadow une conversation musicale avec Louis Moreau Gottschalk, une exploration créative de la Nouvelle-Orléans du XIXème siècle.Whisper of a Shadow Opus 1 est le premier d'une série d'albums, l'aboutissement de l'exploration musicale du compositeur et trompettiste Yohan Giaume revisitant les liens musicaux entre l'Europe, l'Afrique et l'Amérique. S'inspirant du voyage du compositeur et pianiste romantique louisianais Louis Moreau Gottschalk, l'album est construit comme une conversation imaginée entre 2 compositeurs - Gottschalk, un Louisianais d'origine créole et le Français Yohan Giaume - représentant 2 époques et 2 cultures différentes. Yohan Giaume est, par ailleurs, ethnomusicologue.Titres interprétés au grand studio à RFI- Mascarade Live RFI- La Savane, ballade créole, Louis Moreau Gottschalk- Lez African A Lé, extrait de l'album Whisper of a Shadow- Winter in America, Gil Scott Heron- The Promise of Dawn Live RFI.Line Up : Yohan Giaume, trompette, composition, Evan Christopher, clarinette, Roland Guerin, contrebasse, Chuck Perkins, vocal, Guillaume Nouaux, batterie, Tristan Liehr, violon, Louis-Jean Perreau, violon, Emmanuel François, alto, Thomas Ravez, violoncelle.Son : Jérémie Besset, Mathias Taylor.► Album Whisper of a shadow (Life Celebration Project 2023).

Synopsis In 1863, the price of The New York Times was three cents, and many plunked down their pennies to read front-page news about “the rebellion”—what we now call the Civil War. But if you were a music aficionado back in 1863, the Times “Amusements” page noted that one of Verdi's newest operas, Un Ballo in Maschera, had just closed at the Academy of Music, and the contemporary composer-pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk had given a concert of his latest works the day before.After all that “modern” music, maybe you were in the mood for some really OLD music. The enterprising duo of William Mason and Theodore Thomas was offering a Soiree of Chamber Music at Dodworth's Hall on April 21, 1863, and their program included the first public performance in America of the Concerto in C Major for Two Keyboards and Strings by J.S. Bach. Now this was really old stuff— predating the birth of America in 1776 by a good 50 years! The Times did not review this Bach premiere, but the next documented American performance in Boston in 1877 was described in Dwight's Journal as a “cheerful, lightsome, everyday sort of composition …  full of vigor and life, the best of tonics.” Music Played in Today's Program J.S. Bach (1650 - 1721) Concerto in C for Two Keyboards

Synopsis Early in April in the year 1845, a 15-year old American pianist named Louis Moreau Gottschalk performed at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. On the program was Chopin's Piano Concerto in E minor, and Chopin happened to be in the audience and congratulated the young American on his performance. What exactly Chopin said depends on whom you asked. Gottschalk's first biographer claims it was, “Very good, my child, let me shake your hand,” while Gottschalk's sister insists it was, “I predict you will become the king of pianists!” In 1845, Parisian society was curious about anything American after experiencing other exotic exports from the New World, including P.T. Barnum's circus and George Catlin's paintings of Native American life. Anything American was definitely “hip.” Four years later, on today's date in 1849, Gottschalk returned to the Salle Pleyel, this time performing some of his own compositions, including a work entitled Bamboula, after the name of a deep-voiced Afro-Caribbean drum. The Parisian audiences had never heard anything like it and gave him a standing ovation. Gottschalk was born in New Orleans and was exposed from childhood to Cuban and Haitian music and went on to write original works which anticipate both the rhythms and colors of American jazz. Music Played in Today's Program Frederic Chopin (1810 – 1849) Piano Concerto No. 1 Krystian Zimerman, piano; Polish Festival Orchestra DG 459 684 Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829 – 1869) Bamboula Alan Feinberg, piano Argo 444 457

A cura di Carlo Centemeri. Mentre Salgari e Verne raccontavano mondi esotici che non avevano ai visto, l'Europa si divideva tra autori che ricordavano le origini, musicisti che provenivano da lontano (e venivano guardati con sospetto) e compositori europei che si inventavano mondi remotii scatenando l'immaginazione. Con musiche di Sergei Prokofiev, Darius Milhaud, Manuel De Falla, Alexandre Borodin, Alberto Nepomuceno, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Carlos Chavez

Synopsis Today is Bastille Day, and on today's date in 1900, the Opera-Comique in Paris premiered a patriotic opera entitled “La Marseillaise,” which melodramatically depicted how, on a spring night during the French Revolution, Rouget de l'Isle supposedly wrote the words AND music for the song which later became the French National Anthem. The opera has been long forgotten, but its composer, the French-born Lucien-Leon-Guillaume Lambert, JUNIOR – alongside his father, the American-born composer Charles-Lucien Lambert, SENIOR – is getting some renewed attention. Both are included in a landmark new reference work: The International Dictionary of Black Composers, published by the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College in Chicago. The elder Lambert was born in New Orleans around 1828, and was a contemporary and friendly rival of the famous piano virtuoso and composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The elder Lambert settled in Brazil, and enjoyed an international career in both Brazil and France, performing and publishing his piano dances and salon pieces, and often appearing in concert with his son. Lucien Lambert, Jr. was born in France in 1858, and studied with Jules Massenet, among others. He won the prestigious Concours Rossini competition, and enjoyed a productive career in France and Portugal, composing ballets, concertos, and several operas – including the one that premiered in Paris on today's date in 1900. He died in Portugal in 1945. Music Played in Today's Program Roger de Lisle (1760-1836) – La Marseillaise (Detroit Symphony; Paul Paray, cond.) Mercury 434 332 Lucien Lambert, Jr. (1858-1945) – Brocéliande Overture (Hot Springs Music Festival; Richard Rosenberg, cond.) Naxos 8.559 037

durée : 00:58:22 - Le Louisianais Louis Moreau Gottschalk à Cuba - par : Marcel Quillévéré - Nous partons sur les traces du compositeur louisianais Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) à Cuba. Gottschalk est, sans conteste, le premier compositeur panaméricain de l'histoire car il a chanté toutes les Amériques, du Nord à la Terre de feu !

Schule, erster Kuss oder ABBA - lass uns gemeinsam in Erinnerungen an besondere Orte, Menschen oder Melodien schwelgen. Diese Musikstücke hast Du in der Folge gehört: Clannad - "Robin (The Hooded Man)" // Tschaikowski - "Souvenir de une lieu chere" // Louis Moreau Gottschalk - "Souvenir de Cuba" // ABBA - "Don't Shut Me Down" // Marie Jaell - "Feuillet D'album" // Greif mit Philipp nach den Sternen: Am 1. Oktober im Planetarium Wolfsburg in einer Sonderausgabe. Du möchtest live dabei sein und Dir ein galaktisches Musikstück wünschen? Dann schicke eine Mail an: playlist@ndr.de"

durée : 00:25:13 - Louis-Moreau Gottschalk, compositeur et voyageur - par : Anne-Charlotte Rémond - Compositeur atypique, l'Américain Gottschalk (1829-1869) passa autant de temps en Europe et dans les Antilles qu'aux États-Unis. Influencé par la musique de tous ces différents pays, il composa des pièces (notamment pour piano) d'une modernité étonnante dans leurs couleurs et rythmes. - réalisé par : Philippe Petit

Synopsis Stephen Sondheim was 32 years old when his musical “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” opened on Broadway on today’s date in 1962. The best seats would have cost you $8.60, but decent tickets were available for three bucks in those days–and, much to Sondheim’s relief, New Yorkers snapped them up in short order. The trial run of “Forum” in Washington had been a near disaster, and, as this was the first major musical for which Sondheim wrote both the lyrics and the music, he had a lot riding on the show’s success. Audiences and critics alike loved the over-the-top fusion of an ancient Roman comedy by Plautus with the kick-in-the-pants conventions of American Vaudeville, spiced up with a liberal dash of Burlesque beauties in skimpy Roman costumes. As the NY Times review put it, the cast included six courtesans who “are not obliged to do much, but have a great deal to show.” “Forum” won several Tony Awards in 1962, including “Best Musical.” Even so, while Sondheim’s lyrics were praised, his music was barely mentioned: Sondheim’s skill as a composer not yet fully appreciated. that would occur several years, and several shows, later. Music Played in Today's Program Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930) A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum 1996 Broadway Cast Angel 52223 On This Day Births 1745 - Baptismal date of Bohemian violinist and composer Carl Philipp Stamitz, in Mannheim; He was the son of the composer JohannWenzel Anton Stamitz (b. 1717), and the brother of composer Johann Anton Stamitz (b. 1750); 1829 - American pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, in New Orleans; 1945 - American pianist and composer Keith Jarrett, in Allentown, Pa.; Deaths 1829 - Italian composer and guitar virtuoso Mauro Giuliani, age 47, in Naples; 1944 - British composer and women's rights advocate Dame Ethel Smyth, age 86, in Woking; 1960 - Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén, age 88, in Falun; Premieres 1720 - Handel: opera "Radamisto" (1st version) (Julian date: April 27); 1736 - Handel: anthem "Sing unto God" (Julian date: April 27); 1749 - Handel: "Music for the Royal Fireworks" (Julian date: April 27); 1924 - Honegger: "Pacific 231," in Paris at a Koussevitzky Concert; 1938 - Stravinsky: "Dumbarton Oaks" Concerto, at Dumbarton Oaks, conducted by Nadia Boulanger; 1939 - Persichetti: Piano Sonata No. 1, at Philadelphia Conservatory, composer performing; 1946 - Menotti: "The Medium," at Columbia University in New York City; 1958 - Ligeti: String Quartet No. 1 ("Metamorphoses nocturnes"), in Vienna, by the Ramor Quartet; 1962 - Sondheim: Broadway premiere of musical "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum"; Near-disasterous trial run performances in Washington DC and other cities preceded the show's Broadway premiere; This was the first major musical for which Sondheim wrote both the lyrics and the music; It won several Tony Awards in 1962, including "Best Musical"; 1965 - Rochberg: "Zodiac" (orchestral version), by Cincinnati Symphony, Max Rudolf conducting; 1970 - Gunther Schuller: children's opera "The Fisherman and His Wife," in Boston; 1973 - Rochberg: "Imago Mundi," by Baltimore Symphony, Sergiu Commisiona conducting; 1979 - Andrew Lloyd-Webber: musical "Evita," in Los Angeles; The musical opened on Broadway on September 25, 1979; 1985 - Frank Zappa: "Time's Beach" for winds, at Alice Tully Hall in New York, by the Aspen Wind Quintet; 1996 - Lowell Liebermann: opera "The Picture of Dorian Gray," at the Monte Carlo Opera, with tenor Jeffrey Lentz in the title role and Steuart Bedford conducting; The American premiere of this opera was staged in Milwaukee, Wis., by the Florentine Opera in Feb. of 1999; 1998 - Saariaho: Cello Octet, at the Beauvais Cello Festival in Beavais, France; Others 1747 - J.S. Bach performs an organ recital at the Heiligeistkirche in Potsdam; 1821 - Earliest documented American performance Beethoven's Symphony No. 2, in Philadelphia at Washington Hall, by the Musical Fund Society, Charles Hupfeld conducting; The finale only was performed by the Philharmonic Society in New York on December 16, 1824 and repeated at Castle Garden on April 21, 1825; The first complete performance in New York was apparently given on April 22, 1843, at the Apollo Room during the first season of the New York Philharmonic with George Loder conducting; 1874 - American premiere of J.S. Bach's "St. Matthew Passion," at the Music Hall in Boston, by the Handel and Haydn Society, Carl Zerrahn conducting; The performing forces included a chorus of 600, and orchestra of 90, and a 60-voice boy's choir; For this performance, the first 12 numbers of Part II were omitted; The complete Passion was not performed by the Society until 1879; About half of Bach's Passion was given its New York City premiere at St. George's Church on March 17, 1880, by the New York Oratorio Society under Leopold Damrosch; Theodore Thomas conducted the next documented performance in Cincinnati on May 17, 1882, during that city's May Festival; 1945 - Aaron Copland's Pulitzer Prize for Music for his "Appalachian Spring" ballet score is announced on V-E Day (the day the Allied Forces won the war in Europe). Links and Resources On Sondheim

Synopsis Stephen Sondheim was 32 years old when his musical “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” opened on Broadway on today’s date in 1962. The best seats would have cost you $8.60, but decent tickets were available for three bucks in those days–and, much to Sondheim’s relief, New Yorkers snapped them up in short order. The trial run of “Forum” in Washington had been a near disaster, and, as this was the first major musical for which Sondheim wrote both the lyrics and the music, he had a lot riding on the show’s success. Audiences and critics alike loved the over-the-top fusion of an ancient Roman comedy by Plautus with the kick-in-the-pants conventions of American Vaudeville, spiced up with a liberal dash of Burlesque beauties in skimpy Roman costumes. As the NY Times review put it, the cast included six courtesans who “are not obliged to do much, but have a great deal to show.” “Forum” won several Tony Awards in 1962, including “Best Musical.” Even so, while Sondheim’s lyrics were praised, his music was barely mentioned: Sondheim’s skill as a composer not yet fully appreciated. that would occur several years, and several shows, later. Music Played in Today's Program Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930) A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum 1996 Broadway Cast Angel 52223 On This Day Births 1745 - Baptismal date of Bohemian violinist and composer Carl Philipp Stamitz, in Mannheim; He was the son of the composer JohannWenzel Anton Stamitz (b. 1717), and the brother of composer Johann Anton Stamitz (b. 1750); 1829 - American pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, in New Orleans; 1945 - American pianist and composer Keith Jarrett, in Allentown, Pa.; Deaths 1829 - Italian composer and guitar virtuoso Mauro Giuliani, age 47, in Naples; 1944 - British composer and women's rights advocate Dame Ethel Smyth, age 86, in Woking; 1960 - Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén, age 88, in Falun; Premieres 1720 - Handel: opera "Radamisto" (1st version) (Julian date: April 27); 1736 - Handel: anthem "Sing unto God" (Julian date: April 27); 1749 - Handel: "Music for the Royal Fireworks" (Julian date: April 27); 1924 - Honegger: "Pacific 231," in Paris at a Koussevitzky Concert; 1938 - Stravinsky: "Dumbarton Oaks" Concerto, at Dumbarton Oaks, conducted by Nadia Boulanger; 1939 - Persichetti: Piano Sonata No. 1, at Philadelphia Conservatory, composer performing; 1946 - Menotti: "The Medium," at Columbia University in New York City; 1958 - Ligeti: String Quartet No. 1 ("Metamorphoses nocturnes"), in Vienna, by the Ramor Quartet; 1962 - Sondheim: Broadway premiere of musical "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum"; Near-disasterous trial run performances in Washington DC and other cities preceded the show's Broadway premiere; This was the first major musical for which Sondheim wrote both the lyrics and the music; It won several Tony Awards in 1962, including "Best Musical"; 1965 - Rochberg: "Zodiac" (orchestral version), by Cincinnati Symphony, Max Rudolf conducting; 1970 - Gunther Schuller: children's opera "The Fisherman and His Wife," in Boston; 1973 - Rochberg: "Imago Mundi," by Baltimore Symphony, Sergiu Commisiona conducting; 1979 - Andrew Lloyd-Webber: musical "Evita," in Los Angeles; The musical opened on Broadway on September 25, 1979; 1985 - Frank Zappa: "Time's Beach" for winds, at Alice Tully Hall in New York, by the Aspen Wind Quintet; 1996 - Lowell Liebermann: opera "The Picture of Dorian Gray," at the Monte Carlo Opera, with tenor Jeffrey Lentz in the title role and Steuart Bedford conducting; The American premiere of this opera was staged in Milwaukee, Wis., by the Florentine Opera in Feb. of 1999; 1998 - Saariaho: Cello Octet, at the Beauvais Cello Festival in Beavais, France; Others 1747 - J.S. Bach performs an organ recital at the Heiligeistkirche in Potsdam; 1821 - Earliest documented American performance Beethoven's Symphony No. 2, in Philadelphia at Washington Hall, by the Musical Fund Society, Charles Hupfeld conducting; The finale only was performed by the Philharmonic Society in New York on December 16, 1824 and repeated at Castle Garden on April 21, 1825; The first complete performance in New York was apparently given on April 22, 1843, at the Apollo Room during the first season of the New York Philharmonic with George Loder conducting; 1874 - American premiere of J.S. Bach's "St. Matthew Passion," at the Music Hall in Boston, by the Handel and Haydn Society, Carl Zerrahn conducting; The performing forces included a chorus of 600, and orchestra of 90, and a 60-voice boy's choir; For this performance, the first 12 numbers of Part II were omitted; The complete Passion was not performed by the Society until 1879; About half of Bach's Passion was given its New York City premiere at St. George's Church on March 17, 1880, by the New York Oratorio Society under Leopold Damrosch; Theodore Thomas conducted the next documented performance in Cincinnati on May 17, 1882, during that city's May Festival; 1945 - Aaron Copland's Pulitzer Prize for Music for his "Appalachian Spring" ballet score is announced on V-E Day (the day the Allied Forces won the war in Europe). Links and Resources On Sondheim

durée : 00:53:51 - Yohan Giaume - par : Alex Dutilh - Le compositeur et trompettiste Yohan Giaume débute son carnet de voyage musical par une exploration créative de la Nouvelle-Orléans au 19ème siècle. Il y a également fait une découverte inattendue : Louis Moreau Gottschalk. - réalisé par : Fabien Fleurat

durée : 00:53:51 - Yohan Giaume - par : Alex Dutilh - Le compositeur et trompettiste Yohan Giaume débute son carnet de voyage musical par une exploration créative de la Nouvelle-Orléans au 19ème siècle. Il y a également fait une découverte inattendue : Louis Moreau Gottschalk. - réalisé par : Fabien Fleurat

16th-20th Centuries This week we hear works by Michael Praetorius, Hector Berlioz, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Gustav Mahler, Herbert Howells, with a surprise at the end. 139 Minutes – Week of March 22, 2021

Portrait Amandine Tshijanu Ngindu alias Mubulu est habitée de la tête aux pieds par le krump - une danse urbaine super intense née à l’orée des années 2000 dans les quartiers défavorisés de Los Angeles - dont elle défend la philosophie avec passion depuis huit ans. À même pas 30 ans, elle vient d’être consacrée «Female European Krumper of the Year 2020» par ses pairs. Jeanne Lacaille présente cette Suissesse qui fait rayonner son art à l’international. Musikactu Lumière sur la Nouvelle-Orléans et plus particulièrement le label Imperial records qui a enregistré dans les années 50 et 60 moult artistes souvent produits par Dave Bartholomew, le compositeur et directeur artistique du bluesman Fats Domino, et aussi de ce chanteur guitariste aveugle, Snooks Eaglin, qui n’avait pas son pareil pour interpréter un registre allant du folk au blues et à la soul music. Bintou Simporé partage histoires et anecdotes dans ce Musikactu, premier acte d’une rencontre avec le musicien Yohan Giaume. D’ici et d’ailleurs Conversations musicales avec le musicien Yohan Giaume, auteur du disque “Whisper of A Shadow'' qui revisite le patrimoine du pianiste créole louisianais Louis-Moreau Gottschalk. Au micro de Bintou Simporé, le musicien retourne à l’origine de la musique et des termes issus du sud des Etats-Unis, comme “bamboula” souvent péjoratif dans la bouche de ceux qui l’emploie pour désigner des fêtes buyantes, mais qui cache un sens plus spirituel. Yohan Giaume évoque également ses souvenirs de la Nouvelle-Orléans, remplis de processions funéraires faites de fanfares tristes et joyeuses. Vous avez un message... Escale à Bangalore dans le Karnataka en Inde d'où nous vient cette carte postale sonore de Côme Bastin qui observe de son œil de reporter les événements politiques, sociaux et culturels qui secouent la péninsule. A New Delhi, les impressionnantes manifestations d’agriculteurs en colère continuent, alors que les leaders du mouvement et le gouvernement cherchent un terrain d’entente. Dans tout le pays, la campagne de vaccination, projet titanesque, vient de s’amorcer, et côté culture, un conflit idéologique oppose religieux fondamentalistes et humoristes. De Visu Zoom sur une pochette culte des années 90, qui illustre le troisième album du groupe de rap hardcore Geto Boys. En photo, 3 garcons au regard dur, ou pour le moins déterminé, qui circulent dans un couloir d’hôpital, avec en bas du disque inscrit en lettres bleues sombres « We can’t be stopped » , (nous ne pouvons pas être arrêtés). Reza Pounewatchy dissèque cette illustration, qui n’a pas volé son encart préventif fait de noir et de blanc apposé sur bon nombre d’albums de rap : « Parental Advisory, Explicit Content » (Avertissement parental, contenu explicite.). Classico Véronique Mortaigne décode la balade folk « John Henry » qui chante la vie héroïque d’un « pousseur d’acier », et la vie de son interprète, le jamaïcano-américain Harry Belafonte.Repris par de nombreux artistes, ce morceau est issu du premier album de Belafonte, « Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites »( RCA 1954), paru quelques années avant que les États-Unis ne soient rythmés par une vague de folk moderne, amenée par des artistes comme Bob Dylan ou John Baez.Live Le musicien franco-américain Cory Seznec s’installe dans le Salon de musique de Néo Géo Nova. Alternant banjo joué façon « clawhammer » et guitare, il interprète un classique du folk nord-américain « Boat’s up the river » et « Tirailleurs » un titre issu de... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Listen in this week as we discuss Sam Lawton and (Jr), our relationships to the military, toxic masculinity and South (lesser) Carolina. Intro theme: Pictures of Water by Ruins in Mist (E.W. Harris) Other Music: Major-General's Song from "The Pirates of Penzance" by Gilbert & Sullivan Perfomed by Dr. Ben Dawkins and the UGA Opera Theatre Ensemble Pasquinade, Caprice, Op. 59 by Louis Moreau Gottschalk performed by Cecile Licad Pine Apple Rag by Scott Joplin performed by Joshua Rivkin To hear the program ad-free, and with the complete musical program (as well as tons of other great content) click the link here and become a supporter on Patreon. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wastelandentertainment/message

durée : 01:57:34 - Relax ! du vendredi 27 novembre 2020 - par : Lionel Esparza - Au menu, un portrait de l'un des pères de la musique américaine, le compositeur et pianiste virtuose Louis Moreau Gottschalk, qui a passé une grande partie de sa vie à voyager aux quatre coins du globe. Et à 16h, notre disque de légende est le sublime "Cosi fan tutte" de Mozart par Karajan en 1955. - réalisé par : Antoine Courtin, Olivier Guérin

It's my pleasure to introduce my guest today, pianist, composer, educator, and researcher, Philipp Teriete. Today we will explore the improvisation and partimento in the 19th century, the great French music teacher Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmerman, Frederic Chopin's music education, the influence of German music theory in early ragtime and jazz composers and so much more! 0:38 What is your background and how did you come to your present areas of research? 4:40 Who was Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmerman? 5:55 Did he have any famous pupils? 7:27 What was Zimmerman's training? 9:17 Was he a victim of the cult of genius? 10:41 Was Zimmerman consigned to historical oblivion before your research? 12:55 Partimento and Zimmerman 14:21 Zimmerman's holistic approach to teaching music 17:00 How was Zimmerman different from someone like Fenaroli? 18:10 Zimmerman's recommendation of solfege 19:23 Needing to read 7 clefs right at the beginning with Zimmerman 20:33 How long does it take to be acquainted with 7 clefs? 21:23 Zimmerman calling pianists who have no knowledge of harmony, “schoolboys” 22:37 Cherubini giving Liszt and Berlioz a hard time 23:05 Zimmerman rejecting Louis Moreau Gottschalk from entering the Paris Conservatory 24:09 Did Zimmerman teach the Rule of the Octave and Moti del basso? 24:35 Were these 19th century versions of these things? 26:23 Zimmerman's method leading to free composition and counterpoint 29:00 Are Zimmerman's technical piano teachings comparable to someone like Hanon? 30:56 Frederic Chopin, how did he learn music? 32:19 What's the evidence for the claim that Josef Elsner's curriculum was modeled after the Paris Conservatory? 33:27 Chopin studying 6 hours a week of counterpoint with Elsner 34:06 Chopin and the cult of the genius 34:51 Could he be considered a formally trained musician instead of self-taught? 35:47 Were these all treatises that Elsner used to teach Chopin? 36:14 Did Chopin know the Rule of the Octave? 36:43 What about Chopin and Partimento? 39:05 What was Henri Reber's lineage of teaching music theory? 39:46 Were Henri Reber and Chopin good friends? 40:27 Chopin's plan to write his own piano method 41:35 Why would Chopin ask a music theorist/composer to help him with his piano method 42:33 Was Chopin 100% focused on completing his method? 43:14 Chopin being very musically opinionated and yet asking several friends to finish his piano method 44:42 Friedrich Kalkbrenner's negative image 47:33 People dismissing great composers as “inferior” 48:57 How would Chopin analyze his own music? 52:10 Francis Plante's video recordings of Chopin Etudes at age 90 53:26 Ragtime - Do we have any evidence that Scott Joplin and Tom Turpin had any formal music training? 55:06 Do we know for sure that Scott Joplin had a counterpoint treatise in his possession? 58:32 The Leipzig Conservatory and Generalbass 59:13 Roman Numerals, Harmonic Function Theory, Generalbass and Counterpoint - a Nuanced take 1:01:34 Were Leipzig Conservatory students learning Stufentheorie and Generalbass at the same time? 1:02:45 Joplin's counterpoint treatise containing many notes and annotations 1:03:56 On counterpoint being something that takes years to study 1:05:34 If you study counterpoint already, what's the need for Stufentheorie or Roman Numerals? 1:07:30 Is Wagner influenced by the German theories of music? 1:10:33 Counterpoint vs chord invertibility 1:14:17 Wrapping Up

The Romantic Period – Part II This week we hear works by Frédéric Chopin, Robert Schumann, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Modest Mussorgsky, Leoš Janáček, and Alexander Scriabin. 157 Minutes – Week of September 28, 2020

In the 1950s, if you said the words “Cuban music,” perhaps Desi Arnez, a.k.a. Ricky Ricardo, singing “Babaloo” might come to mind. These days, it’s more likely the Buena Vista Social Club. On today’s date back in 1932, George Gershwin had Cuban music on his mind when the New York Philharmonic premiered his “Cuban Overture” under its original title “Rumba.” Cuban dance music has always proved appealing to North American composers and long before Gershwin, the 19th century piano virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk toured Cuba and imitated some of the sounds and rhythms he heard there in his original works. In the early 1940s, a young hay fever sufferer named Leonard Bernstein escaped the New England pollen of Tanglewood for a time in Key West. There he was inspired by the Latin dance bands he heard on radio Havana to write a jaunty, little Cuban-style dance of his own that would resurface some 15 years later as the song “America” in Bernstein’s hit musical, “West Side Story.” And in 1990, American composer Michael Daughterty composed his orchestral conga line entitled “Desi”—a symphonic tribute to Cuban bandleader Desi Arnez, in his pop icon role of, who else, Ricky Ricardo.

In the 1950s, if you said the words “Cuban music,” perhaps Desi Arnez, a.k.a. Ricky Ricardo, singing “Babaloo” might come to mind. These days, it’s more likely the Buena Vista Social Club. On today’s date back in 1932, George Gershwin had Cuban music on his mind when the New York Philharmonic premiered his “Cuban Overture” under its original title “Rumba.” Cuban dance music has always proved appealing to North American composers and long before Gershwin, the 19th century piano virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk toured Cuba and imitated some of the sounds and rhythms he heard there in his original works. In the early 1940s, a young hay fever sufferer named Leonard Bernstein escaped the New England pollen of Tanglewood for a time in Key West. There he was inspired by the Latin dance bands he heard on radio Havana to write a jaunty, little Cuban-style dance of his own that would resurface some 15 years later as the song “America” in Bernstein’s hit musical, “West Side Story.” And in 1990, American composer Michael Daughterty composed his orchestral conga line entitled “Desi”—a symphonic tribute to Cuban bandleader Desi Arnez, in his pop icon role of, who else, Ricky Ricardo.

In this episode of Spoleto Backstage , Geoff Nuttall shares with co-host Bradley Fuller about one of his favorite Spoleto Festival USA Chamber Music Series concerts from the past ten years: a 2011 program featuring Osvaldo Golijov’s “Lullaby and Doina” from The Man Who Cried , Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “The Union: Concert Paraphrase on National Airs,” and Franz Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, D. 956, also known as his “Cello Quintet.” After performances of the solo and chamber selections, Spoleto Festival General Manager Nigel Redden joins Bradley to discuss the difficult decision to cancel the two-week arts event for 2020 and to highlight some of its next steps.

»Latinmusik i Venezuela & tidlig New Orleans« præsenteres af Radio Jazz studievært Ole Matthiessen. Der er musik fra, om og med Shakira, llanera, Juan-Vincente Torrealba, Un Solo Pueblo, Oscar D’León, El Puma“ José Luis Rodríguez, Billo’s Caracas Boys, masmoudi & habanera, Spike Jones, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, The New York Military Band, Pablo Valenzula, Lorenzo Tio Jr. & Armand Piron, Papa Jack Laine, The spanish tinge og Jelly Roll Morton. Sendt i Radio Jazz Der er mere jazz på www.radiojazz.dk

Sección del programa de Rpa "La radio es mía" que demuestra que la modernidad es algo que viene de antiguo. Emisión del 4/11/2019, séptima de la quinta temporada y quinta y última de las dedicadas al pianista y compositor de Nueva Orleans Louis Moreau Gottschalk, llamado el Chopin criollo. En esta última entrega hablamos de sus últimos años de vida, trufados de éxitos y escándalos. Embarcado en una imparable gira durante la guerra civil americana, se ve obligado a huir de California por un nunca aclarado escándalo sexual con una menor. Sus últimos tres años son de gira por Sudamérica, antes de morir en Brasil en 1869, tras desmayarse en el escenario del Teatro Lírico Fluminense.

Sección del programa de Rpa "La radio es mía" que demuestra que la modernidad es algo que viene de antiguo. Emisión del 4/11/2019, séptima de la quinta temporada y quinta y última de las dedicadas al pianista y compositor de Nueva Orleans Louis Moreau Gottschalk, llamado el Chopin criollo. En esta última entrega hablamos de sus últimos años de vida, trufados de éxitos y escándalos. Embarcado en una imparable gira durante la guerra civil americana, se ve obligado a huir de California por un nunca aclarado escándalo sexual con una menor. Sus últimos tres años son de gira por Sudamérica, antes de morir en Brasil en 1869, tras desmayarse en el escenario del Teatro Lírico Fluminense.

Con la "abu" recuerdos de vientos y difuntos. Fernando y Rafa, futbol con cabeza. César Alonso, de Tu Colmena, hace el cambio de armario en la casa de las abejas. Lucia López Santos nos recuerda que páginas, apps y demás vigilan nuestros movimientos y nuestras decisiones y deciden que nos van a cobrar. Y final de la vida de Louis Moreau Gottschalk, el pianista y compositor norteamericano, con Carlos Lapeña.

Con la "abu" recuerdos de vientos y difuntos. Fernando y Rafa, futbol con cabeza. César Alonso, de Tu Colmena, hace el cambio de armario en la casa de las abejas. Lucia López Santos nos recuerda que páginas, apps y demás vigilan nuestros movimientos y nuestras decisiones y deciden que nos van a cobrar. Y final de la vida de Louis Moreau Gottschalk, el pianista y compositor norteamericano, con Carlos Lapeña.

Con la "abu" recuerdos de vientos y difuntos. Fernando y Rafa, futbol con cabeza. César Alonso, de Tu Colmena, hace el cambio de armario en la casa de las abejas. Lucia López Santos nos recuerda que páginas, apps y demás vigilan nuestros movimientos y nuestras decisiones y deciden que nos van a cobrar. Y final de la vida de Louis Moreau Gottschalk, el pianista y compositor norteamericano, con Carlos Lapeña.

Con la "abu" recuerdos de vientos y difuntos. Fernando y Rafa, futbol con cabeza. César Alonso, de Tu Colmena, hace el cambio de armario en la casa de las abejas. Lucia López Santos nos recuerda que páginas, apps y demás vigilan nuestros movimientos y nuestras decisiones y deciden que nos van a cobrar. Y final de la vida de Louis Moreau Gottschalk, el pianista y compositor norteamericano, con Carlos Lapeña.

Sección del programa de Rpa "La radio es mía" que demuestra que la modernidad es algo que viene de antiguo. Emisión del 28/10/2019, sexta de la quinta temporada y cuarta de las dedicadas al pianista y compositor de Nueva Orleans Louis Moreau Gottschalk, llamado el Chopin criollo. Hablamos de su vida bohemia en Nueva York, de su falsa rivalidad con Segismund Thalberg y de su larga gira por el Caribe acompañando a Adelina Patti. En esos años caribeños compuso su sorprendente sinfonía "La noche en el Trópico", precedente de la música americana del siglo XX.

Sección del programa de Rpa "La radio es mía" que demuestra que la modernidad es algo que viene de antiguo. Emisión del 28/10/2019, sexta de la quinta temporada y cuarta de las dedicadas al pianista y compositor de Nueva Orleans Louis Moreau Gottschalk, llamado el Chopin criollo. Hablamos de su vida bohemia en Nueva York, de su falsa rivalidad con Segismund Thalberg y de su larga gira por el Caribe acompañando a Adelina Patti. En esos años caribeños compuso su sorprendente sinfonía "La noche en el Trópico", precedente de la música americana del siglo XX.

Como disfrutar del tiempo, con la "abu", Josefina Martínez. Porque hoy nos propusimos planes a realizar en una hora. César Alonso, de Tu Colmena, nos propone ir a la Feria de la Miel de Boal este fin de semana. Con Lucía López Santos, apps para ser un activista político. Y cuarta entrega de la biografía de Louis Moreau Gottschalk!

Como disfrutar del tiempo, con la "abu", Josefina Martínez. Porque hoy nos propusimos planes a realizar en una hora. César Alonso, de Tu Colmena, nos propone ir a la Feria de la Miel de Boal este fin de semana. Con Lucía López Santos, apps para ser un activista político. Y cuarta entrega de la biografía de Louis Moreau Gottschalk!

Como disfrutar del tiempo, con la "abu", Josefina Martínez. Porque hoy nos propusimos planes a realizar en una hora. César Alonso, de Tu Colmena, nos propone ir a la Feria de la Miel de Boal este fin de semana. Con Lucía López Santos, apps para ser un activista político. Y cuarta entrega de la biografía de Louis Moreau Gottschalk!

Como disfrutar del tiempo, con la "abu", Josefina Martínez. Porque hoy nos propusimos planes a realizar en una hora. César Alonso, de Tu Colmena, nos propone ir a la Feria de la Miel de Boal este fin de semana. Con Lucía López Santos, apps para ser un activista político. Y cuarta entrega de la biografía de Louis Moreau Gottschalk!

Sección del programa de Rpa "La radio es mía" que demuestra que la modernidad es algo que viene de antiguo. Emisión del 21/10/2019, quinta de la quinta temporada y tercera de las dedicadas al pianista y compositor de Nueva Orleans Louis Moreau Gottschalk, llamado el Chopin criollo. Hablamos de su retorno a Nueva York, de su gira por Estados Unidos que comienza con gran éxito y, tras el abandono de su agente, concluye en fracaso. Tras la muerte de su padre, Gottschalk viaja a Cuba donde recuperará éxito y autoestima, aunque no consigue la recuperación económica.

Sección del programa de Rpa "La radio es mía" que demuestra que la modernidad es algo que viene de antiguo. Emisión del 21/10/2019, quinta de la quinta temporada y tercera de las dedicadas al pianista y compositor de Nueva Orleans Louis Moreau Gottschalk, llamado el Chopin criollo. Hablamos de su retorno a Nueva York, de su gira por Estados Unidos que comienza con gran éxito y, tras el abandono de su agente, concluye en fracaso. Tras la muerte de su padre, Gottschalk viaja a Cuba donde recuperará éxito y autoestima, aunque no consigue la recuperación económica.

Sección del programa de Rpa "La radio es mía" que demuestra que la modernidad es algo que viene de antiguo. Emisión del 14/10/2019, cuarta de la quinta temporada y segunda de las dedicadas al pianista y compositor de Nueva Orleans Louis Moreau Gottschalk, llamado el Chopin criollo. Hablamos de sus primeras composiciones criollas, que sorprenden en Europa. Gottschalk gira con gran éxito por Suiza y por España antes de, a finales de 1852, volverse definitivamente a América.

Sección del programa de Rpa "La radio es mía" que demuestra que la modernidad es algo que viene de antiguo. Emisión del 14/10/2019, cuarta de la quinta temporada y segunda de las dedicadas al pianista y compositor de Nueva Orleans Louis Moreau Gottschalk, llamado el Chopin criollo. Hablamos de sus primeras composiciones criollas, que sorprenden en Europa. Gottschalk gira con gran éxito por Suiza y por España antes de, a finales de 1852, volverse definitivamente a América.

Sección del programa de Rpa "La radio es mía" que demuestra que la modernidad es algo que viene de antiguo. Emisión del 7/10/2019, tercera de la quinta temporada. y primera de las dedicadas al pianista y compositor de Nueva Orleans Louis Moreau Gottschalk, llamado el Chopin criollo, primer músico estadounidense de renombre y eslabón perdido entre el gran piano romántico y el primer jazz. Gottschalk fue el primer autor que introdujo los ritmos criollos, negros, cubanos y portorriqueños en la música de concierto de tradición europea.

Sección del programa de Rpa "La radio es mía" que demuestra que la modernidad es algo que viene de antiguo. Emisión del 7/10/2019, tercera de la quinta temporada. y primera de las dedicadas al pianista y compositor de Nueva Orleans Louis Moreau Gottschalk, llamado el Chopin criollo, primer músico estadounidense de renombre y eslabón perdido entre el gran piano romántico y el primer jazz. Gottschalk fue el primer autor que introdujo los ritmos criollos, negros, cubanos y portorriqueños en la música de concierto de tradición europea.

    Welcome to episode eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Fats Domino and "The Fat Man". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- A couple of notes: This one originally ran very long, so I've had to edit it down rather ruthlessly -- I know one of the things people like about this podcast is that it only takes half an hour. I also had some technical issues, so you might notice a slight change in audio quality at one point. I think I know what caused the problem, and it shouldn't affect any other episodes. Also, this episode is the first episode to discuss someone who's still alive -- we're now getting into the realm of living memory, as Dave Bartholomew is still alive, aged ninety-nine -- and I hope he'll be around for many more years. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The Mixcloud, in fact, was created before I edited this one down, and so contains one song -- "Junko Partner" by Dr. John -- that doesn't appear in the finished podcast. But it's a good song anyway. Fats Domino's forties and fifties music is now all in the public domain, so there are all sorts of cheap compilations available. However, the best one is actually one that was released when some of the music was still in copyright -- a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. We'll be talking a lot about Fats in the coming months, and there's a reason for that -- his music is among the best of his era. The performance of the Gottschalk piece, "Danza", I excerpted is from a CD of performances by Frank French of Gottschalk's piano work. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the development of American music. I first learned about Gottschalk from his influence on another great Louisiana-raised pianist, Van Dyke Parks, and Parks has excellent orchestral arrangements of Gottschalk's "Danza" and "Night in the Tropics" on his Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove album. I talk early on about The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett. I recommend that book to anyone who's interested in 50s and 60s rock and roll, though it's dated in some respects (most notably, it uses the word "Negro" thoughout -- at the time, that was the word that black people considered the most appropriate to describe them, though now it's very much looked upon as inappropriate). The only biography of Fats Domino I know of is Rick Coleman's Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll. It's a very good book, though I don't totally buy Coleman's argument that the rhythms in New Orleans music come directly from African drumming. The recording of "New Orleans Blues" by Jelly Roll Morton is from a cheap compilation called Doctor Jazz (100 Original Tracks) -- it's labelled "New Orleans Joys" there, but it's clearly the same song as "New Orleans Blues", which appears in a different recording under that name on the same set. That set also has Morton being interviewed and talking about the "Spanish tinge". The precise set I have seems no longer to be available, but this looks very similar. And finally, the intro to this episode comes, of course, from the Fat Man radio show, episodes of which can be found in a collection along with The Thin Man here. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript In his 1970 book The Sound of the City, which was the first attempt at a really serious history of rock and roll, Charlie Gillett also makes the first attempt at a serious typology of the music. He identifies five different styles of music, all of them very different, which loosely got lumped together (in much the same way that country and western or rhythm and blues had) and labelled rock and roll.   The five styles he identifies are Northern band rock and roll -- people like Bill Haley, whose music came from Western Swing; Memphis country rock -- the music we normally talk about as rockabilly; Chicago rhythm and blues -- Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley; what he calls "vocal group rock and roll" but which is now better known as doo-wop; and New Orleans dance blues. I'd add a sixth genre to go in the mix, which is the coastal jump bands -- people like Johnny Otis and Lucky Millinder, based in the big entertainment centres of LA and New York.   So far, we've talked about the coastal jump bands, and about precursors to the Northern bands, doo-wop, and rockabilly. We haven't yet talked about New Orleans dance blues though. So let's take a trip down the Mississippi.   We can trace New Orleans' importance in music back at least to the early nineteenth century, and to the first truly great American composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk.   Gottschalk was considered, in his life, an unimportant composer, just another Romantic -- Mark Twain made fun of his style, and he was largely forgotten for decades after his early death. When he was remembered, if at all, it was as a performer -- he was considered the greatest pianist of his generation, a flashy showman of the keyboard, who could make it do things no-one else could. But listen to this:   [Excerpt of "Danza"]   That's a piece composed by someone who knew Chopin and Liszt. Someone who was writing so long ago he *taught someone* who played for Abraham Lincoln. Yet it sounds astonishingly up to date. It sounds like it could easily come from the 1920s or 1930s.   And the reason it sounds so advanced, and so modern, is that Gottschalk was the first person to put New Orleans music into some sort of permanent form.   We don't know -- we can't know -- how much of later New Orleans music was inspired by Gottschalk, and how much of Gottschalk was him copying the music he heard growing up. Undoubtedly there is an element of both -- we know, for example, that Jelly Roll Morton, who was credited (mostly by himself, it has to be said) as the inventor of jazz, knew Gottschalk's work. But we also know that Gottschalk knew and incorporated folk melodies he heard in New Orleans.   And that music had a lot of influences from a lot of different places. There were the slave songs, of course, but also the music that came up from the Caribbean because of New Orleans' status as a port city. And after the Civil War there was also the additional factor of the brass band music -- all those brass instruments that had been made for the military, suddenly no longer needed for a war, and available cheap.   Gottschalk himself was almost the epitome of a romantic -- he wrote pieces called things like "the Dying Poet", he was first exiled from his home in the South due to his support for the North in the Civil War and then later had to leave the US altogether and move to South America after a scandalous affair with a student, and he eventually contracted yellow fever and collapsed on stage shortly after playing a piece called Morte! (with an exclamation mark) which is Portuguese for "death". He never recovered from his collapse, and died three weeks later of a quinine overdose.   So as well as presaging the music of the twentieth century, Gottschalk also presaged the careers of many twentieth-century musicians. Truly ahead of his time.   But by the middle of the twentieth century, time had caught up to him, and New Orleans had repeatedly revolutionised popular music, often with many of the same techniques that Gottschalk had used.   In particular, New Orleans became known for its piano virtuosos. We'll undoubtedly cover several of them over the course of this series, but anyone with a love for the piano in popular music knows about the piano professors of New Orleans, and to an extent of Louisiana more widely. Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair, James Booker, Allen Toussaint, Huey "Piano" Smith... it's in the piano that New Orleans music has always come into its own.   And if there's one song that sums up New Orleans music, more than any other, it's "Junker's Blues". You've probably not heard that name before, but you've almost certainly heard the melody:   [section of "Junker's Blues" as played by Champion Jack Dupree]   That's Champion Jack Dupree, in 1940, playing the song. That's the first known recording of it, and Dupree claims songwriting credit on the label, but it was actually written by a New Orleans piano player, Drive-Em Down Hall, some time in the 1920s. Dupree heard the song from Hall, who also apparently taught Dupree his piano style.   "Junker's Blues" itself never became a well-known song, but its melody was reused over and over again. Most famously there was the Lloyd Price song "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", which we're going to be devoting a full episode to soon, but there was also "Tipitina" by Professor Longhair...   [section of "Tipitina"]   "Tee Nah Nah"   ["Tee Nah Nah" -- Smiley Lewis]   And more. This one melody, by a long-dead unknown New Orleans piano player, has been performed under various names and with different sets of lyrics, by everyone from the Clash to the zydeco accordion player Clifton Chenier, by way of Elvis, Doctor John, and even Hugh Laurie.   But the most important recording of it was in 1949, by a New Orleans piano player called Fats Domino. And in his version, it became one of those songs that is often considered to be "the first rock and roll record".   Fats Domino was not someone who could have become a rock star even a few years later. He was not mean and moody and slim, he was a big cheerful fat man, who spoke Louisiana Creole as his first language. He was never going to be a sex symbol. But he had a way of performing that made people happy, and made them want to dance, and in 1949 that was the most important thing for a musician to do.   He grew up in a kind of poverty that's hard to imagine now -- his family *did* have a record player, but it was a wind-up one, not an electrical one, and eventually the winding string broke, but young Antoine Domino loved music so much that he would sit at the record player and manually turn the records using his finger so he could still listen to them.   By 1949, Domino had become a minor celebrity among black music fans in New Orleans, more for his piano playing than for his singing. He was known as one of the best boogie woogie players around, with a unique style based on triplets rather than the more straightforward rhythms many boogie pianists used. He'd played, for example, with Roy Brown, although Domino and his entire band got dropped by Brown after Domino sang a few numbers on stage himself during a show -- Brown said he was only paying Domino to play piano, not to sing and upstage him.   But minor celebrities in local music scenes are still only minor celebrities -- and at aged twenty-one Fats Domino already had a family, and was living in a room in his in-laws' house with his wife and kids, working a day job at a mattress factory, and working a second job selling crushed ice with syrup to kids, to try to make ends meet. Piano playing wasn't exactly a way to make it rich, unless you got on records.   Someone who *had* made records, and was the biggest musician in New Orleans at the time, was Dave Bartholomew; and Bartholomew, who was working for Imperial Records, suggested that the label sign Domino.   Like many musicians in New Orleans in the late forties, Dave Bartholomew learned his musical skills while he was in the Army during World War II -- he'd already been able to play the trumpet, having been taught by the same man who taught Louis Armstrong, but once he was put into a military brass band he had to learn more formal musical skills, including writing and arranging.   After getting out of the army, he got work as an A&R man for Imperial Records, and he also formed his own band, the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra, who had a hit with "Country Boy"   [excerpt of "Country Boy" by the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra]   Now, something you may notice about that song is that "dan, dah-dah" horn part. That may sound absolutely cliched to you now, but that was the first time anything like that had been used in an R&B record. And we can link that horn part back to the Gottschalk piece we heard earlier by its use of a rhythm called the tresillo (pronounced tray heel oh). The tresillo is one of a variety of related rhythms that are all known as "habanera" rhythms. That word means "from Havana", and was used to describe any music that was influenced by the dance music -- Danzas, like the title of the Gottschalk piece -- coming out of Cuba in the mid nineteenth century.   The other major rhythm that came from the habanera is the clave, which is a two-bar rhythm. The first bar is a tresilo, and the second is just a "bam bam" [demonstrates]. That beat is one we'll be seeing a lot of in the future.   These rhythms were the basis of the original tango -- which didn't have the beat that we now associate with the tango, but instead had that "dan, dah-dah" rhythm (or rhythms like it, like the cinquillo). And through Gottschalk and people like him -- French-speaking Creole people living in New Orleans -- that rhythm entered New Orleans music generally. Jelly Roll Morton called it the "Spanish tinge". Have a listen, for example, to Jelly Roll's "New Orleans Blues":   [excerpt "New Orleans Blues" by Jelly Roll Morton]   Jelly Roll claimed to have written that as early as 1902, and the first recording of it was in 1923. It's the tresillo rhythm underpinning it. From Gottschalk, to Jelly Roll Morton, to Dave Bartholomew. That was the sound of New Orleans, travelling across the generations.   But what really made that rhythm interesting was when you put that "dah dah dah" up against something else -- on those early compositions, you have that rhythm as the main pulse, but by the time Dave Bartholomew was doing it -- and he seems to have been the first one to do this -- that rhythm was put against drums playing a shuffle or a backbeat. The combination of these pulses rubbing up against each other is what gave New Orleans R&B its special flavour.   I'm going to try to explain how this works, and to do that I'm going to double-track myself to show those rhythms rubbing against each other.   You have the backbeat, which we've talked about before -- "one TWO three FOUR" -- emphasising the second and fourth beats of the bar, like that.   And you have the tresillo, which is "ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and" -- emphasising the first, a beat half-way between the two and the three, and the fourth beat. Again, "ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and".   You put those two together, and you get something that sounds like this:   [excerpt -- recording of me demonstrating the two rhythms going up against each other]   That habanera-backbeat combination is something that, as far as I can tell, Dave Bartholomew and the musicians who worked with him were the first ones to put together (and now I've said that someone will come up with some example from 1870 or something).   The musicians on "Country Boy" were ones that Bartholomew would continue to employ for many years on all the sessions he produced, and in particular they included the drummer Earl Palmer, who was bar none the greatest drummer working in America at that time.   Earl Palmer has been claimed as the first person to use the word "funky" to describe music, and he was certainly a funky player. He was also an *extraordinarily* precise timekeeper. There's a legend told about him at multiple sessions that in the studio, after a take that lasted, say, three minutes twenty, the producer might say to the band "can we have it a little faster, say two seconds shorter?"   Palmer would then pretend to "wind up" his leg, like a clock, count out the new tempo, and the next take would come in at three minutes eighteen, dead on. That's the kind of story that's hard to believe, but it's been told about him by multiple people, so it might just be true.   Either way, Earl Palmer was the tightest, funkiest, just plain best drummer working in the US in 1949, and for many years afterwards. And he was the drummer in the band of session musicians who Dave Bartholomew put together. That band were centred around Cosimo Matassa's studio, J&M, in Louisiana, which would become one of the most important places in the history of this new music.   Cosimo Matassa was one of many Italian-American or Jewish people who got in at the very early stages of rock and roll, when it was still a predominantly black music, and acted as a connection between the black and white communities, usually in some back-room capacity. In Matassa's case, it was as an engineer and studio owner. We've actually already heard one record made by him, last week -- Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight", which he recorded with Matassa in 1947. "Good Rockin' Tonight" was made in New Orleans, and engineered by the man most responsible for recording the New Orleans sound, but in other respects it doesn't have that New Orleans sound to it -- it's of the type we're referring to as coastal jump band music. It's music recorded *in* New Orleans, but not music *of* New Orleans. But the records that Matassa would go on to engineer with Dave Bartholomew and his band, and with other musicians of their type, would be the quintessential New Orleans records that still, seventy years on, sum up the sound of that city.   Matassa's studio was tiny -- it was in the back room of his family's appliance store, which also had a bookmaker's upstairs and a shoeshine boy operating outside the studio door. Matassa himself had no training in record production -- he'd been a chemistry student until he dropped out of university, aged eighteen, and set up the studio, which was laughably rudimentary by today's standards. He had a three-channel mixer, and they didn't record to tape but directly to disc. They had two disc cutters plugged into the mixer. One of them would cut a safety copy, which they could listen to to see if it sounded OK, while the other would be cutting the master.   To explain why this is, I should probably explain how records were actually made, at least back then. A disc cutter is essentially a record player in reverse. It uses a stylus to cut a groove into a disc made of some soft material, which is called the master -- the groove is cut by the vibrations of the stylus as the music goes through it. Then, a mould, called the mother, is made of the master -- it's a pure negative copy, so that instead of a groove, it has a ridge. That mother is then used to stamp out as many copies as possible of the record before it wears out -- at which point, you create a new mother from the original master.   They had two disc cutters, and during a recording session someone's job would be to stand by them and catch the wax they cut out of the discs before it dropped on to the floor -- by this point, most professional studios, if they were using disc cutters at all, were using acetate discs, which are slightly more robust, but apparently J&M were still using wax.   A wax master couldn't be played without the needle causing so much damage it couldn't be used as a master, so you had two choices -- you could either get the master made into a mother, and then use the mother to stamp out copies, and just hope they sounded OK, or you could run two disc cutters simultaneously. Then you'd be able to play one of them -- destroying it in the process -- to check that it sounded OK, and be pretty confident that the other disc, which had been cut from the same signal, would sound the same.   To record like this, mixing directly onto wax with no tape effects or any way to change anything, you needed a great engineer with a great feel for music, a great room with a wonderful room sound, and fantastic musicians.   Truth be told, the J&M studio didn't have a great room sound at all. It was too small and acoustically dead, and the record companies who received the masters and released them would often end up adding echo after the fact.   But what they did have was a great engineer in Matassa, and a great bandleader in Dave Bartholomew, and the band he put together for Fats Domino's first record would largely work together for the next few years, creating some of the greatest rock and roll music ever made.   Domino had a few tunes that would always get the audiences going, and one of them was "Junker's Blues". Dave Bartholomew wanted him to record that, but it was felt that the lyrics weren't quite suitable for the radio, what with them being pretty much entirely about heroin and cocaine.   But then Bartholomew got inspired, by a radio show. "The Fat Man" was a spinoff from The Thin Man, a radio series based on the Dashiel Hammet novel. (Hammet was credited as the creator of "The Fat Man", too, but he seems to have had almost nothing to do with it). The series featured a detective who weighed two hundred and thirty seven pounds, and was popular enough that it got its own film version in 1951. But back in 1949 Dave Bartholomew heard the show and realised that he could capitalise on the popular title, and tie it in to his fat singer. So instead of "they call me a junker, because I'm loaded all the time", Domino sang "they call me the fat man, 'cos I weigh two hundred pounds".   Now, "The Fat Man" actually doesn't have that tresillo rhythm in much of the record. There are odd parts where the bass plays it, but the bass player (who it's *really* difficult to hear anyway, because of the poor sound quality of the recording) seems to switch between playing a tresillo, playing normal boogie basslines, and playing just four root notes as crotchets. But it does, definitely, have that "Spanish tinge" that Jelly Roll Morton talked about. You listen to this record, and you have no doubt whatsoever that this is a New Orleans musician. It's music that absolutely couldn't come from anywhere else.   [Excerpt from "The Fat Man"]   Domino's scatted vocals here are very reminiscent of the Mills Brothers -- there's a similarity in his trumpet imitation which I've not seen anyone pick up on, but is very real. On later records, there'd be a saxophone solo doing much the same kind of thing -- Domino's later records almost all featured a tenor sax solo, roughly two thirds of the way through the record -- but in this case it's Domino's own voice doing the job.   And while this recording doesn't have the rhythmic sophistication of the later records that Domino and Bartholomew would make, it's definitely a step towards what would become their eventual sound. You'd have Earl Palmer on drums playing a simple backbeat, and then over that you'd lay the bass playing a tresillo rhythm, and then over *that* you'd lay a horn riff, going across both those other rhythms, and then over *that* you'd lay Domino's piano, playing fast triplets. You can dance to all of the beats, all of them are keeping time with each other and going in the same 4/4 bars, but what they're not doing is playing the same thing -- there's an astonishing complexity there.   Bartholomew's lyrics, to the extent they're about anything at all, follow a standard blues trope of being fat but having the ability to attract women anyway -- the same kind of thing as Howlin' Wolf's later "Three Hundred Pounds of Joy" or "Built for Comfort" -- but what really matters with the vocal part is Domino's obvious *cheeriness*.   Domino was known as one of the nicest men in the music industry -- to the extent that it's difficult to find much biographical information about him compared to any of his contemporaries, because people tend to have more anecdotes about musicians who shoot their bass player on stage, get married eight times, and end up accidentally suing themselves than they do about people like Fats Domino. He remained married to the same woman for sixty-one years, and while he got himself a nice big house when he became rich, it was still in the same neighbourhood he'd lived in all his life, and he stayed there until Hurricane Katrina drove him out in 2005.   By all accounts he was just an absolutely, thoroughly, nice person -- I have read a lot about forties rhythm and blues artists, and far more about fifties rock and rollers, and I don't recall anyone ever saying a single negative word about him. He was shy, friendly, humble, gracious, and cheerful, and that all comes across in his vocals. While other rhythm and blues vocalists of the era were aggressive -- remember, this was the era of the blues shouter -- Domino comes across as friendly. Even when, as in a song like this, he's bragging sexually, he doesn't actually sound like he means it.   "The Fat Man" went on to sell a million copies within four years, and was the start of what became a monster success for Domino -- and as a result, Fats Domino is the first artist we've seen who's going to get more episodes about him. We've now reached the point where we're seeing the very first rock star -- and this is the point beyond which it's indisputable that rock and roll has started. Fats Domino, usually with Dave Bartholomew, carried on making records that sounded just like this throughout the fifties. Everyone called them rock and roll, and they sold in massive numbers. He outsold every other rock and roll artist of the fifties other than Elvis, and had *thirty-nine* charting hit singles in a row in the fifties and early sixties. Estimates of his sales vary between sixty-five million and a hundred and ten million, but as late as the early eighties it was being seriously claimed that the only people who'd sold more records than him in the rock era were Elvis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson. Quite a few others have now overtaken him, but still, if anyone can claim to be the first rock star, it's Fats Domino. And as the music he was making was all in the same style as "The Fat Man", it's safe to say that while we still have many records that have been claimed as "the first rock and roll record" to go, we're now definitely in the rock and roll era.

    Welcome to episode eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Fats Domino and “The Fat Man”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- A couple of notes: This one originally ran very long, so I’ve had to edit it down rather ruthlessly — I know one of the things people like about this podcast is that it only takes half an hour. I also had some technical issues, so you might notice a slight change in audio quality at one point. I think I know what caused the problem, and it shouldn’t affect any other episodes. Also, this episode is the first episode to discuss someone who’s still alive — we’re now getting into the realm of living memory, as Dave Bartholomew is still alive, aged ninety-nine — and I hope he’ll be around for many more years. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The Mixcloud, in fact, was created before I edited this one down, and so contains one song — “Junko Partner” by Dr. John — that doesn’t appear in the finished podcast. But it’s a good song anyway. Fats Domino’s forties and fifties music is now all in the public domain, so there are all sorts of cheap compilations available. However, the best one is actually one that was released when some of the music was still in copyright — a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings. We’ll be talking a lot about Fats in the coming months, and there’s a reason for that — his music is among the best of his era. The performance of the Gottschalk piece, “Danza”, I excerpted is from a CD of performances by Frank French of Gottschalk’s piano work. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the development of American music. I first learned about Gottschalk from his influence on another great Louisiana-raised pianist, Van Dyke Parks, and Parks has excellent orchestral arrangements of Gottschalk’s “Danza” and “Night in the Tropics” on his Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove album. I talk early on about The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett. I recommend that book to anyone who’s interested in 50s and 60s rock and roll, though it’s dated in some respects (most notably, it uses the word “Negro” thoughout — at the time, that was the word that black people considered the most appropriate to describe them, though now it’s very much looked upon as inappropriate). The only biography of Fats Domino I know of is Rick Coleman’s Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s a very good book, though I don’t totally buy Coleman’s argument that the rhythms in New Orleans music come directly from African drumming. The recording of “New Orleans Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton is from a cheap compilation called Doctor Jazz (100 Original Tracks) — it’s labelled “New Orleans Joys” there, but it’s clearly the same song as “New Orleans Blues”, which appears in a different recording under that name on the same set. That set also has Morton being interviewed and talking about the “Spanish tinge”. The precise set I have seems no longer to be available, but this looks very similar. And finally, the intro to this episode comes, of course, from the Fat Man radio show, episodes of which can be found in a collection along with The Thin Man here. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript In his 1970 book The Sound of the City, which was the first attempt at a really serious history of rock and roll, Charlie Gillett also makes the first attempt at a serious typology of the music. He identifies five different styles of music, all of them very different, which loosely got lumped together (in much the same way that country and western or rhythm and blues had) and labelled rock and roll.   The five styles he identifies are Northern band rock and roll — people like Bill Haley, whose music came from Western Swing; Memphis country rock — the music we normally talk about as rockabilly; Chicago rhythm and blues — Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley; what he calls “vocal group rock and roll” but which is now better known as doo-wop; and New Orleans dance blues. I’d add a sixth genre to go in the mix, which is the coastal jump bands — people like Johnny Otis and Lucky Millinder, based in the big entertainment centres of LA and New York.   So far, we’ve talked about the coastal jump bands, and about precursors to the Northern bands, doo-wop, and rockabilly. We haven’t yet talked about New Orleans dance blues though. So let’s take a trip down the Mississippi.   We can trace New Orleans’ importance in music back at least to the early nineteenth century, and to the first truly great American composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk.   Gottschalk was considered, in his life, an unimportant composer, just another Romantic — Mark Twain made fun of his style, and he was largely forgotten for decades after his early death. When he was remembered, if at all, it was as a performer — he was considered the greatest pianist of his generation, a flashy showman of the keyboard, who could make it do things no-one else could. But listen to this:   [Excerpt of “Danza”]   That’s a piece composed by someone who knew Chopin and Liszt. Someone who was writing so long ago he *taught someone* who played for Abraham Lincoln. Yet it sounds astonishingly up to date. It sounds like it could easily come from the 1920s or 1930s.   And the reason it sounds so advanced, and so modern, is that Gottschalk was the first person to put New Orleans music into some sort of permanent form.   We don’t know — we can’t know — how much of later New Orleans music was inspired by Gottschalk, and how much of Gottschalk was him copying the music he heard growing up. Undoubtedly there is an element of both — we know, for example, that Jelly Roll Morton, who was credited (mostly by himself, it has to be said) as the inventor of jazz, knew Gottschalk’s work. But we also know that Gottschalk knew and incorporated folk melodies he heard in New Orleans.   And that music had a lot of influences from a lot of different places. There were the slave songs, of course, but also the music that came up from the Caribbean because of New Orleans’ status as a port city. And after the Civil War there was also the additional factor of the brass band music — all those brass instruments that had been made for the military, suddenly no longer needed for a war, and available cheap.   Gottschalk himself was almost the epitome of a romantic — he wrote pieces called things like “the Dying Poet”, he was first exiled from his home in the South due to his support for the North in the Civil War and then later had to leave the US altogether and move to South America after a scandalous affair with a student, and he eventually contracted yellow fever and collapsed on stage shortly after playing a piece called Morte! (with an exclamation mark) which is Portuguese for “death”. He never recovered from his collapse, and died three weeks later of a quinine overdose.   So as well as presaging the music of the twentieth century, Gottschalk also presaged the careers of many twentieth-century musicians. Truly ahead of his time.   But by the middle of the twentieth century, time had caught up to him, and New Orleans had repeatedly revolutionised popular music, often with many of the same techniques that Gottschalk had used.   In particular, New Orleans became known for its piano virtuosos. We’ll undoubtedly cover several of them over the course of this series, but anyone with a love for the piano in popular music knows about the piano professors of New Orleans, and to an extent of Louisiana more widely. Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair, James Booker, Allen Toussaint, Huey “Piano” Smith… it’s in the piano that New Orleans music has always come into its own.   And if there’s one song that sums up New Orleans music, more than any other, it’s “Junker’s Blues”. You’ve probably not heard that name before, but you’ve almost certainly heard the melody:   [section of “Junker’s Blues” as played by Champion Jack Dupree]   That’s Champion Jack Dupree, in 1940, playing the song. That’s the first known recording of it, and Dupree claims songwriting credit on the label, but it was actually written by a New Orleans piano player, Drive-Em Down Hall, some time in the 1920s. Dupree heard the song from Hall, who also apparently taught Dupree his piano style.   “Junker’s Blues” itself never became a well-known song, but its melody was reused over and over again. Most famously there was the Lloyd Price song “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, which we’re going to be devoting a full episode to soon, but there was also “Tipitina” by Professor Longhair…   [section of “Tipitina”]   “Tee Nah Nah”   [“Tee Nah Nah” — Smiley Lewis]   And more. This one melody, by a long-dead unknown New Orleans piano player, has been performed under various names and with different sets of lyrics, by everyone from the Clash to the zydeco accordion player Clifton Chenier, by way of Elvis, Doctor John, and even Hugh Laurie.   But the most important recording of it was in 1949, by a New Orleans piano player called Fats Domino. And in his version, it became one of those songs that is often considered to be “the first rock and roll record”.   Fats Domino was not someone who could have become a rock star even a few years later. He was not mean and moody and slim, he was a big cheerful fat man, who spoke Louisiana Creole as his first language. He was never going to be a sex symbol. But he had a way of performing that made people happy, and made them want to dance, and in 1949 that was the most important thing for a musician to do.   He grew up in a kind of poverty that’s hard to imagine now — his family *did* have a record player, but it was a wind-up one, not an electrical one, and eventually the winding string broke, but young Antoine Domino loved music so much that he would sit at the record player and manually turn the records using his finger so he could still listen to them.   By 1949, Domino had become a minor celebrity among black music fans in New Orleans, more for his piano playing than for his singing. He was known as one of the best boogie woogie players around, with a unique style based on triplets rather than the more straightforward rhythms many boogie pianists used. He’d played, for example, with Roy Brown, although Domino and his entire band got dropped by Brown after Domino sang a few numbers on stage himself during a show — Brown said he was only paying Domino to play piano, not to sing and upstage him.   But minor celebrities in local music scenes are still only minor celebrities — and at aged twenty-one Fats Domino already had a family, and was living in a room in his in-laws’ house with his wife and kids, working a day job at a mattress factory, and working a second job selling crushed ice with syrup to kids, to try to make ends meet. Piano playing wasn’t exactly a way to make it rich, unless you got on records.   Someone who *had* made records, and was the biggest musician in New Orleans at the time, was Dave Bartholomew; and Bartholomew, who was working for Imperial Records, suggested that the label sign Domino.   Like many musicians in New Orleans in the late forties, Dave Bartholomew learned his musical skills while he was in the Army during World War II — he’d already been able to play the trumpet, having been taught by the same man who taught Louis Armstrong, but once he was put into a military brass band he had to learn more formal musical skills, including writing and arranging.   After getting out of the army, he got work as an A&R man for Imperial Records, and he also formed his own band, the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra, who had a hit with “Country Boy”   [excerpt of “Country Boy” by the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra]   Now, something you may notice about that song is that “dan, dah-dah” horn part. That may sound absolutely cliched to you now, but that was the first time anything like that had been used in an R&B record. And we can link that horn part back to the Gottschalk piece we heard earlier by its use of a rhythm called the tresillo (pronounced tray heel oh). The tresillo is one of a variety of related rhythms that are all known as “habanera” rhythms. That word means “from Havana”, and was used to describe any music that was influenced by the dance music — Danzas, like the title of the Gottschalk piece — coming out of Cuba in the mid nineteenth century.   The other major rhythm that came from the habanera is the clave, which is a two-bar rhythm. The first bar is a tresilo, and the second is just a “bam bam” [demonstrates]. That beat is one we’ll be seeing a lot of in the future.   These rhythms were the basis of the original tango — which didn’t have the beat that we now associate with the tango, but instead had that “dan, dah-dah” rhythm (or rhythms like it, like the cinquillo). And through Gottschalk and people like him — French-speaking Creole people living in New Orleans — that rhythm entered New Orleans music generally. Jelly Roll Morton called it the “Spanish tinge”. Have a listen, for example, to Jelly Roll’s “New Orleans Blues”:   [excerpt “New Orleans Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton]   Jelly Roll claimed to have written that as early as 1902, and the first recording of it was in 1923. It’s the tresillo rhythm underpinning it. From Gottschalk, to Jelly Roll Morton, to Dave Bartholomew. That was the sound of New Orleans, travelling across the generations.   But what really made that rhythm interesting was when you put that “dah dah dah” up against something else — on those early compositions, you have that rhythm as the main pulse, but by the time Dave Bartholomew was doing it — and he seems to have been the first one to do this — that rhythm was put against drums playing a shuffle or a backbeat. The combination of these pulses rubbing up against each other is what gave New Orleans R&B its special flavour.   I’m going to try to explain how this works, and to do that I’m going to double-track myself to show those rhythms rubbing against each other.   You have the backbeat, which we’ve talked about before — “one TWO three FOUR” — emphasising the second and fourth beats of the bar, like that.   And you have the tresillo, which is “ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and” — emphasising the first, a beat half-way between the two and the three, and the fourth beat. Again, “ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and”.   You put those two together, and you get something that sounds like this:   [excerpt — recording of me demonstrating the two rhythms going up against each other]   That habanera-backbeat combination is something that, as far as I can tell, Dave Bartholomew and the musicians who worked with him were the first ones to put together (and now I’ve said that someone will come up with some example from 1870 or something).   The musicians on “Country Boy” were ones that Bartholomew would continue to employ for many years on all the sessions he produced, and in particular they included the drummer Earl Palmer, who was bar none the greatest drummer working in America at that time.   Earl Palmer has been claimed as the first person to use the word “funky” to describe music, and he was certainly a funky player. He was also an *extraordinarily* precise timekeeper. There’s a legend told about him at multiple sessions that in the studio, after a take that lasted, say, three minutes twenty, the producer might say to the band “can we have it a little faster, say two seconds shorter?”   Palmer would then pretend to “wind up” his leg, like a clock, count out the new tempo, and the next take would come in at three minutes eighteen, dead on. That’s the kind of story that’s hard to believe, but it’s been told about him by multiple people, so it might just be true.   Either way, Earl Palmer was the tightest, funkiest, just plain best drummer working in the US in 1949, and for many years afterwards. And he was the drummer in the band of session musicians who Dave Bartholomew put together. That band were centred around Cosimo Matassa’s studio, J&M, in Louisiana, which would become one of the most important places in the history of this new music.   Cosimo Matassa was one of many Italian-American or Jewish people who got in at the very early stages of rock and roll, when it was still a predominantly black music, and acted as a connection between the black and white communities, usually in some back-room capacity. In Matassa’s case, it was as an engineer and studio owner. We’ve actually already heard one record made by him, last week — Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, which he recorded with Matassa in 1947. “Good Rockin’ Tonight” was made in New Orleans, and engineered by the man most responsible for recording the New Orleans sound, but in other respects it doesn’t have that New Orleans sound to it — it’s of the type we’re referring to as coastal jump band music. It’s music recorded *in* New Orleans, but not music *of* New Orleans. But the records that Matassa would go on to engineer with Dave Bartholomew and his band, and with other musicians of their type, would be the quintessential New Orleans records that still, seventy years on, sum up the sound of that city.   Matassa’s studio was tiny — it was in the back room of his family’s appliance store, which also had a bookmaker’s upstairs and a shoeshine boy operating outside the studio door. Matassa himself had no training in record production — he’d been a chemistry student until he dropped out of university, aged eighteen, and set up the studio, which was laughably rudimentary by today’s standards. He had a three-channel mixer, and they didn’t record to tape but directly to disc. They had two disc cutters plugged into the mixer. One of them would cut a safety copy, which they could listen to to see if it sounded OK, while the other would be cutting the master.   To explain why this is, I should probably explain how records were actually made, at least back then. A disc cutter is essentially a record player in reverse. It uses a stylus to cut a groove into a disc made of some soft material, which is called the master — the groove is cut by the vibrations of the stylus as the music goes through it. Then, a mould, called the mother, is made of the master — it’s a pure negative copy, so that instead of a groove, it has a ridge. That mother is then used to stamp out as many copies as possible of the record before it wears out — at which point, you create a new mother from the original master.   They had two disc cutters, and during a recording session someone’s job would be to stand by them and catch the wax they cut out of the discs before it dropped on to the floor — by this point, most professional studios, if they were using disc cutters at all, were using acetate discs, which are slightly more robust, but apparently J&M were still using wax.   A wax master couldn’t be played without the needle causing so much damage it couldn’t be used as a master, so you had two choices — you could either get the master made into a mother, and then use the mother to stamp out copies, and just hope they sounded OK, or you could run two disc cutters simultaneously. Then you’d be able to play one of them — destroying it in the process — to check that it sounded OK, and be pretty confident that the other disc, which had been cut from the same signal, would sound the same.   To record like this, mixing directly onto wax with no tape effects or any way to change anything, you needed a great engineer with a great feel for music, a great room with a wonderful room sound, and fantastic musicians.   Truth be told, the J&M studio didn’t have a great room sound at all. It was too small and acoustically dead, and the record companies who received the masters and released them would often end up adding echo after the fact.   But what they did have was a great engineer in Matassa, and a great bandleader in Dave Bartholomew, and the band he put together for Fats Domino’s first record would largely work together for the next few years, creating some of the greatest rock and roll music ever made.   Domino had a few tunes that would always get the audiences going, and one of them was “Junker’s Blues”. Dave Bartholomew wanted him to record that, but it was felt that the lyrics weren’t quite suitable for the radio, what with them being pretty much entirely about heroin and cocaine.   But then Bartholomew got inspired, by a radio show. “The Fat Man” was a spinoff from The Thin Man, a radio series based on the Dashiel Hammet novel. (Hammet was credited as the creator of “The Fat Man”, too, but he seems to have had almost nothing to do with it). The series featured a detective who weighed two hundred and thirty seven pounds, and was popular enough that it got its own film version in 1951. But back in 1949 Dave Bartholomew heard the show and realised that he could capitalise on the popular title, and tie it in to his fat singer. So instead of “they call me a junker, because I’m loaded all the time”, Domino sang “they call me the fat man, ‘cos I weigh two hundred pounds”.   Now, “The Fat Man” actually doesn’t have that tresillo rhythm in much of the record. There are odd parts where the bass plays it, but the bass player (who it’s *really* difficult to hear anyway, because of the poor sound quality of the recording) seems to switch between playing a tresillo, playing normal boogie basslines, and playing just four root notes as crotchets. But it does, definitely, have that “Spanish tinge” that Jelly Roll Morton talked about. You listen to this record, and you have no doubt whatsoever that this is a New Orleans musician. It’s music that absolutely couldn’t come from anywhere else.   [Excerpt from “The Fat Man”]   Domino’s scatted vocals here are very reminiscent of the Mills Brothers — there’s a similarity in his trumpet imitation which I’ve not seen anyone pick up on, but is very real. On later records, there’d be a saxophone solo doing much the same kind of thing — Domino’s later records almost all featured a tenor sax solo, roughly two thirds of the way through the record — but in this case it’s Domino’s own voice doing the job.   And while this recording doesn’t have the rhythmic sophistication of the later records that Domino and Bartholomew would make, it’s definitely a step towards what would become their eventual sound. You’d have Earl Palmer on drums playing a simple backbeat, and then over that you’d lay the bass playing a tresillo rhythm, and then over *that* you’d lay a horn riff, going across both those other rhythms, and then over *that* you’d lay Domino’s piano, playing fast triplets. You can dance to all of the beats, all of them are keeping time with each other and going in the same 4/4 bars, but what they’re not doing is playing the same thing — there’s an astonishing complexity there.   Bartholomew’s lyrics, to the extent they’re about anything at all, follow a standard blues trope of being fat but having the ability to attract women anyway — the same kind of thing as Howlin’ Wolf’s later “Three Hundred Pounds of Joy” or “Built for Comfort” — but what really matters with the vocal part is Domino’s obvious *cheeriness*.   Domino was known as one of the nicest men in the music industry — to the extent that it’s difficult to find much biographical information about him compared to any of his contemporaries, because people tend to have more anecdotes about musicians who shoot their bass player on stage, get married eight times, and end up accidentally suing themselves than they do about people like Fats Domino. He remained married to the same woman for sixty-one years, and while he got himself a nice big house when he became rich, it was still in the same neighbourhood he’d lived in all his life, and he stayed there until Hurricane Katrina drove him out in 2005.   By all accounts he was just an absolutely, thoroughly, nice person — I have read a lot about forties rhythm and blues artists, and far more about fifties rock and rollers, and I don’t recall anyone ever saying a single negative word about him. He was shy, friendly, humble, gracious, and cheerful, and that all comes across in his vocals. While other rhythm and blues vocalists of the era were aggressive — remember, this was the era of the blues shouter — Domino comes across as friendly. Even when, as in a song like this, he’s bragging sexually, he doesn’t actually sound like he means it.   “The Fat Man” went on to sell a million copies within four years, and was the start of what became a monster success for Domino — and as a result, Fats Domino is the first artist we’ve seen who’s going to get more episodes about him. We’ve now reached the point where we’re seeing the very first rock star — and this is the point beyond which it’s indisputable that rock and roll has started. Fats Domino, usually with Dave Bartholomew, carried on making records that sounded just like this throughout the fifties. Everyone called them rock and roll, and they sold in massive numbers. He outsold every other rock and roll artist of the fifties other than Elvis, and had *thirty-nine* charting hit singles in a row in the fifties and early sixties. Estimates of his sales vary between sixty-five million and a hundred and ten million, but as late as the early eighties it was being seriously claimed that the only people who’d sold more records than him in the rock era were Elvis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson. Quite a few others have now overtaken him, but still, if anyone can claim to be the first rock star, it’s Fats Domino. And as the music he was making was all in the same style as “The Fat Man”, it’s safe to say that while we still have many records that have been claimed as “the first rock and roll record” to go, we’re now definitely in the rock and roll era.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk ist ein Komponist mit Entertainerqualitäten gewesen. Er verband kreolischen Sound und europäische Klassik. Ist das schon Ragtime? Stillsitzen ist für unsere "Klassik drastisch"-Nerds Devid Striesow und Axel Ranisch jedenfalls vorbei. Von Devid Striesow und Axel Ranisch www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Echtzeit Hören bis: 01.01.2030 00:00 Direkter Link zur Audiodatei

Alyne Pustanio is recognized as one of the foremost authorities in the field of paranormal research, the supernatural, and the occult, and is considered an expert in the folklore and haunted history of her hometown, New Orleans. Alyne is a sixth-generation New Orleanian, a descendant of the family of American classical composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and many of her ancestors were present for some of the most famous events in New Orleans’ haunted history. From the capture of Bras Coupe, the notorious “Zombie King” to the opening of the attic doors amid the flames of the infamous Lalaurie House, many of these firsthand accounts have been passed down through generations and inform every one of Alyne’s “Haunting Tales of Old New Orleans.” As an expert in the paranormal field, Alyne has been featured on the popular Ghost Hunters television series and has been a consultant for numerous other productions on the SyFy Channel, the History Channel, the Travel Channel, the Discovery Channel, the Destination America Channel, Bio, and NatGeo. Alyne’s writings are featured with the works of paranormal expert Brad Steiger in his books RealZombies, Real Monsters, Real Aliens, and the seminal The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shapeshifting Beings (Second Edition). She is also Managing Editor and Creative Consultant of the Journal of Hoodoo and Conjure and Hoodoo and Conjure Quarterly magazine; she is the co-author of the wildly popular Hoodoo Almanac, published by Creole Moon Publications.

Ethan plays piano music that imitates banjo music. He starts off with "Ring de Banjo" by Stephen Foster and then plays "The Banjo" by HC Harris. Then Ethan plays the most famous piano-banjo piece of all-time: "The Banjo" by Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Finally, Ethan reads a poem about Gottschalk by Gwendolyn Brooks and talks about the musical exploitation of enslaved African-Americans. 

This coffee break listens to extraordinary, but rarely heard classical music written by composers of African descent. Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was a virtuoso violinist, and conductor of the leading symphony orchestra in Paris. His mother was an African slave. Louis Moreau Gottschalk composed music with an African-Caribbean flavor. Born in New Orleans in 1829 – Gottchalk was best known as a virtuoso performer of his own romantic piano works. José Silvestre White was an Afro-Cuban violinist and composer born in Cuba in 1836, studied in Paris, was director of the Imperial Conservatory in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, before returning to France to end his career. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, born in England in 1875, was an Afro-British composer, conductor & professor. Coleridge-Taylor achieved such success that he was referred to by white New York musicians as the "African Mahler" at the time when he had three tours of the United States in the early 1900s. contact the show at yccb@mauriceriver press.com

Klavierwerke von Louis Moreau Gottschalk, George Gershwin, Philip Glass, Frederic Rzewski und Samuel Barber | Ulrich Roman Murtfeld (Klavier)

A seeing-eye dog learns to find bus stops. In this episode, we meet Powers, a black lab who helps out my visually impaired friend Mike. Powers is smart and obedient. But he has one big weakness. And it's not fire hydrants.The outro for this piece by Lindsay Starke, who handily won last month's podcast challenge.Music is Le Banjo by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, performed by BachScholar.