1959 Jazz Albums and the Grammys: Saturday Music Club

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

The 1959 Project

Lambert, Hendricks & Ross: The Hottest New Group in Jazz

Max Roach Quintet: The Many Sides of Max

Toshiko Akiyoshi: "The Village"

Cecil Taylor Trio and Quintet: Love for Sale

Sun Ra And His Arkestra: "Ancient Aiethopia"

Gerry Mulligan Quartet: What is There to Say?

From Wikipedia: Grammys for 1959 releases

• Record of the Year
  • Bobby Darin for "Mack the Knife"
• Album of the Year
  • Frank Sinatra for Come Dance with Me!
• Song of the Year
  • Jimmy Driftwood for "The Battle of New Orleans"
• Best New Artist
  • Bobby Darin

Children's

• Best Recording for Children
  • Peter Ustinov for Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf performed by Peter Ustinov & the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan

Classical

• Best Classical Performance - Orchestra
  • Charles Münch (conductor) & the Boston Symphony Orchestra for Debussy: Images for Orchestra
• Best Classical Performance - Vocal Soloist (with or without orchestra)
  • Jussi Björling for Bjoerling in Opera
• Best Classical Performance - Opera Cast or Choral
  • Erich Leinsdorf (conductor), Lisa Della Casa, Rosalind Elias, George London, Roberta Peters, Giorgio Tozzi & the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro
• Best Classical Performance - Concerto or Instrumental Soloist (with full orchestral accompaniment)
  • Kiril Kondrashin (conductor), Van Cliburn & the Symphony of the Air Orchestra for Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3
• Best Classical Performance - Concerto or Instrumental Soloist (other than full orchestral accompaniment)
  • Arthur Rubinstein for Beethoven: Sonatas No. 21 in C (Waldstein) and No. 18 in E Flat
• Best Classical Performance - Chamber Music (including chamber orchestra)
  • Arthur Rubinstein for Beethoven: Sonatas No. 21 in C (Waldstein) and No. 18 in E Flat

Comedy

• Best Comedy Performance - Spoken
  • Shelley Berman for Inside Shelley Berman
• Best Comedy Performance - Musical
  • Homer and Jethro for The Battle of Kookamonga

Composing and arranging

• Best Musical Composition First Recorded and Released in 1959 (more than 5 minutes duration)
  • Duke Ellington for Anatomy of a Murder Soundtrack (see link above)
• Best Sound Track Album - Background Score from a Motion Picture or Television
  • Duke Ellington (composer) for Anatomy of a Murder
• Best Arrangement
  • Billy May (arranger) for "Come Dance with Me" performed by Frank Sinatra

Country[edit]

• Best Country & Western Performance
  • Johnny Horton for "The Battle of New Orleans"

Folk[edit]

• Best Performance - Folk
• The Kingston Trio for The Kingston Trio at Large

Jazz[edit]

• Best Jazz Performance - Soloist
  • Ella Fitzgerald for Ella Swings Lightly
• Best Jazz Performance - Group
  • Jonah Jones for I Dig Chicks [about on par with Johnny Horton's winner--tm]

Musical show[edit]

• Best Broadway Show Album
  • Ethel Merman & the original cast for Gypsy
  • The original cast with Gwen Verdon, Richard Kiley, Leonard Stone, Doris Rich, Cynthia Latham, Joy Nichols, Bob Dixon & Pat Ferrier for Redhead
• Best Sound Track Album, Original Cast - Motion Picture or Television
• André Previn, Ken Darby & the original cast for Porgy and Bess (film soundtrack)

The Gil Evans Orchestra featuring Miles Davis: 

Packaging and notes[edit]

• Best Album Cover
  • Robert M. Jones (art director) for Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5 conducted by Howard Mitchell

Pop

• Best Vocal Performance, Female
  • Ella Fitzgerald for "But Not for Me"
• Best Vocal Performance, Male
  • Frank Sinatra for Come Dance with Me!
• Best Performance by a Vocal Group or Chorus
  • Richard P. Condie (choir director) for "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir directed by Condie
• Best Performance by a Dance Band
  • Duke Ellington for Anatomy of a Murder
• Best Performance by an Orchestra
  • André Previn & David Rose for Like Young performed by Dave Rose and his Orchestra with André Previn
• Best Performance by a "Top 40" Artist
  • Nat "King" Cole for "Midnight Flyer"

Production and engineering

• Best Engineering Contribution - Other Than Classical or Novelty
  • Robert Simpson (engineer) for Belafonte at Carnegie Hall performed by Harry Belafonte
• Best Engineering Contribution - Classical Recording
  • Lewis W. Layton (engineer), Robert Russell Bennett (conductor) & the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra for Victory at Sea, Vol. I
• Best Engineering Contribution - Novelty Recording
  • Ted Keep (engineer) for "Alvin's Harmonica" performed by David Seville

R&B[edit]

• Best Rhythm & Blues Performance
  • Dinah Washington for "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes"

Spoken[edit]

• Best Performance - Documentary or Spoken Word (other than comedy)
• Carl Sandburg for A Lincoln Portrait

Music from Peter Gunn and More Music from PG;

Lola Albright and Shorty Rogers & band:

Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959 film)

Pull My Daisy (score by David Amram)

From Spirituals to Swing (1959 album of 1937/39 concerts)

FFB: Margaret Millar week...books in progress...reviewer in retrograde...

This is Margaret Millar Friday in our weekly readathon, yet it has also been a week wracked with dental misadventure, attempts to work around and ahead of minor surgery that has yet to fully happen, and generally the kind of week where I've been taking massive doses of ibuprofen and sleeping accordingly (not only my best analgesic but my best sleep aid...the supposedly stronger stuff I've also been prescribed as usual is less effective at controlling pain, but does have an unpleasantly distorting effect on my dream sleep, something a work colleague has noted with her own recent experience with the similar opiates after scratching her corneas; at least I'm not as sensitive as my father, who can go off into waking hallucination with relatively low doses of poppy-stuff...something inattentive hospital staff keep rediscovering for him on occasion, despite instruction in advance, when he's needed some not so minor surgery of his own).

It's also been a week where we've lost some impressive people, not least of course the singer and guitar pioneer Doc Watson...the reading (by James Earl Jones) and presentation (with limited animation and music) of Why Mosquitos Buzz in People's Ears: A West African Tale (Dial Press, 1975), a 1976 Caldecott winner for reteller Verna Aardema and the brilliant illustrators Diane and the late Leo Dillon, is eminently worth seeing and hearing.

So, books that have not yet been finished, despite attempts to get them in on time:

Margaret Millar, The Listening Walls (Random House, 1959). The Millars I had already were all, it turns out, in storage...and I hadn't yet read this, not one of her more obscure titles (and James Reasoner has reviewed it today; Juri Nummelin did so a while back). I've still barely begun it...despite the proprietor at The Title Page noting that it terrified her as a college student upon first reading it.

Sharon Jarvis, editor, Inside Outer Space (Frederick Ungar 1985). An anthology of (then-)new essays by writers and editors about the art and business of science fiction and fantasy writing...one which almost unaccountably got by me in the mid-'80s (or at least I have no memory of seeing it nor seeing it reviewed)...including a sadly informed (the hardest way) essay by the late George Alec Effinger about his gathering troubles with health, medical bills and the IRS and how to hope to avoid such, and a range of interesting folks represented (from Ron Goulart through Stuart David Schiff to Marion Zimmer Bradley and Jarvis herself) who haven't often been tapped for this kind of volume, at least when put together, as several important ones were, by R. Bretnor.

Brenda Knight, Women of the Beat Generation (Conart Press, 1996) is similarly a survey of people who mostly haven't had the attention they deserve, particularly when compared even to the minor male Beat writers and hangers-on. Diane di Prima and Jane Bowles and just maybe Hettie Jones are in relatively little danger of being forgotten by at least some of the larger audience of their kind of art, but entirely too many other folks, certainly the writers, had their only work in print a decade and a half ago in this small-press volume...itself, despite picking up the then-dwindling American Book Award in 1997, not too robustly in print now.

Stephen Jones, editor, The Monster Book of Zombies (a 2009 rebranded instant-remainder edition of the Robinson/Carroll & Graf 1993 The Mammoth Book of Zombies) features some of the best work dealing with the creatures who are just beginning to commercially cool on the book market, even as the cooling or warmly-rotting undead ghouls themselves are being supplemented by a recent rash of too-similar true-crime stories over the last week or so. This volume, unlike such even earlier anthologies as Bill Pronzini's Voodoo! (please see below), is largely comprised of fiction newly-published in the 1993 edition, by the brilliant likes of Kim Newman and Nicholas Royle, alongside chestnuts (Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar") and otherwise largely inaccessible work (Robert Bloch's fine novella "The Dead Don't Die!", which should always be reprinted with Virgil Finlay's illustrations from its original publication in Fantastic Adventures, which cast Bloch himself in the role of the protagonist).


(I see I am quoted, probably from the librarian-heavy discussion list Fiction-L, without credit along with others at one YALSA database:

"I would point him toward John Skipp and Craig Spector's anthology BOOK OF THE DEAD, which is one of the initial tributes to George Romero-style zombie apocalypses in literature, featuring most of the best writers drawn to that sort of thing...many if not most of those stories were reprinted in the first three anthologies I mention, but BOOK OF THE DEAD and its sequel anthology STILL DEAD are among the best work I've encountered that fits the bill you lay out. The collected works of Karl Edward Wagner would be useful for your patron to investigate, as well, I suspect (and perhaps David Drake's, as well)...and he might be suprised how much he likes Fritz Leiber's CONJURE WIFE...and Robert Bloch's "The Dead Don't Die!" among the other stories collected in Stephen Jones's THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF ZOMBIES...which doesn't overlap completely with Bill Pronzini's anthology VOODOO! (also included in the omnibus editions THE ARBOR HOUSE NECROPOLIS and THE BOOK OF THE DEAD--the latter reprinted by an instant remainder house).
THE ARBOR HOUSE NECROPOLIS and THE BOOK OF THE DEAD (two forms of the same omnibus) were also edited by Bill Pronzini...VOODOO! was collected in them (with two other similar anthologies), as well as being published initially on its own.
CONJURE WIFE by Fritz Leiber is inarguably horror, but not science fiction in any meaningful way. It's even been published, by the opportunistic paperback house Award Books at the height of supermarket gothic craze in the latest '60s/early '70s, as a gothic.
David Drake's historical fantasies are also not science-fictional, but much of his Vietnam War-inspired anti-war HAMMER'S SLAMMERS series are indeed sf. I was thinking of the former more than the latter, particularly his zombie stories set in the Vietnam War era.
Octavia Butler's first novel, KINDRED, is almost inarguably horror/fantasy (a time-travel novel with no rational explanation attempted to explain the involuntary time travel/personality swaps), but most of her other work is indeed science-fictional. I haven't yet read CLAY'S ARK, but I suspect that one would be better in the sf column.")

So...I offer this in lieu of my Millar review, for now...with apologies. Please see Patti Abbott's blog for the list of people who actually got their books read.