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)

TAKE THIS HAMMER with James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, Janet Flanner and "Ross Macdonald" and others on THE WRITER IN AMERICA, and producer/director/editor/interviewer Richard O. Moore

                         James Baldwin in Take This Hammer

THE WRITER IN AMERICA series producer/director/editor/interviewer Richard O. Moore:

Moore interviewed: https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/210522

mostly discussing his 1963 National Educational Television (NET) documentary 

TAKE THIS HAMMER (based on a tour of 1963 African-American San Francisco by James Baldwin);

fuller director's cut: https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/216518

broadcast cut: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-512-2r3nv9b09w  first aired on February 4th 1964.

Other episodes in the series IMDb is aware of:

Season 1: Janet Flanner

Robert Duncan (IMDb has the wrong copy attached to this record)

Season 3: Wright Morris

Season 4: John Gardner

Muriel Rukeyser

Toni Morrison 

Ross Macdonald (misspelled at IMDb)

Eudora Welty

--see below and at bottom of post for links to archived video online.

Toni Morrison on The Writer in America (sadly, Google, as owner of Blogspot and YouTube, currently at least makes it difficult to embed any video not from, you guessed it, YouTube).

Janet Flanner on The Writer in America and five more episodes linked below/at bottom of post (so far...).

Millar/"Macdonald" and Welty

On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 Paul DiFilippo noted:

The 30-minute film is embedded at the link [at CrimeReads]

https://crimereads.com/this-1970s-film-about-ross-macdonald-is-fascinating-and-unexpectedly-beautiful/ 

 Tiny URL:

https://tinyl.io/3FeZ

Current direct YouTube link to the Macdonald episode (as with all these episodes as currently archived, damage to the source film or perhaps video distorts the Duke Ellington Orchestra score, alas): 

https://youtu.be/iT3QpPfH39Q

Further episodes of The Writer in America (courtesy Tony Baer):

Robert Duncan

John Gardiner

Wright Morris

Muriel Rukeyser

The Night We Caught the Hallowe'en Show: guest post by Jeff Segal

I watched the documentary Halloweenville late Friday night, the 30th, taking notes on how enthusiastically Lambertville, NJ celebrates the holiday and which streets to visit. That exposure, plus what I found on the internet, assured us of a more entertaining adventure. Local Lambertville filmmaker/musicians Paul Kaye & Gary P. Cohen helmed the doc and they recruited actress Deborah Reed to narrate. She is known, with good reason, among cult film fans for her role in the legendary Troll 2 as the bespectacled queen of the goblins, vicious vegan monsters who convert hapless humans into greenery so they can be eaten.

Saturday, October 31, 2015

  

Though Saturday's temps never rose beyond the low sixties, the cheery sun was out all day and there wasn't much wind when sundown brought temperatures down to the upper forties and early fifties. I had on my clunky large ankle-cradling shoes, thick jeans, a multi-pocketed zipper up vest that had belonged to my father UNDER my oversized Hawaiian shirt and a large multipocketed black jacket (the heaviest of my lighter jackets, which in conjunction with the rest of them, probably adds up to a winter coat) so I was quite comfortable lumbering around two quaint towns Hallowe'en night: New Hope, PA, where we eventually ate and shopped, is separated from NJ's Lambertville by a sheet-metal automobile and pedestrian bridge that clanks as we walk over it...and we did lots of footwork. My cousin Joe and my buddy Jeff were dressed in traditional more serious winter outerwear.  While killing time in New Hope, waiting for sundown, we ate at the Logan Inn--good, tasty food but too pricy for my comfort. We didn't encounter any scary phenomena, save for the bill, but ghosts would have certainly given us more bang for our buck if we had! Once it grew dusky, we packed our purchases of New Hope fudge and gourmet popcorn away, clanged back over the bridge, and re-entered the transformed Lambertville. I had switched the Christmas-decoration-festooned, guinea pig-sized rubber spider that I had been carrying (Nastassja Kinski once, gingerly, had patted it, its sole brush with celebrity) with the dog-sized rubber cockroach that I had decked out with a Santa cap, a pet sized Santa coat and Christmas mittens, plus a spiked collar and leash. The Christmas roach (as my cousin dubbed it), often evokes cringing revulsion in many onlookers once they realize what it is and I cradled it in one arm like Paris Hilton does her barking rat-dogs, jiggling it around for maximum jointed-leg-twitching effect. It did its magic Hallowe'en night, provoking much conversation and gasps. 

Evidently, there are side streets of decorated houses and neat businesses, most of which we didn't have time to side-track down. But we did tour the most popular street in Lambertville, which the police close to automobile traffic for several hours Hallowe'en evening. Many residential and businesses owners decorate along that drag, with second and third stories featuring illuminated or moving figures against windows, things dangling out of the window frames, webs stretching from top floors down to their postage-stamp-sized front yards. I recognized some of the props as pop-up Hallowe'en store merchandise from the current season or previous years, but the owners often utilized them in ways that maximized their efficiency or modified them. There were plenty of created-from-scratch figures and scenarios, some I recognized from the Halloweenville documentary. I think I saw the one house where the owner made use of hooded, caped performers in expressionless golden masks--she confessed in the film that she had discovered that they disturbed visitors more than the more obvious monsters that she had once employed; the house front and yard looked familiar but I didn't see any masked figures doing odd rituals...they still might have been lurking about.  Amid the concerts of ghostly noises some owners played, a ghoulish rock band pounded out classic dark rock tunes such as a track from the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon. To accommodate the hundreds of trick 'r treaters (including parents, older siblings and many costumed pets, some in glow-in-the-dark outfits to prevent them from getting stepped on), many owners stocked BARREL LOADS of goodies. A significant portion of the revelers were costumed. We only saw a portion of them but some folks were pushing a huge enclosed transparent illuminated crib with their multiple monkey-garbed children, another family had their children in a huge carrier dressed like a waste management truck. A child too young to be watching or reading Watchmen was dressed as Rorschach. The most impressive spectacle of the evening had at least two strong adults operating an Imperial Walker the size of of a large bulky camel, complete with classic "Imperial March" theme playing in a loop. The four-legged costume didn't walk swiftly up the street but the crowds did part out of respect for it. 

[Unrelated to the documentary, except from the same year's festivities:]

This is the type of well-populated small-town Halloween celebration nostalgically envisioned by the movie Trick 'R Treat. I'm sure that the revelry could be juxtaposed with adventures down creepier parts of town where there are more shadows than people and among more rural patches in Lambertville; that was the geographical contrast mapped out by the Trick 'R Treat film and could be used as a template for Lambertville as well. 

Overlooked Films and A/V guest post: Jeff Segal on his recent horror and suspense film documentary and tv viewing...and videotape nostalgia

Recently, I watched The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry, a swiftly-paced documentary on ham-fisted yet sincere monster-loving actor/writer/director Paul Naschy's life and career, with

from The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry

plenty of comment on the prolific King of Spanish Horror Cinema from the likes of his wife and brood, as well as director-turned-commentator John Landis, Mick Garris, the unflappable Jack Taylor (a somnolent chap who squeezed many cult/exploitation/horror film roles in between international vacations), Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue director Jorge Grau, and many more, plus behind-the-scenes photos and footage, film clips, etc. Highly recommended to the Naschy fan and general Eurotrash scholars.

I've also recently caught the Brian Clemens' Thriller episode, "Screamer," featuring Legend of Hell House and The Innocents actress Pamela Franklin as an imperiled American (!) in backwoods Britain (sadly, the winsome Franklin suppressed her lovely British accent for the part and was saddled with an unflattering 'do). Clemens was known for his clever scripting of The Avengers and sundry twilight-era Hammer horrors but his 1970s UK Thriller anthology show, which I've never previously seen, has taken plenty of heat over the years. Clemens previously co-wrote and produced the suspenseful original version of And Soon the Darkness, which also starred Franklin.

I've seen Slice and Dice, a clip-packed documentary about slasher films which included footage from Michele Soavi's Stagefright, Mario Bava's Bay of Blood and the black-gloved, straight razor-filled giallos that flooded the market between them. The production runs through the expected slasher-film antecedents: Psycho, Peeping Tom, the Italian gialli titles and Black Christmas, then gleefully plunges into the genre proper. I've also watched From Romero To Rome, another British doc charting the influence of the original Night of the Living Dead, the rise of Spanish zombies with Tombs of the Blind Dead and Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (though they neglected the numerous Iberian Paul Naschy movies that involved traditional or Romeroesque zombies), and the effect of Dawn of the Dead and Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters on the genre; a good sampling of subsequent Italian movies, including Fulci's increasingly surreal oeuvre, are addressed by, among others, writer and cinema scholar Kim Newman.

from Rewind This!

I've watched Rewind This!, one of several documentaries dedicated to the rise and fall of the video market, which also includes the perspective of the Japanese as well as, included in the DVD's "special features," bits on the British Video Nasty debacle. This production should be pure nostalgia for many who read the Horror discussion lists (the psychological narcotic of nostalgia is a topic that turns up in those special feature segments as well). Rewind This! dedicates a lot of its running time to the horror and exploitation market, with veteran huckster Charles Band and others chiming in; the makers of the documentary acknowledge that the horror/exploitation market may not be the only points of interest for the retro-video fans but they are some of the most visible. 

I borrowed, rented and traded videotapes through the 1980s and much of the '90s and only began purchasing them new late in that decade, at a time when the writing on their wall was "Goodbye obsolete format, signed, DVD." During the first decade of the 21st century, I began picking among flea market vendors for a few videotape-only rarities and even ordered  VHS titles from online vendors, for those films not yet on DVD....