Listenin' to Jazz and Conversation

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Lonson, Sep 1, 2016.

  1. Robitjazz

    Robitjazz Forum Resident

    Location:
    Liguria, Italy
    I have watched a documentary about him. If I am not wrong, it was broadcasted by Rai Play, a free web service available here in Italy. It might be available on YouTube as well.
    I agree with you about his strong personality. I know that he appreciated jazz, in particular a lot of pianists.
    I own his rendition of the two books of Debussy Preludes and the Images: pure transcendence to my ears. His approach was perfect with Debussy's music.
    I also own The Emperor Concerto played by himself with Wiener (I believe... I go to memory) conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini, great friend of his.
    I wanted to have Rachmaninoff's fourth Concerto influenced by jazz (less played than the very popular second and third Concertos played by nearly all pianists) and then that compilation features some fine Chopinian pages.
     
    Last edited: Nov 29, 2020
  2. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    Camilla Wicks, acclaimed mid-century violin virtuoso, dies at 92

    By Matt Schudel
    November 27, 2020

    Camilla Wicks, a violin prodigy acclaimed as one of the most gifted virtuosos of her generation, only to give up a globe-trotting career in the 1950s to raise her children, died Nov. 25 at her daughter’s home in Weston, Fla. She was 92.

    Lise-Marie Thomas Wertanzl, her daughter, said she did not know the specific cause of death but noted that her mother had been treated several months ago for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

    At a time when classical music was heavily dominated by men, Ms. Wicks was often described as the foremost female concert violinist of her generation.

    Born into a musical family, she made her solo debut at age 7, performing a Mozart violin concerto in her hometown of Long Beach, Calif. By age 10, she was studying at the Juilliard School in New York, and at 13 she gave her first solo concert in New York.

    After appearing at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic at 18, she launched an international career, winning critical praise for her sensitive musicianship. She presented hundreds of concerts over the next decade with the world’s leading orchestras.

    Ms. Wicks was widely known and photographed, yet she gave few substantive interviews throughout her life. Instead, it was left to critics, most of them men, to describe her variously as “a violin genius,” a “violin-playing Madonna” and a “delicate woman . . . consumed by the demon of music.”

    Her extensive repertoire ranged from Bach to challenging 20th-century compositions, and she appeared with such renowned conductors as Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski and Fritz Reiner. Her violin was a Stradivarius.

    In the early 1950s, Ms. Wicks played the violin concerto of Jean Sibelius for the composer himself, who reportedly pronounced it the best version he had heard. Her 1953 performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the New York Philharmonic, under Walter’s direction, “was evidence that the young artist has developed into a violinist of distinction,” critic Ross Parmenter wrote in the New York Times.

    “The performance was . . . so pure in tone, so carefully considered, so refined in feeling and so technically secure that it easily held the attention of the large audience.”

    More than 50 years later, when a radio recording of the concerto was issued on compact disc, critic Raymond Tuttle, writing for the Classical.net website, called it “one of the best performances of the Beethoven I’ve ever heard.”

    Ms. Wicks’s career was at its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, when such illustrious violinists as Jascha Heifetz, Zino Francescatti, Nathan Milstein, Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin were active. She made few recordings, Tuttle wrote, but a 2005 disc that included several of her performances of that era “supports the claim that she was worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the aforementioned male colleagues.”

    Ms. Wicks, who was married in 1951, was visibly pregnant when she performed the Beethoven concerto in New York two years later. She continued her concert career for a few years, but in 1958 she took a hiatus from performing to be with her family.

    She sold her Stradivarius and moved to Texas, where she began teaching. In the 1960s, she resumed her career, but her days of constant travel were over. As a divorced mother of five, she focused more on teaching, moving her family from Washington State to California, Louisiana, Michigan and back to Texas.

    In the 1970s, she spent several years in her ancestral homeland of Norway, teaching at a music conservatory in Oslo. She was on the faculty at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., then at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, from which she retired in 2005.

    Five years ago, the classical record label Music & Arts released a six-disc compilation of previously unavailable recordings Ms. Wicks made from the 1940s to the 1990s, many of them chamber works.

    “What is revealed in this comprehensive survey of Wicks’ career,” critic Henry Fogel wrote in Fanfare magazine, “is a front rank artist who merits a greater public reputation than was granted her. Her technique is as close to flawless as humans get, and her intelligence and interpretive breadth are clearly those of a major artist.”

    Camilla Dolores Wicks was born Aug. 9, 1928, in Long Beach. Her father was a Norwegian-born violinist, her mother an American-born pianist.

    Ms. Wicks showed an early interest in music and asked for a violin when she was 3. Her father was her first teacher. At Juilliard, Ms. Wicks’s mentor was Louis Persinger, whose other violin students included Menuhin, Stern and Ruggiero Ricci. In the 1960s, when Ms. Wicks resumed her career, Ricci gave her one of his violins, made in 1959 by Australian Arthur Smith.

    Ms. Wicks’s marriage to Robert Thomas ended in divorce. Two sons, Philip Thomas and Paul Thomas, died in 2011 and 2017, respectively. Survivors include three children, Angela Thomas Jeffrey, Erik Thomas and Lise-Marie Thomas Wertanzl; and three grandchildren.

    Her only sibling, Virginia Wicks, who died in 2013, was a publicist for such jazz artists as Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie.

    After performing at Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and Europe’s top concert halls in her 20s, Ms. Wicks was content in her later years to appear in small recitals or chamber concerts.

    “The thrill of concert life,” Ms. Wicks said in one of her few interviews, with the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram’s Southland magazine in 1963, “all boils down to a single multiple experience — the time one stands, drained of all you have given that evening, on the particular stage — loving the people you have played for . . . listening to their cries for ‘Encore!’ . . . feeling unworthy of all this and yet knowing something important and great has just happened to you and to the people out there.”
     
  3. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    The quotation at the end of that obituary sums up what I also believe is the most important moment of any performance:

    "“The thrill of concert life,” Ms. Wicks said in one of her few interviews, with the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram’s Southland magazine in 1963, “all boils down to a single multiple experience — the time one stands, drained of all you have given that evening, on the particular stage — loving the people you have played for . . . listening to their cries for ‘Encore!’ . . . feeling unworthy of all this and yet knowing something important and great has just happened to you and to the people out there.”

    That is the very moment when an artist completes a powerful performance. To see the release of emotion on the artist's face as they stand there is the real thrill of a musical performance.

    Yet, in nearly every film of a live performance, the film maker never shows that moment. They nearly always cut away to a shot of the audience, or to a very long shot from the back of the theater. The film producers seem to lack all understanding of what the musicians themselves feel. The sentiment described by Camilla Wicks has been described to me by many musicians. That moment of completion almost always overpowers them, and it is revealed in their silent faces.

    The stage lighting people, when they have control, also do not understand this. They often drop the lights, often to darkness, so that most of the audience cannot even see the performers, as they stand full of powerful emotions.

    If I am at a concert, with binoculars, even when I may be in the front row, that is when I zoom in and look at the face of the performer.
     
    Last edited: Nov 29, 2020
  4. Berthold

    Berthold "When you swing....swing some more!" -- Th. Monk

    Location:
    Rheinhessen
    Henry "Red" Allen & His New York Orchestra #1


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  5. Mike6565

    Mike6565 Hyperactive!

    Location:
    Long island, ny
  6. mwheelerk

    mwheelerk Sorry, I can't talk now, I'm listening to music...

    Location:
    Gilbert Arizona
  7. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member


    Red Allen and Satchmo with Louis' wife

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  8. mwheelerk

    mwheelerk Sorry, I can't talk now, I'm listening to music...

    Location:
    Gilbert Arizona
    fingerpoppin, SJR, vanhooserd and 8 others like this.
  9. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    Red and Roy

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  10. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    Django and Duke's men.

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    Al Sears, Junior Raglin, Shelton Hemphill, Junior Raglin, Django Reinhardt, Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, Aquarium, NYC, ca. November 1946

    It looks like Lawrence Brown dealing
     
    jonwoody, peter1, bjlefebvre and 6 others like this.
  11. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

  12. Gibson67

    Gibson67 Life is a Magical Mystery Tour enjoy the ride

    Location:
    Diss, UK
    Lester Young, Roy Eldridge and Harry Edison Laughin ‘To Keep from cryin’

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  13. eeglug

    eeglug Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago, IL, USA
    Recent black friday downloads from Qobuz - $3.89 each!


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  14. cds23

    cds23 Accidentally slowing the forum down with huge pics

    Location:
    Germany, Aachen
    UNITY | BLOW THRU YOUR MIND | EPI | 1974 | US FIRST STEREO PRESSING EPI_02 LP

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    „Unity“ was the title of the first album released on EPI records by Byron Morris and Gerald Wise (also featuring Byard Lancaster). While this record was a rather complicated Free Jazz outing, „Blow Thru Your Mind“ represents something completely different.

    Very rhythmic, heavy on bass and with vocals by Jay Clayton, „Blow Thru Your Mind“ should be a pleasant experience to anyone with a slight interest in 1970‘s (Avantgarde) Jazz.

    The simple fact that Milton Suggs plays the bass on this record made it a must-have for me. Suggs is responsible for this incredible sound on „First Impressions“ by Shamek Farrah on Strata East. It doesn‘t come as a surprise that the sound is quite similar to said record. On top of that, it was recorded at Minot Sound in New York, where many Strata East sessions took place. Still, it stands completely on its own as a unique album with fantastic ideas and - at least to ears - superior recording quality.

    „Kitty Bey“ and „Reunion“ should be part of every Deep Jazz compilation. I‘m sure you‘ll agree once you listened to this album. I almost got a heart attack when I first listened to the original pressing and heard an introduction at what seems to be a live concert - oh man, money burnt for a mispressing, is what I thought. But skipping forward revealed that this introduction was always part of this album - it was just left out for all digital versions.

     
  15. Mike6565

    Mike6565 Hyperactive!

    Location:
    Long island, ny
  16. Ant G

    Ant G Senior Member

    Location:
    NY
    Hows it sound? These Tone Poets masters are supposed to sound wonderful, and they really nailed the packaging. The only one I've heard is the RVG edition. Otherwise known as the "rarely very good" editions.
    Regardless this is an excellent album that I will listen to now. :D
     
  17. Berthold

    Berthold "When you swing....swing some more!" -- Th. Monk

    Location:
    Rheinhessen
    Buck Clayton: The CBS Jam Sessions #4


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  18. Gibson67

    Gibson67 Life is a Magical Mystery Tour enjoy the ride

    Location:
    Diss, UK
    Coleman Hawkins “Wrapped Tight”

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  19. Sorcerer

    Sorcerer Senior Member

    Location:
    Netherlands
    I'd never heard of Alfa Mist. Listening to Structuralism on Bandcamp now. Good stuff! :righton: I've added the Japanese CDs to my CD Japan bookmarks.
     
    Ray Cole and alarickc like this.
  20. Mike6565

    Mike6565 Hyperactive!

    Location:
    Long island, ny
    it’s fantastic, one of the best Tone poets of the year, Wonderful discovery as I went in with a blind purchase and now reach for it often....
     
    charlesp likes this.
  21. alarickc

    alarickc Vinylholic

    Location:
    Shaker Heights, OH
    Oh yeah. Everything he's put out is gold in my opinion. I look forward to his next release, whenever that may be.
     
    davidpoole and Sorcerer like this.
  22. Bradd

    Bradd Now’s The Time

    Location:
    Chester, NJ
    What don’t you like about the RVGs. I think they’re all fantastic.
     
  23. Bradd

    Bradd Now’s The Time

    Location:
    Chester, NJ
    Starwanderer and frightwigwam like this.
  24. Valkenburg

    Valkenburg Forum Resident

    Location:
    Hawaii
  25. Lonson

    Lonson I'm in the kitchen with the Tombstone Blues Thread Starter

    Wolfgang Lackerschmid and Chet Baker "Quintet Sessions 1979"

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    Audiophile sound, nice playing.
     

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