The Arts

Quincy Jones

Quincy Jones has had several very successful careers, largely leaving jazz altogether by the early ’70s to make his money out of producing pop, R&B and even rap records. His earlier years were much more significant to improvised music. He grew up in Seattle and his first important job was playing trumpet and arranging for Lionel Hampton’s Orchestra (1951-53), sitting in a trumpet section with Clifford Brown and Art Farmer.

During the 1950s he started freelancing as an arranger, writing memorable charts for sessions led by Oscar Pettiford, Brown, Farmer, Gigi Gryce, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, Cannonball Adderley and Dinah Washington among others. He toured with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band (1956), started recording as a leader for ABC-Paramount in 1956 and worked in Paris (1957-58) for the Barclay label as an arranger and producer. In 1959 Jones toured Europe with his all-star big band which was originally put together to play for Harold Arlen’s show Free and Easy. Continue reading →

George Herriman

George Herriman III was born in New Orleans in 1880 to Creole parents. The family moved to Los Angeles a few years later and worked with his father as a barber and then a baker where he drove the family bread truck, but his pranksterish attitude frequently irritated his parents, and after baking a mouse into a loaf of bread his parents implored him to perform his pranks elsewhere, and relieved him of his position at the bakery.

In 1900, Herriman emigrated to New York City and in 1901, his first cartoons began to appear in Judge magazine. Shortly thereafter he landed a job at Joseph Pulitzer’s “New York World” and began creating Sunday & daily comic strips for the fledgling medium. In 1906 he left Pulitzer to do a strip for the McClure syndicate, went back to Pulitzer & finally left Pulitzer again to work for William Randolph Hearst at the “New York Journal American”. It would be here that Herriman created his most famous & popular characters, the animal residents of Coconino County, USA. Continue reading →

Miles Davis

What is cool? At its very essence, cool is all about what’s happening next. In popular culture, what’s happening next is a kaleidoscope encompassing past, present and future: that which is about to happen may be cool, and that which happened in the distant past may also be cool. This timeless quality, when it applies to music, allows minimalist debate with few exceptions, that which has been cool will always be cool.

For nearly six decades, Miles Davis has embodied all that is cool â€“ in his music (and most especially jazz), in his art, fashion, romance, and in his international, if not intergalactic, presence that looms strong as ever today. Continue reading →

W.C. Handy

1873-1958 b. Florence, Ala. William Christopher Handy was largely self-taught, Handy began his career as a cornet player in a minstrel show in 1896, and later organized various small bands.

He was among the first to set down the blues, and with his Memphis Blues (1912), originally entitled Mr. Crump (1909), he rose to prominence. His songs, such as St. Louis Blues (1914) and Beale Street Blues (1917), are the classic examples of their type.

In 1918 he moved from Memphis to New York City and remained active as a writer and publisher of music, in spite of growing blindness, until shortly before his death. Continue reading →

Jean-Michel Basquiat

b. Brooklyn, N.Y. Born into a middle-class Haitian and Puerto Rican family, he was a 1980s art star whose rise and fall were rapid and dramatic. A rebel, high school dropout, and part of the downtown New York scene, he was influenced by the violence of street life and by the life and work of Andy Warhol, who became his mentor.

Basquiat started as a graffiti artist, making images and writing slogans on the walls of buildings, and also produced painted T-shirts, found-object assemblages, and paintings.

In the early 1980s he was ‘discovered’ by the art establishment, and his works in paint and crayon on unprimed canvas, featuring crude, angry, and rawly powerful figures and graffiti-like written messages, were much sought after by collectors.

Basquiat’s art focused on “suggestive dichotomies,” such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. Basquiat appropriated poetry, drawing and painting, and married text and image, abstraction and figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. Continue reading →

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