Here is a clip from Chaplin's 1928 film The Circus. |
No use of digitally imposed lions or dual screen projection. One comic actor and one slumbering lion.
|
|
This is the final speech from The Great Dictator. This was Chaplin's first film in which he spoke. It is a brilliant comedy and a harsh indictment of the facism that was brutalizing Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Film features Chaplin in dual roles, one as an innocent jewish barber and another as a Hitler-like dictator. This scene comes from the end of the film by which time the barber character has been mistaken for the dictator. If you want to know how, watch the film. Mr. Book usually shows it at the end of his AP class. |
|
This clip is from Chaplin's 1936 film Modern Times, his last silent film. In this scene, the tramp character is forced to have his lunch fed to him by an out of control apparatus.
|
Here is a clip of John Steinbeck accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is considered one of the greatest jazz albums ever made because of its mood and musical genius but also because of its beauty that grabs the attention of non-jazz fans. This is a clip that features music as well as comments from journalists, fans, and musicians speaking about its influence. What do you think? |
|
Here are two tracks from Kind of Blue.
Here is Bob Dylan performing a song on the Johnny Cash Show in 1969. He is singing a song from his Nashville Skyline album, a country folk-rock kind of album with a lot of fine pickin' and good songs. Dylan is singing in a more listener-friendly timbre than the rasp he otherwise uses. People don't love and obsess over Dylan's music because he has a gorgeous voice because he really doesn't have one of those. They obsess over his music because of the many brilliant songs and albums he has recorded over the past 50 years. They also obsess over his songs because of his poetic lyrics that are not always easy to decipher. Dylan single-handledly elevated rock and roll music from a silly disposable pop form to an artistic and literary artform with his peerless albums and influence in the 1960s. The clip on the right is an acoustic version of a song on Dylan's Blood on the Tracks album. I have no idea where this version came from other than knowing that Dylan's unreleased recordings are plentifully bootlegged. Dylan did record the Blood on the Tracks album twice. The second set of recordings became the 1975 classic album. Three or four of those first-version tracks that he abandoned have been released, but I would personally go through many lengths to get a good copy of those first recordings on a proper album.
|
|
The last face on the wall mural is Louis Armstrong. When one is asked who the most important musician of the twentieth century is, don't say Madonna or even Elvis. Louis Armstrong, born in 1901, was at the forefront of jazz in the early 1920s, playing with King Oliver, his musical mentor. Jazz drew its tools from the instruments of orchestras, but in the hands of African Americans in New Orleans, the music they created discarded fixed forms and emphasized improvisation. Armstrong did not invent jazz--that distinciton is often credited to Buddy Bolden, who performed his most impactful work from 1900-1907, at which point he developed schizophrenia and spent the remainder of his days in an insane asylum in Louisiana, dying there in 1931. Bolden's work influenced subsequent musicans like Sidney Bechet, King Oliver and Armstrong, but unlike them, Bolden never recorded his music.
Amstrong's influences were many: scat singing; pioneering the trumpet and coronet as solo instruments; creating small five-man bands, recorded in the late twenties as the "Hot-Five" records; creating a singing style modeled on how a trumpet can be played; as well as many other innovations. All of these contributions were innovated from the traditional orchestra paradigm, one that was European in origin. Using orchestral instruments, as well as folk instruments like the banjo, Armstrong, as well as his contemporaries, used these intruments to invent new music, and the innovations he made created and refined a distinctively American music that incorporated blues and gospel. The result was some of the finest jazz ever made, and the influence of the solo instrument and the small band reverberated through the R & B (rhythm and blues) bands of the forties and the rock and roll bands onwards.
THE VIDEO CLIPS--The one on the left is "St. Louis Blues," recorded in Chicago April 26, 1933 for Victor Records. The music starts about 22 seconds into the clip. Notice the quick tempo--Jazz was meant to make people dance. The clip on the right is an elegant duet between Louis and Ella Fitzgerald--one of the finest female jazz vocalists of all time. This tune is a jazzy slow jam from 1950, a song to which to dance slowly.
Bottom line is that a wealth of music is waiting for you to listen to--likable, interesting music. So go on YouTube and investigate, then find some of these treasures and tuck them into your collection.
Amstrong's influences were many: scat singing; pioneering the trumpet and coronet as solo instruments; creating small five-man bands, recorded in the late twenties as the "Hot-Five" records; creating a singing style modeled on how a trumpet can be played; as well as many other innovations. All of these contributions were innovated from the traditional orchestra paradigm, one that was European in origin. Using orchestral instruments, as well as folk instruments like the banjo, Armstrong, as well as his contemporaries, used these intruments to invent new music, and the innovations he made created and refined a distinctively American music that incorporated blues and gospel. The result was some of the finest jazz ever made, and the influence of the solo instrument and the small band reverberated through the R & B (rhythm and blues) bands of the forties and the rock and roll bands onwards.
THE VIDEO CLIPS--The one on the left is "St. Louis Blues," recorded in Chicago April 26, 1933 for Victor Records. The music starts about 22 seconds into the clip. Notice the quick tempo--Jazz was meant to make people dance. The clip on the right is an elegant duet between Louis and Ella Fitzgerald--one of the finest female jazz vocalists of all time. This tune is a jazzy slow jam from 1950, a song to which to dance slowly.
Bottom line is that a wealth of music is waiting for you to listen to--likable, interesting music. So go on YouTube and investigate, then find some of these treasures and tuck them into your collection.
|
|