Musical maestro Leonard Bernstein was born 105 years ago today
Leonard Bernstein smiles as he listens to a question at a press conference at the Savoy Hotel M in London, April 4, 1972
Associated Press photo
Leonard Bernstein was born 105 years ago today.
A composer, conductor, author, music lecturer and pianist, Bernstein was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States to receive worldwide acclaim.
The New York Times wrote the he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."
Bernstein is quite possibly the conductor whose name is best known to the American public. His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras and from his music for West Side Story, as well as Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town and his own, Mass.
Bernstein was also the first conductor to give numerous television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. In addition, he was a skilled pianist, often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard.
As a composer, he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and pieces for the piano.
Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and commercial success of West Side Story.
Here, Bernstein conducts the studio recording of West Side Story.
Elvis Costello is 69 years old today.
The English singer-songwriter came to prominence as an early participant in London's pub rock scene in the early 1970s. He later became associated with the original wave of the British Punk/New Wave movement of the mid to late 1970s. Steeped in word play, the vocabulary of Costello's lyrics is broader than that of most popular songs.
Born in St Mary's Hospital, London, Costello is the son of Lilian Alda and Ross MacManus, a musician and bandleader. He is of Irish descent. He lived in Twickenham and attended Archbishop Myers R.C. School, which is now St Mark's Catholic Secondary School in neighboring Hounslow.
With a musically inclined father (who was a jazz trumpeter and sang with the Joe Loss Orchestra), Costello's first broadcast recording was with his father in a television commercial for R. White's Lemonade ("I'm a Secret Lemonade Drinker"). His father wrote and sang the song while his young son provided backing vocals. The advertisement won a silver award at the 1974 International Advertising Festival.
Costello moved with his Liverpool-born mother to Birkenhead, Cheshire, in 1971. There, he formed his first band, a folk duo called Rusty, with Allan Mayes. After completing secondary school at St. Francis Xavier's College, he moved back to London where he next formed a band called Flip City, which had a style in the pub rock vein. They were active from 1974 through to early 1976.
Around this time, he adopted the stage name D.P. Costello. His father had performed under the name Day Costello, and Elvis has said in interviews that he took this name as a tribute to his father.
Costello worked at a number of office jobs to support himself, most famously at Elizabeth Arden – immortalized in the lyrics of "I'm Not Angry" as the "vanity factory" – where he worked as a data entry clerk.
He worked for a short period as a computer operator at the Midland Bank computer center in Bootle. He continued to write songs and began looking for a solo recording contract.
Costello was signed to Stiff Records, an independent label, on the basis of a demo tape. His manager at Stiff, Jake Riviera, suggested a name change, combining Elvis Presley's first name and Costello, his father's stage name.
Costello’s music has drawn on many diverse genres. One critic described him as a "pop encyclopedia,” able to "reinvent the past in his own image.”
Here, Costello, in 1979, performs “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love & Understanding."
Sean Connery as James Bond and Claudine Auger as Domino in Thunderball, 1965
Sean Connery was born 93 years ago today.
The Scottish actor and producer won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards (one of them being a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award) and three Golden Globes (including the Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Henrietta Award).
Connery was best known for portraying the character, James Bond, starring in seven Bond films between 1962 and 1983.
In 1988, Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables.
His film career also included such films as Marnie, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Hunt for Red October, Highlander, Murder on the Orient Express, Dragonheart and The Rock.
He was knighted in July, 2000. Connery was polled as "The Greatest Living Scot" and "Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure.”
In 1989, he was proclaimed "Sexiest Man Alive" by People magazine and in 1999, at age 69, he was voted "Sexiest Man of the Century.”
Connery died in his sleep of pneumonia and heart failure on October 31, 2020 at his home in the Bahamas.
Blair Underwood taping a segment of “The Orangeburg Massacre” on the top of a parking garage in Hollywood
Photo by Frank Beacham
In 1990, the mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, advertised a program where individuals could apply for a $5,000 grant to do an art project.
I applied to produce a radio drama of the Orangeburg Massacre and won.
The massacre is the 1968 story of an act of racism in Orangeburg, South Carolina, a small Southern town where two black colleges — South Carolina State and Claflin — are located.
The saga began as a peaceful protest by frustrated black college students who were denied use of the Orangeburg community’s only bowling alley.
However, a conservative Southern governor, wanting to appear tough to his white constituents, overreacted to the civil rights protest, ordering a massive show of armed force. As emotions frayed and the situation veered out of control, nine white highway patrolmen opened gunfire on the S.C. state campus — killing three black students and wounding 27 others.
All the students were unarmed and in retreat from the highway patrolmen at the time of the shooting. Yet, without warning, they were shot in their backs with deadly buckshot.
The killings occurred in a southern state that proudly celebrated a record of nonviolence during the turbulent civil rights years. The state claimed the deaths were the result of a two-way gun battle between students and lawmen at the predominately black South Carolina State College (now university) in Orangeburg.
To bolster that claim and deflect responsibility from its own actions, the state hastily devised a media campaign to blame the riot on Cleveland Sellers, a young black activist working to organize area college students.
At first, the people of South Carolina believed it. Time, however, would unravel the state’s story. By then, the cover-up had gone on 25 years. The story is as old as the South itself — one where stubborn whites will not face up to their own racism.
Mayor Bradley, who was African-American, apparently liked the pitch. I got the grant and went straight to work on the script, which I adapted from a 1971 book by Jack Nelson and Jack Bass. I had yet to write my own book on the subject. In additional to writing the script and I would also direct the show.
Peggy Webber would produce and helped put together a terrific group of major radio, television and film actors through her California Artists Radio Theatre.
We got James Whitmore, of Harry S. Truman’s “Give ‘Em Hell Harry” fame, to play S.C. Gov. Robert McNair. Parley Baer, who was “Chester” on the radio version of Gunsmoke and the mayor of Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show, played S.C. SLED chief and the story’s major villain, Pete Strom.
Other actors included Ford Rainey, Royal Dano, Bill Erwin, Robert Rockwell, Lou Krugman, Vance Colvig and Ellerine Harding.
As a passenger on a flight from New York City to LA, I found myself sitting next to Blair Underwood, a then 20-something African-American actor who had a role on LA Law, a primetime television show.
Today, Underwood is 59 years old and has had an excellent career since I met him. On the flight, Underwood was friendly and we talked. I told him about The Orangeburg Massacre and how I had gotten a grant for a radio production from the city of Los Angeles. I asked if he’d consider appearing in it.
He immediately said yes, and also readily agreed to work for scale. He would play John Stroman, the man who wanted to bowl and had started the demonstration that began the entire Orangeburg dispute.
Later, Underwood’s agent tried to torpedo the deal. The money was so low that he would make nothing. But Underwood himself overruled the agent and did the show against his wishes since he had made me a promise.
I appreciated that. Blair Underwood was a man of his word, and I've always admired him because of his position with that agent.
I needed one more actor. This one would play me — the story’s narrator.
I had a friend who knew and suggested David Carradine, who had acted in the TV series, King Fu. He gave me his phone number.
I called Carradine and he agreed for a price of $400, all the beer he could drink and a ride to and from his home to the recording studio. I agreed, and our project was fully cast.
We recorded The Orangeburg Massacre documentary-style at several real locations, with only the narration recorded in a studio. Instead of a camera, we used a Neumann stereo microphone and a digital audio recorder.
For the sounds of a bowling alley, we visited a real bowling alley to get its natural sound and ambience. For the outdoor demonstrations, we got the city’s sounds by using the top of a parking garage at Sunset-Gower studios after hours. We recorded certain scenes at James Whitmore’s home over the beach in Malibu.
The talent we brought together worked very quickly. We finished the entire show in several days. Everything went flawlessly. It usually does when you work with professionals. In about a week, we finished the editing. The show was quickly picked up by public radio and aired nationally.
The Orangeburg Massacre radio drama won the Gold Medal for Best History Program and Silver Medal for Best Social Issues Program in the international radio programming competition at the 1991 New York Festivals.
The winners — selected from nearly 1800 international entries from 28 countries — were chosen by juries assembled in the United States, England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
When the show had its run, we retired it rather than have to continue to pay residuals to the actors. Everyone in the cast agreed to donate the program to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in Mississippi where it could be heard, but not sold at a profit. It resides there today.
My story, The Legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre, is part of the fourth edition of my compilation of Southern stories in, Whitewash — A Southern Journey through Music, Mayhem and Murder.
Wayne Shorter, jazz saxophonist and composer, was born 90 years ago today.
Many of Shorter's compositions have become jazz standards. His output earned worldwide recognition, critical praise and various commendations. He also received acclaim for his mastery of the soprano saxophone, after switching his focus from the tenor in the late 1960s.
He began an extended reign in 1970 as Down Beat's annual poll-winner on that instrument, winning the critics' poll for 10 consecutive years and the readers' for eighteen.
Shorter first came to wide prominence in the late 1950s as a member of, and eventually primary composer for, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.
Following the release of Odyssey of Iska in 1970, Shorter formed the fusion group Weather Report with Miles Davis veteran keyboardist, Joe Zawinul. The other original members were bassist Miroslav Vitous, percussionist Airto Moreira, and drummer Alphonse Mouzon.
After Vitous' departure in 1973, Shorter and Zawinul co-led the group until the band's break-up in late 1985. A variety of musicians would make up Weather Report over the years (most notably the revolutionary bassist, Jaco Pastorius) helping the band produce many high quality recordings in diverse styles, with funk, bebop, Latin jazz, ethnic music and futurism being the most prevalent denominators.
As a bandleader, Shorter recorded over 20 albums.
In 2017, Shorter was the joint winner of the Polar Music Prize. The award committee stated: "Without the musical explorations of Wayne Shorter, modern music would not have drilled so deep."
Shorter died in Los Angeles on March 2, 2023 at the age of 89.
Here, Shorter performs a solo with the Miles Davis Quintet in 1964.
Marshall Brickman with Woody Allen
Marshall Brickman is 84 years old today.
A screenwriter and director, Brickman is best known for his collaborations with Woody Allen. He also played the banjo with Eric Weissberg in the 1960s.
Born in Rio de Janeiro, after attending the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he became a member of Folk act The Tarriers in 1962, recruited by former classmate Eric Weissberg. Following the disbanding of The Tarriers in 1965, Brickman joined The New Journeymen with John Phillips and Michelle Phillips, who later had success with The Mamas & the Papas.
He left The New Journeymen to pursue a career as a writer, initially writing for television in the 1960s, including Candid Camera, The Tonight Show and The Dick Cavett Show. It was during this time that he met Woody Allen, with whom he would collaborate on three completed film screenplays during the 1970s. These were Sleeper (1973), Annie Hall (1977, which won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar), and Manhattan (1979).
Brickman directed several of his own scripts in the 1980s, including Simon, Lovesick, and The Manhattan Project, as well as Sister Mary Explains It All, a TV adaptation of the play by Christopher Durang.
With partner Rick Elice, he wrote the book for the Broadway musical, Jersey Boys. The two collaborated again in 2009 to write the book for the musical, The Addams Family.
On this day in 1835 — 188 years ago — the first in a series of six articles announcing the discovery of life on the moon appeared in the New York Sun newspaper.
Known collectively as "The Great Moon Hoax," the articles were supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The byline was Dr. Andrew Grant, described as a colleague of Sir John Herschel, a famous astronomer of the day.
Herschel had in fact traveled to Capetown, South Africa, in January, 1834 to set up an observatory with a powerful new telescope. As Grant described it, Herschel had found evidence of life forms on the moon, including such fantastic animals as unicorns, two-legged beavers and furry, winged humanoids resembling bats.
The articles also offered vivid description of the moon's geography, complete with massive craters, enormous amethyst crystals, rushing rivers and lush vegetation.
The New York Sun, founded in 1833, was one of the new "penny press" papers that appealed to a wider audience with a cheaper price and a more narrative style of journalism. From the day the first moon hoax article was released, sales of the paper shot up considerably. It was exciting stuff and readers lapped it up.
The only problem was that none of it was true. The Edinburgh Journal of Science had stopped publication years earlier, and Grant was a fictional character. The articles were most likely written by Richard Adams Locke, a Sun reporter educated at Cambridge University.
Intended as satire, they were designed to poke fun at earlier, serious speculations about extraterrestrial life, particularly those of Reverend Thomas Dick, a popular science writer who claimed in his bestselling books that the moon alone had 4.2 billion inhabitants.
Readers were completely taken in by the story, however, and failed to recognize it as satire. The craze over Herschel's supposed discoveries even fooled a committee of Yale University scientists, who traveled to New York in search of the Edinburgh Journal articles.
After Sun employees sent them back and forth between the printing and editorial offices, hoping to discourage them, the scientists returned to New Haven without realizing they had been tricked. On September 16, 1835, the Sun admitted the articles had been a hoax. People were generally amused by the whole thing, and sales of the paper didn’t suffer.
The Sun continued operation until 1950, when it merged with the New York World-Telegram. The merger folded in 1967. A new New York Sun newspaper was founded in 2002, but it has no relation to the original.
The tradition still continues today. It’s now called “Fox News.”
Thanks History.com
Bob Dylan, Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, NY, Sept 4, 2012
Photo by Frank Beacham
In 2009 — 14 years ago — Bob Dylan told the audience on his weekly radio show broadcast, Theme Time Radio Hour, that he was speaking to a number of car companies about becoming the voice of their satellite navigation systems.
Dylan said he thought it be would be good for drivers to hear him saying things such as: "Take a left at the next street. No, a right. You know what, just go straight."
The press and many members of the audience took Dylan seriously and the story ran for days. Dylan, as usual, got the last laugh.