Interchanging Idioms

Dave Brubeck dies at 91 A jazz legend died today, at Norwalk Hospital, near his home in Wilton, Connecticut. His famous "Take Five" is one of the great jazz pieces, and ushered in a whole world of different time signatures and irregular rhythms bringing jazz into the main stream. Although early on fellow jazz musicians felt Dave's piano playing didn't swing, he taught the world a new meaning to swing relying on shifting meter and intricate rhythmic play. Back in the mid 70's I was just coming into my own as a musicians (albeit still in 8th grade). I was first chair trombone in a school jazz band and fell in love with making music. It was this year I first heard "Take Five" and it's been my favorite piece of music every since. If you listen to my music today, you'll heard elements of those initial irregular rhythms that seem to somehow feel regular pervasive throughout. While I have studied Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, Debussy, Shostakovich, Copla...

One of the giants of the Avant-garde movement in music, Milton Babbitt passed away Saturday, January 29th, 2011. He was 94. Composing for more than 60 years, an educator, innovator, founder of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for "life's work as a distinguished and seminal American composer."

Polish composer Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki passed away "We are sorry to confirm the news that Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki has passed away," said Beata Jankowska-Burzynska, an official with Polish Radio's National Symphony Orchestra in the southern city of Katowice. Gorecki was born December 6, 1933 in Czernica, near Poland's gritty coal-mining city of Katowice. He was orphaned at the age of two when his mother, a pianist, died. He studied music at the Katowice Music Academy, where he went on to hold a professorship and became its rector from 1975-1979. Known for his trademark simple yet monumental musical style, Gorecki was regarded as being at the forefront of Polish avant-guard classical composers through the 1950's to 1970's, exploring Polish folk music and medieval themes. Focused on motherhood and the ravages of war, Gorecki's Symphony No 3 or Symphony of Sorrow Songs, gained critical acclaim and worldwide popularity after its 1992 re-release featuring ...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Big band and jazz drummer Louie Bellson, a master musician who performed with such greats as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman and his late wife, Pearl Bailey, has died. He was 84. Bellson died Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications of Parkinson's disease following a broken hip in November, according to his wife, Francine. Bellson's career spanned more than six decades, performing on more than 200 albums with jazz greats including Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Oscar Peterson, Woody Herman, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong. It was through Ellington that he met Bailey, the great singer and Broadway performer. They married in 1952, and when she died in 1990 at age 72, he told the Philadelphia Daily News that "I just lost my best friend." He was designated as a "master of jazz" in 1994 by the National Endowment for the Arts, which said he "ranks among the fo...

Lukas Foss , the American composer, conductor and pianist who succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as head of composition at UCLA, died Sunday at his home in New York. He was 86. Foss wrote more than 100 works, passing through three stylistic periods, from tonal, neoclassical writing through experimentation with 12-tone, electronic, chance and other techniques, then returning to complex but more listener-friendly works. His output includes four symphonies, three string quartets and many choral, chamber, orchestral and stage pieces, embodying almost every style available to a classical composer. His best-known works are "Time Cycle" (songs with orchestra after texts by W. H. Auden, A. E. Housman, Franz Kafka and Friedrich Nietzsche); "Baroque Variations" for orchestra (deconstruction of Bach, Handel and D. Scarlatti); "Echoi" (for four instruments); two operas, "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (after Mark Twain) and "Griffelkin"; Symph...