Rhapsody In Blue Quotes

They flew high above savanna grassland. The sky was the deep cornflower blue of a sunny late afternoon on Earth…exactly the color of a sunny late afternoon on Earth. Only there was no sun. Whatever was lighting this planet, it wasn’t a star.

Freedom means we have to be free to be Stupid, and Banal, and Perverse, free to generate both Absalom, Absalom!, and Swapping Pets: The Alligator Edition. Freedom means that if some former radio DJ can wrestle his way to the top of the heap and provoke political upheavals by spouting his lame opinions and bullying his guests, he too has a right to have a breakfast cereal named after him. American creative energy has always teetered on the bring of insanity. "Rhapsody in Blue" and "The Night Chicago Died" have, alas, common DNA, the DNA for "joyfully reckless confidence.

BLUE HEAVENS It could make a person dizzy, those spinning, circling heavens filled with knots of stars, swirling blue stars approaching, blue-shadow stars fading away. It’s a mayhem of reeling, a scattering blue dust of star clouds circling the circling centers of spiraling galaxies wheeling forever toward no known horizon. Someone, immersed in the deep beauty of these blue celestials, could get lost while waiting for hands to deliver perhaps an orange, perhaps an apple, scarlet or gold, a sprig of green, a blossom, pink dogwood, spring plum. Inspired by “Golden Horn” Tondino The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas

It was decaffeinated jazz he sent to WJZ via Western Union lines from the Hotel Pennsylvania. A distant echo of New Orleans, yet it spoke to listeners.” The ’20s style was lively, rich with saxophone and violin and well-sprinkled with novelty tunes. Lopez was instantly identified by his theme, Nola, given a dexterous workout on the Lopez keyboard. Whiteman had Gershwin: his Rhapsody in Blue concert at Aeolian Hall on Feb. 12, 1924, established his reputation. And though Whiteman was slow to find his way into radio, he was a major force in band music of the ’20s. George Olsen was a master of popular music: his 1925 recording Who was a bestseller, followed by such period hits as The Varsity Drag, Because My Baby Don’t Mean Maybe Now, and Doin’ the Raccoon, a testament to the national passion for fur coats.

The now-literary-minded masses read an astonishing rush of new novels during this period: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Newly minted intellectuals tried to parse James Joyce’s Ulysses or T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. New fans of the arts listened to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and saw plays by Eugene O’Neill, who won three Pulitzer Prizes during the 1920s.

In Jazz, like in America, the group works together toward a common cause with lots of room left for each individual to shine.

I'd heard "Rhapsody in Blue" a thousand times and it always amazed me. It was so humble and then so bombastic. It was beautiful, bright, and terrifying: old and new, European and American. At times it sounded like Debussy, at times it sounded like Stravinsky, and at times it sounded like the Lower East Side in 1910. "Rhapsody in Blue" was a quintessentially New York work of art, but it was also about moving from east to west, from the old world to the new...