Music History Monday: Orrin Keepnews: With Great Respect and Appreciation

03/01/21 • 19 min

We mark the death on March 1, 2015 â six years ago today â of the American jazz producer and founder of Riverside Records and Milestone Records Orrin Keepnews, in El Cerrito California, but a couple of stonesâ throws from where Iâm writing this blog. Born in da Bronx on March 2, 1923, Keepnews died one day before what would have been his 92nd birthday. Keepnews remains one of those indispensable people who made entire careers possible, who protected and respected musicians in an often-vicious artistic environment, who labored in the background and was thus someone whose contributions are often overlooked. Well, not here; not today. We will get to Mr. Keepnews in a moment. But first: March 1st is one of those âfeast daysâ during which so much stuff happened in music history that any number of anniversaries or events could have occupied the bulk of todayâs post. As I would never forgive myself for not mentioning at least some of them, here we go. We mark the birth on March 1, 1810 â 221 years ago today â of the miraculous FrÃ©dÃ©ric FranÃ§ois Chopin in Å»elazowa Wola, Poland, not far from Warsaw. He died, all-too-young 39 years later, [â¦]

The post Music History Monday: Orrin Keepnews: With Great Respect and Appreciation first appeared on Robert Greenberg.

The post Music History Monday: Orrin Keepnews: With Great Respect and Appreciation first appeared on Robert Greenberg.

Previous Episode

Music History Monday: Tchaikovsky: Two Women and a Symphony

We mark the premiere on February 22, 1878 – 143 years ago today – of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor in a concert of the Russian Musical Society in Moscow, under the baton of Nicolai Rubinstein. The story of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 and the two women that inspired it is a fascinating one, a story that desperately wants to be told in some detail. Therefore, I am stretching it across two posts: today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes. Tchaikovsky at 37 Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) celebrated his 37th birthday on May 7, 1877. He was a man with many secrets and many fears: a cross-dressing homosexual with a penchant for teenaged boys living and working in one of the most homophobic societies ever: Tsarist Russia. Not surprisingly given his sexuality and the dangers it created for him, Tchaikovsky was over-sensitive to a fault, given to anxiety attacks, extended bouts of weeping, deep self-loathing and dependence on alcohol and tobacco. At the time of his 37th birthday Tchaikovsky was living in Moscow (where he taught at the Moscow Conservatory) and had begun sketching his fourth symphony. It was at this moment in time that – [...]

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Next Episode

Music History Monday: Dressed to Kill

We mark the death on March 8, 1869 â 152 years ago today â of the French composer and conductor Hector Berlioz, in Paris at the age of 65. We will use this anniversary of Berliozâ death for a two-day Berlioz wallow. Todayâs Music History Monday post will frame Berlioz as a founding member of the Romantic movement and will tell a wonderful story that conveys to us much of what we need to know about Berlioz the man: his passion, his impulsiveness, and in the end, his good sense. Tomorrowâs Dr. Bob Prescribes post will delve more deeply into his biography and his proclivity for compositional gigantism, using his Requiem Mass of 1837 as an example. Background: The Romantic Era Cult (really, fetish) of Individual Expression An idealized image of the middle-class âindividualâ dominated the thought and art of the second half of the eighteenth century, a period generally referred to as the Enlightenment and, in music history, the Classical Era. This Enlightenment elevation of an idealized âindividual personâ saw its political denouement in the French Revolution (1789-1795) and its musical denouement in Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) and the subsequent Romantic era cult of individual expression. Whereas Classical era [â¦]

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