Let’s say it upfront: Salvatore (“Sal”) Joseph Mosca (1927–2007) is the greatest jazz musician you’ve likely never heard perform. Readers of my posts have heard of Maestro Mosca, as I’ve mentioned him repeatedly as being among my favorite, best-of-the-best jazz pianists ever. But I would hazard to guess that the vast majority of you have never actually heard him play. That will all change during the course of this post. I would tell you that Sal Mosca has inspired me to do something I never, ever, have otherwise done, and that is to write reviews of his albums on Amazon. I have written and posted only two reviews on Amazon, both of them dealing with Mosca albums. One of those review is spectacularly positive; the other equally negative. The positive one deals with one of the prescribed recordings” Too Marvelous for Words. The negative one deals with an album that should never have been released. Writing under the nom-de-plume of “RMonteverdi”, here are those two reviews:  One Of The Very Best At His Very Best “Sal Mosca was without any doubt one of the greatest improvising musicians who ever lived, and this fantastic five-cd set shows him at the very […]

John Alden Carpenter was a lifelong Midwesterner: he was born in Chicago in 1876 and died there in 1951. He reached his compositional maturity in the twentieth century. He was a businessman and thus, a compositional amateur. (“Amateur” in the best sense: as a practitioner of something not for money but for love, which is what “ama-teur” means.) He adored American popular culture and music and he filled his compositions with aspects of both. As opposed to Paine, Buck, Foote, and MacDowell, all of whom came to their compositional maturity in the nineteenth century. (For our information, Paine and Buck were born almost 40 years before Carpenter.) Paine, Buck, and Foote were all born in New England; MacDowell in New York. They all had academic musical careers; they all worshipped at the altar of German music; and they were all embarrassed by what they perceived of as the provincial cretinism of American musical culture. As such, this stylistically schizoid album inadvertently tells us something of the “story” of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American concert music: the reliance on German musical models by academic composers working primarily in the nineteenth century, and the celebration of things “American” by some […]

Enrico Nicola “Henry” Mancini was born on April 16, 1924, in Cleveland, Ohio. He grew up in the western Pennsylvanian town of West Aliquippa, about 15 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. Apropos of nothing, my research reveals an astonishing number of high-end professional athletes hail from “greater” Aliquippa, including Jon Baldwin (National Football League/NFL); Tommie Campbell (NFL); Mike Ditka (NFL); Tony Dorsett (NFL); Tito Francona (Major League Baseball/MLB); Sean Gilbert (NFL); Nate Guenin (National Hockey League/NHL); Frank Hriber (NFL); Ty Law (NFL); Pete Maravich (National Basketball Association/NBA); Doc Medich (MLB); Paul Posluszny (NFL); Darrelle Revis (NFL); and Pete Suder (MLB). We might wonder whether there was something “in the water”, though that water was probably badly tainted by the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company mill that was the town’s primary source of employment. (Steel towns. By their nature, they are filled with big, brawny men who make big, brawny sons, many of them desperate to avoid the fate of their fathers! No wonder so many professional football players hailed from Aliquippa!) There can be no doubt that Henry Mancini’s father wanted something better for his son. Having emigrated from the Italian mountain town of Scanno, in Abruzzo as a teenager, Quintiliano […]

I offer up a hot, steaming mug (or if you prefer, an ice-cold martini) of gratitude to Jack Conte, who created the Patreon platform in 2013, and to my wonderful patrons for having given me the wherewithal to write, opine, and on occasion bloviate on topics musical.  I will in today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes acknowledge the “season of giving” by offering up some “holiday music”, holiday music that will serve as something of an antidote to the seasonal treacle that has been assaulting our ears since at least the day after Thanksgiving. (Yes, color me humbug. To my mind and ear, one of the great challenges of surviving the holiday season is coping with the music. Question: for how long can we tolerate the high-fat aural regimen of silent nights, roasting chestnuts, spinning dreidels, little drummer boys, and sugar plum fairies before our ears occlude with phlegm-like plaque and simply stop working?)  Thank heavens, there are exceptions to this musical mugging we call “holiday music”, and I’m not just referring to the music of J. S. Bach and G. F. Handel. Last year, in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post for December 25, 2018, I offered up the phenomenal Dave McKenna’s […]

Thus far, this post series has celebrated eight mid-twentieth century American composers – Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, Samuel Barber, Henry Cowell, David Diamond, Peter Mennin, William Schuman and Walter Piston – each and every one of whom deserves to be respected and his music embraced. For better or for worse, the one mid-century American composer who has come to overshadow them all is Aaron Copland (1900-1990). Yes, for both the American public and professional music community, Copland is considered the most representative “American” composer of the twentieth century. Having said that, we’d also observe that Copland was a genuinely nice man, someone who believed deeply in the essential role of the arts in a free society, and he would be nothing less than mortified by the present obscurity of so many of his contemporaries. Barber, Diamond, Mennin, Schuman and Piston (and Morton Gould and Roger Sessions and Irving Fine and Virgil Thomson, etc.) were not just Copland’s fellow mid-century composers; they were also his colleagues, his collaborators, and his friends. See the post and celebration of Copland’s little-known masterpiece – his Short Symphony of 1933, only on Patreon!