Terence Blanchard’s upcoming “Opera in the Jazz” Style
New Orleans trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard is joining the ranks of jazz musicians who have branched out to write formal long-form compositions. His first opera, “Champion,” based on the story of boxer Emile Griffith, will premiere with Opera Theatre of St. Louis this June. Find out, in this St. Louis Beacon story by Patricia Rice, what motivated Blanchard to turn to opera and this tragic subject.
-Nick Moy
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Anthony Davis to Premiere New Opera: Riffing on emKing Lear/em
Composer and pianist Anthony Davis, who brought the world “X: the Life and Times of Malcolm X, ” is about to premiere a new opera, Lear on the 2nd Floor, which he describes as not so much doing King Lear as riffing on it. In this feature in U-T San Diego, Davis acknowledges the influence of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn on this work. Yet, as Davis points out, no one has actually written an opera based on King Lear. In that respect, among others, he’s still very much in the vanguard.
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Ray Charles: His Sense About Music, 1963
This 1963 Down Beat conversation with Ray Charles was conducted by Leonard Feather and really focuses on Charles’s take on the music scene at that time. 1963 was a varied and volatile time and the views of a genre-busting genius like Ray Charles are especially fascinating.
-Michael Cuscuna
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