PROGRESSIVE MUSIC COMPANY

AFRO-AMERICAN MUSIC INSTITUTE CELEBRATES 36 YEARS

BOYS CHOIR AFRICA SHIRTS
 
 
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/building-today-for-tomorrow/x/267428

 Pain Relief Beyond Belief

                         http://www.komehsaessentials.com/                              

 

PITTSBURGH JAZZ

 

From Blakey to Brown, Como to Costa, Eckstine to Eldridge, Galbraith to Garner, Harris to Hines, Horne to Hyman, Jamal to Jefferson, Kelly to Klook; Mancini to Marmarosa, May to Mitchell, Negri to Nestico, Parlan to Ponder, Reed to Ruther, Strayhorn to Sullivan, Turk to Turrentine, Wade to Williams… the forthcoming publication Treasury of Pittsburgh Jazz Connections by Dr. Nelson Harrison and Dr. Ralph Proctor, Jr. will document the legacy of one of the world’s greatest jazz capitals.

 

Do you want to know who Dizzy Gillespie  idolized? Did you ever wonder who inspired Kenny Clarke and Art Blakey? Who was the pianist that mentored Monk, Bud Powell, Tad Dameron, Elmo Hope, Sarah Vaughan and Mel Torme? Who was Art Tatum’s idol and Nat Cole’s mentor? What musical quartet pioneered the concept adopted later by the Modern Jazz Quartet? Were you ever curious to know who taught saxophone to Stanley Turrentine or who taught piano to Ahmad Jamal? What community music school trained Robert McFerrin, Sr. for his history-making debut with the Metropolitan Opera? What virtually unknown pianist was a significant influence on young John Coltrane, Shirley Scott, McCoy Tyner, Bobby Timmons and Ray Bryant when he moved to Philadelphia from Pittsburgh in the 1940s?  Would you be surprised to know that Erroll Garner attended classes at the Julliard School of Music in New York and was at the top of his class in writing and arranging proficiency?

 

Some answers  can be gleaned from the postings on the Pittsburgh Jazz Network.

 

For almost 100 years the Pittsburgh region has been a metacenter of jazz originality that is second to no other in the history of jazz.  One of the best kept secrets in jazz folklore, the Pittsburgh Jazz Legacy has heretofore remained mythical.  We have dubbed it “the greatest story never told” since it has not been represented in writing before now in such a way as to be accessible to anyone seeking to know more about it.  When it was happening, little did we know how priceless the memories would become when the times were gone.

 

Today jazz is still king in Pittsburgh, with events, performances and activities happening all the time. The Pittsburgh Jazz Network is dedicated to celebrating and showcasing the places, artists and fans that carry on the legacy of Pittsburgh's jazz heritage.

 

WELCOME!

 

Badge

Loading…

Duke Ellington is first African-American and the first musician to solo on U.S. circulating coin

    MARY LOU WILLIAMS     

            INTERVIEW

       In Her Own Words

(CNN)Legendary actress Maureen O'Hara, best known for her roles in "Miracle on 34th Street" and films by John Ford, died Saturday of natural causes, her family said.

O'Hara, 95, passed away in her sleep at home in Boise, Idaho.

"Maureen was our loving mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and friend. She passed peacefully surrounded by her loving family as they celebrated her life listening to music from her favorite movie, 'The Quiet Man,'" a family statement said.


O'Hara was born Maureen FitzSimons in Ranelagh, Ireland, a suburb of Dublin, where her mother was an accomplished contralto and her father ran a business and was part owner of a soccer team, according to her biography on the Internet Movie Database. She was one of six children.

O'Hara starred in films with leading men such as Tyrone Power in 1942's "The Black Swan," Douglas Fairbanks in 1947's "Sinbad the Sailor," Sir Alec Guinness in 1960's "Our Man In Havana," as well as John Payne, Rex Harrison, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Brian Keith and John Wayne.

O'Hara and Wayne made "The Quiet Man" in 1952, directed by Ford. O'Hara was a favorite of Ford, who cast her in five films, including "How Green Was My Valley" in 1941. The film won five Academy Awards, thought not by O'Hara.

O'Hara and Wayne held great chemistry on the screen, and Ford also directed them in 1950's "Rio Grande" and 1957's "The Wings of Eagles."

A passionate redhead with green eyes and "peaches and cream complexion," O'Hara played heroines and became known as the "Queen of Technicolor," according to Biography.com.

She came to Hollywood in 1939 to star as Esmeralda with Charles Laughton in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."

In the 1947 holiday classic "Miracle on 34th Street," O'Hara plays a no-nonsense supervisor at a Macy's department store where Kris Kringle goes to work and claims to be the real Santa Claus. The film co-starred a young Natalie Wood.

When in her 40s, she advanced her singing voice in television appearances and records. She also took roles in family comedies, including "The Parent Trap" in 1961.

In her autobiography, written with longtime manager John Nicoletti, O'Hara wrote:

"When I was young, I didn't think I was at all pretty. I was told only that I had a sulky, pouty face. Ironically, after I got to Hollywood, I resented that I didn't get a crack at more dramatic role because I photographed so beautifully. More than anything, though, it was the way I used my eyes that caused audiences to look deep inside my characters to see what else was there."

Last November, she received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.

"Her characters were feisty and fearless, just as she was in real life. She was also proudly Irish and spent her entire lifetime sharing her heritage and the wonderful culture of the Emerald Isle with the world," the FitzSimons family statement said.

"For those who may ask what they can do to honor Maureen, we have a simple request: visit Ireland one day and think of her," the family said.

People we've lost in 2015

Views: 45

Replies to This Discussion

Maureen O’Hara obituary

Irish-born Hollywood star known for playing fiery heroines happy to stand up to men
Maureen O’Hara in 1955. Her career began when she joined Dublin’s Abbey theatre at the age of 14. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Feature

Maureen O’Hara in 1955. Her career began when she joined Dublin’s Abbey theatre at the age of 14. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Feature

In the early 1950s the prevailing image of Maureen O’Hara, who has died aged 95, was one of a feisty heroine, red hair blazing, who was more than a match for her male co-stars. Big John “Duke” Wayne, whom she partnered in five films, said of her: “I’ve had many male friends in my life except for one, O’Hara; and she’s a great guy.” The great director John Ford, with whom she also worked so often, referred to her as “a man’s kind of woman”.

In The Quiet Man (1952), Ford’s Irish pastoral-romantic-comedy, the blue-bloused, scarlet-skirted, bare-footed O’Hara, as Mary Kate Danaher, is first seen by Wayne as she tends her sheep. “Hey, is that real?” he asks. “She couldn’t be.” At their second meeting Wayne tries to kiss her, and she tries to sock him. “Watch that scene, and you’ll see Duke put his hand up,” O’Hara once said. “He deflects my blow because he knew me so well. He knew I was for real. I was hitting him.”


The Quiet Man, 1952

Wayne’s defensive action had unintended consequences. “The pain went up under my armpit,” she said. “[Afterwards] Duke came up to me and said, ‘godammit, you nearly knocked my head off. Let me see your hand.’ Each finger was like a sausage [and] they sent me to hospital.”



Ford declared O’Hara to be “the best bloody actress in Hollywood”. She certainly was not that, but Ford, who had Irish roots, brought out her warmth and “Irishness,” and she became an important element in his repertory company. Their relationship was never easy, but O’Hara loved the results of working with him. “So many films we made crying in our heart as we went to work every day,” O’Hara recalled, “but a great role in a great movie with somebody like John Ford was never difficult. That was heaven, even though you wanted to kill him.”

O’Hara was born Maureen FitzSimons, the second of six children, in a suburb of Dublin. Her mother was an accomplished contralto, and her father, a businessman, part-owned Shamrock Rovers football team. “We grew up on sport and music. All the great singers that would come to visit Dublin would come to our house for a musical evening,” she said. “We six kids, we used to sit at the top of the stairs and listen.”


Jamaica Inn, 1939

Maureen was torn between wanting to be an opera singer or a football player. In the end she settled for acting, having been accepted by Dublin’s Abbey theatre at the age of 14. Three years later, during her theatrical training at the Abbey, she received a request to travel to London for a screen test at Elstree studios. As a result she landed two bit parts but, more significantly, she impressed the actor Charles Laughton, who could not forget her “hauntingly beautiful eyes”. Laughton and the producer Erich Pommer, the co-founders of Mayflower Productions, offered her a seven-year contract, and changed her name to O’Hara. Her first role was as a naive orphan girl involved with Cornish smugglers in Alfred Hitchcock’s corny Jamaica Inn (1939), opposite Laughton as the lip-smacking squire. On the set of that film she met the English film producer George Brown, whom she married that year at the age of 19. The marriage ended in divorce only two years later.

In 1939 Laughton also persuaded RKO studios to cast O’Hara as the Gypsy girl Esmeralda to his Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. She gave both a sensual and touching portrayal, which immediately established her as a Hollywood star. Her career from then on was divided between colourful escapist entertainments and more serious black-and-white efforts.

Among the former were piratical and exotic adventure yarns such as The Black Swan (1942), The Spanish Main (1945), Sinbad the Sailor (1947), Bagdad (1949) and Tripoli (1950), the latter directed by Will Price, whom O’Hara married soon afterwards. In most of these films she was rescued from the villain by the hero, though the villain often seemed more in need of rescuing from her. O’Hara’s spirited character stretched the limits of Hollywood’s macho conventions. Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) has been championed by feminists because of the final scene when O’Hara, as a chorus girl, having submitted unwillingly to the role forced upon her, berates the audience of leering males. However, despite her celebrated monologue, which she delivers with passion, she eventually gives up her dreams of becoming a ballet dancer in favour of marriage.


How Green Was My Valley, 1941

In 1941, O’Hara played her first part for Ford in How Green Was My Valley, set in a Welsh mining town, in which her Irish accent, Donald Crisp’s Scottish and Walter Pidgeon’s American served for a Welsh accent. As Angharad Morgan, O’Hara has mostly to look beautifully lovelorn during her abortive romance with the pipe-smoking preacher Pidgeon, but has a fine scene with him in which she defends a single mother from attack. “What do the deacons know about it? What do you know about what could happen to a poor girl when she loves a man so much that even to lose sight of him for a moment is torture!”

O’Hara was often an exemplar of noble and defiant womanhood, not least in Jean Renoir’s This Land Is Mine (1943). In it, she was reunited with Laughton, who plays a mother-dominated schoolteacher secretly in love with O’Hara, a colleague who is working for the wartime resistance.

Now a resident star at 20th Century-Fox, O’Hara proved the perfect middle-class wife in Sentimental Journey (1946), Miracle on 34th Street (1947) and Sitting Pretty (1948). But she was her tempestuous self again as a Southern belle in the period piece The Foxes of Harrow (1947), and in Rio Grande (1950), the last of Ford’s cavalry trilogy, in which she played the estranged Confederate wife of a Yankee colonel (Wayne), fighting over their son.

O’Hara played quite a few estranged wives, providing her with the opportunity to be sassy; battling over her twin daughters with Brian Keith in The Parent Trap (1961), and again with Wayne in McLintock! (1963), the latter containing a rerun of the taming-of-the-shrew theme from The Quiet Man, with Duke giving her a spanking in the distinctly non-feminist finale.

The last film she made for Ford was The Wings of Eagles (1957), in which she played the long-suffering wife of a war hero pilot (Wayne). Eleven years later the divorced O’Hara, with a grown-up daughter, married Charles Blair, a famous aviator. She retired from films a few years later to live in the Virgin Islands and run a commuter sea plane service, Antilles Airboats, with her husband. “I got to live the adventures I’d only acted out on the Fox and Universal lots,” she said. However Blair was killed in a plane crash in 1978. She then became head of the company, the first woman president of a scheduled airline in the US.

Fortunately she was coaxed out of her 20-year retirement in 1991 to appear as John Candy’s domineering Catholic mother in Only the Lonely – she acted everyone else off the screen, a reminder of just how much the cinema had missed her. After that she appeared in three TV movies, including The Last Dance (2000), in which she played a retired teacher.

In 2005 she moved back to Ireland, settling in her house on a 35-acre estate, Lugdine Park, in west Cork, which she had bought with Blair in 1970. In 2012 she returned to the US to be closer to her family as her health declined.

Although O’Hara was never nominated for an Oscar, she received an honorary Academy award in 2014 in acknowledgment of a lifetime of performances that “glowed with passion, warmth and strength”.

She is survived by her daughter, Bronwyn, from her marriage to Price, and by a grandson and two great-grandchildren.

Maureen O’Hara, actor, born 17 August 1920; died 25 October 2015

RSS

© 2024   Created by Dr. Nelson Harrison.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service