Platinum Author
Attending a John Eaton concert is as cozy as sitting on the piano bench with your best friend while every glorious song you've ever loved pours forth. Between each number, Eaton regales you with amusing and erudite tidbits about the reason for the song's existence, be it comic, tragic, or financial necessity.
A graduate of Yale University, the legendary jazz pianist, singer, raconteur, historian, and wit became a Steinway Concert Artist in 1988 and has been sharing his keyboard genius and perceptive insights ever since. His venues include jazz clubs, the Kool Jazz Festival, the Smithsonian Institution, Wolf Trap, and frequent broadcasts on NPR and Radio Smithsonian. One of his fondest memories is a command performance in the East Room of the White House. An annual perk is his concert for members and staff of the U.S. Supreme Court each May, always a packed event regardless of political leanings.
Eaton grew up in Washington, DC listening to the radio and enjoying the mainstream music of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Today his extraordinary knowledge of the composers of that period and the stories behind their songs add zest to his popular concerts. Armed with only a Steinway and whichever one of his two favorite bassists, Tommy Cecil and Jay Leonhart, is not engaged elsewhere, he meanders down memory lane, sharing jewels by America's great composers and lyricists of the 20th century.
Never out of material or words, he has been a mainstay at the Smithsonian for more than three decades and at the Barns of Wolf Trap for more than two. He had been presenting packed musical lectures both places based on a specific composer, style, or era when he decided to preserve his forays on videos. Several of these ran as a television series before Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts approached him with an offer to become the first artist representing its new record company.
Entitled "John Eaton Presents the American Popular Song," the planned series of ten began with the release in 2006 of "Richard Rodgers - One Man and His Lyricists." Eaton says that the subject was a natural because Rodgers' music spans more generations than does that of most contemporaries. He and his first collaborator, Lorenz Hart, began writing together in 1919 while at Columbia University and produced dozens of blockbuster hits before Hart's death in 1943, the same year that "Oklahoma" hit Broadway. The Pulitzer Prize-winning musical marked the first collaboration of Rodgers with Oscar Hammerstein II, already a veteran lyricist with Jerome Kern and others. More than six decades later, "South Pacific," their popular 1949 musical based on James Michener's book about his World War II experiences, is still enjoying a run of more than two years at New York's Lincoln Center, playing to the grandchildren of those who saw the original show and bought the record album featuring Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza.
The focus of Volume Two "Harold Arlen, The Wonderful Wizard of Song" (2007), is one of Eaton's favorite composers. Younger audiences unfamiliar with Arlen, he points out, find him fascinating in the way he incorporates blues and jazz elements. Unlike Gershwin, Rodgers, and Porter, Arlen was not self-promotional and had only one major Broadway success, "Bloomer Girl." Most of his songs that became famous in the 1930s were those he wrote for Cotton Club artists. At the time, they gained scant publicity and were not smash successes; today, however, they rank among the classics.
In Volume III, "Blowin' in the Wind - The 60's Music Revolution" (2008), Eaton bows to the Baby Boomers and the music that emerged when a great divide sprang up in the 1960s between Berlin, Gershwin, Porter and their contemporaries on one side and newcomers like the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon on the other. He followed it in 2009 with "The Jazz Connection - Hoagy Carmichael and Fats Waller."
From a deprived childhood, during which his sister died because the family lacked money for necessary medical care, to a law degree from Indiana University, multiple appearances in film and on television, and a shared Oscar with his frequent colleague Johnny Mercer for "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening," Carmichael remained a lover of the honky-tonk piano. Like Carmichael, Waller, one of music's greatest stride pianists, had multiple talents. From an early age, he performed in Harlem, played Bach organ works, and composed many popular songs, never receiving credit for some he sold to other composers in order to survive during a period of poverty. Two that remain evergreen are Grammy Hall of Fame winners "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Ain't Misbehavin,'"
Eaton's series reached the halfway mark in March 2010 with the release of "Hooray for Hollywood." It features the music of Harry Warren, the first American composer to write primarily for film. Eleven Academy Award nominations and three Oscar winners number among the 800 tunes Warren penned, not to forget "Chattanooga Choo Choo," the first gold record ever. Most of the songs Warren contributed to 56 feature films are beloved by fans of the Great American Songbook. Surprisingly, few recall his name or the fact that he composed the score of "42nd Street," the first blockbuster film musical, later a Broadway hit.
One of Eaton's most popular concerts, "Jazz, Blues & Broadway," encapsulates the 20th century in music, beginning with the songs of Scott Joplin and W.C. Handy and closing with favorites by Gershwin and Porter, two composers certain to be featured in his upcoming recordings. No matter which musical genius he venerates on his piano with incomparable legerdemain, Eaton inevitably reveals a hitherto unknown story about the life and times that prompted a particular song. As his fervent fans proclaim time and again, John Eaton is truly one of America's treasures.
About this Author
Emily Cary is a prize-winning teacher and novelist whose articles about entertainers appear regularly in the DC Examiner. She is a genealogist, an avid traveler, and a researcher who incorporates landscapes, cultures and the power of music in her books and articles.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Emily_Cary
