Jazz pianist and composer Charles Cornell is not alone in his contempt for the sort of dumbed down musical fare typical of children’s programming.
Children have ears, and they’re people, and they can hear good music as well as anybody else. So I started right from the beginning playing for them as I would for any adults.
The show not only hooked many young viewers on jazz, it may have planted a subliminal preference for live jazz.
As Cornell notes, above, host Fred Rogers, an accomplished pianist himself, wrote the program’s signature tunes, including its famous opening theme, but left it to Costa to improvise as he saw fit.
As a result the opening number varies a bit from episode to episode, with hints of Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum, Thelonius Monk and other jazz world greats.
Cornell considers Costa their “criminally unnoticed” equal, but observes that his quarter century of involvement on Mister Rogers Neighborhood means his music has likely reached a far larger audience.
Costa had carte blanche to noodle as he saw fit under the onscreen proceedings, including the many discussions of feelings. This musical underscoring helped Rogers demonstrate the wide range of human emotions he sought to acknowledge and normalize without condescending to his preschool audience.
The show’s website praises Costa for simultaneously knowing “when to stop playing and let the silence take over, as there were times when Fred Rogers didn’t want anything, even music, to distract the children from concentrating on what he was saying or showing.”
As Costa revealed:
I watch Fred, and there must be some kind of telepathy that we’re not aware of, because somehow I get the message to play or not to play. I’m sure that some of it has to do with working together all these years, but a lot of it is unexplainable.
The show afforded him the opportunity to play with renowned neighborhood visitors like trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and crooner Tony Bennett, as well as the Land of Make Believe’s puppets inhabitants.
Which is not to say he never ventured outside of the neighborhood. Behold Costa and “Handyman” Joe Negri performing on 67 Melody Lane, a show geared toward adult viewers.
Stream more of Johnny Costa’s music for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood below.
by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on Meet Johnny Costa, the Pianist Who Introduced Millions of Mister Rogers Fans to Jazz ) |
One needn’t think too hard to come up with a list of celebrated children who seem somehow less exceptional when their baby fat comes off and their permanent teeth come in.
When she was 11, conductor Johannes Wildner told the New York Times that “she is not good because she is young. She is good because she is extremely talented and has matured very early.”
Her parents were the first to recognize her extraordinary abilities.
It’s nice when a musically gifted child is born to parents who are not only willing to cultivate that seed, they understand that their 18 month old sings with perfect pitch…
She was nearing the age of reason when the general public became acquainted with the pigtailed composer who played piano and violin, loved improvising and drew constant, not universally welcome comparisons to Mozart.
At seven, she penned a short opera inspired by “The Sweeper of Dreams”, a short story by Neil Gaiman.
She followed that up with a full length operatic reimagining of Cinderella (age 10) and rigorous training that built on her early exposure to Partimenti — keyboard improvisation.
Now 18, Alma continues to spellbind listeners with her seemingly magical ability to conjure a piano sonata using randomly selected notes in less that a minute, just as she wowed 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley after he picked a B, an A, an E flat, and a G from a hat back in 2017, when she was 12.
She’s was unabashed about her love of melody in the 60 Minutes appearance, and has remained so, explaining the reasoning behind her piece, Waltz of the Sirens, to a 2019 Carnegie Hall audience by saying that she’s always wanted to write beautiful music:
Music that comes out of the heart and speaks directly to the heart, but some people have told me that nowadays melodies and beautiful harmonies are no longer acceptable in serious classical music because in the 21st century, music must reflect the ugliness of the modern world. Well, in this waltz, instead of trying to make my music artificially ugly in order to reflect the modern world, I went in exactly the opposite direction. I took some ugly sounds from the modern world, and I tried to turn them into something more beautiful through music.
The full length opera The Emperor’s New Waltz is the soon to be 19-year-old’s first major adult achievement in what promises to be a long career.
Taking her inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, she sought to create a love story that would appeal to young pop fans (while also getting a few swipes in at the “tuneless world of atonal contemporary music.”)
As she noted in an interview with Germany’s Klassik Radio, it’s “definitely the beautiful melodies that unite pop and classical music:”
I’m sure that if Mozart or Schubert had heard the most beautiful melodies of ABBA, or Queen or Elton John, then they would have been jealous and they would have said, “I wish I had thought of that!”
by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on Meet Alma Deutscher, the Classical Music Prodigy: Watch Her Performances from Age 6 to 14 ) |
You can hang onto the source of Rudolph’s shame and eventual triumph — the glowing red nose that got him bounced from his playmates’ reindeer games before saving Christmas.
Lose all those other now-iconic elements — the Island of Misfit Toys, long-lashed love interest Clarice, the Abominable Snow Monster of the North, Yukon Cornelius, Sam the Snowman, and Hermey the aspirant dentist elf.
As originally conceived, Rudolph (runner up names: Rollo, Rodney, Roland, Roderick and Reginald) wasn’t even a resident of the North Pole.
He lived with a bunch of other reindeer in an unremarkable house somewhere along Santa’s delivery route.
Santa treated Rudolph’s household as if it were a human address, coming down the chimney with presents while the occupants were asleep in their beds.
To get to Rudolph’s origin story we must travel back in time to January 1939, when a Montgomery Ward department head was already looking for a nationwide holiday promotion to draw customers to its stores during the December holidays.
He settled on a book to be produced in house and given away free of charge to any child accompanying their parent to the store.
Copywriter Robert L. May was charged with coming up with a holiday narrative starring an animal similar to Ferdinand the Bull.
After giving the matter some thought, May tapped Denver Gillen, a pal in Montgomery Ward’s art department, to draw his underdog hero, an appealing-looking young deer with a red nose big enough to guide a sleigh through thick fog.
(That schnozz is not without controversy. Prior to Caitlin Flanagan’s 2020 essay in the Atlantic chafing at the television special’s explicitly cruel depictions of othering the oddball, Montgomery Ward fretted that customers would interpret a red nose as drunkenness. In May’s telling, Santa is so uncomfortable bringing up the true nature of the deer’s abnormality, he pretends that Rudolph’s “wonderful forehead” is the necessary headlamp for his sleigh…)
On the strength of Gillen’s sketches, May was given the go-ahead to write the text.
His rhyming couplets weren’t exactly the stuff of great children’s literature. A sampling:
Twas the day before Christmas, and all through the hills,
The reindeer were playing, enjoying the spills.
Of skating and coasting, and climbing the willows,
And hopscotch and leapfrog, protected by pillows.
___
And Santa was right (as he usually is)
The fog was as thick as a soda’s white fizz
—-
The room he came down in was blacker than ink
He went for a chair and then found it a sink!
No matter.
May’s employer wasn’t much concerned with the artfulness of the tale. It was far more interested in its potential as a marketing tool.
“We believe that an exclusive story like this aggressively advertised in our newspaper ads and circulars…can bring every store an incalculable amount of publicity, and, far more important, a tremendous amount of Christmas traffic,” read the announcement that the Retail Sales Department sent to all Montgomery Ward retail store managers on September 1, 1939.
Over 800 stores opted in, ordering 2,365,016 copies at 1½¢ per unit.
Promotional posters touted the 32-page freebie as “the rollickingest, rip-roaringest, riot-provokingest, Christmas give-away your town has ever seen!”
The advertising manager of Iowa’s Clinton Herald formally apologized for the paper’s failure to cover the Rudolph phenomenon — its local Montgomery Ward branch had opted out of the promotion and there was a sense that any story it ran might indeed create a riot on the sales floor.
His letter is just but one piece of Rudolph-related ephemera preserved in a 54-page scrapbook that is now part of the Robert Lewis May Collection at Dartmouth, May’s alma mater.
Another page boasts a letter from a boy named Robert Rosenbaum, who wrote to thank Montgomery Ward for his copy:
I enjoyed the book very much. My sister could not read it so I read it to her. The man that wrote it done better than I could in all my born days, and that’s nine years.
The magic ingredient that transformed a marketing scheme into an evergreen if not universally beloved Christmas tradition is a song …with an unexpected side order of corporate generosity.
May’s wife died of cancer when he was working on Rudolph, leaving him a single parent with a pile of medical bills. After Montgomery Ward repeated the Rudolph promotion in 1946, distributing an additional 3,600,000 copies, its Board of Directors voted to ease his burden by granting him the copyright to his creation.
Once he held the reins to the “most famous reindeer of all”, May enlisted his songwriter brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, to adapt Rudolph’s story.
The simple lyrics, made famous by singing cowboy Gene Autry’s 1949 hit recording, provided May with a revenue stream and Rankin/Bass with a skeletal outline for its 1964 stop-animation special.
by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on The Origin Story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: How a 1939 Marketing Gimmick Launched a Beloved Christmas Character ) |
The very first lines were spoken by Gordon (Matt Robinson), a Black schoolteacher who’s showing a new kid around the neighborhood, introducing her to a couple of other kids, along with Sesame Street adult mainstays Bob, Susan, and Mr. Hooper, and Big Bird, whose appearance had yet to find its final form:
Sally, you’ve never seen a street like Sesame Street. Everything happens here. You’re gonna love it.
The milieu would have felt familiar to children growing up on New York City’s Upper West Side, or Harlem or the Bronx. While not every block was as well integrated as Sesame Street’s cheerful, deliberately multicultural, brownstone setting, any subway ride was an opportunity to rub shoulders with New Yorkers of all races, classes and creeds.
Not six months later, the all-White Mississippi State Commission for Educational Television voted 3 to 2 to remove Sesame Street from their state’s airwaves.
A disgruntled pro-Sesame commission member leaked the reason toThe New York Times:
Some of the members of the commission were very much opposed to showing the series because it uses a highly integrated cast of children.
The whistleblower also intimated that those same members objected to the fact that Robinson and Loretta Long, the actor portraying Susan, were Black.
They claimed Mississippi was “not yet ready” for such a show, even though Sesame Street was an immediate hit. Professionals in the fields of psychology, education, and medicine had consulted on its content, helping it secure a significant amount of federal and private grants prior to filming. The show had been lauded for its main mission — preparing American children from low-income backgrounds for kindergarten through lively educational programming with ample representation.
Kids growing up in sheltered, all-white enclaves stood to gain, too, by being welcomed into a television neighborhood where Black and white families were shown happily coexisting, treating each other with kindness, patience and respect. (Sonia Manzano and Emilio Delgado, who played Maria and Luis, joined the cast soon after.)
Even though Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee also moved to pre-empt the innovative hit show, the government appointees on the Mississippi State Commission for Educational Television who’d ousted Sesame Street found themselves outnumbered when Jackson residents of all ages staged a protest in front of Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s HQ.]
The Delta Democrat-Timespublished an editorial piece arguing that “there is no state which more desperately needs every educational tool it can find than Mississippi:”
There is no educational show on the market today better prepared than Sesame Street to teach preschool children what many cannot or do not learn in their homes….The needs are immense.
After 22 days, the ban was rolled back and Sesame Street was reinstated.
That fall, the cast made a pitstop in Jackson during a 14-city national tour. Susan, Gordon, Bob, Mr. Hooper and Big Bird sang and joked with audience members as part of an event co-sponsored by the very same commission that had tried to blackball them, and left without having received a formal apology.
Sesame Street has stayed true to its progressive agenda throughout its fifty+ year history, a commitment that seems more essential than ever in 2023.
Below, Elmo, a Muppet who rose through the ranks to become a Sesame Street star engages in an entry-level conversation about race with some newer characters in an episode from two years ago.
The Sesame Workshop recommends it for viewers aged 1 to 4, though it seems our country doesn’t lack for adult citizens who could do with a refresher on the subject…
by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on When Mississippi Tried to Ban Sesame Street for Showing a “Highly Integrated Cast” (1970) ) |
The Barbiemovie has captured the popular imagination in a big way.
The New York Times can’t get enough of the recently opened summer blockbuster. Between reviews, fashion round ups, interviews, box office reports and op eds, it has published over two dozen pieces tied to this massive cultural moment.
Even those who don’t feel a burning need to catch Barbie at the multiplex are likely aware of the Barbenheimer phenom.
The 1959 ad, above, that introduced the glamorous “teen age fashion doll” to the public clears up the misperception that pink has always been Barbie’s de facto color. It’s black-and-white, but so is the diagonal striped swimsuit the film’s star, Margot Robbie models in the film’s opener, a tongue in cheek homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
(Astute observers may note the similarities between some of the sophisticated ensembles original flavor Barbie sports here and the outfits Robbie donned for the pink carpet prior to the Screen Actors Guild strike.)
In the battle between pink and historical record, pink is destined to come out on top in the Barbie movie. Director Greta Gerwig and her design team punch up Barbie’s early 80’s Western look with a wide pink brush, lowering the neckline but keeping the wink.
The doll came with a working autograph stamp Robbie may consider adopting, should Barbie mania continue on into fall.
One of the most thrilling design elements of the movie is the human scale Dreamhouses occupied by Barbie and her friends, the majority of whom are also named Barbie.
The Dreamhouse has taken many architectural forms over the years — townhouse, cottage, mansion — but it always comes without a fourth wall.
Another cinematic treat is the roll call of vehicles Barbie commandeers on her journey to the real world with her hapless boyfriend, Ken.
Some of the film’s deeper cuts are jokes at the expense of misguided releases, Barbie sidekicks so ill-conceived that they were quickly discontinued, although 1993’s Earring Magic Ken became a bestseller, thanks to his popularity in the gay community.
Look for Barbie’s pregnant pal, Midge, her yellow Labrador retriever, Tanner (whose scoopable excrement was quickly deemed a choking hazard) and Growing up Skipper, the little sister who goes through puberty with a twist of the arm … “which is something you can’t do,” the commercial’s narrator taunts in a rare reversal of the “girls can be anything” ethos Mattel insists is part of the brand.
Of course, one can only cram so many knowingly-placed products into one feature-length film.
Are those of you who grew up with Barbie hurting from any glaring omissions? (Asking as a child of the Malibu Barbie era…)
by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on 1000+ Barbie Commercials Provides Context for This Summer’s Pinkest Blockbuster (1959–2023) ) |
At first blush, Schoolhouse Rock!, the interstitial animations airing between ABC’s Saturday morning cartoon line up from 1973 to 1984, may seem like a catchy, educational equivalent of sneaking spinach into pancakes (and a major Gen X touchstone.)
Not so fast! It’s also jazz, baby!
Jazz pianist Bob Dorough recalled how an ad exec at a New York ad agency pitched the idea:
My little boys can’t memorize their times tables, but they sing along with Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones, so why don’t you put it to rock music and we’ll call it Multiplication Rock?
Dorough, whose compositional preferences ran to “extravagant love songs” and vocal challenging numbers, realized that his first order of business would be to write a good song:
I hit upon the idea, let’s pick a number. Three! That’s a good number. And I sat down at the piano and started fooling around. It took me 2 weeks.
In his hands, three became a magic number, an ear worm to bring even the most reluctant elementary mathematicians up to speed in no time.
Eventually, Dorough was able to bring many of his jazz world friends into the fold, including, most famously, trumpeter and Merv Griffin Showsidekick Jack Sheldon, whose one-of-a-kind delivery is the hands down highlight of “Conjunction Junction.”
(Many Schoolhouse Rock! fans, viewing the excerpt of the duo’s mid-90’s live appearance on the KTLA Morning Show, above, professed disbelief that Sheldon’s soul was of the blue-eyed variety, even though the animated engineer who serves as his avatar in that three minute episode is white.)
When we made Conjunction Junction, it was me and Teddy Edwards and Nick Ceroli and Leroy Vinegar and Bob Dorough played the piano. That’s a jazz band…it was really nothing to do with rock. It was always jazz, but we said rock and roll, so everybody loved it for rock and roll.
Another memorable collaboration between Sheldon and Dorough is the much parodied “I’m Just a Bill,” in which a weary scroll loiters on the steps of the Capital Building, explaining to a wide eyed youngster (voiced by his son) the process by which a bill becomes law.
Doroughs’ Schoolhouse Rock! contributions include the haunting Figure Eight, the folky Lucky Seven Sampson, whose sentiments Dorough identified with most closely, and Naughty Number Nine, which his protégé, singer-songwriter Nellie McKay singled out for special praise, “cause it was kind of weird and subversive:”
(It) made me want to gamble and win.I got hooked when I heard Bob’s jazzy rasp of a voice breaking the rules even as he explained them… this guy had a wild mind, which I figured out later equaled creativity.
She also paid the perpetually sunny Dorough, whom she first encountered “glow(ing) with health and good cheer, spreading sunshine wherever he went on the campus of East Stroudsburg University, the supreme compliment:
Lou Reed’s idea of hell would be to sit in heaven with Bob Dorough.
by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on Watch the Original Schoolhouse Rock Composers Sing “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m Just a Bill” Live in Concert ) |
Outdoor enthusiasts of a non-vegetarian stripe, do you weary of garden variety energy bars and trail mix?
Perhaps you’re feeling adventurous enough to make your own pemmican, variously described by Tasting History’s Max Miller, above, as “history’s Power Bar” and “a meaty version of a survival food that has a shelf life not measured in months but in decades, just like hard tack.”
Perhaps you’re already well acquainted with this low-carb, ketogenic portable provision, a culinary staple of the upper half of North America long before the first European traders set foot on the land. Many indigenous communities across North America are still producing pemmican for both personal and ceremonial consumption.
Back in 1743, Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader James Isham was one of the first to document pemmican production for an English readership:
[Meat] beat between two Stones, till some of itt is as small as Dust…when pounded they putt itt into a bag and will Keep for several Years, the Bones they also pound small and Boil them…to Reserve the fatt, which fatt is fine and sweet as any Butter…Reckon’d by some Very good food by the English as well as Natives.
A time may come when knowing how to make pemmican could give us a leg up on surviving, but for now, execution of this recipe is likely more of a curiosity satisfier.
To be fair, it’s not designed to be a delicacy, but rather an extremely long lasting source of calories, four times as nourishing as the same weight of fresh meat.
If you want to try it, lay in 2 pounds of meat — bison is historically the most popular and most documented, but deer, elk, moose, beef, fish, or fowl work well too.
You’ll also need an equal amount of suet, though heed Miller’s advice and add just enough to make things stick.
Bump the flavor up a notch with ground dried berries, sugar, or salt.
(Miller went the traditional route with chokeberries, procured in an extremely 21st-century manner.)
In terms of appliances, feel free to use such modern conveniences as your oven, your blender, and a small pan or mold.
(Please report back if you take the old school route with fire, direct sunlight, mortar, pestle, and a bag formed from undressed hide.)
Those still up for it should feel free to take their pemmican to the next level by boiling it with wild onions or the tops of parsnips, to produce a rubaboo or rechaud, as bushcrafter Mark Young does below.
You can also get a taste of pemmican by ordering the Tanka Bars that Oglala Lakota-owned small business produces on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation.
Watch more of Max Miller’s Tasting History videos here.
“But right here are two parallel lines,” she continues, pointing to a pink and orange quilt. “and these are transversals, and they are at a 90º angle and it feels real. You’ve gotta get it to look right.”
The teenaged participants in the Oakland, California program she founded to demystify geometry through hands-on quiltmaking get it to look right by plotting their designs on graph paper, carefully measuring and cutting shapes from bright calico of their own choosing. (Licthman has committed to buttoning her lip if their favored print is not to her taste.)
Lichtman came up with this creative approach to help a bright student who was in danger of not graduating, having flunked geometry three times.
She details their journey in How to Make a Geometric Quilt, an essay formatted as step-by-step instructions…not for quiltmaking but rather how those in the teaching profession can lead with humility and determination, while maintaining good boundaries.
Some highlights:
6. Sometime after the sewing has begun, and the math notebook is ignored for weeks, begin to worry that your student is not really learning geometry. She’s learning sewing and she’s learning to fix a broken bobbin, but really, geometry?
7. Remind yourself that this kid needs a quilt as much as she needs geometry.
8. Remember, also, the very, very old woman who taught you hat-making one night long ago. She had gone to school only through 5th grade because, she said, she was a Black child in the deep south and that’s how it was back then. Think about how she explained to the hat-making class that to figure out the length of the hat’s brim, you needed to measure from the center to the edge with a string and then do “three of those and a little bit more,” and remember how you sat in awe, because three radii and a little bit more is the definition of pi, and this hat-maker had evidently discovered for herself the formula for circumference.
As the two become better acquainted, the student let her guard down, revealing more about her situation while they swapped stories of their mothers.
But this was no easy A.
In addition to expecting regular, punctual attendance, Lictman stipulated that in order to pass, the student could not give the fruits of her labor away.
…those who have never knit something have no idea how much time it took. If you give someone a sweater, they may think that you made that in an evening when you were watching a half-hour sitcom. It’s only when people actually attempt to knit that they finally get this realization, this light bulb goes on over their heads, and they realize that, “Wow, this actually takes some skill and some time. I’ve got newfound respect for my grandma.”)
Ultimately, Lichtman concludes that the five credits she awarded her student could not be reduced to something as simple as geometry or quilt-making;
You are giving her credit for something less tangible. Something like pride. Five credit hours for feeling she can accomplish something hard that, okay, is slightly related to geometry.
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