The Way Ahead (1944)

I recently got married! This workshop is based on the journey I went on whilst organizing my wedding. I have organized many events in my life but planning my own wedding day was a whole new ballgame. All of the sudden every decision became very personal.

Dancer, actor, and singer Fred Astaire worked steadily in various entertainment media during nine decades of the 20th century. The most celebrated dancer in the history of film, with appearances in 31 movie musicals between 1933 and 1968 (and a special Academy Award in recognition of his accomplishments in them), Astaire also danced on-stage and on television (garnering two Emmy Awards in the process), and he even treated listening audiences to his accomplished tap dancing on records and on his own radio series. He appeared in another eight non-musical feature films and on numerous television programs, resulting in an Academy Award nomination and a third Emmy Award as an actor. His light tenor voice and smooth, conversational phrasing made him an ideal interpreter for the major songwriters of his era, and he introduced dozens of pop standards, many of them written expressly for him, by such composers as Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Burton Lane, Frank Loesser, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Arthur Schwartz, Harry Warren, and Vincent Youmans.

Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby (May 3, 1903 – October 14, 1977) was a popular American singer and actor whose career stretched over more than half a century from 1926 until his death. Crosby's unique bass-baritone voice made him the best-selling recording artist until well into the rock era, with over half a billion records in circulation.
One of the first multimedia stars, from 1934 to 1954 Bing Crosby held a nearly unrivaled command of record sales, radio ratings and motion picture grosses. Widely recognized as one of the most popular musical acts in history, Crosby is also credited as being the major inspiration for most of the male singers of the era that followed him, including Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin…

Richard Strauss is most conspicuously represented in the symphony hall through a handful of the tone poems he produced from the late 1880s through the early years of the twentieth century, some of which—like Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel, and Thus Spake Zarathustra—represent high points of their genre. He seemed to draw a double-bar on that phase of his career after writing Symphonia domestica in 1902-03, and he returned to the genre only once more, when An Alpine Symphony occupied him from 1911 to 1915. Apart from that, his production of symphonic poems gave way to his growing interest in composing operas, which was most immediately manifested in Salome (premiered in 1905) and Elektra (1909).

Through the 1930s, Coleman Hawkins growth is exponential, especially in his ballad playing. Buttery warm and cozy, he finds notes that always work within the chord and are clearly there for anyone to find. But he's the one who finds them. And what is there to say about his solo on 1939's "Body and Soul" that hasn't already been said? This is the music that has proven so inspirational to generations of tenor saxophonists since; the endless possibility when taste and intelligence take on exceptional material. Our jam-packed set on eight CDs includes 190 tracks, 12 never before released. Included is material from Coleman's earliest days with Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds, his time with Henderson including various pseudonym bands and offshoots that shared personnel, the Mound City Blue Blowers, Benny Goodman's orchestra, Lionel Hampton, Benny Carter, Count Basie, co-leader sides with trumpeter Henry Red Allen, Cozy Cole, and a variety of all-star dates for Metronome, Leonard Feather, and Esquire, as well as recordings as a leader of his own dates. Our research has corrected many discrepancies in previous discographies.