Total Film 2019

The first popular jazz singer to move audiences with the intense, personal feeling of classic blues, Billie Holiday changed the art of American pop vocals forever. More than a half-century after her death, it's difficult to believe that prior to her emergence, jazz and pop singers were tied to the Tin Pan Alley tradition and rarely personalized their songs; only blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey actually gave the impression they had lived through what they were singing.

After a decade of success in Hollywood, Erich Korngold returned to concert music during the last decade of his life. The works he wrote did not fit the heady postwar atmosphere, when the avant-garde, strengthened by its distance from the aesthetics of Hitler, ruled the scene. However, more recently the Symphony in F sharp major has had its champions, Andre Previn among them, and it's showing signs of reaching everyday-repertory status. This is all to the good, for the work is enormously enjoyable. Unlike other composers who adopted a kind of diglossia between their concert works and their film scores, Korngold devises an effective fusion where passages that could have come out of Captain Blood are built into larger structures. Sample the first movement.

Ai Shinohara just released August 22nd with the latest work "To The End Of This World" which co-starred with the up-and-coming creators. A dream team by her and Will Lee and Steve Gadd returned to Blue Note Tokyo after a year and three months. For Sugawara, Will and Gadd have been super heroes since she opened her eyes on jazz and fusion when she was in elementary school. I was fascinated by their performance hundreds of times with records, CDs, videos, live, etc. I dreamed that I could play with them someday. That was the first time in February 2017. This live, in addition to the numbers from the commemorative album 'Somehow, Someday, Somewhere', is a stage more than the last time from the last time to the original written down and the cover song surprisingly surprised.