If I’m not mistaken, U.S.A. big band tunes - Fabulous - ANDRÉ RIEU looking great as always knocked it out of the park. Look at all those audience patrons dressed in suits and ties! That was the Detroit of old.
Funtabulastico! Although I've seen the set before, never this VHS version. 22 years? Okay, the performers have aged a little (apart from the ladies) but music, that international language we all love, is never out of fashion. Thank you, Bill Hawk, The André Sisters, and of course The Man Himself!
I've always said that this music, really an extension to the romantic tradition, was at the pinnacle, and it's been downhill ever since. Jazz - a word which is a corruption of the creole "jasser", which means "to copulate" - went on to "rock and roll", with exactly the same connotation, but simplified. It took effete western dilettantes to descend to the tuneless chaos of bebop, and urbanized nihilistic blacks renounced their own rich musical tradition, to degenerate to the ultimate bleak mindlessness of rap. Of course so-called "intellectual" or "art" music had broken away in the early twentieth century, with composers like Stravinsky and Holst, who could both compose real music, but who mostly disdained it, being influenced by furious iconoclasts like Berg, Schoenberg and Webern, who themselves only wanted to out-Mahler Mahler. But what they churned out was never popular, being listened to only by contrarians who wished to display their cultural disassociation as a badge of pride. It was largely ignored, but they had their revenge, may they be forced to listen to their own effluvia at stunning volume forever. They were the worm in the apple that went on to devour the whole fruit. Or perhaps not the whole fruit. The "arts academy", the taxpayer funded orchestras and "artists" and "composers" revel in their monopoly of the establishment, but that's only politics. Real musicians and composers are working in the film industry, and they are creating real music, and people are listening to it. Williams and Zimmer and Morricone continued the tradition of the western heroic, as Tiomkin had that of Russia, and they are now being listened to by people in cars on their way to work, not only in concert halls, where the cognoscenti gather to be enlightened - or rather, to separate themselves from the unwashed masses - by listening to random groans and shrieks. There is hope, still. And Mr Rieu and his admirable orchestra are the epitome of hope.
