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Fanshawe, David
Farnon, Robert
Fontana, Carl
Furtwängler, Wilhelm
David Fanshawe
compositore, esploratore, etnomusicologo, tecnico
del suono, presentatore, fotografo, autore e personalità dei
mass media. Acclamato come "uno dei compositori più
originali del mondo".
Nato nel 1942, ha frequentato la St George's Choir School and
Stowe, ha cominciato la sua carriera come preparatore di film.
Nel 1965 ha vinto una borsa di studio "Foundation
Scholarship" al Royal College of Music, studiando
composizione con John Lambert. Raggiunge la notorietà nazionale
nel 1970, alla Queen Elizabeth Hall, con Salaams, un
lavoro basato sui ritmi dei pescatori di perle del Bahrain. Altri
brani da concerto includono: Dover Castle, Requiem
for the Children of Aberfan, The Awakening, Dona
Nobis Pacem, Serenata, Fanfare to Planet Earth,
Millennium March, Epitaphs in Memoriam, Tarka Suite
ed un numero di Christmas Carols. I suoi commenti
musicali, commissionati per oltre 30 film e produzioni televisive,
includono When The Boat Comes In, per la BBC, Flambards
per la YTV ed il film Tarka the Otter (Rank).
La fortunatissima miscela di David Fanshawe fra musica e viaggi
è stata il soggetto di album unici, concerti e premiati
documentari: African Sanctus, Arabian Fantasy, Musical
Mariner (National Geographic) e più recentemente Tropical
Beat. Dal 1978 ha intrapreso un'odissea decennale di
registrazione attraverso le isole del Pacifico, che ha portato ad
un raro archivio: migliaia di nastri musicali, dispositive e
responsi manoscritti, preservando per i posteri le tradizioni
orali di Polinesia, Micronesia e Melanesia. Attualmente sta
pubblicando, copiando digitalmente e catalogando le sue
collezioni sull'Africa ed il Pacifico, mentre sta componendo Pacific
Odyssey per una prima esecuzione mondiale alla Sydney Opera
House.
Robert Farnon
Robert Farnon
Society Web Site
Charles
Carl Fontana (Monroe,
Louisiana, 18 luglio 1928 - Las Vegas, Nevada, 9 ottobre 2003)
trombonist and bandleader: born Monroe, Louisiana,
18 July 1928; married (two sons, one daughter); died Las Vegas 9
October 2003
It is an odd fact that all the really outstanding jazz
trombonists were very low on ego. Carl Fontana, perhaps the most
gifted player of his time, certainly was. He played potent and
dazzling music in such a facile way that it was rather like
Leonardo da Vinci sawing off a length of picture on demand.
Fontana first surfaced in 1951. The Woody Herman band was playing
at the Blue Room in New Orleans when its virtuoso trombone
soloist Urbie Green had to return to New York for three weeks
when his wife gave birth. A young local musician hired as a
temporary replacement arrived in the band room. "Can I help
you?" asked the tenor player Dick Hafer. "I'm here to
replace Urbie Green," said Fontana. "You're here to
replace Urbie Green?" repeated Hafer, as the band musicians
roared with sardonic laughter.
In performance an hour or so later, their jaws dropped as Fontana
ripped off a series of agile and eloquent solos that instantly
announced him as a challenger to the crown of Jay Jay Johnson,
the trombonist who dominated the era. From then on, Fontana never
looked back and no one has ever challenged his supremacy. His
several disciples approached his speed and technical agility, but
no one ever matched his sublime streams of improvisation.
Herman was so impressed that when Urbie Green returned he kept
Fontana in the band. The young man abandoned his studies for his
master's degree and toured with Herman for the next two years.
One day when Fontana was a child, his father, Collie, had walked
into the house and placed a box in front of his son. "What's
that?" asked Carl. "It's what you're going to play,"
his father told him, opening up the trombone case. The Fontanas
lived in Monroe, Louisiana during the Depression (Carl was born
there in 1928) and Collie supported his family by working as a
plumber and by playing violin and saxophone in a band he
inherited from another leader.
His son joined the band and worked in it throughout his high
school days as well as playing in the school concert orchestra.
Fontana was always an athletic man and his first loves as a boy
had been football, basketball and baseball. "Dad and I had a
few run-ins about whether I was supposed to be playing music jobs
on the weekends or playing ball in some tournament or other. He
won all the arguments."
A big man of imposing stature, Fontana was a benign and amusing
companion when I interviewed him in Florida some years ago, but
he could be intimidating when he felt like it. Many years ago,
one of the sidemen in one of the big bands had been making
unwanted suggestions to some of the other musicians' wives.
Fontana approached him and spoke cordially. "You're leaving
this band," he said. "Whether you go out vertically or
horizontally is up to you."
Fontana was awarded a degree in musical education at Louisiana
State University in 1950 where he also played in concert and
symphony orchestras. By the time he joined Herman the following
year he had developed the unique way of combining a plump tone
with the fast-tonguing of notes that caused a re-thinking of
trombone techniques the world over.
His two years with Herman gave Fontana a love for the big bands
that never left him, and because he was such a proficient sideman
and a good reader for a time his talent was buried in the ranks
of the Lionel Hampton and Hal McKintyre bands.
But in 1955 he joined the band of Stan Kenton. Kenton was under
no illusions about Fontana's talents and brought him right out
front as one of the band's major soloists. Kenton's band had
earlier been something of a pretentious monolith but by the time
that Fontana joined it had been considerably loosened up by
soloists like Zoot Sims and Lee Konitz and, more importantly, by
the arranger-composers Bill Holman, Gerry Mulligan and Gene
Roland.
Deployed against the ranks of powerhouse brass, Fontana's solos
were breath-taking. He was featured on the perennial "Intermission
Riff" but more importantly Holman wrote two specific
features for him. The first was the fluent assault course for
trombone called simply "Carl", whilst the second was a
setting of "Polka Dots and Moonbeams", which
exemplified Collie Fontana's advice to his son: "Whenever
you play a ballad, play it as if you were talking to your best
girl."
Although Fontana had startled trombonists throughout the world,
it was only when Kenton featured him on his 1956 tour of Europe
that he conquered the general public. His modest manner at the
microphone (Kenton let him introduce his own features) belied the
pyrotechnics that followed and delighted audiences across the
continent - but not in Britain where a ludicrous Ministry of
Works ban still prevented American musicians playing here.
British fans showed their devotion by taking the boat to Dublin
where the Kenton galaxy was on glorious display.
An ex-Kenton trombonist who had made an even bigger name for
himself, Kai Winding, was able to tempt Fontana with money to
join his band, which consisted of four trombones and a rhythm
section. Then in December 1957, before moving to Las Vegas, he
deputised for Bill Harris in the Woody Herman band.
Las Vegas became Fontana's base, and he worked contentedly in
mundane show bands there, leaving when called on to dazzle the
rest of the world as a jazz soloist. In 1966 he toured the world
on a US State Department tour with the Herman band, coming to
London before touring in Africa for 12 weeks.
From then onwards he was called regularly to festivals, tours and
the newly emergent jazz parties to grace their all-star line-ups.
He worked with Benny Goodman in Las Vegas in the mid-Sixties and
became a key member of Supersax, a band devoted to re-creating
the solos of Charlie Parker, in 1973. He was in the various bands
that led eventually to the emergence of the World's Greatest Jazz
Band in 1975. Here he showed his abilities to play convincingly
in such Dixieland surroundings. "I'm just an old bebopper at
heart," he had told me in Florida.
Fontana co-led a group with the drummer Jake Hanna that recorded
and appeared at festivals in 1975 and later toured Japan.
Unusually, although he had appeared on so many recordings under
other leaders, Fontana didn't make an album under his own name
until 1985, when he led a quintet that included his long-time
friend and musical associate Al Cohn.
He had more good exposure when, during the Eighties, he appeared
regularly on the National Public Radio show Monday Night Jazz. By
the Nineties he had retired from regular work in Las Vegas and
only toured as a jazz soloist. At this time he came to London to
play at Ronnie Scott's in tandem with one of his disciples, Bill
Watrous.
In Las Vegas he continued to play for fun in a quintet that he co-led
with the tenor player Bill Trujillo. One night, at the end of the
evening, he turned to Trujillo and said "You'll have to take
me home. I can't remember where I live." It was the onset of
the Alzheimer's disease that was to lead to his death.
Wilhelm
Furtwängler
direttore d'orchestra e
compositore, nato il 25 Gennaio 1886 a Schöneberg (oggi:
Berlin-Schöneberg) e morto il 30 Novembre 1954 a Ebersteinburg,
vicino Baden-Baden; sepolto nel Bergfriedhof di Heidelberg. È
stato uno dei più grandi direttori d'orchestra del XX secolo.
Foto di Furtwängler: Foto 1 - Foto 2
Wilhelm-Furtwängler-Gesellschaft