Fred Katz @90
Katz on cello on gay anthem jazz standard “My Funny Valentine” by the Chico Hamilton band.
Fred Katz (born February 25, 1919) is an American composer, songwriter, conductor, cellist, and professor, perhaps best-known as the composer and lyricist of “Satan Wears a Satin Gown“[1].
Folk Songs for Far Out Folk (1958)
Katz was classically trained at the cello and piano and began his career in a number of classical and swing orchestras. In the early 1950s, Katz accompanied singers such as Lena Horne, Tony Bennett and Frankie Laine. From 1955 through 1958, he was a member of the Chico Hamilton Quintet. He also recorded several solo albums such as Folk Songs for Far Out Folk[2] labels including Pacific Jazz, Warner Bros., and Decca Records.
In the late 1950s and 1960s, Katz scored a number of films for Roger Corman, including A Bucket of Blood, The Wasp Woman, Creature from the Haunted Sea and The Little Shop of Horrors. He also composed a number of pieces of classical music. Katz went on to become a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of San Fernando, specializing in ethnic music.
His cello can also be heard on Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz projects, on Dorothy Ashby’s The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby, and Billy Bean’s Makin’ It.
2 responses so far ↓
Janis Michelson Rojany // October 20, 2009 at 3:15 am |
Ye’sha Ko’ach, Fred. My father, z’ Cantor Allan Michelson would have been your same age. He thought very highly of you and of your music.
All my love, Janis Rojany
Jeanine Millasseau // October 31, 2009 at 1:01 pm |
Hi, I think you ‘ll like this book
Discographisme rereatif
Discographisme recreatif :
http://approximatif.free.fr/index.php?page1
Discographisme recratif is both a documentary and collectional work begun in 1996. It’s composed of different iconographic montages made from record sleeves and CD jackets. The distinctive feature: these covers, be they 45s, 33s, or CDs, mostly found at flea markets, have all been redone or modified by anonymous indivuals using the original covers as a guideline and as a source of inspiration. The first book issued in 2004 ever compiles around 100 examples of found altered or homemade record sleeves. The second one contains around 200 sleeves 21 x 21 cm 224 pages, 200 ill. color
The most frequent forms of collecting/conservating with consumption pictures exclude all modification of the original. A “polished” commercial image is rarely tampered with, and very few would dare intervene on the immaculate surface of a prized consumer product. In spite of this, we have all seen a coarsely drawn sexual organ on a starlet, a discreetly appended moustache (as upon Marcel Duchamp’s famous Mona Lisa), or an improvised pointillist outbreak of chicken pox with a purple felt tip pen on the portrait of another famous face.
This iconographic and documentary “study” focuses on a selection of record covers of a variety of formats 12” LP, CD, Tapes but largely upon 7” 45 rpm. All the selected covers were “modified” or “remade” by unknowns using the original as a canvas or as an inspirational rebuilding source and have subsequently been discovered at private individual’s residences, flea markets or at boot sales (garage sales).
Frequently sleeves are found covered with timid and unfinished inscriptions, random traces and botched drawings. Most are simple squiggles, messy retouching, cut out of parts and pieced together with sellotape. But in other cases I’ve unearthed more elaborate creations, drawings, collage, painting and other forms of customization. Sometimes I’ve even found montages assembled with, possibly, an accompanying artistic, or literary intention (comments, puns, poems). The graphic forms tend to be as varied as the reasons for the intervention on the object itself.
By turns stammering and needlessly witty, their graphics considered vague or petty, for these reasons, they are frequently regarded with contempt as minor, vulgar, ridiculous and the product of an insignificant unimportant practice.
Nevertheless, however one perceives them, they remain an expression of memories, sentiments, the site of risked aesthetic attempts and sometimes stupefying remarks oscillating between copy, stylization, quotation, diversion, projection, idealization, creation, iconoclasm…
This book “DISCOGRAPHISME RE-CREATIF” could be a subjective iconographic history of popular music; considering these productions “beyond good or bad taste”, pursuing a documentary approach and in admiration of this singular and dissonant experiment of daily life.
Patrice Caillet
jeanine Millasseau