Of Mambo Kings and Songs of Love: Dance Music in Havana and New York from the 1930s to the 1950s

1994 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lise Waxer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
The 1950S

Spaces and Places

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-53
Author(s):  
Sue Miller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Latin Music

This chapter provides a summary of the most important venues in New York where musicians have performed danzón, rhumba/son, mambo, chachachá, and pachanga. Aside the Palladium, other venues operating in the 1950s and ‘60s are examined in terms of the types of Latin music played in them, documenting the experiences of performers of Cuban dance music in The Bronx, Spanish Harlem, downtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Catskills resort venues. The usual narrative of the Palladium as ‘home of the mambo’ is not negated but the narrative is expanded so that the relationships between the various performance scenes can be evaluated more fully. In the latter part of this chapter the history of the dance hall from 1947 to 1966 is examined in terms of the mambo big bands, conjuntos, and charanga bands that performed there, drawing on the perspectives of musicians who experienced live performances there.

Alive Still

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Curtis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Severe Form ◽  
The Other ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Village Voice

In 1942, at age twenty, after a vision-impaired and rebellious childhood in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine decamped for New York. Operations had corrected her eyesight, and she was newly aware of modern art, so different from the literal style of her youthful drawings. In Manhattan, she met rising young artists and poets. Her life was hectic, with raucous parties in her loft, lovers of both sexes, and freelance design jobs, including a stint at the Village Voice. Initially drawn to the rigorous formalism of Piet Mondrian, she received critical praise for her jazzy abstractions. During the 1950s, she began to paint interiors and landscapes. By 1959, when the Whitney Museum purchased one of her paintings, her career was firmly established. That year, she contracted a severe form of polio on a trip to Greece; suddenly, she was a paraplegic. Undaunted, she taught herself to paint in oil with her left hand, reserving her right hand for watercolors. In her postpolio work, she achieved a freer style, expressive of the joy she found in flowers and landscapes. Living half the year in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the other half in New York, she took special delight in painting the views from her windows and from her country garden. Critics found her new style irresistible, and she had a loyal circle of collectors; still, she struggled to earn enough money to pay the aides who made her life possible. At her side for her final twenty-nine years was her lover, painter Carolyn Harris.

The Big Push Déjà Vu: A Review of Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

2006 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Easterly
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Development Economics ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Poor ◽  
World Poverty ◽  
Incentive Problems ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Déjà Vu ◽  
Big Push ◽  
Made In

Jeffrey Sachs's new book (The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Penguin Press: New York, 2005) advocates a “Big Push” featuring large increases in aid to finance a package of complementary investments in order to end world poverty. These recommendations are remarkably similar to those first made in the 1950s and 1960s in development economics. Today, as then, the Big Push recommendation overlooks the unsolvable information and incentive problems facing any large-scale planning exercise. A more promising approach would be to design incentives for aid agents to implement interventions piecemeal whenever they deliver large benefits for the poor relative to costs.

The ‘Brazilian Connection’ in the History of American Linguistics

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-382
Author(s):  
Cristina Altman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
South American ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Structural Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

Summary When mention is made of Brazil in connection with American linguistics, it usually amounts to a reference to the Linguistic Circle of New York, where Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (b.1908), who had come from Brazil where he had done ethnological work, met and exchanged ideas. This singular event has cast a shadow on other contacts between Brazil and American linguistics, of which, the one between Jakobson and the Brazilian linguist Joaquim Mattoso Câmara (1904–1970) was much more consequential, at least as far as the implementation of structural linguistics in Brazil and in South America generally during the 1950s and the 1960s is concerned. Mattoso Câmara came to the United States and spent most of his time in New York City (September 1943 till April 1944), where he got exposure to Praguean type structuralism, notably through Jakobson’s lectures he attended at Columbia University and at the École Libre of New York, which had been established by European refugees at the time. He also participated in the first meetings of the Linguistic Circle of New York in 1943 as one of its co-founders. Following his return to Rio de Janeiro, Mattoso Câmara proposed, in 1949, as his doctoral thesis a phonemic description of Brazilian Portuguese. The work was published a few years later, in 1953. His most influential work, Princípios de Lingüística Gerai, first published in 1954, had two more revised and updated editions (1958, 1967) and served to introduce several generations of Brazilian as well as other South American students to structural linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s.

"You Better Work!" Underground Dance Music in New York City

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 138
Author(s):  
Tim Lawrence ◽  
Kai Fikentscher
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Dance Music

Altar Call in Europe

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Altar Call ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
International Ministry

This book provides a transnational history of Billy Graham’s revival work in the 1950s, zooming in on his revival meetings in London (1954), Berlin (1954/1960), and New York (1957). It shows how Graham’s international ministry took shape in the context of transatlantic debates about the place and future of religion in public life after the experiences of war and at the onset of the Cold War, and through a constant exchange of people, ideas, and practices. It explores the transnational nature of debates about the religious underpinnings of the “Free World” and sheds new light on the contested relationship between business, consumerism, and religion. In the context of Graham’s revival meetings, ordinary Christians, theologians, ministers, and church leaders in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom discussed, experienced, and came to terms with religious modernization and secular anxieties, Cold War culture, and the rise of consumerism. The transnational connectedness of their political, economic, and spiritual hopes and fears brings a narrative to life that complicates our understanding of the different secularization paths the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany embarked on in the 1950s. During Graham’s altar call in Europe, the contours of a transatlantic revival become visible, even if in the long run it was unable to develop a dynamism that could have sustained this moment in these different national and religious contexts.

La Charanga Moderna and the Modern Charanga

2021 ◽  
pp. 207-220
Author(s):  
Sue Miller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
The Us ◽  
Professional Field ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
The City

This chapter profiles the work of another key figure in Cuban dance music in New York, Puerto Rican conga player, bandleader, and arranger, Ray Barretto. Like Eddie Palmieri, Barretto embraced charanga and conjunto aesthetics, combining Cuban forms with jazz, soul, and blues inflection. Flute player José/Joe Canoura’s soloing style with Barretto’s Charanga Moderna is evaluated here. An evaluation of the US-based charangas and their respective flute soloists is then undertaken looking at the various current manifestations of the típico charanga sound in New York. The voices of female musicians are more in evidence here although the professional field remains male-dominated. Charanga flute players active on the New York scene today such as Karen Joseph, Joe de Jesus, and Connie Grossman contribute their perspectives on charanga performance past and present in the city.

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