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Animation: Transparent Heart
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Bob Belden is a sort of jazz renaissance man. He's worn many hats in his long career: producer, arranger, composer and reeds player, a combination of roles for which there are few parallels in the business.Transparent Heart highlights Belden the bandleader, the third release by his group, Animation. This is an all-new lineup for the group, constituted of students and recent grads from the highly reputed jazz program at the University of North Texas, where Belden graduated many ...
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by Glenn Astarita
With his second release for this UK-based progressive record label, award-winning saxophonist/composer/bandleader Bob Belden nurtures and perhaps challenges a youthful cast of musicians who are graduates from his alma mater, the University of North Texas. Moving further east, however, the premise for the production, resides within Belden's impressionistic sensibilities of Manhattan. Belden's jazz-fusion applications paint a sinister viewpoint of the Big Apple, where intermittent rays of light slice through foreboding alleyways and busy thoroughfares. Here, the ensemble melds ...
read moreAnimation: Asiento
by Mark Corroto
1969 was perhaps a watershed year for jazz in America. Trumpeter Miles Davis, the anointed pied piper, recorded Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970). It was to be the beginning of jazz/rock fusion. Maybe better described as jazz/rock/soul/funk fusion. Miles wasn't one to miss out on trends. He saw the popularity of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, with their rocked-out blues/soul sound, and he decided to get in on the action. Fast-forward to the conservative purge of the 1980s, when ...
read moreJim Henson's "Drums West" Animation
Source:
Michael Ricci
Watch How Jim Henson Animated Jazz With Tiny, Dancing Strips of Paper Before he achieved fame with the Muppets, Jim Henson, a skilled animator as well as a puppeteer, was making all sorts of innovative work out of his home studio, in Bethesda, Md. Around 1961, he made the papercut animation above, which visualized jazz drummer Chico Hamilton's Drums West." Released last year by the Jim Henson Company, the video was only recently rediscovered. At the end you can catch ...
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Saxophonist/Composer Dan Blake Presents The World Premiere Of His New Work, "The Dust Moves" - For String Quartet, Saxophone & Animation
Source:
Jason Byrne, Red Cat Publicity
Saxophonist and composer Dan Blake regards tradition as a welcoming playground best approached with a sense of wonder and adventure." —Andy Gilbert, The Boston Globe He will do justice to any musical situation." —Danilo Pérez One of the most adventurous and diverse young players I have heard in some time" —Dave Liebman Thank you Daniel Blake for un-packaging the avant-garde gracefully and soulfully." —Esperanza Spalding Saxophonist/Composer DAN BLAKE Presents The World Premiere of His New Work ...
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Ed Catmull Pixar Animation Pioneer Earns Honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement
Source:
All About Jazz
One of the digital wizards behind such cartoon smashes as WALL-E, Ratatouille and Finding Nemo is getting an Academy Award.
Pixar Animation co-founder Ed Catmull is receiving the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, an honorary Oscar statuette, for lifetime achievement in computer graphics for filmmaking.
Catmull is receiving the prize at the academy's Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony Feb. 7, which precedes the Feb. 22 Oscars.
It's the second honorary Oscar for Catmull. He's a previous recipient in 2000 for developing ...
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Jazz and Film Animation: A Brief, Sketchy History
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
Film animation married to jazz improvisation goes back to the 1930s and the advent of sound films. This collaboration of the cartoon figure Betty Boop and the real Louis Armstrong is one of the most famous early examples. Social sensitivity was not a consideration.I
n 1949, the art advanced--or at least changed--dramatically when two Canadians, painter Norman McLaren and pianist Oscar Peterson, got together. They made Begone Dull Care, in which McLaren painted and otherwise altered the surface of ...
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Jazz Animation
Source:
All About Jazz
Early Pixar
I caught a presentation by Pixar director Gary Rydstrom at the Chicago Film Festival. Rydstrom was giving the first public screening of his new short Lifted, and he opened the show with 4 early Pixar shorts: Luxo Jr., Red's Dream, Knick Knack and Tin Toy (all of which were sound designed by Rydstrom). These films were all new to me, and I was surprised to discover that the first two films, Luxo Jr. and Red's Dream, feature jazz ...
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