While not being too restrictive in our views and in the process snuffing individuality, we’ve got to highlight when something concerning our lifestyle, attire, music and dance is misrepresented, and not too put too fine a word on it debased. Today it’s the turn of the bop and specifically the teddy-boy bop of the 1960s, […]
Music/Dance/Reads
Hepsters
The Hepsters – not to be confused with modern Hipsters – were associated with jazz, both musicians and fans. It is worth noting, too, that Gillespie had already gained a measure of stardom at a time when Parker’s following was limited to musicians and other insiders; Parker was not even mentioned in a silly 1948 […]
Babs Gonzales, the hepster from ‘Oo-poo-pa-doo’
Babs Gonzales (1919-80) Bab’s Three Bips and a Bop (1946-49) recorded the earliest version of ‘oop-pop-a-da’ for Blue Note in 1947 (made famous later by Dizzy Gillespie). ‘Professor Bop’ 1949 & ‘be-bop Santa Claus’ 1954 (by Lloyd Williams) Babs Gonzales was a featured artist in Alan Freed’s ‘Rock’n’roll Ball’ held at the Saint Nicholas Arena, […]
1991 The Firebirds in concert
This is not a music site for rock’n’roll, there are plenty of those, but every now and then a performance or an interesting video clip deserves its place. This goes for this excellent performance from 1991 by the Firebirds, a group hailing from Bristol (it was released as a video in 1992). The concert took […]
‘Rock’n’roll’ – ‘rockabilly’ – ‘rhythm’n’blues’ : a rant about musical terminology
In 1976 when I got into the music – a tender 12 year-old – it was ‘rock’n’roll’. As a late 70s ted in the music’s revival in Britain I was still into ‘rock’n’roll’, at the dawn of the 1980s when I got my first drape jacket I continued to love ‘rock’n’roll’, and now, approaching my […]
1994 ‘Tear it Up! The Rockabilly Documentary’
As short as it is, this short 18-minute documentary from 1994 by Greg Wolske of Columbus (Ohio), is the best introduction to rockabilly music around. Rather than the planned film, this is a taster of a more ambitious project which has not yet – it would seem – been completed. This taster contains some testimonies […]
