Now this is one flight delay we actually wish we were stuck in.
A video uploaded to YouTube captures every theater geek’s dream-come-true: a sing-off between Broadway cast members of “The Lion King” and “Aladdin.” Though it took place during a six-hour weather delay at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, the singing turned what could’ve been a dreary scene into an incredible one.
Watch as “The Lion King” cast starts off belting the iconic “Circle of Life,” but at the 3:06 mark, the camera cuts to the “Aladdin” cast fighting back, as James Inglehart, who plays the Genie, gives a seriously impressive freestyle rap. The battle continues and later on, at the 6:40 mark, the Aladdin cast performs a fantastic “Arabian Nights.”
For those who witnessed the sing-off, that awesome performance may have been more memorable than their trip.
• 1672 ~ Orazio Benevoli, Italian Composer, died at the age of 67
• 1725 ~ Joseph Anton Bauer, Composer
• 1750 ~ Michel Woldemar, Composer
• 1818 ~ Charles Gounod, French composer, conductor and organist
Read quotes by and about Gounod
More information about Gounod
• 1855 ~ Fritz Steinbach, Composer
• 1882 ~ Igor Stravinsky, Russian-born American composer Stravinsky’s Firebird is featured in Fantasia 2000 and his The Rite of Spring was featured in the original Fantasia
Read quotes by and about Stravinsky
More information about Stravinsky Grammy winner
• 1883 ~ Alexandre Cellier, Composer
• 1888 ~ Bernhard van den Sigtenhorst Meyer, Composer
• 1900 ~ Hermann Reuter, Composer
• 1902 ~ Sammy Fain (Samuel Feinberg), Oscar-winning musician, composer
More information about Fain
• 1941 ~ Johan Wagenaar, Dutch Composer (Cyrano de Bergerac), died at the age of 78
• 1930 ~ Romuald Twardowski, Composer
• 1932 ~ Mignon Dunn, American mezzo-soprano
• 1933 ~ Christian Ferras, French violinist/conductor
• 1939 ~ Dickie Doo (Gerry Granahan), Singer with Dickie Doo and The Don’ts
• 1942 ~ Norman Kuhlke, Musician, drummer with The Swinging Blue Jeans
• 1943 ~ Christopher Brown, Composer
• 1946 ~ Barry Manilow, American singer, composer, and arranger of popular music
• 1951 ~ Carl Vogler, Composer, died at the age of 77
• 1952 ~ Alberto Williams, Argentine Composer (Etrerno Reposo), died at the age of 89
• 1953 ~ Walter Niemann, Composer, died at the age of 76
• 1957 ~ So Rare by Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra peaked at #2
• 1967 ~ “Somebody To Love” by Jefferson Airplane peaked at #5
• 1967 ~ Barbra Streisand: A Happening in Central Park performed
• 1968 ~ Ohio Express’ Yummy Yummy Yummy went gold
• 1969 ~ Jazz musician Charles Mingus came out of a two-year, self-imposed retirement to make a concert appearance at the Village Vanguard in New York City.
• 1972 ~ Long Haired Lover From Liverpool by Little Jimmy Osmond peaked at #38
• 1978 ~ Shadow Dancing, by Andy Gibb, reached the number one spot on the pop music charts for the first of seven weeks. Gibb had two other number one hits: I JustWant to Be Your Everything and (Love is) Thicker than Water. Gibb, the youngest of the Gibb brothers who made up the Bee Gees, hosted TV’s Solid Gold in 1981-82. Andy scored nine hits on the pop music charts in the 1970s and 1980s. He died of an inflammatory heart virus in Oxford, England in 1988.
• 1978 ~ Cheeseburger In Paradise by Jimmy Buffett peaked at #32
• 1983 ~ Peter Mennin(i), American Composer (Moby Dick), died at the age of 60
• 1986 ~ Kate Smith died in Raleigh North Carolina at 78
• 1991 ~ Country entertainer Minnie Pearl suffered a stroke at 78
• 1992 ~ Dewey Balfa, Bayou fiddler, died at the age of 65
• 1995 ~ The Who’s “Tommy” closed at St James Theater NYC after 899 performances
We’ve previously featured the cellist Nicholas Canellakis and the pianist Michael Brown performing together as part of our Café Concert series on WQXR.org. But this week brings out a different side to the musicians’ collaboration, as the host and sometime sidekick of the online video series “Conversations with Nick Canellakis.”
Joined by the pianist Emanuel Ax – or “Yo-Yo Ma’s accompanist” – we hear about awards he didn’t win and the various “songs” that he performs. Watch:
• 1837 ~ Valentino Fioravanti, Composer, died at the age of 72
• 1843 ~ David Popper, Composer
• 1843 ~ Jan Malat, Composer
• 1853 ~ Johan Gustaf Emil Sjogren, Composer
• 1858 ~ Eugene Ysaye, Composer
• 1863 ~ Paul Antonin Vidal, Composer
• 1879 ~ Gilbert and Sullivan’s “HMS Pinafore” debuted at Bowery Theater New York City
And from Startrek: Picard and Worf sing HMS Pinafore in an effort to control a renegade Data.
• 1899 ~ Helen Traubel, Opera singer at the St. Louis Symphony and New York Metropolitan Opera (“The Met’s premier Wagnerian soprano.”)
• 1890 ~ A glittering program of music and ballet, featuring composer Edward Strause, opened the first Madison Square Garden in New York City.
• 1901 ~ Conrad Beck, Composer
• 1903 ~ Huldreich Georg Fruh, Composer
• 1909 ~ Willi Boskovsky, Austrian violinist and conductor
• 1910 ~ Wendelin Weissheimer, Composer, died at the age of 72
• 1916 ~ Francis Lopez, Composer
• 1928 ~ Sergiu Comissiona, Rumanian-born American conductor
• 1929 ~ James Kirtland Randall, Composer
• 1931 ~ Ivo Petric, Composer
• 1934 ~ Lucia Dlugoszewski, Composer
• 1938 ~ Mickie Finn, TV hostess and banjo player
• 1939 ~ Billy ‘Crash’ Craddock, Country singer
• 1940 ~ Vitezslava Kapralova, Composer, died at the age of 25
• 1941 ~ Lamont Dozier, Songwriter
• 1942 ~ Eddie Levert, Singer
• 1945 ~ Ian Matthews (McDonald), Musician, guitarist and singer with Fairport Convention
• 1946 ~ Miloje Milojevic, Composer, died at the age of 61
• 1946 ~ “Annie Get Your Gun” opened at Imperial Theater NYC for 1147 performances
• 1950 ~ James Smith, American singer with the Stylistics
• 1952 ~ Gino Vannelli, Singer, songwriter
• 1956 ~ Be-Bop-A-Lula, by Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, was released on Capitol Records. Vincent was called Capitol’s answer to Elvis Presley. The tune became Vincent Eugene Craddock’s biggest hit of three (Lotta Lovin’, Dance to the Bop) to make the pop music charts. Vincent died in 1971.
• 1958 ~ Jose Pablo Moncayo Garcia, Composer, died at the age of 45
• 1962 ~ Paula Abdul, Singer
• 1967 ~ The Monterey Pop Festival got underway at the Monterey Fairgrounds in Northern California. Fifty thousand spectators migrated to the site that featured Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Mamas and the Papas and The Who.
• 1969 ~ Karl Hubert Rudolf Schiske, Composer, died at the age of 53
• 1970 ~ Heino Eller, Composer, died at the age of 83
• 1972 ~ The only museum devoted exclusively to jazz music opened. The New York Jazz Museum welcomed visitors for the first time.
• 1978 ~ The film adaptation of Grease, a success on the Broadway stage, premiered in New York City. John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. Several hit songs came out of the motion picture: Grease, by Frankie Valli, You’re the One That I Want and Summer Nights (both sung by Travolta and Newton-John). The first two songs were platinum 2,000,000+ sellers, while the third was a million-seller.
• 1979 ~ Ben Weber, American composer and winner of the Thorne Music Award in 1965, died at the age of 62
• 1980 ~ The movie The Blues Brothers opened in Chicago, IL. John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, formerly of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, starred. The pair played Jake and Elwood Blues. James Brown, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin performed. Cab Calloway also appeared with a rendition of his classic Minnie the Moocher.
• 1990 ~ Eva Turner, British soprano, died
• 1991 ~ Vicky Brown, American singer (Power of Love), died
• 1991 ~ “Fiddler on the Roof” closed at Gershwin Theater NYC after 241 performances
• 1994 ~ Boris Alexandrov, Conductor of the Red Army Song/Dance Ensemble, died at the age of 88
• 1997 ~ Thirtyfirst Music City News Country Awards: Alan Jackson & LeAnn Rimes
• 2000 ~ Richard Dufallo, a conductor known for his energetic performances of contemporary music, died at age 67 of stomach cancer. Dufallo, who lived in Denton, conducted more than 80 major orchestras and festivals in the United States, Canada, and Europe, premiering numerous works by American and European composers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jacob Druckman, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Krzystof Penderecki. He was a former assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and worked closely with Leonard Bernstein from 1965 to 1975. He also served as associate conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic and as artistic director of contemporary music at the Aspen Festival in Colorado. He was married to pianist Pamela Mia Paul.
• 2001 ~ Joe Darion, the lyricist for “Man of La Mancha,” died at the age of 90. “Man of La Mancha” opened in New York in 1965 and ran for 2,328 performances. It won Darion and his composing partner Mitch Leigh a Tony Award for best score. Inspired by Cervantes’s “Don Quixote,” the musical went on to become the third-longest-running Broadway musical of the 1960s. Its music included the popular song The Impossible Dream. In the early 1950s, Darion had three top 10 hits: the Patti Page ballad “Changing Partners,” the Teresa Brewer novelty song Ricochet and Red Buttons’s comedy hit The Ho Ho Song. At the time of his death, Darion was working on a show titled “Oswego.”
Danish comedian and pianist Victor Borge gives every impression of having been asked to play a duet with someone whom he not only doesn’t know, but doesn’t particularly like. Forced to come up with a mutually agreeable way of sharing the musical workload, he settles on the most difficult route possible.
It’s not clear why two pianists were needed for this performance of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.2, S.244/2. I think that they did it just for the fun of it. The result is hilarious.
They’re not the only ones to tackle Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.2 as a piano duo. We also have these guys:
• 1945 ~ Rod Argent, English keyboardist for the Zombies
• 1946 ~ Janet Lennon, Singer with the Lennon Sisters
. 1946 ~ Artemios “Demis” Ventouris Roussos (June 15 1946-January 25, 2015) was a Greek singer and performer who had international hit records as a solo performer in the 1970s after having been a member of Aphrodite’s Child, a progressive rock group that also included Vangelis. He has sold over 60 million albums worldwide.
• 1956 ~ Sixteen-year-old John Lennon of the music group, The Quarrymen, met 14-year-old Paul McCartney and invited him to join the group. In a few years, the group became The Beatles.
• 1957 ~ “Ziegfeld Follies of 1957″ closed at Winter Garden NYC after 123 performances
• 1962 ~ Alfred Cortot, French pianist, died at the age of 84
• 1963 ~ Kyu Sakamoto from Kawasaki, Japan, reached the number one spot on the pop music charts with Sukiyaki. The popular song captivated American music buyers and was at the top of the Billboard pop chart for three weeks. In Japan, where Sakamoto
was enormously popular, Sukiyaki was known as Ue O Muite Aruko (I Look Up When I Walk). The entertainer met an untimely fate in 1985. Kyu (cue) Sakamoto was one of 520 people who perished in the crash of a Japan Air Lines flight near Tokyo. He was 43 years old.
• 1963 ~ “Sound of Music” closed at Lunt Fontanne Theater NYC after 1443 performances
June 14 is set aside to observe National Pop Goes the Weasel Day. On this day people dig back into their memories to the nursery rhymes they learned as children and celebrate the day singing “Pop Goes the Weasel”.
The origins of this nursery rhyme are believed to date back to the 1700′s.
The following lyric was printed in Boston in 1858:
All around the cobbler’s house,
The monkey chased the people.
And after them in double haste,
Pop! goes the weasel.
In 1901 in New York the opening lines were:
All around the chicken coop,
The possum chased the weasel.
The most common recent version was not recorded until 1914. In addition to the three verses above, American versions often include some of the following:
All around the mulberry bush,
The monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey stopped to pull up his sock, (or The monkey stopped to scratch his nose)
Pop! goes the weasel.
Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
Mix it up and make it nice,
Pop! goes the weasel.
A Piano Version:
‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ is played by the oboe while Elgar’s ‘Enigma’ Theme is performed on piano. This test of Dennis Whitten’s alleged solution demonstrates it is not a credible counterpoint to the ‘Enigma’ Theme, finishing five measures too soon while producing an unacceptably high number of dissonant note intervals.
• 1884 ~ John McCormack, Irish/American singer of Irish folksongs
• 1891 ~ Nicolo Gabrielli, Composer, died at the age of 77
• 1895 ~ Cliff Edwards “Ukulele Ike”, Singer of When You Wish Upon a Star
• 1904 ~ Benno Ammann, Composer
• 1909 ~ Burl Ives, American folk singer, banjo player, guitarist and Oscar-winning actor. His gentle voice helped popularise American folk music. He played powerful dramatic roles in movies including “The Big Country,” for which he won an Acadamy Award for best supporting actor, and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” anniversary of his death
• 1910 ~ Nappy (Hilton Napoleon) Lamare, Musician with Bob Cats
• 1911 ~ Johan Severin Svendsen, Composer, died at the age of 70
• 1916 ~ Karl-Rudi Griesbach, Composer
• 1916 ~ MIT and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company attempted the largest transcontinental telephone circuit of the time at Symphony Hall!
• 1918 ~ Carter Harman, Composer
• 1920 ~ Helmer-Rayner Sinisalo, Composer
• 1923 ~ Theodore Bloomfield, Composer
• 1923 ~ It was the beginning of the country music recording industry. Ralph Peer of Okeh Records recorded Fiddlin’ John Carson doing The Little Old Log Cabin in theLane— and the first country music recording was in the can.
• 1929 ~ Cy Coleman (Seymour Kaufman), American composer of popular music and pianist
More information about Cy Coleman
• 1932 ~ Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Composer
• 1933 ~ Albert Ross Parsons, Composer, died at the age of 85
• 1940 ~ John Mizelle, Composer
• 1943 ~ Muff (Mervyn) Winwood, Singer, songwriter, bass with The Spencer Davis Group
• 1945 ~ Rod Argent, Keyboard
• 1948 ~ Ernst Henrik Ellberg, Composer, died at the age of 79
• 1948 ~ John Blackwood McEwen, Composer, died at the age of 80
• 1953 ~ Elvis Presley graduated from L.C. Humes High School in Memphis, TN. Within three years, the truck driver-turned-singer had his first number-one record with Heartbreak Hotel.
• 1960 ~ Vladimir Nikolayevich Kryukov, Composer, died at the age of 57
• 1962 ~ Boy George, Singer
• 1965 ~ Guido Guerrini, Composer, died at the age of 74
• 1969 ~ John & Yoko appeared on David Frost’s British TV Show
• 1974 ~ Knud Christian Jeppesen, Composer, died at the age of 81
• 1975 ~ America reached the top spot on the Billboard pop music chart with SisterGolden Hair. The group had previously (March, 1972) taken A Horse With No Name to the number one spot. The trio of Dan Peek, Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell had received the Best New Artist Grammy in 1972. America recorded a dozen hits that made it to the popular music charts in the 1970s and 1980s. Though number one, Sister Golden Hair did not qualify for gold record (million-seller) status.
• 1976 ~ The Beatles were awarded a gold record for the compilation album of past hits titled, Rock ’n’ Roll Music.
• 1978 ~ Theodore Karyotakis, Composer, died at the age of 74
• 1980 ~ Theme From New York, New York by Frank Sinatra hit #32
• 1986 ~ Alan Jay Lerner, Broadway librettist, died in NY at 67
More information about Lerner
• 1989 ~ Carole King got a star in Hollywood’s walk of fame
• 1994 ~ Henry Mancini passed away at the age of 70
More information about Mancini
• 1994 ~ Lionel Grigson, Professor of jazz, died at the age of 52
• 1994 ~ Harry “Little” Caesar, blues singer/actor (City Heat), died at the age of 66
• 1996 ~ Thomas Edward Montgomery, drummer, died at the age of 73
• 2002 ~ Marvin Paymer, Pianist, composer, musicologist and author, died of cancer. He was 81. His son, actor David Paymer, told the Los Angeles Times that Paymer died in San Diego. In 1977, he co-founded and, until his retirement in 1993, served as associate director of the Pergolesi Research Center at City University of New York Graduate Center. Pergolesi was 18th century Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. Paymer authenticated 13 Pergolesi compositions among hundreds of fakes attributed to the posthumously famous composer, who died at 26.
For tapping out a beat may help children learn difficult fraction concepts, according to new findings due to be published in the journal Educational Studies in Mathematics.
An innovative curriculum uses rhythm to teach fractions at a California school where students in a music-based programme scored significantly higher on math tests than their peers who received regular instruction.”Academic Music” is a hands-on curriculum that uses music notation, clapping, drumming and chanting to introduce third-grade students to fractions.The programme, co-designed by San Francisco State University researchers, addresses one of the most difficult – and important – topics in the elementary mathematics curriculum.”If students don’t understand fractions early on, they often struggle with algebra and mathematical reasoning later in their schooling,” said Susan Courey, assistant professor of special education at San Francisco State University.
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