Vitro Nasu

Sting sings Russians for Ukraine refuges

Body Armor Ukraine – fight Russia to the last drop of Ukrainian blood

(Happy birthday John Lurie – December 14)

John Lurie’s father used to take him to fishing. John Lurie is a hard working, self taught artist in music, acting and in painting. Basquiat painted and slept at his place. Basquiat was a close friend that Lurie wrote a lot about in this memoir.
John Lurie is a world traveller.
He wrote about Africa, one of many places Lurie visited. He wrote.
“I had been depressed for a long, long time. I could not get out of it. Africa saved me. You can feel life started there.

More paintings at his Gallery with great soundtrack from John Lurie’s Strange and Beautiful homepage

Strange and Beautiful John Lurie (previous post)

Listen to his playing here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_864xjMQY8)

John Lurie: ‘I wanted to break into Martha Stewart’s house and change the curtains. My lawyer said no’
(He’s hung out with Warhol and gone ice fishing with Willem Dafoe, but the Fishing With John man’s new series stars just him and his canvas)

(A man, a bull and of course, the Soldier Bunnies. – John Lurie)

Stephen Sondheim, Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin in rehearsal for Sunday in the Park with George (1984)

Stephen Sondheim

Sondheim’s best-known works as composer and lyricist include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and Into the Woods (1987). He was also known for writing the lyrics for West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959).

A must see – on youtube James Lipton interviewed Stephen Sondheim

BBC obit see photos of Elizabeth Taylor and Stephen Sondheim (Also Judy Dench video of singing his song)

The Stephen Sondheim cameo you didn’t realize was in Tick, Tick…Boom

Stephen Sondheim’s Voice End of Tick Tick Boom

“When I showed him the finished film, he said, ‘You treated me gently and royally, for which I’m grateful,'” says Miranda. “And then he wrote me and said, ‘But the last phone message to Jon, the language feels a little trite. I don’t feel like I would ever really say that. Can I rewrite it?’ I was like, ‘Gosh, a rewrite from Stephen Sondheim — do I accept this?'”
There was only one problem — Whitford had already wrapped his work on the project and was unavailable to re-record it. Sondheim offered to record the new version for Miranda, and it’s his voice that audiences can hear in the final cut.
“It makes me weep to even think about,” gushes Miranda. “Because he was such a mentor to Jon and generations of songwriters. But yes, he rewrote that message and recorded it himself and just sent it to me.”
He’s not good, he’s not nice, he’s Stephen Sondheim.

Listen to 22 best “I am still here

William Hurt and Sandrine Bonniare in Plague (youtube)

Albert Camus

Camus and Maria Casarès

Camus and his women

Camus had met Maria Casares, later star of Cocteau’s Orpheus but already an established actress, in 1944. Daughter of a rich Spanish Republican, a refugee from Franco, she was a passionate, wilful, intelligent woman. She was probably the only one of his lovers who had a relationship of equality with him. In addition, Todd says, ‘If he was a Don Juan, she was a Don Juana’.

(Albert Camus and Viggo Mortensen)
Far from Men Viggo Mortensen

Leonard Cohen archive (Cohen died on Nov 7,2016.)

Happy birthday Joni Mitchell
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Ji Hye Lee

Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday born on this date April 7 in 1915 as Eleanora Fagan and later called Lady Day, sings this song God Bless the Child for you.

Gerry Mulligan film credits
Gerry Mulligan homepage via

Chet Baker
and Gerry Mulligan

Sandy & Gerry Mulligan
Dennis lived with prominent jazz musician Gerry Mulligan from 1965 until they split up in 1974. (Via Sandy Dennis wiki)

(Milford Graves, Dojo dance)

Wiki

Milford Graves (August 20, 1941 – February 12, 2021) was an American jazz drummer, percussionist, Professor Emeritus of Music,[4][5] researcher/inventor,[6][7] visual artist/sculptor,[8][9][10][11] gardener/herbalist,[12] [13] and martial artist.[14][15] Graves is noteworthy for his early avant-garde contributions in the 1960s with Paul Bley, Albert Ayler, and the New York Art Quartet, and is considered to be a free jazz pioneer, liberating percussion from its timekeeping role. The composer and saxophonist John Zorn referred to Graves as “basically a 20th-century shaman.

Artforum Obit

Only two weeks ago did “Milford Graves: A Mind-Body Deal,” a major exhibition of his work at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, draw to a close after a five-month run.

Pioneering Drummer and Polymath dies at 79

Milford Graves a Mind Body deal

As a young drummer, Milford performed at John Coltrane’s funeral and led successful Latin music combos, drawing on his Afro-Caribbean roots. When he was barely old enough to vote, his life had taken off in a half-dozen different directions that led to revolutions in music, activism, medicine, botany, and even martial arts. He led the charge in bringing the drums out from the back of the bandstand, to a position equal with the “melodic” instruments. An anchor in the New York Art Quartet with Amiri Baraka, he was also active in the collective-bargaining movement of the Jazz Composers Guild. At the same time, he began his training as a cardiac technician with zeal; he invented a martial art form called Yara based on the movements of the Praying Mantis, boxing, West African ritual dance, and Lindy Hop; and he had an abiding interest in botany and herbology, inherited from his grandmother. By the time he began his nearly 40-year career at Bennington College, as a professor of music and holistic medicine, his fecund intellect had begun to explore radical connections between rhythm and the universe: in music, in movement, in healing, in the subatomic, in the activity of the heart and other organs.

Chick Corea Jazz Fusion Keyboard died (LA times obit)

Rolling Stones obit

Chick Corea wiki

American jazz-fusion pianist Chick Corea, Rome, Italy, 1992. (Photo by Luciano Viti/Getty Images)

Chick Corea dead Cancer

Legendary Jazz Keyboardist Chick Corea Dies of ‘Rare Form of Cancer’ at 79
“My mission has always been to bring the joy of creating anywhere I could, and to have done so with all the artists that I admire so dearly — this has been the richness of my life,” he said before his death

Beethoven, who had met Nannette in Augsburg years earlier, asked to borrow one of her pianos for a 1796 concert in Pressburg (now Bratislava). Writing to Andreas, Beethoven joked that it was too “good” for him, because he wanted the “freedom to create his own tone.” In a follow-up letter, he complained that the piano was still the least developed of all the instruments and that it sounded too much like a harp.

Nanette Streicher
(wik)
The Woman who built Beethoven’s Pianos

Beethoven’s Great Love (French title: Un grand amour de Beethoven, US title: The Life and Loves of Beethoven) is a 1937 French film directed by Abel Gance. It stars Harry Baur (as Ludwig van Beethoven), Annie Ducaux, Jany Holt, Jane Marken, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Marcel Dalio. Dalméras plays the part of Franz Schubert.
Abel Gance – MUBI

Windmill scene

Death bed scene Beethoven Abel Gance.

Photo of Gance by Latigue

Abel Gance

(25 October 1889 – 10 November 1981) was a French film director and producer, writer and actor. Pioneer in the theory and practice of montage, he is best known for three major silent films: J’accuse (1919), La Roue (1923), and the monumental Napoléon (1927).

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Juliette Greco
She died at the age of 93

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(Juliette Greco & Miles Davis)

(Michel Piccoli and Juliette Greco)

(Jean Cocteau and Juliette Greco)
Juliette Gréco as Aglaonice in Orpheus directed by J. Cocteau.

My Night with Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen The Hill

Where is gypsie wife

Ennio M.

Ennio Morricone. Org

Days of Heaven soundtrack

Matt Savoie skated to the soundtrack from the Mission.