The alap is “the opening section of a typical North Indian classical performance.” In dhrupad it is “unmetered, improvised (within the raga) and unaccompanied.” The music site Swarganga describes its purpose: “to let the raag introduce itself slowly, before the more structured rhythmic play begins.”
The main composition, with the tabla, comes later.
On June 1, 1979, during a rain delay in a game against the Padres, Willie Stargell of the Pittsburgh Pirates chose a new team song. “We are going to make ‘We Are Family’ the team song,” he said. The song was by Sister Sledge. “We felt the song typified our ballclub,” he said later.
In the World Series that year, the Pirates trailed the Baltimore Orioles three games to one. They won in seven. “We had to scratch, we had to crawl, and we did it together because we are family,” Stargell said.
“High Hopes,” with music by Jimmy Van Heusen and lyrics by Sammy Cahn, was sung by Frank Sinatra and the boy actor Eddie Hodges in the 1959 film A Hole in the Head. It won the Oscar for Best Original Song. In the song, an ant moves a rubber tree plant all by himself, and a ram puts a hole in a dam.
In 1960 Van Heusen and Cahn wrote new lyrics, and the song became the theme of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
On August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc played at a back-to-school party in a community room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. His sister Cindy Campbell had organized it. The party is remembered as the beginning of hip-hop.
Expensive DJ equipment “was still a limiting factor” for young DJs. Herc “figured out how to use his two turntables to loop a single break with two copies of the same record.”
“I don’t need time,” Duke Ellington liked to say. “What I need is a deadline!” His biographer Terry Teachout gives the line in Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington.
Teachout calls Ellington “the most chronic of procrastinators.” In Teachout’s book, the only thing harder than getting him out of bed in the afternoon “was getting him to finish writing a new piece of music in time for the premiere.”
Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem began in 1934. In 2020 a CBS station in New York described the rule: “There’s no panel of judges here.” Instead, “the audience decides, and they are not forgiving.”
Dave Chappelle was booed off the stage. Luther Vandross was booed off a record four times. The theater has had a so-called Executioner. Several people have held the role, including Howard “Sandman” Sims. His job was to “usher amateurs off the stage.” The same audiences launched careers. In 1934 a 17-year-old named Ella Fitzgerald was discovered there.
On May 12, 2009, Lin-Manuel Miranda performed at a White House evening of poetry and music. He said he was working on a “hip-hop album” about “the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop … Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton.” The audience, including President Obama, laughed. “You laugh, but it’s true!” Miranda said. Then he performed the opening number. At the time it was called “The Hamilton Mixtape.”
The work kept developing in stages. Lincoln Center presented a preview on January 11, 2010. A workshop at Vassar College in the summer of 2013 covered the first act and three songs from the second. Hamilton opened at the Public Theater on February 17, 2015, and on Broadway on August 6, 2015.
The concert rider of the rock band Van Halen for its 1982 world tour included the line: “M&M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).” In his 1997 memoir, the singer David Lee Roth recalled the clause as: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”
Roth explained the reason. The rider contained detailed technical and safety requirements, and the candy clause showed whether the venue had read them. If he found brown M&M’s, he wrote, “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract.”
You had one job. — Said when the one thing that was required did not happen.
Close, but no cigar. — Nearly right is still not right.
Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. — In most things, a near miss earns nothing.
Nice try. — Often ironic. The effort is noted, and the result is still missing.
What have you done for me lately? — Past results do not count for long. The phrase is also the title of Janet Jackson’s 1986 single, which reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100.
West Side Story opened on Broadway on September 26, 1957. Leonard Bernstein wrote the music and Stephen Sondheim the lyrics. Arthur Laurents wrote the book. Jerome Robbins directed and choreographed. Two street gangs fight for control of their Manhattan neighborhood. The Jets are white. The Sharks are Puerto Rican.
Early in the show the Jets sing the “Jet Song.” In it they swear loyalty to the gang for life and mock the Sharks. Sondheim later called the song “very mildly threatening and menacing.” The 1961 film won 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.