Music Notes

Free Press news services 2005-05-05 02:52:55

IT HAPPENED TODAY . . .

1891 The world-famous Carnegie Hall opened in New York. Among the
opening night attractions was Tchaikovsky conducting his Marche
Solennelle. On this date in 1991, the hall’s 100th birthday celebration
featured violinist Isaac Stern, tenor Placido Domingo, soprano Jessye
Norman, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and conductor Zubin Mehta.

1908 The first Alberta Music Festival was held in Edmonton. It was
the earliest musical competition of its kind in Canada.

1942 Country superstar Tammy Wynette, whose real name was Virginia
Wynette Pugh, was born in Mississippi. Stand by Your Man, which topped
the country charts in 1968, was the biggest-selling single by a woman
in country music history. Her other No. 1 hits included The Ways to
Love a Man, He Loves Me All the Way and We’re Gonna Hold On — a 1973
duet with George Jones. Wynette and Jones were married from 1969 to
’75. Wynette died from a blood clot in her lungs at her Nashville
home on April 6, 1998.

1968 Buffalo Springfield played its final show in Long Beach, Calif.
The band made just three albums in two years, but its 1967 hit, For
What It’s Worth, became an anthem for the hippie generation. Two group
members, Stephen Stills and Canada’s Neil Young, became part of Crosby,
Stills, Nash and Young.

1972 Blues and folk singer Rev. Gary Davis died of a heart attack in
Hammonton, N.J., at 76. He’d been singing on street corners and small
clubs for more than 25 years. Davis’s composition, Samson and Delilah,
was recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary. His finger-picked guitar style
influenced such rock-era artists as Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal and Jorma
Kaukonen.

1982 Jazz vibraphonist Cal Tjader, who may well have been the
greatest non-Latino leader of Latin jazz groups, died in Manila at
56. Tjader played with pianists Dave Brubeck and George Shearing
before going out on his own in the mid-’50s. Over the next three
decades, he recorded dozens of albums, most of them in a Latin vein.
Tjader even had a minor pop hit in 1965 with Soul Sauce, a reworking
of a Dizzy Gillespie tune.

1984 It was a marriage of rock singers as Jim Kerr of Simple Minds
wed Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. They broke up five years later.

1990 Artists B. B. King, Joe Cocker, Roberta Flack, the Moody Blues
and Randy Travis gathered in Liverpool for a hometown tribute to the
late John Lennon.

1992 The CBC announced that The Tommy Hunter Show had been
cancelled after 27 years as a weekly series. It was North America’s
longest-running network music show.

1993 Cher went to the capital of the former Soviet republic of
Armenia aboard a chartered cargo jet carrying about $3 million worth
of privately donated humanitarian aid. Cher, who’s half Armenian,
called on Western nations to aid the people of Armenia, which was
fighting an undeclared war with neighbouring Azerbaijan.

1996 Members of the Rankin Family received honorary doctor of music
degrees from Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S.

1997 Crosby, Stills and Nash helped mark the 27th anniversary of
the Kent State University shootings with a concert at the Kent, Ohio
campus. The group performed their hit, Ohio, written by Neil Young
after the killing of four students by National Guardsmen during an
anti-war demonstration on May 4, 1970.

1997 Bruce Springsteen received the Polar Music Prize — and $133,000
— from King Carl Gustav of Sweden. Springsteen was cited for being an
“uncompromising steward of the essential qualities of rock.”

1998 A stage version of the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever opened in
London. Starring Australian actor Adam Garcia, the stage version had
most of the movie’s disco music plus two new songs by the Bee Gees.
Young fans clash

1987 Six people were arrested and about 20 were injured after
riot police in Milan, Italy, fired tear gas during clashes with
rock-throwing fans locked out of a Neil Young concert.

The London Free Press