April Wine - Oowatanite

Yet jazz embodied freedom, multiethnic democracy and was even censored by the Nazis during World War II. Jazz gained popularity in the Big Band Swing Era. Hollywood jazz musicals emerged with sound era talkies, as in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s original score for Love Me Tonight, 1932... As the war commenced, Abel Meeropol penned blues number Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday’s jazz hit, which she later performed on British television. The protest song critiqued the lynching and racial violence against Blacks in the American South and would continue to have cultural resonance in its call for social justice decades later in an era of civil rights... The filmic rendering of jazz shifted from seedy, underground and illicit to stylish, cultured and aspirational during the war and postwar years. The hip, sophisticated iconography in Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day, for instance, was shot in expansive outdoor spaces at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, as yachts sail by on the water, rather than the dark claustrophobic confines of a nightclub. Jazz critic Nate Chinen recalls Amiri Baraka’s conception of jazz as trying to foster a self reliant alternative culture as a reaction to popular culture. He observes that jazz constitutes just a sliver of our cultural landscape. But within those margins, there are worlds to explore, joys to savor, even miracles to be found.

Jazz performing in musical noir featured low lit lounges, enthralling minor key sounds of musicians, and blue film scores suggesting censorable activity in afterhours nightspots. Smoky jazz noir nightclubs created an atmospheric milieu in Blues in the Night, 1941, Jammin’ the Blues (1944, with Lester Young), Phantom Lady, 1944, To Have and Have Not, 1944... Gilda, 1946, Lift to the Scaffold is renowned for its evocative moody blue Miles Davis jazz score.

Source: Blues, Smoke and Shadows: Jazz in 'Musical' Noir Films by Chinen Biesen

April Wine - Oowatanite

• Released in: 1990
• Genre: Rock, hard rock, pop rock
• Written by: Myles Goodwyn

"The Henman brothers, David and Ritchie, got together with their cousin Jim Henman and fellow musician Myles Goodwyn to April Wine, a name chosen because they were two words that sounded good together. April Wine has released fifteen studio albums, three live releases, numerous compilations, a boxed set and thousands of concerts."

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