“After Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker ranks as the most influential jazz musician of the 20th century. He was also a hard-drinking heroin addict whose habits directly led to his death in 1955 at the untimely age of 34. In a profession whose members have long been known for their erratic behavior, Parker’s irresponsibility stood out, so much so that it became impossible for him to find steady work despite being universally regarded by his contemporaries as a genius. On various occasions he has been described as a con man, a sociopath, even an idiot savant…”

“In the winter of 1972, CBS began to air four of its most successful comedy shows, All in the Family, The Bob Newhart Show, The Carol Burnett Show, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, back to back on Saturday evenings, customarily the night of the week people were least likely to watch television. CBS undermined this custom with its Saturday-night shows, which were so popular that large numbers of people stayed home to watch them…”

“The Vienna Philharmonic recently issued a report by a group of independent historians in which the orchestra officially acknowledged for the first time the closeness of its relationship to the Third Reich. Not only had half its players become members of the Nazi Party by 1942, but all 13 of its Jewish players had been fired four years earlier and five of them later died in the camps. A few weeks later, Der Spiegel published a 6,000-word essay called ‘Wagner’s Dark Shadow: Can We Separate the Man from His Works?’ in which Dirk Kurbjuweit dealt no less honestly with the continuing inability of many German music lovers to grapple with the fact that Richard Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite whose writings directly influenced Adolf Hitler…”

“Playwriting in America ihas tended to be a man’s game. Many American women have written individual hit plays, but only three–Lillian Hellman, Wendy Wasserstein, and the long-forgotten Rachel Crothers–scored multiple successes on Broadway in the 20th century, and their track records there have yet to be rivaled…”

“Twenty years ago a bill of one-act comedies by a nearly unknown playwright named David Ives opened off-Broadway. One-act plays are not often professionally staged in New York, and when they are, they rarely draw crowds. But Ives’s All in the Timing ran for more than 600 performances. Part of what made its success so noteworthy was Ives’s decidedly intellectual and complex brand of humor. Yet to this day, the plays are performed widely throughout the English-speaking world…”

“Nothing is more legendary than the work of a legendary stage actor, since it is all but impossible to leave behind a permanent record of the live performances that made his reputation. And because theatrical acting usually looks and sounds overemphatic, at times grotesquely so, when filmed and viewed on a screen, many of the most storied stage actors have been reluctant to make movies or appear on TV. As a result, such once celebrated artists of the past as Katharine Cornell, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, and Laurette Taylor are now known for the most part only as names in books…”

“In 1969, Duke Ellington celebrated his 70th birthday at the White House, where President Nixon threw a star-studded party and presented him with a Medal of Freedom. Only four years earlier, the greatest jazz composer of the 20th century had been passed over for a special Pulitzer Prize in recognition of his musical achievements. Hence the significance of the party, which was seen not merely as a tribute to Ellington but to jazz itself. Cynics took it for granted that Nixon’s purposes were purely political. If, on the other hand, they had had access to Ellington’s FBI file, it might have puzzled them that so prominent an opponent of Soviet Communism had chosen to honor an artist who appeared to have once had close ties to the American Communist Party…”

“For those baby boomers who grew up watching Warner Bros. cartoons on television every Saturday morning, the inexorable demise of Bugs and his friends has been a source of nostalgic dismay. But for critics and scholars who believe that the best studio-era animated cartoons are comparable in quality to the best live-action screen comedies of the 1930s and 40s, it is a catastrophe…”