[ad_1]
Earlier than he grew to become the primary musical director of “Sesame Avenue,” Joe Raposo used to make ends meet by acting at jazz venues round Boston, accompanying on piano such legends as Ella Fitzgerald. When the youngsters’s present went on the air in 1969, Raposo made positive the present provided a various mixture of musical genres, reflecting the present’s total theme of encouraging range. And the present enriched youngsters’s lives with music they won’t have heard anyplace else.
Raposo had a particular proclivity for jazz—and that was obvious when he composed the instrumental model of the present’s theme tune, “Can You Inform Me How you can Get to Sesame Avenue?,” used for the closing credit.
The harmonica participant under is the Belgian jazz legend Toots Thielemans, who was the primary to make use of the mouth harp to play complicated bebop traces. Thielemans carried out and recorded with jazz stars, such as Bennie Goodman and Charlie Parker, and led his personal band.
Right here’s Toots briefly performing the “Sesame Avenue” theme initially of a visitor look on saxophonist David Sanborn’s TV present “Night time Music” in 1990.
And when he fashioned the present’s home band, Raposo referred to as on jazz bassist Bob Cranshaw, whose different important longtime gig was with tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins’ quartet. “We had a ball,” Cranshaw was quoted as saying in a eulogy posted after his dying in 2016, on Allegro, the web site of the New York chapter of the American Federation of Musicians. “Through the years at ‘Sesame Avenue,’ when Joe would write a lead sheet, he by no means wrote a bass half. He knew I might hear the bass components alone.”
Right here’s the “Sesame Avenue” home band, with Cranshaw on electrical bass and Raposo on keyboards, accompanying bluesman B.B. King as he sings the alphabet and counts to 10 in his personal type in a 1984 episode.
And the present launched its younger viewers to some jazz legends. They included pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams (1975), who engaged some youngsters in scat singing, and drummer Max Roach (2000), a seminal determine within the bebop motion, who counted off drum beats with The Rely. If solely there have been high quality movies of those appearances.
Bandleader and singer Cab Calloway, who was identified for his trademark “hi-de-hi-de-hi” scat refrain, had carried out in all places from Betty Boop cartoons within the Nineteen Thirties to the 1980 comedy movie basic “The Blues Brothers.”
In 1981, he strutted his manner via “The Hello-De-Ho Man,” partaking in call-and-response with some Muppets. Singer Norah Jones, who on the time was solely two years previous, recalled to The New York Instances that this was “undoubtedly the primary time I noticed any jazz musicians.”
Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, one of many founding fathers of bebop, carried out his 1957 tune “Birks Works” to an admiring viewers of kids and solid members in 1984. .
In 1983, solid member Maria introduced the “Sesame Avenue” youngsters to Herbie Hancock’s studio, the place the keyboard participant confirmed simply what sort of sounds he might get out of his Fairlight CMI synthesizer, sampling the voice of a bit of lady. The lady’s title needs to be acquainted—Tatyana Ali, who would later go on to star with Will Smith on the sitcom “The Contemporary Prince of Bel-Air.” After his friends left, Hancock carried out his personal model of the “Sesame Avenue Theme” on the synthesizer.
In a extra conventional vein, pop-jazz vocalist Tony Bennett sang a parody of the usual “Fly Me to the Moon” referred to as “Slimey to the Moon” as a part of a 1998 story arc about Oscar the Grouch’s pet worm making a visit to the moon.
And Latin Jazz was not missed, both. Percussionist Ray Barretto, a legend in Latin Jazz and salsa music, offered an indication in 1977 of sounds from the bongos, timbales, and conga drums.
Bandleader Tito Puente, identified for his mixing of jazz and Latin sounds, even bought Oscar the Grouch dancing when he performed timbales on his mambo tune “Ran-Kan-Kan” in a 1993 episode.
However “Sesame Avenue” actually bought swinging with the arrival in 1985 of Hoots the Owl, its resident jazz-musician Muppet, who performed the sax and did some jive speaking in a gravelly voice. Hoots led his personal Muppet jazz band and taught Ernie what he wanted to do if he wished to play the saxophone on this 1986 episode.
In one other 1986 episode, Hoots thought he might educate Wynton Marsalis a factor or two about jazz, however the owl was outmatched of their musician’s duel till he did one thing the trumpeter couldn’t do. He flapped his wings and flew away whereas enjoying the saxophone. “They by no means taught us that in music college,” Marsalis quipped.
And in 1987, when Hoots opened Birdland, the world’s solely jazz membership that welcomed youngsters and Muppets, jazz stars flocked to carry out there. Birdland bore the title of an precise famed New York jazz membership the place Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, Miles Davis, Rely Basie, and different jazz greats carried out from 1949 via 1965.
Appropriately, the primary visitor on the “Sesame Avenue” membership was Joe Williams, who carried out on the authentic Birdland when he was the male vocalist with the Rely Basie Orchestra in the course of the Nineteen Fifties. Williams carried out “Birdland Soar,” a “Sesame Avenue” tune composed by Christopher Cerf.
After which in 1991, Birdland provided a double-bill of Wynton Marsalis and Bobby McFerrin. The trumpeter performed an oft-performed “Sesame Avenue” commonplace “No Matter What Your Language,” written by Jeff Moss, in 1972. McFerrin did a wordless call-and-response scat tune with the viewers.
And Wynton’s brother, saxophonist Branford Marsalis, additionally had a date in 1991 at Birdland the place he traded riffs in a duet with Hoots on “Hear and Bounce It Again,” a “Sesame Avenue” tune composed by Stephen Lawrence.
Hoots was retired as a personality within the late 2000s, however the owl got here again in a giant manner in October 2019, when Wynton Marsalis invited the “Sesame Avenue” Muppets and Muppeteers to his “Home of Swing” at Jazz at Lincoln Heart for a “Swingin’ Sesame Avenue Celebration” of the present’s fiftieth anniversary.
The live performance featured brand-new preparations of basic “Sesame Avenue” songs, written by members of the Jazz at Lincoln Heart Orchestra, together with trumpeter Kenny Rampton, additionally a member of the TV present’s home band. And, after all, it started with a New Orleans-style model of the “Sesame Avenue Theme,” with a tuba doubling on the bass line.
And on “Elmo’s Track,” the lovable purple monster added a brand new verse devoted to Marsalis.
The live performance ended with all of the Muppets and Muppeteers on stage with the orchestra to carry out Raposo’s best-known tune, “Sing,” closing with the Muppets parading down the aisles as the viewers sang alongside.
[ad_2]
Source link