John Eaton, America's Musical Treasure

 Going to a John Eaton show is just about as comfortable as sitting on the piano seat with your dearest companion while each heavenly melody you've at any point cherished pours forward. Between each number, Eaton entertains you with interesting and intelligent goodies about the justification behind the tune's presence, be it funny, unfortunate, or monetary need. 

An alum of Yale University, the unbelievable jazz piano player, vocalist, raconteur, antiquarian, and mind turned into a Steinway Concert Artist in 1988 and has been sharing his console virtuoso and keen experiences from that point forward. His scenes incorporate jazz clubs, the Kool Jazz Festival, the Smithsonian Institution, Wolf Trap, and regular transmissions on NPR and Radio Smithsonian. Perhaps his fondest memory is an order execution in the East Room of the White House. A yearly advantage is his show for individuals and staff of the U.S. High Court each May, consistently a stuffed occasion paying little mind to political leanings. 

Eaton experienced childhood in Washington, DC paying attention to the radio and partaking in the standard music of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Today his exceptional information on the authors of that period and the tales behind their melodies add zing to his well known shows. Outfitted with just a Steinway and whichever one of his two most loved bassists, Tommy Cecil and Jay Leonhart, isn't locked in somewhere else, he wanders through a world of fond memories, sharing gems by America's extraordinary arrangers and lyricists of the twentieth century. 

Never out of material or words, he has been a backbone at the Smithsonian for over thirty years and at the Barns of Wolf Trap for more than two. He had been introducing pressed melodic talks the two spots dependent on a particular writer, style, or period when he chose to safeguard his invasions on recordings. A few of these ran as a TV series before Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts moved toward him with a proposal to turn into the principal craftsman addressing its new record organization. 

Named "John Eaton Presents the American Popular Song," the arranged series of ten started with the delivery in 2006 of "Richard Rodgers - One Man and His Lyricists." Eaton says that the subject was a characteristic since Rodgers' music traverses a greater number of ages than does that of most counterparts. He and his first colleague, Lorenz Hart, started composing together in 1919 while at Columbia University and delivered many blockbuster hits before Hart's passing in 1943, that very year that "Oklahoma" hit Broadway. The Pulitzer Prize-winning melodic denoted the primary joint effort of Rodgers with Oscar Hammerstein II, currently a veteran lyricist with Jerome Kern and others. Over sixty years after the fact, "South Pacific," their well known 1949 melodic dependent on James Michener's book about his World War II encounters, is as yet partaking in a run of over two years at New York's Lincoln Center, playing to the grandkids of the people who saw the first show and purchased the record collection highlighting Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza. 

The focal point of Volume Two "Harold Arlen, The Wonderful Wizard of Song" (2007), is one of Eaton's #1 arrangers. More youthful crowds new to Arlen, he brings up, think that he is intriguing in the manner in which he consolidates blues and jazz components. Dissimilar to Gershwin, Rodgers, and Porter, Arlen was not self-limited time and had just one significant Broadway achievement, "Blossomer Girl." Most of his tunes that became well known during the 1930s were those he composed for Cotton Club craftsmen. At that point, they acquired sparse exposure and were not crush triumphs; today, nonetheless, they rank among the works of art. 

In Volume III, "Blowin' in the Wind - The 60's Music Revolution" (2008), Eaton bows to the Baby Boomers and the music that arose when an incredible gap jumped up during the 1960s between Berlin, Gershwin, Porter and their counterparts on one side and newbies like the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon on the other. He followed it in 2009 with "The Jazz Connection - Hoagy Carmichael and Fats Waller." 

From a denied youth, during which his sister kicked the bucket on the grounds that the family needed cash for essential clinical consideration, to a law degree from Indiana University, different appearances in film and on TV, and a common Oscar with his continuous associate Johnny Mercer for "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening," Carmichael stayed an admirer of the honky-tonk piano. Like Carmichael, Waller, one of music's most prominent step musicians, had various gifts. Since the beginning, he acted in Harlem, played Bach organ works, and created numerous famous tunes, never getting acknowledgment for some he offered to different arrangers to make due during a time of neediness. Two that stay evergreen are Grammy Hall of Fame victors "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Ain't Misbehavin.