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Sunday July 17 2022
Emerson Avenue Salonlines Proudly Presents
a Live YouTube Broadcast
– A “hybrid” concert –
Alex Hassan
piano
Alex Comes to the Rescue!
We recently put out an all points bulletin [actually, just to Alex] saying that if he couldn’t promptly come up with another solo program (he’s already scheduled to play August 14th), there’d be “Hell Toupee”, in that there’d be [cue the violins] TWO SUNDAYS IN A ROW MINUS A STREAMED CONCERT.
(Those of you who know Alex well will recognize that he wrote most of this!)
This all happened because of a mix of cancellations, travel plans, family visits and general summer sloth. Needless to say, this would be existentially threatening, should it possibly happen, to the Emerson Avenue Salon series.
Alex will bring us a surprise mix of new-to-salon repertoire, and a few golden oldies from earlier in the streamed concert series. How’s about the boundless melodies of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s CAROUSEL. Yup, Alex ventures into the 1940s! What about Italian foxtrots from the 30s? A brilliant Canadian novelty from the early 70s? Yet another great Vernon Duke find?
Join us Sunday night, the 17th. to find out what else he conjures, thereby preventing an Emerson Avenue tragedy (i.e.–no concert at all!)
Biography
Alex Hassan has been in total immersion 1920s/30s Tin Pan Alley Popular Piano Styles therapy for over 40 years. A pupil of a pupil of a pupil of a pupil of Franz Liszt (well…it SOUNDS impressive?!), he has been a torchbearer for the melodies of between-the-wars Broadway and Hollywood (and European equivalents), devoting himself more specifically to collecting and resurrecting the great “late Romantic with a beat” popular songs that really never had a chance.
His archival collection of [mostly] popular piano solo and vocal sheet music numbers around 45,000 titles, entirely 1920s/30s. It is a tribute to those heady musical times that there is still so much left to find.
Alex has performed internationally at such venues as England’s Aldeburgh Festival, Husum (2007 & 2015–“Piano Rarities Festival”), Washington DC’s Kennedy Center, the Coolidge Auditorium (Library of Congress), various Manhattan/Baltimore/Washington night spots, and national ragtime festivals. He has recorded prolifically for England’s SHELLWOOD PRODUCTIONS, Los Angeleno label OPERETTA ARCHIVES, and Pennsylvania’s STOMP OFF, and has produced/annotated several reissues of the virtuoso popular pianists of the 78RPM period, for both Shellwood and the Pittsburgh company, RIVERMONT (for which he has also recorded, along with two brilliant singing friends).
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