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Sunday August 20, 2023 PM EST
Emerson Avenue Salonlines Proudly Presents
a Live YouTube Broadcast
– A “hybrid” concert –
Alex Hassan
piano
20th CENTURY POP PIANISTICAL PYROTECHNICS
Emersonians! Despite the Herculean rigors of Alex Hassan’s last solo concert, he has happily informed us that all fingers then lost… HAVE GROWN BACK.
This Sunday, Aug 20th, 7:30PM, Alex will likely leave a few digits stranded on the Kawai keyboard, but not before wowing us with another demonstration of how popular pianists of the 20s/30s played, when melody was paramount. As he so aptly puts it, this was the “late Romantic with a beat”.
In the Sunday mix, there’ll be a couple of Alex’s medley-fantasies, celebrating the melodies of two UK giants, Billy Mayerl and Vivian Ellis. There’ll be a veritably joyous stride solo by 20s black jazzer, Fred Longshaw. Slightly more modern will be a set of compositions/transcriptions by great NY society pianist of the 40s/50s/60s, Cy Walter. And if there’s time, who knows what else he may pull out of his bag-of-licks!
So, as ever, join us and stick around for the chat-with-our-artist, post-concert Zoom session.
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 50,000 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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