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Sunday, June 23 2024
— a “hybrid” event —
Alex Hassan
Piano
“Dancing on the Keys”
Popular Piano Styles of Our Melodic Past
ALL POINTS BULLETIN! Ever reliable Emerson Avenue regular, Alex Hassan, returns to…uhhhh…..Emerson Avenue (!), to showcase a few between-the-world wars songwriters (Harry Woods, Joseph Meyer, Rube Bloom), with tunes that have become standards, and several more that should’ve! Interspersed will be a few new period song acquisitions, in which our pianist will demonstrate some of his arranging techniques. Jackie has asked for a segment like this nearly every concert. Alex is crying UNCLE!
At program’s close, Alex plans on a short tribute to his late mother (**melodies from her Russian youth**), who periodically attended our salons, pre-Pandemic. She passed away a few weeks back, missing 93 by a month. Prepare yourselves for some bee-yoo-tee-ful stuff!
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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