Shimmy on down that road, Georgie

Considering that he gained (or self-applied) the moniker "Bad Boy of Music", it's nice to remember that George Antheil (1900-1959) had his nice moments.  A restless semi-trickster of the early American Avant-Garde (often lumped together with Henry Cowell and Leo Ornstein by the lazy), Antheil was a notorious personality in his day, bouncing around Europe and causing fistfights with his Ballet Mécanique, originally scored for 16 synchronized player pianos and percussion (including two airplane propellers).  And don't even get me started on his work helping Hedy Lamarr invent a wireless transmitter using player piano components*.  Poorly understood in his lifetime and prone to fits of style-shifting, the majority of his works were published either quite late in his life or after his death, with editors forced to sift through piles of odd-looking manuscripts, Ives style.  Some of his works were so bizarre and short it's no wonder they had a hard time seeing print, such as the Jazz Sonata for piano, written in his jazz deconstruction period in the 20's.  And from this same brain we are given a smile from where the sidewalk ends - the Little Shimmy.

(Click for larger view)

I realize that with this post I've made a trilogy on pseudo-jazz piano leaves, and when treading the murky waters of pseudo-jazz one has to watch out for condescension.  When early jazz swept across Europe in the inter-WW years a big part of its novelty was its origins with black culture, and many composers imitated contemporary jazz crazes with a nice heap of racist under- (and over-) tones.  It's hard for me to think of a leaf with malice, so when the threat of foolishly posting something offensive rears its ugly mug I get a bit scared.  Fortunately, this little guy comes without message, singing nothing more than itself.  I'm a bit surprised I even got two paragraphs here, as there's really nothing much to say about the piece, except that it's a shimmy written in a low-calorie incarnation of Antheil's harmonic approach from this time.  I could compare it to a lost tire nearby a Nebraska gas station, but you thought of that already.  I can't be certain if there'll be more leaf trilogies, but we've got to shimmy on to find out.

~PNK

*I'm not kidding.