Fishko Files

The jazz pianist Dick Hyman is in New York for a few days. As WNYC’s Sara Fishko tells us in this Fishko Files, when Hyman sits at the keyboard, the piano’s past comes alive.

Dick Hyman appears tonight at Tribeca Performing Arts Center and this Friday and Saturday at Jazz at Kitano. 

The acclaimed film editor Anne V. Coates died yesterday at the age of 92. Born in England in 1925, Coates began training as an editor in the late 1940s and went on to work in Hollywood with numerous renowned directors including David Lean, Steven Soderbergh, and Sidney Lumet. In addition to her Oscar win for "Lawrence in Arabia" (1962), Coates received scores of BAFTA and Oscar nominations for her work on films like Erin Brockovich, The Elephant Man, Becket, Murder on the Orient Express, In the Line of Fire, and Out of Sight. In 2016, she was awarded the Academy's Governor's Award, as well as the Los Angeles Film Critics Association's award for career achievement. She is survived by her three children, all of whom also work in the film industry: Anthony Hickox, Emma E. Hickox, and James D.R. Hickox.

This weekend, the Museum of Modern Art celebrates a new book on the incomparable Andy Warhol and his film Chelsea Girls with 10 days of related screenings. In this archival Fishko Files, WNYC's Sara Fishko leads us through another Warhol book - one that traces Andy's ritual of daily walks through Manhattan. (Produced in 2011)

The Chelsea Girls Exploded begins at MoMA Friday, May 4 and continues through Sunday, May 13.

Andy Warhol's New York City: Four Walks, Uptown to Downtown is available on Amazon.

In 1918, Arnold Schoenberg founded the Society for Private Musical Performances with the aim of making new music, excellently played, available to the then-modern audience. In this archival Fishko Files, composer and author Allen Shawn reflects on his own efforts, in his book Arnold Schoenberg's Journey, to demystify the composer himself for our own era. (Produced in 2002)

The documentary Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes has its premiere Monday at the Tribeca Film Festival. In the course of talking about the history of the label, musicians in the film muse more generally about the art of jazz and the nature of improvisation. In this archival Fishko Files, Oscar Peterson, Bill Charlap, and others try to describe the indescribable. (Produced in 2003)

The movie The Big Clock was released in April of 1948, adapted from a book by the radical, Depression-era poet Kenneth Fearing. As WNYC’s Sara Fishko tells us, Fearing’s work zeroed in on advertising and media long before it was the thing to do. In honor of poetry month: this edition of Fishko Files.

Jeanine Basinger is the Chair of Film Studies at Wesleyan University and the author of numerous books and articles on film.

Geoffrey O'Brien is the author of Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir, among many others.

Robert Polito is a professor of writing at the New School and edited the Library of America's Kenneth Fearing: Selected Poems.

Fearing's book "The Big Clock" (1946) and the film The Big Clock (1948) are available on Amazon.

American pianist Van Cliburn (1934-2013) will forever be remembered for one phenomenal Cold War moment. Everyone knew the 23-year-old from Texas was good, but no one expected him to steal the show in Moscow 60 years ago. (Produced in 2008)

60 years ago in 1958, Johnny Mandel's score for the film "I Want to Live" used jazz to play under (and sometimes over) the grim story of an execution. Mandel and others tell us more about jazz scores in movies and TV, in this archival episode of Fishko Files. (Produced in 2008)

The opening of Angels in America on Broadway this weekend will start another chapter in the play's history. And, as WNYC's Sara Fishko tells us in this Fishko Files, the history of that play is the subject of a new book, created in a good old tradition.

Angels in America opens on Broadway this Sunday, March 25.

The World Only Spins Forward, Robert Altman: An Oral Biography, and Edie: American Girl are available now on Amazon.

Thanks to Pacifica Radio Archives for archival material.

It’s been 10 years since film composer Leonard Rosenman died, at age 83. He won Oscars for his adaptations of existing music for movies such as Barry Lyndon (1975) and Bound for Glory (1976), but these days it's Rosenman’s own original scores that are remembered for their arresting modernism.

George Burt – interviewee in this piece and film composer, author, and friend of Rosenman – died in 2015. (Produced in 2008)