John Eaton is Washington’s foremost pianist, vocalist, musicologist and humorist rolled up into one extraordinary performer. Concluding his Barns of Wolf Trap journeys this season through “The Roaring Twenties” and “The Swinging Thirties,” he pays tribute to “The Fabulous Forties” and the composers who kept the nation singing and dancing during and after World War II.
“The theme I’ve developed is that you can measure the evolution of jazz by the way mainstream writers wrote,” he says. “You had Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker coming up during the ’40s, so it’s a period when music looked backward and forward at the same time.
“The ’40s were still part of a great tradition that included Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael, yet we clearly were entering a different time. Berlin had been writing since 1910, but he wrote his greatest score, ‘Annie Get Your Gun,’ in 1945, replacing Kern who died. For that reason he was regarded as a contemporary writer in the ’40s as well as in the ’10s.
“In the early part of the decade, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen and Jule Styne were writing classic wartime songs, along with Frank Loesser, who wrote ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.’ Loesser and Styne, the new chaps on the block, went on to conquer Broadway in the ’50s.
“Rodgers, who had teamed with Lorenz Hart during the ’30s, reinvented himself in the ’40s with Oscar Hammerstein. Their collaboration had a profound effect on music and society and shook up American culture.”
Eaton will open his show with a medley of pieces showing how jazz evolved from the earlier period. Following the intermission, he and bassist Victor Dvoskin will focus on Washington’s own Duke Ellington. Even though he had been writing since the 1920s, Ellington formed his greatest band during the ’40s, thereby establishing his presence and prominence as a major composer.
A graduate of Yale University, Eaton’s resume ranges from jazz clubs and festivals to command performances at the White House, lecture/concerts for the Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio, and PBS television series on Gershwin and Ellington.
IF YOU GO:
John Eaton plays music from “The Fabulous Forties”
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday
Venue: The Barns at Wolf Trap, 1645 Trap Road, Vienna
Tickets: $25
Info: 877-WOLFTRAP (965-3872), wolf-trap.org/performances/tickets
