NBCC News: Mark Rotella, David Hajdu “Tenement Talk”  December 7

by Jane Ciabattari | Dec-01-2011

Amore:
The Story of Italian American Song
With Mark Rotella
In conversation with David Hajdu

A Tenement Talk

Date
Wednesday, December 7, 6:30 pm

Location
Sadie Samuelson Levy Immigrant Heritage Center
103 Orchard Street

www.tenement.org

rsvp
Please RSVP to ARosen@tenement.org
or 212.431.0233 x 212

The celebration of the "Italian decade" -- when Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Tony Bennett, & Dean Martin won the hearts of the American public and their music became the soundtrack of postwar America -- is also a story of immigrant life.

NBCC member Mark Rotella is the author of Amore: The Story of Italian American Song and Stolen Figs and Other Adventures in Calabria.  A senior editor at Publishers Weekly, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Salon, Washington Post,Village Voice, Saveur and American Heritage, among others.

David Hajdu is the music critic for The New Republic,  a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and author of four books, three of which were finalists for the NBCC award: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, and Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics and Culture.