He puts stops and elongations into each tune, making it move like a sleepwalker until a hard blues phrase wakes it up.
It began cool and wary, with a bass ostinato echoed in the piano's bass clef; after the theme, Mr. Clayton began his solo with hard, argumentative phrases, but his left hand, inside the piano, damped the strings, muffling the notes.
The journal employed the traditional hard-liner phrase "people with ulterior motives" —directed to at least one student.
During the second act in a song called "Ode to the Gun," the weary but beautifully harmonizing warriors repeat the hard-nosed phrase "We believe in God/And we believe in thee," -- "thee," meaning the guns they shoulder.
So, instead, he's couched his vision in the language of deficit reduction and hard choices, phrases that serve as narcotics to much of the mainstream political media, but fundamentally misrepresent what he and Romney really believe - that they and their pals are better than you and government policy should reflect that fact.
In Italian we have a phrase: hard legs, heavy legs.
In the finale fractured motifs soon coalesce into hard-driving phrases.
There was her technique - huskytoned, steel-hard in phrasing, with immaculate timing, an unsentimental tenderness and a shrewd wit.
She does not have a particularly plush sound, and in going for intensity she sometimes pushed her voice, resulting in some hard-edged phrases.
The erotic and hard-hitting phrases are part of a down-to-earth campaign aimed at reducing by one-half the rate of infection from H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, in South Africa in five years.
