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Don Grusin
Don Grusin (born April 22, 1941) is an American jazz keyboardist, composer, and record producer. He is the younger brother of Dave Grusin. Career Don Grusin grew up in Littleton, Colorado. His father, a native of Latvia, was a classical violinist. His brother, Dave Grusin, is a pianist, record producer, and co-founder of GRP Records. Grusin graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with a bachelor's degree in sociology and a master's degree in economics. In the early 1970s, he was an economics professor in Guadalajara, Mexico. Soon after, he taught economics at Foothill College in California. Grusin performed in Bogota, Colombia, as a member of Azteca, a Latin jazz fusion band led by Pete Escovedo that included Escovedo's daughter, drummer Sheila E. The trip sparked a lifelong interest in Latin music. In 1975, Quincy Jones invited him to tour with his band, and Grusin was persuaded to leave teaching for a career in music. He worked as a studio musician on albums by Ra ...
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Littleton, Colorado
Littleton is a home rule municipality city located in Arapahoe, Douglas, and Jefferson counties, Colorado, United States. Littleton is the county seat of Arapahoe County and is a part of the Denver–Aurora–Lakewood, CO Metropolitan Statistical Area. The city population was 45,652 at the 2020 United States Census, ranking as the 20th most populous municipality in the State of Colorado. History The city of Littleton's history dates back to the 1859 Pike's Peak Gold Rush, which brought not only gold seekers, but merchants and farmers to the community. Richard Sullivan Little was an engineer from New Hampshire who made his way out West to work on irrigation systems. Little soon decided to settle in the area at present day Littleton and brought his wife Angeline out from the East in 1862. The Littles, along with many neighbors, built the Rough and Ready Flour Mill in 1867, which provided a solid economic base in the community. By 1890, the community had grown to 245 people ...
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Joe Pass
Joe Pass (born Joseph Anthony Jacobi Passalaqua; January 13, 1929 – May 23, 1994) was an American jazz guitarist. Pass is well known for his work stemming from numerous collaborations with pianist Oscar Peterson and vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, and is often heralded as one of the most unique and notable jazz guitarists of the 20th century. Early life Pass was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on January 13, 1929. His father, Mariano Passalaqua, was a steel mill worker who was born in Sicily. The family later moved to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Pass became interested in the guitar after he saw Gene Autry on television. He got his first guitar when he was nine. He took guitar lessons every Sunday with a local teacher for 6-8 months and also practiced for many hours each day. Pass found work as a performer as early as age 14. He played with bands led by Tony Pastor and Charlie Barnet, honing his guitar skills while learning the ropes in the music industry. He began traveling with sm ...
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Dori Caymmi
Dorival "Dori" Tostes Caymmi (born 26 August 1943) is a Brazilian singer, songwriter, guitarist, arranger, and producer. Biography Caymmi was born in Rio de Janeiro to parents who were musicians, his father Dorival Caymmi a composer and his mother Stella Maris a singer. When he was eight, he started piano lessons. At the Conservatório Lorenzo Fernandez, he studied music theory and harmony. He became a professional musician in 1959 when he accompanied his sister Nana in a performance. During the next year, he became a member of Grupo dos Sete and composed music for TV. He directed the play ''Opinião'' and performed on violão for it in 1964, contributing to the growth of música popular brasileira ( MPB). He worked as a producer for Eumir Deodato, Edu Lobo, and Nara Leão and as a composer with Nelson Motta. He and Motta were an effective songwriting duo. Their song "Saveiros" won a national competition. "O Cantador" was covered by Sarah Vaughan and Natalie Cole, while "Fes ...
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Oscar Castro-Neves
Oscar Castro-Neves (May 15, 1940 - September 27, 2013), was a Brazilian guitarist, arranger, and composer who is considered a founding figure in bossa nova. Biography He was born in Rio de Janeiro as one of triplets and formed a band with his brothers in his youth. At 16 he had a national hit with ''Chora Tua Tristeza.'' In 1962 he was in a bossa nova concert at Carnegie Hall, and later he toured with Stan Getz and Sérgio Mendes. He went on to work with musicians from different genres, including Billy Eckstine, Yo Yo Ma, Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, João Gilberto, Eliane Elias, Lee Ritenour, Airto Moreira, Toots Thielemans, John Klemmer, Carol Welsman, Stephen Bishop, and Diane Schuur. During the 1970s and early 1980s he was member of the Paul Winter Consort. With Mendes, Castro-Neves, was a key guitarist in the A&M release "Fool on the Hill" and continued with the classic "Stillness" which was to see the last Brasil '66 grouping. Castro-Neves re-ap ...
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Larry Carlton
Larry Eugene Carlton (born March 2, 1948) is an American guitarist who built his career as a studio musician in the 1970s and 1980s for acts such as Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell. He has participated in thousands of recording sessions, recorded on hundreds of albums in many genres, for television and movies, and on more than 100 gold records. He has been a member of the jazz fusion group the Crusaders, the smooth jazz band Fourplay, and has maintained a long solo career. Music career Session work Carlton was born in Torrance, California, United States, and at the age of six began guitar lessons. His interest in jazz came from hearing guitarist Joe Pass on the radio, after which he moved on to jazz guitarists Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery, and blues guitarist B.B. King. He went to junior college and Long Beach State College while playing professionally at clubs in Los Angeles. During the 1970s, he found steady work as a studio musician on electric and acoustic guitar in ...
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David Benoit (musician)
David Bryan Benoit (born August 18, 1953) is an American jazz pianist, composer and producer, based in Los Angeles, California, United States. Benoit has charted over 25 albums since 1980, and has been nominated for three Grammy Awards. He is also music director for the Pacific Vision Youth Symphony (previously known as the Asia America Symphony Orchestra) and the Asia America Youth Orchestra. Furthermore, crediting Vince Guaraldi as an inspiration, Benoit has participated both as performer and music director for the later animated adaptations of the ''Peanuts'' comic strip, such as the feature film, '' The Peanuts Movie'', restoring Guaraldi's musical signature to the franchise. Early life David Bryan Benoit was born in Bakersfield, California, on August 18, 1953. He studied piano at age 13 with Marya Cressy Wright and continued his training with Abraham Fraser, who was the pianist for Arturo Toscanini. He attended Mira Costa High School. He focused on theory and composition a ...
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Patti Austin
Patti Austin (born August 10, 1950) is an American R&B, pop, and jazz singer and songwriter. Music career Austin was born in Harlem, New York, to Gordon Austin, a jazz trombonist. She was raised in Bay Shore, New York on Long Island. Quincy Jones and Dinah Washington have referred to themselves as her godparents. When Austin was four years old, she performed at the Apollo Theater. As a teenager she recorded commercial jingles and worked as a session singer in soul and R&B. She had an R&B hit in 1969 with "Family Tree". She sang backing vocals on Paul Simon's 1975 number-one hit " 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover". The jazz label CTI released her debut album, ''End of a Rainbow'', in 1976. She sang " The Closer I Get to You" for Tom Browne's album ''Browne Sugar'', a duet with Michael Jackson for his album '' Off the Wall'', and a duet with George Benson on "Moody's Mood for Love". After singing on Quincy Jones's album '' The Dude'', she signed a contract with his record la ...
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Gerald Albright
Gerald Albright is an American jazz saxophonist. He earned Grammys for 24/7 in 2012 and Slam Dunk in 2014 and has been nominated for New Beginnings in 2008 and for Sax for Stax in 2009. Biography Born in Los Angeles, Albright grew up in its South Central neighborhood. He began piano lessons at an early age, although he professed no interest in the instrument. His love of music picked up when he was given a saxophone that belonged to his piano teacher. It further reinforced when he attended Locke High School. After high school, he attended the University of Redlands where he was initiated into the Iota Chi Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha and received a degree in business management with a minor concentration on music. He switched to bass guitar after he saw Louis Johnson in concert. After college, Albright worked as a studio musician in the 1980s for Anita Baker, Ray Parker Jr., Olivia Newton-John, and The Temptations. He joined Patrice Rushen, who was forming a band, in which ...
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Echo Award
Echo Music Prize (stylised as ECHO, ) was an accolade by the , an association of recording companies of Germany to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry. The first ECHO Awards ceremony was held in 1992, and it was set up to honor musical accomplishments by performers for the year 1991, succeeding the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis, which was awarded since 1963. Each year's winner was determined by the previous year's sales. In April 2018, following controversy regarding that year's ceremony, the Bundesverband Musikindustrie announced the end of the award. History First held with 370 people in the Flora, Cologne in 1992, the award ceremony in Frankfurt was televised and the classical awards were moved to a separate event, Echo Klassik, in Cologne in 1994. Until 1995, only invited guests could attend the ceremony. It was held in Munich, and in 2001, the venue was moved from Hamburg to Berlin because of subsidies of up to 20 million euros, although a return in 2004 wa ...
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Paul Winter
Paul Winter (born August 31, 1939) is an American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. He is a pioneer of world music and earth music, which interweaves the voices of the wild with instrumental voices from classical, jazz and world music. The music is often improvised and recorded in nature to reflect the qualities brought into play by the environment. Early life Winter was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, United States. He studied piano and clarinet, then fell in love with saxophone in the fourth grade. He started the Little German Band with his schoolmates when he was twelve, then a Dixieland band, and a nine-piece dance band known as The Silver Liners. He became enthralled by big bands and bebop bands of the 1950s. After graduating from Altoona Area High School in 1957, he spent the summer on a tour of state fairs in the Midwest with the conductor and members of the Ringling Brothers Circus Band. Paul Winter Sextet At Northwestern University, he majored in English and ...
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Grammy Award
The Grammy Awards (stylized as GRAMMY), or simply known as the Grammys, are awards presented by the Recording Academy of the United States to recognize "outstanding" achievements in the music industry. They are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the music industry worldwide. It was originally called the Gramophone Awards, as the trophy depicts a gilded gramophone. The Grammys are the first of the Big Three networks' major music awards held annually, and is considered one of the four major annual American entertainment awards, alongside the Academy Awards (for films), the Emmy Awards (for television), and the Tony Awards (for theater). The first Grammy Awards ceremony was held on May 4, 1959, to honor the musical accomplishments of performers for the year 1958. After the 2011 ceremony, the Recording Academy overhauled many Grammy Award categories for 2012. History The Grammys had their origin in the Hollywood Walk of Fame project in the 1950 ...
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Alex Acuña
Alejandro Neciosup Acuña (born December 12, 1944), known professionally as Alex Acuña, is a Peruvian-American drummer and percussionist. Background Born in Pativilca, Peru, Acuña played in local bands such as La Orquesta de los Hermanos Neciosup from the age of ten. Acuña then followed his brothers and moved to Lima as a teenager. At the age of eighteen he joined the band of Perez Prado, and in 1965 he moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 1974 Acuña moved to Las Vegas, working with artists such as Elvis Presley, The Temptations, and Diana Ross, and the following year he joined the jazz-fusion group Weather Report, appearing on the albums ''Black Market'' and '' Heavy Weather''. While in New York City, Acuña recorded several songs under RCA records. Acuña decided to leave because of the genre limitations placed on him, in which RCA records only had him play Latin music. Acuña left Weather Report in 1978, and became a session musician in California, recording and playing l ...
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