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A Book Of Luminous Things
A Book of Luminous Things is the fifth studio album by the Polish jazz singer Aga Zaryan. It was released on June 14, 2011 by EMI Music Poland and Blue Note Records. The album contains twelve compositions to the poems of Czesław Miłosz and his favourite poets: Anna Świrszczyńska, Jane Hirshfield and Denise Levertov. In October, 2011 EMI Music Poland published another version of the album, called ''Księga olśnień'' (which is the Polish translation of ''A Book of Luminous Things'') with the same songs being performed in Polish. Apart from the language, the only difference between the two versions is in the song ''This Only'' (Polish: ''To jedno''), which in the English version is performed by Aga Zaryan as sole vocalist, while in the Polish version she was joined by Grzegorz Turnau. Recorded at Castle Oaks Studios in Calabasas, California in spring 2011. Track listing Personnel *Aga Zaryan – vocals *Michał Tokaj – piano *Larry Koonse – guitar *Darek Oleszkiewicz ...
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Aga Zaryan
Aga Zaryan (born Agnieszka Skrzypek on 17 January 1976) is a Polish jazz vocalist and the first Polish musician to sign with Blue Note Records. Her albums have earned gold, platinum, and multi-platinum status. In 2008 and 2012 she was honored with the Fryderyk award, the Polish recording industry's most prestigious prize. She was nominated for Woman of the Year in 2008 by ''Gazeta Wyborcza'', one of Poland's most widely circulated newspapers. From 2007 to 2018, she was named Jazz Vocalist of the Year in the annual readers' poll at ''Jazz Forum'' magazine. Early life Zaryan was born in Warsaw, Poland. At an early age, she traveled throughout Europe with her parents. Her father was a classical pianist, and her mother was an English language educator and author. Her parents shared a love for Stevie Wonder, Weather Report, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley, and the Beatles. Zaryan spent part of her childhood and primary school education in Manchester, England. After returning ...
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Calabasas, California
Calabasas (from Spanish ''calabazas'' "gourds") is a city in the southwestern region of the San Fernando Valley, between the foothills of the Santa Monica and Santa Susanna mountains.City of Calabasas
Official website
The city was incorporated in 1991, prior to which it was an unincorporated portion of . As of the 2020 census, the city's ...
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Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. But jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisationa ...
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EMI Music
EMI Group Limited (originally an initialism for Electric and Musical Industries, also referred to as EMI Records Ltd. or simply EMI) was a British transnational conglomerate founded in March 1931 in London. At the time of its break-up in 2012, it was the fourth largest business group and record label conglomerate in the music industry, and was one of the "Big Four" record companies (now the " Big Three"). Its labels included EMI Records, Parlophone, Virgin Records, and Capitol Records, which are now owned by other companies. EMI was listed on the London Stock Exchange, and was also once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index, but faced financial problems and US$4 billion in debt, leading to its acquisition by Citigroup in February 2011. Citigroup's ownership was temporary, as EMI announced in November 2011 that it would sell its music arm to Vivendi's Universal Music Group for $1.9 billion and its publishing business to a Sony/ATV consortium for around $2.2 b ...
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Blue Note Records
Blue Note Records is an American jazz record label owned by Universal Music Group and operated under Capitol Music Group. Established in 1939 by Alfred Lion and Max Margulis, it derived its name from the blue notes of jazz and the blues. Originally dedicated to recording traditional jazz and small group swing, the label began to switch its attention to modern jazz around 1947. From there, Blue Note grew to become one of the most prolific, influential and respected jazz labels of the mid-20th century, noted for its role in facilitating the development of hard bop, post-bop and avant-garde jazz, as well as for its iconic modernist art direction. History Historically, Blue Note has principally been associated with the "hard bop" style of jazz (mixing bebop with other forms of music including soul, blues, rhythm and blues and gospel), but also recorded essential albums in the avant-garde and free styles of jazz. Horace Silver, Jimmy Smith, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Art Blake ...
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Looking Walking Being
Looking is the act of intentionally focusing visual perception on someone or something, for the purpose of obtaining information, and possibly to convey interest or another sentiment. A large number of troponyms exist to describe variations of looking at things, with prominent examples including the verbs "stare, gaze, gape, gawp, gawk, goggle, glare, glimpse, glance, peek, peep, peer, squint, leer, gloat, and ogle".Anne Poch Higueras and Isabel Verdaguer Clavera, "The rise of new meanings: A historical journey through English ways of ''looking at''", in Javier E. Díaz Vera, ed., ''A Changing World of Words: Studies in English Historical Lexicography, Lexicology and Semantics'', Volume 141 (2002), p. 563-572. Additional terms with nuanced meanings include viewing,Madeline Harrison Caviness, ''Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy'' (2001), p. 18. watching,John Mowitt, ''Sounds: The Ambient Humanities'' (2015), p. 3. eyeing,Charles John Smit ...
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Czesław Miłosz
Czesław Miłosz (, also , ; 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts". Miłosz survived the German occupation of Warsaw during World War II and became a cultural attaché for the Polish government during the postwar period. When communist authorities threatened his safety, he defected to France and ultimately chose exile in the United States, where he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry—particularly about his wartime experience—and his appraisal of Stalinism in a prose book, '' The Captive Mind'', brought him renown as a leading '' émigré'' artist and intellectual. Throughout his life and work, Miłosz tackled questions of morality, politics, history, ...
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Anna Świrszczyńska
Anna Świrszczyńska (also known as Anna Swir) (1909–1984) was a Polish poet whose works deal with themes including her experiences during World War II, motherhood, the female body, and sensuality. Biography Świrszczyńska was born in Warsaw and grew up in poverty as the daughter of an artist. She began publishing her poems in the 1930s. During the Nazi occupation of Poland she joined the Polish resistance movement in World War II and was a military nurse during the Warsaw Uprising. She wrote for underground publications and once waited 60 minutes to be executed. Czesław Miłosz writes of knowing her during this time and has translated a volume of her work. Her experiences during the war strongly influenced her poetry. In 1974 she published ''Building the Barricade'', a volume which describes the suffering she witnessed and experienced during that time. She also writes frankly about the female body in various stages of life. Some of Swir's poems are translated into Ne ...
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Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield (born February 24, 1953) is an American poet, essayist, and translator, known as 'one of American poetry's central spokespersons for the biosphere' and recognized as 'among the modern masters,' 'writing some of the most important poetry in the world today.' A 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, her books include numerous award-winning collections of her own poems, collections of essays, and edited and co-translated volumes of world writers from the deep past. Widely published in global newspapers and literary journals, her work has been translated into over fifteen languages. Life, education, and work Jane Hirshfield was born on East 20th Street in New York City. She received her bachelor's degree in 1973 from Princeton University, in the school's first graduating class to include women as freshmen, and received lay ordination in Soto Zen at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1979. Hirshfield's nine books of poetry have received numero ...
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Denise Levertov
Priscilla Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997) was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Early life and influences Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni (1985) ''Contemporary Women Poets''. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Adelaide (née Spooner-Jones) Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales. Her father, Paul Levertoff, had been a teacher at Leipzig University and as a Russian Hasidic Jew was held under house arrest during the First World War as an 'enemy alien' by virtue of his ethnicity. He emigrated to the UK and became an Anglican priest after converting to Christianity. In the mistaken belief that he would want to preach in a Jewish neighbourhood, he was housed in Ilford, within reach of a parish in Shoreditch, in East London. His daughter wrote, "My father's Hasidic ancestry, his being steeped in Jewish and Christian scholarship and mysticism, h ...
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Grzegorz Turnau
Grzegorz Jerzy Turnau (born 31 July 1967) is a Polish composer, pianist, poet and singer. He has released eleven albums to date, including one (Cafe Sułtan) made up of his own versions of songs by Jeremi Przybora and Jerzy Wasowski, and most have enjoyed considerable chart success. His characteristic style consists of strong, clear lyrics and music composed in special keys and harmonies, using instruments such as the piano (played by himself), saxophone, violin and various horns. Influenced by such artists as Marek Grechuta and Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz, his music style falls within the broad genre of sung poetry. Biography He was born on 31 July 1967 in Kraków, Poland. At age seventeen he won First Prize (Grand Prix) at The Student Song Festival in Kraków in 1984. He went on to join the Piwnica pod Baranami Cabaret, composing such hits as "Znów wędrujemy", and released his first album, ''Naprawdę nie dzieje się nic'' ("Really, nothing is happening") in 1991. He di ...
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Darek Oleszkiewicz
Darek Oleszkiewicz (born February 20, 1963), also known as Darek Oles, is a jazz bassist, composer, arranger, and educator. Biography Oleszkiewicz was born in Wrocław, Poland, on February 20, 1963. He lived in Kraków in the early 1980s, then moved to Los Angeles in 1987 or 1988 and attended California Institute of the Arts from 1989 on a full scholarship. While studying at Cal Arts he was a protégé of Charlie Haden.Heimbauer, Gary (December 2010) "Bob Mamet". ''Jazz Inside''. p. 44. In the early 1990s and 2000s he built a reputation on the West Coast of the United States.Kelman, John (September 19, 2004"Darek Oleszkiewicz: Like a Dream" AllAboutJazz. He co-founded the Los Angeles Jazz Quartet in 1993, with saxophonist Chuck Manning, guitarist Larry Koonse, and drummer Kevin Tullius. They recorded for Naxos Records and Not Two Records. Oleszkiewicz's first album as sole leader was '' Like a Dream'',Dryden, Ke"Darek Oleszkiewicz – Like a Dream" AllMusic. Retrieved December 1 ...
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