|
DownBeat
''DownBeat'' (styled in all caps) is an American music magazine devoted to "jazz, blues and beyond", the last word indicating its expansion beyond the jazz realm that it covered exclusively in previous years. The publication was established in 1934 in Chicago, Illinois. It is named after the " downbeat" in music, also called "beat one", or the first beat of a musical measure. ''DownBeat'' publishes results of annual surveys of both its readers and critics in a variety of categories. The ''DownBeat'' Jazz Hall of Fame includes winners from both the readers' and critics' poll. The results of the readers' poll are published in the December issue, those of the critics' poll in the August issue. Since 2008, the Hall of Fame also includes winners from the Veterans Committee. Popular features of ''DownBeat'' magazine include its "Reviews" section where jazz critics, using a '1-Star to 5-Star' maximum rating system, rate the latest musical recordings, vintage recordings, and books; arti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bud Powell
Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell (September 27, 1924 – July 31, 1966) was an American jazz pianist and composer. A pioneer in the development of bebop and its associated contributions to jazz theory,Grove Powell's application of complex phrasing to the piano influenced both his contemporaries and later pianists including Walter Davis Jr., Toshiko Akiyoshi, and Barry Harris. Born in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance to a musical family, Powell, during the 1930s, developed an attacking, right-handed approach to the piano, which marked a break from the left-handed approach of stride and ragtime that had been prevalent. Upon joining trumpeter Cootie Williams's band in 1943, he received attention from the broader musical community for his fluency and advanced technique. In 1945, he suffered a severe beating by police, followed by several years of intermittent institutionalizations. However, his recordings and live performances with Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt, and Max Roach during ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Art Tatum
Arthur Tatum Jr. (, October 13, 1909 – November 5, 1956) was an American jazz pianist who is widely regarded as one of the greatest ever. From early in his career, fellow musicians acclaimed Tatum's technical ability as extraordinary. Tatum also extended jazz piano's vocabulary and boundaries far beyond his initial stride influences, and established new ground through innovative use of reharmonization, voicing, and bitonality. Tatum grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where he began playing piano professionally and had his own radio program, rebroadcast nationwide, while still in his teens. He left Toledo in 1932 and had residencies as a solo pianist at clubs in major urban centers including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In that decade, he settled into a pattern he followed for most of his career – paid performances followed by long after-hours playing, all accompanied by prodigious alcohol consumption. He was said to be more spontaneous and creative in such venues, and altho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Miles Davis
Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926September 28, 1991) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th century music, 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musical directions in a roughly five-decade career that kept him at the forefront of many major stylistic developments in jazz. Born into an upper-middle-class family in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis, Davis started on the trumpet in his early teens. He left to study at Juilliard School, Juilliard in New York City, before dropping out and making his professional debut as a member of saxophonist Charlie Parker's bebop quintet from 1944 to 1948. Shortly after, he recorded the ''Birth of the Cool'' sessions for Capitol Records, which were instrumental to the development of cool jazz. In the early 1950s, while addicted to heroin, Davis recorded some of the earliest hard bop music under Prestige Records. After a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eric Dolphy
Eric Allan Dolphy Jr. (June 20, 1928 – June 29, 1964) was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer, and bandleader. Primarily an alto saxophonist, bass clarinetist, and flautist, Dolphy was one of several multi-instrumentalists to gain prominence during the same era. His use of the bass clarinet helped to establish the unconventional instrument within jazz. Dolphy extended the vocabulary and boundaries of the alto saxophone, and was among the earliest significant jazz flute soloists. His improvisational style was characterized by the use of wide intervals, in addition to employing an array of extended techniques to emulate the sounds of human voices and animals. He used melodic lines that were "angular, zigzagging from interval to interval, taking hairpin turns at unexpected junctures, making dramatic leaps from the lower to the upper register." Although Dolphy's work is sometimes classified as free jazz, his compositions and solos were often rooted in conventional (if ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bix Beiderbecke
Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke ( ; March 10, 1903 – August 6, 1931) was an American jazz cornetist, pianist and composer. Beiderbecke was one of the most influential jazz soloists of the 1920s, a cornet player noted for an inventive lyrical approach and purity of tone, with such clarity of sound that one contemporary famously described it like "shooting bullets at a bell”. His solos on seminal recordings such as Singin' the Blues (1920 song)#Trumbauer/Beiderbecke Recording, "Singin' the Blues" and "I'm Coming Virginia, I'm Coming, Virginia" (both 1927) demonstrate a gift for extended Jazz improvisation, improvisation that heralded the jazz ballad style, in which jazz solos are an integral part of the composition. Moreover, his use of extended chords and an ability to improvise freely along harmonic as well as melodic lines are echoed in post-WWII developments in jazz. "In a Mist" (1927) is the best known of Beiderbecke's published piano compositions and the only one that he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louis Armstrong
Louis Daniel Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed "Satchmo", "Satch", and "Pops", was an American trumpeter and vocalist. He was among the most influential figures in jazz. His career spanned five decades and several eras in the history of jazz. Armstrong received numerous accolades including the Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, Grammy Award for Best Male Vocal Performance for ''Hello, Dolly! (song), Hello, Dolly!'' in 1965, as well as a posthumous win for the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1972. His influence crossed musical genres, with inductions into the DownBeat, ''DownBeat'' Jazz Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame, among others. Armstrong was born and raised in New Orleans. Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an inventive trumpet and cornet player, he was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the focus of the music from collective improvisation to solo performance. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Coltrane
John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967) was an American jazz saxophonist, bandleader and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the Jazz#Post-war jazz, history of jazz and 20th-century music. Born and raised in North Carolina, after graduating from high school Coltrane moved to Philadelphia, where he studied music. Working in the bebop and hard bop idioms early in his career, Coltrane helped pioneer the use of Modal jazz, modes and was one of the players at the forefront of free jazz. He led at least fifty recording sessions and appeared on many albums by other musicians, including trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Thelonious Monk. Over the course of his career, Coltrane's music took on an increasingly spiritual dimension, as exemplified on his most acclaimed album ''A Love Supreme'' (1965) and others. Decades after his death, Coltrane remains influential, and he has received numerous posthumous awards, including a Pulitzer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday made significant contributions to jazz music and pop music, pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly influenced by jazz instrumentalists, inspired a new way of manipulating Phrase (music), phrasing and tempo. Holiday was known for her vocal delivery and Jazz improvisation, improvisational skills. After a turbulent childhood, Holiday began singing in nightclubs in Harlem where she was heard by producer John Hammond (record producer), John Hammond, who liked her voice. Holiday signed a recording contract with Brunswick Records, Brunswick in 1935. Her collaboration with Teddy Wilson produced the hit "What a Little Moonlight Can Do", which became a jazz standard. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Holiday had mainstream success on labels such as Columbia Records, Columbia and Decca Records, Decca. H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Benny Goodman
Benjamin David Goodman (May 30, 1909 – June 13, 1986) was an American clarinetist and bandleader, known as the "King of Swing". His orchestra did well commercially. From 1936 until the mid-1940s, Goodman led one of the most popular swing big bands in the United States. His concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City on January 16, 1938, is described by critic Bruce Eder as "the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history: jazz's 'coming out' party to the world of 'respectable' music." Goodman's bands started the careers of many jazz musicians. During an era of racial segregation, he led one of the first integrated jazz groups, his trio and quartet. He continued performing until the end of his life while pursuing an interest in classical music. Early years Goodman was the ninth of twelve children born to poor Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire. His father, David Goodman, came to the United States in 1892 from Warsaw in partitioned Poland and becam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Earl Hines
Earl Kenneth Hines, also known as Earl "Fatha" Hines (December 28, 1903 – April 22, 1983), was an American jazz pianist and bandleader. He was one of the most influential figures in the development of jazz piano and, according to one source, "one of a small number of pianists whose playing shaped the history of jazz". The trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (a member of Hines's big band, along with Charlie Parker) wrote, The piano is the basis of modern harmony. This little guy came out of Chicago, Earl Hines. He changed the style of the piano. You can find the roots of Bud Powell, Herbie Hancock, all the guys who came after that. If it hadn't been for Earl Hines blazing the path for the next generation to come, it's no telling where or how they would be playing now. There were individual variations but the style of … the modern piano came from Earl Hines. The pianist Lennie Tristano said, "Earl Hines is the ''only'' one of us capable of creating real jazz and real swing when playi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, hymns, marches, vaudeville song, and dance music. 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. 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. However, jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jelly Roll Morton
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe ( Lemott, later Morton; c. September 20, 1890 – July 10, 1941), known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American blues and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer of Louisiana Creole descent. Morton was jazz's first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential characteristics when notated. His composition " Jelly Roll Blues", published in 1915, was one of the first published jazz compositions. He also claimed to have invented the genre. Morton also wrote " King Porter Stomp", " Wolverine Blues", " Black Bottom Stomp", and "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say", the last being a tribute to New Orleans musicians from the turn of the 20th century. Morton's claim to have invented jazz in 1902 was criticized. Music critic Scott Yanow wrote, "Jelly Roll Morton did himself a lot of harm posthumously by exaggerating his worth ... Morton's accomplishments as an early innovator are so vast that he did not really n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
