The Westerlies
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The Westerlies
The Westerlies are an American brass quartet. Composed of two trumpets and two trombones, the ensemble is known for taking inspiration from jazz, contemporary classical, and folk music, as well as employing nontraditional sonorities. History The group's founding members were originally childhood friends in Seattle, where they attended Garfield High School and Roosevelt High School. Each had a background in jazz performance, and as a high school senior, trombonist Andy Clausen led the ten-piece Split Stream Big Band, in which trumpeter Riley Mulkerhar and trombonist Willem de Koch performed. The group formed in 2011 in New York City as members pursued graduate degrees at the Juilliard School, The New School, and the Manhattan School of Music. It first performed that year at the Royal Room jazz club in Seattle's Columbia City neighborhood. In May 2018, trumpeter Zubin Hensler left the group to focus on producing and was replaced by Chloe Rowlands. In 2024, trombonist Willem ...
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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. 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, ...
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Columbia City, Seattle
Columbia City is a neighborhood in southeastern Seattle, Washington, within the city's Rainier Valley district. It has a landmark-protected historic business district and is one of the few Seattle neighborhoods with a long history of ethnic and income diversity. The neighborhood's main thoroughfares running north–south are Rainier Avenue S. and Martin Luther King Jr. Way S. The principal east–west thoroughfares are S. Alaska Street, S Orcas Street, and S. Genesee Street. Mass transit includes Sound Transit's Central Link light rail service from the Columbia City station (approx. 15 minutes to downtown Seattle and 20 minutes to SeaTac airport). History Founding and early years The area was once dense conifer forest, primarily inhabited by Coast Salish peoples, until the arrival of the Rainier Valley Electric Railway from Downtown Seattle in 1891. Owners of the electric railway bought forty acres, built a lumber mill, cleared the area for settlement, and promoted their ...
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Arthur Russell (musician)
Charles Arthur Russell Jr. (May 21, 1951 – April 4, 1992) was an American cellist, composer, producer, singer, and musician from Iowa, whose work spanned a disparate range of styles. After studying contemporary composition and Indian classical music in California, Russell relocated to New York City in the mid-1970s, where he became involved in Lower Manhattan's avant-garde community and later the city's burgeoning disco scene. His eclectic music was often marked by adventurous production choices and his soft tenor vocals. Russell worked as musical director of the New York avant-garde venue The Kitchen in 1974 and 1975, but later embraced dance music, producing or co-producing several underground club hits under names such as Dinosaur L, Loose Joints, and Indian Ocean between 1978 and 1988. He co-founded the independent label Sleeping Bag Records with Will Socolov in 1981, and collaborated with a wide variety of artists, including musicians Peter Gordon, Peter Zummo, and Talk ...
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Tin Foil
Tin foil, also spelled tinfoil, is a thin foil made of tin. Tin foil was superseded after World War II by cheaper and more durable aluminium foil, which is still referred to as "tin foil" in many regions (an example of a misnomer). History Foil made from a thin leaf of tin was commercially available before its aluminum counterpart. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, tin foil was in common use, and some people continue to refer to the new product by the name of the old one. Tin foil is stiffer than aluminum foil. It tends to give a slight tin taste to food wrapped in it, which is a major reason it has largely been replaced by aluminum and other materials for wrapping food. Because of its corrosion resistance, oxidation resistance, availability, low cost, low toxicity, and slight malleability, tin foil was used as a filling for tooth cavities prior to the 20th century. The first audio recordings on phonograph cylinder Phonograph cylinders (also referred to a ...
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Wayne Horvitz
Wayne Horvitz (born September 1, 1955) is an American composer, keyboardist and record producer. He came to prominence in the Downtown scene of 1980s and '90s New York City, where he met his future wife, the singer, songwriter and pianist Robin Holcomb. He is noted for working with John Zorn's Naked City among others. Horvitz has since relocated to the Seattle, Washington area where he has several ongoing groups and has worked as an adjunct professor of composition at Cornish College of the Arts. Biography Horvitz, a "defiant cross-breeder of genres",de Barros, Paul"Wayne Horvitz" Liner notes to ''Wayne Horvitz: Joe Hill: 16 Actions for Orchestra, Voices, and Soloist''. New World Records. has led the groups The President, Pigpen, Zony Mash, and the Four Plus One Ensemble. Works for theater and dance include music for the 1998 production of ''Death of a Salesman'' for Seattle's ACT theater (directed by Gordon Edelstein); productions of Ezra Pound's Elektra and the American p ...
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Minimal Music
Minimal music (also called minimalism)"Minimalism in music has been defined as an aesthetic, a style, and a technique, each of which has been a suitable description of the term at certain points in the development of minimal music. However, two of these definitions of minimalism—aesthetic and style—no longer accurately represent the music that is often given that label." Johnson 1994, 742. is a form of art music or other compositional practice that employs limited or minimal musical materials. Prominent features of minimalist music include repetitive patterns or pulses, steady drones, consonant harmony, and reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units. It may include features such as phase shifting, resulting in what is termed phase music, or process techniques that follow strict rules, usually described as process music. The approach is marked by a non-narrative, non- teleological, and non- representational approach, and calls attention to the activity of listening ...
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Timbre
In music, timbre (), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes sounds according to their source, such as choir voices and musical instruments. It also enables listeners to distinguish instruments in the same category (e.g., an oboe and a clarinet, both woodwinds). In simple terms, timbre is what makes a particular musical instrument or human voice have a different sound from another, even when they play or sing the same note. For instance, it is the difference in sound between a guitar and a piano playing the same note at the same volume. Both instruments can sound equally tuned in relation to each other as they play the same note, and while playing at the same amplitude level each instrument will still sound distinctive with its own unique tone color. Musicians distinguish instruments based on their varied timbres, even instruments playing notes at the same pitch and volume ...
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Charles Ives
Charles Edward Ives (; October 20, 1874May 19, 1954) was an American modernist composer, actuary and businessman. Ives was among the earliest renowned American composers to achieve recognition on a global scale. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Later in life, the quality of his music was publicly recognized through the efforts of contemporaries like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, and he came to be regarded as an "American original". He was also among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements, and quarter tones. His experimentation foreshadowed many musical innovations that were later more widely adopted during the 20th century. Hence, he is often regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the 20th century. Sources of Ives's tonal imagery included hymn ...
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Jimmy Giuffre
James Peter Giuffre (, ; April 26, 1921 – April 24, 2008) was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, and arranger. He is known for developing forms of jazz which allowed for free interplay between the musicians, anticipating forms of free improvisation. Biography Jimmy Giuffre was born in Dallas, Texas, United States, the son of Joseph Francis Giuffre (an Italian immigrant from Termini Imerese, Palermo Province, Sicily) and Everet McDaniel Giuffre. Giuffre was a graduate of Dallas Technical High School and North Texas State Teachers College ( University of North Texas College of Music). He first became known as an arranger for Woody Herman's big band, for which he wrote " Four Brothers" (1947). He would continue to write creative, unusual arrangements throughout his career. He was a central figure in West Coast jazz and cool jazz. He became a member of Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All Stars in 1951 as a full-time All Star, along with Shorty Rogers and Shel ...
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Bill Frisell
William Richard Frisell (born March 18, 1951) is an American jazz guitarist. He first came to prominence at ECM Records in the 1980s, as both a session player and a leader. He went on to work in a variety of contexts, notably as a participant in the Downtown Scene in New York City, where he formed a long working relationship with composer and saxophonist John Zorn. He was also a longtime member of veteran drummer Paul Motian's groups from the early 1980s until Motian's death in 2011. Since the late 1990s, Frisell's output as a bandleader has also integrated prominent elements of folk, country, rock ‘n’ roll and Americana. He has six Grammy nominations and one win. Biography Early life and career Frisell was born in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, but spent most of his youth in the Denver, Colorado area. He studied clarinet with Richard Joiner of the Denver Symphony Orchestra as a youth, but by his teens was more interested in guitar. He graduated from Denver East Hi ...
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Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland (, ; November 14, 1900December 2, 1990) was an American composer, critic, writer, teacher, pianist, and conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as the "Dean of American Composers". The open, slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many consider the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit. He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as "populist" and which he called his "vernacular" style. Works in this vein include the ballets ''Appalachian Spring'', ''Billy the Kid (ballet), Billy the Kid'' and ''Rodeo (ballet), Rodeo'', his ''Fanfare for the Common Man'' and Symphony No. 3 (Copland), Third Symphony. In addition to his ballets and orchestral works, he produced music in many other genres, including chamber music, vocal works, opera, and film scores. After some initial studie ...
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Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of newspapers in the United States, sixth-largest newspaper in the U.S. and the largest in the Western United States with a print circulation of 118,760. It has 500,000 online subscribers, the fifth-largest among U.S. newspapers. Owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong and published by California Times, the paper has won over 40 Pulitzer Prizes since its founding. In the 19th century, the paper developed a reputation for civic boosterism and opposition to Trade union, labor unions, the latter of which led to the Los Angeles Times bombing, bombing of its headquarters in 1910. The paper's profile grew substantially in the 1960s under publisher Otis Chandler, who adopted a more national focus. As with other regional newspapers in California and the United Sta ...
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