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Jack Fallon (speedway Rider)
Jack Patrick Fallon (October 13, 1915 – May 22, 2006) was a British jazz bassist born in Canada. Fallon played violin and studied with London Symphony Orchestra founder Bruce Sharpe before making double-bass his primary instrument in 1935 when he was 20 years old. During World War II he played in a dance band in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and settled in Britain after his discharge. He joined the band of Ted Heath in 1946, and played bebop in London clubs in his spare time. In 1947 he played with Ronnie Scott and Tommy Whittle at the Melody Maker/Columbia Jazz Rally, and following this worked with Jack Jackson (1947), George Shearing (1948), Duke Ellington (1948), and Django Reinhardt (1949). Soon after playing with Reinhardt, he played in a Count Basie ensemble which also included Malcolm Mitchell and Tony Crombie; he played with both of them after leaving Basie, working together with Hoagy Carmichael and Maxine Sullivan and touring in Sweden together with Reinha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
London, Ontario
London (pronounced ) is a city in southwestern Ontario, Canada, along the Quebec City–Windsor Corridor. The city had a population of 422,324 according to the 2021 Canadian census. London is at the confluence of the Thames River, approximately from both Toronto and Detroit; and about from Buffalo, New York. The city of London is politically separate from Middlesex County, though it remains the county seat. London and the Thames were named in 1793 by John Graves Simcoe, who proposed the site for the capital city of Upper Canada. The first European settlement was between 1801 and 1804 by Peter Hagerman. The village was founded in 1826 and incorporated in 1855. Since then, London has grown to be the largest southwestern Ontario municipality and Canada's 11th largest metropolitan area, having annexed many of the smaller communities that surround it. London is a regional centre of healthcare and education, being home to the University of Western Ontario (which brands it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Django Reinhardt
Jean Reinhardt (23 January 1910 – 16 May 1953), known by his Romani nickname Django ( or ), was a Romani-French jazz guitarist and composer. He was one of the first major jazz talents to emerge in Europe and has been hailed as one of its most significant exponents. With violinist Stéphane Grappelli, Reinhardt formed the Paris-based Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934. The group was among the first to play jazz that featured the guitar as a lead instrument. Reinhardt recorded in France with many visiting American musicians, including Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter, and briefly toured the United States with Duke Ellington's orchestra in 1946. He died suddenly of a stroke in 1953 at the age of 43. Reinhardt's most popular compositions have become standards within gypsy jazz, including " Minor Swing", "Daphne", "Belleville", "Djangology", "Swing '42", and "Nuages". Jazz guitarist Frank Vignola says that nearly every major popular-music guitarist in the world has been influe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern (the blues scale and specific chord progressions) of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove. Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current str ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ralph Sharon
Ralph Simon Sharon (September 17, 1923 – March 31, 2015) was a British-American jazz pianist and arranger. He is best known for working with Tony Bennett as his pianist on numerous recordings and live performances. Biography Ralph Sharon was born in London, England, to a British mother and Latvian-born father. He emigrated to the United States in early 1954, becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States five years later. By 1958, Ralph Sharon was recording with Tony Bennett as accompanist. That was the start of a more than 50 year working relationship as Bennett's "man behind the music" on many Grammy Award-winning studio recordings, and touring with Bennett for many years. Sharon found the song "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" for Bennett, a year after placing the sheet music in a bureau and forgetting about it. Sharon discovered the manuscript while packing for a tour that included San Francisco. While Bennett and Sharon liked the song, they were convinced it would ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kenny Baker (trumpeter)
Kenny Baker (1 March 1921 – 7 December 1999) was an English jazz trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn player, and a composer. Biography Baker was born in Withernsea, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. He joined a brass band and by the age of 17 and had already become a professional musician. After leaving his home town of Withernsea, in Yorkshire's East Riding, for London, he met and began performing with the already well-known jazz musician George Chisholm. While serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, Baker was called up to do forces programmes. Baker was first heard on record in a British public jam session in 1941 and quickly established a strong reputation in London clubs. He was brass band trained and had faultless technical command. The young Baker was lead trumpeter with Ted Heath's post war orchestra, with "Bakerloo Non-Stop" recorded for the Decca record label in 1946. He played a tenor saxophone solo on "Johnny Gray", the piece recorded by both Bake ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Humphrey Lyttelton
Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton (23 May 1921 – 25 April 2008), also known as Humph, was an English jazz musician and broadcaster from the Lyttelton family. Having taught himself the trumpet at school, Lyttelton became a professional musician, leading his own eight-piece band, which recorded a hit single, "Bad Penny Blues", in 1956. As a broadcaster, he presented BBC Radio 2's ''The Best of Jazz'' for forty years, and hosted the comedy panel game ''I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue'' on BBC Radio 4, becoming the UK's oldest panel game host. Lyttelton was also a cartoonist, collaborating on the long-running '' Flook'' series in the ''Daily Mail'', and a calligrapher and president of The Society for Italic Handwriting. Early life and career Lyttelton was born at Eton College (then in Buckinghamshire), where his father, George William Lyttelton (second son of the 8th Viscount Cobham), was a house master. (As a male-line descendant of Charles Lyttelton, Lyttelton was in remain ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lena Horne
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American dancer, actress, singer, and civil rights activist. Horne's career spanned more than seventy years, appearing in film, television, and theatre. Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood. Horne advocated for human rights and took part in the March on Washington in August 1963. Later she returned to her roots as a nightclub performer and continued to work on television while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, '' Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music'', which ran for more than 300 performances on Broadway. She then toured the country in the show, earning numerous awards and accolades. Horne continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, retreating from the public eye in 2000. Early life Lena Horne was born in Bedford–S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Lois Vaughan (March 27, 1924 – April 3, 1990) was an American jazz singer. Nicknamed "Sassy" and "Jazz royalty, The Divine One", she won two Grammy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, and was nominated for a total of nine Grammy Awards. She was given an NEA Jazz Masters Award in 1989. Critic Scott Yanow wrote that she had "one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century". Early life Vaughan was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Asbury "Jake" Vaughan, a carpenter by trade who played guitar and piano, and Ada Vaughan, a laundress who sang in the church choir, migrants from Virginia. The Vaughans lived in a house on Brunswick Street in Newark for Vaughan's entire childhood. Jake was deeply religious. The family was active in New Mount Zion Baptist Church at 186 Thomas Street. Vaughan began piano lessons at the age of seven, sang in the church choir, and played piano for rehearsals and services. She developed an early love for popular music on records and th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mary Lou Williams
Mary Lou Williams (born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs; May 8, 1910 – May 28, 1981) was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements and recorded more than one hundred records (in 78, 45, and LP versions). Williams wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie. Early years The second of eleven children, Williams was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A musical prodigy, at the age of two, she was able to pick out simple tunes and by the age of three, she was taught piano by her mother. Mary Lou Williams played piano out of necessity at a very young age; her white neighbors were throwing bricks into her house until Williams began playing the piano in their homes. At the age of six, she supported her ten half-brothers a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stéphane Grappelli
Stéphane Grappelli (; 26 January 1908 – 1 December 1997, born Stefano Grappelli) was a French jazz violinist. He is best known as a founder of the Quintette du Hot Club de France with guitarist Django Reinhardt in 1934. It was one of the first all-string jazz bands. He has been called "the grandfather of jazz violinists" and continued playing concerts around the world well into his eighties. For the first three decades of his career, he was billed using a gallicised spelling of his last name, ''Grappelly'', reverting to ''Grappelli'' in 1969. The latter, Italian spelling is now used almost universally when referring to the violinist, including reissues of his early work. Biography Early years Grappelli was born at Hôpital Lariboisière in Paris, France, and christened with the name Stefano. His father, Italian marchese Ernesto Grappelli, was born in Alatri, Lazio, while his French mother, Anna Emilie Hanoque, was from St-Omer. Ernesto was a scholar who taught Italian, so ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maxine Sullivan
Maxine Sullivan (May 13, 1911 – April 7, 1987), born Marietta Williams in Homestead, Pennsylvania, United States, was an American jazz vocalist and performer. As a vocalist, Sullivan was active for half a century, from the mid-1930s to just before her death in 1987. She is best known for her 1937 recording of a swing version of the Scottish folk song "Loch Lomond". Throughout her career, Sullivan also appeared as a performer on film as well as on stage. A precursor to better-known later vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, Sullivan is considered one of the best jazz vocalists of the 1930s. Singer Peggy Lee named Sullivan as a key influence in several interviews. Career Sullivan began her music career singing in her uncle's band, The Red Hot Peppers, in her native Pennsylvania, in which she occasionally played the flugelhorn and the valve trombone, in addition to singing. In the mid 1930s, she was discovered by Gladys Mosier (then working in Ina Ray Hutton's big ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hoagy Carmichael
Hoagland Howard Carmichael (November 22, 1899 – December 27, 1981) was an American musician, composer, songwriter, actor and lawyer. Carmichael was one of the most successful Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the 1930s, and was among the first singer-songwriters in the age of mass media to utilize new communication technologies such as television, electronic microphones, and sound recordings. Carmichael composed several hundred songs, including 50 that achieved hit record status. He is best known for composing the music for " Stardust", "Georgia on My Mind" (lyrics by Stuart Gorrell), "The Nearness of You", and " Heart and Soul" (in collaboration with lyricist Frank Loesser), four of the most-recorded American songs of all time. He also collaborated with lyricist Johnny Mercer on " Lazybones" and "Skylark". Carmichael's "Ole Buttermilk Sky" was an Academy Award nominee in 1946, from ''Canyon Passage'', in which he co-starred as a musician riding a mule. " In the Cool, Cool, C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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