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Jay Ferguson (American Musician)
John Arden "Jay" Ferguson (born May 10, 1947) is an American rock and pop musician known for his work with the bands Spirit and Jo Jo Gunne, and his 1978 solo hit " Thunder Island". His later career has been as a composer of music for television programs and films. Many people know Ferguson for composing the theme song for the American version of ''The Office'' on NBC. Childhood and early musical career Ferguson was born on May 10, 1947, in Burbank in the San Fernando Valley, California, to John Becker and Kathleen Jane Ferguson. He grew up in the Van Nuys and Canoga Park sections of Los Angeles. At 12 years old, Ferguson's parents encouraged his musical abilities with classical piano lessons. When he was 16, Ferguson's interest transferred to the banjo. Along with his brother Tom, an accomplished fiddle player, he formed a bluegrass group called The Oat Hill Stump Straddlers including Michael Fondiler and Steve Fondiler. Ferguson was also a member of local garage bands ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Burbank, California
Burbank is a city in the southeastern end of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Located northwest of downtown Los Angeles, Burbank has a population of 107,337. The city was named after David Burbank, who established a sheep ranch there in 1867. Billed as the "Media Capital of the World" and only a few miles northeast of Hollywood, numerous media and entertainment companies are headquartered or have significant production facilities in Burbank, including Warner Bros. Entertainment, The Walt Disney Company, Nickelodeon Animation Studio, The Burbank Studios, Cartoon Network Studios with the West Coast branch of Cartoon Network, and Insomniac Games. The broadcast network The CW is also headquartered in Burbank. The Hollywood Burbank Airport was the location of Lockheed's Skunk Works, which produced some of the most secret and technologically advanced airplanes, including the U-2 spy planes that uncovered Soviet Union missile components in Cu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Van Nuys, Los Angeles, California
Van Nuys () is a neighborhood in the central San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California. Home to Van Nuys Airport and the Valley Municipal Building, it is the most populous neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. History In 1909, the Suburban Homes Company – a syndicate led by Hobart Johnstone Whitley, general manager of the board of control, along with Harry Chandler, H. G. Otis, M. H. Sherman and O. F. Brandt – purchased 48,000 acres of the Farming and Milling Company for $2.5 million. Henry E. Huntington extended his Pacific Electric Railway (Red Cars) through the Valley to Owensmouth (now Canoga Park). The Suburban Home Company laid out plans for roads and the towns of Van Nuys, Reseda (Marian) and Canoga Park (Owensmouth). The rural areas were annexed into the city of Los Angeles in 1915. The town was founded in 1911 and named for Isaac Newton Van Nuys, a rancher, entrepreneur and one of its developers. It was annexed by Los Angeles on May 22, 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Singing
Singing is the act of creating musical sounds with the voice. A person who sings is called a singer, artist or vocalist (in jazz and/or popular music). Singers perform music (arias, recitatives, songs, etc.) that can be sung with or without accompaniment by musical instruments. Singing is often done in an ensemble of musicians, such as a choir. Singers may perform as soloists or accompanied by anything from a single instrument (as in art song or some jazz styles) up to a symphony orchestra or big band. Different singing styles include art music such as opera and Chinese opera, Indian music, Japanese music, and religious music styles such as gospel, traditional music styles, world music, jazz, blues, ghazal, and popular music styles such as pop, rock, and electronic dance music. Singing can be formal or informal, arranged, or improvised. It may be done as a form of religious devotion, as a hobby, as a source of pleasure, comfort, or ritual as part of music ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Khalil Gibran
Gibran Khalil Gibran ( ar, جُبْرَان خَلِيل جُبْرَان, , , or , ; January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931), usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran (pronounced ), was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist, also considered a philosopher although he himself rejected the title. He is best known as the author of '' The Prophet'', which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages. Born in a village of the Ottoman-ruled Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate to a Maronite family, the young Gibran immigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States in 1895. As his mother worked as a seamstress, he was enrolled at a school in Boston, where his creative abilities were quickly noticed by a teacher who presented him to photographer and publisher F. Holland Day. Gibran was sent back to his native land by his family at the age of fif ... [...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, 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, improvis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ed Cassidy
Edward Claude Cassidy (May 4, 1923 – December 6, 2012) was an American jazz and rock drummer who was one of the founders of the rock group Spirit in 1967. Biography Ed Cassidy was born in Harvey, Illinois, a south suburb of Chicago on May 4, 1923. His family moved to Bakersfield, California in 1931. Cassidy began his career as a professional musician in 1937. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and after his discharge held many jobs before becoming a full-time musician again. At one time in the late 1940s, Cassidy played 282 consecutive one-nighters in 17 states. He worked in show bands, Dixieland, country and western bands, and on film soundtracks, as well as having a brief stint with the San Francisco Opera. In 1950, Cassidy enrolled at college to get a musical teaching credential. However, after a year, he decided to move to Southern California to meet more jazz musicians and perhaps form a group of his own. During this period, Cassidy performed together with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Randy California
Randy Craig Wolfe (February 20, 1951 – January 2, 1997), known as Randy California, was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter, and one of the original members of the rock group Spirit, formed in 1967. Life and career California was born as Randy Craig Wolfe into a musical Jewish family in Los Angeles and spent his early years studying varied styles at the family's Los Angeles folk club, the Ash Grove, which was founded by his uncle, Ed Pearl. He was 15 years old when his mother Bernice Pearl and new stepfather, Ed Cassidy (later to become a founding member of the band Spirit, with Randy), moved to New York City in the summer of 1966 because Cassidy had a number of jazz gigs lined up. It was there, at Manny's Music, that Randy met Jimi Hendrix. He played in Hendrix's band Jimmy James and the Blue Flames that summer. California, Cassidy and Pearl lived in an apartment building in Forest Hills, Queens called the Balfour, whose other residents included future Steely D ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960, that comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They are regarded as the most influential band of all time and were integral to the development of 1960s counterculture and popular music's recognition as an art form. Rooted in skiffle, beat and 1950s rock 'n' roll, their sound incorporated elements of classical music and traditional pop in innovative ways; the band also explored music styles ranging from folk and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock. As pioneers in recording, songwriting and artistic presentation, the Beatles revolutionised many aspects of the music industry and were often publicised as leaders of the era's youth and sociocultural movements. Led by primary songwriters Lennon and McCartney, the Beatles evolved from Lennon's previous group, the Quarrymen, and built their reputation playing clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg over three years from 1960, initia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
UCLA
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California State Normal School (now San José State University). This school was absorbed with the official founding of UCLA as the Southern Branch of the University of California in 1919, making it the second-oldest of the 10-campus University of California system (after UC Berkeley). UCLA offers 337 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines, enrolling about 31,600 undergraduate and 14,300 graduate and professional students. UCLA received 174,914 undergraduate applications for Fall 2022, including transfers, making the school the most applied-to university in the United States. The university is organized into the College of Letters and Science and 12 professional schools. Six of the schools offer undergraduate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bluegrass Music
Bluegrass music is a genre of American roots music that developed in the 1940s in the Appalachian region of the United States. The genre derives its name from the band Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys. Like mainstream country music, it largely developed out of old-time string music, though in contrast, bluegrass is traditionally played exclusively on acoustic instruments and also has roots in traditional English, Scottish, and Irish ballads and dance tunes as well as in blues and jazz. Bluegrass was further developed by musicians who played with Monroe, including 5-string banjo player Earl Scruggs and guitarist Lester Flatt. Monroe characterized the genre as: " Scottish bagpipes and ole-time fiddlin'. It's a part of Methodist, Holiness and Baptist traditions. It's blues and jazz, and it has a high lonesome sound." Bluegrass features acoustic stringed instruments and emphasizes the off-beat. Notes are anticipated, in contrast to laid back blues where notes are behin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fiddle
A fiddle is a bowed string musical instrument, most often a violin. It is a colloquial term for the violin, used by players in all genres, including classical music. Although in many cases violins and fiddles are essentially synonymous, the style of the music played may determine specific construction differences between fiddles and classical violins. For example, fiddles may optionally be set up with a bridge with a flatter arch to reduce the range of bow-arm motion needed for techniques such as the double shuffle, a form of bariolage involving rapid alternation between pairs of adjacent strings. To produce a "brighter" tone than the deep tones of gut or synthetic core strings, fiddlers often use steel strings. The fiddle is part of many traditional ( folk) styles, which are typically aural traditions—taught " by ear" rather than via written music. Fiddling is the act of playing the fiddle, and fiddlers are musicians that play it. Among musical styles, fiddling tends to p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Banjo
The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, and usually made of plastic, or occasionally animal skin. Early forms of the instrument were fashioned by African Americans in the United States. The banjo is frequently associated with folk, bluegrass and country music, and has also been used in some rock, pop and hip-hop. Several rock bands, such as the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and the Grateful Dead, have used the five-string banjo in some of their songs. Historically, the banjo occupied a central place in Black American traditional music and the folk culture of rural whites before entering the mainstream via the minstrel shows of the 19th century. Along with the fiddle, the banjo is a mainstay of American styles of music, such as bluegrass and old-time music. It is also very frequently used in Dixieland jazz, as well as in Caribbean genres like biguine, calypso and mento. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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