Mike Cooper (musician)
Michael Cooper (born 24 August 1942) is an English guitarist and singer-songwriter. Initially coming to attention as a country blues performer, his later work also straddles jazz, Polynesian, ambient, and various experimental and improvisational styles. Biography Early life Mike Cooper was born in Reading, Berkshire. After spending several years as a child in Australia, he returned to England. He started playing guitar after leaving school aged 16, and became involved in local skiffle groups. Having spent time at local jazz clubs, in 1961 he saw Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee play with Terry Lightfoot, and harmonica player James Cotton playing with Chris Barber's band at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival. Inspired by Alexis Korner, he formed an R&B band, the Blues Committee, in which he was the lead singer. The band supported visiting blues musicians including John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, and Sonny Boy Williamson. With changes in line-up, from 1964 the Blues Committee diver ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Reading, Berkshire
Reading ( ) is a town and borough in Berkshire, Southeast England, southeast England. Located in the Thames Valley at the confluence of the rivers River Thames, Thames and River Kennet, Kennet, the Great Western Main Line railway and the M4 motorway serve the town. Reading is east of Swindon, south of Oxford, west of London and north of Basingstoke. Reading is a major commercial centre, especially for information technology and insurance. It is also a regional retail centre, serving a large area of the Thames Valley with its shopping centre, the The Oracle, Reading, Oracle. It is home to the University of Reading. Every year it hosts the Reading and Leeds Festivals, Reading Festival, one of England's biggest music festivals. Reading has a professional association football team, Reading F.C., and participates in many other sports. Reading dates from the 8th century. It was an important trading and ecclesiastical centre in the Middle Ages, the site of Reading Abbey, one of th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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James Cotton
James Henry Cotton (July 1, 1935 – March 16, 2017) was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter, who performed and recorded with many fellow blues artists and with his own band. He also played drums early in his career. Cotton began his professional career playing the blues harp in Howlin' Wolf's band in the early 1950s. He made his first recordings in Memphis, Tennessee, Memphis for Sun Records, under the direction of Sam Phillips. In 1955, he was recruited by Muddy Waters to come to Chicago and join his band. Cotton became Muddy's bandleader and stayed with the group until 1965. In 1965, he formed the Jimmy Cotton Blues Quartet, with Otis Spann on piano, to record between gigs with the Muddy Waters band. He eventually left to form his own full-time touring group. His first full album, on Verve Records, was produced by the guitarist Mike Bloomfield and the singer and songwriter Nick Gravenites, who later were members of the band The Electric Flag, Electr ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Don Partridge
Donald Eric Partridge (27 October 1941 – 21 September 2010)Report of death '''', 23 September 2010. was an English singer and songwriter, known as the "king of the buskers".Longman Records article dated March 2005 , accessed 5 January 2010. He performed from the early 1960s first as a folk singer and later as a busker and [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Leon Rosselson
Leon Rosselson (born 22 June 1934, Harrow, Middlesex, England) is an English songwriter and writer of children's books. After his early involvement in the folk music revival in Britain, he came to prominence, singing his own satirical songs, in the BBC's topical TV programme of the early 1960s, ''That Was The Week That Was''. He toured Britain and abroad, singing mainly his own songs and accompanying himself with acoustic guitar. In later years, he has published 17 children's books, the first of which, ''Rosa's Singing Grandfather'', was shortlisted in 1991 for the Carnegie Medal. He continues to write and perform his own songs, and to collaborate with other musicians and performers. Most of his material includes some sort of satirical content or elements of radical politics. Folk years Leon Rosselson was born and brought up in North London, lived in Tufnell Park and attended school in Highgate Road, adjacent to Parliament Hill Fields. His Jewish parents came to England as ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Martin Carthy
Martin Carthy MBE (born 21 May 1941) is an English folk singer and guitarist who has remained one of the most influential figures in British traditional music, inspiring contemporaries such as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, and later artists such as Richard Thompson, since he emerged as a young musician in the early days of the folk revival in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s. Early life He was born in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England, and grew up in Hampstead, North West London. His mother was an active socialist and his father, from a family of Thames lightermen, went to grammar school and became a trade unionist and a councillor for Stepney at the age of 21. Martin's father had played fiddle and guitar as a young man but Martin was unaware of this connection to his folk music heritage until much later in life. His vocal and musical training began when he became a chorister at the Queen's Chapel of The Savoy. He picked up his father's old guitar for the first time after hearing ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones are an English rock band formed in London in 1962. Active for six decades, they are one of the most popular and enduring bands of the rock era. In the early 1960s, the Rolling Stones pioneered the gritty, rhythmically driven sound that came to define hard rock. Their first stable line-up consisted of vocalist Mick Jagger, multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, guitarist Keith Richards, bassist Bill Wyman, and drummer Charlie Watts. During their formative years, Jones was the primary leader: he assembled the band, named it, and drove their sound and image. After Andrew Loog Oldham became the group's manager in 1963, he encouraged them to write their own songs. Jagger and Richards became the primary creative force behind the band, alienating Jones, who had developed a drug addiction that interfered with his ability to contribute meaningfully. Rooted in blues and early rock and roll, the Rolling Stones started out playing covers and were at the forefront ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Folk Club
A folk club is a regular event, permanent venue, or section of a venue devoted to folk music and traditional music. Folk clubs were primarily an urban phenomenon of 1960s and 1970s Great Britain and Ireland, and vital to the second British folk revival, but continue today there and elsewhere. In America, as part of the American folk music revival, they played a key role not only in acoustic music, but in launching the careers of groups that later became rock and roll acts. British clubs Origins From the end of the Second World War there had been attempts by the English Folk Dance and Song Society in London and Birmingham to form clubs where traditional music could be performed. A few private clubs, like the Good Earth Club and the overtly political Topic Club in London, were formed by the mid-1950s and were providing a venue for folk song, but the folk club movement received its major boost from the short-lived British skiffle craze, from about 1955 to 1959, creating a demand f ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Modern Jazz
Bebop or bop is a style of jazz developed in the early-to-mid-1940s in the United States. The style features compositions characterized by a fast tempo, complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and numerous changes of key, instrumental virtuosity, and improvisation based on a combination of harmonic structure, the use of scales and occasional references to the melody. Bebop developed as the younger generation of jazz musicians expanded the creative possibilities of jazz beyond the popular, dance-oriented swing music-style with a new "musician's music" that was not as danceable and demanded close listening.Lott, Eric. Double V, Double-Time: Bebop's Politics of Style. Callaloo, No. 36 (Summer, 1988), pp. 597–605 As bebop was not intended for dancing, it enabled the musicians to play at faster tempos. Bebop musicians explored advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords, extended chords, chord substitutions, asymmetrical phrasing, and intricate melodies. B ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sonny Boy Williamson II
Alex or Aleck Miller (originally Ford, possibly December 5, 1912 – May 24, 1965), known later in his career as Sonny Boy Williamson, was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter. He was an early and influential blues harp stylist who recorded successfully in the 1950s and 1960s. Miller used various names, including Rice Miller and Little Boy Blue, before calling himself Sonny Boy Williamson, which was also the name of a popular Chicago blues singer and harmonica player. To distinguish the two, Miller has been referred to as Sonny Boy Williamson II. He first recorded with Elmore James on "Dust My Broom". Some of his popular songs include " Don't Start Me Talkin'", " Help Me", "Checkin' Up on My Baby", and " Bring It On Home". He toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival and recorded with English rock musicians, including the Yardbirds, the Animals. "Help Me" became a blues standard, and many blues and rock artists have recorded his songs. Bi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jimmy Reed
Mathis James Reed (September 6, 1925 – August 29, 1976) was an American blues musician and songwriter. His particular style of electric blues was popular with blues as well as non-blues audiences. Reed's songs such as "Honest I Do" (1957), "Baby What You Want Me to Do" (1960), " Big Boss Man" (1961), and " Bright Lights, Big City" (1961) appeared on both ''Billboard'' magazine's rhythm and blues and Hot 100 singles charts. Reed influenced other musicians, such as Elvis Presley, Hank Williams Jr., and the Rolling Stones, who recorded his songs. Music critic Cub Koda describes him as "perhaps the most influential bluesman of all," due to his easily accessible style. Biography Reed was born in Dunleith, Mississippi, United States. He learned the harmonica and guitar from his friend Eddie Taylor. After several years of busking and performing there, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1943. He was then drafted into the U.S. Navy and served in World War II. He was discharged in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1912 or 1917 – June 21, 2001) was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The son of a sharecropper, he rose to prominence performing an electric guitar-style adaptation of Delta blues. Hooker often incorporated other elements, including talking blues and early North Mississippi hill country blues. He developed his own driving-rhythm boogie style, distinct from the 1930s–1940s piano-derived boogie-woogie. Hooker was ranked 35 in ''Rolling Stone''s 2015 list of 100 greatest guitarists. Some of his best known songs include "Boogie Chillen'" (1948), "Crawling King Snake" (1949), "Dimples" (1956), " Boom Boom" (1962), and "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (1966). Several of his later albums, including '' The Healer'' (1989), '' Mr. Lucky'' (1991), ''Chill Out'' (1995), and '' Don't Look Back'' (1997), were album chart successes in the U.S. and UK. ''The Healer'' (for the song "I'm In The Mood") and ''Chill Out'' (for the album) both e ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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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]   |