Monte Kay
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Monte Kay
Monte Kay (September 18, 1924 – May 25, 1988)The New York Timesbr>obituary/ref> was an American musicians' agent and record producer. Kay acted as a talent scout and as the musical director of several night clubs on the New York jazz scene in the late 1940s and 1950s. According to some accounts, during those years some thought Kay was a Caucasian due to his fair-skin. Kay always referred to himself as African American although he could pass as Caucasian.Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography, Simon and Schuster, 1989, . In May and June 1945, Mal Braveman and Kay's New Jazz Foundation produced concerts at New York's Town Hall that included Dizzy Gillespie, Pearl Bailey, Erroll Garner, Don Byas, Charlie Parker, Max Roach and Sidney Catlett. As the artistic director of the Royal Roost (a jazz venue on 52nd Street) he succeeded in persuading the owner, Ralph Watkins, to hire Miles Davis' nonet - sometimes called the ''"Tuba Band"'' - with which Davis was pursu ...
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Music Producer
A record producer is a recording project's creative and technical leader, commanding studio time and coaching artists, and in popular genres typically creates the song's very sound and structure.Virgil Moorefield"Introduction" ''The Producer as Composer: Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music'' (Cambridge, MA & London, UK: MIT Press, 2005).Richard James Burgess, ''The History of Music Production'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)pp 12–13Allan Watson, ''Cultural Production in and Beyond the Recording Studio'' (New York: Routledge, 2015)pp 25–27 The record producer, or simply the producer, is likened to film director and art director. The executive producer, on the other hand, enables the recording project through entrepreneurship, and an audio engineer operates the technology. Varying by project, the producer may or may not choose all of the artists. If employing only synthesized or sampled instrumentation, the producer may be the sole artist. Conversely, some artists ...
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Don Byas
Carlos Wesley "Don" Byas (October 21, 1912 – August 24, 1972) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist, associated with swing and bebop. He played with Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Art Blakey, and Dizzy Gillespie, among others, and also led his own band. He lived in Europe for the last 26 years of his life. Biography Oklahoma and Los Angeles Byas was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, United States. Both of Byas' parents were musicians. His mother played the piano, and his father, the clarinet. Byas began his musical education in the European classical tradition, learning to play violin, clarinet and alto saxophone, which he played until the end of the 1920s. Benny Carter, who played many instruments, was his idol at this time. Byas started to perform in local orchestras at the age of 17, with Bennie Moten, Terrence Holder and Walter Page. He founded and led his own college band, Don Carlos and His Collegiate Ramblers, during 1931–1932, at Langston College, Oklahoma. Byas swi ...
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George Carlin
George Denis Patrick Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008) was an American comedian, actor, author, and social critic. Regarded as one of the most important and influential stand-up comedians of all time, he was dubbed "the dean of counterculture comedians". He was known for his black comedy and reflections on politics, the English language, psychology, religion, and taboo subjects. His "seven dirty words" routine was central to the 1978 United States Supreme Court case '' F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation'', in which a 5–4 decision affirmed the government's power to censor indecent material on public airwaves. The first of Carlin's 14 stand-up comedy specials for HBO was filmed in 1977. From the late 1980s onwards, his routines focused on sociocultural criticism of American society. He often commented on American political issues and satirized American culture. He was a frequent performer and guest host on ''The Tonight Show'' during the three-decade Johnny Carson era and hos ...
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Comedy Album
Comedy is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, television, radio, books, or any other entertainment medium. The term originated in ancient Greece: in Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by political satire performed by comic poets in theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance pitting two groups, ages, genders, or societies against each other in an amusing '' agon'' or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old". A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions posing obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth then becomes constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to resort to ruses wh ...
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Little David Records
Little David Records was a record label started in 1969 by up-and-coming comedian Flip Wilson and his manager, veteran jazz producer Monte Kay. The label focused mainly on comedy albums, with some jazz and soft rock releases. Little David was independently distributed for its first year but was picked up by Atlantic Records for most of its existence, except for a year under Warner Bros. Records. The label's logo depicted biblical David wielding a sling, ready to fight Goliath. The small label produced two Grammy Award-winning comedy albums, and five Gold records to become highly profitable. Kay and Wilson parted ways in 1977. The label was sold to comedian George Carlin, who folded the catalog into Eardrum Records in the 1980s. Founding Comedian Flip Wilson hired Monte Kay as his manager in 1963 when Wilson was 30 and Kay was 39. Kay was known for founding the jazz club Birdland in 1949. He had been producing jazz records, and managing jazz musicians ever since. Kay booked Wilso ...
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Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name = United States , subdivision_type1 = State , subdivision_type2 = Counties , subdivision_name1 = Illinois , subdivision_name2 = Cook and DuPage , established_title = Settled , established_date = , established_title2 = Incorporated (city) , established_date2 = , founder = Jean Baptiste Point du Sable , government_type = Mayor–council , governing_body = Chicago City Council , leader_title = Mayor , leader_name = Lori Lightfoot ( D) , leader_title1 = City Clerk , leader_name1 = Anna Valencia ( D) , unit_pref = Imperial , area_footnotes = , area_tot ...
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Birdland (jazz Club)
Birdland is a jazz club started in New York City on December 15, 1949. The original Birdland, which was located at 1678 Broadway, just north of West 52nd Street in Manhattan, was closed in 1965 due to increased rents, but it re-opened for one night in 1979. A revival began in 1986 with the opening of the second nightclub by the same name that is now located in Manhattan's Theater District, not far from the original nightclub's location. The current location is in the same building as the previous headquarters of ''The New York Observer''. The original Birdland (1949–1965) 1678 Broadway, below the street level Irving Levy (1923–1959), Morris Levy, and Oscar Goodstein – along with six other partners – purchased the venue in 1949 from Joseph "Joe the Wop" Catalano.Nick Talevski, ''Knocking on Heaven's Door: Rock Obituaries'', pp. 368–369, Omnibus Press (2006) They adopted the name "Birdland" to capitalize on the profile of Charlie "Yardbird" Parker. The club ...
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Diahann Carroll
Diahann Carroll (; born Carol Diann Johnson; July 17, 1935 – October 4, 2019) was an American actress, singer, model, and activist. She rose to prominence in some of the earliest major studio films to feature black casts, including ''Carmen Jones'' (1954) and ''Porgy and Bess'' (1959). In 1962, Carroll won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, a first for an African-American woman, for her role in the Broadway musical ''No Strings.'' In 1974 she starred in ''Claudine'' alongside James Earl Jones for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. Her title role in ''Julia'', for which she received the 1968 Golden Globe Award for Best TV Star – Female, was the first series on American television to star a black woman in a non-stereotypical role, and was a milestone both in her career and the medium. In the 1980s, she played the role of Dominique Deveraux, a mixed-race diva, in the prime time soap opera ''Dynasty''. In 1997, she had a significant r ...
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Birth Of The Cool
''Birth of the Cool'' is a compilation album by American jazz trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis, released in February 1957 by Capitol Records. It compiles eleven tracks recorded by Davis's nonet for the label over the course of three sessions during 1949 and 1950. Featuring unusual instrumentation and several notable musicians, the music consisted of innovative arrangements influenced by classical music techniques such as polyphony, and marked a major development in post-bebop jazz. As the title suggests, these recordings are considered seminal in the history of cool jazz. Most of them were originally released in the 10-inch 78-rpm format and are all approximately three minutes long. Background From 1944 to 1948, Miles Davis played in Charlie Parker's quintet. Davis recorded several albums worth of material with Parker during this period, including Parker's Sessions for the Savoy and Dial labels. Davis' first records released under his own name were recorded with Parker' ...
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Cool Jazz
Cool jazz is a style of modern jazz music that arose in the United States after World War II. It is characterized by relaxed tempos and lighter tone, in contrast to the fast and complex bebop style. Cool jazz often employs formal arrangements and incorporates elements of classical music. Broadly, the genre refers to a number of post-war jazz styles employing a more subdued approach than that found in other contemporaneous jazz idioms. As Paul Tanner, Maurice Gerow, and David Megill suggest, "the tonal sonorities of these conservative players could be compared to pastel colors, while the solos of izzy Gillespie and his followers could be compared to fiery red colors." The term ''cool'' started being applied to this music around 1953, when Capitol Records released the album ''Classics in Jazz: Cool and Quiet''. Mark C. Gridley, writing in the ''All Music Guide to Jazz'', identifies four overlapping sub-categories of cool jazz: # "Soft variants of bebop," including the Miles Dav ...
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52nd Street
52nd Street is a -long one-way street traveling west to east across Midtown Manhattan, New York City. A short section of it was known as the city's center of jazz performance from the 1930s to the 1950s. Jazz center Following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, 52nd Street replaced 133rd Street as "Swing Street" of the city. The blocks of 52nd Street between Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue became renowned for the abundance of jazz clubs and lively street life. The street was convenient to musicians playing on Broadway and the 'legitimate' nightclubs and was also the site of a CBS studio. Musicians who played for others in the early evening played for themselves on 52nd Street. In the period from 1930 through the early 1950s, 52nd Street clubs hosted such jazz musicians as Louis Prima, Art Tatum, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Trummy Young, Harry Gibson, Nat Jaffe, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Marian McPartland, and many more. Although musici ...
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Royal Roost
The Royal Roost was a jazz club located at 1580 Broadway in the Theater District of Manhattan in New York City. History Ralph Watkins originally opened the Royal Roost as a chicken restaurant. After a difficult start, Watkins was persuaded by Sid Torin (D.J. Symphony Sid) to try presenting modern jazz at the club. Beginning in 1948 the club began to showcase the likes of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Dexter Gordon, Tadd Dameron, and Max Roach. The presence of so many prominent bebop musicians performing at the Royal Roost led to the club being nicknamed "the Metropolitan Bopera House," a pun referencing the club's close proximity to the nearby Metropolitan Opera House. In 1949, a record label, Roost Records, was founded by Arthur Faden, Bill Faden, Monty Kay and Ralph Watkins, which recorded many of the musicians who performed at the club. In September 1948, Miles Davis debuted his nonet at the club, a project that would eventually give rise to the seminal cool ja ...
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