Rodd Keith
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Rodd Keith
Rodd Keith (born Rodney Keith Eskelin; January 30, 1937 – December 15, 1974) was an American multi-instrumentalist and songwriter. He is perhaps the best known figure in the obscure musical subgenre known as song poem music. Life and career He worked for several companies active in the song poem business, a practice also known as song sharking, and generally dismissed as a scam. Keith recorded hundreds of musical compositions based around lyrics sent in to song-poem companies by amateur songwriters, based upon small ads in the backs of mass market magazines promising success in the profitable field of songwriting. After a letter was sent by the company, the amateur songwriters would then be convinced to pay the company a fee to have a recording made and records pressed. Keith sang on many of these recordings as well as playing several different instruments, including saxophone, melodica, and all manner of keyboards. His earliest song-poem work was made for Sandy Stanton's ...
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Song Poem
Song poems are songs with lyrics by usually non-professional writers that have been set to music by commercial companies for a fee. This practice, which has long been disparaged in the established music industry, was also known as ''song sharking'' and was conducted by several businesses throughout the 20th century in North America. Production and promotion From the early 20th century, the business of recording song poems was promoted through small display ads in popular magazines, comic books, tabloids, men's adventure journals and similar publications with a headline reading (essentially) ''Send in Your Poems - Songwriter A songwriter is a musician who professionally composes musical compositions or writes lyrics for songs, or both. The writer of the music for a song can be called a composer, although this term tends to be used mainly in the classical music gen ...s Make Thousands of Dollars - Free Evaluation.'' The term ''lyrics'' was avoided because it was assumed p ...
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Saxophone
The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on a mouthpiece vibrates to produce a sound wave inside the instrument's body. The pitch is controlled by opening and closing holes in the body to change the effective length of the tube. The holes are closed by leather pads attached to keys operated by the player. Saxophones are made in various sizes and are almost always treated as transposing instruments. Saxophone players are called '' saxophonists''. The saxophone is used in a wide range of musical styles including classical music (such as concert bands, chamber music, solo repertoire, and occasionally orchestras), military bands, marching bands, jazz (such as big bands and jazz combos), and contemporary music. The saxophone is also used as a solo and melody instrument or as a member of a horn section in som ...
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Melodica
The melodica is a handheld free-reed instrument similar to a pump organ or harmonica. It features a musical keyboard on top, and is played by blowing air through a mouthpiece that fits into a hole in the side of the instrument. The keyboard usually covers two or three octaves. Melodicas are small, lightweight, and portable, and many are designed for children to play. They are popular in music education programs, especially in Asia. The modern form of the instrument was invented by Hohner in the late 1950s, though similar instruments have been known in Italy since the 19th century. Description The mouthpiece can be a short rigid or semi-flexible plastic piece or a long flexible plastic tube (designed to allow the player to either hold the keyboard so the keys can be seen or lay the keyboard horizontally on a flat surface for two-handed playing). A foot pump can also be used as an alternative to breathing into the instrument. Melodica keyboards typically ascend from a low F note. ...
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Keyboard Instrument
A keyboard instrument is a musical instrument played using a keyboard, a row of levers which are pressed by the fingers. The most common of these are the piano, organ, and various electronic keyboards, including synthesizers and digital pianos. Other keyboard instruments include celestas, which are struck idiophones operated by a keyboard, and carillons, which are usually housed in bell towers or belfries of churches or municipal buildings. Today, the term ''keyboard'' often refers to keyboard-style synthesizers. Under the fingers of a sensitive performer, the keyboard may also be used to control dynamics, phrasing, shading, articulation, and other elements of expression—depending on the design and inherent capabilities of the instrument. Another important use of the word ''keyboard'' is in historical musicology, where it means an instrument whose identity cannot be firmly established. Particularly in the 18th century, the harpsichord, the clavichord, and the early ...
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Los Angeles
Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world's most populous megacities. Los Angeles is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Southern California. With a population of roughly 3.9 million residents within the city limits , Los Angeles is known for its Mediterranean climate, ethnic and cultural diversity, being the home of the Hollywood film industry, and its sprawling metropolitan area. The city of Los Angeles lies in a basin in Southern California adjacent to the Pacific Ocean in the west and extending through the Santa Monica Mountains and north into the San Fernando Valley, with the city bordering the San Gabriel Valley to it's east. It covers about , and is the county seat of Los Angeles County, which is the most populous county in the United States with an estim ...
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Teri Thornton
Teri Thornton, born Shirley Enid Avery (September 1, 1934 – May 2, 2000) was an American jazz singer. Thornton first performed in local Detroit clubs in the 1950s. She moved to New York City in the 1960s, where she found work singing for television advertisements, and recorded for several different labels. Late in the 1960s Thornton faded from public view, and only decades later was discovered to have been singing on various song poem records in Los Angeles on the Preview label as "Teri Summers." She played clubs in New York after moving back there from Los Angeles in 1983, and in the 1990s she fully revived her career. She was a resident of the Actors' Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey. In 1998, she won the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Vocal Competition in Washington, DC. (Singers Jane Monheit, Tierney Sutton and Roberta Gambarini were runners-up in the same competition.) Thornton signed with Verve, which released ''I'll Be Easy to Find''. That same year, she was diagno ...
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Psychedelics
Psychedelics are a subclass of hallucinogenic drugs whose primary effect is to trigger non-ordinary states of consciousness (known as psychedelic experiences or "trips").Pollan, Michael (2018). ''How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence'' Sometimes, they are called classic hallucinogens, serotonergic hallucinogens, or serotonergic psychedelics, and the term ''psychedelics'' is used more broadly to include all hallucinogens; this article uses the narrower definition of ''psychedelics''. Psychedelics cause specific psychological, visual, and auditory changes, and often a substantially altered state of consciousness.Leary, Timothy; Metzner, Ralph (1964). ''The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead'' Psychedelic states are often compared to meditative, psychodynamic or transcendental types of alterations of mind. The "classical" psychedelics, the psyc ...
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Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the United States. The publication has won more than 40 Pulitzer Prizes. It is owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong and published by the Times Mirror Company. The newspaper’s coverage emphasizes California and especially Southern California stories. In the 19th century, the paper developed a reputation for civic boosterism and opposition to labor unions, the latter of which led to the 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. In recent decades the paper's readership has declined, and it has been beset by a series of ownership changes, staff reductions, and other controversies. In January 2018, the paper's staff voted to unionize and final ...
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Ellery Eskelin
Ellery Eskelin (born August 16, 1959) is an American tenor saxophonist raised in Baltimore, Maryland and residing in New York City. His parents, Rodd Keith and Bobbie Lee, were both professional musicians. Rodd Keith died in 1974 in Los Angeles, California, and became a cult figure after his death in the little-known field of " song-poem" music. Organist Bobbie Lee performed in local nightclubs in Baltimore in the early 1960s and provided Eskelin an introduction to standards from the Great American Songbook as well as inspiring an early interest in jazz music. Eskelin has resided in New York City since 1983 and has led numerous international touring ensembles while participating as a sideman or collaborator with many of today's most forward-thinking composers and improvisers. He has released more than twenty-five recordings as a leader since the late 1980s, primarily for the Swiss hatOLOGY label. His most important work has been with the group he formed in 1994 featuring keyboar ...
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1974 Deaths
Major events in 1974 include the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis and the resignation of President of the United States, United States President Richard Nixon following the Watergate scandal. In the Middle East, the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War determined politics; following List of Prime Ministers of Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's resignation in response to high Israeli casualties, she was succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin. In Europe, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, invasion and occupation of northern Cyprus by Turkey, Turkish troops initiated the Cyprus dispute, the Carnation Revolution took place in Portugal, and Chancellor of Germany, Chancellor of West Germany Willy Brandt resigned following an Guillaume affair, espionage scandal surrounding his secretary Günter Guillaume. In sports, the year was primarily dominated by the 1974 FIFA World Cup, FIFA World Cup in West Germany, in which the Germany national football team, German national team won the championshi ...
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1937 Births
Events January * January 1 – Anastasio Somoza García becomes President of Nicaragua. * January 5 – Water levels begin to rise in the Ohio River in the United States, leading to the Ohio River flood of 1937, which continues into February, leaving 1 million people homeless and 385 people dead. * January 15 – Spanish Civil War: Second Battle of the Corunna Road ends inconclusively. * January 20 – Second inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt: Franklin D. Roosevelt is sworn in for a second term as President of the United States. This is the first time that the United States presidential inauguration occurs on this date; the change is due to the ratification in 1933 of the Twentieth Amendment to the United States Constitution. * January 23 – Moscow Trials: Trial of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center – In the Soviet Union 17 leading Communists go on trial, accused of participating in a plot led by Leon Trotsky to overthrow Joseph Stalin's regime, and assas ...
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American Multi-instrumentalists
American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, people who self-identify their ancestry as "American" ** American English, the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States ** Native Americans in the United States, indigenous peoples of the United States * American, something of, from, or related to the Americas, also known as "America" ** Indigenous peoples of the Americas * American (word), for analysis and history of the meanings in various contexts Organizations * American Airlines, U.S.-based airline headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas * American Athletic Conference, an American college athletic conference * American Recordings (record label), a record label previously known as Def American * American University, in Washington, D.C. Sports teams Soccer * B ...
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