Rob Wasserman
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Rob Wasserman
Rob Wasserman (April 1, 1952 – June 29, 2016) was an American composer and bass player. A Grammy Award and NEA grant winner, he played and recorded with a wide variety of musicians including Bob Weir, Bruce Cockburn, Elvis Costello, Ani di Franco, Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Stéphane Grappelli, Rickie Lee Jones, Van Morrison, Aaron Neville, Lou Reed, Pete Seeger, Jules Shear, Brian Wilson, Chris Whitley, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Laurie Anderson, Stephen Perkins, Banyan, Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, and Ratdog. He is best known for his own work on the trilogy of albums, ''Solo'', ''Duets'', and ''Trios''. Life and career Wasserman started playing violin, and graduated to the bass after his teenage years. He studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music where he studied composing with John Adams and double bass with San Francisco Symphony bassists. He worked with Van Morrison, Oingo Boingo, and David Grisman. His 1983 album ''Solo'' won ''Down Beat'' magazin ...
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San Mateo, California
San Mateo ( ; ) is a city in San Mateo County, California, on the San Francisco Peninsula. About 20 miles (32 km) south of San Francisco, the city borders Burlingame to the north, Hillsborough to the west, San Francisco Bay and Foster City to the east and Belmont to the south. The population was 105,661 at the 2020 census. San Mateo has a Mediterranean climate and is known for its rich history at the center of the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of the biggest economic drivers for the city include technology, health care and education. History The Ramaytush people lived in the land, prior to its becoming the city of San Mateo. In 1789, the Spanish missionaries had named a Native American village along Laurel Creek as ''Los Laureles'' or the Laurels (Mission Dolores, 1789). At the time of Mexican Independence, 30 native Californians were at San Mateo, most likely from the Salson tribelet. Naming of the city Captain Frederick William Beechey in 1827 traveling with t ...
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Jules Shear
Jules Mark Shear (born March 7, 1952) is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He wrote the Cyndi Lauper hit single " All Through the Night" and The Bangles' hit "If She Knew What She Wants", and charted a hit as a performer with "Steady" in 1985. Life and early career Shear was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. He attended the University of Pittsburgh. He distinguished himself with the Pitt Glee Club where he led a special side ensemble called Wooden Music, which used acoustic instruments, in a foreshadowing of his "Unplugged" concept. One of his noted songs of the time, which he performed in concerts with the glee club, was "Always in the Morning". He left Pitt after three years in 1973, and headed to Los Angeles to pursue a music career. Shear is married to singer-songwriter Pal Shazar. Career Shear has recorded more than 20 albums to date. He made his first appearance on vinyl with Funky Kings (along with two other songwriters, Jack Tempchin and ...
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Down Beat
' (styled in all caps) is an American music magazine devoted to "jazz, blues and beyond", the last word indicating its expansion beyond the jazz realm which it covered exclusively in previous years. The publication was established in 1934 in Chicago, Illinois. It is named after the "downbeat" in music, also called "beat one", or the first beat of a musical measure. ''DownBeat'' publishes results of annual surveys of both its readers and critics in a variety of categories. The ''DownBeat'' Jazz Hall of Fame includes winners from both the readers' and critics' poll. The results of the readers' poll are published in the December issue, those of the critics' poll in the August issue. Popular features of ''DownBeat'' magazine include its "Reviews" section where jazz critics, using a '1-Star to 5-Star' maximum rating system, rate the latest musical recordings, vintage recordings, and books; articles on individual musicians and music forms; and its famous "Blindfold Test" column, in a ...
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Oingo Boingo
Oingo Boingo () was an American new wave band formed by songwriter Danny Elfman in 1979. The band emerged from a surrealist musical theatre troupe, The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, that Elfman had led and written material for in the years previous. Their highest charting song, " Weird Science", reached No. 45 on the US ''Billboard'' Hot 100. Oingo Boingo were known for their high energy live concerts and experimental music, which can be described as mixing rock, ska, pop, and world music. The band's body of work spanned 17 years, with various genre and line-up changes. Their best-known songs include "Only a Lad", " Little Girls", " Dead Man's Party" and " Weird Science". As a rock band, Oingo Boingo started as a ska and punk-influenced new wave octet, achieving significant popularity in Southern California. During the mid-1980s, the band changed line-ups, and adopted a more pop-oriented style, until a significant genre change to alternative rock in 1994. At that po ...
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John Adams (composer)
John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer and conductor whose music is rooted in minimalism. Among the most regularly performed composers of contemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for his operas, which are often centered around recent historical events. Apart from opera, his ''oeuvre'' includes orchestral, concertante, vocal, choral, chamber, electroacoustic and piano music. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Adams grew up in a musical family, being regularly exposed to classical music, jazz, musical theatre and rock music. He attended Harvard University, studying with Kirchner, Sessions and Del Tredici among others. Though his earliest work was aligned with modernist music, he began to disagree with its tenets upon reading John Cage's '' Silence: Lectures and Writings''. Teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Adams developed his own minimalist aesthetic, which was first fully realized in ''Phrygian Gates'' (1977) a ...
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San Francisco Conservatory Of Music
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) is a private music conservatory in San Francisco, California. As of 2021, it had 480 students. History The San Francisco Conservatory of Music was founded in 1917 by Ada Clement and Lillian Hodghead as the Ada Clement Piano School. In 1923, the name was changed to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In 1956 the Conservatory moved from Sacramento Street to 1201 Ortega Street, the home of a former infant shelter. It resided there for fifty years, before moving to its next location at 50 Oak Street in 2006. In 2020, the SFCM added the new Bowes Center at 200 Van Ness Avenue (across from Davies Symphony Hall), a 12-story building that includes dorms (eight floors) with acoustic insulation for 400 of its students, 27 rent-controlled apartments for residents of the older building that was replaced by the construction, and some public performing spaces, including a penthouse concert room with views towards the north and west. The Bo ...
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Ratdog
RatDog is an American rock band. The group began in 1995 as a side project for Grateful Dead guitarist and singer Bob Weir. After the Dead disbanded later that year, RatDog became Weir's primary band. They performed some Grateful Dead songs, a mixture of covers (including Bob Dylan and Chuck Berry tunes), and some originals. RatDog's repertoire consisted of more than 150 songs. They released two albums – ''Evening Moods'' (2000) and ''Live at Roseland'' (2001). RatDog has not toured since July 2014. The lineup of RatDog evolved over time. Musicians who were members of the band at different times include Rob Wasserman and Robin Sylvester on bass, Jay Lane on drums, Matthew Kelly, Mark Karan, and Steve Kimock on guitar, and Vince Welnick, Johnny Johnson and Jeff Chimenti on keyboards. History During the late 1980s, Bob Weir teamed up with bassist Rob Wasserman and the duo toured for seven years under names such as Weir/Wasserman and Scaring the Children. In 1994, Weir and Was ...
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Mystic Knights Of The Oingo Boingo
The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo was an American Surrealism, surrealist street theatre troupe, formed by performer and director Richard Elfman in 1972. The group was led by Richard until 1976, when his brother Danny Elfman took over. The group evolved into an experimental musical theatre group, performing songs from the 1930s-40s and original material. In 1979, Danny Elfman wished to pursue a new direction as a dedicated rock band and the group reformed as Oingo Boingo. Several Mystic Knights band members continued with the new band including Steve Bartek, Leon Schneiderman, Dale Turner, and Sam 'Sluggo' Phipps. History The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, formed in late 1972 by Richard Elfman, was a musical theater troupe in the tradition of Spike Jones and Frank Zappa, performing an eclectic repertoire ranging from Cab Calloway covers to instrumentals in the style of Balinese gamelan and Russian ballet music. The name was inspired by a fictional secret society on the ...
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Banyan
A banyan, also spelled "banian", is a fig that develops accessory trunks from adventitious prop roots, allowing the tree to spread outwards indefinitely. This distinguishes banyans from other trees with a strangler habit that begin life as an epiphyte, i.e. a plant that grows on another plant, when its seed germinates in a crack or crevice of a host tree or edifice. "Banyan" often specifically denotes ''Ficus benghalensis'' (the "Indian banyan"), which is the national tree of India, though the name has also been generalized to denominate all figs that share a common life cycle and used systematically in taxonomy to denominate the subgenus '' Urostigma''. Characteristics Like other fig species, banyans bear their fruit in the form of a structure called a " syconium". The syconium of ''Ficus'' species supply shelter and food for fig wasps and the trees depend on the fig wasps for pollination. Frugivore birds disperse the seeds of banyans. The seeds are small, and because ...
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Stephen Perkins
Stephen Andrew Perkins (September 13, 1967) is an American musician and songwriter. A drummer and percussionist, he currently plays with Jane's Addiction and Hellride. Following the dissolution of Jane's Addiction, Perkins continued to play with frontman Perry Farrell in the rock band Porno for Pyros. He also has a solo project called Banyan, and in the 1990s was involved in Lil' Pit with Mike Watt. In 1992, he appeared as percussionist on Rage Against the Machine's " Know Your Enemy" and in 1995, contributed percussion to the Red Hot Chili Peppers songs "One Big Mob" and " Warped" on their album ''One Hot Minute'' (fellow Jane's Addiction member Dave Navarro was the guitarist for the Chili Peppers during the making of that album). Perkins also played drums on the Nine Inch Nails album ''The Downward Spiral'' on the track "I Do Not Want This". In addition to Banyan, Perkins worked with Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro, Jane's Addiction bass player Chris Chaney and si ...
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Laurie Anderson
Laurel Philips Anderson (born June 5, 1947), known as Laurie Anderson, is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting,Amirkhanian, Charles"Women in Electronic Music – 1977" Liner note essay. New World Records. Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York City, New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She became more widely known outside the art world when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981. Her debut album ''Big Science (Laurie Anderson album), Big Science'' was released the following year. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film ''Home of the Brave (1986 film), Home of the Brave''. Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art sh ...
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Jackson Browne
Clyde Jackson Browne (born October 9, 1948) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and political activist who has sold over 18 million albums in the United States. Emerging as a precocious teenage songwriter in mid-1960s Los Angeles, he had his first successes writing songs for others, writing "These Days" as a 16-year-old; the song became a minor hit for the German singer and Andy Warhol protégé Nico in 1967. He also wrote several songs for fellow Southern California bands the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (of which he was briefly a member in 1966) and the Eagles (band), Eagles, the latter of whom had their first Billboard Hot 100, ''Billboard'' Top 40 hit in 1972 with the Browne co-written song "Take It Easy". Encouraged by his successes writing songs for others, Browne released his Jackson Browne (album), self-titled debut album in 1972, which spawned two Top 40 hits of his own, "Doctor, My Eyes" and "Rock Me on the Water". For his debut album, as well as for the next severa ...
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