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Shawn Patterson (composer)
Shawn Michael Patterson (born September 14, 1965) is an American composer and songwriter. His most notable work to date is as the songwriter/composer for the song "Everything Is Awesome", written for the Warner Brothers feature film ''The Lego Movie'' (2014). Early life Shawn Patterson was born in the small rural town of Athol, Massachusetts, to blue collar working parents, Ronald and Joan Patterson. His father was a gifted musician playing several instruments including the saxophone, guitar, trumpet, and pedal steel. However, Patterson's very first draw to music came from watching comedian Steve Martin play the banjo on television during his ''Let's Get Small Tour.'' Martin's banjo playing was so influential, Patterson begged his parents to purchase a 5-string banjo and began taking lessons studying Bluegrass and Dixieland styles of music. Although he was jamming along with his father, Patterson grew bored with the instrument after a year and began tampering with the banjo, att ...
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Athol, Massachusetts
Athol is a town in Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 11,945 at the 2020 census. History Originally called Pequoiag when settled by Native Americans, the area was subsequently settled by five families in September 1735. When the township was incorporated in 1762, the name was changed to Athol. John Murray, one of the proprietors of the land, chose the name which traditionally was believed to mean "new Ireland" although some, including historian James E. Fraser, dispute this definition. Early residents subsisted on agriculture and hunting. By 1791, Athol had four gristmills, six sawmills, a fulling mill, and a shop with a trip hammer, all of which were operated by water power. The Athol Cotton Factory, built in 1811, was one of the first industries to serve a market beyond the local one. Through the 1800s, textile, leather, wood, and metal industries further expanded the market for goods produced in Athol. The construction of the Vermont and ...
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Joe Pass
Joe Pass (born Joseph Anthony Jacobi Passalaqua; January 13, 1929 – May 23, 1994) was an American jazz guitarist. Pass is well known for his work stemming from numerous collaborations with pianist Oscar Peterson and vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, and is often heralded as one of the most unique and notable jazz guitarists of the 20th century. Early life Pass was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey, on January 13, 1929. His father, Mariano Passalaqua, was a steel mill worker who was born in Sicily. The family later moved to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Pass became interested in the guitar after he saw Gene Autry on television. He got his first guitar when he was nine. He took guitar lessons every Sunday with a local teacher for 6-8 months and also practiced for many hours each day. Pass found work as a performer as early as age 14. He played with bands led by Tony Pastor (bandleader), Tony Pastor and Charlie Barnet, honing his guitar skills while learning the ro ...
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The Chipmunks Rock The House
''The Chipmunks Rock the House'' is a music album by Alvin and the Chipmunks, released in 1991 by Quality Special Products. Track listing Side one # " Cradle of Love" ''(Billy Idol)'' - The Chipmunks # "Freedom! '90" ''( George Michael)'' - The Chipmunks # "Roam" ''(The B-52's)'' - The Chipettes # "It Must Have Been Love" ''( Roxette)'' - The Chipettes # "The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss)" ''(Betty Everett/ Cher)'' - The Chipettes # " Express Yourself" ''( Madonna)'' - The Chipmunks and The Chipettes # " Joyride" ''(Roxette)'' - The Chipmunks and The Chipettes Side two # "Rock the House" - The Chipmunks # "U Can't Touch This" ''(MC Hammer)'' - The Chipmunks # " Wiggle It" ''( 2 in a Room)'' - The Chipmunks # "Cold Hearted" ''( Paula Abdul)'' - The Chipettes # " Unbelievable" ''( EMF)'' - The Chipmunks # "Hangin' Tough" ''(New Kids on the Block)'' - The Chipmunks # " Ice Ice Alvin" ''(Vanilla Ice Robert Matthew Van Winkle (born October 31, 1967), known profession ...
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Alvin And The Chipmunks
Alvin and the Chipmunks, originally David Seville and the Chipmunks or simply The Chipmunks, are an American animated virtual band and media franchise first created by Ross Bagdasarian for novelty records in 1958. The group consists of three singing animated anthropomorphic chipmunks named Alvin, Simon, and Theodore who are originally managed by their human adoptive father, David "Dave" Seville. Bagdasarian provided the group's voices by producing sped-up recordings of his own, a technique pioneered on the successful "Witch Doctor". Later in 1958 Bagdasarian released the similarly-engineered "The Chipmunk Song" for which he came up with the chipmunk characters and their human father, attributing the track to them. ''David Seville and the Chipmunks'' released several more records over the following decade until Bagdasarian's death in 1972. The franchise was revived in 1979 with the characters' voices provided by his son Ross Bagdasarian Jr. and the latter's wife Janice Karman. ...
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Max Roach
Maxwell Lemuel Roach (January 10, 1924 – August 16, 2007) was an American jazz Jazz drumming, drummer and composer. A pioneer of bebop, he worked in many other styles of music, and is generally considered one of the most important drummers in history. He worked with many famous jazz musicians, including Clifford Brown, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Abbey Lincoln, Dinah Washington, Charles Mingus, Billy Eckstine, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, and Booker Little. He was inducted into the ''DownBeat'' Hall of Fame in 1980 and the ''Modern Drummer'' Hall of Fame in 1992. In the mid-1950s, Roach co-led a pioneering quintet along with trumpeter Clifford Brown. In 1970, he founded the percussion ensemble M'Boom. He made numerous musical statements relating to the civil rights movement. Biography Early life and career Max Roach was born to Alphonse and Cressie Roach in the Township of Newland, Pasquotank County, ...
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Billy Taylor
Billy Taylor (July 24, 1921 – December 28, 2010) was an American jazz pianist, composer, broadcaster and educator. He was the Robert L. Jones Distinguished Professor of Music at East Carolina University in Greenville, and from 1994 was the artistic director for jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. A jazz activist, Taylor sat on the Honorary Founders Board of The Jazz Foundation of America, an organisation he founded in 1989, with Ann Ruckert, Herb Storfer and Phoebe Jacobs, to save the homes and the lives of America's elderly jazz and blues musicians, later including musicians who survived Hurricane Katrina. Taylor was a jazz educator, who lectured in colleges, served on panels and travelled worldwide as a jazz ambassador. Critic Leonard Feather once said, "It is almost indisputable that Dr. Billy Taylor is the world's foremost spokesman for jazz." Biography Early life and career Taylor was born in Greenville, North Carolina, Unit ...
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Sunset Boulevard
Sunset Boulevard is a boulevard in the central and western part of Los Angeles, California, that stretches from the Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades east to Figueroa Street in Downtown Los Angeles. It is a major thoroughfare in the cities of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood (including a portion known as the Sunset Strip), as well as several districts in Los Angeles. Geography Approximately in length, the boulevard roughly traces the arc of mountains that form part of the northern boundary of the Los Angeles Basin, following the path of a 1780s cattle trail from the Pueblo de Los Angeles to the ocean. From Downtown Los Angeles, the boulevard heads northwest, to Hollywood, through which it travels due west for several miles before it bends southwest towards the ocean. It passes through or near Echo Park, Silver Lake, Los Feliz, Hollywood, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Holmby Hills. In Bel-Air, Sunset Boulevard runs along the northern boundary of UCLA's W ...
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Benny Goodman Sextet
Benjamin David Goodman (May 30, 1909 – June 13, 1986) was an American clarinetist and bandleader known as the "King of Swing". From 1936 until the mid-1940s, Goodman led one of the most popular swing big bands in the United States. His concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City on January 16, 1938, is described by critic Bruce Eder as "the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history: jazz's 'coming out' party to the world of 'respectable' music." Goodman's bands started the careers of many jazz musicians. During an era of racial segregation, he led one of the first integrated jazz groups, his quartet and quintet. He performed nearly to the end of his life while exploring an interest in classical music. Early years Goodman was the ninth of twelve children born to poor Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire. His father, David Goodman (1873–1926), came to the United States in 1892 from Warsaw in partitioned Poland and became a tailor. His mother, Dora ...
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Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was based in New York City from the mid-1920s and gained a national profile through his orchestra's appearances at the Cotton Club in Harlem. A master at writing miniatures for the three-minute 78 rpm recording format, Ellington wrote or collaborated on more than one thousand compositions; his extensive body of work is the largest recorded personal jazz legacy, and many of his pieces have become standards. He also recorded songs written by his bandsmen, such as Juan Tizol's " Caravan", which brought a Spanish tinge to big band jazz. At the end of the 1930s, Ellington began a nearly thirty-year collaboration with composer-arranger-pianist Billy Strayhorn, whom he called his writing and arranging companion. With Strayhorn, he composed multipl ...
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Count Basie
William James "Count" Basie (; August 21, 1904 – April 26, 1984) was an American jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer. In 1935, he formed the Count Basie Orchestra, and in 1936 took them to Chicago for a long engagement and their first recording. He led the group for almost 50 years, creating innovations like the use of two "split" tenor saxophones, emphasizing the rhythm section, riffing with a big band, using arrangers to broaden their sound, and others. Many musicians came to prominence under his direction, including the tenor saxophonists Lester Young and Herschel Evans, the guitarist Freddie Green, trumpeters Buck Clayton and Harry "Sweets" Edison, plunger trombonist Al Grey, and singers Jimmy Rushing, Helen Humes, Thelma Carpenter, and Joe Williams. Biography Early life and education William Basie was born to Lillian and Harvey Lee Basie in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father worked as a coachman and caretaker for a wealthy judge. After automobiles replaced ...
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Wes Montgomery
John Leslie "Wes" Montgomery (March 6, 1923 – June 15, 1968) was an American jazz guitarist. Montgomery was known for an unusual technique of plucking the strings with the side of his thumb and his extensive use of octaves, which gave him a distinctive sound. Montgomery often worked with his brothers Buddy (Charles F.) and Monk (William H.) and with organist Melvin Rhyne. His recordings up to 1965 were oriented towards hard bop, soul jazz, and post bop, but around 1965 he began recording more pop-oriented instrumental albums that found mainstream success. His later guitar style influenced jazz fusion and smooth jazz. Biography Montgomery was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. According to NPR, the nickname "Wes" was a child's abbreviation of his middle name, Leslie. The family was large, and the parents split up early in the lives of the children. Montgomery and his brothers moved to Columbus, Ohio, with their father and attended Champion High School. His older brother Monk dropped ...
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Jim Hall (musician)
James Stanley Hall (December 4, 1930 – December 10, 2013) was an American jazz guitarist, composer and arranger. Biography Early life and education Born in Buffalo, New York, Hall moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio, during his childhood. Hall's mother played the piano, his grandfather violin, and his uncle guitar.Hall, Devra "Sketches from PROS Folios: Jim Hall". Copyright 1988-2004. He began playing the guitar at the age of 10, when his mother gave him an instrument as a Christmas present. At 13 he heard Charlie Christian play on a Benny Goodman record, which he calls his "spiritual awakening". As a teenager in Cleveland, he performed professionally, and also took up the double bass. Hall's major influences since childhood were tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Paul Gonsalves, and Lucky Thompson. While he copied out solos by Charlie Christian, and later Barney Kessel, it was horn players from whom he took the lead. In 1955, Hall attended the Cleveland I ...
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