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The Nairobi Trio
The Nairobi Trio was a sketch comedy skit that Ernie Kovacs performed many times for his TV shows. It combined several existing concepts and visuals in a novel and creative way. People in gorilla suits had long been a comedy staple. The ploy of well-known, predictable music pieces gone awry had been practiced by artists as diverse as Stan Freberg, Spike Jones, and P. D. Q. Bach. The "slow burn" of one character being annoyed by another, resulting in eventual retaliation, was not new. But the combination of all of those ingredients, combined with impeccable timing, produced a unique and memorable result. Origins The skit was a live-action version of a child's animatronic wind-up music box, performed to the tune "Solfeggio" by Robert Maxwell. According to an interview with Edie Adams in John Barbour's 1982 documentary ''Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius'', Barry Shear, Kovacs's director at DuMont Television Network, brought the tune to Kovacs's attention in 1954. The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ernie Kovacs
Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was a Hungarian-American comedian, actor, and writer. Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, ''Laugh-In, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In'', ''Saturday Night Live'', ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'', Jim Henson, ''Max Headroom (character), Max Headroom'', Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, ''Captain Kangaroo'', ''Sesame Street'', ''The Electric Company'', ''Pee-wee's Playhouse'', ''The Muppet Show'', Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, ''You Can't Do That on Television'', ''Mystery Science Theater 3000, MST3K'', Uncle Floyd, among others. Chase even thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for ''Saturday Night Live''. While Kovacs and his wife Edie Adams received Emmy nominations for best performances in a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nairobi Trio Masks
Nairobi ( ) is the capital and largest city of Kenya. The name is derived from the Maasai phrase ''Enkare Nairobi'', which translates to "place of cool waters", a reference to the Nairobi River which flows through the city. The city proper had a population of 4,397,073 in the 2019 census, while the metropolitan area has a projected population in 2022 of 10.8 million. The city is commonly referred to as the Green City in the Sun. Nairobi was founded in 1899 by colonial authorities in British East Africa, as a rail depot on the Uganda - Kenya Railway.Roger S. Greenway, Timothy M. Monsma, ''Cities: missions' new frontier'', (Baker Book House: 1989), p.163. The town quickly grew to replace Mombasa as the capital of Kenya in 1907. After independence in 1963, Nairobi became the capital of the Republic of Kenya. During Kenya's colonial period, the city became a centre for the colony's coffee, tea and sisal industry. The city lies in the south central part of Kenya, at an elevation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moog Synthesizer
The Moog synthesizer is a modular synthesizer developed by the American engineer Robert Moog. Moog debuted it in 1964, and Moog's company R. A. Moog Co. (later known as Moog Music) produced numerous models from 1965 to 1981, and again from 2014. It was the first commercial synthesizer, and is credited with creating the analog synthesizer as it is known today. The Moog synthesizer consists of separate modules which create and shape sounds, which are connected via patch cords. Modules include voltage-controlled oscillators, amplifiers, filters, envelope generators, noise generators, ring modulators, triggers, and mixers. The synthesizer can be played using controllers including keyboards, joysticks, pedals, and ribbon controllers, or controlled with sequencers. Its oscillators can produce waveforms of different timbres, which can be modulated and filtered to shape their sounds (subtractive synthesis). By 1963, Robert Moog had been designing and selling theremins for several ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hot Butter
Hot Butter were an American instrumental band fronted by the keyboard player and studio musician Stan Free. The other band members were John Abbott, Bill Jerome, Steve Jerome, and Danny Jordan and Dave Mullaney. They were best known for their 1972 version of the Moog synthesizer instrumental hit "Popcorn", originally recorded by its composer, Gershon Kingsley, in 1969. The track became an international hit, selling a million copies in France, 250,000 in the United Kingdom, and over two million globally. History The group released two albums, ''Hot Butter'' (Musicor MS-3242; 1972) and ''More Hot Butter'' (Musicor MS-3254; 1973), primarily of covers, on LP issued by Hallmark Records. The two albums were compiled on CD as ''Popcorn'' on the Castle Music label in 2000 (with an album cover from the 1974 Australian release of ''More Hot Butter'' titled ''Moog Hits'', depicting the five other band members immersed in melted butter produced by Free's synthesizer), though several ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cover Band
A cover band (or covers band) is a band that plays songs recorded by someone else, sometimes mimicking the original as accurately as possible, and sometimes re-interpreting or changing the original. These remade songs are known as cover songs. New or unknown bands often find the format marketable for smaller venues, such as pubs, clubs or parks. The bands also perform at private events, for example, weddings and birthday parties, and may be known as a wedding band, party band, function band or band-for-hire. A band whose covers consist mainly of songs that were chart hits is often called a top 40 band. Some bands, however, start as cover bands, then grow to perform original material. For example, The Rolling Stones released three albums consisting primarily of covers and then recorded one with their own original material. Cover bands play several types of venues. When a band is starting out, they might play private parties and fundraisers, often for little or no money, or in retu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Instrumental
An instrumental is a recording normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to instrumentals. The music is primarily or exclusively produced using musical instruments. An instrumental can exist in music notation, after it is written by a composer; in the mind of the composer (especially in cases where the composer themselves will perform the piece, as in the case of a blues solo guitarist or a folk music fiddle player); as a piece that is performed live by a single instrumentalist or a musical ensemble, which could range in components from a duo or trio to a large big band, concert band or orchestra. In a song that is otherwise sung, a section that is not sung but which is played by instruments can be called an instrumental interlude, or, if it occurs at the beginning of the song, before the singer starts to sing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coconut (song)
"Coconut" is a novelty song written and first recorded by American singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, released as the third single from his 1971 album, ''Nilsson Schmilsson''. It was on the U.S. ''Billboard charts, Billboard'' charts for 14 weeks, reaching #8, and was ranked by ''Billboard'' as the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1972, #66 song for 1972. It charted minorly in the UK, reaching #42. "Coconut" did best in Canada, where it peaked at #5. In 1998, a cover version was released by Australian singer Dannii Minogue as a single, peaking at #62 on the ARIA Charts, ARIA singles chart. Lyrics The lyrics feature Nilsson singing three characters (a Narration, narrator, a woman and a doctor), each in a different voice.Alyn Shipton (2013). Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter. Oxford University Press. 9780199330690 The woman drinks a mixture of lime juice and coconut water, becomes sick, and calls the doctor. The doctor, annoyed at being woken up, tells her to hair o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harry Nilsson
Harry Edward Nilsson III (June 15, 1941 – January 15, 1994), sometimes credited as Nilsson, was an American singer-songwriter who reached the peak of his commercial success in the early 1970s. His work is characterized by pioneering vocal overdub experiments, returns to the Great American Songbook The Great American Songbook is the loosely defined canon of significant early-20th-century American jazz standards, popular songs, and show tunes. Definition According to the Great American Songbook Foundation: The "Great American Songbook" i ..., and fusions of Caribbean music, Caribbean sounds. A tenor with a octave range, Nilsson was one of the few major pop-rock recording artists to achieve significant commercial success without ever performing major public concerts or undertaking regular tours. Born in Brooklyn, Nilsson moved to Los Angeles as a teenager to escape his family's poor financial situation. While working as a computer programmer at a bank, he grew interested ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. But jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisationa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island country by area, covering . New Zealand is about east of Australia across the Tasman Sea and south of the islands of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga. The country's varied topography and sharp mountain peaks, including the Southern Alps, owe much to tectonic uplift and volcanic eruptions. New Zealand's capital city is Wellington, and its most populous city is Auckland. The islands of New Zealand were the last large habitable land to be settled by humans. Between about 1280 and 1350, Polynesians began to settle in the islands and then developed a distinctive Māori culture. In 1642, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to sight and record New Zealand. In 1840, representatives of the United Kingdom and Māori chiefs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Videotape
Videotape is magnetic tape used for storing video and usually sound in addition. Information stored can be in the form of either an analog or digital signal. Videotape is used in both video tape recorders (VTRs) and, more commonly, videocassette recorders (VCRs) and camcorders. Videotapes have also been used for storing scientific or medical data, such as the data produced by an electrocardiogram. Because video signals have a very high bandwidth, and stationary heads would require extremely high tape speeds, in most cases, a helical-scan video head rotates against the moving tape to record the data in two dimensions. Tape is a linear method of storing information and thus imposes delays to access a portion of the tape that is not already against the heads. The early 2000s saw the introduction and rise to prominence of high-quality random-access video recording media such as hard disks and flash memory. Since then, videotape has been increasingly relegated to archival and si ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Riff
A riff is a repeated chord progression or refrain in music (also known as an ostinato figure in classical music); it is a pattern, or melody, often played by the rhythm section instruments or solo instrument, that forms the basis or accompaniment of a musical composition. Though riffs are most often found in rock music, heavy metal music, Latin, funk, and jazz, classical music is also sometimes based on a riff, such as Ravel's Boléro. Riffs can be as simple as a tenor saxophone honking a simple, catchy rhythmic figure, or as complex as the riff-based variations in the head arrangements played by the Count Basie Orchestra. David Brackett (1999) defines riffs as "short melodic phrases", while Richard Middleton (1999) defines them as "short rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic figures repeated to form a structural framework". Rikky Rooksby states: "A riff is a short, repeated, memorable musical phrase, often pitched low on the guitar, which focuses much of the energy and excitement ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
