The Spatial AKA Orchestra
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The Spatial AKA Orchestra
The Spatial AKA Orchestra is a music ensemble led by Jerry Dammers of The Specials, an English 2 Tone ska band popular in the late 1970s (which also went by the name the Special AKA). Dammers formed the orchestra in 2006 as a tribute to American jazz musician Sun Ra, though it grew to include other genres such as reggae, funk, and classical music. The shows are as much about theater as music. At a festival in Norwich, England, Dammers donned a golden mask behind a row of keyboards on a stage cluttered with Egyptian mannequins, astronauts, and spaceships. The rest of the band emerged disguised as aliens and superheroes. Over 20 band members populated the stage during the night including Denys Baptiste, Larry Bartley, Roger Beaujolais, and Finn Peters. A similar show took place at the Barbican in London. The band played cover versions of Sun Ra's songs before covering the Specials, other work by Dammer, and ska music. Performers included poet Anthony Joseph, former Specials vocalis ...
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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 ...
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Shabaka Hutchings
Shabaka Hutchings is a British jazz musician, composer and bandleader. He leads the bands Sons of Kemet and Shabaka and the Ancestors. He is also a member of The Comet Is Coming, performing under the stage name King Shabaka. Hutchings has played saxophone with the Sun Ra Arkestra, Floating Points, Mulatu Astatke, Polar Bear, Melt Yourself Down, Heliocentrics and Zed-U. Background Hutchings was born in London, but moved to Birmingham at the age of two. From the age of six he was raised in his parents' native Barbados. There, as a nine-year-old, he picked up the clarinet and practised along to the hip hop verses of Nas, Notorious BIG and Tupac, as well as the rhythms of Crop Over. He returned to England to receive a classical-music degree on the instrument. In London he joined the Tomorrow's Warriors programme, a blues workshop led by British bassist Gary Crosby, Janine Irons and expat New Orleans trumpeter Abram Wilson, where Hutchings met many of his future coll ...
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Crispin Spry Robinson
Saints Crispin and Crispinian are the Christian patron saints of cobblers, curriers, tanners, and leather workers. They were beheaded during the reign of Diocletian; the date of their execution is given as 25 October 285 or 286. History Born to a noble Roman family in the 3rd century AD, Crispin and Crispinian fled persecution for their faith, ending up at Soissons, where they preached Christianity to the Gauls while making shoes by night. It is stated that they were twin brothers. They earned enough by their trade to support themselves and also to aid the poor. Their success attracted the ire of Rictus Varus, governor of Belgic Gaul, who had them tortured and thrown into the river with millstones around their necks. Though they survived, they were beheaded by the Emperor 286. Veneration The feast day of Saints Crispin and Crispinian is 25 October. Although this feast was removed from the Roman Catholic Church's universal liturgical calendar following the Second Vatican Counc ...
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Rico Rodriguez (musician)
Emmanuel "Rico" Rodriguez (17 October 1934 – 4 September 2015), also known as Rico, Reco or El Reco, was a Cuban-born Jamaican ska and reggae trombonist. He recorded with producers such as Karl Pitterson, Prince Buster, and Lloyd Daley. He was known as one of the first ska musicians. Beginning in the 1960s, he worked with The Members, The Specials, Jools Holland, and Paul Young. Career Rodriguez was born in Havana, Cuba, and at an early age moved with his family to Jamaica.Campbell, Howard (2012)Rico Rodriguez: Man From Wareika, '' Jamaica Observer'', 22 June 2012; retrieved 24 June 2012. He grew up there in Kingston, and was taught to play the trombone by his slightly older schoolmate Don Drummond at the Alpha Boys School. In the 1950s, Rodriguez became a Rastafarian and was closely associated musically to the rasta drummer Count Ossie. In 1961 Rodriguez moved to the UK, where he joined live bands such as Georgie Fame's Blue Flames
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Cornell Campbell
Cornel Campbell aka Don Cornel or Don Gorgon (born 23 November 1945 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a reggae singer, best known for his trademark falsetto voice, and his recordings at Studio One in the late 1960s and his later work with Bunny Lee in the 1970s. Biography Campbell has one of Jamaican music's distinctive falsettos. His first name was mistakenly spelled with two L's on a record and has been commonly misquoted since. He prefers the correct spelling: Cornel Campbell. Campbell's singing career began in his local church choir. At age eleven, in 1956, he was introduced to trombonist Rico Rodriguez, who took him to Clement Dodd's studio, where he recorded his first single, "My Treasure".Katz, David (2003) ''Solid Foundation – an Oral History of Reggae'', Bloomsbury, Further singles followed, including "Turndown Date", as Jamaican music transformed from rhythm and blues to ska, with backing from The Skatalites. He later recorded for King Edwards backed by The Bell S ...
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Anthony Joseph
Anthony Joseph (born 12 November 1966 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) is a British/Trinidadian poet, novelist, musician and academic. Biography Joseph was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, where he was raised by his grandparents. He began writing as a young child and cites his main influences as calypso, surrealism, jazz, the spiritual Baptist church that his grandparents attended, and the rhythms of Caribbean speech. Joseph has lived in the United Kingdom since 1989. In September 2004 he was chosen by Renaissance One and Arts Council England as one of 50 Black and Asian writers who have made major contributions to contemporary British literature, appearing in the "A Great Day in London" photograph and performing at the event at the British Library. In April 2005, he served as the British Council's first poet-in-residence at California State University, Los Angeles. Joseph holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has taught at L ...
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Larry Bartley
Larry is a masculine given name in English, derived from Lawrence or Laurence. It can be a shortened form of those names. Larry may refer to the following: People Arts and entertainment * Larry D. Alexander, American artist/writer *Larry Boone, American country singer * Larry Collins, American musician, member of the rockabilly sibling duo The Collins Kids *Larry David (born 1947), Emmy-winning American actor, writer, comedian, producer and film director *Larry Emdur, Australian TV host *Larry Feign, American cartoonist working in Hong Kong *Larry Fine, of the Three Stooges * Larry Gates, American actor *Larry Gatlin, American country singer *Larry Gelbart (1928–2009), American screenwriter, playwright, director and author *Larry Graham, founder of American funk band Graham Central Station *Larry Hagman, American actor, best known for the TV series ''I Dream of Jeannie'' and ''Dallas'' *Larry Henley (1937–2014), American singer and songwriter, member of The Newbeats *Larry H ...
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Norwich, England
Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. Norwich is by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. As the seat of the See of Norwich, with one of the country's largest medieval cathedrals, it is the largest settlement and has the largest urban area in East Anglia. The population of the Norwich City Council local authority area was estimated to be 144,000 in 2021, which was an increase from 143,135 in 2019. The wider built-up area had a population of 213,166 in 2019. Heritage and status Norwich claims to be the most complete medieval city in the United Kingdom. It includes cobbled streets such as Elm Hill, Timber Hill and Tombland; ancient buildings such as St Andrew's Hall; half-timbered houses such as Dragon Hall, The Guildhall and Strangers' Hall; the Art Nouveau of the 1899 Royal Arcade; many medieval lanes; and the winding River Wensum that flows through the cit ...
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Classical Music
Classical music generally refers to the art music of the Western world, considered to be distinct from Western folk music or popular music traditions. It is sometimes distinguished as Western classical music, as the term "classical music" also applies to non-Western art music. Classical music is often characterized by formality and complexity in its musical form and harmonic organization, particularly with the use of polyphony. Since at least the ninth century it has been primarily a written tradition, spawning a sophisticated notational system, as well as accompanying literature in analytical, critical, historiographical, musicological and philosophical practices. A foundational component of Western Culture, classical music is frequently seen from the perspective of individual or groups of composers, whose compositions, personalities and beliefs have fundamentally shaped its history. Rooted in the patronage of churches and royal courts in Western Europe, surviving earl ...
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Funk
Funk is a music genre that originated in African American communities in the mid-1960s when musicians created a rhythmic, danceable new form of music through a mixture of various music genres that were popular among African Americans in the mid-20th century. It de-emphasizes melody and chord progressions and focuses on a strong rhythmic groove of a bassline played by an electric bassist and a drum part played by a percussionist, often at slower tempos than other popular music. Funk typically consists of a complex percussive groove with rhythm instruments playing interlocking grooves that create a "hypnotic" and "danceable" feel. Funk uses the same richly colored extended chords found in bebop jazz, such as minor chords with added sevenths and elevenths, or dominant seventh chords with altered ninths and thirteenths. Funk originated in the mid-1960s, with James Brown's development of a signature groove that emphasized the downbeat—with a heavy emphasis on the first bea ...
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Reggae
Reggae () is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, " Do the Reggay" was the first popular song to use the word "reggae", effectively naming the genre and introducing it to a global audience. While sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to most types of popular Jamaican dance music, the term ''reggae'' more properly denotes a particular music style that was strongly influenced by traditional mento as well as American jazz and rhythm and blues, and evolved out of the earlier genres ska and rocksteady. Reggae usually relates news, social gossip, and political commentary. It is instantly recognizable from the counterpoint between the bass and drum downbeat and the offbeat rhythm section. The immediate origins of reggae were in ska and rocksteady; from the latter, reggae took over the use of the bass as a percussion instrument. Reggae is d ...
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Sun Ra
Le Sony'r Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, May 22, 1914 – May 30, 1993), better known as Sun Ra, was an American jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, and poet known for his experimental music, "cosmic" philosophy, prolific output, and theatrical performances. For much of his career, Ra led "The Arkestra", an ensemble with an ever-changing name and flexible line-up. Born and raised in Alabama, Blount became involved in the Chicago jazz scene during the late 1940s. He soon abandoned his birth name, taking the name Le Sony'r Ra, shortened to Sun Ra (after Ra, the Egyptian god of the Sun). Claiming to be an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace, he developed a mythical persona and an idiosyncratic credo that made him a pioneer of Afrofuturism. Throughout his life he denied ties to his prior identity saying, "Any name that I use other than Ra is a pseudonym." His widely eclectic and avant-garde music echoed the entire history of jazz, from ragtime and ea ...
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