(Piano, vocals, b. 1949) One of the leading exponents of the Professor Longhair school of piano playing, East Texas-born ‘Long Tall’ Marcia Ball was also greatly influenced by R&B divas Irma Thomas and Etta James, and zydeco king Clifton Chenier. Her infectious blend of modern Texas roadhouse blues, boogie-woogie and Louisiana swamp rock is best exemplified ...
(Alto saxophone, 1928–75) Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley and his brother, trumpeter Nat, presided over one of the 1960s’ hippest hard-bop outfits with pianist Joe Zawinul; ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’ was one of their crossover hits. Adderley had been employed as a Florida school band director when he was overheard at a New York gig and was encouraged by ...
‘A Masked Ball’ In 1857, Verdi was virtually asking for censorship trouble when he chose Gustavuse III, ou Le bal masqué (‘Gustavus III, or The Masked Ball’) for his next work. In 1792 King Gustavusus III of Sweden had been shot dead at a masked ball in Stockholm. Regicide was a taboo subject and the Neapolitan censors immediately ...
b. 1933, Spanish This soprano’s melting pianissimo has earned her a faithful following, but she is also one of the few operatic singers to have had a hit pop record – Freddie Mercury, of rock band Queen, wrote ‘Exercises in Free Love’ for her, which was featured on the award-winning album Barcelona. Caballé’s training began at ...
b. 1933 Spanish soprano Caballé studied at the Barcelona Liceo, and joined the Basle Opera in 1956, where she sang the Italian and German repertory. She appeared at La Scala and in Vienna, before consolidating her reputation in several operas by Donizetti. She made her Glyndebourne and Metropolitan Opera debuts in 1965, and her Covent Garden debut ...
(Bandleader, vocals, 1936–2003) Alabama-raised Henry ‘Hank’ Ballard fronted The Midnighters (previously The Royals). 1954 brought the Detroit group four big US R&B hits with risqué lyrics about a fictitious ‘Annie’. In 1960, the group released the original version of ‘The Twist’, written by Ballard, but the younger, more photogenic Chubby Checker took the million sales and ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1979–90, 2009) Tony Hadley (vocals), Gary Kemp (guitar), Steve Norman (saxophone), Martin Kemp (bass) and John Keeble (drums) enjoyed success with their amalgam of late 1960s orchestral pop and 1980s technology. Firmly at the forefront of new romantics, their hits included ‘Chant No 1 (Don’t Need This Pressure On)’, ‘Gold’ and ‘True’. The latter was a ...
(Tenor saxophone, flute, 1940–92) A passionate voice on tenor sax in Charles Mingus’s last band (1973–76), Adams co-led one of the most dynamic quartets of the 1980s with pianist Don Pullen; it also featured Mingus drummer Dannie Richmond and bassist Cameron Brown. In a series of 12 recordings through the 1980s for the Soul Note and Timeless labels, ...
A rollicking, fast piano style characterized by repetitive eighth-note bass figures in the left hand, meshed with sharp, bluesy single-note runs in the right hand, boogie-woogie was an infectious form that had an immediate appeal to dancers. While the left hand remained tied to the task of covering driving bass lines in a kind of ‘automatic pilot’ ...
Whistles, or duct flutes, have a device to channel the player’s breath, so a narrow air stream hits a sharpened edge, causing the necessary turbulence to vibrate the air column without the player using any special embouchure. Usually this duct is created by inserting a block, known as a fipple, into the end of the ...
Reggae is unique. No other style has made so much out of its original musical resources to present itself in so many different guises with only a couple of structural changes in over 40 years. No other style has so accurately reflected the people that create and consume it. Jamaican music’s relationship with its people is such that it is not ...
‘The Bat’ Composed: 1874 Premiered: 1874, Vienna Libretto by Carl Haffner and Richard Genée after Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy’s Le réveillon Prologue Falke wants revenge for a practical joke when Eisenstein left him sleeping, dressed as a bat, outside the Vienna law courts. Act I Eisenstein’s wife, Rosalinde, recognizes the voice serenading her as her ...
Composed in 1787 and triumphantly premiered in Prague on 29 October that year, Don Giovanni reworks the old legend of the serial seducer, drawing on the Spanish play by Tirso de Molina (1630) and Molière’s Don Juan (1665). The opera revolves around the tensions of class and sex that were so central to Figaro. Ensembles and propulsive ‘chain’ finales ...
Eugene Onegin was written after the disaster of Tchaikovsky’s marriage in 1877, and was also influenced by his platonic relationship with his admirer and patron Nadezhda von Meck. Tchaikovsky began Eugene Onegin by writing the famous ‘letter scene’ from Act I, in which the heroine Tat’yana spends the night writing to Onegin, telling him of her love for ...
Rossini’s two-act version of the Cinderella story, his twentieth opera and last Italian comic opera, received its first performance at the Teatro Valle in Rome on 25 January 1817. This was followed by performances in London (1820), Vienna (1822) and New York (1826). The Teatro Valle, which had commissioned Rossini to write the opera for the carnival in ...
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David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
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