Of all the guitar players of the last 40 years, none produce music as confounding yet beautiful as Allan Holdsworth (b. 1946). His blinding speed, fluid legato, impossible intervallic leaps, perplexing chord voicings and unpredictable melodies have made his style one of the most mystifying to guitarists everywhere. Allan Holdsworth was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1939) Coe broke through first as a songwriter, penning tunes for Tanya Tucker (1973’s No. 1 ‘Would You Lay Me Down (In A Field Of Stone)’, Willie Nelson and George Jones. Coe scored his own hit with 1975’s ‘You Never Even Called Me By My Name’, followed by five more Top 25 hits, including ...
Johnny Hiland (b. 1975) is one of the top guitarists to emerge from the Nashville music scene in recent years. His playing combines country chicken pickin’ with elements of blues, metal and jazz. Often compared to Danny Gatton, Hiland displays an amazing vocabulary as he plays seemingly effortlessly onstage. His skill is also noteworthy because he is legally blind ...
‘Fusion’ can be applied to any music that blends two or more different styles, though it is normally used to describe the electronic jazz rock movement that emerged in the late 1960s. Some of the musicians expanded the boundaries of both jazz and rock, while others focused on producing sophisticated, but shallow, ‘background’ music. Although fusion records ...
Rock, jazz, soul; each of these genres, while containing a multiplicity of various offshoots, is defined by some kind of unifying theme. But this miscellaneous section, as any record collector will know, is where everything else ends up. Most of the styles within this ‘genre’ have little in common save the fact that they do ...
(Vocal group, 1973–84) This hard-driving Canadian rock band were assembled by former Guess Who members Randy Bachman (guitar, vocals) and Chad Allen (keyboards) with Robbie Bachman (drums) and Fred Turner (bass). Third brother Tim Bachman soon replaced Allan and the band’s commercial breakthrough came with Bachman-Turner Overdrive II (1974) and the US hit ‘Takin’ Care Of Business’. In Britain ...
(Vocals, fiddle, b. 1939) During the 1960s’ folk movement in the UK, Brian Golbey and banjo player Pete Stanley became leading international exponents of traditional music. Visiting the USA in 1970, Golbey was invited to appear on Nashville’s Midnight Jamboree by host Ernest Tubb (who strongly encouraged young, aspiring talents) as well as on WWVA’s famed ...
1862–1918, French Debussy wrote only one opera that has entered the repertoire, but there were many other compositions without which this masterpiece among masterpieces may never have come into being. His lover, the singer Marie-Blanche Vasnier, some years his elder, had deepened his understanding of literature in his early twenties, and his interest in poetry ...
Despite a life cut tragically short by violence, Darrell Lance Abbott (1966–2004), known as ‘Dimebag Darrell,’ achieved stardom not only as a founding member of the bands Pantera and Damageplan, but also in death as an icon who succumbed onstage and carried his passions to the grave. Darrell Abbott took up guitar when he was 12. He was ...
b. 1960, British George Benjamin is known as a composer who takes his time. His teachers included Olivier Messiaen, who compared his student with Mozart, but Benjamin has always taken time over his work, often taking a number of years to complete works of a few minutes. His first full-scale opera, Written on Skin, became ...
(Vocals, guitar, 1938–2003) Johnny Paycheck was, like David Allan Coe, an Outlaw in fact as well as by musical reputation. The former Donald Eugene Lytle was court-martialled from the US Navy in 1956 and served two years in an Ohio prison after shooting a man in a 1985 bar fight. In between he recorded rockabilly as Donnie ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1942) Clayton, a former fighter pilot from Tennessee, was one of the most original songwriters in the Outlaws movement, penning ‘Ladies Love Outlaws’ for Waylon Jennings, ‘If You Could Touch Her At All’ for Willie Nelson and ‘Lone Wolf’ for Jerry Jeff Walker. Clayton’s own albums, marked by vivid if unconventional ...
In the Bakersfield family tree, the likes of Bill Woods and Wynn Stewart set the stage, Buck Owens put the town on the map, and Merle Haggard was the heir apparent. ‘The Hag’, as he is often known, also had the distinction of actually being born in Bakersfield, on 6 April 1937. His parents, James ...
(Vocals, b. 1958) Teenage prodigy Tanya Tucker amazed everyone when, at the age of only 13, she charted with ‘Delta Dawn’, and she reached No. 1 three times in less than a year throughout 1973–74. The last of these chart-toppers was David Allan Coe’s adult song, ‘Would You Lay With Me (In A Field Of Stone)’. Voted ...
May Stuart Sutcliffe Joins Although the bookings had dried up again at the beginning of 1960, John Lennon’s art school friend Stuart Sutcliffe was persuaded to join the band on bass. Having sold a painting for £65 he was able to buy a big, stylish Hofner bass that he couldn’t actually play. But no matter; it looked good and ...
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An extensive music information resource, bringing together the talents and expertise of a wide range of editors and musicologists, including Stanley Sadie, Charles Wilson, Paul Du Noyer, Tony Byworth, Bob Allen, Howard Mandel, Cliff Douse, William Schafer, John Wilson...
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Classical, Rock, Blues, Jazz, Country and more. Flame Tree has been making encyclopaedias and guides about music for over 20 years. Now Flame Tree Pro brings together a huge canon of carefully curated information on genres, styles, artists and instruments. It's a perfect tool for study, and entertaining too, a great companion to our music books.
David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
his life, music, art and movies, with a
sweep of incredible photographs.