AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Fifties
• Jazz & Blues

(Drums, 1919–90) Art Blakey (also later known as Buhaina or simply Bu after he converted to Islam) led the quintessential hard bop group the Jazz Messengers across four decades from the late 1940s, and was a fervent advocate of the music he loved. He formed his first band in his native Pittsburgh, but moved to New York and ...

• Personalities
• Jazz & Blues
• Seventies

With its tribal masks, arcane percussion instruments and grand sense of theatre, the Art Ensemble of Chicago always seemed to be more than just a jazz band. Indeed, the group grew from the communal activities of the Chicago-based AACM, which quickly became a magnet and laboratory for freedom-seeking African-American musicians in the city, including saxophonists Roscoe ...

• Personalities
• Jazz & Blues
• Sixties

(Trumpet, flugelhorn, 1928–99) Art Farmer was largely responsible for popularizing the mellow-toned flugelhorn as a solo jazz instrument. A wonderfully lyrical player, he came up in Los Angeles’ Central Avenue jazz clubs in the 1940s and worked with Lionel Hampton, Horace Silver, Gerry Mulligan and alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce. In 1959–62 he and tenor saxophonist Benny ...

• Personalities
• Fifties
• Jazz & Blues

(Alto and tenor saxophones, 1925–82) Art Pepper was a soloist with Stan Kenton (1947–52) and took part in trumpeter Shorty Rogers’s first so-called West Coast jazz recordings in 1951. He made a series of classic records for the California-based Contemporary label (1957–60), but was imprisoned at various times for heroin-related offences, culminating in three years’ voluntary rehabilitation in Synanon ...

• Personalities
• Country
• Cowboys & Playboys

(A&R man, 1889–1986) Arthur Satherley was a pioneering A&R man for several important record companies from the 1920s, responsible for scouting and recording a vast array of country and blues performers. Among these were two important figures whose careers the British-born Satherley helped particularly to shape and steer – Bob Wills and Gene Autry. A legend himself by the ...

• Personalities
• Jazz & Blues
• Thirties

(Piano, 1909–56) In the arms race of virtuosity that drove jazz in the 1930s, no player was more dazzling than Art Tatum. The piano had a history of virtuosos, but none approached the levels of sheer athletic aptitude that Tatum tossed off with such nonchalance. It came so naturally that he often seemed bored by his own wizardry ...

• Inside the Music
• Alt. Country & The Bluegrass Revival
• Country

The most influential country act of 2001 was a band that didn’t even exist. The Soggy Bottom Boys were the prime attraction on O Brother, Where Art Thou ? the soundtrack album that topped the country and pop charts and sold more than four million copies. The group revived the late 1930s and early 1940s sound when old-time string-band music ...

• Women in Music
• Classical
• Renaissance

During the Renaissance, European noblewomen were taught to sing and play particular instruments deemed suitable for them, such as the harp, lute and keyboard. Improvising songs with accompaniment was an important aspect of such music-making but, as in other improvising traditions, few women of this class ever wrote down the music they created, so it ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

Contemporary music whose ancestry lies in the Western classical tradition finds itself in a curious position. Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that we are not entirely sure what to call it. The label ‘classical’ seems anachronistic, especially when applied to composers who have challenged some of the fundamental assumptions of the classical tradition. ‘Concert music’ is similarly problematic ...

• Opera
• High Romantic

In 1891, when the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) wrote his famous words ‘Life imitates art far more than art imitates life’, he had somehow managed to overlook the artistic realities of the late nineteenth century. By that time, after some 50 years of the High Romantic era, music and opera had brought real life on stage and ...

• Classical
• Late Romantic

The political structure of Europe changed greatly during the second half of the nineteenth century. Germany and Italy became united countries under supreme rulers. The Habsburgs’ Austrian Empire, ruled from Vienna, became fragmented into Austria-Hungary. The borders of this new confederation contained the cauldron of difficulties that eventually developed into the confrontations which culminated in World War I in ...

• Classical
• Medieval Era

‘Medieval’ as a concept is very hard to define, and the period itself is just as difficult to delineate. It was a term invented by Renaissance writers who wished to make a distinction between their modernity and what had gone before. Although the onset of the Renaissance is often taken to be around the beginning of the fourteenth century, ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

There is no escaping the crucial importance of World War I (1914–18) in the formation of the Modern Age (as the first half of the twentieth century has come to be known). The war changed irrevocably the development and directions of almost all pre-war innovations in politics, society, the arts and ideas in general. Declining economic conditions also altered ...

• Opera
• Modern Era

Although the art of the classical singer has traditionally been perceived as the pursuit of technical perfection and tonal beauty, the twentieth century enabled a re-evaluation of what that art should be. Due in part to the technological advances and harrowing events of the times, much of the music was innovative, challenging, moving, powerful and, ...

• Opera
• Roots of Opera

Opera, with its unique blend of poetry, drama and music, has come a long way from its humble beginnings in ancient Greek theatre. The grandiose, all-encompassing music dramas of Verdi and Wagner may seem a world away from the era of Aristotle and Plato, but this noble civilization, which held music and theatre in high ...