(Tenor saxophone, 1909–73) Ben Webster served an initial apprenticeship in ‘territory’ bands in the Southwest (including those led by Benny Moten and Andy Kirk) before moving to New York in 1934. He recorded with Billie Holiday and worked with a succession of notable bandleaders before joining Duke Ellington in 1940. He was a key member of Ellington’s legendary band of ...
Jazz and R&B star George Benson (b. 1943) seemed destined for a respected but low-key career in cool jazz until he adopted a funky hybrid of jazz and soul for the 1976 album Breezin’. Driven by accessible instrumentals and a smash reworking of Leon Russell’s ‘This Masquerade’, the album made Benson the biggest star to cross over from jazz to pop ...
(Ba-na-dat’-to Mär-chel’-lo) 1686–1739 Italian composer and satirist Marcello was a Venetian nobleman and younger brother of the composer Alessandro Marcello (1669–1750). Benedetto trained as a lawyer and held various public positions in Venice, including those of chamberlain and governor. He was not dependent upon music for a living and consequently styled himself dilettante. His compositions included concertos, sonatas, sinfonias ...
(Ga-ôrg Ben’-da) 1722–95 Bohemian composer Born at Staré Benátky in Bohemia into a family of musicians (his brother Franz was a violinist and composer at Frederick the Great’s court in Berlin), Benda went to Germany as a young man and spent most of his working career as Kapellmeister at Gotha; he retired in 1778. He is remembered chiefly for his German operas ...
(E’-zak Al-ba’-neth) 1860–1909 Spanish pianist and composer Albéniz led the revival of a Spanish national musical style at the turn of the twentieth century. He studied composition with Felipe Pedrell (1841–1922), famous for his pioneering collections of Spanish folk and classical music that also inspired Albéniz’s contemporary Enrique Granados and, a little later, Manuel de Falla (1876–1946). Aged 20, ...
1816–75 English composer Bennett was a leading figure of the ‘London Piano School’, a significant group of pianist-composers that included Muzio Clementi (1752–1832), Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870) and Johann Baptist Cramer (1771–1858). A boy chorister at King’s College, Cambridge, he began studies aged 10 at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM), where his teachers included Cipriani Potter. Close friends included ...
(Drums, 1903–71) A member of the Chicago-based New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Pollack formed his own band in 1926 and by 1928 was employing such promising young players as Benny Goodman, Jimmy McPartland, Jack Teagarden and Glenn Miller. When Pollack’s orchestra disbanded in 1934, its membership became the core group for Bob Crosby’s orchestra. Pollack became the ...
Benny Goodman was the first of the great bandleader virtuosos of the 1930s to achieve global success. Through a combination of personal connections, nerve, enormous talent and sheer luck, he parlayed a sequence of opportunities in 1934–35 into a payoff that changed American music. After forming his first band in New York in 1934, he won a ...
(Alto saxophone, arranger, trumpet, vocals, 1907–2003) One of the great arrangers and soloists in jazz history, Bennett Lester Carter wrote some of the first big-band music to fully realize the flowing, legato ensemble of the coming swing movement. His saxophone ensembles were smooth projections of his solo style. ‘Lonesome Nights’ and ‘Symphony In Riffs’ were ...
(Guitar, vocals, b. 1951) Robben Ford was born into a musical family on the coast of northern California. His father, Charles, was a guitarist who encouraged Robben to teach himself the instrument at the age of 13. Ford has two musical brothers, drummer Pat and harmonica player Mark. Influenced by Mike Bloomfield, Robben and Pat ...
(Piano, organ, 1939–99) This Texas native was active on the southern Louisiana swamp-blues scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s, recording for various regional labels. She spent the 1970s and early 1980s playing her unique brand of boogie-woogie piano around Louisiana – including at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival – before being ‘discovered’ by Alligator ...
(Guitar, vocals, songwriter, b. 1975) Arizona-born and raised, Bentley moved to Nashville in 1994, playing the clubs as an intimate singer-songwriter. In 2001, he released the self-financed Don’t Leave Me In Love, backed by friends from the Jamie Hartford Band and bluegrass legend Del McCoury’s band. In 2003, a major label deal resulted ...
(Vocals, b. 1970) Bente Boe from Tonsberg, Norway, made her national radio debut aged only nine, and has been singing for her entire adult life. Voted European Female Singer of the Year in 1996, she made her first album in the US, Cross The River, in 1998, following three previous albums in Norway. ...
1722–95, Czech Georg Benda was a Czech composer who produced several stage dramas for the ducal court at Gotha, where he was Kapellmeister. His first – and only – Italian opera was Xindo riconosciuto (‘Xindo Remembered’, 1765). Subsequent works were distinctly innovative. In this phase of his career, Benda turned first to German ‘duodramas’, also known as ‘melodramas’. ...
c. 1745–1824, Italian Francesco Benucci, an Italian bass, created the role of Figaro in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro in 1786. Benucci spent the first 13 years of his career as an opera singer (1769–82) in Italy, before joining the renowned Italian company in Vienna. Benucci remained in Vienna until 1795, with a short break in ...
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David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
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