(Piano, vocals, 1922–99) Charles Mose Brown was born in Texas City, Texas and had extensive classical piano training as a youth. He moved to Los Angeles in 1943 and by September 1944 had become the vocalist-pianist in Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers. The Blazers had several hits before Brown went solo in 1948 and scored success with songs such ...
1709–70 English composer Avison was a teacher, writer, concert promoter and organist of St Nicholas’s Church, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, from 1735. As well as composing several sets of his own concertos, published over a period of some 30 years, he arranged 12 of Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord sonatas as concerti grossi (1744), orchestrating them skilfully. Along with almost ...
1726–1814 English music theorist and writer Burney was undoubtedly the most important English writer on music of his time. The theorist was born in Shrewsbury and brought up in Chester. There he met Arne, to whom he was apprenticed. Later he took posts as organist and worked in the London theatres. In the 1770s he made two long journeys through ...
1745–1814 English composer Dibdin began his career as a chorus singer at the Covent Garden Theatre, London. He composed many English operas and other dramatic pieces, spending most of his life around the London theatres and pleasure gardens (with journeys to France to elude his creditors and other enemies). His chief success came with his one-man ‘Table Entertainments’, songs ...
(Shärl On-re’ Va-lon-tan’ Al-kan’) 1813–88 French pianist and composer One of the only virtuosos before whom Liszt, a contemporary, was believed to be anxious about playing, Alkan extended the technical challenges of piano repertory to astonishing new peaks. A child prodigy and young virtuoso, he performed alongside Frédéric François Chopin (1810–49), but thereafter became an eccentric recluse, ...
(Sharl Goo-no) 1818–93 French composer Gounod is best known as the composer of one of the most popular French lyric operas, Faust. His teachers at the Paris Conservatoire were the opera composers Jacques-François-Fromental Halévy (1799–1862) and Jean François Le Sueur (1760–1837) and in 1839 he won the coveted Prix de Rome. Alongside much sacred music, such as the florid ...
1848–1918 English composer Parry’s precocious musical talents earned him an Oxford music degree while still a schoolboy at Eton. From 1867 he studied with Sterndale Bennett and Macfarren at Oxford, where he became Professor of Music (1900–08); he then succeeded Sir George Grove as director of the Royal College of Music. Although he produced four symphonies and chamber music, ...
1852–1924 British composer Born in Dublin where he studied the organ, Stanford moved to London at the age of 10 to study the piano with Ernst Pauer. At Cambridge he was organist of Trinity College (1873–92) and founder-conductor of the Cambridge University Musical Society, where he gave the premieres of many of Brahms’ works. He also studied in Leipzig ...
(Guitar, vocals, 1900–52) An associate of Charley Patton, Brown was a part of the Mississippi blues scene in the early 1920s. While he started out playing with Patton and Tommy Johnson, he teamed up with Son House in 1926 and accompanied his Paramount session in May 1930, also cutting four songs of his own. Brown played ...
(Vocals, 1925–81) Roy James Brown was born in New Orleans and raised in Texas and Louisiana. A strong blues shouter, Brown was one of the first stars of New Orleans R&B. He led his own group, Roy Brown & his Mighty, Mighty Men, and wrote most of the material he recorded. He began recording for DeLuxe ...
(Guitar, vocals, 1915–96) Walter Brown McGhee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. He learned to play guitar before his tenth birthday and dropped out of school to play throughout the state in the late 1920s. He met Sonny Terry in 1939 and they joined forces almost immediately. McGhee began recording for OKeh in 1940 and moved to New York. ...
Ray Charles Robinson was born on 23 September 1930 in Albany, Georgia. Blind by the age of seven, he was educated at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine, where he studied piano and learned to read music in braille. A Musical Education Shortly after his fifteenth birthday, he was expelled and left ...
(Guitar, violin, vocals, 1924–2005) Clarence Brown Jr. was born in Vinton, Louisiana and raised in Orange, Texas. By the age of 10 he had learned guitar and violin. After the Second World War he settled in the Houston, Texas area. He made his recording debut in 1947 for Aladdin and signed with Peacock Records in ...
(Trumpet, 1930–56) The tragic death of Clifford Brown in a road accident robbed jazz of one of its brightest young stars, but even his truncated legacy has established his standing as a major figure and profound influence. He took up the trumpet at the age of 13, drawing on the influence of bebop stars Dizzy Gillespie and Fats ...
(Vocals, b. 1929) Napoleon Brown Goodson Culp was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. He sang with a gospel group, the Heavenly Lights, which recorded for Savoy, but was convinced to try blues material in 1954 and had several hits, including ‘Don’t Be Angry’. He returned to singing gospel in the 1960s but was rediscovered in ...
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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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David Bowie
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