(Piano, 1919–78) Lennie Tristano began his career as a performer in promising style in his native Chicago, but later focused much of his time and creative energy on teaching his own musical ideas. He was born weak-sighted and was blind from the age of 10. He gathered a group of important acolytes around him during the late 1940s in ...
(Piano, b. 1929) Since the late 1950s, pianist Cecil Taylor has maintained a prime position in the pantheon of free jazz. He was one of the first jazzmen to jettison standard chord changes, fixed rhythms and expected ensemble roles in the interest of musical democracy. Taylor developed his unorthodox style while studying at New England Conservatory. Duke Ellington ...
American guitarist Joe Satriani is widely credited with pioneering the rock-instrumental style in the 1980s, opening up the genre for guitarists like Steve Vai, Eric Johnson and Yngwie Malmsteen. His talent for creating highly evolved music, using a pop-song structure with tuneful melodies before applying his own virtuoso skills, has made him one of the most successful ...
(Harmonica, vocals, 1911–86) Saunders Terrell was born in Greensboro, Georgia and taught himself to play the harmonica at the age of eight. He lost the sight in one eye, aged 10, and the second eye at 16. Terry played mostly in North Carolina from the late 1920s. He teamed up with Blind Boy Fuller in 1934 ...
In the wake of the pyrotechnic manifesto that Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker and Dizzy Gillespie jointly issued on their first recording together in 1945, most musicians on the New York jazz scene began fanning the flames of bebop. Tempos picked up speed, intensity increased on the bandstand and blazing virtuosity became a means to an end, in a fiery ...
Free jazz is seen by many as an avant-garde art form rather than a type of jazz, with its unpredictable rhythm and chord progressions. Evolving out of bebop in the 1940s and 1950s the exponents of free jazz abandoned traditional forms to expand the music’s creative possibilities, challenging mainstream listeners and players alike. The first documented free jazz recordings ...
The 1950s was a big decade for blues and jazz – arguably, the biggest. In the wake of international triumph and the stirrings of empire, the US enjoyed a boom of babies, cars, television, and urban and suburban development, that trickled down to embolden a stronger movement for civil rights for black people, inspired ...
The cultural momentum of the 1950s spilled directly into the 1960s – arguably, the change of the decade (and century) in jazz was 1959, when Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Gil Evans, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, Jackie McLean, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Wes Montgomery, Sun ...
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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.