(Dance/vocal group, 1990–present) After releasing the infectious ‘Charly’, Prodigy mainman Liam Howlett secured acid-house credentials with a series of singles, recruiting dancers Keith Flint and Leeroy Thornhill and singer MC Maxim to distract live audiences from his knob-twiddling. Music For The Jilted Generation (1994) displayed wide-ranging styles fused on to the frenetic beats. The Fat Of The Land (1997) ...
and UK garage all evolving from these electronic styles throughout the 1990s. Electronic music also became intertwined in the fabric of popular music as the 1990s progressed. Acts like The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers are now some of the biggest acts in the world, while the ambient soundscapes of Future Sound Of London, The Orb and Orbital have ...
a 15-year-old girl, an Illinois high-school sophomore with red curls and quick fingers who had won nearly every fiddle contest she entered. They thought they were signing a fiddle prodigy like Mark O’Connor, but when they asked her to sing a little on her first solo album, Too Late To Cry, she opened her mouth and out ...
(An’-ton Roo’-ben-stin) 1829–94 Russian pianist and composer Rubinstein’s younger brother Nikolai (1835–81) founded the Moscow Conservatory. As a child prodigy Anton played to Liszt. His legendary virtuosity was acclaimed across Europe and the US, where he toured with Wieniawski in 1872. He espoused German Romanticism and thus, as founder-director of the St Petersburg Conservatory (1862), represented the ‘conservative’ opposition to ...
, funky arrangements on hits for other Stax and Atlantic stars like Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and Otis Redding. Booker T. Jones, Stax’s sax and organ prodigy, formed The M.G.s (Memphis Group) with Steve Cropper (guitar), Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn (bass, replacing Lewis Steinberg) and Al Jackson Jr. (drums). Their first release, 1963’s ...
1835–1921, French Camille Saint-Saëns was a child prodigy as both pianist and composer. He began composing when he was six. At 10, he gave his first piano recital, and entered the Paris Conservatory aged 13. At 17, in 1852, Saint-Saëns wrote his prizewinning Ode à Sainte-Cécile (‘Ode to Saint Cecilia’) and at 18, he produced ...
output and through his pupil Fauré. His music epitomizes French qualities of formal elegance, clarity of texture and craftsmanship, all allied to techniques of Romanticism. He was a prodigy, beginning his studies aged 13 at the Paris Conservatoire. Saint-Saëns introduced Liszt’s symphonic poems to the French public and also composed the first French symphonic poems, of which ...
1786–1826, German Carl Maria von Weber was a teenage prodigy who wrote his first opera aged 14. By 1804 Weber, still only 18, was musical director in Breslau. By the time he had moved on to Stuttgart, Weber had reworked his first opera, Das Waldmädchen (‘The Forest Girl’, 1810), and gave it the new title of ...
for being compressed into structured songs. The album featured Santana’s expressive guitar on two well-known pieces, Peter Green’s ‘Black Magic Woman’ and ‘Samba Pa Ti’. The recruitment of teenage prodigy Neal Schon gave the band a harder-edged dual-guitar sound for Santana (1971), also known as Santana III to avoid confusion with the first album. Caravanserai (1972) veered into jazz-rock fusion ...
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, seldom appearing in public. His death was as enigmatic as his life ...
barriers and achieve stardom) and Don Gibson. Atkins’ collaborations with other guitar masters were also many and varied – he recorded and performed with everyone from Les Paul, jazz prodigy Lenny Breau and British rocker Mark Knopfler to fellow Nashville guitar wizard Jerry Reed, fellow country guitar legends Merle Travis and Doc Watson and The Boston Pops. In 1973 ...
Derek Trucks was born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1979. Trucks bought his first guitar at a yard sale for $5 at age nine and became a child prodigy, playing his first paid performance at age 11. Trucks began playing the guitar using a ‘slide’ bar because it allowed him to play the guitar with his small hands. By his ...
(E-les-a-bet’ Klod Zha-ka’ de la Gâr) 1665–1729 French composer and harpsichordist Jacquet de la Guerre was a child prodigy. The daughter of an organ builder, she was described by the Mercure Galant in 1678 as la merveille de notre siècle (‘the marvel of our century’). After performing for Louis XIV, she was taken to live at Versailles, where her ...
b. 1971 Russian pianist A child prodigy, he gave his first solo recital at the age of 10 and as a teenager worked with Karajan, later collaborating with Solti, Giulini, Abbado, Maazel and Ashkenazy among conductors, and with Martha Argerich, Isaac Stern and Joshua Bell in chamber music. But it is for solo performances ...
‘Rock Me Amadeus’, 1986 Perhaps Austria’s great pop export, Falco (born Johann Hölzl) was a classically trained child prodigy who later fronted a jazz rock combo. His early career mixed a lot of techno-synths with German rap, and he even had a single, ‘Jenny’, banned. ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ played on his classical background, fusing synths with classical ...
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David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
his life, music, art and movies, with a
sweep of incredible photographs.