Best New Artist and Best New Pop Vocal Performance By A Group Or Duo. Subsequent album and single releases were acclaimed hits in some circles, though time has erased Swing Out Sister from the memories of many. They now enjoy a cult fan base in the US and UK, and a continued success in Japan, where they recorded ...
Angeles on 21 August 1935, it signalled the beginning of a new national youth craze to rival the turn-of-the-century ragtime fad. Symbolically, it was the birth of the swing era, the predominance of big bands in jazz. Reaching Fever Pitch Following Goodman’s triumph at the Palomar Ballroom, the floodgates opened wide and several bands followed in his ...
Western swing is an innovative, free-wheeling yet complex instrumental amalgam drawn from blues, jazz and Dixieland syncopations and harmonies. Central to the style is an emphasis on instrumental solos, often involving the transposition of jazz-style horn parts to fiddle, guitar and steel guitar. It is indicative of western swing’s sophistication that Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys, the ...
– all of which had a profound effect on western music. This was the dawn of mass communication, which enabled musical styles to spread across the globe, and swing band music was the first type of music to achieve mass popularity in this way. The large-scale development of new wind and brass instruments that had taken place over the ...
From its roots, country music has been associated with simplicity – in melody, in subject-matter and in instrumentation, and it is this that has perhaps ensured its longevity. However, all good musicians make their craft look simple, and the history of country music is packed with virtuosos, from the pioneering banjoist Earl Scruggs, through ...
or open position, notated + and o respectively, making a short or a sustained sizzling sound as the two cymbals vibrate against each other. A typical jazz or swing rhythm exploits this feature of the cymbal. Other Cymbals Rhythms are played on the ride or bounce cymbal (45–52 cm/18–21 in diameter), which is designed to have a clean articulation ...
group. This then formed the instrumentation for his Octet. In jazz, small ‘swing combos’ occasionally performed in the 1930s and 1940s using three or four players from the same swing band. An ensemble might also come into existence primarily to serve a certain function. The rise of the wind band, for instance, was closely linked to the need ...
Bb tenor saxophone is the most successful of the family. With a range from Ab to eb'', it became the most prominent solo voice of the big band from the swing era onwards. The saxophone is probably at its best in the tenor’s tessitura; here its range of articulation and tone colour allied to its remarkable dexterity has made it one ...
early 1920s, the very first country records were made by old-time fiddlers John Carson and Eck Robertson. In the 1920s and 1930s Bob Wills and other pioneers of western swing music in the south western USA made the fiddle (often two fiddles playing in unison, named ‘twin fiddle’) an essential ingredient of their sophisticated music. The fiddle was also ...
a trio of trombones (two tenor and one bass) was standard in the orchestra. By the early-twentieth century, the trombone had also became a standard instrument in jazz and swing bands. The Jazz Trombone Jazz trombonists probably did more to exploit and develop the trombone’s capabilities than anyone else. In the early-twentieth century, Kid Ory brought ‘tailgate’ trombone to ...
Gary Davis developed a more folky, ’Piedmont’ blues style. In Kansas City, Count Basie was absorbing the blues and reinjecting it into the big band jazz style of the swing era. And in New York, Billie Holiday, one of the most famous blues/jazz singers of all time, began captivating audiences with her haunting, sensuous voice. As ...
conjunto/Tex Mex music, and the high-gloss country-pop of contemporary stars like Shania Twain and Faith Hill. Also included under country’s catch-all umbrella are the great Texas and Oklahoma western swing bands of the 1930s and 1940s, the influential southern California country rock bands of the 1960s and 1970s and the progressive bluegrass artists of 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. ...
Dancing is as old as time, and its one constant is music that you can do it to. And while not all music is designed for dancing, some revolutionary dance music has been produced since records began. Some of it is intentionally disposable, but it is surprising just how much of the dance music made in the last ...
in order to survive. Indeed, many movements that came along throughout the course of jazz history were direct reactions to some previous, prevailing movement: as bebop was to swing, as hard bop was to the cool school, as the avant-garde movement was to mainstream jazz, and so on. Rather than supplanting a previous style, each new ...
Eugene Onegin was written after the disaster of Tchaikovsky’s marriage in 1877, and was also influenced by his platonic relationship with his admirer and patron Nadezhda von Meck. Tchaikovsky began Eugene Onegin by writing the famous ‘letter scene’ from Act I, in which the heroine Tat’yana spends the night writing to Onegin, telling him of her love for ...
AUTHORITATIVE
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.