![[REQ] D.Gray-Man - Musician Piano Tutorial](http://web.archive.org./web/20110504181727im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/qYJLukBCI2c/0.jpg "[REQ] D.Gray-Man - Musician Piano Tutorial")
![Madonna - Ray Of Light (Live from Wembley Stadium,United Kington) [Live Earth]](http://web.archive.org./web/20110504181727im_/http://i.ytimg.com/vi/DZRnuxJggqc/0.jpg "Madonna - Ray Of Light (Live from Wembley Stadium,United Kington) [Live Earth]")
A musician is a person who writes, performs, or makes music. Musicians can be classified by their roles in creating or performing music.
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| Name | Wynton Marsalis |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Wynton Learson Marsalis |
| Background | non_vocal_instrumentalist |
| Born | October 18, 1961New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. |
| Instrument | Trumpet |
| Genre | Jazz, post-bop, jazz poetry, Classical |
| Occupation | Composer, Trumpeter, Artistic Director Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra and Opera |
| Years active | 1980–present |
| Label | Columbia, Sony |
| Associated acts | English Chamber Orchestra |
| Url |
Marsalis is the son of jazz musician, Ellis Marsalis, Jr. (pianist), grandson to Ellis Marsalis, Sr. and brother to Branford (saxophonist), Delfeayo (trombonist), Mboya, and Jason (drummer).
At age 17 Wynton was the youngest musician admitted to Tanglewood’s Berkshire Music Center, where he won the school’s Harvey Shapiro Award for outstanding brass student. Wynton moved to New York City to attend Juilliard in 1979, and picked up gigs around town. In 1980 Wynton joined the Jazz Messengers led by Art Blakey. In the years to follow Wynton performed with Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Sweets Edison, Clark Terry, Sonny Rollins, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams and countless other jazz legends.
In the fall of 1995 Wynton launched two major broadcast events. In October PBS premiered Marsalis On Music, an educational television series on jazz and classical music. The series was written and hosted by Marsalis and viewed by millions. The same month National Public Radio aired the first of Marsalis’ 26-week series entitled Making the Music. Wynton’s radio and television series were awarded the George Foster Peabody Award. Marsalis has also written five books: Sweet Swing Blues on the Road, Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life, To a Young Musician: Letters from the Road, Jazz ABZ (an A to Z collection of poems celebrating jazz greats), and his most recent release Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life.
In 1987 Wynton Marsalis co-founded a jazz program at Lincoln Center. In July 1996 Jazz at Lincoln Center was installed as new constituent of Lincoln Center. In October 2004 Marsalis opened Frederick P. Rose Hall, the world’s first institution for jazz containing three performance spaces (including the first concert hall designed specifically for jazz) along with recording, broadcast, rehearsal and educational facilities. Wynton presently serves as Artistic Director for Jazz at Lincoln Center and Music Director for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
Marsalis has been criticized by some jazz musicians and writers as a minor and limited trumpeter who pontificates on jazz, as he did in his 1988 opinion piece in the New York Times "What Jazz Is - and Isn't".
Jazz Critic Scott Yanow praised Marsalis's talent but questioned his "selective knowledge of jazz history considering post-1965 avant-garde playing to be outside of jazz and 1970s fusion to be barren." Trumpeter Lester Bowie said of Marsalis, "If you retread what's gone before, even if it sounds like jazz, it could be anathema to the spirit of jazz." In his 1997 book Blue: The Murder of Jazz Eric Nisenson argues that Marsalis's focus on a narrow portion of jazz's past stifled growth and innovation. In 1997 pianist Keith Jarrett criticized Marsalis saying "I've never heard anything Wynton played sound like it meant anything at all. Wynton has no voice and no presence. His music sounds like a talented high-school trumpet player to me." Pierre Sprey, president of jazz record company Mapleshade Records, said in 2001 that "When Marsalis was nineteen, he was a fine jazz trumpeter...But he was getting his tail beat off every night in Art Blakey's band. I don't think he could keep up. And finally he retreated to safe waters. He's a good classical trumpeter and thus he sees jazz as being a classical Music. He has no clue what's going on now." Bassist Stanley Clarke said "All the guys that are criticizing—like Wynton Marsalis and those guys — I would hate to be around to hear those guys playing on top of a groove!" In his autobiography Miles Davis - whom Marsalis said had left jazz and "went into rock" - hedged his praise of Marsalis suggesting that he was unoriginal. He also found him too competitive, saying "Wynton thinks playing music is about blowing people up on stage." In 1986, in Vancouver, Davis stopped his band to eject Marsalis, who had appeared onstage uninvited. Echoing Clarke's comment, Davis said "Wynton can't play the kind of shit we were playing", and twice told Marsalis to leave the stage saying "Get the fuck off."
Personal insults have marked some exchanges. Besides insinuating that Davis was pandering to audiences, he said Davis dressed like a "buffoon". Trumpeter Lester Bowie called Marsalis "brain dead", "mentally-ill" and "trapped in some opinions that he had at age 21...because he's been paid to."
In 1997 Wynton Marsalis became the first jazz musician ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his epic oratorio Blood On The Fields. In the years following Marsalis’ award, the Pulitzer Prize for Music has been awarded posthumously to Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. In a personal note to Wynton, Zarin Mehta wrote, “I was not surprised at your winning the Pulitzer Prize for Blood On The Fields. It is a broad, beautifully painted canvas that impresses and inspires. It speaks to us all ... I’m sure that, somewhere in the firmament, Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong and legions of others are smiling down on you.”
Marsalis won the Netherlands’ Edison Award and the Grand Prix Du Disque of France. The Mayor of Vitoria, Spain, awarded Wynton with the city’s Gold Medal – its most coveted distinction. Britain’s senior conservatoire the Royal Academy of Music made Marsalis an honorary Mmmber, the Academy’s highest decoration for a non-British citizen (1996). The city of Marciac, France, erected a bronze statue in his honor. The French Ministry of Culture appointed Wynton the rank of Knight in the Order of Arts and Literature and in the fall of 2009 Wynton received France’s highest distinction, the insignia Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, an honor that was first awarded by Napoleon Bonaparte.
, Spain]]
Marsalis, with his father and brothers, are group recipients of the 2011 NEA Jazz Masters Award.
Marsalis has toured 30 countries on every continent except Antarctica, and nearly five million copies of his recordings have been sold worldwide.
Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance (with orchestra)
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo
Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children
Category:1961 births Category:African American musicians Category:American classical trumpeters Category:American jazz trumpeters Category:George Peabody Medal winners Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Jazz bandleaders Category:Jazz composers Category:Juilliard School of Music alumni Category:Living people Category:Jazz musicians from New Orleans, Louisiana Category:People from New Orleans, Louisiana Category:Post-bop jazz musicians Category:Pulitzer Prize for Music winners Category:Blue Note Records artists
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Reich's style of composition influenced many other composers and musical groups. Reich has been described by The Guardian as one of "a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history", and the critic Kyle Gann has said Reich "may...be considered, by general acclamation, America's greatest living composer." On January 25, 2007, Reich was named the 2007 recipient of the Polar Music Prize, together with jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins. On April 20, 2009, Reich was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Double Sextet.
For a year following graduation, Reich studied composition privately with Hall Overton before he enrolled at Juilliard to work with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti (1958–1961). Subsequently he attended Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud (1961–1963) and earned a master's degree in composition. At Mills, Reich composed Melodica for melodica and tape, which appeared in 1986 on the three-LP release Music from Mills.
Reich worked with the California Tape Music Centre along with Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick, and Terry Riley. He was involved with the premiere of Riley's In C and suggested the use of the eighth note pulse, which is now standard in performance of the piece.
Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley, whose work In C combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly shifting, cohesive whole. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work, It's Gonna Rain. Written in 1965, the piece used recordings of a sermon about the end of the world given by a black Pentecostal street-preacher known as Brother Walter. Reich built on his early tape work, transferring the sermon to multiple tape loops played in and out of phase, with segments of the sermon cut and rearranged.
The 13-minute "Come Out" (1966) uses similarly manipulated recordings of a single spoken line given by Daniel Hamm, one of the falsely accused Harlem Six, who was severely injured by police. The survivor, who had been beaten, punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police about his beating. The spoken line includes the phrase "to let the bruise’s blood come out to show them." Reich rerecorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which are initially played in unison. They quickly slip out of sync; gradually the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, and continues splitting until the actual words are unintelligible, leaving the listener with only the speech's rhythmic and tonal patterns.
A similar, lesser known example of process music is "Pendulum Music" (1968), which consists of the sound of several microphones swinging over the loudspeakers to which they are attached, producing feedback as they do so. "Pendulum Music" has never been recorded by Reich himself, but was introduced to rock audiences by Sonic Youth in the late 1990s.
Reich's first attempt at translating this phasing technique from recorded tape to live performance was the 1967 Piano Phase, for two pianos. In Piano Phase the performers repeat a rapid twelve-note melodic figure, initially in unison. As one player keeps tempo with robotic precision, the other speeds up very slightly until the two parts line up again, but one sixteenth note apart. The second player then resumes the previous tempo. This cycle of speeding up and then locking in continues throughout the piece; the cycle comes full circle three times, the second and third cycles using shorter versions of the initial figure. Violin Phase, also written in 1967, is built on these same lines. Piano Phase and Violin Phase both premiered in a series of concerts given in New York art galleries.
Reich also tried to create the phasing effect in a piece "that would need no instrument beyond the human body". He found that the idea of phasing was inappropriate for the simple ways he was experimenting to make sound. Instead, he composed Clapping Music (1972), in which the players do not phase in and out with each other, but instead one performer keeps one line of a 12-quaver-long (12-eighth-note-long) phrase and the other performer shifts by one quaver beat every 12 bars, until both performers are back in unison 144 bars later.
The 1967 prototype piece Slow Motion Sound was never performed, but the idea it introduced of slowing down a recorded sound until many times its original length without changing pitch or timbre was applied to Four Organs (1970), which deals specifically with augmentation. The piece has maracas playing a fast eighth note pulse, while the four organs stress certain eighth notes using an 11th chord. This work therefore dealt with repetition and subtle rhythmic change. It is unique in the context of Reich's other pieces in being linear as opposed to cyclic like his earlier works— the superficially similar Phase Patterns, also for four organs but without maracas, is (as the name suggests) a phase piece similar to others composed during the period. Four Organs was performed as part of a Boston Symphony Orchestra program, and was Reich's first composition to be performed in a large traditional setting.
After Drumming, Reich moved on from the "phase shifting" technique that he had pioneered, and began writing more elaborate pieces. He investigated other musical processes such as augmentation (the temporal lengthening of phrases and melodic fragments). It was during this period that he wrote works such as Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973) and Six Pianos (1973).
In 1974, Reich began writing what many would call his seminal work, Music for 18 Musicians. This piece involved many new ideas, although it also hearkened back to earlier pieces. It is based on a cycle of eleven chords introduced at the beginning (called "Pulses"), followed by a small section of music based on each chord ("Sections I-XI"), and finally a return to the original cycle ("Pulses"). This was Reich's first attempt at writing for larger ensembles. The increased number of performers resulted in more scope for psychoacoustic effects, which fascinated Reich, and he noted that he would like to "explore this idea further". Reich remarked that this one work contained more harmonic movement in the first five minutes than any other work he had written. Steve Reich and Musicians made the premier recording of this work on ECM Records.
Reich explored these ideas further in his frequently recorded pieces Music for a Large Ensemble (1978) and Octet (1979). In these two works, Reich experimented with "the human breath as the measure of musical duration … the chords played by the trumpets are written to take one comfortable breath to perform". Human voices are part of the musical palette in Music for a Large Ensemble but the wordless vocal parts simply form part of the texture (as they do in Drumming). With Octet and his first orchestral piece Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (also 1979), Reich's music showed the influence of Biblical cantillation, which he had studied in Israel since the summer of 1977. After this, the human voice singing a text would play an increasingly important role in Reich's music. In 1974 Reich published a book, Writings About Music (ISBN 0814773583), containing essays on his philosophy, aesthetics, and musical projects written between 1963 and 1974. An updated and much more extensive collection, Writings On Music (1965–2000) (ISBN 0195111710), was published in 2002.
Different Trains (1988), for string quartet and tape, uses recorded speech, as in his earlier works, but this time as a melodic rather than a rhythmic element. In Different Trains Reich compares and contrasts his childhood memories of his train journeys between New York and California in 1939–1941 with the very different trains being used to transport contemporaneous European children to their deaths under Nazi rule. The Kronos Quartet recording of Different Trains was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 1990. The composition was described by Richard Taruskin as "the only adequate musical response—one of the few adequate artistic responses in any medium—to the Holocaust", and he credited the piece with earning Reich a place among the great composers of the 20th century.
As well as pieces using sampling techniques, like Three Tales and City Life (1994), Reich also returned to composing purely instrumental works for the concert hall, starting with Triple Quartet (1998) written for the Kronos Quartet that can either be performed by string quartet and tape, three string quartets or 36-piece string orchestra. According to Reich, the piece is influenced by Bartók's and Alfred Schnittke's string quartets, and Michael Gordon's Yo Shakespeare. This series continued with Dance Patterns (2002), Cello Counterpoint (2003), and sequence of works centered around Variations: You Are (Variations) (2004) (a work which looks back to the vocal writing of works like Tehillim or The Desert Music), Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings (2005, for the London Sinfonietta) and Daniel Variations (2006).
Invited by Walter Fink, he was the 12th composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2002.
In an interview with The Guardian, Reich stated that he continues to follow this direction with his piece Double Sextet (2007) commissioned by eighth blackbird, an American ensemble consisting of the instrumental quintet (flute, clarinet, violin or viola, cello and piano) of Schoenberg's piece Pierrot Lunaire (1912) plus percussion. Reich states that he was thinking about Stravinsky's Agon (1957) as a model for the instrumental writing.
Reich was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music, on April 20, 2009, for Double Sextet.
John Adams commented, "He didn't reinvent the wheel so much as he showed us a new way to ride." He has also influenced visual artists such as Bruce Nauman, and many notable choreographers have made dances to his music, Eliot Feld, Jiří Kylián, Douglas Lee and Jerome Robbins among others; he has expressed particular admiration of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's work set to his pieces.
In featuring a sample of Reich's Electric Counterpoint (1987) the British ambient techno act the Orb exposed a new generation of listeners to the composer's music with its 1990 production “Little Fluffy Clouds.” Further acknowledgment of Reich's influence on various electronic dance music producers came with the release in 1999 of the Reich Remixed tribute album which featured reinterpretations by artists such as DJ Spooky, Kurtis Mantronik, Ken Ishii, and Coldcut, among others. Reich's influence from jazz includes its roots, also, from the West African music he studied in his readings and visit to Ghana. Other important influences are Kenny Clarke and Miles Davis, and visual artist friends such as Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra. Reich recently contributed the introduction to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky.
;Interviews
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Category:20th-century classical composers Category:21st-century classical composers Category:Postmodern composers Category:Minimalist composers Category:Jewish American classical composers Category:Opera composers Category:Nonesuch Records artists Category:Grammy Award winners Category:ECM artists Category:Pulitzer Prize winners Category:Deutsche Grammophon artists Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:Juilliard School of Music alumni Category:Cornell University alumni Category:American people of Austrian-Jewish descent Category:American Orthodox Jews Category:1936 births Category:Living people Category:Guggenheim Fellows
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| Name | Reggie Watts |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Reginald Lucien Frank Roger Watts |
| Born | March 23, 1972 |
| Instrument | Voice, loop sampler, piano, synthesizers |
| Associated acts | Maktub |
| Url | http://www.reggiewatts.com |
| Notable instruments | Line 6 DL4 delay modeler, Electro Harmonix 2880 |
Reggie Watts is a New York-based comedian and musician. Watts' shows are mostly improvised and consist of stream of consciousness stand-up in various shifting personae, mixed with loop pedal-based a cappella compositions. He also performs regularly on television and in live theater.
During the Seattle period, Watts became interested in alternative performance styles. He composed musical scores for Northwest dance choreographers KT Niehoff, Amy O'Neal, Maureen Whiting, Pat Graney and Beth Huerta. He also dabbled in sketch comedy with the groups Hi, D and The Stuntmen with future theatrical collaborator Tommy Smith.
Watts’ genesis as a solo performer started to emerge at the beginning of 2002. While touring years earlier with the Wayne Horvitz 4+1 Ensemble, Watts was forced to downsize his effects pedal from a Roland Space Echo tape delay to a Line 6 DL4 delay modeler, a smaller device that makes it easy to travel. Watts began using the Line 6 in live shows with Maktub, in order to replicate the duplicate harmonies from the recorded material. From here, Watts experimented with improvising entire songs in solo acts with the Line 6, playing initial gigs at small Seattle venues and artist bungalows. Inspired by the work of sketch groups The State and the film Wet Hot American Summer, Watts began infusing spontaneous comedic material with the beat box-driven musical compositions.
During this time, Watts shot comedic web shorts for Superdeluxe, Vimeo and CollegeHumor, where his video “What About Blowjobs?” became a viral hit. He also formed a theatrical collaboration with playwright Tommy Smith, and began developing web philosophy/content with online entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick, with whom he recorded the EP Pot Cookies.
Moving to Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2006, Watts started to branch out into performing for television and film, while continuing to pursue live performance and the creation of new performance technologies.
Watts' recent solo comedic experience includes gigs at Fusebox, SXSW, Bonnaroo, Brian Eno’s Luminous Festival at the Sydney Opera House, The Louvre, Montreal Comedy Festival, PopTech!, Soho Theatre (London), Vancouver Comedy Festival, CollegeHumor’s “CH Live” stand-up comedy series, The Edinburgh Festival, Bumbershoot, The Sydney Festival, Sasquatch, Outside Lands Festival and cities throughout the world including Amsterdam's Boom Chicago, Paris, Cologne, Madrid, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Melbourne, Cape Town and Reykjavik, among others.
Watts frequently collaborates with performers/musicians around the globe. He appeared as part of the Ensemble cast of UK beatboxer Beardyman's Complete and Utter Shambles show at the Udderbelly during its residency at South Bank. He was the opening act for Regina Spektor on her European tour; he recorded vocals for Spektor’s song “Dance Anthem of the 80s”. He collaborated with French singer Camile Dalmais in a performance at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. He also contributed two tracks to DFA Records’ Spaghetti Circus.
Waverly Films recently shot a one-hour special on Watts called “Why Shit So Crazy?”. Created as a dual DVD/CD, the special features Watts in live performance at New York venues Galapagos, The Bellhouse and Le Poisson Rouge, intercut with brief sketches and a music video of Watts’ “Fuck Shit Stack”.
As a composer, Watts wrote and performed music for comedian Louis CK’s show "Louie", and created the theme song for “Comedy Death-Ray Radio” and Kristen Schaal’s “Penelope Princess of Pets”.
He was also featured in a commerical for DieHard batteries
Transition played at The Under The Radar Festival at The Public Theater, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time Based Art Festival and On the Boards (Seattle); it was also the winner of the MAP Fund Award and Creative Capital award. Disinformation was seen at the UTR Festival, PICA: TBA, The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), The Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), and ICA (Boston). Radioplay premiered at Ars Nova (New York), and played at Seattle Rep (Bumbershoot), IRT Theater (New York) and Redhouse (Syracuse). Dutch A/V, a live environmental film performance and winner of the MAP Fund Award, was workshopped at IRT Theatre (New York).
Watts and Smith also regularly host Occurrence, a cabaret of alternative performers, which has been seen at Ars Nova, Galapagos, The Tank, Leftbank (Portland) and various other venues. A recording of their show Transition at On the Boards helped launch the first-ever live performance download website, OTBTV.
Category:Living people Category:African American comedians Category:African American singers Category:American male singers Category:American comedians Category:American comedy musicians Category:American people of French descent Category:People from Great Falls, Montana Category:Place of birth missing (living people) Category:Cornish College of the Arts alumni Category:1972 births
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Ken Vandermark (born September 22, 1964 in Warwick, Rhode Island) is an American jazz composer and saxophone and clarinet player.
A fixture on the Chicago-area music scene since the 1990s, Vandermark has earned wide critical praise for his playing and his multilayered compositions, which typically balance intricate orchestration with passionate improvisation. He has led or been a member of many groups, has collaborated with many other musicians, and was awarded a 1999 MacArthur Fellowship. He plays tenor saxophone, clarinet and bass clarinet; in about 2000, added baritone saxophone to his arsenal, and often favors the instrument, particularly in larger ensembles.
He was also a member of NRG Ensemble.
Returning to the Boston area after graduation, he led or co-led groups (including Lombard Street and Mr. Furious) in Boston. Compositions/arrangements for the Boston-based groups set the groundwork for and predicted approaches to recordings and live performances developed in Chicago. Although a trio, Lombard Street incorporated “suite forms” characteristic of later arrangements for groups of both substantial and limited instrumentation. Vandermark’s “dedication pieces” are found first in Lombard Street performances, as in the case of “The Politics of Sound,” which was dedicated to the musicians in Boston-based ensembles Shock Exchange, The Fringe, and the Joe Morris Trio. Works performed by Mr. Furious, such as “Cold Coffee,” include some of the most convincing early examples of Vandermark’s signature free-ranging charts. Developed further in Barrage Double Trio (e.g., “Agamemnon Sleeps”) this simultaneously linear and episodic perspective on arrangement broadly has been the overarching architecture in most of his works for large-ensembles since that time.
The Joe Harriott Project, a brief celebration of Harriott in 1998 in the Chicago area, consisted of Ken Vandermark (reeds), Jeb Bishop (trombone), Kent Kessler (bass), and Tim Mulvenna (drums). The band played the music of Joe Harriott, transcribed and arranged by Vandermark.
In 2002 Vandermark recorded Furniture Music, his first released performances as an unaccompanied soloist.
After several years of Vandermark 5 performances of his arrangements of works by Sonny Rollins, Joe McPhee, Cecil Taylor, and others, Vandermark in 2005 announced, "Though I have learned a great deal by rearranging some of my favorite composers' work for the Vandermark 5, it's time to leave that process behind and focus more completely on my own ideas."
Vandermark is the subject of Musician (2007), one of a series of Daniel Kraus video documentaries on contemporary occupations.
Category:Avant-garde jazz musicians Category:1964 births Category:Living people Category:Jazz saxophonists Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:Musicians from Chicago, Illinois
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| Name | Jake Shimabukuro |
|---|---|
| Background | non_vocal_instrumentalist |
| Born | November 03, 1976 |
| Instrument | Ukulele |
| Genre | jazz, blues, funk, classical, bluegrass, folk, flamenco and rock |
| Years active | 1998–present |
| Associated acts | Pure Heart |
| Url | www.jakeshimabukuro.com |
Jake Shimabukuro (born November 3, 1976 in Honolulu, Hawaii) is a ukulele virtuoso known for his complex finger work. His music combines elements of jazz, rock and pop.
The following year, they released Pure Heart 2, which earned them another Hoku award for Island Contemporary Album of the year. Yamasato informed the others that he was quitting the group via a newspaper story that ran in the Honolulu Advertiser on Thanksgiving Day, and Shimabukuro and Colon formed another group, Colon, which they named in honor of Colon's father, famed percussionist Augie Colon. The new guitarist was Guy Cruz, younger brother of the Kaau Crater Boys' Ernie Cruz, Jr., and John Cruz. Colon won the Hoku Award for Favorite Entertainer of the Year in 2001, after which Shimabukuro decided to pursue a solo career.
As a solo artist after the break-up of Colon he experimented with using effect pedals to make new sounds that few would associate with a ukulele. He has released an instructional DVD called Play Loud Ukulele, and in 2006, composed the music to the Japanese film Hula Girls, which featured hula dancing and a Hawaiian spa resort as its primary theme and setting respectively.
In November 2009, Shimabukuro accompanied fellow Hawaiian-born Bette Midler at the Royal Variety Show. They performed a rendition of the Beatles song "In My Life" as the first of Midler's three-song set.
Category:Musicians from Hawaii Category:1976 births Category:Living people Category:American people of Japanese descent Category:American people of Okinawan descent Category:American musicians of Japanese descent Category:Ukulele players
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He was an editor of American Heritage magazine early in his career. He wrote the television mini-series The Civil War with its director Ken Burns and has collaborated with Burns on every documentary he has made since, including Jazz and Baseball. This work won him five Emmy Awards. The most recent Burns/Ward collaboration, The War, premiered on PBS in September 2007. In addition he co-wrote The West, of which Ken Burns was an executive producer, with fellow historian Dayton Duncan.
He is the author or co-author of eighteen books, including five companion books to the documentaries he has written. A First-Class Temperament, his biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians.
Category:1940 births Category:Living people Category:Oberlin College alumni Category:American historians Category:American writers
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| Name | Bill Drummond |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | William Ernest Drummond |
| Alias | King Boy DTime Boy |
| Born | April 29, 1953, Butterworth, South Africa |
| Origin | Newton Stewart, Scotland |
| Instrument | Vocals, guitar, bass, synthesizers, keyboards |
| Occupation | MusicianMusic industry managerWriterArtist |
| Years active | 1977- |
| Label | Zoo RecordsWEAKLF Communications |
| Associated acts | Big in JapanLori & The ChameleonsThe Justified Ancients of Mu-MuThe TimelordsThe KLFK Foundation2K |
| Url | www.penkiln-burn.com |
Drummond's musical career began in 1977 with Big in Japan, a band whose membership also included future luminaries Holly Johnson, Budgie, Jayne Casey and Ian Broudie. After the band's demise, Drummond and another member David Balfe started Zoo Records, their first release being Big in Japan's posthumous EP, From Y To Z and Never Again. They went on to act as both producers and label managers, releasing the debut singles by Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, both of which Drummond would later manage somewhat idiosyncratically. This included sending Echo & The Bunnymen on a tour of "bizarre and apparently random sites, including the Northern Isles. "It's not random," said Drummond, speaking as the Bunnymen's manager. "If you look at a map of the world, the whole tour's in the shape of a rabbit's ears."" The production team of Drummond and Balfe was christened The Chameleons, who also recorded the single "Touch" together with a female singer as Lori and the Chameleons.
Drummond was "obviously very sharp," said WEA chairman Rob Dickens, "and he knew the business. But he was too radical to be happy inside a corporate structure. He was better off working as an outsider."
Later in the year, Drummond issued a solo album, The Man, a country/folk music recording, backed by Australian rock group The Triffids. The album was perhaps most notable for the sardonic "Julian Cope Is Dead", where he outlined his fantasy of shooting the Teardrop Explodes frontman in the head to ensure the band's early demise and subsequent legendary status. The song has commonly been seen as a reply to the Cope song "Bill Drummond Said". As a B-side, Drummond wrote and recorded "The Manager" in which he lamented the state of the music industry and offered his services to help fix it.
The Man received positive reviews - including 4 stars from Q Magazine; and 5 from Sounds Magazine who called the album a "touching if idiosyncratic biographical statement". Drummond intended to focus on writing books once The Man had been issued but, as he recalled in 1990, "That only lasted three months, until I had an[other] idea for a record and got dragged back into it all".
Drummond and Cauty (who Drummond had signed to Food/WEA as a member of Brilliant) released their first single, The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu's "All You Need Is Love", in March 1987. This was followed by an album - 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) - in June of the same year, and a high-profile copyright dispute with ABBA and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society. A second and final album by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMs) - Who Killed The JAMs? was released in February 1988.
Later in 1988, Drummond and Cauty released a 'novelty' pop single, "Doctorin' the Tardis" as The Timelords. The song reached number one in the UK Singles Chart on 12 June, and charted highly in Australia and New Zealand. On the back of this success, the duo self-published a book, The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way).
In March 1988, the duo regrouped as The KLF and released their first singles under this moniker, "Burn the Bastards" and "Burn the Beat". (From late 1987, Drummond and Cauty's independent record label had been named "KLF Communications".) As The KLF, Drummond and Cauty would amass fame and fortune. "What Time Is Love?" - a signature song which they would revisit and revitalise several times in the coming years - saw its first release in July 1988, and its success spawned an album, The "What Time Is Love?" Story, in September 1989. Chill Out, an ambient house album which had its roots in Cauty's chill-out sessions with The Orb's Alex Paterson, was released in February 1990. Described by The Times as "The KLF's comedown classic", Chill Out was named the fifth best dance album of all time in a 1996 Mixmag feature.
The KLF's commercial success peaked in 1991, with The White Room album and the accompanying "Stadium House" singles, remixes of 1988's "What Time Is Love?", 1989's "3 a.m. Eternal", 1990's "Last Train to Trancentral"; and "Justified and Ancient", a new song based on a sample from 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?).
In 1992, The KLF were awarded the "Best British group" BRIT Award. With hardcore heavy metal group Extreme Noise Terror, The KLF performed a live version of "3 a.m. Eternal" at the BRIT Awards ceremony, a "violently antagonistic performance" in front of "a stunned music-business audience". Later in the evening Drummond and Cauty dumped a dead sheep with the message "I died for ewe—bon appetit [sic]" tied around its waist at the entrance to one of the post-ceremony parties. NME listed this appearance at number 4 in their "top 100 rock moments", and, in 2003, The Observer named it the fifth greatest "publicity stunt" in the history of popular music.
On 14 May 1992, The KLF announced their immediate retirement from the music industry and the deletion of their entire back catalogue, an act which associate Scott Piering described as "[throwing] away a fortune". As when he left WEA, Drummond issued an enigmatic press release, this time talking of a "wild and wounded, glum and glorious, shit but shining path" he and Cauty had been following "...these past five years. The last two of which has [sic] led us up onto the commercial high ground—we are at a point where the path is about to take a sharp turn from these sunny uplands down into a netherworld of we know not what." There have been numerous suggestions that in 1992 Drummond was at the edge of a nervous breakdown. Vox Magazine wrote, for example, that 1992 was "the year of Bill's 'breakdown', when The KLF, perched on the peak of greater-than-ever success, quit the music business, ... [and] machine gunned the tuxedo'd twats in the front row of that year's BRIT Awards ceremony." Drummond himself said that he was on the edge of the "abyss".
Infamy followed when, on 23 August 1994, the K Foundation burnt what remained of The KLF's earnings - one million pounds sterling - at a boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura. A film of the event - Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid - was taken on tour, with Drummond and Cauty discussing the incineration with members of the public after each screening. In 2004 Drummond admitted to the BBC that he now regretted burning the money. "It's a hard one to explain to your kids and it doesn't get any easier. I wish I could explain why I did it so people would understand." Rumor has it that the £1 million was "bought' from the Royal Mint - and was to be incinerated anyway (as notes that have become too fragile to remain in circulation usually are). It is reported that the £1 million actually cost the KLF £40,000 - the publicity generated by the "stunt" was well worth the financial outlay. However this seems unlikely; Banknotes deemed for destruction have to suffer that fate at the Mint, they cannot be sold. Equally, when the ashes of the notes were sent to the Bank of England for analysis so it could be confirmed they were the remains of £1 million in £50 notes, the Bank refused to touch them as they could not believe anyone in the public domain would willingly destroy their banknotes. The K-Foundation had to use an independent analysis company to confirm they were the remains as claimed.
On 4 September 1995 the duo recorded "The Magnificent" for The Help Album. In 1997, Drummond and Cauty briefly re-emerged as 2K and K2 Plant Hire Ltd. with various plans to "Fuck the Millennium". K2 Plant Hire's published aim was to "build a massive pyramid containing one brick for every person born in the UK during the 20th century" Members of the public were urged to donate bricks, with 1.5 bricks per Briton being needed to complete the project. Drummond also contributed a short story titled "Let’s Grind, or How K2 Plant Hire Ltd Went to Work" to the book "Disco 2000".
In 1995, Drummond bought A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind by Richard Long, his favourite contemporary artist, for $20,000. Five years later, he attempted to sell the work by placing a series of placards around the country. When this failed to work, in 2001, he cut the photograph and text work into 20,000 pieces, to sell for $1 each.
In 2002, Bill Drummond was involved - along with Turner Prize nominee Tracey Emin - in a controversial exhibition at the deconsecrated St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church, Liverpool. Drummond contributed a guestbook which asked visitors "Is God a Cunt?". It was later reported that the artwork had been stolen and a £1000 reward offered for its return. Drummond himself said that he would answer "no" to his own question: "God is responsible for all the things I love, the speckles on a brown trout; the sound of Angus Young's guitar, the nape of my girlfriend's neck, the song of the blackcap when he returns in Spring. I never blame God for all the shit, for the baby Rwandan slaughtered in a casual genocide, the ever-present wars, drudgery and misery that fills most of our lives."
Other projects have included MyDeath.net, where people can plan their own funeral.
Drummond is also co-founder of The Foundry, an arts centre in Shoreditch, London, and owner of The Curfew Tower in Cushendall, Northern Ireland. Via an arts trust called In You We Trust, Drummond loans the tower to young artists and exhibits their work.
In 1998, the Scottish Football Association invited Drummond to write and record a theme song for the Scotland national football team's 1998 FIFA World Cup campaign. It was reported that Drummond and Jimmy Cauty were in talks with the SFA. Drummond later wrote about the grandiose plans he had for the record: " I had the whole thing worked out in my head - the tune, the words, the video storyboard, even the Top of the Pops performance choreographed. All my experience in pop music had a reason after all. Everything I had gone through was leading to this point, to write this song, to make this record...." One of the highlights was to be "a 16 bar instrumental refrain featuring at least a hundred guitarists, each playing the same melody in unison! Every Scottish guitarist that ever made it into the UK Top 40 would be invited, from the lads out of the Bay City Rollers to Primal Scream; from Nazareth, Big Country, Orange Juice, The Alex Harvey Band, Josef K to The Humblebums." Drummond backed out as he realised the amount of effort that would be required (Del Amitri got the job) but he wondered if he had twisted fate by declining, because the other major football songs of that year were all made by associates of his: Keith Allen ("Vindaloo") and Ian Broudie ("Three Lions"), two men he had met on the same day when working on Illuminatus! in 1976, and former protege Ian McCulloch ("Top of the World"). "That night after I heard the three English World Cup football records", Drummond continued, "I fell asleep and had a dream. Ian Broudie, Ian McCulloch, Keith Allen and myself were sitting around that table in the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun. 'Why didn't you make your record, Bill? You know you were supposed to make it. It was agreed a long time ago. We made our records, why didn't you make yours?'".
In 2000, Drummond released 45, a book consisting of a "series of loosely related vignettes forming the rambling diary of one year." 45 also explored Drummond's KLF legacy, and was well received by the press.
His most recent project is a choir called The17.
Also in 1993, an NME piece about the K Foundation found much to praise in Drummond's career, from Zoo Records through to the K Foundation art award: "Bill Drummond's career is like no other... there's been cynicism... and there's been care (no one who didn't love pop music could have made a record so commercial and so Pet Shop Boys-lovely as 'Kylie Said to Jason', or the madly wonderful 'Last Train to Trancentral', or the Tammy Wynette version of 'Justified and Ancient'). There's been mysticism... But most of all there's been a belief that, both in music and life, there's something more."
Trouser Press referred to Drummond as a "high-concept joker"; and Britain's The Sun called him a "madcap Scots genius".
Category:The KLF Category:Conceptual artists Category:Creation Records artists Category:Scottish record producers Category:Scottish electronic musicians Category:Scottish folk musicians Category:Scottish keyboardists Category:Scottish music managers Category:Scottish non-fiction writers Category:Scottish short story writers Category:People from the Eastern Cape Category:People from Newton Stewart Category:1953 births Category:Living people Category:Scouse culture of the early 1980s
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