The term round-robin was originally used to describe a document signed by multiple parties in a circle to make it more difficult to determine the order in which it was signed, thus preventing a ringleader from being identified.^[1] The term has evolved to account for any activity in which a group of resources is interacted with singularly and in a circular order.

Round-robin may also refer to a letter with a single author copied and sent to multiple recipients, as when one sends out family news on holidays; this is also called a circular. Gatherings among friends or neighbors where each course is held in a different house, commonly during the holiday season, may also be called a round-robin. This is more commonly referred to as a progressive dinner/supper.^[2]

Origin[link]

The modern use of the term dates from the 17th Century French ruban rond (round ribbon).^[3][4] This described the practice of signatories to petitions against authority (usually Government officials petitioning the Crown) appending their names on a document in a non-hierarchical circle or ribbon pattern (and so disguising the order in which they have signed) so that none may be identified as a ringleader.

This practice was adopted by sailors petitioning officers in the Royal Navy (first recorded 1731).

Usages[link]

Aviation[link]

In aviation, a round-robin flight is a cross-country flight that starts at one airport, travels to several other points for fly-over or touch-and-goes, and returns to the airport of origin. Such flights are often flown for cross-country training purposes.^{[citation needed]}

Computing[link]

In computing, "round-robin" describes a method of choosing a resource for a task from a list of available resources, usually for the purposes of load balancing. For example, this may be used as the method of distributing incoming requests to a number of processors, worker threads, or servers. As the basic algorithm, the scheduler selects a resource pointed to by a counter from a list, after which the counter is incremented and if the end is reached, returned to the beginning of the list. Round-robin selection has a positive characteristic of preventing starvation, as every resource will be eventually chosen by the scheduler, but may be unsuitable for some applications where affinity is desirable, for example when assigning a process to a CPU or in link aggregation.

Sports[link]

In sports, round-robin refers to every player or team in a group or pool taking turns to play one another a set number of times. This may be called the group stage (or phase) of a tournament, prior to the knock-out stage. (See Round-robin tournament for more information).

Literature[link]

In fan fiction, the term commonly denotes a literary work which is written by multiple authors who continually exchange the manuscript.

See also[link]

• Round-robin DNS

References[link]

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2012)

Jack Nitzsche
Photo by Brian Ashley White
Background information
Birth name	Bernard Alfred Nitzsche
Born	(1937-04-22)April 22, 1937 Chicago, Illinois
Died	August 25, 2000(2000-08-25) (aged 63) Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
Genres	Rock, jazz, classical
Occupations	Composer, orchestrator, arranger, session musician, record producer
Instruments	Saxophone, piano
Years active	1955–2000
Associated acts	The Nooney Rickett 4, Sonny Bono, Phil Spector, The Wrecking Crew, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, The Rolling Stones, Willy DeVille

Bernard Alfred "Jack" Nitzsche (22 April 1937 – 25 August 2000) was an arranger, producer, songwriter, and film score composer. He first came to prominence in the late 1950s as the right-hand-man of producer Phil Spector, and went on to work with the Rolling Stones, Neil Young and others. He also worked extensively in film scores, winning a song of the year Oscar in 1983 for co-writing "Up Where We Belong" (from An Officer and a Gentleman.)

Biography[link]

Born in Chicago, Illinois and raised on a farm in Newaygo, Michigan, Nitzsche moved to Los Angeles, California in 1955 with ambitions of becoming a jazz saxophonist. He found work copying musical scores, where he met Sonny Bono, with whom he wrote the song "Needles and Pins" for Jackie DeShannon, later covered by Cher, The Searchers, The Ramones, Crack the Sky and Willy DeVille and Tom Petty with Stevie Nicks (Pack up the Plantation). His own instrumental composition "The Lonely Surfer" became a minor hit, as did a big-band swing arrangement of Link Wray's "Rumble".

He eventually became arranger and conductor for producer Phil Spector, and orchestrated the ambitious Wall of Sound for the song "River Deep, Mountain High" by Ike and Tina Turner. Besides Spector, he worked closely with West Coast session musicians such as Leon Russell, Roy Caton, Glen Campbell, Carol Kaye, and Hal Blaine in a group known as The Wrecking Crew. They created backing music for numerous sixties pop recordings by various artists such as The Beach Boys and The Monkees. Nitzsche also arranged the title song of Doris Day's Move Over, Darling that was a successful single on the pop charts of the time.^[1]

Nitzsche also was the producer and arranger for two of Bob Lind's albums: Don't Be Concerned and Photographs of Feeling; a compilation disc entitled Elusive Butterfly: The Complete 1966 Jack Nitzsche Sessions, issued in 2007, contains the material on these two albums.

While organizing the music for The T.A.M.I. Show television special in 1964, he met The Rolling Stones, and went on to contribute the keyboard textures to their albums The Rolling Stones, Now! (or The Rolling Stones No. 2 in the UK), Out of Our Heads, Aftermath and Between the Buttons, as well as the hit singles "Paint It Black" and "Let's Spend the Night Together" and the choral arrangements for "You Can't Always Get What You Want". In 1968, Nitzsche introduced the band to slide guitarist Ry Cooder, a seminal influence on the band's 1969-1973 style.

Some of Nitzsche's most enduring rock productions were conducted in collaboration with Neil Young, beginning with his production and arrangement of Buffalo Springfield's "Expecting To Fly", considered by many critics to be a touchstone of the psychedelic era. In 1968, he produced Young's eponymously titled solo debut with David Briggs. Even as the singer's style veered from the baroque to rootsy hard rock, Young continued to work with Nitzsche on some of his most commercially successful solo recordings, most notably Harvest. Nitzsche played electric piano with Crazy Horse throughout 1970 (a representative performance can be heard on the Live at the Fillmore East album) and went on to produce their sans-Young debut album a year later.

While prolific and hard working throughout the 1970s, he began to suffer from depression and problems connected with substance abuse. After he castigated Young in a drunken 1974 interview, the two men became estranged for several years and would only collaborate sporadically thereafter; later that year, he was dropped from Reprise Records' roster after recording a scathing song criticizing executive Mo Ostin. This culminated in his arrest for a violent assault on longtime girlfriend Carrie Snodgress, formerly Young's companion, in 1979.

In 1979, he produced Graham Parker's album Squeezing Out Sparks. Nitzsche produced three Willy DeVille albums beginning in the late 1970s: Cabretta (1977), Return to Magenta (1978), and Coup de Grâce (1981). Nitzsche said that DeVille was the best singer he had ever worked with.^[2]

In the 1970s he began to concentrate more on film music rather than pop music, and became one of the most prolific film orchestrators in Hollywood in the period, winning an Academy Award for Best Song for co-writing with Buffy Sainte-Marie "Up Where We Belong" from 1982's An Officer and a Gentleman. (Nitzsche had already worked with Sainte-Marie on She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina in the early 1970s.) Nitzsche had also worked on film scores throughout his career, such as his contributions to the Monkees movie Head, the theme music from Village of the Giants (recycling an earlier single, "The Last Race"), and the distinctive soundtracks for Performance, The Exorcist, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hardcore (1979), The Razor's Edge (1984), and Starman (also 1984).

At the start of the next decade, he scored Revenge (1990). On Revenge he worked with Joanna St. Claire, who wrote, recorded and produced the original song "Are You Ready" for the film's soundtrack.^[3] Nitzsche called St. Claire "one of the most phenomenal singers I have heard or had the pleasure to work with”, and “a great, innovative songwriter”.^[4]

His intensive output declined somewhat during the rest of the decade. In the mid-1990s, a clearly inebriated Nitzsche was seen in an episode of the reality show COPS, being arrested in Hollywood after brandishing a gun at some youths who had stolen his hat. In attempting to explain himself to the arresting officers he is heard exclaiming that he was an Academy Award winner. In 1997, he expressed interest in producing a comeback album for Link Wray, although this never materialized due to their mutually declining health.

His first wife was blue-eyed soul singer Gracia Ann May; they divorced in 1974. In 1983, he married Canadian/First Nations folk singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie. In the 1990s, he was frequently seen once more in the company of Snodgress.

Nitzsche suffered a stroke in 1998 that effectively ended his career. He died in Hollywood's Queen of Angels Hospital in 2000 of cardiac arrest brought on by a recurring bronchial infection.^[5] The R.E.M. instrumental b-side "2JN" was written by guitarist Peter Buck the week Nitzsche died, and the title uses his initials in tribute.^[6]

Discography[link]

• 1963: The Lonely Surfer
• 1964: Dance To The Hits Of The Beatles
• 1966: Chopin '66
• 1972 : St. Giles Cripplegate
• 1978 : OSR Blue Collar
• 1980 : Promises "Promises" - Capitol Unreleased in U.S.
• 1984 : OSR The Razor's Edge
• 1991 : OSR The Indian Runner with David Lindley

Filmography[link]

• Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962)
• Village of the Giants (1965)
• Performance (1970)
• Greaser's Palace (1972)
• Sticks and Bones (1973)
• The Exorcist (1973)
• Moment to Moment (1975)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
• Heroes (1977)
• Blue Collar (1978)
• Hardcore (1979)
• When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? (1979)
• Cruising (1980)
• Heart Beat (1980)
• Cutter and Bone a.k.a. Cutter's Way (1981)
• Personal Best (1982)
• Cannery Row (1982)
• An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)
• Without a Trace (1983)
• Breathless (1983)
• Windy City (1984)
• The Razor's Edge (1984)
• Starman (1984)
• The Jewel of the Nile (1985)
• Stripper (1986)
• 9½ Weeks (1986)
• Stand by Me (1986)
• The Whoopee Boys (1986)
• Streets of Gold (1986)
• The Seventh Sign (1988)
• Next of Kin (1989)
• Revenge (1990)
• The Last of the Finest (1990)
• The Hot Spot (1990)
• Mermaids (1990)
• The Indian Runner (1991)
• Blue Sky (1994)
• The Crossing Guard (1995)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Jack Nitzsche at Allmusic
• Jack Nitzsche at the Internet Movie Database
• The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a fan site
• Jack Nitzsche discography
• Nitzsche discography at Spectropop