Jazz

Jazz is a music genre that originated from African American communities of New Orleans in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of African American and European American musical parentage with a performance orientation. Jazz spans a period of over a hundred years, encompassing a very wide range of music, making it difficult to define. Jazz makes heavy use of improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swing note, as well as aspects of European harmony, American popular music, the brass band tradition, and African musical elements such as blue notes and African-American styles such as ragtime. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience to the music as well. Intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as "one of America's original art forms".

Jazz (Wallace Roney album)

Jazz is an album by jazz artist Wallace Roney released in 2007.

Track listing

Personnel

Jazz (Kanso series)

Jazz (Kanso series) is a series of 20 paintings made by Nabil Kanso in 1978-79. The subjects of the works are based on the jazz music and the entertainments night life in New York and New Orleans. The paintings are done in oil and acrylic on canvas measuring 224 X 182 cm (88 X 72 inches) each. Their compositions reflect predominant red tonality built with broad brushstrokes. Works from the series were exhibited in Atlanta in 1985.

References

External links

Portal (interactive novel)

Portal is a mix between a computerized novel and an interactive game. It was published for the Amiga in 1986 by Activision, written by Rob Swigart, produced by Brad Fregger, and programmed by Nexa Corporation. Versions for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and DOS were later released. Versions for the Macintosh and Atari ST were announced and developed, but never formally released. A unique game for its time, Portal was one part text-driven adventure (à la Zork or Planetfall) but with a graphical interface. It is unrelated to the game Portal (2007) by Valve Corporation.

Setting

The player, taking on the role of the unnamed astronaut protagonist, returns from a failed 100-year voyage to 61 Cygni to find the Earth devoid of humans. Cars are rusted and covered with moss, the streets are completely barren and everything appears as though the entire human race had just vanished suddenly. The player happens upon a barely functioning computer terminal that is tied into a storytelling mainframe, Homer. Through this interface, the player, assisted by Homer who attempts to weave the information into a coherent narrative, discovers information in order to piece together the occurrences leading to the disappearance of the human race. For instance, spending some time in the Medical Records section may unlock a piece of data in the Science section, and through these links the player can finish the game.

Portal (architecture)

A portal is an opening in a wall of a building, gate or fortification, especially a grand entrance to an important structure.doors, metal gates or portcullis in the opening can be used to control entry or exit. The surface surrounding the opening may be made of simple building materials or decorated with ornamentation. The elements of a portal can include the voussoir, tympanum, an ornamented mullion or trumeau between doors, and columns with carvings of saints in the westwork of a church.

Examples

Baroque portal of a private Palace in Brescia

Baroque portal of a private Palace in Brescia

Portal of the Church of São Martinho de Cedofeita, with nested arches

Portal of the Church of São Martinho de Cedofeita, with nested arches

Gothic portal of the cathedral of Metz

Gothic portal of the cathedral of Metz

Portal of the church in Hronský Beňadik

Portal of the church in Hronský Beňadik

Other uses

The term portal is also applied to the ends of a tunnel.

Portal (video game)

Portal is a 2007 first-person puzzle-platform video game developed by Valve Corporation. The game was released in a bundle package called The Orange Box for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 on October 9, 2007, and for the PlayStation 3 on December 11, 2007. The Windows version of the game is available for download separately through Valve's content delivery system Steam and was released as a standalone retail product on April 9, 2008. A standalone version called Portal: Still Alive was released on the Xbox Live Arcade service on October 22, 2008; this version includes an additional 14 puzzles. An OS X version was released as part of the Mac-compatible Steam platform on May 12, 2010. A Linux version was released on Steam as a beta on May 2, 2013, and came out of beta on June 24, 2013. An Android port for the Nvidia Shield was released on May 12, 2014.

The game primarily comprises a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player's character and simple objects using "the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device", a device that can create inter-spatial portals between two flat planes. The player-character, Chell, is challenged by an artificial intelligence named GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) to complete each puzzle in the Aperture Science Enrichment Center using the portal gun with the promise of receiving cake when all the puzzles are completed. The game's unique physics allows momentum to be retained through portals, requiring creative use of portals to maneuver through the test chambers. This gameplay element is based on a similar concept from the game Narbacular Drop; many of the team members from the DigiPen Institute of Technology who worked on Narbacular Drop were hired by Valve for the creation of Portal.