Kurt Edelhagen

Kurt Edelhagen (5 June 1920 – 8 February 1982) was a major European big band leader throughout the 1950s.

Edelhagen was born in Herne, Germany. After studying clarinet and piano in Essen, he set up his multicultural big band, which over the years would include many jazz musicians who were well known in Europe, including Francy Boland (who would later set up his own), Ron Simmonds Charly Antolini, Jiggs Whigham, Claus Ogerman, Jimmy Deuchar, Duško Gojković, Rick Kiefer, Ronnie Stephenson, Gerd Dudek, Wilton Gaynair, Derek Humble, Shake Keane and Tubby Hayes.

Closely associated with the radio station Südwestfunk (SWF), in 1953 Edelhagen took on Caterina Valente as a singer for his big band, and together they recorded her first album that same year. In 1957 Popular singer Tony Sandler recorded several songs, such as "Ik weet wat je vraagt", with his orchestra for the POLYDOR label. In 1957 Kurt Edelhagen moved to Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne where he led the station's big band until his contract ran out in 1972.

Greatest hits album

A greatest hits album, sometimes called a "best of" album or a catalog album, is a compilation of songs by a particular artist or band. Most often the track list contains previously released recordings with a high degree of notability. However, to increase the appeal, especially to people who already own the original release, it is common to include remixes and/or alternate takes of popular songs; even new material (previously unreleased). At times a greatest hits compilation is the original release for songs that have themselves been released as a single and charted successfully.

Notable compilations

Madonna's The Immaculate Collection is the best selling greatest hits compilation by a solo artist; all of the songs on it are presented in different versions than the original hit versions. The Eagles' Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) is the best selling greatest hits compilation by a group and also one of the ten best selling albums in history. Greatest hits albums are typically produced after an artist has had enough successful songs to fill out an album release. Some artists, such as Mariah Carey, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Kenny Rogers, Aerosmith, Kiss, U2, Dolly Parton, Journey, Los Tigres del Norte, Queen, Kylie Minogue and Billy Joel, have released multiple greatest hits albums through their long careers. Some greatest hits albums are released only at the end of the artist or group's career. For example, My Chemical Romance released a greatest hits album after they disbanded. Other artists, like Eminem have released hits albums in the center of their success. He released Curtain Call: The Hits in 2005 and then Shady XV as a compilation album in 2014.

UTF-8

UTF-8 is a character encoding capable of encoding all possible characters, or code points, in Unicode.

The encoding is variable-length and uses 8-bit code units. It was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII, and to avoid the complications of endianness and byte order marks in the alternative UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings. The name is derived from: Universal Coded Character Set + Transformation Format – 8-bit.

UTF-8 is the dominant character encoding for the World Wide Web, accounting for 86.2% of all Web pages in January 2016 (with the most popular East Asian encoding, GB 2312, at 0.9% and Shift JIS at 1.1%). The Internet Mail Consortium (IMC) recommends that all e-mail programs be able to display and create mail using UTF-8, and the W3C recommends UTF-8 as the default encoding in XML and HTML.

UTF-8 encodes each of the 1,112,064 valid code points in the Unicode code space (1,114,112 code points minus 2,048 surrogate code points) using one to four 8-bit bytes (a group of 8 bits is known as an octet in the Unicode Standard). Code points with lower numerical values (i.e., earlier code positions in the Unicode character set, which tend to occur more frequently) are encoded using fewer bytes. The first 128 characters of Unicode, which correspond one-to-one with ASCII, are encoded using a single octet with the same binary value as ASCII, making valid ASCII text valid UTF-8-encoded Unicode as well. And ASCII bytes do not occur when encoding non-ASCII code points into UTF-8, making UTF-8 safe to use within most programming and document languages that interpret certain ASCII characters in a special way, e.g. as end of string.

Wilton Gaynair

Wilton "Bogey" Gaynair (born 11 January 1927 in Kingston, Jamaica – died in Germany 13 February 1995) was a jazz musician, whose primary instrument was the tenor saxophone. He was raised at Kingston’s famous Alpha Boys School, where fellow Jamaican musical legends Joe Harriott, Harold McNair and Don Drummond were also pupils of a similar age.

Career

He began his professional career playing in the clubs of Kingston, backing such notable visitors as George Shearing and Carmen McRae, before travelling to Europe in 1955, deciding to base himself in Germany because of the plentiful live work on offer. He recorded very seldom, only three times as a bandleader in his lifetime. Two of those recordings came during visits to England, 1959’s Blue Bogey on Tempo Records and 1960’s Africa Calling, also recorded for Tempo but unreleased until 2005 on account of that label’s demise.

Soon after recording these sessions, he returned to Germany, where he remained based for the rest of his life. He concentrated on live performance with such bands as the Kurt Edelhagen Radio Orchestra – including playing at the opening ceremony of the 1972 Munich Olympics, also taking much anonymous session work. He was a guest artist on Ali Haurand's Third Eye (LP 1977) but only recorded one more jazz album under his own name, 1982’s Alpharian. Other artists he played with included Gil Evans, Freddie Hubbard, Shirley Bassey, Manhattan Transfer, Horace Parlan, Bob Brookmeyer, Mel Lewis and many others. In September 1983 he suffered a stroke during a concert, and from that time until his death in 1995 he was unable to play the saxophone.

Jiggs Whigham

Jiggs Whigham (born Oliver Haydn Whigham III on 20 August 1943) is an American jazz trombonist living in Europe.

Biography

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he began his professional career at the age of 17, joining the Glenn Miller/Ray McKinley orchestra in 1961. He left that band for Stan Kenton, where he played in the touring "mellophonium" band in 1963, then settled in New York to play commercially.

Frustrated with commercial playing, Whigham migrated to Germany, where he still lives, He taught at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. He played for many years in the big band of Kurt Edelhagen, was a featured soloist in the Bert Kaempfert orchestra, and was also a member of the Peter Herbolzheimer band. He is widely admired by trombonists and other musicians for his fluent and expressive playing, and has produced an extensive discography as a leader, including work with Bill Holman, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Carl Fontana, and many others.

In recent years, Whigham has been musical director of the RIAS (Radio In The American Sector) Big Band in Germany. He is currently conductor of the BBC Big Band in Great Britain and artistic director of the Berlin Jazz Orchestra with singer Marc Secara and is featured on the Berlin Jazz Orchestra albums Update, You're Everything and music DVD (Polydor/Universal) Strangers In Night - The Music Of Bert Kaempfert. He is visiting tutor and artist at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. He is artist-in-residence for the Conn-Selmer company, maker of the King Jiggs Whigham model trombone. He continues to tour worldwide as soloist, conductor, and educator.