Creed Taylor

Creed Taylor (born May 13, 1929) is an American record producer, best known for his work with CTI Records, which he founded in 1968. His career also included work at Bethlehem Records, ABC-Paramount, Verve, and A&M Records. He is widely acknowledged for bringing major bossa nova talent from Brazil (Antonio Carlos Jobim, João and Astrud Gilberto, among others) to record in the U.S. in the 1960s.

Biography

Early work

Taylor was born and spent his childhood in Bedford, Virginia, where he played trumpet in the high school marching band and symphony orchestra. Although he grew up surrounded by country music and bluegrass, he gravitated more toward the sounds of jazz, citing Dizzy Gillespie as a source of inspiration during his high school years. Taylor recalls spending many evenings beside a small radio, listening to Symphony Sid's live broadcasts from Birdland in New York City.

After high school, Taylor completed an undergraduate degree in psychology from Duke University in 1951 while actively performing with the student jazz ensembles the Duke Ambassadors and the Five Dukes. Taylor credits Duke’s strong tradition of student-led jazz ensembles, and Les Brown's association with Duke in particular, as initially drawing him to the university. As he recalls, "The reason I went to Duke was from hearing Les Brown and all the history of the bands who went through Duke. This was really a great jazz band, . . . and the book was handed down from one class to the next, you had to audition and all the best players who came to Duke got in the band. . . . I had a ball when I was there." After graduating from Duke, Taylor spent two years in the Marines before returning to Duke for a year of graduate study.

The Creed

The Creed is the eighth album released by Christian vocal group Avalon, their fifth studio project. It is the first Avalon album to include Greg Long (group member Janna Long's husband), who replaced Michael Passons after his unexpected departure in mid-2003. The Creed debuted and peaked at #104 on the Billboard 200 chart for the week of March 13, 2004, and to date has spent a total of eight weeks there. It also made an appearance on Billboard's Christian Albums chart, its highest ranking #4, also for the week of March 13, 2004. On the Christian Albums chart, it spent a total of nineteen weeks. The project was unable to produce a No. 1 radio single, a rare occurrence in the group's successful career. However, lead single "All" did manage to peak at #2 on Radio & Records' Christian AC chart and spent a total of eight weeks in the chart's top five. It also made chart positions in all three major Christian formats—AC, CHR, and Inspirational.The Creed contains the track "Overjoyed", lifted from Janna Long's self-titled solo album.

Kenyon Hopkins

Kenyon Hopkins (January 15, 1912 – April 7, 1983) was an American composer who composed many film scores in a jazz idiom. He was once called "one of jazz's great composers and arrangers."

Biography

Born in Coffeyville, Kansas, Hopkins composed various orchestral works, including two symphonies, the Symphony in Two Movements, Town and County Dances for chamber orchestra, and the jazz ballet Rooms for Anna Sokolow.

He recorded several albums for ABC Paramount Records, Cadence Records, Capitol Records, and Verve Records during the 1960s. Many of his soundtrack recordings were released on LP, including that for the 1956 film Baby Doll, which was re-released on CD.

Hopkins died in Princeton, New Jersey at the age of 71.

Discography

Creed

A creed (also confession, symbol, or statement of faith) is a statement of the shared beliefs of a religious community in the form of a fixed formula summarizing core tenets.

One of the most widely used creeds in Christianity is the Nicene Creed, first formulated in AD 325 at the First Council of Nicaea. It was based on Christian understanding of the Canonical Gospels, the letters of the New Testament and to a lesser extent the Old Testament. Affirmation of this creed, which describes the Trinity, is generally taken as a fundamental test of orthodoxy for most Christian denominations. The Apostles' Creed is also broadly accepted. Some Christian denominations and other groups have rejected the authority of those creeds.

Muslims declare the shahada, or testimony: "I bear witness that there is no god but (the One) God (Allah), and I bear witness that Muhammad is God's messenger."

Whether Judaism is creedal has been a point of some controversy. Although some say Judaism is noncreedal in nature, others say it recognizes a single creed, the Shema Yisrael, which begins: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one."

Assassin's Creed

Assassin's Creed is an action-adventure video game series that consists of nine main games and a number of supporting materials, as of 2015. The games have appeared on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Nintendo DS, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation Vita, iOS, HP webOS,Android, Nokia Symbian Windows Phone platforms, and the Wii U.

The games are set in a fictional history of real world events and follows the centuries-old struggle between the Assassins, who fight for peace with free will, and the Templars, who desire peace through control. The main games in the franchise were developed by Ubisoft Montreal for the single player and Ubisoft Annecy for the multiplayer, with the handheld titles developed by Gameloft and Gryptonite Studios, with additional development by Ubisoft Montreal. The series has been well received by the public and critics, and has sold over 73 million copies as of April 2014, becoming Ubisoft's best selling franchise. The series took inspiration from the novel Alamut by the Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol, while building upon concepts from the Prince of Persia series.