Todd Edwards

Todd Edwards (born December 9, 1972) is an American house and garage producer and Grammy winner. He currently resides in Los Angeles. With remixes numbering in the hundreds, some of the artists Edwards has remixed include Wildchild, St. Germain, Benjamin Diamond, Justice, Klaxons and Dimitri From Paris. Edwards co-produced and performed vocals on the Daft Punk song "Face to Face" from the album Discovery. Edwards worked again with Daft Punk, co-writing, co-producing and contributing vocals to the song, "Fragments of Time" off of their 2013 album, Random Access Memories, for which he won a Grammy. Much like his solo albums, his remixes make use of a complex vocal sampling technique, which in some cases renders the original track almost unrecognizable.

History

Todd Edwards began his musical career around 1992. He employs vocal reconstruction techniques to his songs, creating a unique vocal collage set to a four-on-the-floor beat. Marc "MK" Kinchen, who is primarily responsible for pioneering this technique, is one of Edwards's influences.

Alabama

Alabama (ⁱ/ˌæləˈbæmə/) is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama is the 30th-most extensive and the 24th-most populous of the 50 United States. At 1,300 miles (2,100 km), Alabama has one of the longest navigable inland waterways in the nation.

From the American Civil War until World War II, Alabama, like many states in the South, suffered economic hardship, in part because of continued dependence on agriculture. Despite the growth of major industries and urban centers, White rural interests dominated the state legislature from 1901 to the 1960s, as it did not regularly reapportion the legislature from 1901 to 1961; urban interests and African Americans were markedly under-represented. African Americans and poor whites were essentially disenfranchised altogether by the state constitution of 1901, a status that continued into the mid-1960s before being alleviated by federal legislation. Exclusion of minorities continued under at-large voting systems in most counties; some changes were made through a series of omnibus court cases in the late 1980s to establish different electoral systems.

Joe Marsala

Joe Marsala (January 4, 1907 – March 4, 1978) was an Italian-American jazz clarinetist and songwriter, born and initially based in Chicago, Marsala moved to New York City in 1933 at the request of Wingy Manone. It was in NYC that Joe found his greatest success as the leader of the 1936 band that entered the Hickory House on 52nd Street. He remained there as leader for ten years.

Early career

Primarily self-taught, Joe and his brother Marty (trumpet) hung out in the early 1920s behind the clubs on the south side of Chicago listening to and absorbing the music called jazz. He was active during the big band era though he preferred the smaller combos of six or seven in which each member could really swing. Marsala is notable as one of the early employers of drummers Buddy Rich and Shelly Manne, jazz harpist Adele Girard whom he later married,guitarist Charlie Byrd, pianist Gene DiNovi and trumpeter Neal Hefti. Other early band members were trumpeter brother Marty, pianist Joe Bushkin, guitarists Eddie Condon, Jack Lemaire, Carmen Mastren, and bassist Artie Shapiro. Jazz critic and pianistLeonard Feather, among others, gives him a good deal of credit for breaking down race segregation in jazz when he hired trumpeter Henry,"Red" Allen in 1936. In the early 1940s Marsala invited many fine African American musicians to sit in on his Sunday jam sessions at the Hickory House, trumpeter Clarence"Hot Lips"Page, saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, drummer Zutty Singleton, and pianist Fats Waller were a few. Marsala's earliest friendships in Chicago from neighbors to the back alleys of the south side to his earliest recording sessions were peopled with African Americans whom he respected as the first and finest of jazz musicians. Hiring and inviting these musicians to display their talents with his band was just something that came naturally to Joe, it wasn't done for effect or to impress.

M. J. Cole

M. J. Cole (born Matthew James Firth Coleman, 9 August 1973) is an English house and UK garage producer, writer and remixer.

Career

Born in London, England, in his youth, Cole was classically trained on the oboe and piano, and won scholarships to both the Royal College of Music Junior Department and City Of London School.

Having graduated from City University, Cole began at respected drum ‘n’ bass label, SOUR, as a tape operator and sound engineer to the likes of Freq Nasty and Ed Rush. It was working on Ramsey & Fen’s 2-step remixes for Kim Mazelle, however, that gave him the garage bug.

From there, Cole penned and produced Sincere in 1998 using a sampler and Atari, which was eventually picked up by Pete Tong and AM:PM and became one of the earliest garage records to break into the UK Top 40.

He signed on Gilles Peterson’s Takin’ Loud label where in 2000 he produced his first album, also called Sincere, which earned him two Top 15 singles, a prestigious Mercury Music Prize nomination, Brit Award nomination and beat Dr Dre to win MOBO's Best Producer award in 2001. He received a Silver Disc for UK sales in excess of 60,000 copies. Cole formed a live band to accompany his Sincere album performing on Jools Holland’s Later Show as well as TOTP, CDUK, The Chart Show, Mercury Music Prize and the MOBO Awards. In 2003, Cole followed Sincere with his Cut To The Chase album, also released via Talkin’ Loud.

2-step garage

2-step garage, or simply 2-step, is a typically English genre of modern electronic music and a relatively popular subgenre of UK garage.

Characteristics

One of the primary characteristics of the 2-step sound – the term being coined to describe "a general rubric for all kinds of jittery, irregular rhythms that don't conform to garage's traditional four-on-the-floor pulse" – is that the rhythm lacks the kick drum pattern found in many other styles of electronic music with a regular four-on-the-floor beat. A typical 2-step drum pattern features beat-skipping kick drums, with a shuffled rhythm or the use of triplets applied to other elements of the percussion, creating a "lurching, falter-funk feel", and resulting in a beat distinctly different from that present in other house or techno. Although tracks with only two kick drum beats to a bar are perceived as being slower than the traditional four-on-the-floor beat, the listener's interest is maintained by the introduction of unusual snare placements and accents in the drum patterns, or scattered rimshots and woodblocks, as well as syncopated basslines and the percussive use of other instruments such as pads and strings.