Jonn Serrie

Jonn Serrie is an American composer of space music, a genre of ambient electronic music, and New Age music. He has recorded at least 18 albums and worked on projects for Lucasfilm, IMAX Corporation, NASA, the United States Navy, Hayden Planetarium, Expo Seville, and CNN.

Musical career

Serrie has been composing and performing music for planetariums since the early 1980s. His first album, And the Stars Go With You, was in memory of the astronauts lost in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. His second album, Flightpath, contains six songs that commemorate the pre-space-age test pilots of Edwards Air Force Base in the 1950s. Jonn is a pilot with advanced instrument and commercial ratings and flies for the Civil Air Patrol as a search-and-rescue pilot.

Serrie's third album, Tingri, was based on a remote village in Tibet. It was his way of infusing more spiritual and romantic emotion into his music. In so doing, he strayed a bit from his space music roots but without sacrificing his trademark sound. In 1992 and 1994, he made two albums in which he put his earlier planetarium work from the 1980s on CD, on Planetary Chronicles, Volume 1 and Planetary Chronicles, Volume 2. In between, in 1993 and 1995, Serrie composed his own musical science fiction story based on a fictional Century Princess in Midsummer Century and Ixlandia. In 1993, he submitted a song from his planetarium collection called "Soft Landing" to a Various Artists album sponsored largely by Steve Roach, another prominent new age musician. This song is only available on this recording. In 1997, Serrie's first Christmas album Upon a Midnight Clear was released; he rearranged known and less-known Christmas songs from around the world in his unique style. Due to its popularity, Serrie released two more Christmas albums, Yuletides in 2001 and Merrily on High in 2004.

Universal Music Group

Universal Music Group, Inc. (legally known as UMG Recordings, Inc., abbreviated as UMG) is an American-French worldwide music corporation that operates as a subsidiary of Paris-based French media conglomerate Vivendi. It claims to be the largest music corporation in the world. UMG also owns Universal Music Publishing Group, which is cited as the second largest music publishing company in the world. Universal Music Group's global corporate headquarters are in Santa Monica, California, United States.

History

Early history

Universal Music was once the music company attached to film studio Universal Pictures. Its origins go back to the formation of the American branch of Decca Records in 1934. The Decca Record Co. Ltd. of England spun American Decca off in 1939.MCA Inc. merged with American Decca in 1962. The present organization was formed when its parent company Seagram purchased PolyGram in May 1998 and merged it with Universal Music Group in early 1999. However, the name had first appeared in 1996 when MCA Music Entertainment Group was renamed Universal Music Group. The PolyGram acquisition included Deutsche Grammophon which traces its ancestry to Berliner Gramophone making Deutsche Grammophon UMG's oldest unit. UMG's Canadian unit traces its ancestry to a Berliner Gramophone breakaway firm the Compo Company.

Blood, Sweat & Tears

Blood, Sweat & Tears (also known as "BS&T") is a contemporary jazz-rock American music group. They are noted for their combination of brass and rock band instrumentation. The group recorded songs by rock/folk songwriters such as Laura Nyro, James Taylor, the Band, the Rolling Stones, as well as Billie Holiday and Erik Satie. They also incorporated music from Thelonious Monk and Sergei Prokofiev into their arrangements.

They were originally formed in 1967 in New York City. Since their beginnings, the band has gone through numerous iterations with varying personnel and has encompassed a multitude of musical styles. The band is most notable for fusing of rock, blues, pop music, horn arrangements and jazz improvisation into a hybrid that came to be known as "jazz-rock". Unlike "jazz fusion" bands, which tend toward virtuosic displays of instrumental facility and some experimentation with electric instruments, the songs of Blood, Sweat & Tears merged the stylings of rock, pop and R&B/soul music with big band, while also adding elements of 20th Century Classical and small combo jazz traditions.