(Vocals, songwriter, guitar, b. 1936) Hall had his own band, The Kentucky Travelers, by the time he was 16. He worked as a commercial DJ and for armed-forces radio in Germany between 1957 and 1961, moving to Nashville in 1964. Hall’s career changed overnight in 1968 when Jeannie C. Riley took his song, ‘Harper ...
(A’-dam de la Al) c. 1250–1300 French Trouvère Adam de la Halle appears as something of a Janus figure at the end of the thirteenth century, at once looking back to his forebears and forwards into the fourteenth century and beyond, and he composed works in amost every genre of the period, including monophonic and polyphonic songs and ...
(To-mas’ Loo-es’ da Vik-tôr’-ya) 1548–1611 Spanish composer After training as a choirboy at Avila Cathedral, Victoria spent his early adult life in Rome, principally at the Jesuit Collegio Germanico, as both pupil and teacher. He returned to Spain permanently in the 1580s, where he became the chaplain to Philip II’s sister, Maria; he remained there as organist ...
Driven by a fierce intelligence, a relentless pursuit of social justice and a wide-ranging taste in sounds and songs, Tom Morello (b. 1964) was the driving force behind the bands Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave. Morello has won Grammys and performed around the world inspiring and uniting people with music. Known for innovative guitar solos and varied, ...
A crucial figure in New York’s late 1970s new-wave scene, Tom Verlaine (b. 1949) was born Thomas Miller in New Jersey. At an early age, he learned piano before switching to saxophone, inspired by John Coltrane. He took up the guitar in his teens and began forging his own style, searching for new ways of expressing himself ...
(To-ma’-zo Al-be-no’-ne) 1671–1751 Italian composer Albinoni considered himself a dilettante, depending for a living neither on the success of his compositions nor on his ability as a performer. Although he was a prolific composer of operas, several of which were performed outside Italy, Albinoni is recognized chiefly for his concertos, the first of which (op. 2, 1700) ...
There have always been avant-garde artists and bands that take elements of country and fuse them with other musical idioms to make their own highly original, often idiosyncratic styles. Many of these artists also address controversial issues that are taboo in the politically correct country mainstream. It was the late-1960s and early 1970s, when America’s anti-war ‘alternative’ sub-culture was ...
Dancehall reggae is a vivid example of how the music perpetually reinvents itself to refresh its rebel spirit and to keep itself relevant to its primary audience: downtown Kingston (both spiritually as well as geographically). it began to appear on the sound systems at the beginning of the 1980s, when roots reggae had reached a world stage through the likes ...
During its golden years, music hall rivalled European cabaret and American vaudeville. But music hall performers were bawdier than their cabaret counterparts, indulging in more boisterous banter with audiences than their American cousins. It was singalong fun, sprinkled with lewd humour. The term first entered common usage in 1848, when the Surrey Music Hall opened in London. ...
(To-ma’-zo Tra-ât’-te) 1727–79 Italian composer Trained in Naples, Traetta began his career as an opera composer there and in Rome. He was appointed to the Parma court in 1758, where his first few operas included two based on translations of texts used by Rameau, so bringing French structure into Italian opera (Ippolito ed Aricia, 1759; I tintaridi, ...
(Arnst Ta’-o-dôr A-ma-da’-oos Hof’-man) 1776–1822 German writer and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann’s wide-ranging talents were the source of great inspiration throughout the nineteenth century, and composers who drew on his stories include Schumann (Kreisleriana) and Offenbach (Les contes d’Hoffmann). He was also an astute and perceptive critic, and his review in 1810 of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is justly famous. ...
If any city could be cited as epitomizing the sense of decline and despair in the late nineteenth century it would be Vienna. Heartland of the oldest existing European empire, its shift from the liberalism of the 1840s towards the political conservatism of the 1890s onwards was typical, as was the inability of its emperor and ruling aristocracy to ...
(Vocals, piano, 1899–1993) Thomas A. Dorsey earned his greatest fame as the ‘Father of Gospel Music’ after leaving his blues career behind in 1932, but in his early days he was an important blues performer, songwriter, arranger and studio musician. In his youth in ragtime-era Atlanta and in Chicago from 1916, Dorsey developed his piano-playing ...
(Vocals, guitar, c. 1896–1956) Johnson was a highly influential early blues artist due to the impact of his three 1928 records for Victor, which earned him a niche as Mississippi’s first black recording star. Johnson recorded only three more 78s after that, for Paramount, plus a few unissued sides, but the songs he recorded for ...
(Clarinet, 1901–67) Raised in a musical family (his father Edward also played clarinet), Hall played around New Orleans during the early 1920s before departing to New York in 1928 to work with Alonzo Ross. He worked with Claude Hopkins, Lucky Millinder, Joe Sullivan and Zutty Singleton in the 1930s; with Teddy Wilson and Eddie Condon through the 1940s; ...
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David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
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