1.
Norah Jones
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Norah Jones is an American singer, songwriter and actress. Throughout her career, Jones has won awards and has sold more than 50 million albums worldwide. Billboard named her the top jazz artist of the 2000–2009 decade and she has won nine Grammy Awards and was 60th on Billboard magazines artists of the 2000–2009 decade chart. In 2002, Jones launched her music career with the release of Come Away with Me. It was certified diamond, selling over 26 million copies, the record earned Jones five Grammy Awards, including the Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best New Artist. They were also well received by critics. Jones fifth studio album, Little Broken Hearts, was released on April 27,2012, Jones is the daughter of Indian sitar player and composer Ravi Shankar, and half-sister of fellow musician Anoushka Shankar. Jones was born Geetali Norah Shankar on March 30,1979 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York, to American concert producer Sue Jones, after her parents separated in 1986, Shankar lived with her mother, growing up in Grapevine, Texas. She attended Colleyville Middle School and Grapevine High School before transferring to Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing, while in high school, she sang in the school choir, participated in band, and played the alto saxophone. At the age of sixteen, with parents consent, she officially changed her name to Norah Jones. Jones always had an affinity for the music of Bill Evans and Billie Holiday and she once said, My mom had this eight-album Billie Holiday set, I picked out one disc that I liked and played that over and over again. As a child, Jones began singing in church and also took piano and she considers herself spiritual and appreciates the rituals of her church but does not consider herself deeply religious. She attended Interlochen Center for the Arts during the summers, while at high school, she won the Down Beat Student Music Awards for Best Jazz Vocalist and Best Original Composition. Jones attended the University of North Texas, where she majored in jazz piano, during this time, she had a chance meeting with future collaborator Jesse Harris. She gave a ride to a band playing at the university whose members happened to be friends of Harris and he was on a cross-country road-trip with friend and future Little Willies member Richard Julian, and stopped to see the band play. After meeting Jones, Harris started sending her lead sheets of his songs, in 1999, Jones left Texas for New York City. Less than a later, she started a band with Harris. As artist Peter Malick states in the notes, I started looking for a singer who could record for me
2.
Jazz
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Jazz is a music genre that originated amongst African Americans in New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in Blues and Ragtime. Since the 1920s jazz age, jazz has become recognized as a form of musical expression. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms, Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the Black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience, intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as one of Americas original art forms. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging musicians music which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed in the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments. In the early 1980s, a form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin, the question of the origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to jasm, a term dating back to 1860 meaning pep. The use of the word in a context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a context in New Orleans was in a November 14,1916 Times-Picayune article about jas bands. In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying, When Broadway picked it up. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, the American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century. Jazz has proved to be difficult to define, since it encompasses such a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, in the opinion of Robert Christgau, most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz. As Duke Ellington, one of jazzs most famous figures, said, although jazz is considered highly difficult to define, at least in part because it contains so many varied subgenres, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements
3.
Rock music
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It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by blues, rhythm and blues and country music. Rock music also drew strongly on a number of genres such as electric blues and folk. Musically, rock has centered on the guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass guitar. Typically, rock is song-based music usually with a 4/4 time signature using a verse-chorus form, like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis. Punk was an influence into the 1980s on the subsequent development of subgenres, including new wave, post-punk. From the 1990s alternative rock began to rock music and break through into the mainstream in the form of grunge, Britpop. Similarly, 1970s punk culture spawned the visually distinctive goth and emo subcultures and this trio of instruments has often been complemented by the inclusion of other instruments, particularly keyboards such as the piano, Hammond organ and synthesizers. The basic rock instrumentation was adapted from the blues band instrumentation. A group of musicians performing rock music is termed a rock band or rock group, Rock music is traditionally built on a foundation of simple unsyncopated rhythms in a 4/4 meter, with a repetitive snare drum back beat on beats two and four. Melodies are often derived from older musical modes, including the Dorian and Mixolydian, harmonies range from the common triad to parallel fourths and fifths and dissonant harmonic progressions. Critics have stressed the eclecticism and stylistic diversity of rock, because of its complex history and tendency to borrow from other musical and cultural forms, it has been argued that it is impossible to bind rock music to a rigidly delineated musical definition. These themes were inherited from a variety of sources, including the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition, folk music and rhythm, as a result, it has been seen as articulating the concerns of this group in both style and lyrics. Christgau, writing in 1972, said in spite of some exceptions, rock and roll usually implies an identification of male sexuality, according to Simon Frith rock was something more than pop, something more than rock and roll. Rock musicians combined an emphasis on skill and technique with the concept of art as artistic expression, original. The foundations of music are in rock and roll, which originated in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Its immediate origins lay in a melding of various musical genres of the time, including rhythm and blues and gospel music, with country. In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music for a multi-racial audience, debate surrounds which record should be considered the first rock and roll record. Other artists with rock and roll hits included Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis
4.
Los Angeles Times
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The Los Angeles Times, commonly referred to as the Times or LA Times, is a paid daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008, the Times is owned by tronc. The Times was first published on December 4,1881, as the Los Angeles Daily Times under the direction of Nathan Cole Jr. and it was first printed at the Mirror printing plant, owned by Jesse Yarnell and T. J. Unable to pay the bill, Cole and Gardiner turned the paper over to the Mirror Company. Mathes had joined the firm, and it was at his insistence that the Times continued publication, in July 1882, Harrison Gray Otis moved from Santa Barbara to become the papers editor. Otis made the Times a financial success, in an era where newspapers were driven by party politics, the Times was directed at Republican readers. As was typical of newspapers of the time, the Times would sit on stories for several days, historian Kevin Starr wrote that Otis was a businessman capable of manipulating the entire apparatus of politics and public opinion for his own enrichment. Otiss editorial policy was based on civic boosterism, extolling the virtues of Los Angeles, the efforts of the Times to fight local unions led to the October 1,1910 bombing of its headquarters, killing twenty-one people. Two union leaders, James and Joseph McNamara, were charged, the American Federation of Labor hired noted trial attorney Clarence Darrow to represent the brothers, who eventually pleaded guilty. Upon Otiss death in 1917, his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, Harry Chandler was succeeded in 1944 by his son, Norman Chandler, who ran the paper during the rapid growth of post-war Los Angeles. Family members are buried at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery near Paramount Studios, the site also includes a memorial to the Times Building bombing victims. The fourth generation of family publishers, Otis Chandler, held that position from 1960 to 1980, Otis Chandler sought legitimacy and recognition for his familys paper, often forgotten in the power centers of the Northeastern United States due to its geographic and cultural distance. He sought to remake the paper in the model of the nations most respected newspapers, notably The New York Times, believing that the newsroom was the heartbeat of the business, Otis Chandler increased the size and pay of the reporting staff and expanded its national and international reporting. In 1962, the paper joined with the Washington Post to form the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service to syndicate articles from both papers for news organizations. During the 1960s, the paper won four Pulitzer Prizes, more than its previous nine decades combined, eventually the coupon-clipping branches realized that they could make more money investing in something other than newspapers. Under their pressure the companies went public, or split apart, thats the pattern followed over more than a century by the Los Angeles Times under the Chandler family. The papers early history and subsequent transformation was chronicled in an unauthorized history Thinking Big and it has also been the whole or partial subject of nearly thirty dissertations in communications or social science in the past four decades. In 2000, the Tribune Company acquired the Times, placing the paper in co-ownership with then-WB -affiliated KTLA, which Tribune acquired in 1985
5.
Ray Charles
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Ray Charles Robinson, known professionally as Ray Charles, was an American singer-songwriter, musician, and composer. Among friends and fellow musicians he preferred being called Brother Ray and he was often referred to as The Genius. Charles was blind from the age of seven and he pioneered the genre of soul music during the 1950s by combining blues, rhythm and blues, and gospel styles into the music he recorded for Atlantic Records. He also contributed to the integration of music, rhythm and blues and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records. While he was with ABC, Charles became one of the first black musicians to be granted artistic control by a record company. Charles cited Nat King Cole as an influence, but his music was also influenced by country, jazz, blues. In the late forties, he became friends with Quincy Jones and their friendship would last till the end of Charless life. Frank Sinatra called him the true genius in show business. In 2002, Rolling Stone ranked Charles number ten on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, Billy Joel observed, This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley. Robinson was the son of Bailey Robinson, a laborer, at the time, she was a teenage orphan making a living as a sharecropper. They lived in Greenville, Florida, with Robinsons mother and his wife, the Robinson family had informally adopted Aretha, and she became known as Aretha Robinson. When she, scandalously, became pregnant by Bailey, she briefly left Greenville late in the summer of 1930 to be family members in Albany, Georgia. After that, mother and child returned to Greenville, and Aretha and he was deeply devoted to his mother and later recalled her perseverance, self-sufficiency, and pride as guiding lights in his life. His father abandoned the family, left Greenville, and took another wife elsewhere, in his early years, Charles showed a fondness about mechanical objects and would often watch his neighbors working on their cars and farm machinery. Charles and his mother were always welcome at the Red Wing Cafe, pitman would also care for Rays brother George, to take the burden off Aretha. George drowned in Arethas laundry tub when he was four years old, Charles started to lose his sight at the age of four or five, and was completely blind by the age of seven, apparently as a result of glaucoma. Destitute, uneducated and still mourning the loss of George, Aretha used her connections in the community to find a school that would accept a blind African-American student. Despite his initial protest, Charles attended school at the Florida School for the Deaf, Charles further developed his musical talent at school, and was taught to play the classical piano music of J. S
6.
Foo Fighters
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Foo Fighters is an American rock band, formed in Seattle, Washington in 1994. It was founded by Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl as a project following the dissolution of Nirvana after the death of Kurt Cobain. The group got its name from the UFOs and various phenomena that were reported by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II. The band began with performances in Portland, Oregon, Goldsmith quit during the recording of the groups second album, The Colour and the Shape, when most of the drum parts were re-recorded by Grohl himself. Smears departure followed soon afterward, though he would rejoin them in 2005 and they were replaced by Taylor Hawkins and Franz Stahl, respectively, although Stahl was fired before the recording of the groups third album, There Is Nothing Left to Lose. The band briefly continued as a trio until Chris Shiflett joined as the lead guitarist after the completion of There Is Nothing Left to Lose. The band released its album, One by One, in 2002. The group followed that release with the two-disc In Your Honor, Foo Fighters released its sixth album, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, in 2007. The bands seventh album, Wasting Light, produced by Butch Vig was released in 2011. In November 2014, the eighth studio album, Sonic Highways, was released as an accompanying soundtrack to the Grohl-directed 2014 miniseries of the same name. Over the course of the career, four of its albums have won Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album. As of 2015, the eight albums have sold 12 million copies in the U. S. and 30 million worldwide. Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl joined the grunge group Nirvana as its drummer in 1990, during tours, he took a guitar with him and wrote songs. Grohl held back these songs from the rest of the band, he said in 1997, I was in awe of, I thought it was best that I kept my songs to myself. Grohl occasionally booked studio time to record demos and covers of songs he liked, frontman Kurt Cobain was found dead in his Seattle home on April 8,1994, and Nirvana subsequently disbanded. Grohl received offers to work with artists, press rumors indicated he might be joining Pearl Jam and he almost accepted a permanent position as drummer in Tom Petty. Ultimately Grohl declined and instead entered Robert Lang Studios in October 1994 to record fifteen of the forty songs he had written. With the exception of a part on X-Static, played by Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs, Dave Grohl played every instrument
7.
Willie Nelson
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Willie Hugh Nelson is an American musician, singer, songwriter, author, poet, actor, and activist. He was one of the figures of outlaw country, a subgenre of country music that developed in the late 1960s as a reaction to the conservative restrictions of the Nashville sound. Nelson has acted in over 30 films, co-authored several books, and has involved in activism for the use of biofuels. Born during the Great Depression, and raised by his grandparents, Nelson wrote his first song at age seven, during high school, he toured locally with the Bohemian Polka as their lead singer and guitar player. After graduating from school in 1950, he joined the Air Force but was later discharged due to back problems. After his return, Nelson attended Baylor University for two years but dropped out because he was succeeding in music, during this time, he worked as a disc jockey in Texas radio stations and a singer in Honky-tonks. Nelson moved to Vancouver, Washington, where he wrote Family Bible, in 1958, he moved to Houston, Texas after signing a contract with D Records. He sang at the Esquire Ballroom weekly and he worked as a disk jockey, during that time, he wrote songs that would become country standards, including Funny How Time Slips Away, Hello Walls, Pretty Paper, and Crazy. In 1960 he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and later signed a contract with Pamper Music which allowed him to join Ray Prices band as a bassist. In 1962, he recorded his first album. And Then I Wrote, due to this success, Nelson signed in 1964 with RCA Victor and joined the Grand Ole Opry the following year. After mid-chart hits in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Nelson retired in 1972 and moved to Austin, the ongoing music scene of Austin motivated Nelson to return from retirement, performing frequently at the Armadillo World Headquarters. In 1973, after signing with Atlantic Records, Nelson turned to country, including albums such as Shotgun Willie. In 1975, he switched to Columbia Records, where he recorded the acclaimed album. The same year, he recorded another outlaw country album, Wanted, the Outlaws, along with Waylon Jennings, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser. In 1990, Nelsons assets were seized by the Internal Revenue Service, the difficulty of paying his outstanding debt was aggravated by weak investments he had made during the 1980s. In 1992, Nelson released The IRS Tapes, Wholl Buy My Memories, the profits of the double album—destined to the IRS—and the auction of Nelsons assets cleared his debt. During the 1990s and 2000s, Nelson continued touring extensively, reviews ranged from positive to mixed. He explored genres such as reggae, blues, jazz, Nelson made his first movie appearance in the 1979 film The Electric Horseman, followed by other appearances in movies and on television
8.
Outkast
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Outkast is an American hip hop duo formed in 1991, in East Point, Atlanta, Georgia, composed of Atlanta-based rappers André André3000 Benjamin and Antwan Big Boi Patton. Benjamin and Patton formed the group as high school students in 1991, OutKast released their debut album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik in 1994, which gained popularity after the single Players Ball reached number one on the Billboard Hot Rap Tracks chart. With successive releases including ATLiens and Aquemini, the duo developed their sound, experimenting with a variety of styles. In 2000, Outkast released the critically acclaimed Stankonia, which included the singles Ms. Jackson, in 2003, the duo released the double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which featured the number one singles Hey Ya. and The Way You Move. The album would win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year and was certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America. Outkast next released the soundtrack for the 2006 musical film Idlewild, in 2007, the duo went on hiatus and both members have since pursued solo careers. In 2014, Outkast reunited to celebrate their 20th anniversary by performing at more than 40 festivals worldwide in 2014, the duo is one of the most successful hip-hop groups of all time, having received six Grammy Awards. Between six studio albums and a greatest hits release, Outkast has sold over 25 million records, meanwhile, they have garnered widespread critical acclaim, with publications such as Rolling Stone and Pitchfork Media listing albums such as Aquemini and Stankonia among the best of their era. Benjamin and Patton met in 1991 at the Lenox Square shopping mall when they were sixteen years old. The two lived in the East Point section of Atlanta and attended Tri-Cities High School, an arts based academy, during school, Benjamin and Patton participated in rap battles in the cafeteria. Benjamins parents were divorced and he was living with his father, meanwhile, Patton had to move with his four brothers and six sisters from Savannah to Atlanta. Benjamin and Patton eventually teamed up and were pursued by Organized Noize, OutKast, Organized Noize, and schoolmates Goodie Mob formed the nucleus of the Dungeon Family organization. During the holiday season of 1993, they released their first single, the songs funky style, much of it accomplished with live instrumentation, was a hit with audiences. Players Ball hit number-one on the Billboard Hot Rap Tracks chart, Players Ball also topped the R&B charts for six weeks. Their debut album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, was issued on April 26,1994 and this initial effort is credited with laying the foundation for southern hip hop and is considered a classic by many. Every track on Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik was produced by Organized Noize and featured members of the Dungeon Family. Follow-up singles included the track and Git Up Git Out. OutKast won Best New Rap Group at the Source Awards in 1995, in the same year, the group contributed Benz or a Beamer to the popular New Jersey Drive soundtrack
9.
Gillian Welch
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Gillian Howard Welch is an American singer-songwriter. She performs with her partner, guitarist David Rawlings. Welch and Rawlings have released five acclaimed albums under the name Gillian Welch. Their 1996 debut, Revival, and the 2001 release Time and their 2003 album, Soul Journey, introduced electric guitar, drums and a more upbeat sound to their body of work. After a gap of eight years, they released their studio album, The Harrow & The Harvest, in 2011. Welch was associate producer and performed on two songs of the O Brother, Where Art Thou. soundtrack, an album that won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2002. Welch has collaborated and recorded with distinguished musicians such as Alison Krauss, Ryan Adams, Jay Farrar, Emmylou Harris, the Decemberists, and Ani DiFranco. Gillian Howard Welch was born on October 2,1967 in New York City and her biological mother was a freshman in college, and her father was a musician visiting New York City. Welch has speculated that her father could have been one of her favorite musicians. Alec Wilkinson of The New Yorker stated that from an address they had been given, may have grown up in the mountains of North Carolina. When Welch was three, her parents moved to Los Angeles to write music for The Carol Burnett Show. They also appeared on The Tonight Show, as a youngster, Welch was introduced to the music of American folk singers Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Carter Family. She performed folk songs with her peers at the Westland Elementary School in Los Angeles, Welch later attended Crossroads School, a high school in Santa Monica, California. While in high school, a television program featured her as a student who excelled at everything she did. While a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Welch played bass in a goth band and it was just as powerful as the electric stuff, and it was songs Id grown up singing. All of a sudden Id found my music, after graduating from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in photography, Welch attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she majored in songwriting. During her two years studying at Berklee, Welch gained confidence as a performer, Welch met her music partner David Rawlings at a successful audition for Berklees only country band. Upon finishing college in 1992, Welch and Rawlings moved to Nashville and she recalled, I looked at my record collection and saw that all the music I loved had been made in Nashville—Bill Monroe, Dylan, the Stanley Brothers, Neil Young—so I moved there
10.
Dolly Parton
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After achieving success as a songwriter for others, Dolly Parton made her album debut in 1967, with her album Hello, Im Dolly. However, in the new millennium, Parton achieved commercial success again and has released albums on independent labels since 2000, including albums on her own label, Parton is the most honored female country performer of all time. Achieving 25 RIAA certified Gold, Platinum, and Multi-Platinum awards, she has had 25 songs reach No.1 on the Billboard country music charts, a record for a female artist. She has 41 career top 10 country albums, a record for any artist, all-inclusive sales of singles, albums, hits collections, and digital downloads during her career have topped 100 million worldwide. Parton has received 46 Grammy nominations, in 1999, Parton was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. She has composed over 3,000 songs, notably I Will Always Love You, Jolene, Coat of Many Colors and she is also one of the few to have received at least one nomination from the Academy Awards, Grammy Awards, Tony Awards, and Emmy Awards. As an actress, she starred in such as 9 to 5, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Rhinestone. Parton was born in Sevier County, Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children of Robert Lee Parton, a farmer and construction worker, Partons middle name comes from her maternal great-great grandmother, Rebecca Whitted. She has described her family as being dirt poor, Partons father paid the doctor who helped deliver her with a bag of oatmeal. She outlined her familys poverty in her early songs Coat of Many Colors and they lived in a rustic, one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, just north of the Greenbrier Valley of the Great Smoky Mountains, a predominantly Pentecostal area. Music played an important role in her early life and she was brought up in the Church of God, the church her grandfather, Jake Robert Owens pastored. Her earliest public performances were in the church, beginning at age six, at seven, she started playing a homemade guitar. When she was eight years old, her uncle bought her first real guitar, Parton began performing as a child, singing on local radio and television programs in the East Tennessee area. By ten, she was appearing on The Cas Walker Show on both WIVK Radio and WBIR-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, the day after she graduated from high school in 1964, she moved to Nashville. Her songs were recorded by other artists during this period, including Kitty Wells. She signed with Monument Records in 1965, at 19, where she was pitched as a bubblegum pop singer. She released a string of singles, but the one that charted, Happy, Happy Birthday Baby. Although she expressed a desire to record country material, Monument resisted, after her composition, Put It Off Until Tomorrow, as recorded by Bill Phillips, went to number six on the country chart in 1966, the label relented and allowed her to record country
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