Charlie Parker
Charles Parker Jr. known as Yardbird and Bird, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Parker was a influential jazz soloist and a leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique and advanced harmonies. Parker was a blazingly fast virtuoso, he introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas including rapid passing chords, new variants of altered chords, chord substitutions, his tone ranged from clean and penetrating to somber. Parker acquired the nickname "Yardbird" early in his career on the road with Jay McShann. This, the shortened form "Bird", continued to be used for the rest of his life, inspiring the titles of a number of Parker compositions, such as "Yardbird Suite", "Ornithology", "Bird Gets the Worm", "Bird of Paradise". Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual rather than just an entertainer. Charles Parker Jr. was born in Kansas City, Kansas at 852 Freeman Avenue, raised in Kansas City, Missouri near Westport and – in high school – near 15th and Olive Street.
He was the only child of Charles Parker and Adelaide "Addie" Bailey, of mixed Choctaw and African American background. He attended Lincoln High School in September 1934, but withdrew in December 1935, just before joining the local musicians' union and to pursue his musical career full-time, his childhood sweetheart and future wife, Rebecca Ruffin, graduated from Lincoln High School in June 1935. Parker began playing the saxophone at age 11, at age 14 he joined his high school band where he studied under Bandmaster Alonzo Lewis, his mother purchased a new alto saxophone around the same time. His father, Charles Sr. was required to travel for work, but provided some musical influence because he was a pianist and singer on the T. O. B. A. Circuit, he became a Pullman waiter or chef on the railways. Parker's mother Addie worked nights at the local Western Union office, his biggest influence at that time was a young trombone player named Robert Simpson, who taught him the basics of improvisation. In the mid-1930s, Parker began to practice diligently.
During this period he mastered improvisation and developed some of the ideas that led to the development of Bebop. In an interview with Paul Desmond, he said that he spent three to four years practicing up to 15 hours a day. Bands led by Count Basie and Bennie Moten influenced Parker, he played with local bands in jazz clubs around Kansas City, where he perfected his technique, with the assistance of Buster Smith, whose dynamic transitions to double and triple time influenced Parker's developing style. In late spring 1936, Parker played at a jam session at the Reno Club in Kansas City, his attempt to improvise failed. This prompted Jo Jones, the drummer for Count Basie's Orchestra, to contemptuously throw a cymbal at his feet as a signal to leave the stage. However, rather than discouraging Parker, the incident caused him to vow to practice harder, turned out to be a seminal moment in the young musician's career when he returned as a new man a year later. Parker proposed to his wife, Rebecca Ruffin, the same year and the two were married on July 25, 1936.
In the fall of 1936, Parker traveled with a band from Kansas City to the Ozarks for the opening of Clarence Musser's Tavern south of Eldon, Missouri. Along the way, the caravan of musicians had a car accident and Parker broke three ribs and fractured his spine; the accident led to Parker's ultimate troubles with pain killers and opioids heroin. Parker struggled with drug use for the rest of his life. Despite his near death experience on the way to the Ozarks in 1936, Parker returned to the area in 1937 where he spent some serious time woodshedding and developing his sound. In 1938 Parker joined pianist Jay McShann's territory band; the band toured other venues of the southwest, as well as Chicago and New York City. Parker made his professional recording debut with McShann's band. In 1939 Parker moved to New York City, he held several other jobs as well. He worked for nine dollars a week as a dishwasher at Jimmie's Chicken Shack, where pianist Art Tatum performed, it was in 1939 in New York that Parker had his musical breakthrough that had begun in 1937 in the Missouri Ozarks.
Playing through the changes on Cherokee, Parker discovered a new musical vocabulary and sound that forever shifted the course of music history. In 1940, he returned to Kansas City to perform with Jay McShann and to attend the funeral of his father, Charles, Sr, he played Fairyland Park in the summer with McShann's band at 75th and Prospect for all-white audiences. The up-side of the summer was his introduction to Dizzy Gillespie by Step Buddy Anderson near 19th and Vine in the summer of 1940. After the summer season at Fairyland, Parker left with McShann's band for gigs in the region. On a trip to Omaha he earned his nickname from McShann and the band after an incident with a chicken and the tour bus. In 1942 Parker left McShann's band and played for one year with Earl Hines, whose band included Dizzy Gillespie, who played with Parker as a duo; this period is undocumented, due to the strike of 1942–1943 by the American Federation of Musicians, during which time few professional recordings were made.
Parker joined a group of young musicians, played in after-hours clubs in Harlem, such as Clark Monroe's Uptown House. These young iconoclasts included Gillespie, pianist Thelonious Monk, guitarist Charlie Christian, drummer Kenny Clarke; the beboppers' attitude was summed up in a famous quotation attributed to Monk by Mary Lou Williams
Ornette Coleman
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was an American jazz saxophonist, violinist and composer. In the 1960s, he was one of the founders of free jazz, a term he invented for his album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, his "Broadway Blues" and "Lonely Woman" have become standards and are cited as important early works in free jazz. His album Sound Grammar received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music. Coleman was born on 1930 in Fort Worth, Texas where he was raised, he attended I. M. Terrell High School, where he participated in band until he was dismissed for improvising during "The Washington Post" march, he began performing R&B and bebop on tenor saxophone and started The Jam Jivers with Prince Lasha and Charles Moffett. Eager to leave town, he accepted a job in 1949 with a Silas Green from New Orleans traveling show and with touring rhythm and blues shows. After a show in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he was assaulted and his saxophone was destroyed, he switched to alto saxophone, which remained his primary instrument, first playing it in New Orleans after the Baton Rouge incident.
He joined the band of Pee Wee Crayton and traveled with them to Los Angeles. He worked including as an elevator operator, while pursuing his music career. In California he found like-minded musicians such as Ed Blackwell, Bobby Bradford, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, Charles Moffett, he recorded his debut album, Something Else!!!! with Cherry, Walter Norris, Don Payne. During the same year he belonged to a quintet led by Paul Bley that performed at a club in New York City. By the time Tomorrow Is the Question! was recorded soon after with Cherry and Haden, the jazz world had been shaken up by Coleman's alien music. Some jazz musicians called him a fraud. In 1959 Atlantic released The Shape of Jazz to Come According to music critic Steve Huey, the album "was a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven't come to grips with." Jazzwise listed it No. 3 on their list of the 100 best jazz albums of all time.
Coleman's quartet received a long – and sometimes controversial – engagement at Five Spot jazz club in New York City. Leonard Bernstein, Lionel Hampton, Modern Jazz Quartet were impressed and offered encouragement. Hampton asked to perform with the quartet, but trumpeter Miles Davis said Coleman was "all screwed up inside" although he recanted this comment and became a proponent of Coleman's innovations. Coleman's early sound was due in part to his use of a plastic saxophone, he bought a plastic horn in Los Angeles in 1954 because he was unable to afford a metal saxophone, though he didn't like the sound of the plastic instrument at first. On the Atlantic recordings, Coleman's sidemen in the quartet are Cherry on pocket trumpet; the complete recordings for the label were collected on the box set Beauty Is a Rare Thing. In 1960, Coleman recorded Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, which featured a double quartet, including Don Cherry and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, Haden and LaFaro on bass, both Higgins and Blackwell on drums.
The album was recorded in stereo with a reed/brass/bass/drums quartet isolated in each stereo channel. Free Jazz was, at nearly 40 minutes, the longest recorded continuous jazz performance to date and was one of Coleman's most controversial albums; the music features a regular but complex pulse, one drummer playing "straight" while the other played double-time. A series of solo features for each member of the band, but the other soloists are free to chime in as they wish. In the January 18, 1962 issue of Down Beat magazine, in a review titled "Double View of a Double Quartet," Pete Welding gave the album five stars while John A. Tynan rated it zero stars. Coleman intended "free jazz" as an album title, but his growing reputation placed him at the forefront of jazz innovation, free jazz was soon considered a new genre, though Coleman has expressed discomfort with the term. Among the reasons he may have disapproved of the term, his melodic material, although skeletal, recalls melodies that Charlie Parker wrote over standard harmonies.
The music is closer to the bebop. After the Atlantic period and into the early part of the 1970s, Coleman's music became more angular and engaged with the avant-garde jazz which had developed in part around his innovations. After his quartet disbanded, he formed a trio with David Izenzon on bass and Charles Moffett on drums, he extended the sound of his music, introducing string players and playing trumpet and violin, which he played left-handed. He had little conventional musical technique and used the instruments to make large, unrestrained gestures, his friendship with Albert Ayler influenced his development on violin. Charlie Haden sometimes joined this trio to form a two-bass quartet. Coleman recorded At the Golden Circle Stockholm. In 1966, he recorded The Empty Foxhole with his son, Denardo Coleman, ten years old. Freddie Hubbard and Shelly Manne regarded this as an ill-advised piece of publicity on Coleman's part. Despite his youth, Denardo Coleman had studied drumming for several years.
His technique was unrefined but enthusiastic, owing more to pulse-oriented free jazz drummers like Sunny Murray t
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the Vistula River in east-central Poland and its population is estimated at 1.770 million residents within a greater metropolitan area of 3.1 million residents, which makes Warsaw the 8th most-populous capital city in the European Union. The city limits cover 516.9 square kilometres, while the metropolitan area covers 6,100.43 square kilometres. Warsaw is an alpha global city, a major international tourist destination, a significant cultural and economic hub, its historical Old Town was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Once described as the'Paris of the North', Warsaw was believed to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world until World War II. Bombed at the start of the German invasion in 1939, the city withstood a siege for which it was awarded Poland's highest military decoration for heroism, the Virtuti Militari. Deportations of the Jewish population to concentration camps led to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 and the destruction of the Ghetto after a month of combat.
A general Warsaw Uprising between August and October 1944 led to greater devastation and systematic razing by the Germans in advance of the Vistula–Oder Offensive. Warsaw gained the new title of Phoenix City because of its extensive history and complete reconstruction after World War II, which had left over 85% of its buildings in ruins. Warsaw is one of Europe's most dynamic metropolitan cities. In 2012 the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Warsaw as the 32nd most liveable city in the world. In 2017 the city came 4th in the "Business-friendly" category and 8th in "Human capital and life style", it was ranked as one of the most liveable cities in Central and Eastern Europe. The city is a significant centre of research and development, Business process outsourcing, Information technology outsourcing, as well as of the Polish media industry; the Warsaw Stock Exchange is most important in Central and Eastern Europe. Frontex, the European Union agency for external border security as well as ODIHR, one of the principal institutions of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have their headquarters in Warsaw.
Together with Frankfurt and Paris, Warsaw is one of the cities with the highest number of skyscrapers in the European Union. The city is the seat of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra, University of Warsaw, the Warsaw Polytechnic, the National Museum, the Great Theatre—National Opera, the largest of its kind in the world, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art; the picturesque Old Town of Warsaw, which represents examples of nearly every European architectural style and historical period, was listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1980. Other main architectural attractions include the Castle Square with the Royal Castle and the iconic King Sigismund's Column, the Wilanów Palace, the Łazienki Palace, St. John's Cathedral, Main Market Square, palaces and mansions all displaying a richness of colour and detail. Warsaw is positioning itself as Central and Eastern Europe’s chic cultural capital with thriving art and club scenes and serious restaurants, with around a quarter of the city's area occupied by parks.
Warsaw's name in the Polish language is Warszawa. Other previous spellings of the name may have included Werszewa. According to some sources, the origin of the name is unknown. In Pre-Slavic toponomastic layer of Northern Mazovia: corrections and addenda, it is stated that the toponymy of northern Mazovia tends to have unclear etymology. Warszawa was the name of a fishing village. According to one theory Warszawa means "belonging to Warsz", Warsz being a shortened form of the masculine name of Slavic origin Warcisław; however the ending -awa is unusual for a big city. Folk etymology attributes the city name to a fisherman and his wife, Sawa. According to legend, Sawa was a mermaid living in the Vistula River. In actuality, Warsz was a 12th/13th-century nobleman who owned a village located at the modern-day site of the Mariensztat neighbourhood. See the Vršovci family which had escaped to Poland; the official city name in full is miasto stołeczne Warszawa. A native or resident of Warsaw is known as a Varsovian – in Polish warszawiak, warszawianka and warszawianie.
Other names for Warsaw include Varsovia and Varsóvia, Varsavia, Warschau, װאַרשע /Varshe, Varšuva, Varsó and Varšava The first fortified settlements on the site of today's Warsaw were located in Bródno and Jazdów. After Jazdów was raided by nearby clans and dukes, a new similar settlement was established on the site of a small fishing village called Warszowa; the Prince of Płock, Bolesław II of Masovia, established this settlement, the modern-day Warsaw, in about 1300. In the beginning of the 14th century it became one of the seats of the Dukes of Masovia, becoming the official capital of the Masovian Duchy in 1413. 14th-century Warsaw's economy rested on crafts and trade. Upon the extinction of the local ducal line, the duchy was reincorporated into the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland in 1526. In 1529, Warsaw for the first time became the seat of th
Attica Prison riot
The Attica Prison uprising known as the Attica Prison rebellion or Attica Prison riot, occurred at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, United States, in 1971. Based upon prisoners' demands for better living conditions and political rights, the uprising was one of the most well-known and significant uprisings of the Prisoners' Rights Movement. On September 9, 1971, two weeks after the killing of George Jackson at San Quentin State Prison, 1,281 of the Attica prison's 2,200 inmates rioted and took control of the prison, taking 42 staff hostage. During the following four days of negotiations, authorities agreed to 28 of the prisoners' demands, but would not agree to demands for complete amnesty from criminal prosecution for the prison takeover or for the removal of Attica's superintendent. By the order of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, state police took back control of the prison; when the uprising was over, at least 43 people were dead, including ten correctional officers and civilian employees, 33 inmates.
Rockefeller, who refused to visit the prisoners during the rebellion, stated that the prisoners "carried out the cold-blood killings they had threatened from the outset," despite only one of the officers and four inmates killed being attributed to the prisoners. New York Times writer Fred Ferretti said the rebellion concluded in "mass deaths that four days of taut negotiations had sought to avert"; as a result of the riot, a number of changes were made in the New York prison system to satisfy some of the prisoners' demands, reduce tension in the system, prevent such incidents in the future. As of 2018, Attica remains the most prominent prison riot to have occurred in the United States. At 4:20 a.m. on Thursday, September 9, 1971, 5 Company lined up for roll-call. Hearing rumors that one of their companions was to remain in his cell after being isolated for an incident involving an assault on prison officer Tom Boyle after he was hit in the face with a full soup can by Inmate William Ortiz, a small group of 5 Company inmates protested that they too would be locked up and began walking back towards their cells.
The remainder of 5 Company continued towards breakfast. As the protesting group walked past the isolated inmate Ortiz, they freed him from his cell, they rejoined the rest of 5 Company and proceeded on their way to breakfast. A short time when the command staff discovered what had occurred, they changed the usual scheduling of the prisoners, but did not tell prison officer Gordon Kelsey, the correctional officer in charge of leading 5 Company to the yard. Instead of going to the yard after breakfast as they did, the prisoners were led there to find a locked door, puzzling them and the correctional officer Kelsey. Complaints led to anger when more correctional officers led by Lt. Robert T. Curtiss arrived to lead the prisoners back to their cells. Officer Kelsey was assaulted and the riot began; the inmates gained control of sections, D-yard, two tunnels, the central control room, referred to as "Times Square". Inmates took 42 officers and civilians hostage, produced a list of grievances demanding their conditions be met before their surrender.
Throughout the negotiations, there was organization among the prisoners. Frank "Big Black" Smith was appointed as head of security, he kept the hostages and the observers safe. Additionally, an ardent orator, 21-year-old Elliott James "L. D." Barkley, was a strong force during the negotiations, speaking with great articulation to the inmates, the camera crews, outsiders at home. Barkley, just days away from his scheduled release at the time of the uprising, was killed during the recapturing of the prison. Assemblyman Arthur Eve testified that Barkley was alive after the prisoners had surrendered and the state regained control. We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such; the entire prison populace, that means each and every one of us here, have set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.
We will not compromise on any terms except those terms. We’ve called upon all the conscientious citizens of America to assist us in putting an end to this situation that threatens the lives of not only us, but of each and every one of you, as well; as speakers like Barkley raised morale, the rebels' negotiating team of prisoners proposed their requests to the commissioner. The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto Of Demands is a compilation of complaints written by the Attica prisoners, which speak directly to the "sincere people of society", it includes 27 demands, such as better medical treatment, fair visitation rights, an end to physical brutality. The prisoners requested better sanitation, improved food quality, one set of rules for the state among numerous other demands; the manifesto assigns the power to negotiate to five inmates: Donald Noble, Peter Butler, Frank Lott, Carl Jones-El, Herbert Blyden X. Additionally, the document lists out "vile and vicious slave masters" who oppressed the prisoners such as the New York governor, New York Corrections, the United States Courts.
The prisoners continued to unsuccessfully negotiate with Correctional Services Commissioner Russell G. Oswald, later with a team of observers that included Tom Wicker, an editor of The New York Times, James Ingram of the Michigan Chronicle, state senator John Dunne, state representative Arthur Eve, civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, others. Prisoners request
Free jazz
Free jazz is an approach to jazz that developed in the 1960s when musicians attempted to change or break down jazz conventions, such as regular tempos and chord changes. Musicians during this period believed that the bebop, hard bop, modal jazz, played before them was too limiting, they became preoccupied with creating something new. Free jazz has been combined with or substituted for the term "avant-garde jazz". Europeans tend to favor the term "free improvisation". Others have used "modern jazz", "creative music", "art music"; the ambiguity of free jazz presents problems of definition. Although it is played by small groups or individuals, free jazz big bands have existed. Although musicians and critics claim it is innovative and forward looking, it draws on early styles of jazz and has been described as an attempt to return to primitive religious, roots. Although jazz is an American invention, free jazz musicians drew from world music and ethnic music traditions from around the world. Sometimes they invented their own.
They emphasized emotional sound for its own sake. Some jazz musicians resist any attempt at classification. One difficulty is. Many musicians draw on free jazz concepts and idioms, free jazz was never distinct from other genres, but free jazz does have its own characteristics. Pharoah Sanders and John Coltrane used harsh overblowing or other extended techniques to elicit unconventional sounds from their instruments. Like other forms of jazz it places an aesthetic premium on expressing the "voice" or "sound" of the musician, as opposed to the classical tradition in which the performer is seen more as expressing the thoughts of the composer. Earlier jazz styles were built on a framework of song forms, such as twelve-bar blues or the 32-bar AABA popular song form with chord changes. In free jazz, the dependence on a fixed and pre-established form is eliminated, the role of improvisation is correspondingly increased. Other forms of jazz use regular meters and pulsed rhythms in 4/4 or 3/4. Free jazz retains pulsation and sometimes swings but without regular meter.
Frequent Accelerando and ritardando give an impression of rhythm. Previous jazz forms used harmonic structures cycles of diatonic chords; when improvisation occurred, it was founded on the notes in the chords. Free jazz by definition is free of such structures, but by definition it retains much of the language of earlier jazz playing, it is therefore common to hear diatonic, altered dominant and blues phrases in this music. Guitarist Marc Ribot commented that Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler "although they were freeing up certain strictures of bebop, were in fact each developing new structures of composition." Some forms use composed melodies as the basis for group improvisation. Free jazz practitioners sometimes use such material. Other compositional structures are employed, some detailed and complex; the breakdown of form and rhythmic structure has been seen by some critics to coincide with jazz musicians' exposure to and use of elements from non-Western music African and Indian. The atonality of free jazz is credited by historians and jazz performers to a return to non-tonal music of the nineteenth century, including field hollers, street cries, jubilees.
This suggests that the movement away from tonality was not a conscious effort to devise a formal atonal system, but rather a reflection of the concepts surrounding free jazz. Jazz became "free" by removing dependence on chord progressions and instead using polytempic and polyrhythmic structures. Rejection of the bop aesthetic was combined with a fascination with earlier styles of jazz, such as dixieland with its collective improvisation, as well as African music. Interest in ethnic music resulted in the use of instruments from around the world, such as Ed Blackwell's West African talking drum, Leon Thomas's interpretation of pygmy yodeling. Ideas and inspiration were found in the music of John Cage, Musica Elettronica Viva, the Fluxus movement. Many critics at the music's inception, suspected that abandonment of familiar elements of jazz pointed to a lack of technique on the part of the musicians. Today such views are more marginal, the music has built a body of critical writing. Many critics have drawn connections between the term "free jazz" and the American social setting during the late 1950s and 1960s the emerging social tensions of racial integration and the civil rights movement.
Many argue those recent phenomena such as the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the emergence of the "Freedom Riders" in 1961, the 1963 Freedom Summer of activist-supported black voter registration, the free alternative black Freedom Schools demonstrate the political implications of the word "free" in context of free jazz, thus many consider free jazz to be not only a rejection of certain musical credos and ideas, but a musical reaction to the oppression and experience of black Americans. Although free jazz is considered to begin in the late 1950s, there are compositions that precede this era that have notable connections to the free jazz aesthetic; some of the works of Lennie Tristano in the late 1940s "Intuition", "Digression", "Descent into the Maelstrom" exhibit the use of techniques associated with free jazz, such as atonal collective improvisation and lack of discrete chord changes. Other notable examples of proto-free jazz include City of Glass written in 1948 by Bob
University of Massachusetts Amherst
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a public research and land-grant university in Amherst, Massachusetts. It is the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system. UMass Amherst has an annual enrollment of 1,300 faculty members and more than 30,000 students and was ranked 27th best public university by U. S. News Report in 2018 in the national universities category; the university offers academic degrees in 77 master's and 48 doctoral programs. Programs are coordinated in colleges; the main campus is situated north of downtown Amherst. In 2012, U. S. News and World Report ranked Amherst among the Top 10 Great College Towns in America, it is a member of the Five College Consortium. The University of Massachusetts Amherst is categorized as a Research University with Highest research activity by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In fiscal year 2014, UMass Amherst had research expenditures exceeding $200 million. UMass Amherst sports teams are called the Minutemen and Minutewomen, the colors being maroon and white.
All teams participate in NCAA Division I. The university is a member of the Atlantic 10 Conference, while playing ice hockey in Hockey East and football as an FBS Independent; the university was founded in 1863 under the provisions of the Federal Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to provide instruction to Massachusetts citizens in "agricultural and military arts." Accordingly, the university was named the Massachusetts Agricultural College, popularly referred to as "Mass Aggie" or "M. A. C." In 1867, the college had yet to admit any students, been through two Presidents, had still not completed any college buildings. In that year, William S. Clark was appointed Professor of Botany, he appointed a faculty, completed the construction plan, and, in the fall of 1867, admitted the first class of 50 students. Clark became the first president to serve longterm after the schools opening and is regarded the primary founding father of the college. Of the school's founding figures, there are a traditional "founding four"- Clark, Levi Stockbridge, Charles Goessmann, Henry Goodell, described as "the botanist, the farmer, the chemist, the man of letters."The original buildings consisted of Old South College, North College, the Chemistry Laboratory known as College Hall, the Boarding House, the Botanic Museum and the Durfee Plant House.
Although enrollment was slow during the 1870s, the fledgling college built momentum under the leadership of President Henry Hill Goodell. In the 1880s, Goodell implemented an expansion plan, adding the College Drill Hall in 1883, the Old Chapel Library in 1885, the East and West Experiment Stations in 1886 and 1890; the Campus Pond, now the central focus of the University Campus, was created in 1893 by damming a small brook. The early 20th century saw great expansion in the scope of the curriculum; the first female student was admitted in 1875 on a part-time basis and the first full-time female student was admitted in 1892. In 1903, Draper Hall was constructed for the dual purpose of a dining female housing; the first female students graduated with the class of 1905. The first dedicated female dormitory, the Abigail Adams House was built in 1920. By the start of the 20th century, the college was thriving and expanded its curriculum to include the liberal arts; the Education curriculum was established in 1907.
In recognition of the higher enrollment and broader curriculum, the college was renamed Massachusetts State College in 1931. Following World War II, the G. I. Bill, facilitating financial aid for veterans, led to an explosion of applicants; the college population soared and Presidents Hugh Potter Baker and Ralph Van Meter labored to push through major construction projects in the 1940s and 1950s with regard to dormitories. Accordingly, the name of the college was changed in 1947 to the "University of Massachusetts." By the 1970s, the University continued to grow and gave rise to a shuttle bus service on campus as well as many other architectural additions. Du Bois Library, the Fine Arts Center. Over the course of the next two decades, the John W. Lederle Graduate Research Center and the Conte National Polymer Research Center were built and UMass Amherst emerged as a major research facility; the Robsham Memorial Center for Visitors welcomed thousands of guests to campus after its dedication in 1989.
For athletic and other large events, the Mullins Center was opened in 1993, hosting capacity crowds as the Minutemen basketball team ranked at number one for many weeks in the mid-1990s, reached the Final Four in 1996. UMass Amherst entered. In 2003, for the first time, the Massachusetts State Legislature designated UMass Amherst as a Research Univ
Ascension (John Coltrane album)
Ascension is a jazz album by John Coltrane recorded in 1965 and released in 1966. It is considered to be a cornerstone of Coltrane's work, with the albums recorded before it being more conventional in structure and the albums recorded after it being looser, free jazz inspired works. In addition, it signaled Coltrane's interest in moving away from the quartet format. Coltrane described Ascension in a radio interview as a "big band thing", although it resembles no big band recording made before it; the most obvious antecedent is Ornette Coleman's octet recording, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, which—like Ascension—is a continuous 40-minute performance with ensemble passages and without breaks. Jazz musician Dave Liebman, commenting on Ascension, recalled that the album was the "torch that lit the free jazz thing". Coltrane's horn section is moored to a rhythm section, centered on pianist McCoy Tyner, double bassists Jimmy Garrison and Art Davis, drummer Elvin Jones. On Ascension, group ensembles alternate with solos, take up about equal space.
The basic theme stated in the opening and closing ensembles is a variation on the major motif of Coltrane's earlier album A Love Supreme, recorded in December 1964 the opening bass riff stated on said album's opening track, "Acknowledgment". Coltrane gave the musicians no directions for their solos, other than that they were to end with a crescendo; the ensemble passages are more structured. There were chords, but they were optional. By comparison to Free Jazz, Ascension features a much expanded "front line", with two altos, three tenors, two trumpeters; the horn section consisted of younger players, most of whom would soon attain some degree of fame on the jazz scene. An exception is trumpeter Dewey Johnson. Plagued by mental illness, Johnson never made another professional recording disappearing in New York City in the 1980s, he spent his years in Coler Specialty Hospital and Nursing Home on Roosevelt Island in New York City before passing away in 2018. Because of Johnson's obscurity, his prominent place on the album, his solo is sometimes mistaken for Hubbard's.
The solo order differs between the takes. Two recordings of "Ascension" exist, called Edition I and Edition II; the latter replaced Edition I some months after the original release. Both versions are available on the single-CD version released by Impulse!/Verve/Universal in 2000 and were available on the 1992 double-disc collection The Major Works of John Coltrane on Impulse!/GRP/MCA. Edition I"Ascension" – 38:30 Edition II"Ascension" – 40:49 Freddie Hubbard – trumpet Dewey Johnson – trumpet Marion Brown – alto saxophone John Tchicai – alto saxophone John Coltrane – tenor saxophone Pharoah Sanders – tenor saxophone Archie Shepp – tenor saxophone McCoy Tyner – piano Art Davis – bass Jimmy Garrison – bass Elvin Jones – drums Kahn, Ashley. A Love Supreme: The Creation of John Coltrane's Classic Album, Granta Books, paperback 2003, ISBN 1-86207-602-2
