1.
Nina Simone
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Nina Simone was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and activist in the Civil Rights Movement. Simone employed a range of musical styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk, R&B, gospel. Born in North Carolina, the child of a preacher. With the help of the few supporters in her hometown of Tryon, North Carolina, Waymon then applied for a scholarship to study at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was denied despite a well-received audition. Waymon became fully convinced this rejection had been due to her race. Years later, two days before her death, the Curtis Institute of Music bestowed on her an honorary degree, to make a living, Eunice Waymon changed her name to Nina Simone. The change related to her need to disguise herself from family members and she was told in the nightclub that she would have to sing to her own accompaniment, and this effectively launched her career as a jazz vocalist. Simone recorded more than forty albums, mostly between 1958, when she made her debut with Little Girl Blue, and 1974, and had a hit in the United States in 1958 with I Loves You, Porgy. Simones musical style fused gospel and pop with music, in particular Johann Sebastian Bach. Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in North Carolina and raised in Tryon, the sixth of eight children in a poor family, she began playing piano at age three, the first song she learned was God Be With You, Till We Meet Again. Demonstrating a talent with the instrument, she performed at her local church, but her concert debut, a classical recital, was given when she was 12. Simone later said that during this performance, her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people. She said that she refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front, Simones mother, Mary Kate Waymon, was a Methodist minister and a housemaid. Simones father, John Divine Waymon, was a handyman who at one time owned a dry cleaning business, Simones music teacher helped establish a special fund to pay for her education. Subsequently, a fund was set up to assist her continued education. With the help of this scholarship money she was able to attend Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina. After her graduation, Simone spent the summer of 1950 at the Juilliard School, as a student of Carl Friedberg, discouraged, she took private piano lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff, a professor at Curtis, but never re-applied to the institution. She took a job as an assistant, but also found work as an accompanist at Arlene Smiths vocal studio
2.
Blues
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Blues is a genre and musical form originated by African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the end of the 19th century. The genre developed from roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs, spirituals, Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. Blue notes, usually thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are also a part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove, Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times, Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the troubles experienced in African-American society. Many elements, such as the format and the use of blue notes. The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery and, later and it is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century, the first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues, World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a form called blues rock evolved. The term blues may have come from blue devils, meaning melancholy and sadness, the phrase blue devils may also have been derived from Britain in the 1600s, when the term referred to the intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal. As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils, by the 1800s in the United States, the term blues was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase blue law, which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, in lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood. The lyrics of traditional blues verses probably often consisted of a single line repeated four times. Two of the first published songs, Dallas Blues and Saint Louis Blues, were 12-bar blues with the AAB lyric structure. Handy wrote that he adopted this convention to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times, the lines are often sung following a pattern closer to rhythmic talk than to a melody
3.
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
4.
Disco
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Disco is a genre of dance music containing elements of funk, soul, pop, and salsa. It achieved popularity during the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, Disco can be seen as a reaction against both the domination of rock music and the stigmatization of dance music by the counterculture during this period. It was popular with men and women, from many different backgrounds. The disco sound often has several components, a beat, an eighth note or 16th note hi-hat pattern with an open hi-hat on the off-beat. In most disco tracks, string sections, horns, electric piano, Orchestral instruments such as the flute are often used for solo melodies, and lead guitar is less frequently used in disco than in rock. Many disco songs use electronic synthesizers, particularly in the late 1970s, well-known 1970s disco performers included Donna Summer, the Bee Gees, Boney M. KC and the Sunshine Band, The Trammps, Sylvester, Village People, Gloria Gaynor and Chic. While performers and singers garnered much attention, record producers working behind the scenes played an important role in developing the disco sound. Many non-disco artists recorded songs at the height of discos popularity. Disco was the last mass popular movement that was driven by the baby boom generation. Disco was a phenomenon, but its popularity drastically declined in the United States in 1980. Disco Demolition Night, an anti-disco protest held in Chicago on 12 July 1979, is thought of as a factor in discos fast. By the late 1970s most major U. S. cities had thriving disco club scenes, Studio 54, a venue popular amongst celebrities, is a well-known example of a disco club. Popular dances included the Hustle, a suggestive dance. Discotheque-goers often wore expensive, extravagant and sexy fashions, Disco clubs were also associated with promiscuity. Disco was a key influence on the 1980s electronic dance style called house. The term is derived from discothèque, by the early 1940s, the terms disc jockey and DJ were in use to describe radio presenters. During WWII, because of restrictions set in place by the Nazi occupiers, eventually more than one of these jazz venues had the proper name discothèque. By 1959, the term was used in Paris to describe any of these type of nightclubs and that year a young reporter named Klaus Quirini started to select and introduce records at the Scotch-Club in Aachen, West Germany
5.
Harp
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The harp is a stringed musical instrument that has a number of individual strings running at an angle to its soundboard, which are plucked with the fingers. Harps have been known since antiquity in Asia, Africa and Europe, Harps vary globally in many ways. In terms of size, many smaller harps can be played on the lap, whereas larger harps are quite heavy, different harps may use strings of catgut or nylon, or of metal, or some combination. While all harps have a neck, resonator, and strings, frame harps have a pillar at their end to support the strings, while open harps, such as arch or bow harps. Modern harps also vary in techniques used to extend the range and chromaticity of the strings, the earliest harps and lyres were found in Sumer,3500 BC, and several harps were found in burial pits and royal tombs in Ur. The oldest depictions of harps without a forepillar can be adjacent to the Near East, in the wall paintings of ancient Egyptian tombs in the Nile Valley. These murals show an instrument that resembles the hunters bow. The chang flourished in Persia in many forms from its introduction, about 3000 BC, around 1900 BC arched harps in the Iraq–Iran region were replaced by angular harps with vertical or horizontal sound boxes. By the start of the Common Era, robust, vertical, angular harps, in the last century of the Sasanian period, angular harps were redesigned to make them as light as possible, while they became more elegant, they lost their structural rigidity. At the height of the Persian tradition of illustrated book production, such light harps were still frequently depicted, the works of the Tamil Sangam literature describe the harp and its variants, as early as 200 BC. Variants were described ranging from 14 to 17 strings, and the instrument used by wandering minstrels for accompaniment, another early South Asian harp was the ancient veena, unlike the modern instrument of the same name, the ancient veena was a harp vice the modern lute-type instrument. Some Samudragupta gold coins show of the mid-4th century AD show the king Samudragupta himself playing the instrument, the ancient veena survives today in Burma, in the form of the saung harp still played there. The harp was popular in ancient China and neighboring regions, though harps are largely extinct in East Asia in the modern day, the Chinese konghou harp is documented as early as the Spring and Autumn period, and became extinct during the Ming Dynasty. A similar harp, the gonghu was played in ancient Korea, Harps are essentially triangular in shape, and are made primarily of wood. Harp strings are made of gut or metal, the top end of each string is secured on the crossbar or neck of the instrument, where each will have a tuning peg or similar device to adjust the pitch of that string. It is the distance between the tuning peg and the soundboard, as well as the tension and weight of the string, the body is hollow and when a taut string is plucked, the body resonates, projecting sound. The longest side of the harp is called the column or pillar, though some earlier harps, such as a bow harp, on most harps, the sole purpose of the pillar is to hold up the neck against the great strain of the strings. On harps which have pedals, the pillar is a column and encloses the rods which adjust the pitch of strings
6.
Charlize Theron
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Charlize Theron is a South African and American actress and film producer. Theron became a U. S. citizen in 2007, while retaining her South African citizenship, in the late 2000s, she moved into the field of producing, both in television and film. In 2006, she produced the documentary East of Havana and she had producing credits on the films The Burning Plain and Dark Places, both of which she starred in. In 2012, she played Queen Ravenna in Snow White and the Huntsman and Meredith Vickers in Prometheus and she reprised her role of Queen Ravenna in the 2016 follow-up film The Huntsman, Winters War. In 2016, Time Magazine named her in the annual Time 100 most influential people list, Theron was born in Benoni, in the then-Transvaal Province of South Africa, the only child of Gerda Jacoba Aletta and Charles Jacobus Theron. Second Boer War figure Danie Theron was her great-great-uncle and she is from an Afrikaner family, and her ancestry includes Dutch, as well as French and German, her French forebears were early Huguenot settlers in South Africa. Theron is an Occitan surname pronounced in Afrikaans as and she grew up on her parents farm in Benoni, near Johannesburg. On 21 June 1991, Therons father, an alcoholic, physically attacked her mother, the shooting was legally adjudged to have been self-defence, and so her mother faced no charges. Theron attended Putfontein Primary School, a period during which she has said she was not fitting in, at thirteen, Theron was sent to boarding school and began her studies at the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg. Although Theron is fluent in English, her first language is Afrikaans, although seeing herself as a dancer, Theron at 16 won a one-year modelling contract at a local competition in Salerno and with her mother moved to Milan, Italy. After Theron spent a year modelling throughout Europe, she and her mother moved to the US, in New York, she attended the Joffrey Ballet School, where she trained as a ballet dancer until a knee injury closed this career path. As Theron recalled in 2008, I went to New York for three days to model, and then I spent a winter in New York in a windowless basement apartment. I was broke, I was taking class at the Joffrey Ballet, I realized I couldnt dance anymore, and I went into a major depression. My mom came over from South Africa and said, Either you figure out what to do next or you come home, at 19, Theron flew to Los Angeles, on a one-way ticket her mother bought for her, intending to work in the film industry. During the initial months there, she went to a Hollywood Boulevard bank to cash a cheque her mother had sent to help with the rent, when the teller refused to cash it, Theron engaged in a shouting match with him. Upon seeing this, talent agent John Crosby, waiting behind her, handed her his business card and subsequently introduced her to casting agents and she later fired him as her manager after he kept sending her scripts for films similar to Showgirls and Species. After several months in the city, she made her debut with a non-speaking role in the horror film Children of the Corn III. Her first speaking role was a supporting but significant and attention-garnering part as a hitwoman in 2 Days in the Valley
7.
BBC
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The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. It is headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, the BBC is the worlds oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees. It employs over 20,950 staff in total,16,672 of whom are in public sector broadcasting, the total number of staff is 35,402 when part-time, flexible, and fixed contract staff are included. The BBC is established under a Royal Charter and operates under its Agreement with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. The fee is set by the British Government, agreed by Parliament, and used to fund the BBCs radio, TV, britains first live public broadcast from the Marconi factory in Chelmsford took place in June 1920. It was sponsored by the Daily Mails Lord Northcliffe and featured the famous Australian Soprano Dame Nellie Melba, the Melba broadcast caught the peoples imagination and marked a turning point in the British publics attitude to radio. However, this public enthusiasm was not shared in official circles where such broadcasts were held to interfere with important military and civil communications. By late 1920, pressure from these quarters and uneasiness among the staff of the licensing authority, the General Post Office, was sufficient to lead to a ban on further Chelmsford broadcasts. But by 1922, the GPO had received nearly 100 broadcast licence requests, John Reith, a Scottish Calvinist, was appointed its General Manager in December 1922 a few weeks after the company made its first official broadcast. The company was to be financed by a royalty on the sale of BBC wireless receiving sets from approved manufacturers, to this day, the BBC aims to follow the Reithian directive to inform, educate and entertain. The financial arrangements soon proved inadequate, set sales were disappointing as amateurs made their own receivers and listeners bought rival unlicensed sets. By mid-1923, discussions between the GPO and the BBC had become deadlocked and the Postmaster-General commissioned a review of broadcasting by the Sykes Committee and this was to be followed by a simple 10 shillings licence fee with no royalty once the wireless manufactures protection expired. The BBCs broadcasting monopoly was made explicit for the duration of its current broadcast licence, the BBC was also banned from presenting news bulletins before 19.00, and required to source all news from external wire services. Mid-1925 found the future of broadcasting under further consideration, this time by the Crawford committee, by now the BBC under Reiths leadership had forged a consensus favouring a continuation of the unified broadcasting service, but more money was still required to finance rapid expansion. Wireless manufacturers were anxious to exit the loss making consortium with Reith keen that the BBC be seen as a service rather than a commercial enterprise. The recommendations of the Crawford Committee were published in March the following year and were still under consideration by the GPO when the 1926 general strike broke out in May. The strike temporarily interrupted newspaper production and with restrictions on news bulletins waived the BBC suddenly became the source of news for the duration of the crisis. The crisis placed the BBC in a delicate position, the Government was divided on how to handle the BBC but ended up trusting Reith, whose opposition to the strike mirrored the PMs own
8.
Eric Burdon
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Eric Victor Burdon is an English singer-songwriter and rocker best known as a member and vocalist of the R&B/rock band The Animals and the funk band War. He is also known for his baritone voice and aggressive stage performance. Burdon and The Animals were a component of the British Invasion of the 1960s and he was ranked 57th in Rolling Stones list The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. Eric Burdon was born in 1941 in Newcastle, England and his father was originally from Tyneside and his mother Ireland, who moved down to Scotland, then to Newcastle in the thirties. Burdon states he often had a divided loyalty in his sense of place and he was born to a lower working-class family, his father did electrical work in some of the clubs Burdon would later play. This led him to take up the trombone, however realizing that he wasnt all that good a player, so he took up singing, Eric matured very quickly due to his lack of normal childhood. In his song he wrote, When I Was Young he states he met his first love at 13 and he also sings he smoked his first cigarette at ten years old and became a drinker at an early age. Burdon describes his school years as a dark nightmare. Due to the pollution and humidity in Newcastle he suffered asthma attacks daily. During primary school, he was Stuck at the rear of the classroom of around 40 to 50 kids and received constant harassment from kids and he goes on to say his primary school was Jammed between a slaughterhouse and a shipyard on the banks of the Tyne. Some teachers were sadistic-- others pretended not to notice-- and sexual molestation, by the time he got to secondary school, a teacher by the name of Bertie Brown was responsible for getting him into art school and changing his life forever. He here met early drummer with Burdon in The Animals, John Steel and he met a lot of other young rebels who shared his interest in jazz, folk, and movies. This was also the age Eric and his friends would disappear from school during undesired classes to go to a field or park to drink Brown Ale. Burdon started out his adult life as one of a bunch of people who hung out at the local jazz club. He describes his friends as like a motorcycle gang. without the motorcycles, they were tough, hard-drinking, Burdon was also a good friend of The Beatles John Lennon and was mentioned in one of their songs, I Am The Walrus as the eggman. Eric states, The nickname stuck after a wild experience I’d had at the time with a Jamaican girlfriend called Sylvia. I was up one morning cooking breakfast, naked except for my socks. As the fumes set my brain alight and I slid to the floor, she reached to the counter and grabbed an egg
9.
H&M
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H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB is a Swedish multinational clothing-retail company, known for its fast-fashion clothing for men, women, teenagers and children. H&M and its associated brands operate in 62 countries with over 4,000 stores and, as of 2015 and it is the second largest global clothing retailer, just behind Spain-based Inditex. The company was founded by Erling Persson in 1947, when he opened his first shop in Västerås, the shop, called Hennes, exclusively sold womens clothing. In 1968, Persson acquired the hunting apparel retailer Mauritz Widforss, which led to the inclusion of a collection in the product range. The company was listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange in 1974, shortly after, in 1976, the first store outside of Scandinavia opened in London. H&M continued to expand in Europe, and began to online in 1998. The two-letter domain was registered in the early 1990s, but data on the first registration is lost, the first US store opened in 2000 on Fifth Avenue, New York. In 2008, the company announced in a release that it would begin selling home furnishings. Initially distributed through the online catalogue, there are now H&M Home stores located internationally. Its worth was estimated at $12–16 billion, H&M operated 2,325 stores at the end of 2011, and 2,629 stores at the end of August 2012. Its 3, 000th store opened in September 2013 in Chengdu, the first H&M store to open outside of Sweden was in Norway in 1964, and the first to open outside of Scandinavia was in the United Kingdom in 1976. H&Ms expansion outside of Europe started with the US in 2000, in November 2004, selected company stores offered an exclusive collection by fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. In November 2005, the company launched a collection by Stella McCartney and, in November 2006, in March 2007, it launched another collaboration designed by the pop star Madonna. In June 2007 the company worked with game developers Maxis to create a stuff pack for the latters The Sims 2 computer game, in November 2007, the company launched a collection by Italian designer Roberto Cavalli. It was reported that the sold out very quickly. Also in 2007, another design with Kylie Minogue was launched in Shanghai, in the spring of 2008 the Finnish company Marimekko was selected as guest designer and was followed by Japanese Comme des Garçons in the fall. In 2008, H&M used the song Hang On by British singer-songwriter Lettie as background music to its UK website. For spring and summer 2009, the British designer Matthew Williamson created two exclusive ranges for the company – the first being a collection of womens clothes released in selected stores, the second collection saw Williamson branch into menswear for the first time, only in selected stores
