1.
Album
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Album, is a collection of audio recordings issued as a single item on CD, record, audio tape, or another medium. Albums of recorded music were developed in the early 20th century, first as books of individual 78rpm records, vinyl LPs are still issued, though in the 21st century album sales have mostly focused on compact disc and MP3 formats. The audio cassette was a format used from the late 1970s through to the 1990s alongside vinyl, an album may be recorded in a recording studio, in a concert venue, at home, in the field, or a mix of places. Recording may take a few hours to years to complete, usually in several takes with different parts recorded separately. Recordings that are done in one take without overdubbing are termed live, the majority of studio recordings contain an abundance of editing, sound effects, voice adjustments, etc. With modern recording technology, musicians can be recorded in separate rooms or at times while listening to the other parts using headphones. Album covers and liner notes are used, and sometimes additional information is provided, such as analysis of the recording, historically, the term album was applied to a collection of various items housed in a book format. In musical usage the word was used for collections of pieces of printed music from the early nineteenth century. Later, collections of related 78rpm records were bundled in book-like albums, the LP record, or 33 1⁄3 rpm microgroove vinyl record, is a gramophone record format introduced by Columbia Records in 1948. It was adopted by the industry as a standard format for the album. Apart from relatively minor refinements and the important later addition of stereophonic sound capability, the term album had been carried forward from the early nineteenth century when it had been used for collections of short pieces of music. Later, collections of related 78rpm records were bundled in book-like albums, as part of a trend of shifting sales in the music industry, some commenters have declared that the early 21st century experienced the death of the album. Sometimes shorter albums are referred to as mini-albums or EPs, Albums such as Tubular Bells, Amarok, Hergest Ridge by Mike Oldfield, and Yess Close to the Edge, include fewer than four tracks. There are no rules against artists such as Pinhead Gunpowder referring to their own releases under thirty minutes as albums. These are known as box sets, material is stored on an album in sections termed tracks, normally 11 or 12 tracks. A music track is a song or instrumental recording. The term is associated with popular music where separate tracks are known as album tracks. When vinyl records were the medium for audio recordings a track could be identified visually from the grooves
2.
Sun Ra
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Sun Ra was an American jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, poet and philosopher known for his experimental music, cosmic philosophy, prolific output, and theatrical performances. For much of his career, Ra led The Arkestra, an ensemble with an ever-changing name, born and raised in Alabama, Blount would eventually become involved in the 1940s Chicago jazz scene. From the mid-1950s until his death, Ra led the musical collective The Arkestra and its performances often included dancers and musicians dressed in elaborate, futuristic costumes inspired by ancient Egyptian attire and the space age. He is now considered an innovator, among his distinctions are his pioneering work in free improvisation and modal jazz. Following Sun Ras death in 1993, the Arkestra continues to perform and he was born Herman Blount on May 22,1914, in Birmingham, Alabama, as discovered by his biographer, John F. Szwed, and published in his 1998 book. He was named after the popular stage magician Black Herman. He was nicknamed Sonny from his childhood, had a sister and half-brother. For decades, very little was known about Sun Ras early life, as a self-invented person, he routinely gave evasive, contradictory or seemingly nonsensical answers to personal questions, and denied his birth name. He speculated, only half in jest, that he was related to Elijah Poole, later famous as Elijah Muhammed. His birthday for years remained unknown, as he claimed it for years ranging from 1910 to 1918, only a few years before his death, the date of Sun Ras birth was still a mystery. Jim Macnies notes for Blue Delight said that Sun Ra was believed to be about 75 years old, but Szwed was able to uncover a wealth of information about his early life and confirmed a birth date of May 22,1914. As a child, Herman was a skilled pianist, by the age of 11 or 12, he was composing and sight reading music. Birmingham was an important stop for touring musicians and he saw famous musicians such as Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Fats Waller, along with others who were quite talented but never made the big time. Sun Ra once said, The world let down a lot of good musicians, by his mid-teens, Blount was performing semi-professionally as a solo pianist, or as a member of various ad hoc jazz and R&B groups. Though deeply religious, his family was not formally associated with any Christian church or sect, Blount had few or no close friends in high school but was remembered as kind-natured and quiet, an honor roll student, and a voracious reader. He took advantage of the Black Masonic Lodge as one of the few places in Birmingham where African Americans had unlimited access to books and its collection on Freemasonry and other esoteric concepts made a strong impression on him. By his teens, Blount suffered from cryptorchidism and it left him with a nearly constant discomfort that sometimes flared into severe pain. Szwed suggests that Blount felt shame about it and the condition contributed to his isolation, in 1934 Blount was offered his first full-time musical job by Ethel Harper—his biology teacher from the high school, who had organized a band to pursue a career as a singer
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.
Free jazz
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For the Ornette Coleman album see Free Jazz, A Collective Improvisation. Though the music of jazz composers varied widely, a common feature was dissatisfaction with the limitations of bebop, hard bop. Often described as avant-garde, free jazz has also described as an attempt to return jazz to its primitive, often religious, roots. As its name implies, free jazz cannot be defined more than loosely, as many musicians draw on free jazz concepts and idioms, and it was never completely distinct as a genre. Many free jazz musicians, notably Pharoah Sanders and John Coltrane, used harsh overblowing or other techniques to elicit unconventional sounds from their instruments, Free jazz musicians created a progressive musical language which drew on earlier styles of jazz such as Dixieland jazz and African music. Typically this kind of music is played by groups of musicians. The music often swings but without regular meter, and there are frequent accelerandi and ritardandi, Free jazz is strongly associated with the 1950s innovations of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor and the later works of saxophonist John Coltrane. Other important pioneers include Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Joe Maneri, some of bassist Charles Minguss work was also important in establishing free jazz. Although today free jazz is the generally used term, many terms were used to describe the loosely defined movement, including avant-garde, energy music. During its early and mid-1960s heyday, much free jazz was released by established labels such as Prestige, Blue Note, keith Johnson of AllMusic describes a Modern Creative genre, in which musicians may incorporate free playing into structured modes -- or play just about anything. Defining the essence of jazz is complicated, many musicians draw on free jazz concepts and idioms. Many individual musicians reject efforts at classification, regarding them as useless or unduly limiting, earlier jazz styles typically were built on a framework of song forms with a set framework of chord changes. In free jazz, the dependence on a fixed and pre-established form is eliminated, Free jazz, especially during its inception, contains theme of both progressive musical language and gathering inspiration from the past. The rejection of the bop aesthetic was combined with a fascination with earlier styles of jazz such as Dixieland jazz with its collective improvisation. This includes Ed Blackwells use of the West African talking drum, typically this kind of music is played by small groups of musicians, although some examples use larger numbers. For example, John Coltranes 1965 album Ascension, uses eleven musicians, other forms of jazz use clear regular meters and strongly pulsed rhythms, usually in 4/4 or 3/4. Free jazz normally retains a general pulsation and often swings but without regular meter, despite all of this, it is still very often possible to tap ones foot to a free jazz performance, meter is more freely variable but has not disappeared entirely. Previous jazz forms used harmonic structures, and even when improvisation occurred it was founded on the notes in the chords, Free jazz almost by definition is free of such structures, but also by definition it retains much of the language of earlier jazz playing
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