1.
Charleston, South Carolina
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Charleston had an estimated population of 132,609 in 2015. Charleston was founded as Charles Town—honoring King Charles II of England—in 1670 and its initial location at Albemarle Point on the west bank of the Ashley River was abandoned in 1680 for its present site, which became the 5th-largest city in North America within 10 years. Despite its size, it remained unincorporated throughout the period, its government was handled directly by the state legislature and by its Anglican parish wardens. It adopted its present spelling with its incorporation as a city in 1783 at the close of the Revolutionary War. The Confederates burned the town prior to its evacuation but continued demand for the cotton and rice, along with growing industry. In 2016, Charleston was ranked the Worlds Best City by Travel + Leisure, the city proper consists of six distinct areas, the Peninsula or Downtown, West Ashley, Johns Island, James Island, Daniel Island, and the Cainhoy Peninsula. The old town fit into 4–5 square miles as late as the First World War, the city limits also have expanded across the Cooper River, encompassing Daniel Island and the Cainhoy area. The present city has an area of 127.5 square miles. North Charleston blocks any expansion up the peninsula, and Mount Pleasant occupies the land directly east of the Cooper River, Charleston Harbor runs about 7 miles southeast to the Atlantic with an average width of about 2 miles, surrounded on all sides except its entrance. Sullivans Island lies to the north of the entrance and Morris Island to itself south, the entrance itself is about 1 mile wide, it was originally only 18 feet deep, but began to be enlarged in the 1870s. The tidal rivers are evidence of a submergent or drowned coastline, there is a submerged river delta off the mouth of the harbor and the Cooper River is deep. Charleston has a subtropical climate, with mild winters, hot, humid summers. Summer is the wettest season, almost half of the rainfall occurs from June to September in the form of thundershowers. Fall remains relatively warm through November, winter is short and mild, and is characterized by occasional rain. Measurable snow only occurs several times per decade at the most, however,6.0 in fell at the airport on December 23,1989, the largest single-day fall on record, contributing to a single-storm and seasonal record of 8.0 in snowfall. The highest temperature recorded within city limits was 104 °F on June 2,1985, and June 24,1944, and the lowest was 7 °F on February 14,1899. At the airport, where records are kept, the historical range is 105 °F on August 1,1999. Hurricanes are a threat to the area during the summer and early fall
2.
Blood, Sweat & Tears
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Blood, Sweat & Tears is a contemporary jazz-rock American music group. They are noted for their combination of brass and rock band instrumentation, the group recorded songs by rock/folk songwriters such as Laura Nyro, James Taylor, the Band, the Rolling Stones, as well as Billie Holiday and Erik Satie. They also incorporated music from Thelonious Monk and Sergei Prokofiev into their arrangements and they were originally formed in 1967 in New York City. Since their beginnings, the band has gone through numerous iterations with varying personnel and has encompassed a multitude of musical styles. The band is most notable for their fusion of rock, blues, pop music, horn arrangements, Al Kooper, Jim Fielder, Fred Lipsius, Randy Brecker, Jerry Weiss, Dick Halligan, Steve Katz and Bobby Colomby formed the original band. The creation of the group was inspired by the ideas of the Buckinghams and its producer, James William Guercio. Jim Fielder was from Frank Zappas the Mothers of Invention and had played briefly with Buffalo Springfield, Kooper, Colomby, Katz, and Fielder did a few shows as a quartet at the Cafe Au Go Go in New York City in September 1967, opening for Moby Grape. Fred Lipsius then joined the two months later. A few more shows were played as a quintet, including one at the Fillmore East in New York, Lipsius then recruited the other three, Dick Halligan, Randy Brecker and Jerry Weiss, who were New York jazz horn players Lipsius knew. The final lineup debuted at the Cafe Au Go Go on November 17–19,1967, the band was a hit with the audience, who liked the innovative fusion of jazz with acid rock and psychedelia. After signing to Columbia Records, the group released Child Is Father to the Man, the album cover was considered quite innovative showing the band members sitting and standing with child-sized versions of themselves. The album slowly picked up in sales despite growing artistic differences among the members which resulted in several personnel changes for the second album. Colomby and Katz wanted to move Kooper exclusively to keyboard and composing duties, while hiring a stronger vocalist for the group and he became a record producer for the Columbia label, but not before arranging some songs that would be on the next BS&T album. The groups trumpeters, Randy Brecker and Jerry Weiss, also left and were replaced by Lew Soloff, Brecker joined Horace Silvers band with his brother Michael, and together they eventually formed their own horn-dominated musical outfits, Dreams and The Brecker Brothers. Jerry Weiss went on to start the similarly-styled group Ambergris, after Kooper left the group, Colomby and Katz began to look for a new vocalist, considering Alex Chilton, Stephen Stills and Laura Nyro. Ultimately, they decided upon David Clayton-Thomas, a Canadian singer, born in Surrey, reportedly, folk singer Judy Collins had seen Clayton-Thomas perform at a New York City club and was so taken and moved by his performance that she told Colomby and Katz about him. With her prodding, they came to see Clayton-Thomas perform and were so impressed that he was offered the role of singer in a re-constituted Blood Sweat & Tears. Trombonist Halligan took up the chores and Jerry Hyman joined to take over trombone
3.
The Blues Brothers
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The Blues Brothers are an American blues and soul revivalist band founded in 1978 by comedians Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi as part of a musical sketch on Saturday Night Live. The band made its debut as the musical guest on the April 22,1978, episode of Saturday Night Live, after the death of Belushi in 1982, the Blues Brothers have continued to perform with a rotation of guest singers and other band members. The band reformed in 1988 for a tour and again in 1998 for a sequel to the film. They make regular appearances at festivals worldwide. While not all appeared in the original film, the full band included. In it, Howard Shore and his All-Bee Band play the Slim Harpo song Im a King Bee, with Belushi singing and Aykroyd playing harmonica, dressed in the bee costumes they wore for the Killer Bees sketch. Following tapings of SNL, it was popular among cast members and the hosts to attend Aykroyds Holland Tunnel Blues bar. Dan and John filled a jukebox with songs from different artists such as Sam and Dave. John bought an amplifier and they kept some musical instruments there for anyone who wanted to jam and it was also at the bar that Aykroyd introduced Belushi to the blues. An interest soon became a fascination and it wasnt long before the two began singing with local blues bands, jokingly, SNL band leader Howard Shore suggested they call themselves The Blues Brothers. The suits came from the concept that when you were a player in the 40s, 50s 60s, to look straight. The band was also modeled in part on Aykroyds experience with the Downchild Blues Band, one of the first professional blues bands in Canada, as Aykroyd has said of this time, So I grew up, in this capital city. My parents used to work for the government, and I went to school, high school. And there was a place on Sussex Drive, and there was a club there called Le Hibou. I was going to Le Hibou and hearing James Cotton, Otis Spann, Pinetop Perkins, I actually jammed behind Muddy Waters. S. P. Leary left the drum kit one night, and I walked on stage and we started, I dont know, Little Red Rooster, something. He said keep that going, you make Muddy feel good. Many, many times I saw Howlin Wolf, and of course Buddy Guy, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee
4.
Frank Zappa
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Zappa also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. He is considered one of the most innovative and stylistically diverse rock musicians of his generation, as a self-taught composer and performer, Zappas diverse musical influences led him to create music that was sometimes difficult to categorize. While in his teens, he acquired a taste for 20th-century classical composers such as Edgard Varèse, Igor Stravinsky and he began writing classical music in high school, while at the same time playing drums in rhythm and blues bands, later switching to electric guitar. His 1966 debut album with the Mothers of Invention, Freak Out, combined songs in conventional rock and roll format with collective improvisations and studio-generated sound collages. He continued this eclectic and experimental approach, irrespective of whether the format was rock. Zappas output is unified by a conceptual continuity he termed Project/Object, with musical phrases, ideas. His lyrics reflected his views of established social and political processes, structures and movements. Unlike many other musicians of his era, he personally disapproved of and seldom used drugs. During Zappas lifetime, he was a productive and prolific artist, earning widespread acclaim from critics. He had some success, particularly in Europe, and worked as an independent artist for most of his career. He remains an influence on musicians and composers. His honors include an induction into the 1995 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the 1997 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him at number 71 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, Zappa was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His mother, Rosemarie was of Italian and French ancestry, his father, whose name was Anglicized to Francis Vincent Zappa, was an immigrant from Partinico, Sicily, with Greek and Arab ancestry. Frank, the eldest of four children, was raised in an Italian-American household where Italian was often spoken by his grandparents, the family moved often because his father, a chemist and mathematician, worked in the defense industry. After a time in Florida in the 1940s, the returned to Maryland. Due to their homes proximity to the arsenal, which stored mustard gas, gas masks were kept in the home in case of an accident and this had a profound effect on Zappa, and references to germs, germ warfare and the defense industry occur throughout his work. Zappa was often sick as a child, suffering from asthma, earaches, a doctor treated his sinusitis by inserting a pellet of radium into each of Zappas nostrils
5.
Magic City Jazz Orchestra
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The Magic City Jazz Orchestra is an American jazz ensemble which was founded in 1999 as a spin-off of the SuperJazz Big Band by Birmingham, Alabama jazz pianist and vocalist Ray Reach. The mission of the group is to. perform and record big band jazz music written by well known, initially, the band met and rehearsed at Boutwell Recording Studio in Birmingham. After a 20-plus year association with the UAB Music Department, ties were severed, as of September 2007, the group now presents concerts four times a year at the new Brock Recital Hall at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. SuperJazz has remained a popular jazz orchestra in the Birmingham metro area for more than 30 years. SuperJazz has performed and/or recorded with notable jazz artists, including Ernie Watts, Lou Marini, Lew Soloff, Chuck Redd. In 2001, a recording titled UAB SuperJazz, Featuring Ellis Marsalis was released by UAB Entertainment Records, SuperJazz has spawned a number of spin-off groups, such as the Night Flight Big Band and the Magic City Jazz Orchestra. Mr. Marini subsequently came to Birmingham, where he conducted jazz workshops, mr. Reach suggested to Marini that a recording of his numerous big band compositions and arrangements was long overdue. Further, Reach suggested, Marini could make a high quality recording using the musicians from SuperJazz. Mr. Marini agreed to do just that and this recording was, in fact, Marinis debut as a leader. So, in 1999, Marini and Reach began work on co-producing a recording titled Lous Blues at Bates Brothers Recording in Hueytown, a suburb of Birmingham. Both Marini and Reach agreed that for new recording they would assemble a new band composed of some of the regular members of SuperJazz. This new band needed a new name, Thus, the Magic City Jazz Orchestra was born, following the successful recording of Lous Blues, Reach decided to make the MCJO an ongoing official organization, dedicated to the continuance of the great tradition of the American jazz orchestra. He planned a series of jazz recordings, featuring well-known but under-recorded artists, such as Lou Marini, Lew Soloff, Tom Malone. To date, the MCJO has made recordings with saxophonist Lou Marini, Jr. in 2003, the MCJO released a CD with Blue Lou Marini, titled Lous Blues, which elicited favorable reviews. The liner notes for this CD were written by Grammy Award winning arranger and composer Bob Belden, in addition, bass player Cleveland Eaton performs with the band, as does Mike Williams and Blue Lou Marini. Ray Reach, founding director of the MCJO recently began work on a new recording to be released in the first quarter of 2011, the title of this recording is Spinning Wheel - The Magic City Jazz Orchestra plays the music of Blood, Sweat and Tears. The CD will feature former members of Blood, Sweat and Tears as soloists, including Lou Marini, Lew Soloff, Tom Malone. UAB SuperJazz, Featuring Ellis Marsalis Lous Blues, Lou Marini, live at WorkPlay, Lew Soloff and the Magic City Jazz Orchestra. com SuperJazz Big Band at AllAboutJazz. com
6.
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
7.
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
8.
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
9.
Soul music
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Soul music is a popular music genre that originated in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It combines elements of African-American gospel music, rhythm and blues, Soul music became popular for dancing and listening in the United States, where record labels such as Motown, Atlantic and Stax were influential during the Civil Rights Movement. Soul also became popular around the world, directly influencing rock music, catchy rhythms, stressed by handclaps and extemporaneous body moves, are an important feature of soul music. Other characteristics are a call and response between the lead vocalist and the chorus and a tense vocal sound. The style also occasionally uses improvisational additions, twirls and auxiliary sounds, Soul music reflected the African-American identity and it stressed the importance of an African-American culture. The new-found African-American consciousness led to new styles of music, which boasted pride in being black, Soul music dominated the U. S. R&B chart in the 1960s, and many recordings crossed over into the pop charts in the U. S. By 1968, the music genre had begun to splinter. Some soul artists developed funk music, while other singers and groups developed slicker, more sophisticated, by the early 1970s, soul music had been influenced by psychedelic rock and other genres, leading to psychedelic soul. The United States saw the development of neo soul around 1994, there are also several other subgenres and offshoots of soul music. The term soul had been used among African-American musicians to emphasize the feeling of being an African-American in the United States, according to another source, Soul music was the result of the urbanization and commercialization of rhythm and blues in the 60s. The phrase soul music itself, referring to music with secular lyrics, is first attested in 1961. The term soul in African-American parlance has connotations of African-American pride, gospel groups in the 1940s and 1950s occasionally used the term as part of their name. The jazz style that derived from gospel came to be called soul jazz, important innovators whose recordings in the 1950s contributed to the emergence of soul music included Clyde McPhatter, Hank Ballard, and Etta James. Ray Charles is often cited as popularizing the genre with his string of hits starting with 1954s I Got a Woman. Singer Bobby Womack said, Ray was the genius and he turned the world onto soul music. Charles was open in acknowledging the influence of Pilgrim Travelers vocalist Jesse Whitaker on his singing style, little Richard and James Brown were equally influential. Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson are also acknowledged as soul forefathers. Cooke became popular as the singer of gospel group The Soul Stirrers
