Soweto
Soweto is a township of the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality in Gauteng, South Africa, bordering the city's mining belt in the south. Its name is an English syllabic abbreviation for South Western Townships. A separate municipality, it is now incorporated in the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, Suburbs of Johannesburg. George Harrison and George Walker are today credited as the men who discovered an outcrop of the Main Reef of gold on the farm Langlaagte in February 1886; the fledgling town of Johannesburg was laid out on a triangular wedge of "uitvalgrond" named Randjeslaagte, situated between the farms Doornfontein to the east, Braamfontein to the west and Turffontein to the south. Within a decade of the discovery of gold in Johannesburg, 100,000 people flocked to this part of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republic in search of riches, they were of all nationalities. In October 1887 the government of the South African Republic bought the south-eastern portion of the farm Braamfontein.
There were large quantities of clay, suitable for brickmaking, along the stream. The government decided that more money was to be made from issuing brick maker's licences at five shillings per month; the result was that many landless Dutch-speaking burghers of the ZAR settled on the property and started making bricks. They erected their shacks there. Soon the area was known either Veldschoendorp. Soon other working poor, Coloureds and Africans settled there; the government, who sought to differentiate the white working class from the black, laid out new suburbs for the Burghers, Coolies and Black Africans, but the whole area stayed multiracial. Soweto was created in the 1930s when the White government started separating Blacks from Whites, creating black "townships". Blacks were moved away from Johannesburg, to an area separated from White suburbs by a so-called cordon sanitaire this was a river, a railway track, an industrial area or a highway etc. they did this by using the infamous'Urban Areas Act' in 1923.
Soweto became the largest Black city in South Africa, but until 1976 its population could have status only as temporary residents, serving as a workforce for Johannesburg. It experienced civil unrest during the Apartheid regime. There were serious riots in 1976, sparked by a ruling that Afrikaans be used in African schools there. Reforms followed, but riots flared up again in 1985 and continued until the first multiracial elections were held in April 1994. In 2010, South Africa's oldest township hosted the FIFA Soccer World Cup final and the attention of more than a billion soccer spectators from all over the world was focused on Soweto. William Carr, chair of non-European affairs, initiated the naming of Soweto in 1959, he called for a competition to give a collective name to townships dotted around the South-west of Johannesburg. People responded to this competition with great enthusiasm. Among the names suggested to the City Council was KwaMpanza, meaning Mpanza's place, invoking the name of Mpanza and his role in bringing the plight of Orlando sub tenants to the attention of the City Council.
The City Council settled for the acronym SOWETO. The name Soweto was first used in 1963 and within a short period of time, following the 1976 uprising of students in the township, the name became internationally known. In April 1904 there was a bubonic plague scare in the shanty town area of Brickfields; the town council burn it down. Beforehand most of the Africans living there were moved far out of town to the farm Klipspruit, south-west of Johannesburg, where the council had erected iron barracks and a few triangular hutments; the rest of them had to build their own shacks. The fire brigade set the 1600 shacks and shops in Brickfields alight. Thereafter the area was redeveloped as Newtown. Pimville was next to Kliptown, the oldest Black residential district of Johannesburg and first laid out in 1891 on land which formed part of Klipspruit farm; the future Soweto was to be laid out on Klipspruit and the adjoining farm called Diepkloof. In the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek and the subsequent Transvaal Colony it was lawful for people of colour to own fixed property.
The township of Sophiatown was laid out in 1903 and Blacks were encouraged to buy property there. For the same reasons Alexandra, Gauteng was planned for Black ownership in 1912; the subsequent Natives Land Act of 1913 did not change the situation because it did not apply to land situated within municipal boundaries. In 1923 the Parliament of the Union of South Africa passed the Natives Act; the purpose of the Act was to provide for improved conditions of residence for natives in urban areas, to control their ingress into such areas and to restrict their access to intoxicating liquor. The Act required local authorities to provide accommodation for Natives lawfully employed and resident within the area of their jurisdiction. Pursuant to this Act the Johannesburg town council formed a Municipal Native Affairs Department in 1927, it bought 1 300 morgen of land on the farm Klipspruit No. 8 and the first houses in what was to become Orlando Location were built there in the latter half of 1930. The township was named after the chairman of Mr. Edwin Orlando Leake.
In the end some 10,311 houses were built there by the municipality. In addition it built 4,045 temporary single-room shelters. In about 1934 James Sofasonke Mpanza
Bass guitar
The bass guitar is a plucked string instrument similar in appearance and construction to an electric guitar, except with a longer neck and scale length, four to six strings or courses. The four-string bass is tuned the same as the double bass, which corresponds to pitches one octave lower than the four lowest-pitched strings of a guitar, it is played with the fingers or thumb, or striking with a pick. The electric bass guitar has pickups and must be connected to an amplifier and speaker to be loud enough to compete with other instruments. Since the 1960s, the bass guitar has replaced the double bass in popular music as the bass instrument in the rhythm section. While types of basslines vary from one style of music to another, the bassist plays a similar role: anchoring the harmonic framework and establishing the beat. Many styles of music include the bass guitar, it is a soloing instrument. According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, an "Electric bass guitar a Guitar with four heavy strings tuned E1'-A1'-D2-G2."
It defines bass as "Bass. A contraction of Double bass or Electric bass guitar." According to some authors the proper term is "electric bass". Common names for the instrument are "bass guitar", "electric bass guitar", "electric bass" and some authors claim that they are accurate; the bass guitar is a transposing instrument, as it is notated in bass clef an octave higher than it sounds. In the 1930s, musician and inventor Paul Tutmarc of Seattle, developed the first electric bass guitar in its modern form, a fretted instrument designed to be played horizontally; the 1935 sales catalog for Tutmarc's electronic musical instrument company, featured his "Model 736 Bass Fiddle", a four-stringed, solid-bodied, fretted electric bass guitar with a 30 1⁄2-inch scale length, a single pick up. The adoption of a guitar's body shape made the instrument easier to hold and transport than any of the existing stringed bass instruments; the addition of frets enabled bassists to play in tune more than on fretless acoustic or electric upright basses.
Around 100 of these instruments were made during this period. Audiovox sold their “Model 236” bass amplifier. Around 1947, Tutmarc's son, began marketing a similar bass under the Serenader brand name, prominently advertised in the nationally distributed L. D. Heater Music Company wholesale jobber catalogue of 1948. However, the Tutmarc family inventions did not achieve market success. In the 1950s, Leo Fender and George Fullerton developed the first mass-produced electric bass guitar; the Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing Company began producing the Precision Bass in October 1951. The "P-bass" evolved from a simple, un-contoured "slab" body design and a single coil pickup similar to that of a Telecaster, to something more like a Fender Stratocaster, with a contoured body design, edges beveled for comfort, a split single coil pickup; the "Fender Bass" was a revolutionary new instrument for gigging musicians. In comparison with the large, heavy upright bass, the main bass instrument in popular music from the early 1900s to the 1940s, the bass guitar could be transported to shows.
When amplified, the bass guitar was less prone than acoustic basses to unwanted audio feedback. In 1953 Monk Montgomery became the first bassist to tour with the Fender bass guitar, in Lionel Hampton's postwar big band. Montgomery was possibly the first to record with the bass guitar, on July 2, 1953 with The Art Farmer Septet. Roy Johnson, Shifty Henry, were other early Fender bass pioneers. Bill Black, playing with Elvis Presley, switched from upright bass to the Fender Precision Bass around 1957; the bass guitar was intended to appeal to guitarists as well as upright bass players, many early pioneers of the instrument, such as Carol Kaye, Joe Osborn, Paul McCartney were guitarists. In 1953, following Fender's lead, Gibson released the first short-scale violin-shaped electric bass, with an extendable end pin so a bassist could play it upright or horizontally. Gibson renamed the bass the EB-1 in 1958. In 1958, Gibson released the maple arched-top EB-2 described in the Gibson catalogue as a "hollow-body electric bass that features a Bass/Baritone pushbutton for two different tonal characteristics".
In 1959 these were followed by the more conventional-looking EB-0 Bass. The EB-0 was similar to a Gibson SG in appearance. Whereas Fender basses had pickups mounted in positions in between the base of the neck and the top of the bridge, many of Gibson's early basses featured one humbucking pickup mounted directly against the neck pocket; the EB-3, introduced in 1961 had a "mini-humbucker" at the bridge position. Gibson basses tended to be smaller, sleeker instruments with a shorter scale length than the Precision. A number of other companies began manufacturing bass guitars during the 1950s: Kay in 1952, Hofner and Danelectro in 1956, Rickenbacker in 1957 and Burns/Supersound in 1958. 1956 saw the appearance at the German trade fair "Musikmesse Frankfurt" of the distinctive Höfner 500/1 violin-shaped bass made using violin construction techniques by Walter Höfner, a second-generation violin luthier. The design was known popularly as the "Beat
The Art Farmer Septet
The Art Farmer Septet is an album by trumpeter Art Farmer, featuring performances recorded in 1953 and 1954, arranged by Quincy Jones and Gigi Gryce, released by Prestige Records in 1956. It is his earliest recorded full-length album, but was his third issued; the cover art was by cartoonist Don Martin. The recordings made on July 2, 1953 are the earliest studio recordings of the electric bass; the four tracks with electric bass, played by Monk Montgomery, display his facility with walking bass lines, bebop melodies, Latin-style ostinato. Arranger Quincy Jones highlights Montgomery in the opening sections of three of the four tracks. All of the players on the 1953 recording were at that time members of the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, subsequently toured europe with Hampton from September to December 1953, except Sonny Johnson. Johnson was a previous associate of bass player Monk Montgomery, from Indiana; the four tracks recorded in 1953 were first issued in 1954 on a 10-inch album Work of Art, on Prestige Records.
Three singles were released, the first being “Mau Mau ” in 1953. AllMusic called the album "An excellent early hard bop set"; the Penguin Guide to Jazz commented that the album demonstrates that Farmer's "style was firmly in place: a pensive restraint on ballads, a fleet yet soberly controlled attack on uptempo tunes, a concern for tonal manipulation within a small range of inflexions". All compositions by Quincy Jones except where noted. "Mau Mau" – 5:15 "Work Of Art" – 5:46 "The Little Bandmaster" – 4:06 "Up In Quincy's Room" – 4:00 "Wildwood" – 2:55 "Evening In Paris" – 2:41 "Elephant Walk" – 3:25 "Tia Juana" – 4:52Note Recorded in WOR Studios, New York City on July 2, 1953 and at Van Gelder Studio in Hackensack, New Jersey on June 7, 1954 Art Farmer – trumpet Jimmy Cleveland – trombone Clifford Solomon, Charlie Rouse – tenor saxophone Oscar Estell, Danny Bank – baritone saxophone Quincy Jones, Horace Silver – piano Monk Montgomery – electric bass Percy Heath – bass Sonny Johnson, Art Taylor – drums Quincy Jones – percussion Quincy Jones, Gigi Gryce – arrangement Doug Hawkins – recording engineer Ira Gitler – producer Rudy Van Gelder – recording engineer Bob Weinstock – producer
Guitar Player
Guitar Player is an American popular magazine for guitarists, founded in 1967 in San Jose, United States. It contains articles, interviews and lessons of an eclectic collection of artists and products, it has been in print since late 1967. The magazine is edited by Christopher Scapilitti. A typical issue of Guitar Player includes in-depth artist features, extensive lessons and music reviews, letters to the magazine, various front-of-book articles. In May 2006, the Music Player Network partnered with TrueFire TV to launch an internet-based television station for guitarists, it provides content similar to that of the magazine such as lessons. Guitar Player TV is provided at no cost to the user because of sponsorship. Guitar Player has a yearly competition now called "Guitar Superstar", which used to be the "Guitar Hero Competition". Guitar Player Online Joe Gore discusses his tenure as an editor at Guitar Player Past and present Guitar Player Staff Interviews Guitar Player Online Archives
Las Vegas
Las Vegas the City of Las Vegas and known as Vegas, is the 28th-most populated city in the United States, the most populated city in the state of Nevada, the county seat of Clark County. The city anchors the Las Vegas Valley metropolitan area and is the largest city within the greater Mojave Desert. Las Vegas is an internationally renowned major resort city, known for its gambling, fine dining and nightlife; the Las Vegas Valley as a whole serves as the leading financial and cultural center for Nevada. The city bills itself as The Entertainment Capital of the World, is famous for its mega casino–hotels and associated activities, it is a top three destination in the United States for business conventions and a global leader in the hospitality industry, claiming more AAA Five Diamond hotels than any other city in the world. Today, Las Vegas annually ranks as one of the world's most visited tourist destinations; the city's tolerance for numerous forms of adult entertainment earned it the title of Sin City, has made Las Vegas a popular setting for literature, television programs, music videos.
Las Vegas was settled in 1905 and incorporated in 1911. At the close of the 20th century, it was the most populated American city founded within that century. Population growth has accelerated since the 1960s, between 1990 and 2000 the population nearly doubled, increasing by 85.2%. Rapid growth has continued into the 21st century, according to a 2018 estimate, the population is 648,224 with a regional population of 2,227,053; as with most major metropolitan areas, the name of the primary city is used to describe areas beyond official city limits. In the case of Las Vegas, this applies to the areas on and near the Las Vegas Strip, located within the unincorporated communities of Paradise and Winchester; the earliest visitors to the Las Vegas area were nomadic Paleo-Indians, who traveled there 10,000 years ago, leaving behind petroglyphs. Anasazi and Paiute tribes followed at least 2,000 years ago. A young Mexican scout named Rafael Rivera is credited as the first non-Native American to encounter the valley, in 1829.
Trader Antonio Armijo led a 60-man party along the Spanish Trail to Los Angeles, California in 1829. The area was named Las Vegas, Spanish for "the meadows," as it featured abundant wild grasses, as well as the desert spring waters needed by westward travelers; the year 1844 marked the arrival of John C. Frémont, whose writings helped lure pioneers to the area. Downtown Las Vegas's Fremont Street is named after him. Eleven years members of the LDS Church chose Las Vegas as the site to build a fort halfway between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, where they would travel to gather supplies; the fort was abandoned several years afterward. The remainder of this Old Mormon Fort can still be seen at the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Washington Avenue. Las Vegas was founded as a city in 1905, when 110 acres of land adjacent to the Union Pacific Railroad tracks were auctioned in what would become the downtown area. In 1911, Las Vegas was incorporated as a city. 1931 was a pivotal year for Las Vegas.
At that time, Nevada legalized casino gambling and reduced residency requirements for divorce to six weeks. This year witnessed the beginning of construction on nearby Hoover Dam; the influx of construction workers and their families helped Las Vegas avoid economic calamity during the Great Depression. The construction work was completed in 1935. In 1941, the Las Vegas Army Air Corps Gunnery School was established. Known as Nellis Air Force Base, it is home to the aerobatic team called the Thunderbirds. Following World War II, lavishly decorated hotels, gambling casinos, big-name entertainment became synonymous with Las Vegas. In the 1950s the Moulin Rouge opened and became the first racially integrated casino-hotel in Las Vegas. In 1951, nuclear weapons testing began at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. During this time the city was nicknamed the "Atomic City". Residents and visitors were able to witness the mushroom clouds until 1963, when the limited Test Ban Treaty required that nuclear tests be moved underground.
The iconic "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign, never located within municipal limits, was created in 1959 by Betty Willis. During the 1960s, corporations and business powerhouses such as Howard Hughes were building and buying hotel-casino properties. Gambling was referred to as "gaming"; the year 1995 marked the opening of the Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas's downtown area. This canopied five-block area features 12.5 million LED lights and 550,000 watts of sound from dusk until midnight during shows held on the top of each hour. Due to the realization of many revitalization efforts, 2012 was dubbed "The Year of Downtown." Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of projects made their debut at this time. They included The Smith Center for the Performing Arts and DISCOVERY Children's Museum, Mob Museum, Neon Museum, a new City Hall complex and renovations for a new Zappos.com corporate headquarters in the old City Hall building. Las Vegas is situated within Clark County in a basin on the floor of the Mojave Desert and is surrounded by mountain ranges on all sides.
Much of the landscape is arid with desert vegetation and wildlife. It can be subjected to torrential flash floods, although much has been done to mitigate the effects of flash floods through improved drainage systems; the peaks surrounding Las Vegas reach elevations of o
Jimmy Blanton
James Blanton was an American jazz double bassist. Blanton is credited with being the originator of more complex pizzicato and arco bass solos in a jazz context than previous bassists. Blanton was born in Tennessee, he learned to play the violin, but took up the bass while at Tennessee State University, performing with the Tennessee State Collegians from 1936 to 1937, during the vacations with Fate Marable. Blanton left university in 1938 to play full-time in St Louis with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra. Blanton joined Duke Ellington's band in 1939. On November 22 of that year and Ellington recorded two tracks – "Blues" and "Plucked Again" – which were the first commercially recorded piano–bass duets. Further duet recordings were made in 1940, Blanton was featured in orchestra tracks. "Blanton took part in a few of the informal jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse in New York that contributed to the genesis of the bop style." He had to leave Ellington's band because of poor health. Ellington put Blanton front-and-center on the bandstand nightly, unheard of for a bassist at the time.
Such was his importance to Ellington's band at the time, together with tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, that it became known as the Blanton–Webster band. Blanton played in the "small group" sessions led by Barney Bigard, Rex Stewart, Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams in 1940-41. In 1941, Blanton was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Blanton died on July 30, 1942, at a sanatorium in Duarte, aged 23; when with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra, Blanton added classical music pizzicato and arco techniques to jazz bass, making it into more of a solo instrument. When with Ellington, Blanton revolutionized the way the double bass was used in jazz, his virtuosity put him in a different class from his predecessors, making him the first master of the jazz bass and demonstrating its potential as a solo instrument. "He possessed great dexterity and range, roundness of tone, accurate intonation, above all an unprecedented sense of swing." He added "many non-harmonic passing notes in his accompaniment lines, giving them a contrapuntal flavour and stimulating soloists to their own harmonic explorations."
His originality was developed by others into the foundations of the bebop rhythm section. His importance was such that, "until the advent of the styles of Scott LaFaro and Charlie Haden in the 1960s all modern bass players drew on his innovations." "Jimmy Blanton". African American Almanac. 9th ed. Gale, 2003. Student Resource Center. Thomson Gale. 11 April 2006
Benny Carter
Bennett Lester Carter was an American jazz saxophonist, trumpeter, composer and bandleader. With Johnny Hodges, he was a pioneer on the alto saxophone. From the beginning of his career in the 1920s he was a popular arranger, having written charts for Fletcher Henderson's big band that shaped the swing style, he had an unusually long career. During the 1980s and'90s, he was nominated for eight Grammy Awards, which included receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award. Born in New York City in 1907, he was given piano lessons by his mother and others in the neighborhood, he played trumpet and experimented with C-melody saxophone before settling on alto saxophone. In the 1920s, he performed with June Clark, Billy Paige, Earl Hines toured as a member of the Wilberforce Collegians led by Horace Henderson, he appeared on record for the first time in 1927 as a member of the Paradise Ten led by Charlie Johnson. He returned to the Collegians and became their bandleader through 1929, including a performance at the Savoy Ballroom in New York City.
In his early 20s, Carter worked as arranger for Fletcher Henderson after that position was vacated by Don Redman. He had no formal education in arranging, so he learned by trial and error, getting on his knees and looking at the existing charts, "writing the lead trumpet first and the lead saxophone first—which, of course, is the hard way, it was quite some time that I did that before I knew what a score was."He left Henderson to take Redman's former job as leader of McKinney's Cotton Pickers in Detroit. In 1932 he formed a band in New York City that included Chu Berry, Sid Catlett, Cozy Cole, Bill Coleman, Ben Webster, Dicky Wells, Teddy Wilson. Carter's arrangements were complex. Among the most significant were "Keep a Song in Your Soul", written for Henderson in 1930, "Lonesome Nights" and "Symphony in Riffs" from 1933, both of which show Carter's writing for saxophones. By the early 1930s, Carter and Johnny Hodges were considered the leading alto saxophonists. Carter became a leading trumpet soloist, having rediscovered the instrument.
He recorded extensively on trumpet in the 1930s. Carter's short-lived Orchestra played the Harlem Club in New York but only recorded a handful of records for Columbia, OKeh and Vocalion; the OKeh sides were issued under the name The Chocolate Dandies. In 1933 Carter participated in sessions with British band leader Spike Hughes, who went to New York City to organize recordings with prominent African American musicians; these 14 sides plus four by Carter's big band, titled at the time Spike Hughes and His Negro Orchestra, were only issued in England. The musicians were from Carter's band and included Red Allen, Dicky Wells, Wayman Carver, Coleman Hawkins, J. C. Higginbotham, Chu Berry. Carter spent two years as arranger for the BBC Big Band. In England and Scandinavia he recorded with local musicians, he took his band to the Netherlands. In these settings Carter played trumpet, piano and tenor saxophone, provided occasional vocals. In 1938 he returned to America, he found regular work leading his band at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem through 1941.
The band included Shad Collins, Sidney De Paris, Vic Dickenson, Freddie Webster. After this engagement he led a seven-piece band which included Eddie Barefield, Kenny Clarke, Dizzy Gillespie. In the middle 1940s, he made Los Angeles his home, forming another big band, which at times included J. J. Johnson, Max Roach, Miles Davis, but these would be his last big bands. With the exception of occasional concerts, performing with Jazz at the Philharmonic, recording, he ceased working as a touring big band bandleader. Los Angeles provided him many opportunities for studio work, these dominated his time during the decades, he wrote music and arrangements for television and films, such as Stormy Weather in 1943. During the 1950s and'60s, he wrote arrangements for vocalists such as Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan. On something of a comeback in the 1970s, Carter returned to playing saxophone again and toured the Middle East courtesy of the U. S. State Department, he began making annual visits to Japan.
In 1969, Carter was persuaded to spend a weekend at Princeton University by Morroe Berger, a sociology professor at Princeton who wrote about jazz. This led to a new outlet for Carter's talent: teaching. For the next nine years he visited Princeton five times, most of them brief stays except for one in 1973 when he spent a semester there as a visiting professor. In 1974 Princeton gave him an honorary doctorate, he conducted teaching at workshops and seminars at several other universities and was a visiting lecturer at Harvard for a week in 1987. Morroe Berger wrote Benny Carter – A Life in American Music, a two-volume work about Carter's career. Time had little effect on Carter's abilities. During the 1980s he wrote the long composition Central City Sketches, performed at Cooper Union by the American Jazz Orchestra. Another long composition, Glasgow Suite, was performed in Scotland. Lincoln Center commission him to write "Good Vibes" in 1990; the National Endowment for the Arts gave him a grant that led Tales of the Rising Sun Suite and Harlem Renaissance Suite.
This music was performed in 1992. Carter had an unusually long career, he was the only musician to have recorded in eight different decades. Another characteristic of his career was its versatility as musician, bandleader and composer, he helped define the sound of alto saxophone, but he performed and recorded on soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone, trombone and piano. He helped establish a foundation for a
