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.
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
3.
New York City
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The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2015 population of 8,550,405 distributed over an area of about 302.6 square miles. Located at the tip of the state of New York. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has described as the cultural and financial capital of the world. Situated on one of the worlds largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, the five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. In 2013, the MSA produced a gross metropolitan product of nearly US$1.39 trillion, in 2012, the CSA generated a GMP of over US$1.55 trillion. NYCs MSA and CSA GDP are higher than all but 11 and 12 countries, New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the countrys largest city since 1790, the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a symbol of the United States and its democracy. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world, the names of many of the citys bridges, tapered skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world. Manhattans real estate market is among the most expensive in the world, Manhattans Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is one of the most extensive metro systems worldwide, with 472 stations in operation. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, and Rockefeller University, during the Wisconsinan glaciation, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth. The ice sheet scraped away large amounts of soil, leaving the bedrock that serves as the foundation for much of New York City today. Later on, movement of the ice sheet would contribute to the separation of what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The first documented visit by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown and he claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême. Heavy ice kept him from further exploration, and he returned to Spain in August and he proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River, named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange
4.
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
5.
Bethlehem Records
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Bethlehem Records was a jazz record company and label founded by Gus Wildi in 1953. Bethlehem is remembered for its releases from the 1950s. Producers included Creed Taylor and Teddy Charles, Bethlehem released the first albums recorded by singers Chris Connor in 1954, Nina Simone in 1958, and singer/actress Julie London. London did not record an album for the label. She recorded four songs that would later be released on the compilation LP Bethlehems Girlfriends in 1955, in 1958, Bethlehem began a distributing deal with King Records. In 1962, it was sold and absorbed by King, after Syd Nathans death in 1968, King was acquired by Starday Records and relaunched as Starday and King Records. It was acquired in 1970 by Lin Broadcasting and in 1972 by Tennessee Recording & Publishing, at that time, Bethlehem was purchased by the Cayre brothers Salsoul Records, who initially intended to release its back catalog for inexpensive 8-track tapes in the 1970s. In 1993, the Bethlehem name was revived as Bethlehem Music Company and it was licensed by the Verse Music Group in 2010. During 2013–2014, Verve and Naxos reissued the 1950s catalogue on LP, CD and this included music by Art Blakey, Chris Connor, Paula Castle, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Nina Simone, Mel Tormé, and Zoot Sims. The BCP1000 Series of 10 inch LP records commenced in September 1954, the BCP Deluxe Series of 12 inch LP records commenced in 1955 and ran until 1960. Early releases consisted of reissues of 10 inch albums from the BCP1000 Series, the 6000 series of 12 inch LP records commenced in 1956 and ran until 1964. List of record labels The Pictorial Discography of 1000 Series Bethlehem Discography
6.
Little Girl Blue (album)
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Little Girl Blue is the debut album by jazz singer, pianist and songwriter Nina Simone, released by Bethlehem Records. Simone was in her mid-20s at the time, and still aspiring to be a concert pianist. She immediately sold the rights for the songs on this album to Bethlehem for $3,000, Simone was dissatisfied by the lack of effort the record company took in promoting her, and after this album she formed a long business relationship with Colpix Records. The album Nina Simone and Her Friends was released after she had left Bethlehem, without her consent, the session was the only one ever recorded for Bethlehem. The original 1958 album was released in mono, but an issue the following year. The album was reissued by Bethlehem in 1992 on CD, with three tracks from the same session, Hes Got the Whole World in His Hands, For All We Know. This format was released again in 2002, as Jazz as Played in an Exclusive Side Street Club by Charly / Snapper Music, remastered, I Loves You, Porgy, from George Gershwins opera Porgy and Bess. This was the song that started Simones career, the single became her only Billboard top 20 hit in the United States. Mood Indigo, also featured on Let It All Out, love Me or Leave Me featured on the soundtrack of Billys Hollywood Screen Kiss, also features on Let It All Out. Plain Gold Ring was later covered by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, White Magic, Simones version was also incorporated into the song Deadly Species by Alif Tree for their album French Cuisine. My Baby Just Cares for Me was Simones biggest hit and it was one of the last songs she recorded during the session, because the record label wanted an uptempo song to finish with. The fairly obscure song became a hit when it was re-released in 1987 and it helped the almost forgotten Simone back into the limelight. Central Park Blues was created and recorded in a single take, the record company needed another song, so Simone drew inspiration from a photo shoot earlier in the day at Central Park. Little Girl Blue is an example of a quodlibet. In this case Simone combined the Rodgers and Hart melody and lyrics with the melody of the popular carol Good King Wenceslas, dont Smoke in Bed, is a jazz song written and originally recorded by Willard Robison
7.
AllMusic
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AllMusic is an online music guide service website. It was launched in 1991 by All Media Guide which later became All Media Network, AllMusic was launched in 1991 by Michael Erlewine of All Media Guide. The aim was to discographic information on every artist whos made a record since Enrico Caruso gave the industry its first big boost and its first reference book was published the following year. When first released onto the Internet, AMG predated the World Wide Web and was first available as a Gopher site, the AMG consumer web properties AllMusic. com, AllMovie. com and AllGame. com were sold by Rovi in July 2013 to All Media Network, LLC. All Media Network, LLC. was formed by the founders of SideReel. com. The following are contributors to AllMusic, as of this date, All Media Network also produced the AllMusic guide series that includes the AllMusic Guide to Rock, the All Music Guide to Jazz and the All Music Guide to the Blues. Vladimir Bogdanov is the president of the series, in August 2007, PC Magazine included AllMusic in its Top 100 Classic Websites list. All Media Network AllGame AllMovie SideReel All Music Guide to the Blues All Music Guide to Jazz Stephen Thomas Erlewine Official website
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