1.
Akron, Ohio
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Akron /ˈækrən/ is the fifth-largest city in the U. S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Summit County. It is located on the edge of the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau. As of the 2015 Census Estimate, the city proper had a population of 197,542. The Akron, OH Metropolitan Statistical Area covers Summit and Portage counties and it is also part of the larger Cleveland-Akron-Canton, OH Combined Statistical Area, which in 2013 had a population of 3,501,538, ranking 15th. Co-founded along the Little Cuyahoga River in 1825 by Simon Perkins and Paul Williams, it was done so being a point at the summit of the developing Ohio. The name derived from the Greek word ἄκρον signifying a summit or high point, due to Eliakim Crosby founding North Akron in 1833, South was added to its name until the two merged into an incorporated village in 1836. Neighboring settlements Kenmore and Ellet became annexed in 1929 and it is a setting for several movie films, television shows and novel stories, and is the origin of fictional characters. Residents of the city are called Akronites and it has had many nicknames, three of which are Rubber Capital of the World, Rubber City and City of Invention. Akron became a manufacturing center owing to its location on the canal, as well as being connected to numerous others and railroad lines. The city is home to the All-American Soapbox Derby, WGC-Bridgestone Invitational, Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens, Akron City Hospital, the Goodyear Polymer Center, and Alcoholics Anonymous. Listed by Newsweek as one of ten Information Age high tech havens, it was awarded by the National Civic League, residents Frank and Charles Menches have a disputed claim of inventing the hamburger thus the annual national festival is hosted in the city. A creature often referred to as the Kenmore Grassman is reported through history, Notable historical events that occurred in the city includes the Akron School Law of 1847 creating the K-12 system, and Sojourner Truth giving her Aint I A Woman. Resident Ferdinand Schumacher supplied the Union Army with quaker oats during the American Civil War. Akron is known for the rubber, tire, and airship industries among others, including the trucking, stoneware, sewer pipe, fishing tackle, farming equipment, mining, match, zipper, and toy industries. With a population increase of 201. 8% during the 1910s, three major civil unrest events took place during the riot of 1900, rubber strike of 1936, and the Wooster Avenue riots of 1968. Du Bois and President Bill Clinton gave speeches on race relations in the city, while visiting during August 1914, Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association. In 1971, James R. Williams founded Alpha Phi Alpha Homes Inc. to build the Channelwood Village area of Akron. During a 2016 march on West Market Street, purple heart Vietnam War veteran, Notable criminal history includes mobster Rosario Borgio headquartering the areas black hand operations, and Pretty Boy Floyds Walker-Mitchell mobs activities
2.
Portland, Oregon
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Portland is a port and the largest city in the U. S. state of Oregon and the seat of Multnomah County. It is in the Willamette Valley region of the Pacific Northwest, at the confluence of the Willamette, the city covers 145 square miles and had an estimated population of 632,309 in 2015, making it the 26th most populous city in the United States. Approximately 2,389,228 people live in the Portland metropolitan statistical area and its Combined Statistical Area ranks 17th with a population of 3,022,178. Roughly 60% of Oregons population resides within the Portland metropolitan area, named after Portland, Maine, the Oregon settlement began to be populated in the 1830s near the end of the Oregon Trail. Its water access provided convenient transportation of goods, and the industry was a major force in the citys early economy. At the turn of the 20th century, the city had a reputation as one of the most dangerous cities in the world. After the citys economy experienced a boom during World War II. Beginning in the 1960s, Portland became noted for its liberal political values, and the city has earned a reputation as a bastion of counterculture. According to a 2009 Pew Research Center study, Portland ranks as the eighth most popular American city, the city operates with a commission-based government guided by a mayor and four commissioners as well as Metro, the only directly elected metropolitan planning organization in the United States. The city government is notable for its planning and investment in public transportation. Its climate is marked by warm, dry summers and cool and this climate is ideal for growing roses, and Portland has been called the City of Roses for over a century. Keep Portland Weird is a slogan for the city. During the prehistoric period, the land that would become Portland was flooded after the collapse of glacial dams from Lake Missoula and these massive floods occurred during the last ice age and filled the Willamette Valley with 300 to 400 feet of water. The Chinook people occupying the land which would become Portland were first documented by Meriwether Lewis, before its European settlement, the Portland Basin of the lower Columbia River and Willamette River valleys had been one of the most densely populated regions on the Pacific Coast. Large numbers of settlers began arriving in the Willamette Valley in the 1830s via the Oregon Trail. In the early 1840s a new settlement began emerging ten miles from the mouth of the Willamette River and this community was initially referred to as Stumptown and The Clearing because of the many trees cut down to allow for its growth. In 1843 William Overton saw potential in the new settlement but lacked the funds to file a land claim. For 25 cents Overton agreed to half of the 640-acre site with Asa Lovejoy of Boston
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.
Experimental rock
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Experimental rock is a subgenre of rock music which pushes the boundaries of common composition and performance technique or which experiments with the basic elements of the genre. From its inception, rock music was experimental, but it wasnt until the late 1960s that rock artists began creating extended, in 1967, the genre was as commercially viable as pop music, but by 1970, most of its leading players had incapacitated themselves in some form. In Germany, the krautrock subgenre merged elements of improvisation and psychedelic rock with avant-garde, later in the 1970s, significant musical crossbreeding took place in tandem with the developments of punk and new wave, DIY experimentation, and electronic music. Funk, jazz-rock, and fusion rhythms became integrated into experimental rock music. The first wave of 1980s experimental rock groups had few precedents for their sound. Later in the decade, avant-rock pursued a psychedelic aesthetic that differed from the self-consciousness, during the 1990s, a loose movement known as post-rock became the dominant form of experimental rock. As of the 2010s, the experimental rock has fallen to indiscriminate use, with virtually every modern rock band being categorized under prefixes such as post-, kraut-, psych-. Although experimentation had always existed in music, it wasnt until the late 1960s that new openings were created from the aesthetic intersecting with the social. In 1966, the boundaries between pop music and the avant-garde began to blur as rock albums were conceived and executed as distinct, self-taught rock musicians in the middle and late 1960s drew from the work of composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luciano Berio. In addition, The Quietus Ben Graham described duos the Silver Apples, calling attention to the very recordedness of the album. This would also be reflected in contemporary experimental rock LPs, such as the Beach Boys Pet Sounds and Smile, the Whos The Who Sell Out and Tommy. The Velvet Underground were a group in experimental rock, according to Rosenberg. Peppers inspired a new consideration for experimental rock as commercially viable music, as progressive rock developed, experimental rock acquired notoriety alongside art rock. By 1970, most of the musicians which had been at the forefront of rock had incapacitated themselves. Groups such as Can, Faust, Neu, the ideas of minimalism and composers such as Stockhausen would be particularly influential. During this era, funk, jazz-rock, and fusion rhythms became integrated into experimental rock music, some groups who were categorized as post-punk considered themselves part of an experimental rock trajectory, with This Heat as one of the prominent players. Anderson claims that the no wave scene represented New York’s last stylistically cohesive avant-rock movement, steve Redhead noted the resuscitation of New Yorks avant-rock scene, including artists such as Sonic Youth and John Zorn, in the 1980s. In the late 1980s, avant-rock pursued a frazzled, psychedelia-tinged, blissed out aesthetic that differed from the self-consciousness, the UK shoegaze scene was seen by some as a continuation of an experimental rock tradition
5.
Tom Waits
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Thomas Alan Tom Waits is an American singer-songwriter, composer, and actor. He has worked as a composer for movies and musicals and has acted in supporting roles in films, including Paradise Alley and he also starred in Jim Jarmuschs 1986 film Down by Law. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on One from the Heart. Waits lyrics frequently present atmospheric portraits of grotesque, often seedy characters and places and he has a cult following and has influenced subsequent songwriters despite having little radio or music video support. His songs are best-known through cover versions by more artists, Jersey Girl, performed by Bruce Springsteen, Ol 55, by the Eagles. Although Waits albums have met with mixed success in his native United States. He has been nominated for a number of music awards and has won Grammy Awards for two albums, Bone Machine and Mule Variations. In 2011, Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and he is also included among the 2010 list of Rolling Stones 100 Greatest Singers, as well as the 2015 list of Rolling Stones 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time. Waits lives in Sonoma County, California, with his wife Kathleen Brennan, Waits was born at Park Avenue Hospital in Pomona, the son of schoolteachers Alma Fern McMurray and Jesse Frank Waits. After his parents divorced in 1960, he lived with his mother in Whittier, Waits, who taught himself how to play the piano on a neighbors instrument, often took trips to Mexico with his father, who taught Spanish. He would later say that he found his love of music during these trips through a Mexican ballad that was probably a Ranchera, you know, on the car radio with my dad. By 1965, while attending at Hilltop High School in Chula Vista and he later admitted that he was not a fan of the 1960s music scene, stating, I wasnt thrilled by Blue Cheer, so I found an alternative, even if it was Bing Crosby. Five years later, he was working as a doorman at the Heritage nightclub in San Diego, where artists of every genre performed, when he did his first paid gig for $6. A fan of Bob Dylan, Lord Buckley, Jack Kerouac, Louis Armstrong, Howlin Wolf, in 1971, Waits moved to the Echo Park neighborhood of L. A. and signed with Herb Cohen at the age of 21. From August to December 1971, Waits made a series of recordings for Zappa and Cohens Bizarre/Straight label. These early tracks were released 20 years later on The Early Years, Volume One, Waits signed to Asylum Records in 1972, and after numerous abortive recording sessions, his first record—the jazzy, folk-tinged Closing Time—was released in 1973. Lee Hazlewood became one of the first major artists to cover a Tom Waits song, using the title variation Those Were Days Of Roses on his album for Capitol, Poet, Fool, or Bum. Also in 1973, Tim Buckley released the album Sefronia, which contained another version of Waits song Martha from Closing Time
6.
Dieselhed
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Dieselhed was a San Francisco-based band, originally from Arcata, California. Dieselhed formed in 1989 in Arcata, California later moving to San Francisco, California, playing a blend of country, punk, drummer Heifetz spread his time between Dieselhed and the genre-bending experimentalists Mr. Bungle. The band signed a contract with independent label Amarillo Records in the early 1990s. Dieselhed released three albums for Amarillo while maintaining a national touring schedule throughout the 90s, often accompanied by road manager John Tynan. Dieselheds self-titled 1993 debut was received well, leading to a modest spurt of college radio airplay, the band wound up selling out Amarillos first two pressings of the album. Their second album, Tales of a Brown Dragon, came out in 1995, Dieselhed became regulars at the SXSW music festival held each year in Austin, Texas. Their third album, 1997s Shallow Water Blackout, was produced by Dwight Yoakam engineer Dusty Wakeman, Dieselhed followed their 1997 release with two U. S. tours opening for Link Wray. For these dates Ellis and Heifitz would return to the stage after their opening set each night to back Wray, the two would go on to become Wrays regular backing band from 1997 to 2003. In 1998 Dieselhed signed a new contract with Bong Load Records, Dieselhed issued Elephant Rest Home in 1998 and their final album, the rarely seen Chico and the Flute in 2000 on Bongload before disbanding later in 2000. Lead songwriter Virgil Shaw went on to two critically acclaimed solo albums, Quad Cities and Still Falling, for San Franciscos independent label Future Farmer Records. Co-songwriter Zac Holtzman now plays in the Los Angeles-based band Dengue Fever, danny Heifetz, now raising a family in Australia, stays busy with local studio session work and drum lessons. Atom Ellis resides between San Francisco and Los Angeles and performs as bassist with Neil Hamburger, The New Cars, guitarist Shon McAllin is currently a licensed contractor residing in the deep woods of Northern California
