1.
Philadelphia
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In 1682, William Penn, an English Quaker, founded the city to serve as capital of the Pennsylvania Colony. Philadelphia was one of the capitals in the Revolutionary War. In the 19th century, Philadelphia became an industrial center. It became a destination for African-Americans in the Great Migration. The areas many universities and colleges make Philadelphia a top international study destination, as the city has evolved into an educational, with a gross domestic product of $388 billion, Philadelphia ranks ninth among world cities and fourth in the nation. Philadelphia is the center of activity in Pennsylvania and is home to seven Fortune 1000 companies. The Philadelphia skyline is growing, with a market of almost 81,900 commercial properties in 2016 including several prominent skyscrapers. The city is known for its arts, culture, and rich history, Philadelphia has more outdoor sculptures and murals than any other American city. Fairmount Park, when combined with the adjacent Wissahickon Valley Park in the watershed, is one of the largest contiguous urban park areas in the United States. The 67 National Historic Landmarks in the city helped account for the $10 billion generated by tourism, Philadelphia is the only World Heritage City in the United States. Before Europeans arrived, the Philadelphia area was home to the Lenape Indians in the village of Shackamaxon, the Lenape are a Native American tribe and First Nations band government. They are also called Delaware Indians and their territory was along the Delaware River watershed, western Long Island. Most Lenape were pushed out of their Delaware homeland during the 18th century by expanding European colonies, Lenape communities were weakened by newly introduced diseases, mainly smallpox, and violent conflict with Europeans. Iroquois people occasionally fought the Lenape, surviving Lenape moved west into the upper Ohio River basin. The American Revolutionary War and United States independence pushed them further west, in the 1860s, the United States government sent most Lenape remaining in the eastern United States to the Indian Territory under the Indian removal policy. In the 21st century, most Lenape now reside in the US state of Oklahoma, with communities living also in Wisconsin, Ontario. The Dutch considered the entire Delaware River valley to be part of their New Netherland colony, in 1638, Swedish settlers led by renegade Dutch established the colony of New Sweden at Fort Christina and quickly spread out in the valley. In 1644, New Sweden supported the Susquehannocks in their defeat of the English colony of Maryland
2.
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
3.
Art Blakey
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Arthur Art Blakey was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. He was known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina after he became a Muslim, Blakey made a name for himself in the 1940s in the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. He worked with bebop musicians Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, in the mid-1950s Horace Silver and Blakey formed the Jazz Messengers, a group that the drummer was associated with for the next 35 years. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz calls the Jazz Messengers the archetypal hard bop group of the late 50s and he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame, the Grammy Hall of Fame, and was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1991, Blakey was born on October 11,1919 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to a single mother, who died shortly after his birth. According to Leslie Gourses biography, the mother figure was Annie Peron. The stories related by family and friends, and by Blakey himself, are contradictory as to how long he spent with the Peron family, equally clouded by contradiction are stories of Blakeys early music career. He switched from piano to drums at a date in the early 1930s. An oft-quoted account of the event states that Blakey was forced at gunpoint to move from piano to drums by a club owner, the veracity of this story is called into question in the Gourse biography, as Blakey himself gives other accounts in addition to this one. The style Blakey assumed was the swing style of Chick Webb, Sid Catlett. From 1939-44, Blakey played with fellow Pittsburgh native Mary Lou Williams, while sources differ on the timing, most agree that he traveled to New York with Williams in 1942 before joining Henderson a year later. While playing in Hendersons band, Blakey got into a scuffle with Georgia police and he then led his own band at the Tic Toc Club in Boston for a short time. From 1944-47, Blakey worked with Billy Eckstines big band, after the Eckstine band broke up, Blakey states that he traveled to Africa for a time, In 1947, after the Eckstine band broke up, we -- took a trip to Africa. I was supposed to stay three months and I stayed two years because I wanted to live among the people and find out just how they lived. Blakey is known to have recorded in 1947,1948 and 1949, Blakey toured with Buddy DeFranco from 1951 to 1953 in a band that also included Kenny Drew. On December 17,1947, Blakey led a group known as Art Blakeys Messengers in his first recording session as a leader, the records were released as 78 rpm records at the time, and two of the songs were released on the New Sounds 10 LP compilation. The octet included Kenny Dorham, Sahib Shihab, Musa Kaleem, around the same time, or 1949 he led a big band called Seventeen Messengers. The band proved to be unstable and broke up soon after
4.
John Coltrane
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John William Coltrane, also known as Trane, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Working in the bebop and hard bop idioms early in his career and he led at least fifty recording sessions during his career, and appeared as a sideman on many albums by other musicians, including trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Thelonious Monk. As his career progressed, Coltrane and his music took on a spiritual dimension. Coltrane influenced innumerable musicians, and remains one of the most significant saxophonists in music history and he received many posthumous awards and recognitions, including canonization by the African Orthodox Church as Saint John William Coltrane and a special Pulitzer Prize in 2007. His second wife was pianist Alice Coltrane and their son Ravi Coltrane is also a saxophonist, Coltrane was born in his parents apartment at 200 Hamlet Avenue, Hamlet, North Carolina on September 23,1926. His father was John R. Coltrane and his mother was Alice Blair and he grew up in High Point, North Carolina, attending William Penn High School. Beginning in December 1938 Coltranes aunt, grandparents, and father all died within a few months of one another, leaving John to be raised by his mother, in June 1943 he moved to Philadelphia. In September of that year his mother bought him his first saxophone, Coltrane played the clarinet and the alto horn in a community band before taking up the alto saxophone during high school. He had his first professional gigs in early to mid-1945 – a cocktail lounge trio, with piano and guitar. To avoid being drafted by the Army, Coltrane enlisted in the Navy on August 6,1945, by the time he got to Hawaii, in late 1945, the Navy was already rapidly downsizing. As the Melody Masters was a band, however, Coltrane was treated merely as a guest performer to avoid alerting superior officers of his participation in the band. He continued to other duties when not playing with the band, including kitchen. By the end of his service, he had assumed a role in the band. His first recordings, a session in Hawaii with Navy musicians. Coltrane played alto saxophone on a selection of standards and bebop tunes. In Philadelphia after the war, he studied theory with guitarist and composer Dennis Sandole. Originally an altoist, in 1947 Coltrane also began playing saxophone with the Eddie Vinson Band. Coltrane later referred to point in his life as a time when a wider area of listening opened up for me
5.
Wayne Shorter
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Wayne Shorter is an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Many of Shorters compositions have become standards, and his output has earned worldwide recognition, critical praise. Shorter first came to prominence in the late 1950s as a member of. In the 1960s, he went on to join Miles Daviss Second Great Quintet and he has recorded over 20 albums as a bandleader. Shorter has won 10 Grammy Awards, the New York Times has described Shorter as probably jazzs greatest living small-group composer and a contender for greatest living improviser. In 2017, he was awarded the Polar Music Prize, Wayne Shorter was born in Newark, New Jersey, and attended Newark Arts High School, from which he graduated in 1952. He loved music, being encouraged by his father to take up the clarinet as a teenager, after graduating from New York University in 1956, Shorter spent two years in the U. S. Army, during which time he played briefly with Horace Silver. After his discharge, he played with Maynard Ferguson, in his youth Shorter had acquired the nickname Mr. Gone, which later became an album title for Weather Report. In 1959, Shorter joined Art Blakey and he stayed with Blakey for five years, and eventually became the bands musical director. When John Coltrane left Miles Davis band in 1960 to pursue his own group, Coltrane proposed Shorter as a replacement, Davis went with Sonny Stitt on tenor, followed by a revolving door of Hank Mobley, George Coleman, and Sam Rivers. In 1964 Davis persuaded Shorter to leave Blakey and join his quintet alongside Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and he composed extensively for Davis, on some albums, he provided half of the compositions. Hancock said of Shorters tenure in the group, The master writer to me, Wayne was one of the few people who brought music to Miles that didnt get changed. Davis said, Wayne is a real composer and he writes scores, write the parts for everybody just as he wants them to sound. Wayne also brought in a kind of curiosity about working with musical rules. If they didnt work, then he broke them, but with musical sense, he understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to them to your own satisfaction. Shorter remained in Daviss band after the breakup of the quintet in 1968, playing on early jazz recordings including In a Silent Way. His last live dates and studio recordings with Davis were in 1970, until 1968, he played tenor saxophone exclusively. The final album on which he played tenor in the sequence of Davis albums was Filles de Kilimanjaro
6.
Montclair, New Jersey
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Montclair is a township in Essex County, New Jersey, United States. As of 2010, it was the 60th-most-populous municipality in New Jersey, Montclair was first formed as a township on April 15,1868, from portions of Bloomfield Township, so that a second railroad could be built to Montclair. After a referendum held on February 21,1894, Montclair was reincorporated as a town and it derives its name from the French mont clair, meaning clear mountain or bright mountain. According to the United States Census Bureau, the township has an area of 6.315 square miles. Montclair is on the east side of the First Mountain of the Watchung Mountains, some higher locations in the township provide excellent views of the surrounding area and of the New York City skyline about 12 miles away. Named localities in the township include Frog Hollow, Montclair Heights, South End, Upper Montclair, Montclair citizens use two main ZIP codes. The central and southern parts of the township are designated 07042, Upper Montclair lies north of Watchung Avenue and has a separate ZIP code,07043. Because the ZIP codes do not exactly match municipal boundaries, a few homes near the borders with neighboring towns fall into the ZIP codes for those communities. A few homes in some adjoining municipalities use one of the two ZIP codes assigned to Montclair, as does HackensackUMC Mountainside, whose campus straddles the border with Glen Ridge, small areas in the southeast of the township fall into the Glen Ridge ZIP code 07028. Yantacaw and Toneys brooks are dammed in parks to create ponds, wigwam, Nishuane, and Toneys brooks flow into the Second River, and the others flow into the Third River. Montclair lies just north of the northernmost extent of the Rahway River watershed, the southern border of Montclair is a straight line between Eagle Rock, on the ridge of the First Watchung Mountain, and the point where Orange Road crosses Nishuane Brook. The eastern border is roughly a line between that point and a point just southwest of where Broad Street crosses the Third River. The western border runs roughly along the ridge of the First Watchung Mountain between Eagle Rock and the Essex County/Passaic County border, the northern border is the border between those two counties. Montclair has a climate, with warm-to-hot, humid summers and cool to cold winters. January tends to be the coldest month, with high temperatures in the upper 30s Fahrenheit. July, the warmest month, features high temperatures in the mid-80s and lows in the 70s, from April to June and from September to early November, Montclair experiences temperatures from the lower 60s to the lower 70s. Montclair gets approximately 50 inches of rain per year, above the United States average of 39 inches, snowfall is common from December to early March, and totals about 30 inches annually. The number of each year in Montclair with any measurable precipitation is 90
