James Taylor
James Vernon Taylor is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. A five-time Grammy Award winner, he was inducted into the Rock and he is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 100 million records worldwide. Taylor achieved his breakthrough in 1970 with the No.3 single Fire and Rain and had his first No.1 hit the year with Youve Got a Friend. His 1976 Greatest Hits album was certified Diamond and has sold 12 million US copies, following his 1977 album, JT, he has retained a large audience over the decades. Every album that he released from 1977 to 2007 sold over a million copies and his chart performance had a resurgence during the late 1990s and 2000s, when he recorded some of his most-awarded work. He achieved his first number one album in the US in 2015 with his recording Before This World. He is notable for his covers of other peoples songs, such as How Sweet It Is. James Vernon Taylor was born at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on March 12,1948 and his father was from a well-off family of Southerners of Scottish ancestry.
His mother, the former Gertrude Woodard, studied singing with Marie Sundelius at the New England Conservatory of Music and was an opera singer before the couples marriage in 1946. James was the second of five children, the others being Alex, Kate and they built a house in the Morgan Creek area off the present Morgan Creek Road, which was sparsely populated. James would say, Chapel Hill, the Piedmont, the hills, were tranquil, beautiful. Thinking of the red soil, the seasons, the way things smelled down there, I feel as though my experience of coming of age there was more a matter of landscape, James attended public primary school in Chapel Hill. Isaacs career prospered, but he was away from home, on military service at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. Isaac Taylor rose to dean of the UNC School of Medicine from 1964 to 1971. The Taylors spent summers on Marthas Vineyard beginning in 1953, Taylor first learned to play the cello as a child in North Carolina and switched to the guitar in 1960.
He began attending Milton Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts in fall 1961. Summering before with his family on Marthas Vineyard, he met Danny Kortchmar, the two began listening to and playing blues and folk music together, and Kortchmar quickly realized that Taylors singing had a natural sense of phrasing, every syllable beautifully in time. I knew James had that thing, Taylor wrote his first song on guitar at 14, and he continued to learn the instrument effortlessly
Mstislav Rostropovich
Mstislav Leopoldovich Slava Rostropovich was a Soviet and Russian cellist and conductor. He is considered to be one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century, in addition to his interpretations and technique, he was well known for both inspiring and commissioning new works, which enlarged the cello repertoire more than any cellist before or since. Rostropovich was internationally recognized as an advocate of human rights. He was married to the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya and had two daughters and Elena Rostropovich, mstislavs father was born in Voronezh to Witold Rostropowicz, a composer of Polish noble descent, and Matilda Rostropovich, née Pule. The Polish part of his family bore the Bogoria coat of arms, mstislavs mother Sofiya and her elder sister Nadezhda were the daughters of the founder of the Fedotov Music School in Orienburg, Nikolay Fedotov. Nadezhda married the cellist Semyon Kozolupov, who was thus Rostropovichs uncle by marriage, Rostropovich grew up in Baku and spent his youth there.
During World War II his family moved back to Orenburg and in 1943 to Moscow, at the age of four, Rostropovich learned the piano with his mother. He began the cello at the age of 10 with his father, in 1943, at the age of 16, he entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied cello with his uncle Semyon Kozolupov, piano and composition with Vissarion Shebalin. His teachers included Dmitri Shostakovich, in 1945 he came to prominence as a cellist when he won the gold medal in the Soviet Unions first ever competition for young musicians. He graduated from the Conservatory in 1948, and became professor of cello there in 1956, Rostropovich gave his first cello concert in 1942. He won first prize at the international Music Awards of Prague, in 1950, at the age of 23 he was awarded what was considered the highest distinction in the Soviet Union, the Stalin Prize. At that time, Rostropovich was already known in his country and while actively pursuing his solo career, he taught at the Leningrad Conservatory.
In 1955, he married Galina Vishnevskaya, a soprano at the Bolshoi Theatre. Rostropovich had working relationships with Soviet composers of the era, in 1949 Sergei Prokofiev wrote his Cello Sonata in C, Op.119, for the 22-year-old Rostropovich, who gave the first performance in 1950, with Sviatoslav Richter. Prokofiev dedicated his Symphony-Concerto for cello to him, this was premiered in 1952, Rostropovich and Dmitry Kabalevsky completed Prokofievs Cello Concertino after the composers death. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote both his first and second cello concertos for Rostropovich, who gave their first performances. His international career started in 1963 in the Conservatoire of Liège, Rostropovich went on several tours in Western Europe and met several composers, including Benjamin Britten, who dedicated his Cello Sonata, three Solo Suites, and his Cello Symphony to Rostropovich. Britten was renowned as a piano accompanist and together they recorded, among other works, Schuberts Sonata for Arpeggione and his daughter claimed that this recording moved her father to tears of joy even on his deathbed
Ray Charles
Ray Charles Robinson, known professionally as Ray Charles, was an American singer-songwriter and composer. Among friends and fellow musicians he preferred being called Brother Ray and he was often referred to as The Genius. Charles was blind from the age of seven and he pioneered the genre of soul music during the 1950s by combining blues and blues, and gospel styles into the music he recorded for Atlantic Records. He contributed to the integration of music and blues and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records. While he was with ABC, Charles became one of the first black musicians to be granted artistic control by a record company. Charles cited Nat King Cole as an influence, but his music was influenced by country, blues. In the late forties, he became friends with Quincy Jones and their friendship would last till the end of Charless life. Frank Sinatra called him the true genius in show business. In 2002, Rolling Stone ranked Charles number ten on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, Billy Joel observed, This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley.
Robinson was the son of Bailey Robinson, a laborer, at the time, she was a teenage orphan making a living as a sharecropper. They lived in Greenville, with Robinsons mother and his wife, the Robinson family had informally adopted Aretha, and she became known as Aretha Robinson. When she, became pregnant by Bailey, she briefly left Greenville late in the summer of 1930 to be family members in Albany, Georgia. After that and child returned to Greenville, and Aretha and he was deeply devoted to his mother and recalled her perseverance, self-sufficiency, and pride as guiding lights in his life. His father abandoned the family, left Greenville, and took another wife elsewhere, in his early years, Charles showed a fondness about mechanical objects and would often watch his neighbors working on their cars and farm machinery. Charles and his mother were always welcome at the Red Wing Cafe, pitman would care for Rays brother George, to take the burden off Aretha. George drowned in Arethas laundry tub when he was four years old, Charles started to lose his sight at the age of four or five, and was completely blind by the age of seven, apparently as a result of glaucoma.
Destitute and still mourning the loss of George, Aretha used her connections in the community to find a school that would accept a blind African-American student. Despite his initial protest, Charles attended school at the Florida School for the Deaf, Charles further developed his musical talent at school, and was taught to play the classical piano music of J. S
Jean Dubuffet
Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. He is perhaps best known for founding the art movement Art Brut, Dubuffet enjoyed a prolific art career, both in France and in America, and was featured in many exhibitions throughout his lifetime. Dubuffet was born in Le Havre to a family of wine merchants who were part of the wealthy bourgeoisie. He moved to Paris in 1918 to study painting at the Académie Julian, becoming friends with the artists Juan Gris, André Masson. Six months later, upon finding academic training to be distasteful, during this time, Dubuffet developed many other interests, including music and the study of ancient and modern languages. Dubuffet traveled to Italy and Brazil, and upon returning to Le Havre in 1925, he married for the first time and he took up painting again in 1934 when he made a large series of portraits in which he emphasized the vogues in art history. But again he stopped, developing his business at Bercy during the German Occupation of France.
Years later, in a text, he boasted about having made substantial profits by supplying wine to the Wehrmacht. In 1942, Dubuffet decided to devote himself again to art and he often chose subjects for his works from everyday life, such as people sitting in the Paris Métro or walking in the country. Dubuffet painted with strong, unbroken colors, recalling the palette of Fauvism, as well as the Brucke painters, with their juxtaposing, many of his works featured an individual or individuals placed in a very cramped space, which had a distinct psychological impact on viewers. His first solo show came in October 1944, at the Galerie Rene Drouin in Paris and this marked Dubuffets third attempt to become an established artist. In 1945, Dubuffet attended and was impressed by a show in Paris of Jean Fautriers paintings in which he recognized meaningful art which expressed directly and purely the depth of a person. Emulating Fautrier, Dubuffet started to use oil paint mixed with materials such as mud, coal dust, pieces of glass, straw, gravel, cement.
His use of materials and the irony that he infused into many of his works incited a significant amount of backlash from critics. Greenberg went on to say that Dubuffet is perhaps the one new painter of importance to have appeared on the scene in Paris in the last decade. Indeed, Dubuffet was very prolific in the United States in the following his first exhibition in New York. After 1946, Dubuffet started a series of portraits, with his own friends Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Jean Paulhan and he painted these portraits in the same thick materials, and in a manner deliberately anti-psychological and anti-personal, as Dubuffet expressed himself. A few years he approached the surrealist group in 1948, in 1944 he started an important relationship with the resistance-fighter and French writer, Jean Paulhan who was strongly fighting against intellectual terrorism, as he called it
Tony Bennett
Anthony Dominick Benedetto, known professionally as Tony Bennett, is an American singer of traditional pop standards, big band, show tunes, and jazz. He is a painter, having created works under the name Anthony Benedetto that are on permanent public display in several institutions and he is the founder of the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Astoria, New York. Born and raised in Astoria to an Italian-American family, Bennett began singing at an early age and he fought in the final stages of World War II as a U. S. Army infantryman in the European Theater. Afterward, he developed his technique, signed with Columbia Records and had his first number-one popular song with Because of You in 1951. Several top hits such as Rags to Riches followed in the early 1950s and he refined his approach to encompass jazz singing. He reached a peak in the late 1950s with albums such as The Beat of My Heart and Basie Swings. In 1962, Bennett recorded his song, I Left My Heart in San Francisco. His career and his personal life experienced a downturn during the height of the rock music era.
Bennett staged a comeback in the late 1980s and 1990s, putting out gold record albums again and he has won 19 Grammy Awards and two Emmy Awards, and was named an NEA Jazz Master and a Kennedy Center Honoree. He has sold over 50 million records worldwide, Anthony Dominick Benedetto was born on August 3,1926, in Astoria, New York, to grocer John Benedetto and seamstress Anna Suraci. In 1906, John had emigrated from Podàrgoni, an eastern district of the southern Italian city of Reggio Calabria. Anna had been born in the U. S. shortly after her parents emigrated from the Calabria region in 1899. Other relatives came over as well as part of the migration of Italians to America. Tony grew up with a sister, and an older brother. With a father who was ailing and unable to work, the children grew up in poverty, John Sr. instilled in his son a love of art and literature and a compassion for human suffering, but died when Tony was 10 years old. The experience of growing up in the Great Depression and a distaste for the effects of the Hoover Administration would make the child a lifelong Democrat.
Young Tony grew up listening to Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Judy Garland, and Bing Crosby as well as artists such as Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden. His Uncle Dick was a tap dancer in vaudeville, giving him a window into show business
Performing arts
Performing arts are a form of art in which artists use their voices and/or their bodies, often in relation to other objects, to convey artistic expression. It is different from visual arts, which is when artists use paint/canvas or various materials to create physical or static art objects, performing arts include several disciplines, each performed in front of a live audience. Artists who participate in performing arts in front of an audience are called performers, examples of these include actors, dancers, circus artists and singers. Performing arts are supported by workers in related fields, such as songwriting, choreography. A performer who excels in acting and dancing is commonly referred to as a triple threat, well-known examples of historical triple threat artists include Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, and Judy Garland. Performers often adapt their appearance, such as costumes and stage makeup, stage lighting. Performing arts may include dance, opera and musical theatre, illusion, spoken word, circus arts, performance art and public speaking.
There is a form of fine art, in which the artists perform their work live to an audience. Most performance art involves some form of art, perhaps in the creation of props. Dance was often referred to as an art during the Modern dance era. Theatre is the branch of performing arts, concerned with acting out stories in front of an audience, using a combination of speech, music, sound, any one or more of these elements is performing arts. In addition to the standard narrative style of plays. In the context of performing arts, dance generally refers to movement, typically rhythmic and to music. Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, aesthetic artistic and moral constraints and range from functional movement to codified, in dance, the connection between the two concepts is stronger than in some other arts, and neither can exist without the other. Choreography is the art of making dances, and the person who practices this art is called a choreographer, music is an art form which combines pitch and dynamic in order to create sound.
It can be performed using a variety of instruments and styles and is divided into genres, as an art form, music can occur in live or recorded formats, and can be planned or improvised. Starting in the 6th century BC, the Classical period of performing art began in Greece and these poets wrote plays which, in some cases, incorporated dance. The Hellenistic period began the use of comedy
Bill Cosby
William Henry Bill Cosby, Jr. is an American stand-up comedian, actor and singer. Cosbys start in comedy began at the hungry i in San Francisco and was followed by his landing a starring role in the 1960s television show I Spy. He was a regular on the television series The Electric Company during the shows first two seasons. Throughout the 1970s, Cosby starred in a number of films, after attending Temple University in the 1960s, he received his bachelors degree there in 1971. In 1973, he received a degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His dissertation discussed the use of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids as a tool in elementary schools. The sitcom highlighted the experiences and growth of an affluent African-American family, Cosby has been the subject of publicized sexual assault allegations since about 2000. He surrendered to authorities on December 30,2015, and was released on $1 million bail, Cosby is scheduled to go on trial on or before June 5,2017. Cosby was born on July 12,1937 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and he is one of four sons of Anna Pearl, a maid, and William Henry Cosby Sr. who served as a mess steward in the U. S.
Navy. During much of Cosbys early childhood, his father was away in the U. S. armed forces, as a student, he described himself as a class clown. Cosby was the captain of both the team and the track and field team at Mary Channing Wister Public School in Philadelphia. Early on, teachers noted his propensity for clowning around rather than studying, at FitzSimons Junior High School, Cosby began acting in plays as well as continuing his devotion to playing sports. Cosby went on to Philadelphias Central High School, a magnet and academically rigorous university prep school where he played football, basketball and ran track. In addition, Cosby was working before and after school, selling produce, shining shoes and he transferred to Germantown High School, but failed the tenth grade. Instead of repeating, he got a job as an apprentice at a repair shop, which he liked. In 1956, Cosby enlisted in the Navy, serving at the Marine Corps Base Quantico, Naval Station Argentia, Newfoundland and at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.
During his four years in the Navy, Cosby served as a Hospital Corpsman working in therapy with Navy. He finished his equivalency diploma via correspondence courses and was awarded a track, there, he studied physical education while running track and playing fullback on the universitys football team
President of the United States
The President of the United States is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president directs the executive branch of the government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces. The president is considered to be one of the worlds most powerful political figures, the role includes being the commander-in-chief of the worlds most expensive military with the second largest nuclear arsenal and leading the nation with the largest economy by nominal GDP. The office of President holds significant hard and soft power both in the United States and abroad, Constitution vests the executive power of the United States in the president. The president is empowered to grant federal pardons and reprieves. The president is responsible for dictating the legislative agenda of the party to which the president is a member. The president directs the foreign and domestic policy of the United States, since the office of President was established in 1789, its power has grown substantially, as has the power of the federal government as a whole.
However, nine vice presidents have assumed the presidency without having elected to the office. The Twenty-second Amendment prohibits anyone from being elected president for a third term, in all,44 individuals have served 45 presidencies spanning 57 full four-year terms. On January 20,2017, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th, in 1776, the Thirteen Colonies, acting through the Second Continental Congress, declared political independence from Great Britain during the American Revolution. The new states, though independent of each other as nation states, desiring to avoid anything that remotely resembled a monarchy, Congress negotiated the Articles of Confederation to establish a weak alliance between the states. Out from under any monarchy, the states assigned some formerly royal prerogatives to Congress, only after all the states agreed to a resolution settling competing western land claims did the Articles take effect on March 1,1781, when Maryland became the final state to ratify them.
In 1783, the Treaty of Paris secured independence for each of the former colonies, with peace at hand, the states each turned toward their own internal affairs. Prospects for the convention appeared bleak until James Madison and Edmund Randolph succeeded in securing George Washingtons attendance to Philadelphia as a delegate for Virginia. It was through the negotiations at Philadelphia that the presidency framed in the U. S. The first power the Constitution confers upon the president is the veto, the Presentment Clause requires any bill passed by Congress to be presented to the president before it can become law. Once the legislation has been presented, the president has three options, Sign the legislation, the bill becomes law. Veto the legislation and return it to Congress, expressing any objections, in this instance, the president neither signs nor vetoes the legislation
Seating capacity
Seating capacity is the number of people who can be seated in a specific space, in terms of both the physical space available, and limitations set by law. Seating capacity can be used in the description of anything ranging from an automobile that seats two to a stadium that seats hundreds of thousands of people. The International Fire Code, portions of which have adopted by many jurisdictions, is directed more towards the use of a facility than the construction. It specifies, For areas having fixed seating without dividing arms and it requires that every public venue submit a detailed site plan to the local fire code official, including details of the means of egress, seating capacity, arrangement of the seating. Once safety considerations have been satisfied, determinations of seating capacity turn on the size of the venue. For sports venues, the decision on maximum seating capacity is determined by several factors, chief among these are the primary sports program and the size of the market area.
Seating capacity of venues plays a role in what media they are able to provide, in contracting to permit performers to use a theatre or other performing space, the seating capacity of the performance facility must be disclosed. Seating capacity may influence the kind of contract to be used, the seating capacity must be disclosed to the copyright owner in seeking a license for the copyrighted work to be performed in that venue. Venues that may be leased for private functions such as ballrooms and auditoriums generally advertise their seating capacity, seating capacity is an important consideration in the construction and use of sports venues such as stadiums and arenas. The seating capacity for restaurants is reported as covers, a restaurant that can seat 99 is said to have 99 covers, seating capacity differs from total capacity, which describes the total number of people who can fit in a venue or in a vehicle either sitting or standing. Use of the term public capacity indicates that a venue is allowed to more people than it can actually seat.
Again, the total number of people can refer to either the physical space available or limitations set by law
Leontyne Price
Mary Violet Leontyne Price is an American soprano. Born and raised in Laurel, she rose to acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s. Time magazine called her voice Rich and shining, it was in its capable of effortlessly soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C. A lirico spinto soprano, she was considered well suited to the roles of Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini. After her retirement from the stage in 1985, she continued to appear in recitals. In October 2008, she was one of the recipients of the first Opera Honors given by the National Endowment for the Arts, Leontyne Price was born in Laurel, Mississippi. Her father James worked in a mill and her mother Katie was a midwife who sang in the church choir. They had waited 13 years for a child, and Leontyne became the focus of intense pride, given a toy piano at the age of three, she began piano lessons with a local teacher. When she was in kindergarten, her parents traded in the family phonograph as the payment on an upright piano.
At 14, she was taken on a trip to hear Marian Anderson sing in Jackson. Meanwhile, she visited the home of Alexander and Elizabeth Chisholm. Mrs. Chisholm encouraged the early piano playing. During World War II, Price worked as a maid in the Chisholms household where she was allowed to play the piano. Mrs. Chisholm noticed her singing voice and accompanied her in several early recitals. Aiming for a career, Price enrolled in the music education program at the all-black Wilberforce College in Wilberforce. Her success in the club led to solo assignments. She sang in the choir with another singer, Betty Allen. With the help of the Chisholms and the famous bass Paul Robeson and she won a scholarship and was admitted to the studio of Florence Page Kimball, who would remain her principal teacher and advisor throughout the 1960s
