David Warren Brubeck (born December 6, 1920 in Concord, California), better known as Dave Brubeck, is an American jazz pianist. His style ranges from refined to bombastic, reflecting his mother's attempts at classical training and his improvisational skills. Much of his music employs non-standard time signatures.
His long-time musical partner, alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, wrote the Dave Brubeck Quartet's most famous piece, "Take Five," which is in 5/4 time and has endured as a jazz classic.
Brubeck experimented with time signatures through much of his career, recording "Pick Up Sticks" in 6/4, "Unsquare Dance" in 7/4, and "Blue Rondo à la Turk" in 9/8.
Charles Parker, Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955) was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.
Parker is widely considered one of the most influential of jazz musicians, along with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Parker acquired the nickname "Yardbird" early in his career, and the shortened form "Bird" remained Parker's sobriquet for the rest of his life, inspiring the titles of many Parker compositions, such as "Yardbird Suite" and "Ornithology."
Parker played a leading role in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuoso technique, and improvisation based on harmonic structure. Parker's innovative approaches to melody, rhythm, and harmony exercised enormous influence on his contemporaries. Several of Parker's songs have become standards, including "Billie's Bounce," "Anthropology," "Ornithology," and "Confirmation." He introduced harmonic practices from concert music, including a tonal vocabulary employing 9ths, 11ths and 13ths of chords, rapidly implied passing chords, and new variants of altered chords and chord substitutions. His tone was clean and penetrating, but sweet and plaintive on ballads. Although many Parker recordings demonstrate dazzling virtuoso technique and complex melodic lines -- such as "Koko," "Kim," and "Leap Frog" -- he was also one of the great blues players. His themeless blues improvisation "Parker's Mood" represents one of the most deeply affecting recordings in jazz.
At various times, Parker fused jazz with other musical styles, from various types of classical music to Latin, establishing paths followed later by others.
Parker also became an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat generation, personifying the conception of the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual, rather than just a popular entertainer.
Highlife is a musical genre that originated in Ghana.
Nyakrom Brass Band - High Life Music
The style spread to Sierra Leone and Nigeria in the 1920's and other West African countries. It is very popular in Liberia and all of English-speaking West Africa, although little has been produced in other countries due to economic challenges brought on by war and instability.
Mark Alburger (b. 1957, Upper Darby, PA) is an award-winning, eclectic ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He is Music Director of San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and San Francisco Cabaret Opera, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music and New Music, and Professor Emeritus in Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College. His principal teachers were Gerald Levinson, Joan Panetti, and James Freeman at Swarthmore College (B.A.); Jules Langert at Dominican University (M.A.); Christopher Yavelow at Claremont University (Ph.D.); and Terry Riley. Dr. Alburger has composed 406 major works over the past 48 years, including chamber music, concertos, oratorios, operas, song cycles, and symphonies. His complete catalogue is being issued on discs from New Music. Alburger's multiple blogs include: markalburger.blogspot.com,
markalburger2022.blogspot.com,
markalburgerworks.blogspot.com, markalburgerevents.blogspot.com, markalburgermusichistory.blogspot.
com, 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com
