Considered by many to be the greatest jazz vocalist of all time, Billie Holiday lived a tempestuous and difficult life. Her singing expressed an incredible depth of emotion that spoke of hard times and injustice as well as triumph. Though her career was relatively short ...
George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn in 1898, the second of four children from a close-knit immigrant family. He began his musical career as a song-plugger on Tin Pan Alley, but was soon writing his own pieces. Gershwin's first published song, "When You Want ‘Em, ...
Jazz critic Leonard Feather called her "the most important singer to emerge from the bop era." Ella Fitzgerald called her the world’s "greatest singing talent." During the course of a career that spanned nearly fifty years, she was the singer’s singer, influencing everyone from Mel ...
Aaron Copland was one of the most respected American classical composers of the twentieth century. By incorporating popular forms of American music such as jazz and folk into his compositions, he created pieces both exceptional and innovative. As a spokesman for the advancement of indigenous ...
"Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about." -- Wynton Marsalis From a New Orleans boys' home to Hollywood, Carnegie Hall and television, the tale of Louis Armstrong's life and triumphant six-decade career epitomizes the American success story. His trumpet playing ...
PART I: THE LIGHTNING STRIKE OF EGO In the opening paragraph of his monumental essay on the first Ali-Frazier fight, Norman Mailer calls ego "the great word of the twentieth century." But the magnitude of ego has long endured. Ego has probably been the great ...
AMERICAN MASTERS Online presents an extended interview with "Quincy Jones" filmmaker Michael Kantor. Q: What did you learn while making an AMERICAN MASTERS program about Quincy Jones? A: There were two stories that I will never forget. One happened to make it into the show, ...
"There was one thing he wanted to do. He didn’t worry about anything else -- as long as he could play that horn." - Jay McShann At age eleven, he had just begun to play the saxophone. At age twenty he was leading a revolution ...
