...the streets, just to help his family. Also when he was eleven, he started to get into trouble. The police took him to a home for troubled boys. At that home, he talked to the band director into letting him join the band. That is where he learned to play the cornet. About two years later, Louis was released from the home and for the next few years, he would be supporting his family by selling newspapers and unloading bananas out of boats. Louis Armstrong’s achievements are remarkable. During his career, he developed a way of playing jazz, as an trumpet player and a singer, which has had an impact on all musicians to follow; recorded hit...
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...by the evil of drugs. Chet Baker was born on December 23, 1929 on a farm on the outskirts of Yale, Oklahoma. Later, shifted to Los Angeles with his parents at the age of 10. Baker, who was privileged with a musical family background enters the musical world when he was a kid. He marks his entrance to the world of music by joining the church choir team. He was introduced to playing trombone by his father who himself was a professional guitar player. Not to mention that his mother was also a very talented pianist. At the age of 13, Baker makes a significant mark in his musical career by replacing the trombone with a trumpet due to the fact that the trombone being huge. Even though Baker received musical education at Glendale Junior High School, he left school at the age of 16 to join the United States Army where and joined the army band. In his transition period, he left the army in 1948 and attended El Camino College in Los Angeles where he studied theory and harmony. But he was dropped out again and joined the army again in 1950. The he became a member of the sixth army band at the Presidio in San Francisco. At this point in his life Baker was into Jazz music. He became a huge fan of Miles Davis and soon he was into the popular jazz clubs in the city of San Francisco. Afterwards, he had a major breakthrough in his career when he was chosen by one of the great saxophonist, Charlie Parker in 1952 to perform in a series of West Coast engagements. In the same year he joined...
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...singer/songwriters that the music industry has ever known, his name is Anthony Kiedis. Kiedis was born on November 1, 1962 in Grand Rapids, Michigan to his father Michael Kiedis and his mother Margaret Noble. In 1966 when Kiedis was just 3 years old his parents divorced; along with his 2 half-sisters Kiedis lived with his mother and step-father in Grand Rapids. Each summer he would visit his father in Hollywood for two weeks which he recalled "Those trips to California were the happiest, most carefree, the-world-is-a-beautiful-oyster times I'd ever experienced." In 1974, when Kiedis was 12 years old he moved to Hollywood with his father full time. Kiedis’ father was a struggling actor and a drug dealer, which had a very strong impact on Kiedis. The two would often smoke marijuana and use cocaine together, and at the age of 14 Kiedis used heroin for the first time mistaking it for cocaine, from then on it was an downhill struggle (Kiedis, 10). Kiedis attended Fairfax High School in Los Angeles where he struggled to find friends at first, being from another school district let along another state. He soon met Michael Balzary, better known as Flea, while sitting next to him in drivers-ed class. After a brief confrontation the two became best friends and were virtually inseparable. Kiedis had a big influence on Flea, introducing him to rock music, punk rock in particular. Kiedis also met future band mate Hillel Slovak after seeing him perform with his band Anthym. After the show, Slovak...
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...Veterans”: The Commemoration of Slavery and Emancipation “Agonizing Groans of Mothers” and “Slave-Scarred Veterans”: The Commemoration of Slavery and Emancipation Leslie A. Schwalm This paper explores the public memory of black slavery and freedom among white and African American Midwesterners of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using an innovative approach that probes public celebrations, autobiography and memoir, family history and obituaries of the formerly enslaved, this paper challenges several key conclusions about African American relationships to the slave past that have been drawn by scholars in both literary and African American studies. Rather than...
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...A Long Way Gone Ishmael Beah was an innocent boy who enjoyed playing football, swimming in the streams, and even started a rap and dance group with his friends and older brother. The group discovered their love for rap music from old cassette tapes of O.P.P, Run D.M.C, and the Sugarhill Gang. Ishmael and Junior, along with their other friends cherished these few hip hop and rap cassette tapes. Ishmael constantly carried these couple tapes on him at all times. They choreographed dance routines and memorized all of the lyrics. The boys also entered a talent show in a close town. Ishmael, Junior, Talloi, and Mohamed have been singing and dancing to rap music since they first formed the group when Ishmael was only eight years old. They learned of rap during a visit to Mobimbi, where their fathers worked for an American company. They were transfixed by the music and returned to Mobimbi as often as they could to watch rap on their big television. Ishmael was shocked mostly because the black men could speak English so well and so quickly to the beat (Lisa). Ishmael and his group were inspired by the rap music. Music represented Ishmael’s transformation into the modern world. The entire group is mesmerized by rap musicians. Music became a way to escape reality of the war, express themselves by writing lyrics, and it eventually saves their lives. Ishmael and the boys all worked together as a group to create music. They also started changing the way they would dress, act, and...
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...seating, this instantly transport me to the era in which the play is set in the 19th century. The stage is open for the audience to see before the play starts and is set out as the stage in a small theatre, a basket for props, two chairs, a rack of costumes and buckets catching water from a leaky roof. The most important part of the set though was the gauze at the back of the stage separating a separate scene behind and revealing it hen needed using lighting. This combination of props and structure conveys the location strongly to the audience without being so defined that it is not possible to change the scene. While we waited there was no background music which gave a slightly eerie edge to the wait. The play started in the theatre depicted on the stage and almost immediately the humour as Mr Kipps’s is reading his memoirs and you don’t think it is going to be horror at all and I think this could be done to lulled the audience into a false sense of security which made shocks later in the play a lot more effective. The most important element of the play I feel was the lighting the spotlights was used to great effect and to draw attention to their facial expressions. Also it allowed the gauze to be...
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...He withdrew it from rehearsal in December under official pressure from the regime, and under fear for his life, and it was not given its first performance until 1961. Shostakovich: Fearing for his Life During 1936 and 1937, in order to maintain as low a profile as possible, Shostakovich mainly composed film music, a genre favoured by Stalin and one in which the composer could avoid expressing any potentially dangerous tendencies. Nevertheless, tired of the repression, he then decided to compose a piece a new piece: his Fifth Symphony, finished july 1937. Only a few days before its premiere, due 21 November 1937, an article by the composer it self was published in the Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva, where he stated that the work: “is a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism.” The Symphony became a huge success because many people in the Leningrad’s audience had lost his family or friends during the “Great Terror”. During the performance of the symphony, people were reported to have wept during the Largo movement. Later Shostakovich wrote in his memoirs: “I'll never believe that a man who understood nothing could feel the Fifth Symphony.”. But of course all those people in Leningrad understood the meaning of his composition and its criticism to the...
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...When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. It was maybe an hour before midnight at the Avalon Nightclub in Chapel Hill, and the Miz was feeling nervous. I didn’t pick up on this at the time—I mean, I couldn’t tell. To me he looked like he’s always looked, like he’s looked since his debut season, back when I first fell in love with his antics: all bright-eyed and symmetrical-faced, fed on genetically modified corn, with the swollen, hairless torso of the aspiring professional wrestler he happened to be and a smile you could spot as Midwestern American in a blimp shot of a soccer stadium. Late in 1998 or early in ’99—during the winter that straddled the two—I spent a night on and off the telephone with a person named John Fahey. The first moves with the courteous lento of one of Peter Taylor’s stories; the last has the directness of something by Raymond Carver; the second, more placeless and more contemporary, could be by lots of writers—Jennifer Egan, or maybe Sam Lipsyte. Actually, all are the opening sentences of essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan, from his second book, “Pulphead” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $16). It is obvious enough that they are by a talented storyteller, who has learned from fiction (as...
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...Journal of American Studies, 45 (2011), 1, 113–129 f Cambridge University Press 2010 doi:10.1017/S0021875810001271 First published online 19 July 2010 Jazz as a Black American Art Form : Definitions of the Jazz Preservation Act JEFF FARLEY Jazz music and culture have experienced a surge in popularity after the passage of the Jazz Preservation Act (JPA) in 1987. This resolution defined jazz as a black American art form, thus using race, national identity, and cultural value as key aspects in making jazz one of the nation’s most subsidized arts. Led by new cultural institutions and educational programs, millions of Americans have engaged with the history and canon of jazz that represent the values endorsed by the JPA. Record companies, book publishers, archivists, academia, and private foundations have also contributed to the effort to preserve jazz music and history. Such preservation has not always been a simple process, especially in identifying jazz with black culture and with America as a whole. This has required a careful balancing of social and musical aspects of jazz. For instance, many consider two of the most important aspects of jazz to be the blues aesthetic, which inevitably expresses racist oppression in America, and the democratic ethic, wherein each musician’s individual expression equally contributes to the whole. Balanced explanations of race and nationality are useful not only for musicologists, but also for musicians and teachers wishing to use jazz as an example...
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...With her collaborator, the neurologist Jonathan Pincus, she has published a great many research papers, showing that serial killers tend to suffer from predictable patterns of psychological, physical, and neurological dysfunction: that they were almost all the victims of harrowing physical and sexual abuse as children, and that almost all of them have suffered some kind of brain injury or mental illness. In 1998, she published a memoir of her life and work entitled "Guilty by Reason of Insanity." She was the last person to visit Ted Bundy before he went to the electric chair. Few people in the world have spent as much time thinking about serial killers as Dorothy Lewis, so when her friend Betty told her that she needed to see "Frozen" it struck her as a busman's holiday. But the calls kept coming. "Frozen" was winning raves on Broadway, and it had been nominated for a Tony. Whenever someone who knew Dorothy Lewis saw it, they would tell her that she really ought to see it, too. In June, she got a call from a woman at the theatre where "Frozen" was playing. "She said she'd heard that I work in this field, and that I see murderers, and she was wondering if I would do a talk-back after the show," Lewis said. "I had done that once before, and it was a delight, so I said sure. And I said, would you...
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...Cultural Moves AMERICAN CROSSROADS Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, Peggy Pascoe, George Sánchez, and Dana Takagi 1. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, by José David Saldívar 2. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, by Neil Foley 3. Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound, by Alexandra Harmon 4. Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War, edited by George Mariscal 5. Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, by Rachel Buff 6. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East,1945–2000, by Melani McAlister 7. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown, by Nayan Shah 8. Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934–1990, by Lon Kurashige 9. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture, by Shelley Streeby 10. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past, by David R. Roediger 11. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, by Laura Briggs 12. meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands, by Rosa Linda Fregoso 13. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, by Eric Avila 14. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, by Tiya Miles 15. Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of...
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...Michael Jackson English Michael Joseph Jackson[1][2] (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009) was an American singer-songwriter, dancer, businessman and philanthropist. Often referred to by the honorific nickname "King of Pop", or by his initials MJ,[3] Jackson is recognized as the most successful entertainer of all time by Guinness World Records. His contributions to music, dance, and fashion, along with his publicized personal life, made him a global figure in popular culture for over four decades. The eighth child of the Jackson family, he debuted on the professional music scene along with his brothers as a member of The Jackson 5 in 1964, and began his solo career in 1971. In the early 1980s, Jackson became the dominant figure in popular music. The music videos for his songs, including those of "Beat It," "Billie Jean," and "Thriller," were credited with breaking down racial barriers and transforming the medium into an art form and promotional tool. The popularity of these videos helped to bring the then relatively new television channel MTV to fame. With videos such as "Black or White" and "Scream" he continued to innovate the medium throughout the 1990s, as well as forging a reputation as a touring solo artist. Through stage and video performances, Jackson popularized a number of complicated dance techniques, such as the robot, and the moonwalk, to which he gave the name. His distinctive sound and style has influenced numerous hip hop, post-disco, contemporary R&B, pop,...
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...Oscar Wilde "Shorter Prose Pieces" PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered. Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others. If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty. Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither. A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature. Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions. The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves. Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance. Dulness is the coming of age of seriousness. In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. If one tells the truth one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out. Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness. It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes. No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime. Vulgarity is the conduct of others. Only the shallow know themselves. Time is waste of money. One should always be a little improbable. There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon. The only...
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...Contents GCSE History Exemplars for Controlled Assessment 2015-2016 Topic Area 1: Political, social and economic developments in Wales and England in the nineteenth century and the twentieth centuries This document contains the WJEC set controlled assessment exemplars for topic area 1 that are available for award up to 2016. This should be used alongside the general guide to controlled assessment available on the WJEC website. Topic Area 1: Political, social and economic developments in Wales and England in the nineteenth century and the twentieth centuries Exemplar Tasks 1. The Rebecca Riots 2. Jack the Ripper’s London 3. The Depression of the 1930s 4. Quarrying in North Wales 5. Life in the 1960s Introduction Controlled Assessment is a compulsory unit for GCSE History. Please note the following advice: These exemplars are written in a consistent style to ensure comparability of demand. These exemplars can be used for entry in any year of the current specification. Centres must change their controlled assessment tasks each year Centres must submit a proposal form for each two year cycle demonstrating to WJEC that they are using different tasks in consecutive years. Centres who are not studying any British history in their examined units must select controlled assessment tasks that focus on British history. Centres cannot mix and match parts (a) and (b) from different tasks. The controlled assessment unit can only be entered at the end of the course....
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...ALSO BY MALCOLM GLADWELL The Tipping Point To my parents, Joyce and Graham Gladwell Introduction The Statue That Didn’t Look Right In September of 1983, an art dealer by the name of Gianfranco Becchina approached the J. Paul Getty Museum in California. He had in his possession, he said, a marble statue dating from the sixth century BC. It was what is known as a kouros—a sculpture of a nude male youth standing with his left leg forward and his arms at his sides. There are only about two hundred kouroi in existence, and most have been recovered badly damaged or in fragments from grave sites or archeological digs. But this one was almost perfectly preserved. It stood close to seven feet tall. It had a kind of light-colored glow that set it apart from other ancient works. It was an extraordinary find. Becchina’s asking price was just under $10 million. The Getty moved cautiously. It took the kouros on loan and began a thorough investigation. Was the statue consistent with other known kouroi? The answer appeared to be yes. The style of the sculpture seemed reminiscent of the Anavyssos kouros in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, meaning that it seemed to fit with a particular time and place. Where and when had the statue been found? No one knew precisely, but Becchina gave the Getty’s legal department a sheaf of documents relating to its more recent history. The kouros, the records stated, had been in the private collection of a Swiss physician named Lauffenberger...
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