Musicians, singers, bands and groups
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Dora Bright
Dora Bright was a 'stage star' before the term 'star' had even been invented. After a successful period at the Royal Academy of Music, reports of her ability circulated the globe from America, across Europe and as far as Australia. She became known as one of the finest pianists of her generation and...
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Desperado
Tomasz Stanko is arguably the greatest jazz musician Poland has ever produced. His career spanned almost 60 years until his death in 2018. A visionary trumpeter and composer, a protege of Krzysztof Komeda and a colleague of musicians from Poland, Sweden, Norway, Britain, Cuba and the USA, his impact...
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Eberhard Weber
Eberhard Weber is a virtuoso who revolutionized jazz bass playing. He brought his instrument from the far corner of the stage into the spotlight - and turned it into a solo force. He began his career as a jazz bassist in the 1960s, and his band Colours with the saxophonist Charlie Mariano became one...
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Hear My Train A Comin'
Although his activity as a recording artist spanned a period of just three years, from 1967, the year of his arrival in England from America to 1970, the year of his death, Jimi Hendrix created a body of work that has exerted a significant influence on a number of artists in the 20th century and bey...
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Mosaics
Graham Collier's career in jazz lasted over five decades. He was a bassist, a band-leader, a composer, an educator and an author, who wrote extensively about the music. His working life was littered with 'firsts'. Amongst his many achievements, he was the first British jazz musician to study at the...
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This is Hip
When Mark Murphy died in October 2015, some of the obituaries mourned the passing of the greatest jazz singer in history. Murphy was the last of his kind, a hipster of the Kerouac generation, who rejected the straight life of prosperity and numb consumerism. With a catalogue of more than 40 albums u...
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Song for Someone
Trumpeter and composer Kenny Wheeler (1930–2014) was one of the most enigmatic and influential musicians in recent memory. His instantly recognisable sound was a driving force within every major innovation in modern European jazz during the last half of the 20th century. More importantly, his lif...
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Grazyna Bacewicz
Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-1969): a composer with an individual, expressive style, an excellent violinist, a very fine pianist, and a talented author. At the Conservatory in Warsaw she studied composition with Kazimierz Sikorski, her violin tutor was Józef Jarzębski and her piano professor was Józef...
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Long Agos and Worlds Apart
The Small Faces epitomised the maxim, "Never mind the width, feel the quality." In their brief original lifespan, they released just three official albums and a dozen-and-a-half authorised non-album singles and B-sides. Yet more than five decades after the London quartet...