Composers and songwriters
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Out of the Long Dark
Few British jazz musicians have been at the cutting edge of as many movements as Ian Carr. A pioneer bebop player in his youth, a colleague of Eric Burdon and John McLaughlin in the R'n'B explosion of the 60s, co-leader of one of Britain's most innovative jazz groups, the Rendell-Carr Quintet, a fre...
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Jazz Visions
Lennie Tristano was one of jazz's most extraordinary innovators, possessing a superb piano technique and an awesome musical imagination. Unheralded by the general public, the blind pianist's work was revered by many jazz greats including the legendary Charlie Parker. Tristano's persuasive personalit...
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Grieg and Delius
Edvard Grieg, Frederick Delius
When the Norwegian composer Christian Sinding introduced his young friend Frederick Delius (1862-1934) to Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) in Leipzig in 1887, it was to be a memorable occasion for each of them. It was, for both men, the beginning of a long and deep personal friendship that, despite the i...
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Lives, Wives and Loves of Great Composers
In an intentionally light-hearted style, Fritz Spiegl has researched the lives and loves of the great composers through the ages. In an alphabetically arranged panorama of biographical portraits, he humorously uncovers hitherto unknown aspects of the composers' personalities that are, at best, di...
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For the Birds
He’s not a composer, he’s an inventor - of genius.Arnold Schoenberg
The New Grove Dictionary of Music has said of Cage that he ‘had a greater impact on world music than any other American composer in the Twentieth Century’, and his musical thinking forms a whole with his wri... -
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Liszt
Franz Liszt, born in October 1811, embarked on his brilliant, if controversial, career at a very early age. His father, Adam Liszt, was his first and perhaps his sternest teacher, but, after the triumph of his first public recital ni 1820, several Hungarian noblemen guaranteed him the means to co...