Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller was an American jazz pianist, organist, composer, and singer. His innovations in the Harlem stride style laid much of the basis for modern jazz piano. A widely popular star in the jazz and swing eras, he toured internationally, achieving critical and commercial success in the United States and Europe. His best-known compositions, "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Honeysuckle Rose", were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1984 and 1999.
Jamshied Sharifi is an American composer, conductor, musician, and record producer. Born in Topeka, Kansas to an Iranian father and an American mother, Sharifi was exposed to music at an early age, learning Jazz and Middle Eastern music through his father and European classical and church music through his mother. He began to study classical piano at age five and quickly developed a thirst for musical instruction and a desire to improvise. At age nine he began studying guitar and drums, and at age ten added flute.
André George Previn was a German-American pianist, composer, and conductor. His career had three major genres: Hollywood films, jazz, and classical music. In each he achieved success, and the latter two were part of his life until the end. In movies, he arranged and composed music. In jazz, he was a celebrated trio pianist, a piano-accompanist to singers of standards, and pianist-interpreter of songs from the "Great American Songbook". In classical music, he also performed as a pianist but gained television fame as a conductor, and during his last thirty years created his legacy as a composer of art music.
Friedrich Gulda was an Austrian pianist and composer who worked in both the classical and jazz fields.
Edwin LeMar "Buddy" Cole was a jazz pianist, organist, orchestra leader, and composer. He played behind a number of pop singers, including Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby.
Boris Claudio "Lalo" Schifrin is an Argentine-American pianist, composer, arranger, and conductor. He is best known for his large body of film and TV scores since the 1950s, incorporating jazz and Latin American musical elements alongside traditional orchestrations. He is a five-time Grammy Award winner; he has been nominated for six Academy Awards and four Emmy Awards.
Billy Taylor was an American jazz pianist, composer, broadcaster and educator. He was the Robert L. Jones Distinguished Professor of Music at East Carolina University in Greenville, and from 1994 was the artistic director for jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
William Alan Hawkshaw was a British composer and performer, particularly of library music used as themes for films and television programs. Hawkshaw worked extensively for the KPM production music company in the 1950s to the 1970s, composing and recording many stock tracks that have been used extensively in film and TV.
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was an American composer whose interests spanned the worlds of jazz, dance, pop, film, television, and classical music. Professionally he was often known as "Coleridge Perkinson".
Gerald Foster Wiggins was an American jazz pianist and organist.
Libertango is a composition by tango composer and bandoneon player Astor Piazzolla, recorded and published in 1974 in Milan. The title is a portmanteau merging "Libertad" and "tango", symbolizing Piazzolla's break from classical tango to tango nuevo.
The Bob Cole Conservatory of Music is the school of music at California State University, Long Beach. In March 2008, the music department was renamed the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music in honor of an endowment gift of $16.4 million from the estate of Robert "Bob" Cole. Cole, a Long Beach real estate investor, long-time music lover, and amateur pianist, died in 2004. Following its disbursement, the gift will benefit the students of the conservatory in the form of scholarships and other awards.
Andy Blythe and Marten Joustra are British composers who have collaborated on various TV, production music and game projects as part of their company, Swallow Studios. Their specialty is jazz, although they have also written in other genres. They are also known as Blythe Joustra.
John Serry Jr. is an American jazz pianist and composer, as well as a composer of contemporary classical music works that feature percussion, on which he also doubles. He is a son of the accordionist and composer John Serry. His debut solo album was 'Exhibition', for which he received a Grammy Nomination for his composition, 'Sabotage'.
Lincoln Mayorga was an American pianist, arranger, conductor and composer who worked in rock and roll, pop, jazz and classical music.
Janko Nilović is a pianist, arranger and composer of Montenegrin and Greek descent who was born in Turkey and has lived in France since 1960. He has published many works, most of them on library labels not available for sale to the public. His oeuvre stretches from classical, jazz, and funk to pop, psychedelia, and easy listening.
Robert Vernor Hammack, Jr. was an American musician, originally from Texas, whose principal instrument was jazz piano. He led a prolific career in Los Angeles as a pianist, organist, conductor, arranger, and composer in (i) live venues, (ii) broadcast studios for radio and television, and (iii) recording studios for records, radio, television, and film. Hammack flourished in a wide spectrum of genres that included dixieland, Blues, swing, sweet dance music (e.g., Lawrence Welk), easy listening, gospel, liturgical jazz, musical theatre, Tin Pan Alley, classical, and film score.
Dave Lee is an English jazz pianist, and a former orchestra leader, music arranger, songwriter and film composer.
Roger Webb was a British jazz pianist and composer best known for leading the Roger Webb Trio (1963–1965) and for the Roger Webb Orchestra. From the early 1970s he became a prolific composer of film scores as well as much library music for De Wolfe Music and others, and his music has been used for television and theatre productions.
Artie Kane was an American pianist, film score composer, and conductor with a career spanning over six decades.
