Ferdinand Rudolph von Grofé, known as Ferde Grofé was an American composer, arranger, pianist, and instrumentalist. He is best known for his 1931 five-movement symphonic poem, Grand Canyon Suite, and for orchestrating George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue for its 1924 premiere.
John Taylor was a British jazz pianist, born in Manchester, England, who occasionally performed on the organ and the synthesizer. In his obituary, The Guardian described him as "one of the great jazz pianists and composers of his generation" and at a musical level comparable to Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner and Brad Meldhau.
Street performance or busking is the act of performing in public places for gratuities. In many countries, the rewards are generally in the form of money but other gratuities such as food, drink or gifts may be given. Street performance is practiced all over the world and dates back to antiquity. People engaging in this practice are called street performers or buskers. Outside of New York, buskers is not a term generally used in American English.
Richard Berry, Jr. was an American singer, songwriter and musician, who performed with many Los Angeles doo-wop and close harmony groups in the 1950s, including The Flairs and The Robins.
Andrew Hill was an American jazz pianist and composer.
Malcolm Earl "Mal" Waldron was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. He started playing professionally in New York in 1950, after graduating from college. In the following dozen years or so Waldron led his own bands and played for those led by Charles Mingus, Jackie McLean, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy, among others. During Waldron's period as house pianist for Prestige Records in the late 1950s, he appeared on dozens of albums and composed for many of them, including writing his most famous song, "Soul Eyes", for Coltrane. Waldron was often an accompanist for vocalists, and was Billie Holiday's regular accompanist from April 1957 until her death in July 1959.
Henry Jones Jr. was an American jazz pianist, bandleader, arranger, and composer. Critics and musicians described Jones as eloquent, lyrical, and impeccable. In 1989, The National Endowment for the Arts honored him with the NEA Jazz Masters Award. He was also honored in 2003 with the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) Jazz Living Legend Award. In 2008, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. On April 13, 2009, the University of Hartford presented Jones with an honorary Doctorate of Music for his musical accomplishments.
George Washington Thomas Jr. was an American blues and jazz pianist and songwriter. He wrote several influential early boogie-woogie piano pieces including "The New Orleans Hop Scop Blues", "The Fives", and "The Rocks", which some believe he may have recorded himself under the name Clay Custer.
Fred Hersch is an American jazz pianist, composer, and a 17-time Grammy nominée. He was the first person to play weeklong engagements as a solo pianist at the Village Vanguard in New York City. He has recorded more than 75 of his jazz compositions.
Michael Gordon is an American composer and co-founder of the Bang on a Can music collective and festival. He grew up in Nicaragua.
Thomas Lee Flanagan was an American jazz pianist and composer. He grew up in Detroit, initially influenced by such pianists as Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, and Nat King Cole, and then by bebop musicians. Within months of moving to New York in 1956, he had recorded with Miles Davis and on Sonny Rollins' album Saxophone Colossus. Recordings under various leaders, including Giant Steps of John Coltrane, continued well into 1962, when he became vocalist Ella Fitzgerald's full-time accompanist. He worked with Fitzgerald for three years until 1965, and then in 1968 returned to be her pianist and musical director, this time for a decade.
Paul Thatcher Smith was an American jazz pianist. He performed in various genres of jazz, most typically bebop, but is best known as an accompanist of singers, especially Ella Fitzgerald.
John Epperson is an American drag artist, actor, pianist, vocalist, and writer who is mainly known for creating his stage character Lypsinka. As Lypsinka, he lip-synchs to meticulously edited, show-length soundtracks culled from snippets of outrageous 20th-century female performances in movies and song.
Joseph Harnell was an American composer, musician, and music arranger.
Daniil Olegovich Trifonov is a Russian pianist and composer. Described by The Globe and Mail as "arguably today's leading classical virtuoso" and by The Times as "without question the most astounding pianist of our age", Trifonov's honors include a Grammy Award win in 2018 and the Gramophone Classical Music Awards' Artist of the Year Award in 2016. The New York Times has noted that "few artists have burst onto the classical music scene in recent years with the incandescence" of Trifonov. He has performed as soloist with such orchestras as the Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Houston Symphony and the Munich Philharmonic, and has given solo recitals in such venues as Royal Festival Hall, Carnegie Hall, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Berliner Philharmonie, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Concertgebouw, and the Seoul Arts Center.
Desmond Gaspar is a Canadian organist, pianist, conductor, composer and songwriter who works as a freelance concert artist and ballet pianist who won the Associateship and Fellowship diplomas of the Royal Canadian College of Organists in consecutive years while under 30 years of age, thus being one of a very small number of Canadians under that age to achieve that distinction at the time.
Kosti Vehanen was a Finnish pianist and composer. As a pianist he performed in more than 3,000 concerts on four continents. While he did perform as a concert soloist with major symphony orchestras and performed in recitals, he is best remembered for his prolific work as an accompanist with some of the most important singers of the first half of the 20th century. As a composer, he produced piano pieces, arrangements of folk songs, solo songs, two ballets, and a violin and cello fantasy. In addition, Vehanen also penned several memoirs, including 1941 book chronicling his decade long experience serving as Marian Anderson's accompanist.
Georg Liebling was a German pianist and composer. Part of the Liebling family of musicians, he had an active international career as a concert pianist and accompanist from the 1880s into the 1920s. He also worked as a piano teacher for most of his life, beginning that occupation at the age of 16 and continuing up until his death more than 50 years later. He taught on the faculties of the Kullack Conservatory in Berlin (1881–1889), the Guildhall School of Music in London (1898–1906), and the Hollywood Conservatory of Music in the early 1930s in addition to teaching privately in Berlin, Munich, and New York City. As a composer, his salon compositions are noteworthy, especially the Air de Ballet and Romance; a gavotte, and the vocal Lieblingswalzer. Also notable is his 1908 opera Die heilige Katharina.
Allegro Brillante is a ballet choreographed by George Balanchine to Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 3. The ballet is danced by a principal couple and a corps de ballet of eight. Balanchine said it "contains everything I knew about classical ballet." Allegro Brillante was made for the New York City Ballet, and premiered on March 1, 1956, at the City Center of Music and Drama, with Maria Tallchief and Nicholas Magallanes originating the two principal roles.
Miguel Angel Sandoval Cabrera, was a Guatemalan-born American pianist, conductor and composer. He spoke Spanish, English, French, and Italian. His musical works contributed greatly to both countries, and he is viewed as a musical ambassador of Guatemala.
