Ryland Peter Cooder is an American musician, songwriter, film score composer, record producer, and writer. He is a multi-instrumentalist but is best known for his slide guitar work, his interest in traditional music, and his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.
The 26th Annual Grammy Awards were held on February 28, 1984, at Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, and were broadcast live on American television. They recognized accomplishments by musicians from the year 1983. Michael Jackson, who had been recovering from scalp burns sustained due to an accident that occurred during the filming of a Pepsi commercial, won a record eight awards during the show. It is notable for garnering the largest Grammy Award television audience ever with 51.67 million viewers.
The 46th Annual Grammy Awards were held on February 8, 2004, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California honoring the best in music for the recording of the year beginning from October 1, 2002, through September 30, 2003. It recognized accomplishments by musicians from the previous year. The big winners were Beyoncé, who won five awards, and Outkast, who won three awards including Album of the Year. Tied for the most nominations, with six each, were Beyoncé, Outkast, and Jay-Z.
Edgar Meyer is an American bassist and composer. His styles include classical, bluegrass, newgrass, and jazz. He has won seven Grammy Awards and been nominated ten times.
Subramaniam Lakshminarayana is an Indian violinist, composer and conductor, trained in the classical Carnatic music tradition and Western classical music.
David Frost is an American classical record producer and pianist. He has won 25 Grammy Awards for his work including seven wins for Producer of the Year, Classical. He is a music producer for the Metropolitan Opera and has recorded major orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Mohan veena refers to either of two distinct plucked string instruments used in Indian classical music, especially Hindustani classical music which is associated with the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent.
Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, known professionally as V. M. Bhatt, is an Indian Hindustani classical music instrumentalist who plays the Mohan veena.
Russ Titelman is an American record producer and songwriter. He has to date won three Grammy Awards. He earned his first producing the Steve Winwood song "Higher Love", and his second and third for Eric Clapton's Journeyman and Unplugged albums, respectively. Titelman also produced Clapton's 24 Nights live album of 1990 and the all-blues album From the Cradle, released in 1994.
World Circuit is a British world-music record label, established in London in the mid-1980s, that specializes in Cuban and West African recording artists, among other international music stars. The label's founding principle was to be an artist-led company with all aspects of each release tailored to the artist. This continues to be the label's way of working. World Circuit celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006 by releasing World Circuit Presents..., a 2-disc retrospective compilation album. In 2018, World Circuit was acquired by BMG Rights Management.
Water Lily Acoustics is an American record label in Santa Barbara, California founded in 1985 by Kavichandran Alexander, a Tamil from Sri Lanka. Alexander is a record producer and audio engineer. He named the label after his mother, Lily. The label primarily releases recordings of Indian classical music and collaborations by musicians from around the world. At its inception, the Alexander emphasized Eastern musicians, espousing the belief that they had seldom been recorded with proper sound quality compared to their Western counterparts. He began to include music from outside Asia. Alexander has recorded and produced musicians such as José Neto, Ali Akbar Khan, V. G. Jog, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Ry Cooder, Jerry Douglas, Béla Fleck, Taj Mahal, Papa Susso, Jiebing Chen, Simon Shaheen, Hungarian National Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra. Music he has recorded has appeared in the films Angel Eyes, Dead Man Walking, and Meet the Fockers.
Shujaat Husain Khan is one of the most acclaimed North Indian musicians and sitar players of his generation. He belongs to the Imdadkhani gharana school of music. He has recorded over 100 albums and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best World Music Album for his work with the band Ghazal with Iranian musician Kayhan Kalhor. He also sings frequently. His style of sitar playing, known as gayaki ang, is imitative of the subtleties of the human voice.
Bop Till You Drop is Ry Cooder's eighth album, released in 1979. The album was the first digitally recorded major-label album in popular music, recorded on a digital 32-track machine built by 3M.
Cassius Khan, is a Canadian Indian classical musician known for playing the Tabla while singing.
Tabula Rasā is a collaborative album by American banjoist Béla Fleck together with Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and Jie-Bing Chen, who plays the traditional Chinese two-string fiddle erhu. The unusual combination of Fleck's banjo together with these traditional instruments creates a unique sound on this album, which was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best World Music Album at the 39th Grammy Awards.
A Meeting by the River is an album recorded by Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt; it was recorded in September 1992 and released in April 1993 through the record label Water Lily Acoustics. This improvised, collaborative album features Cooder on slide guitar and Bhatt on the Mohan veena, a stringed instrument created by Bhatt. A Meeting by the River was produced by Kavichandran Alexander and Jayant Shah, engineered by Alexander, and mastered by Kevin Michael Gray and Paul Stubblebine. It peaked at number four on Billboard's Top World Music Albums chart, and earned Cooder and Bhatt Grammy Awards for Best World Music Album at the 36th Grammy Awards in 1994. The album is included in Tom Moon's 2008 book 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die.
Sandeep Das is an Indian tabla player and composer currently based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
Sakar Khan (1938–2013) was an Indian musician, considered by many as the greatest exponent of the Kamayacha, a Rajasthani version of the Persian musical instrument of the same name, popular among the Manganiar community of the Indian desert state. The Government of India honoured Khan in 2012, with the fourth highest civilian award of Padma Shri.
Music for the Motherless Child is a collaboration album between English folk guitarist Martin Simpson and Chinese pipa player Wu Man, released by Water Lily Records in 1996. As with the other album's released on the label, it was recorded at Christ the King Chapel, St. Anthony Seminary, Santa Barbara, by Tamil producer and label owner Kavichandran Alexander, who, also similarly to the label's other releases, curated and oversaw the project as a fusion between the music of two disparate cultures. Neither Simpson or Man had met before the recording of the album, which was done in only a single session that lasted seven hours. Alexander employed vacuum tube recording and took advantage of the church's natural acoustics.
Nick Gold is a British record producer, multi-instrumentalist and music executive. He is the former CEO of World Circuit Records and the organiser of Buena Vista Social Club, a Cuban musical ensemble which he established in 1996. Gold is a two time Grammy Award winner. In 2006, The New York Times described him as a "Musical Matchmaker".
