Martan Mann is an American jazz pianist and educator [1] living in Boulder Creek, California. He performs with the Martan Mann Trio, the Martan Mann & Mannkind (contemporary jazz band) and has performed with George Young and Dmitri Matheny. A graduate of San Jose State University, San Francisco State University, Hawaii Pacific College, and the University of Hawaii, he is a musical director at Capitola Theater in Capitola, California and is on the board of directors for the Jazz Society of Santa Cruz, California. [2] [3] Jazz educational books include Jazz Improvisation for the Classical Pianist (1989), [4] New Age Improvisation for the Classical Pianist (1994), [5] and Improvising blues piano (1997). [6] [7] He is also the author of an jazz educational DVD, Jazz Skills for Piano.
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals.
Oscar Emmanuel Peterson was a Canadian virtuoso jazz pianist and composer. Considered one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, Peterson released more than 200 recordings, won eight Grammy Awards, as well as a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy, and received numerous other awards and honours. He played thousands of concerts worldwide in a career lasting more than 60 years. He was called the "Maharaja of the keyboard" by Duke Ellington, simply "O.P." by his friends, and informally in the jazz community as "the King of inside swing".
Arthur Tatum Jr. was an American jazz pianist who is widely regarded as one of the greatest in his field. From early in his career, Tatum's technical ability was acclaimed by fellow musicians as extraordinary. Tatum also extended the vocabulary and boundaries of jazz piano far beyond his initial stride influences, and established new ground in jazz through innovative use of reharmonization, voicing, and bitonality.
This is a list of notable events in music that took place in the year 1920.
John Aaron Lewis was an American jazz pianist, composer and arranger, best known as the founder and musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Friedrich Gulda was an Austrian pianist and composer who worked in both the classical and jazz fields.
John Arthur "Jaki" Byard was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer, and arranger. Mainly a pianist, he also played tenor and alto saxophones, among several other instruments. He was known for his eclectic style, incorporating everything from ragtime and stride to free jazz.
Myra Melford is an American avant-garde jazz pianist and composer. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Melford was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as an "explosive player, a virtuoso who shocks and soothes, and who can make the piano stand up and do things it doesn't seem to have been designed for."
In music and music theory, a hexatonic scale is a scale with six pitches or notes per octave. Famous examples include the whole-tone scale, C D E F♯ G♯ A♯ C; the augmented scale, C D♯ E G A♭ B C; the Prometheus scale, C D E F♯ A B♭ C; and the blues scale, C E♭ F G♭ G B♭ C. A hexatonic scale can also be formed by stacking perfect fifths. This results in a diatonic scale with one note removed.
William Henry Cunliffe Jr., is an American jazz pianist and composer.
Denny Zeitlin is an American jazz pianist, composer, and clinical professor of psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco. Since 1963, he has recorded more than 100 compositions and was a first-place winner in the DownBeat International Jazz Critics' Poll in 1965 and 1974. He composed the soundtrack for the 1978 science-fiction horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Bradford Alexander Mehldau is an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger.
In jazz harmony, a So What chord is a particular 5-note chord voicing. From the bottom note upwards, it consists of three perfect fourth intervals followed by a major third interval. It was employed by Bill Evans in the "'amen' response figure" to the head of the Miles Davis tune "So What".
Musical improvisation is the creative activity of immediate musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians. Sometimes musical ideas in improvisation are spontaneous, but may be based on chord changes in classical music and many other kinds of music. One definition is a "performance given extempore without planning or preparation". Another definition is to "play or sing (music) extemporaneously, by inventing variations on a melody or creating new melodies, rhythms and harmonies". Encyclopædia Britannica defines it as "the extemporaneous composition or free performance of a musical passage, usually in a manner conforming to certain stylistic norms but unfettered by the prescriptive features of a specific musical text." Improvisation is often done within a pre-existing harmonic framework or chord progression. Improvisation is a major part of some types of 20th-century music, such as blues, rock music, jazz, and jazz fusion, in which instrumental performers improvise solos, melody lines and accompaniment parts.
In music, a standard is a musical composition of established popularity, considered part of the "standard repertoire" of one or several genres. Even though the standard repertoire of a given genre consists of a dynamic and partly subjective set of songs, these can be identified by having been performed or recorded by a variety of musical acts, often with different arrangements. In addition, standards are extensively quoted by other works and commonly serve as the basis for musical improvisation. Standards may "cross over" from one genre's repertoire to another's; for example, many jazz standards have entered the pop repertoire, and many blues standards have entered the rock repertoire.
Christopher Norton is a British pianist and composer of Jazz music. His pieces are standard in piano learning repitoire, especially the ABRSM piano grades.
Eyran Katsenelenbogen is an Israeli jazz pianist.
Thelonious Alone in San Francisco is jazz pianist Thelonious Monk's third solo album, recorded in 1959.
Dan Haerle is a jazz pianist, composer, author and teacher, based in Denton, Texas. He is professor emeritus of Jazz Studies at the University of North Texas.