The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) is an American not-for-profit performance-rights organization (PRO) that collectively licenses the public performance rights of its members' musical works to venues, broadcasters, and digital streaming services.
Cool jazz is a style of modern jazz music inspired by bebop and big band that arose in the United States after World War II. It is characterized by relaxed tempos and a lighter tone than that used in the fast and complex bebop style. Cool jazz often employs formal arrangements and incorporates elements of classical music. Broadly, the genre refers to a number of post-war jazz styles employing a more subdued approach than that of contemporaneous jazz idioms. As Paul Tanner, Maurice Gerow, and David Megill suggest, "the tonal sonorities of these conservative players could be compared to pastel colors, while the solos of [Dizzy] Gillespie and his followers could be compared to fiery red colors."
Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.
Birth of the Cool is a compilation album by American jazz trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis, released in February 1957 by Capitol Records. It compiles eleven tracks recorded by Davis's nonet for the label over the course of three sessions during 1949 and 1950.
Hampton Barnett Hawes Jr. was an American jazz pianist. He was the author of the memoir Raise Up Off Me, which won the Deems-Taylor Award for music writing in 1975.
"Take the 'A' Train" is a jazz standard by Billy Strayhorn that was the signature tune of the Duke Ellington orchestra.
Ashley Kahn is an American music historian, journalist, and producer. He was born in the Bronx, New York, and was raised in Cincinnati. Kahn graduated from Columbia University in 1983. While attending Columbia, he hosted a jazz and blues radio show on WKCR, and was known on the air as "The Cincinnati Kid."
David Ritz is an American author. He has written novels, biographies, magazine articles, and over a hundred liner notes for artists such as Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and Nat King Cole. He has coauthored 36 autobiographies, including some celebrities' autobiographies.
"Doctor Jazz" is a popular tune and song written by Joe "King" Oliver in 1926.
Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool is a compilation album in the Red Hot AIDS Benefit Series with performers from jazz, pop, rock, and rap. "Stolen Moments" is a jazz standard composed by Oliver Nelson, and is best known for its inclusion on the 1961 album The Blues and the Abstract Truth.
"Skylark" is an American popular song with lyrics by Johnny Mercer and music by Hoagy Carmichael, published in 1941.
"Embraceable You" is a jazz standard song with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. The song was written in 1928 for an unpublished operetta named East Is West. It was published in 1930 and included in that year's Broadway musical Girl Crazy, performed by Ginger Rogers in a song and dance routine choreographed by Fred Astaire.
"Lover Man " is a 1941 popular song written by Jimmy Davis, Roger ("Ram") Ramirez, and James Sherman. It is particularly associated with Billie Holiday, for whom it was written, and her version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1989.
Will Friedwald is an American author and music critic. He has written for newspapers that include the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Village Voice, Newsday, New York Observer, and New York Sun – and for magazines that include Entertainment Weekly, Oxford American, New York, Mojo, BBC Music Magazine, Stereo Review, Fi, and American Heritage.
"Prelude to a Kiss" is a 1938 ballad composed by Duke Ellington, with lyrics by Irving Gordon and Irving Mills.
Dan Morgenstern is a jazz writer, editor, archivist, and producer. He is the son of the German-language Jewish author Soma Morgenstern.
"Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise" is a song with music by Sigmund Romberg and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II from the 1928 operetta The New Moon. One of the best-known numbers from the show, it is a song of bitterness and yearning for a lost love, sung in the show by Philippe (tenor), the best friend of the hero, Robert Mission (baritone).
David Schiff is an American composer, writer and conductor whose music draws on elements of jazz, rock, and klezmer styles, showing the influence of composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Mahler, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy and Terry Riley. His music has been performed by major orchestras and festivals around the United States and by soloists David Shifrin, Regina Carter, David Taylor, Marty Ehrlich, David Krakauer, Nadine Asin and Peter Kogan. He is the author of books on the music of Elliott Carter, George Gershwin and Duke Ellington. His work has been honored by the League-ISCM National Composers Competition award and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for his book on Elliott Carter.
Geoffrey Himes is an American music critic who has written weekly for the Washington Post since 1977. He also wrote for No Depression as a contributing editor in its first print era in the late 1990s to the early 2000s and has written for Paste since 2004. He has written lyrics for songs that have been recorded by multiple artists, including Billy Kemp & the Paradise Rockers and Mojo Filter. He has won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers four times.
