Ellas Otha Bates, known professionally as Bo Diddley, was an American guitarist and singer who played a key role in the transition from the blues to rock and roll. He influenced many artists, including Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, George Thorogood, Syd Barrett, and the Clash.
The didgeridoo is a wind instrument, played with vibrating lips to produce a continuous drone while using a special breathing technique called circular breathing. The didgeridoo was developed by Aboriginal peoples of northern Australia at least 1,000 years ago, and is now in use around the world, though still most strongly associated with Indigenous Australian music. In the Yolŋu languages of the indigenous people of northeast Arnhem Land the name for the instrument is the yiḏaki, or more recently by some, mandapul. In the Bininj Kunwok language of West Arnhem Land it is known as mako.
Funk is a music genre that originated in African American communities in the mid-1960s when musicians created a rhythmic, danceable new form of music through a mixture of various music genres that were popular among African-Americans in the mid-20th century. It deemphasizes melody and chord progressions and focuses on a strong rhythmic groove of a bassline played by an electric bassist and a drum part played by a percussionist, often at slower tempos than other popular music. Funk typically consists of a complex percussive groove with rhythm instruments playing interlocking grooves that create a "hypnotic" and "danceable" feel. It uses the same richly colored extended chords found in bebop jazz, such as minor chords with added sevenths and elevenths, and dominant seventh chords with altered ninths and thirteenths.
The Grateful Dead was an American rock band formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California. The band is known for its eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, blues, jazz, folk, country, bluegrass, rock and roll, gospel, reggae, and world music with psychedelia; for its differentiated live performances centered around improvisation; and for its devoted fan base, known as "Deadheads". According to the musician and writer Lenny Kaye, "Their music touches on ground that most other groups don't even know exists." For the range of their influences and the structure of their live performances, the Grateful Dead are considered "the pioneering godfathers of the jam band world".
Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise expressive content. Definitions of music vary depending on culture, though it is an aspect of all human societies and a cultural universal. While scholars agree that music is defined by a few specific elements, there is no consensus on their precise definitions. The creation of music is commonly divided into musical composition, musical improvisation, and musical performance, though the topic itself extends into academic disciplines, criticism, philosophy, psychology, and therapeutic contexts. Music may be performed or improvised using a vast range of instruments, including the human voice.
Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. It may lack net composition, beat, or structured melody. It uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation. The genre is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. Nature soundscapes may be included, and the sounds of acoustic instruments such as the piano, strings and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer.
Nicholas Edward Cave is an Australian musician, writer and actor. Known for his baritone voice and for fronting the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave's music is characterised by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences and lyrical obsessions with death, religion, love and violence.
Amon Adonai Santos de Araújo Tobin, known as Amon Tobin, is a Brazilian electronic musician, composer and producer. He is noted for his unusual methodology in sound design and music production. He has released eight major studio albums under the London-based Ninja Tune record label. He has also released two albums under the alias Two Fingers with collaborator Doubleclick. His latest release, Nomark Selects V.1, was released on April 28, 2023.
Dancehall is a genre of Jamaican popular music that originated in the late 1970s. Initially, dancehall was a more sparse version of reggae than the roots style, which had dominated much of the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, digital instrumentation became more prevalent, changing the sound considerably, with digital dancehall becoming increasingly characterized by faster rhythms. Key elements of dancehall music include its extensive use of Jamaican Patois rather than Jamaican standard English and a focus on the track instrumentals.
Can were a German experimental rock band formed in Cologne in 1968 by Holger Czukay, Irmin Schmidt (keyboards), Michael Karoli (guitar), and Jaki Liebezeit (drums). The group featured several vocalists, including the American Malcolm Mooney (1968–70) and the Japanese Damo Suzuki (1970–73). They have been widely hailed as pioneers of the German krautrock scene.
Krautrock is a broad genre of experimental rock that developed in West Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It originated among artists who blended elements of psychedelic rock, avant-garde composition, and electronic music, among other eclectic sources. Common elements included hypnotic rhythms, extended improvisation, musique concrète techniques, and early synthesizers, while the music generally moved away from the rhythm & blues roots and song structure found in traditional Anglo-American rock music. Prominent groups associated with the krautrock label included Neu!, Can, Faust, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Amon Düül II and Harmonia.
Milford Graves was an American jazz drummer, percussionist, Professor Emeritus of Music, researcher/inventor, visual artist/sculptor, gardener/herbalist, and martial artist. Graves was noteworthy for his early avant-garde contributions in the 1960s with Paul Bley, Albert Ayler, and the New York Art Quartet, and is considered to be a free jazz pioneer, liberating percussion from its timekeeping role. The composer and saxophonist John Zorn referred to Graves as "basically a 20th-century shaman."
Dark ambient is a genre of post-industrial music that features an ominous, dark droning and often gloomy, monumental or catacombal atmosphere, partially with discordant overtones. It shows similarities with ambient music, a genre that has been cited as a main influence by many dark ambient artists, both conceptually and compositionally. Although mostly electronically generated, dark ambient also includes the sampling of hand-played instruments and semi-acoustic recording procedures.
Sunn O))) is an American drone metal band formed in 1998 in Seattle, Washington. The band is known for their distinctive visual style and slow, heavy sound, which blends diverse genres including doom metal, drone, black metal, dark ambient, and noise rock, as well as for their extremely loud live performances.
E.S.P. is an album by Miles Davis, recorded on January 20–22, 1965 and released on August 16 of that year by Columbia Records. It is the first release from what is known as Davis's second great quintet: Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums. The album was named after a tune by Shorter, and was inspired by the fact that, "since Wayne Shorter's arrival, the five members of the quintet seemed to communicate by mental telepathy."
Vijay Iyer is an American composer, pianist, bandleader, producer and writer based in New York City. The New York Times has called him a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway". Iyer received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. He was voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat magazine international critics' polls in 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2018. In 2014, he received a lifetime appointment as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University, where he was jointly appointed in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies.
Agharta is a 1975 live double album by American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Miles Davis. By the time he recorded the album, Davis was 48 years old and had alienated many in the jazz community while attracting younger rock audiences with his radical electric fusion music. After experimenting with different line-ups, he established a stable live band in 1973 and toured constantly for the next two years, despite physical pain from worsening health and emotional instability brought on by substance abuse. During a three-week tour of Japan in 1975, the trumpeter performed two concerts at the Festival Hall in Osaka on February 1; the afternoon show produced Agharta and the evening show was released as Pangaea the following year.
centrozoon is a German electronic improvisational music group. The core members are Markus Reuter and Bernhard Wöstheinrich. The group's music is flexible and has altered from album to album, but frequently-used elements include ambient music, improvisation, electronica, progressive rock and IDM.
Matthew Sleeth is an Australian visual artist and filmmaker. His often collaborative practice incorporates photography, film, sculpture and installation with a particular focus on the aesthetic and conceptual concerns of new media. The performative and photographic nature of media art is regularly highlighted in his work.
Boom bap is a subgenre and music production style that was prominent in East Coast hip hop during the golden age of hip hop from the late 1980s to the early 1990s.
