He was born on August 27, 1909. Around 1920 he moved to Minneapolis with his father, Willis Handy Young. Lester’s father had the most influence on him as a musician because his father taught him the love of music by teaching him how to play different instruments. Lester studied violin, trumpet, and drums until he decided to dedicate his heart to the saxophone. He began to master the alto saxophone by the age of thirteen.
Jazz In America 10/7/2010 Meade “Lux” Lewis, “Honky Tonk Train Blues” (1927) Lux Meade “Lux” Lewis never achieved the riches or true fame of many musical artists. He essentially was the poster boy of boogie-woogie music during the height of its popularity in the 1930’s, but after the boogie-woogie scene diminished, Lewis faded with it. It is still incredibly interesting to understand where Lewis came from and how he made an impact on jazz music. There is a reason that Meade “Lux” Lewis is so set apart from all of the other boogie-woogie musicians and that reason all has to do with his dynamic left-hand, and the complexity of his music that others lacked. Meade “Lux” Lewis has a very interesting story.
Stephen “Stevie” Ray Vaughn was born on October 3, 1954 in Dallas, Texas. His parents were Martha and Jimmie “Big Jim” Vaughn. It was because of them that Stevie and his brother Jimmie got into music. Martha and Big Jim loved to dance to Western swing music and were friends with a band in Texas called The Texas Playboys, who would bring alcoholic drinks and play dominoes with Big Jim. It is believed that when this band would bring over these drinks young Stevie would sneak sips and that’s where his addiction to alcohol began.
“I sucked! But that did not last long.” With conquering the sax, her mother and uncle realized she had developed a passion for the music and introduced her to the piano, guitar, drums, and trumpet. She was soon on stage playing with the bands, not just singing. In high school she and a group of friends created a band and started playing between the sessions of the usual bands at
In 1951 Buddy met Bob Montgomery, a seventh-grader at Hutchinson Jr. High, who also played guitar and sang. Buddy and Bob played junior high assemblies and local radio shows. Later they added Jerry Allison to the group who played the drums. Buddy Holly wanted to record his own songs with his own group, and named it the Crickets. In 1957, Buddy Holly and the Crickets came out with “Peggy Sue”, “That Will Be the Day”, and "Lookin' for Someone to Love".
He attended the Fisk School for Boys, where he had exposure to music. Louis Armstrong tried to help his mother to stop prostituting by being a paper boy, and by finding discarded food and selling it to restaurants. At the age of 11, Armstrong dropped out of Fisk School for Boys to join a quartet of boys who sang on streets to earn money. Armstrong developed his cornet
Sonny’s Blues, by James Baldwin, was about two brothers from Harlem. The older brother’s name is unknown, and the younger brother being Sonny. Sonny’s brother was a high school math teacher. Sonny, lived on his own and had the dream to play music with jazz musicians. But, he ends up getting arrested out of his apartment.
During the next few years he made recordings fronting his own musicians; depending on the number assembled, they were known as the Hot Five or the Hot Seven. Around the same time, Armstrong is credited with the invention of the jazz technique of scat singing--legend has it that Armstrong dropped his sheet music during a recording session and had to substitute vocal improvisations until someone picked up the sheets for him. Also during this period, his experimentations led him to break free of the more rigid Dixieland style of jazz to pave the way for a more modern jazz
A few composers who made music today possible by struggling through the aftermath of the Black Death epidemic would be; Jasquin Des Prez, (who was a big name at the time,) Pierre De La Rue, a very well proclaimed vocalist (The New York Time Company 2012, March 23. Top 8 Renaissance Composers Retrieved from http://classicalmusic.about.com.) One such composer whose name is still heard pretty often would be Johann Sebastian Bach; he is considered as one of the faces of classical music. Like all of us, he started out with baby steps, slowly learning the ways of music. Bach came from a family of musicians who brought him into the whole scene; his father was a director and had several uncles who were musicians (Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2000.)
During this period, Scott Joplin, noticed as the most influential pianist to ragtime, was born into a typical Africa-American family in Northeast Texas, whose father had been a slave. Playing piano since seven-year-old, Joplin received his most music education from a local professor called Julius Weiss. Weiss introduced him folk and classical music. As a result, the style of a combination of Black American folk music and classical music in later Joplin’s performance not only formed the characteristics of ragtime music but served as ideas for future jazz development. During Joplin’s life time, his completed his most achievement in the city call Sedalia in Missouri, “It was a town in which Joplin could hear a vast amount of music making, a town that offered opportunities for him to work as a performer and composer, a town where he could find congenial colleagues and appreciation” (Berlin 23).