The art of air painting

 

Somei Satoh (佐藤聰明) was born in 1947 in Sendai (northern Honshu), Japan. He began his career in 1969 with "Tone Field," an experimental, mixed media group based in Tokyo. In 1972 he produced "Global Vision," a multimedia arts festival, that encompassed musical events, works by visual artists and improvisational performance groups. In one of his most interesting projects held at a hot springs resort in Tochigi Prefecture in 1981, Satoh places eight speakers approximately one kilometer apart on mountain tops overlooking a huge valley. As a man-made fog rose from below, the music from the speakers combined with laser beams and moved the clouds into various formations. Satoh has collaborated twice since 1985 with theater designer, Manuel Luetgenhorst in dramatic stagings of his music at The Arts at St. Ann's in Brooklyn, New York.

 

Satoh was awarded the Japan Arts Festival prize in 1980 and received a visiting artist grant from the Asian Cultural Council in 1983, enabling him to spend one year in the United States.

 

He has written more than thirty compositions, including works for piano, orchestra, chamber music, choral and electronic music, theater pieces and music for traditional Japanese instruments.

 

Somei Satoh - Mandala/Sumeru

The soul is filled with flags

 

Selda Bağcan is a Turkish female folk singer and guitarist; born in 1948 in Muğla, Turkey.  Her career as a professional musician started in 1971, during her final year at the university The six singles she released that year, in which she interpreted traditional Turkish folk songs in a strong, emotional voice, accompanied by a simple acoustic guitar or bağlama, carried her to national fame. 

Many of her songs carried strong social criticism and solidarity with the poor and the working class, which made her especially popular among the left-wing activists and sympathisers during the politically polarized 1970s.

She experimented with rock and roll and with synthetic and electronic sounds in her LPs, although her musical style remained firmly rooted in the folk tradition. After the 1980 Turkish Coup d'État, she was persecuted by the military rulers due to her political songs, and was imprisoned three times between 1981 and 1984. Her passport was confiscated and held by the authorities until 1987, which, among other things, prevented her from attending the first WOMAD Reading festival in 1986. Partly thanks to pressure from WOMAD, her passport was returned in 1987 and she immediately started a European tour, giving concerts in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the same year.

Since then, she has produced several albums and given concerts in many cities in Turkey and all over the world, and remains active in the Turkish musical scene. Bağcan currently lives in Istanbul and runs the music production company Majör Müzik Yapım.

Ahmet Kaya (1957-2000) was a Turkish–Kurdish folk singer; Kaya was persecuted by Turkish nationalist celebrities and authorities; he left Turkey in an act of self-exile, and moved to France, where he would shortly after die of a heart attack.

Selda Bağcan & Ahmet Kaya - Koçero

Singing under the monsoon

 

Ali Akbar Khan was Born in 1922 in Shibpore, East Bengal, now Bangladesh, as son of the legendary Acharya Baba Allauddin Khan; died at 87 at his home in San Francisco on June 18, 2009, having suffered four years of kidney-related illness. His vocal training began at 3 and, after studying the Surbahar, Sitar and Tabla, focused on the Sarod.

 

Ali Akbar Khan was one of today's most accomplished Indian classical musicians. Late American violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who became one of his earliest champions in the West, said he considered Ali Akbar Khan "an absolute genius, the greatest musician in the world." Regarded as a "National Living Treasure" in India, he is admired by both Eastern and Western musicians for his brilliant compositions and his mastery of the Sarod (a beautiful, 25-stringed Indian instrument).

 

 Ali Akbar Khan - Legacy

Life in dangerous times

 

Alessandro Alessandroni (1925, Rome, Italy - 2017, Rome, Italy) was an Italian composer, arranger, vocalist, whistler, conductor and multi-instrumentalist (guitar, sitar, keyboards, mandolin, mandocello, accordion, banjo, flute, harmonica, jew's harp, recorder, melodica and ocarina). He was the founder of the vocal ensemble I Cantori Moderni di Alessandroni. Husband of Margaret Courtney-Clarke. Previously married to Giulia Alessandroni (Kema) until her death in 1984.

Also collaborated with his childhood friend Ennio Morricone on a number of soundtracks for Spaghetti Westerns. Morricone's orchestration often calls for an unusual combination of instruments, voices, and whistling. Alessandroni's twangy guitar riff is central to the main theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Alessandroni can be heard as the whistler on the soundtracks for Sergio Leone's films, including A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Pervirella. He also collaborated with Morricone in scoring the 1974 film Around the World with Peynet's Lovers.

 

He founded the octet vocal group I Cantori Moderni in 1961. The group, which included his wife, Giulia De Mutiis, performed wordless vocals on several Italian movie soundtracks. Most notably, I Cantori Moderni are featured on the song "Mah Nà Mah Nà", written by Piero Umiliani for the 1968 Luigi Scattini mondo film Svezia, inferno e paradiso and popularized on The Muppets Show.

Alessandro has also composed film scores, including Any Gun Can Play (1967), Johnny Hamlet (1968), The Reward's Yours... The Man's Mine (1969), Lady Frankenstein (1971), The Devil's Nightmare (1971), The Mad Butcher (1971), Seven Hours of Violence (1973), Sinbad and the Caliph of Baghdad (1973), Poker in Bed (1974), White Fang and the Hunter (1975), Blood and Bullets (1976), L'adolescente (1976), La professoressa di scienze naturali (1976), The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), Women's Camp 119 (1977), Killer Nun (1978), L'imbranato (1979), and Trinity Goes East (1998).

Alessandro Alessandroni - Atmosfera Bellica

I am not a number!

 

Ron Grainer (1922 - 1981) was an Australian television and film composer. He worked mainly in the UK and wrote the theme music for television shows, including Maigret (1960), Steptoe And Son (1962-65, 1970-74), The Prisoner (1967) and Edward & Mrs. Simpson (1978), but he is best remembered for composing the "Doctor Who" theme.

 

 

The Ron Grainer Orchestra - The Prisoner

Psycho moogs from outer space

 

Samuel Lloyd Spence (1927 - 2016) was an American soundtrack composer best known for his work with NFL Films. In the early 70's he was an expat working in a community of German rock musicians.

 

As a student of music composition at the École Normale de Musique de Paris with the great composers Arthur Honegger and Francis Poulenc, Spence settled in Europe making his way to Germany to find symphony orchestras to help him develop music for film and television. To balance his classical composition, Spence was able to use his Hollywood credentials to score German TV commissions making dozens of groovy symphonic scores with electronic flourishes.

 

 

Sam Spence - Sam Spence Sounds

Meditations on air

 

Klaus Hashagen (1924 - 1998) was a notable German electroacoustic and experimental music composer. He incorporated numerous styles and techniques in his music: choral, chamber pieces for solo instruments and orchestra, Chanson, "musique concrète," serialist and aleatoric elements, "radiophonic" compositions, spatial sound, and live electronics. 

Klaus co-founded Ars Nova Ensemble Nürnberg in 1968 with Werner Heider, served as the Founding Chairman of "Förderverein" (Friends' Association) at the Hochschule für Musik Nürnberg and was Honorary Professor in electronic music and radiophony at Hochschule für Musik Würzburg.

Klaus Hashagen - Percussion Und Elektronik

The power of extraterrestrial music

 

J.M. Pagan is the cosmic creative musical-mind working behind Swiss/Catalan studio whizz, Zeleste Nightclub engineer, Video Nasty film composer, occasional Jaume Sisa (Música Dispersa) collaborator and future electronic music therapy pioneer; from his mind comes this synth-ridden vocoder-loaded 1984 sci-funk soundtrack to Barcelona's daytime TV response to the universal E.T. phenomena. 

Kiu i els seus amics (Kiu and his friends), was a Spanish television series (1985-1986) of 17 episodes, written and directed by the now famous director Bigas Luna, where a group of children discover an alien who comes from a musical planet, who with his powers helps them to live fantastic adventures.

J. M. Pagan - Kiu I Els Seus Amics

Vapors of imagination

 

Louis De Meester (1904 - 1987)  was a Belgian violin player, piano player, conductor and composer. 

 

Louis De Meester - Alpha Recordings

Rendre des harmonies à l'univers

 

Nino Nardini (Georges Achille Teperino) was a French composer, arranger, engineer, conductor and producer. Frequent collaborator of childhood friend Roger Roger. 

Nardini was born in 1912, to an Italian father and French mother into a family of musicians. His father, a violinist and composer, was his main music teacher. He started his musical career early, at the age of seven, directing a philharmonic orchestra. While still a child, he formed the 5-piece orchestra "Les Diables Rouges" with his friend Roger Roger, which performed at local swing clubs on weekends between the 1920's and 30's.

After the Second World War, he worked conducting and composing Spanish and Mexican ethnic and folk-related music. He formed the Nino Nardini Orchestra in 1951. They were, among other things, featured in "La Chansons de Paris", a weekly musical program wich took place at the Theatre des Champs Elysees. The orchestra continued to perform dance and pop music live at the "Circus 58", allowing Teperino to fine-tune his arrangements in dance styles like paso doble, foxtrot and cha cha cha. He also conducted the orchestras of Radio Luxembourg, Radio Circus and Radio Theatre in Paris as well as taking conductor duties at a French circus, learning with it the arrangement 'trickery' and instrumentation to back the circus' gags and jokes.

In the early 1960's, he, along with Roger Roger, started work composing for music libraries, recording in various styles, often featuring instruments like the harpsichord, marimba or electric organ, and later analog synthesizers and electronic keyboards, instruments which he also featured in his pop arrangements at the time. In the mid-60's, he constructed Studio Ganaro with Roger Roger and Francis Gastambide, which him and Roger used to record and produce their compositions. Teperino and Roger both had fruitful careers in library music, composing a large amount of works for French and British libraries, also experimenting with electronic music in the late 60's and early 70's onwards. Their library music has been, and continues to be featured in numerous radio programs, animations, TV shows and films all over the world.

Nino Nardini - Funny Moogy

Singing songs of wonder

 

Muhammad Ashraf (1942 - 2007) was a Pakistani film composer; he was the most dominating and the most productive music director in Pakistan, and had the highest number of super hit film songs compared to any other music director in Pakistan. 

 

By the end of his 45 years long career, he had composed more than 2.000 film songs for over 400 films compared to many other music directors in Pakistan, and was popular in both Urdu and Punjabi films.

 

 

M. Ashraf, Nahid Akhtar & Ahmed Rushdi - Dekha Jaye Ga

A fantasy on Lara's theme

 

(Peter Thomas was a German composer and arranger, born 1st December 1925 in Breslau, Silesia (today Poland) and came a little later to Berlin, where he remained up to his beginnings as a film musician. He wrote a lots of soundtracks for movies and television series. His music oscillates between easy listening/lounge and electronic/space-age styles. The musician is abroadly well known as director of the incredible musical group The Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra. He died 17th May 2020 in Lugano, Switzerland).

Peter Thomas Sound-Orchester - Dancing Ninotschka

This is not a time to argue

 

Jacques Denjean (Igny, 1929 - Paris, 1995) was a French singer, pianist, composer, arranger and orchestra director. Jazz pianist of some reputation and much sought-after as a record arranger in the 1960s. As a performer and arranger, he worked with the likes of Dionne Warwick, François Hardy, Johnny Hallyday, and many others. In 1964, he arranged and conducted Luxembourg's Eurovision entry 'Dès que le printemps revient', performed by Hugues Aufray. Founded Studio Frémontel in 1971.

 

Jacques Denjean Et Son Orchestre - The Tough Touch