Sade Soldier of Love

Helen Folasade Adu  was born in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.[4] Her middle name, Folasade, means honour confers your crown.[5] Her parents, Adebisi Adu, a Nigerian lecturer in economics of Yoruba background, and Anne Hayes, an English district nurse, met in London, married in 1955 and moved to Nigeria.[4] Later, when the marriage ran into difficulties, Anne Hayes returned to England, taking four-year-old[6] Sade and her older brother Banji to live with her parents.[4] Later on Sade and her brother lived with their grandparents just outside Colchester, Essex. When Sade was 11, she moved toHolland-on-Sea, Essex to live with her mother,[7] and after completing school at 18 she moved to London and studied at Saint Martin's School of Art.[6][4] While in college, she joined a soul band, Pride, in which she sang backing vocals.[4] Her solo performances of the song "Smooth Operator" attracted the attention of record companies and in 1983, she signed a solo deal with Epic Records taking three members of the band, Stuart Matthewman, Andrew Hale and Paul Denman, with her.[4] Sade and her band produced the first of a string of hit albums. Their debut album Diamond Life appeared in 1984. She is the most successful solo female artist in British history, having sold over 110 million albums worldwide.[4] In 2002, she appeared on the Red Hot Organization's Red Hot and Riot, a compilation CD in tribute to the music of fellow Nigerian musician, Fela Kuti. She recorded a remix of her hit single, "By Your Side", for the album and was billed as a co-producer.She squatted in Tottenham in the 1980s, with her then-boyfriend Robert Elms.[8] In 1989, she married Spanish film director Carlos Pliego. Their marriage ended in 1995.[4] She gave birth to a daughter, Ila Adu (who studied at Wycliffe College in Gloucestershire), in 1995 after a relationship with Jamaican music producer Bob Morgan. (She moved briefly to the Caribbean to live with him in the late 1990s, but they later separated and she returned to England.[9]) In 2002, she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to popular music.[10] She lives in the English countryside and, prior to the release of Soldier of Love in 2010, the Daily Mail described her as "famously reclusive".[11]

Art Pepper & Ted Brown

Pepper was born in Gardena, California.[citation needed] He began his career in the 1940s, playing with Benny Carter and Stan Kenton (1946–52).[1] By the 1950s Pepper was recognized as one of the leading alto saxophonists in jazz, epitomized by his finishing second only to Charlie Parker as Best Alto Saxophonist in the Down Beat magazine Readers Poll of 1952. Along with Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and Shelly Manne, and perhaps due more to geography than playing style, Pepper is often associated with the musical movement known as West Coast jazz, as contrasted with the East Coast (or "hot") jazz associated with the likes of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Some of Pepper's most famous albums from the 1950s are Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, Art Pepper + Eleven - Modern Jazz Classics, Gettin' Together, and Smack Up. Representative music from this time appears on The Aladdin Recordings (three volumes), The Early Show, The Late Show, The Complete Surf Ride, and The Way It Was!, which features a session recorded with Warne Marsh. His career was repeatedly interrupted by several prison stints stemming from his addiction toheroin, but Pepper managed to have several memorable and productive "comebacks." Remarkably, his substance abuse and legal travails did not affect the quality of his recordings, which maintained a high level of musicianship throughout his career until his death from a brain hemorrhage in 1982. His last comeback saw Pepper, who had started his career in Stan Kenton's big band, becoming a member of Buddy Rich's Big Band from 1968 to 1969. In 1977 and 1978 he made two well received tours of Japan.[1] During this period, he recorded two albums - Goin' Homewith George Cables, and Winter Moon with a string orchestra - which were among his favorites and which he considered his definitive achievements.[2

Bob James trio

The career of Bob James is long, varied and continues to evolve at every turn. From his first days in Marshall, Missouri, the music of Bob James has captivated audiences throughout the world. Discovered by Quincy Jones at the Notre Dame Jazz Festival in 1963, James recorded his first solo album, Bold Conceptions, that year for Mercury Records. 58 albums and innumerable awards would follow through five decades. He honed his skills working with Creed Taylor, working on albums for artists like Hank Crawford, Grover Washington, Jr, among others.  While with CTI, James found great popular success overseeing significant hits for Paul Simon, Neil Diamond, Maynard Ferguson, and Kenny Loggins.

Duke Ellington Three Suits

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974)[1] was a US composer, pianist and bandleader of jazz-orchestras. His career spanned over 50 years, leading his orchestra from 1923 until death. Though widely considered to have been a pivotal figure in the history of jazz, Ellington himself embraced the phrase "beyond category" as a "liberating principle," and referred his music to the more general category of "American Music," rather than to a musical genre such as "jazz."[2] Born inWashington, D.C., he was based in New York City from the mid-1920s onwards, and gained a national profile through his orchestra's appearances at the Cotton Club. In the 1930s they toured in Europe. Some of the musicians who were members of Ellington's orchestra, such as saxophonist Johnny Hodges, are still, in their own right, considered to be among the best players in jazz, but it was Ellington who melded them into the best-known jazz orchestral unit in the history of jazz. Several members of the orchestra remained members for several decades. A master at writing miniatures for the three-minute 78 rpm record format, Ellington often composed specifically for the style and skills of his individual musicians, such as "Jeep's Blues" for Hodges, and "Concerto for Cootie" for trumpeterCootie Williams, which later became "Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me" with Bob Russell's lyrics. Often collaborating with others, Ellington originated over a thousand compositions and his extensive oeuvre is the largest recorded personal jazz legacy, with many of his extant works having become standards. Ellington also recorded songs written by his bandsmen, for example Juan Tizol's "Caravan" and "Perdido" which brought Spanish tinge to big-band jazz.