CONCORD MUSIC GROUP ASSEMBLES PIANIST VINCE GUARALDI’S VIVID MUSICAL PORTRAITS OF CLASSIC PEANUTS CHARACTERS

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Cartoonist, Charles Schulz, Concord Records, Jazz, Piano, Vince Guaraldi

Concord Music Logo

Peanuts Portraits marks the 60th anniversary of cartoonist Charles Schulz’s enduring characters

Vince Guaraldi - Peanuts Portraits

By the 1960s, cartoonist Charles Schulz’s Peanuts – featuring Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Linus Van Pelt, Schroeder and other alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking characters – had become a popular fixture in newspaper comics for more than a decade. But when pianist Vince Guaraldi began composing and recording music for various Peanuts television specials in the mid-1960s, the characters suddenly gained an entirely new dimension of humanity and emotional resonance that endures to this day.

The TV specials kept coming, and with them came more music from Guaraldi, each piece capturing the infectious personality of a specific character within the strip. By the ’70s, Guaraldi’s compositions for Peanuts – originally released on Fantasy – had become the universally recognized musical backdrop to the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic characters who made up Schulz’s universe.

New Music [Jazz] for 3/23/2010

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African American, Bass, DAve Holland, Jazz

Greeting’s fellow music aficionados, welcome to week three of the March edition of New Releases. As always, I have a diverse array of artists including jazz/blues vocalist Mose Allison, our feature album of the week “Pathways” by Dave Holland Octet, trumpeter Tom Harrell, the finale recording by keyboard legend Joe Zawinul, also the fabulous piano duoEric Reed and Cyrus Chestnut, saxophonist Candy Dulfer and more.

Featured Album of the Week

Dave Holland Octet | Pathways – [ Dare2 Records, 2010]

Dave Holland Octet - Pathways

Pathways marks the recording debut of the Dave Holland Octet and the fourth album to be released on Holland s own Dare2 label. The players should be familiar to Holland fans: Chris Potter (tenor, soprano), Robin Eubanks (trombone), Steve Nelson (vibes, marimba), and Nate Smith (drums). Added to the front-line are other Holland collaborators Antonio Hart (alto), Alex Sipiagin (trumpet), and Gary Smulyan (baritone). Holland returned to New York s Birdland to record Pathways capturing this incredible group of improvisers in full flight.

Says Holland, – I had always loved the sound of the Duke Ellington small groups, often with a five horn front-line plus the rhythm section. The combination of two brass and three saxes gives access to a wide range of textures and colors and allows a composer to evoke the sound of a big band or create the more intimate sound of a small group. I also wanted a project that would include at its core my regular working quintet and build the music around what we had already developed as a small group.

Dira | Something About the Girl

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Dira Yulianti, Female Vocalist, Incognito

Dira | Something About the Girl – [Phantasm Imports, 2010]

Dira - Something About the Girl

-:- Born in Bandung, Indonesia on July 29th, 1979. At the age of 9, Dira Yulianti won the second prize of children singing competition. After she graduated from high school she took her first vocal lesson at Elfa Music Studio. She studied there for three years.

She began her career as a singer as well as a student at the Music Department of Pelita Harapan, majoring vocal performance. In 2006 Dira Yulianti earned her Bachelor Degree. She has performed in several places with many groups and local musicians such as: SOULMATE, Maestro Big Band, Rieka Roslan, SOVA, Imam Praz Quartet, ARAB Jazz, Pelita Harapan University Big Band, and many more.