Word: instrumentalist
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Basketball seasons come and go, but for "The NBA on NBC," the theme song remains the same. That brash melody that leads viewers in and out of commercials is called Roundball Rock, and it was composed by New Age instrumentalist extraordinaire John Tesh. Ever agreeable, Tesh says he doesn't mind that his best-known, and perhaps most hummable, creation is rarely attributed to him. "It happens to other composers as well, and I love hearing it." Tesh says he wrote the tune while in Europe; without a tape recorder or piano, he called home and sang it onto...
...European pale to jet black, the Negroes of New Orleans had many social clubs, parades and picnics. With rags, blues, snippets from opera, church music and whatever else, a wide breadth of rhythm and tune was created to accompany or stimulate every kind of human involvement. Before becoming an instrumentalist, Armstrong the child was either dancing for pennies or singing for his supper with a strolling quartet of other kids who wandered New Orleans freshening up the subtropical evening with some sweetly harmonized notes...
Louis Armstrong was so much, in fact, that the big bands sounded like him, their featured improvisers took direction from him, and every school of jazz since has had to address how he interpreted the basics of the idiom--swing, blues, ballads and Afro-Hispanic rhythms. While every jazz instrumentalist owes him an enormous debt, singers as different as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye have Armstrong in common as well. His freedom, his wit, his discipline, his bawdiness, his majesty and his irrepressible willingness to do battle with deep sorrow...
...while others received encouragement from parents; in either case, it was the student's own momentum that propelled them through many years of hard practice. Although an established legacy of musical performance and/or over a decade's dedication to practice would definitely seem to favor conservatory attendance on the instrumentalist's part, the decision to come to Harvard was not without sacrifice...
...breathe with an almost jazzlike spontaneity. "Yo-Yo has an ease of playing that is given to very few. It is a kind of mastery that gives one the greatest possible freedom," says violinist Isaac Stern, a onetime mentor of Ma's. "He is probably the most perfect instrumentalist I have ever seen," says Ax. "I spend hours and hours practicing every day. Yo-Yo can afford to sleep late and have lunch, and he still plays much more perfectly than...