Word: music
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Paul, who died today at 94 in White Plains, N.Y., was no mere antique hitmaker to the rock generations that both learned from him and put his kind of music out of business. He was an inventor and an inspiration. He pioneered recording on tape, creating dozens of layers of sound with an early reel-to-reel tape machine. He designed (though he did not construct) one of the first synthesizers. He devised the first eight-track tape recording system, which would not become generally accepted until 15 years later, when the Beatles made their White Album. And he invented...
...interview with Frank Beacham, Paul joked that a lot of people didn't know he played a guitar. "They think I am one," he said. He was something more: a genius of a tinkerer, with machines and music - the Edison...
...Sunrise He was born Lester Polsfuss (the family soon simplified the name to Polfus) in Waukesha, Wis., 18 miles west of Milwaukee. Encouraged by his mother, he learned piano, guitar and harmonica. His curiosity led him to all sorts of precocious experiments, like poking new holes in player-piano music to make new melodies, or, at 13, disconnecting a console-radio speaker and attaching a phonograph pickup. He bought his first Gibson guitar, an L-5 acoustic, which he promptly electrified. In local performances, he wired his guitar to radios stage right and left - voilà, stereo...
...Billing himself as Rhubarb Red, Paul soon had a country-music act out of Chicago. He played harmonica and guitar and, between numbers, peddled rube humor. By the early '30s he was making $1,000 a week at the country stuff, but in the bustling Chicago music scene, there was so much more to hear and play. In the morning he was hillbilly, and at night he was playing jazz with Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Nat Cole and Art Tatum. He cut his first records in 1936, backing blues singer-pianist Georgia White as she belted out Andy Razaf...
...Just after World War II, Crosby gave him one of the first Ampex tape recorders. It helped stoke in Paul the familiar dream of a trailblazing artist: to put on wax the music in his head. What emerged, in 1948, with the two-sided hit "Lover" and "Brazil," was something he called the New Sound. It comprised several tracks of brisk, intricate guitar work meticulously laid on top of one another; if he made a mistake with the final track, he had to start over again. The New Sound, which he refined in a later home studio in Mahwah...