Word: windham
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...leading New Age pianist and composer. "It is music that springs from a world culture," says Lucia Hwong, a Chinese American whose music turned up in the 1985 movie Year of the Dragon. Trying to define the style reduces Anne Robinson, a cofounder of the New Age record label Windham Hill, to "stringing words together that sound like an exotic disease identified by a German doctor. New acoustic classical jazz? New acoustic impressionistic music...
Though no firm figures are available, it is estimated that New Age music today accounts for up to 2% of record and tape sales. The percentage may seem small, but it compares favorably with that garnered by classical music. Windham Hill, the West Coast label that has become synonymous with the new style, last year grossed $25 million. In a hard-driving business, Windham Hill's success is anomalous, for the label is rarely heard on the radio, and it advertises only occasionally. Instead, it relies on word of mouth among its target audience of young white professionals. It must...
Last year a challenge to Windham Hill's hegemony sprang up with Private Music, a label founded by Peter Baumann, former keyboard player of the rock group Tangerine Dream. Two of Private Music's early releases are among the best New Age albums so far: Rock Violinist Jerry Goodman's high-flying On the Future of Aviation and the anthology Piano One, which features hypnotic solo performances by Jobson and Japan's Ryuichi Sakamoto, among others. "I like to ; describe the music as very visual," says the Berlin-born Baumann. "One important aspect is the absence of lyrics, which gives...
Perhaps the most financially savvy of the independents is Windham Hill, a Palo Alto, Calif., company started nine years ago by Carpenter-Guitarist William Ackerman, then 26. He borrowed $5 from each of 60 friends to record an album of his own called In Search of the Turtle's Navel. From the outset, Ackerman groomed his disks for the baby boom generation, an audience that he felt was growing tired of rock. He recorded melodic albums like Pianist George Winston's Autumn, which cost just $1,720 to produce but has sold more than 500,000 copies. Some critics regard...
...inmates were asleep when the fire started at about 1.30 a.m. and they were quickly overcome by smoke from the smoldering polyurethane, a synthetic material used as protective padding in an isolation cell, said Harold Windham, an assistant fire chief...