Delia Derbyshire (1937–2001) was an English musician & composer of electronic music\musique concrète. She is best known for her electronic realisation of Ron Grainer’s theme music to the British science fiction series Doctor Who and for her work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Derbyshire was born in Coventry. Educated at Barr’s Hill School, she then completed a degree in mathematics and music at Girton College, Cambridge. In 1959 she applied for a position at Decca Records only to be told that the company did not employ women in their recording studios. Instead she took a position at the UN in Geneva, soon returning to London to work for music publishers Boosey & Hawkes.

Delia Derbyshire / Love Without Sound (1969)

Some of her most acclaimed work was done in the 1960s in collaboration with the British artist and playwright Barry Bermange for the BBC’s Third Programme, which was later renamed BBC Radio 3. Besides the Doctor Who theme, Derbyshire also composed and produced scores, incidental pieces and themes for nearly 200 BBC Radio and BBC TV programmes. A selection of some of her best 1960s electronic music creations for the BBC can be found on the album BBC Radiophonic Music (BBC Records), which was re-released on CD in 2002.

Delia Derbyshire / The Wizards Laboratory (1972)

Several of the smaller pieces that Derbyshire created at the Radiophonic Workshop were used for many years as incidental music by the BBC and other broadcasters, including the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

Delia Derbyshire Radio Scotland interview 1997 Part 1

One set of recordings made for the Third Programme labeled “Dreams” was made in collaboration with Barry Bermange (who originally recorded the narrations). Bermange put together The Dreams (1964), a collage of people describing their dreams, set to a background of electronic sound.

Delia Derbyshire Radio Scotland interview 1997 Part 2

Dreams is a collection of spliced/reassembled interviews with people describing their dreams, particularly recurring elements. The program of sounds and voices attempts to represent, in five movements, some sensations of dreaming: running away, falling, landscape, underwater, and colour.

http://www.delia-derbyshire.org

Chet Baker – My Funny Valentine

Specializing in relaxed, even melancholy music, Baker rose to prominence as a leading name in cool jazz in the 1950s. Baker’s good looks and smoldering, intimate singing voice established him as a promising name in pop music as well. But his success was badly hampered by drug addiction, particularly in the 1960s, when he was imprisoned.

He died in 1988 after falling from a hotel window.

“China Doll” by Leon Thomas

Thomas is known for his work with Pharoah Sanders, particularly the 1969 song “The Creator Has a Master Plan” from Sanders’ Karma album. Thomas’s most distinctive device was that he often broke out into yodeling in the middle of a vocal. This style has influenced singers James Moody and Tim Buckley, among others.

Leon Thomas The Creator Has A Master Plan

Thomas studied music at Tennessee State University. Thomas was for a period member of the band of Carlos Santana. Thomas died of heart failure on May 8, 1999.

Via Clara Flower

Art Ensemble Of Chicago theme de yoyo

The Art Ensemble is notable for its integration of musical styles spanning jazz’s entire history and for their multi-instrumentalism, especially the use of what they termed “little instruments” in addition to the traditional jazz lineup; “little instruments” can include bicycle horns, bells, birthday party noisemakers, wind chimes, and a vast array of percussion instruments (including found objects).

The group also uses costumes and face paint in performance. These characteristics combine to make the ensemble’s performances as much a visual spectacle as an aural one, with each musician playing from behind a large array of drums, bells, gongs, and other instruments. When playing in Europe in 1969, the group were using more than 500 instruments.

Art Ensemble Of Chicago live with Cecil Taylor (1984)

Members of what was to become the Art Ensemble performed together under various band names in the mid-sixties, releasing their first album, Sound, as the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet in 1966. The Sextet included saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, trumpeter Lester Bowie and bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut, who over the next year went on to play together as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble. In 1967 they were joined by fellow AACM members Joseph Jarman (saxophone) and Phillip Wilson (drums), and made a number of recordings for Nessa.

Art Ensemble of Chicago Documentary

http://www.artensembleofchicago.com

http://www.myspace.com/artensembleofchicago

Dick Hyman / Mary Mayo – I’m Glad There Is You

Mayo first got started as a singer appearing on broadcasts from radio station WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina just after the end of World War Two. Gifted with a four-octave range, she was soon spotted by talent scouts and wound up working for Tex Beneke, who was leading the post-war version of the Glenn Miller Orchestra. While singing with Beneke, she married Al Ham, an arranger and bass player in the band.

With the birth of their daughter, Lorri, the couple settled in New York City and went to work in the studios there. Ham joined Columbia Records and became a producer, working with Johnny Mathis, Les Elgart, and, most notoriously, the fabulously successful series of “Sing Along with Mitch [Miller]” albums. He later dabbled in film, producing Harlow, a low-budget copycat of the Paramount movie of the same title. Mayo sang on the soundtrack, which was written by Ham and Nelson Riddle. The film earned a footnote in movie history as the one and only studio production shot in “Electronovision,” an early form of videotape.

Like that of other session singers, Mayo’s work is largely uncredited outside her Musicians Union logs. She ghosted on the “original cast” albums of numerous Broadway musicals, and sang alongside Don Elliott in a short-lived vocal jazz combo known as the Manhattanaires. She released a couple of singles for Columbia in the 1950s, but none even came close to the charts. And she earned a cover billing on one of Leroy Holmes’ releases for MGM. Aside from Moon Gas, her one noteworthy credited appearance of the 1960s was at Duke Ellington’s legendary 1969 jazz concert at the White House for President Nixon.

Dick Hyman – Alfie

The Hillside Singers, Mary Mayo in frontHam and Mayo [pause for the inevitable snickers] owed their biggest success to a schedulling problem. Ad agency McCann Erickson needed a wholesome folk group to record the jingle for their memorable ad, “I’d Like to Give the World a Coke,” but their first choice, the New Seekers, were busy. So they approached Ham, who pulled together a group of studio singers, including Mayo and daughter Lorri, and recorded the tune. Within minutes of the first broadcast of the commercial in December 1971, Coca-Cola was bombarded by requests for the song, and Ham quickly cut a product-free version, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” on Metromedia. He called the group the Hillside Singers, no great stretch of the imagination given that the ad showed a bunch of people singing on a hillside. Although the New Seekers also released their own single soon after, the record’s popularity was enough to convince Metromedia to release two albums by the group, featuring such folk standards as “Kumbaya.”

Mayo continued to work professionally until her death from cancer in 1985. Al Ham created a syndicated radio format known as “The Music of Your Life” that became one of the few refuges for easy listening fans on late 1970s mainstream radio. Their daughter continues to perform with big band ensembles under her professional name, Lorri Hafer.

Mayo’s one release under her own name came posthumously. In 1986, a small label, Audiophile, issued a set of tunes she recorded in 1977 for the NPR radio series, “American Popular Song,” as Time Remembered. Unfortunately, copies of it are about as hard to find as of Moon Gas.