It is helpful to research the artist, using sources like Wikipedia , Music Magazine Reviews (Pitchfork, Rolling stone, NME etc.,) Artist Websites, etc…A synopsis of the life and music of this Issue’s featured artists appears below.

This Week’s Artists

JAGA JAZZIST

Jaga Jazzist is a Norwegian jazz fusion band. Their second album, The core of the band are the brothers and the main songwriters, Lars and Martin Horntveth. Martin formed Jaga Jazzist together with Ivar Christian Johansen in 1994 while they still were in their teens, though Johansen later left the group. Jaga Jazzist nearly created a sensation with their debut album, Jævla Jazzist Grete Stitz (1996), that contained playful, humorous jazz with elements of rap. The very young Lars Horntveth became increasingly involved in composing the music they played. After Magazine word spread about their fresh musical expressions and energetic live shows, and the band toured extensively before they signed a recording contract with Warner Music of Norway in 2000. The highly anticipated debut album for Warner, A Livingroom Hush, was released in 2001. The producer Jørgen Træen played an important role during the recording, and left his mark on the disc with his crackling electronics.The Stix is the third studio album by the Norwegian band Jaga Jazzist. It was released In May 2003 by Ninja Tune to positive reviews. The album is highly regarded for its forward-thinking fusion of acoustic big band textures with intricate digital production, encompassing genres like future jazz, IDM (Intelligent dance music), post-rock, drum ‘n’ bass, and glitch. What We Must is the fourth studio album released in April 2005. The album marked a major stylistic departure for the multi-member collective. introducing heavy post-rock, shoegaze textures, and cinematic rock orchestration.

One-Armed Bandit is the fifth studio album released in January 2010 to positive reviews the album embraces a massive, maximalist progressive rock and electronic fusion sound. Jazzist released their album Starfire in 2015 with a definitive shift toward a more hard-edged, heavily layered, and studio-dominated electronic sound. Pyramid is the acclaimed album released in August 2020, self-produced and recorded in just two intense weeks . Musically, it fuses a deep love for 1970s jazz-rock, post-rock, cosmic psychedelia, and modern electronica.

In 1985, long before they were famous, Ian Brown and drummer Reni gained local notoriety in Manchester by spray-painting the band’s name across city-centre buildings to generate hype. In November 1989, performing live on the The Late Show the studio’s power failed due to a noise limiter trigger. Instead of stopping quietly, frontman Ian Brown began pacing the stage, repeatedly shouting “Amateurs!” at presenter Tracey MacLeod. In 1990, furious over their former label FM Revolver re-releasing the single “Sally Cinnamon” without their permission, the band stormed the label’s Wolverhampton offices. They trashed the premises and threw blue and white paint over the label boss, his staff, and their cars. The stunt resulted in the band being arrested and fined thousands of pounds. They spent years entangled in a bitter legal dispute to escape their contract with Silvertone Records, halting their momentum at their absolute peak. In May 1990, the band held an iconic, self-organized outdoor concert at Spike Island in Cheshire for 27,000 fans. The gig achieved legendary status but was plagued by terrible sound quality. Despite the chaos, it became a cultural touchstone that inspired a generation of subsequent musicians. The Stone Roses were notoriously difficult for journalists to interview. They routinely gave monosyllabic, silent, or openly hostile interviews. They rejected traditional music industry networking and the standard London-centric press machine, radiating a detached, unbothered Manchester confidence that terrified television executives but deeply endeared them to their working-class fanbase.

GÉRARD GRISEY

Gérard Henri Grisey (1946 –1998) was a twentieth-century French composer of contemporary classical music. His work is often associated with spectral music, of which he was a major pioneer. Grisey was born in Belfort, France in 1946. From a very young age, Grisey demonstrated enormous interest and talent in music composition and study, writing his first essay on music when he was 9 years old. His first instrument was the accordion, which he received as a Christmas present aged 5. He was very proficient on the instrument, twice winning first prize at the French national championship and competing in the accordion World Cup. He studied at the conservatory in Trossingen, West Germany, from 1963 to 1965. There he took classes in accordion, as well as harmony, fugue, and counterpoint, before going on to the Conservatoire de Paris, where he studied with Olivier Messiaen from 1965 to 1967 and again from 1968 to 1972, while also working with Henri Dutilleux Professor of Composition at the École Normale de Musique de Paris in 1968. He won prizes for piano accompaniment, harmony, counterpoint, fugue, and composition at the Conservatoire under Messiaen’s guidance. He also studied electroacoustics with Jean-Étienne Marie in 1969, composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and György Ligeti at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1972, and acoustics with Émile Leipp at the Faculté des Sciences in 1974. Other studies were undertaken in the summer of 1969 at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Italy. Grisey won the Prix de Rome, enabling him to stay at the Villa Medici in Rome from 1972 to 1974. While there he became friends with Tristan Murail, with whom he founded the group L’Itinéraire in 1973 along with Roger Tessier and Michaël Lévinas, later to be joined by Hugues Dufourt. In 1974–75, he studied acoustics with Émile Leipp at the Paris VI University.

In 1980 became a trainee at IRCAM in the computer music course organized by David Wessel and Marc Battier. During the same year, Grisey was a guest of DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. He subsequently left for the University of California, Berkeley, where he was appointed professor of theory and composition for the years 1982 to 1986. After returning to Europe, he took up the role of professor of orchestration and composition at the Conservatoire de Paris from 1987 until his death, while also holding numerous composition seminars in France and abroad.In the 1980s, as Grisey’s ideas spread outside France – owing in part to his teaching at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1980 and 1982 – he continued to develop his style. Where early works such as Périodes are based on slow-moving processes, later works like Talea (1986) blend multiple layers of time, evoking the distinct rhythms of whales, humans, and insects. Grisey retained from his early faith a tendency to the mystical, and he often couched his music in images of death. This culminated with the song cycle Quatre chants pout franchir le seuil (‘Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold’), commissioned and premiered by the London Sinfonietta; though at the 1999 world premiere in London, conducted by Grisey’s friend George Benjamin, Grisey was sadly absent: soon after finishing this death-focused work, he died suddenly of an aneurysm. Grisey died at the age of 52 in Paris on 11 November 1998.