cool jazz

Laurent De Wilde, the Mid-Atlantic piano player of the year, is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. This school and a few others like it are called Les Grandes Ecoles and they are comparable to the Ivy League. They produce the elite in this country. And so it seemed appropriate to ask De Wilde: "What's a nice guy like you doing in a métier like this?" He replied with a very American have-a-nice-day croon: "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

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Bernard Herrmann (June 29, 1911 – December 24, 1975) was an American composer noted for his work in motion pictures. In over forty scores Bernard Herrmann[ enriched the work of such directors as Orson Welles (Citizen Kane), Alfred Hitchcock (North By Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, Marnie etc.), Francois Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), and Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver). From his first film (Citizen Kane) to his last (Taxi Driver)...

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Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra is a project by multi-instrumentalist Shawn Lee. Shawn grew up in a rural area on the outskirts of Wichita, Kansas. His mother is half Lebanese, half American Indian, his father Irish-American. While his peers got off on cheesy corporate rock and the kind of line-dancing tunes recently fashionable in Gap ads, Shawn was groovin to the blaxploitation funk Sly and the Isleys.

Bobby (Robert Coull) Wellins is a jazz tenor saxophonist. He was born in Glasgow on 24 January 1936. He came from a musical family and later studied music at college, originally playing alto sax. After college he played in dance bands and made his first recording in 1956 with Buddy Featherstonhaugh's quintet. In the early 1960s Wellins worked with the Tony Crombie Band, Tubby Hayes, and most notably began a long association with the pianist Stan Tracey. He recorded the landmark Under Milk Wood with Tracey in 1965.