MARIAH CAREY - Mariah Carey was born on March 27, 1970 in Huntington, New York. Her parents, father Alfred Roy Carey and mother Patricia Carey (who was an opera singer and vocal coach), named her after the song "They Called the Wind Mariah", from the musical Paint Your Wagon.

Mariah attended Harborfields High School in Greenlawn. She moved into Manhattan in 1987 to pursue a career in music. While working as a backup singer for R&B singer Brenda K. Starr, she met her future husband, record mogul Tommy Mottola, who was instrumental in helping launch her career. (They were divorced in 1998.)

Carey began working on her debut album Mariah Carey (1990) when she was just 18. Four songs from that album went to number one, including 'Vision of Love', 'Love Takes Time', 'Someday', and 'I Don't Wanna Cry'. Her second album Emotions also produced a number one hit with its title track, thus making Carey the first person in the music business to have their first five singles hit number one. Her next album, Music Box (1993), also produced three number one hits, including 'Hero', a song dedicated to the victims of the Long Island Railroad shootings. Carey has continued to record new albums, including Merry Christmas (1994), Daydream (1995), Butterfly (1997), #1s (1998), Charmbracelet (2002) and the The Emancipation of Mimi (2005). She also pursues a career in acting.

Mariah Carey has had more number one hits than any other female artist. Only The Beatles (with 20 number one hits) and Elvis Presley (with 18) have had more than she. She has sold over 160 million albums worldwide and has also received five Grammy Awards.

Mariah Carey - http://www.mariahcarey.com/ http://www.mtv.com/music/artist/carey_mariah/artist.jhtml#bio http://www.vh1.com/artists/az/carey_mariah/bio.jhtml

Mariah Carey Performances on Video Here.
http://fernandosalas.vodpod.com/video/18658-mariah-carey-fantasy
http://nickmaxell.vodpod.com/video/170414-mariah-carey-hero
http://whitegurl.vodpod.com/video/223048-mariahcarey-we-belong-together
http://samira50492.vodpod.com/video/257653-always-be-my-babymariah-carey

HARRY CHAPIN - Chapin was born December 7, 1942, the son of James Chapin (who was a drummer for Tommy Dorsey and Woody Herman) and Elspeth Hart. The family moved to Brooklyn Heights in the 1950s, and music was important facet of family life when the children were growing up. Harry began playing trumpet, but after he discovered folk music in 1957, he learned to play the guitar. Harry formed a band with brothers Tom, Steve and James, and began writing songs in the 1960s. After marrying Sandy Gaston, Harry moved to Huntington in 1968, and started a family. His songwriting changed direction in 1970, and he formed a trio with a cello player and bass guitarist in 1971. Harry signed a recording contract with Elektra Records, which released "Heads and Tales" in late '71 with its #1 hit "Taxi". He also released "Legends of the Lost & Found", "Sniper and Other Love Songs", "Dance Band on the Titanic", "Living Room Suite", and "On the Road to Kingdom Come" during his lifetime. Harry was also interested in theatrical production: he created the multimedia show "The Night That Made America Famous" in 1975, which received two Tony nominations.

Harry met father Bill Ayers in 1975; together, they formed World Hunger Year in 1975, and the Food Policy Center (a Washington-based lobby organization) in 1976, which resulted in the formation of a Presidential Commission on World Hunger in 1977. Harry was appointed to this commission by then-President Jimmy Carter. By the end of his life, Harry was playing 200 concerts a year, half of which were benefits, and raised an enormous amount of money for hunger-related issues as well as for the Performing Arts Foundation. He had also persuaded the New York State Council on the Arts to support the formation of the Long Island Philharmonic. Harry died in an automobile accident on the Long Island Expressway on July 16, 1981 on the way to perform in a free concert at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow.

Audio Portrait

Performances on YouTube Here, Here and Here.

www.harrychapinmusic.com

GEORGE M. COHAN - George Michael Cohan (1878-1942), often referred to as the "Man who owned Broadway," was a playwright, producer, performer, and composer, all in one. This Providence, Rhode Island born talent got his start at the age of nine, when he first graced the stage. He went on to star in The Four Cohans, a popular vaudeville attraction also featuring his fellow show-biz family members. He was just 16 years old when in 1894, he sold his first song to Witmark Music Publishing. Cohan's first play hit Broadway in NYC in 1901, and real success followed three years later when he played Yankee Doodle Boy in his musical Little Johnny Jones (1904). Cohan, known for his hustle and bustle style, wrote approximately 20 plays and musical comedies, in many of which he played the lead. Some examples of his work include Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The Song and Dance Man (1923), and The Merry Malones (1927). He also performed in other artists' productions, including Eugene O'Neil's Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and Rodgers and Hart's I'd Rather Be Right (1937).

Cohan had been called the "most representative American dramatist of the present period." This influential artist developed a play-writing formula still being used by American playwrights today, and the term "typically American" has become interchangeable with "Cohan-esque" in the theater world. George M. Cohan is very well known for his compositions, "Give My Regards to Broadway," "You're a Grand Old Flag," and "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy." He also wrote "Over There," a World War I hit inspired by a newspaper article regarding America's entrance into the war. Cohan, who wrote this song in his Kings Point home, was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for the composition of his patriotic songs.
www.musicals101.com/cohanbio1.htm
http://parlorsongs.com/issues/2004-7/thismonth/feature.asp

JOHN COLTRANE - John Coltrane was born on September 23, 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina surrounded by music. John began his musical studies on the E-flat horn and clarinet, but he shifted his interest to alto saxophone when he was in high school. He studied in Philadelphia at Granoff Studios and the Ornstein School of Music until he was called to military service during World War II, when he performed in the US Navy Band in Hawaii. After the war, John began playing tenor saxophone, and expanded his vision and experimentation, playing in the Eddie 'CleanHead' Vinson Band, followed stints with Jimmy Heath, Thelonius Monk and Dizzy Gillespie.When he joined the Miles Davis Quintet in 1958, he found his freedom of expression, developing his distinctive three-on-one chord approach, and his method of playing multiple notes at one time, called 'sheets of sound'. By 1960, Coltrane had formed his own quartet which included McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison, which created some of the most innovative music in Jazz.

Coltrane released 79 albums as a bandleader in his lifetime, including 'My Favorite Things' released in 1960, 'Giant Steps' in 1959, 'Africa/Brass' in 1961, and the watershed work 'A Love Supreme' in 1964, which was created at his home in Dix Hills. A spiritual man, Coltrane felt deeply that his music was an instrument to create positive thoughts in the mind. John Coltrane succumbed to liver disease on July 17, 1967 at the age of 40, yet his music continues to be widely heard to this day in both film and television scores. In 1982, Coltrane was posthumously awarded a Grammy for 'Best Solo Jazz Performance' and in 1997, he received the RIAA's highest honor, the Lifetime Achievement Award. Universally recognized as one of the most revolutionary saxophonists in jazz, Coltrane has been honored by the USPS with a commemorative postage stamp, and by Universal Studios/MCA Records by naming a street in his honor.

On April 20, 2004, the Town Board of Huntington approved to designate the Coltrane home in Dix Hills as an Historic Landmark slated for preservation.
Performances on YouTube Here, Here an Here.

www.johncoltrane.com
www.dixhills.com

PERRY COMO - A long time Port Washington resident. In 1945, Como recorded the pop ballad "'Til the End of Time" (based on Chopin's "Polonaise"), which marked the beginning a highly successful career. Como was the first artist to have ten records sell more than one million copies. Similarly, his television show achieved a much higher rating than that of any other vocalist to date.

On March 14, 1958, the RIAA certified Como's hit single, "Catch a Falling Star" as its first ever "Gold Record." His exclusive recording contract with RCA Victor in 1943 began an association that would last for almost fifty years. He recorded many albums of songs for the RCA Victor label between 1952 and 1987, and is credited with numerous gold records. Como had so many recordings achieve gold-record status that he refused to have many of them certified. It was this characteristic which made him so different from his peers, and which endeared him to legions of fans throughout the world. Over the decades, Como is reported to have sold millions of records, but he commonly suppressed these figures.

His regular television show, at first a spin-off from the Chesterfield Supper Club, continued through the early 1950s, becoming The Perry Como Show, and then for five years The Perry Como Kraft Music Hall. He became the highest paid performer in the history of television to that date, earning mention in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Audio Portrait

Performances on YouTube Here, Here and Here.

www.perrycomo.net

AARON COPLAND

Born on November 14, 1900 in Brooklyn as the child of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, he first learned to play the piano from his older sister. At the age of sixteen he went to Manhattan to study with Rubin Goldmark, who also taught George Gershwin.

In 1920, Copland set out for Paris, modernism's home in the years between the wars. Perhaps the central legacy of his stay in Paris was his association with his teacher and mentor Nadia Boulanger; who fed his growing interest in jazz and other popular idioms; and nurtured his idea that there was no American counterpart to the national styles being created by composers from France, Russia, and Spain. He became determined to create, in his words, "a naturally American strain of so-called serious music."

Upon his return to America in 1924, his career was launched when the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed his Organ Symphony, with Boulanger as soloist. Throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s, Copland created such American masterworks as the ballets Billy the Kid and Rodeo, Lincoln Portrait, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Appalachian Spring for Martha Graham, Symphony No. 3, Fanfare for the Common Man, El Salon Mexico and the opera The Tender Land.

Copland never ceased to advocate for new music. He was a lecturer and writer about new music and presenter of concerts that brought many 20th Century European masterworks to U.S. audiences for the first time. For 25 years he was a leading member of the faculty at the Berkshire Music Center (Tanglewood) and was one of the most honored of American composers, including the 1979 Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts in 1986. He took up conducting while in his fifties and continued until he was 83. In 1982, The Aaron Copland School of Music was established in his honor at Queens College of the City University of New York.

Copland died at the age of 90 in North Tarrytown, New York. Copland House, his home in Cortland Manor, is now an important institution that sponsors composers' residencies, the Music from Copland House chamber ensemble, community and educational programs, and various recording, broadcast, and Internet projects.

Aaron Copland - http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/copland_a.html and http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/coplanda1.shtml and http://www.coplandhouse.org/info.asp?pb=55&pg=1.

Read About Copland's Lincoln Portrait Here and Listen to an NPR Program About Appalachian Spring Here (scroll down the page for the podcast link).
http://www.npr.org/programs/pt/features/lincolnportrait.html and
http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/milestones/991027.motm.apspring.html.

GEORGE PETER CRISCULA (AKA PETER CRISS)- is the co-founder and drummer for the rock band KISS.

Criss joined the pre-KISS group Wicked Lester in 1973, and took the stage persona of 'The Cat' when KISS adopted the use of makeup and costumes. Despite a youth spent as a tough Brooklyn gang member, Peter was also an avid art student and jazz aficionado. While playing with bandleader Joey Greco, Criscuola ended up studying under his idol, Gene Krupa, at the Metropole Club in New York. This blossomed into an active musical career as he went on to play jazz and rock with a number of bands in New York and New Jersey throughout the 1960s.

In 1973, Peter placed an ad in Rolling Stone magazine in an attempt to find a band that needed a drummer. Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley responded, and were knocked out by Criss' playing style. Criss co-wrote the ballad "Beth" - a Top 10 hit for the band - in 1976. His drum solo in the group's '100,000 Years' was a consistent showstopper. And the show-closing 'Black Diamond' often found Criss suspended thirty plus feet in the air over the KISS army. Peter Criss left KISS in May 1980 to begin a solo career. He released three albums over the next fifteen years. He reunited with KISS in 1995, and remained with them until 2002.

Performances on YouTube Here, Here and Here

JAMES D'AQUISTO - James (Jimmy) D'Aquisto was born on November 9, 1935. He began making guitars at the age of 17, and was apprenticed to master luthier John D'Angelico, who was considered to be the premier archtop builder of the 20th century. After D'Angelico's death in 1964, Jimmy branched out on his own, operating a lutherie in Farmingdale. He also designed guitars for Fender and Hagstrom. Jimmy was well-known for his intense drive, humor, and his willingness to share his knowledge with young luthiers, including Canadian master luthier Linda Manzer (who builds guitars for Pat Metheny), whom he had invited to study with him at Farmingdale in 1982.

Starting about 1967, Jimmy developed a number of innovations, including adjustable tailpieces, smaller pickguards and redesigned f-holes. His elegant and sleek designs, as well as the rich tonal quality and dynamic range of his guitars, made them treasured favorites of serious players and collectors. Jimmy also believed that heavy ornamentation, such as pearl and abalone inlays, detracted from a guitar's tone; this belief is carried on by many luthiers of today.

Jimmy's meticulous attention to detail and innovative design concepts earned him the title of the world's greatest luthier long before his untimely death at the age of 59 on April 18, 1995. No less authorities than George Gruhn, and the late collector Scott Chinery, have cited Jimmy as the finest luthier in the world. His archtop guitars sold for $40,000 before his death, and are among the most highly prized modern instruments, currently fetching well into the six-figure range.

"Acquired of the Angels: The Lives and Works of Master Guitar Makers John D'Angelico and James L. D'Aquisto" by Paul William Schmidt 1991, 1998 Scarecrow Press, London

James D'Aquisto

NEIL DIAMOND- Neil Leslie Diamond was born January 24, 1941, in Brooklyn, the first of two sons born to Akeeba Diamond (known as Kieve), who operated and owned a series of dry goods stores, and Rose (Rapoport) Diamond. Except for two years in the mid-'40s that the family spent in Wyoming while Akeeba Diamond served in the military, Diamond grew up in Brooklyn, albeit in changing locations as his father moved from store to store; he later claimed to have attended nine different schools and to have suffered socially as a result.

He showed an early interest in music and took up singing and playing the guitar after seeing Pete Seeger perform at a camp he was attending as a teenager.

In a career that began in the 1960's Neil Diamond became a major recording artist, an internationally successful touring act, and a songwriter whose compostions produced hits for himself and others. His earliest recognition, in fact, came as a songwriter associated with the Brill Building era of Tin Pan Alley in the early '60s. He soon branched out into recording and performing, and by the early '70s was topping the charts with the self-written singles "Cracklin' Rosie" and "Song Sung Blue." As he made a transition to more of an album artist, those albums began to earn gold and platinum certifications, and developed into a dynamic concert performer, as demonstrated on his 1972 album Hot August Night. At the same time, his music became generally softer, which broadened his appeal. His millions of fans flocked to his shows and bought his albums in big numbers until well into the 1980s. After that, while his concert tours continued to post high grosses, his record sales became more modest. Still, as of 2001, he claimed worldwide record sales of 115 million copies, and as of 2002 he was ranked third, behind only Elton John and Barbra Streisand, on the list of the most successful adult contemporary artists in the history of the Billboard chart. Meanwhile, having been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and given its lifetime achievement award, he could cite an amazingly broad range of pop, rock, R&B, folk, country, jazz, reggae, punk, heavy metal, alternative, easy listening, and new age performers who had recorded his songs, among them Altered Images, Chet Atkins, Harry Belafonte, the Box Tops, Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, Petula Clark, Ray Conniff, Floyd Cramer, Bobby Darin, the Spencer Davis Group, Joey Dee & the Starliters, Deep Purple, the Drifters, David Essex, Percy Faith, José Feliciano, the Four Tops, Dizzy Gillespie, the Heptones, Julio Iglesias, Chris Isaak, Millie Jackson, Wanda Jackson, Jay & the Americans, Waylon Jennings, Tom Jones, Patti LaBelle, David Lanz, Peggy Lee, Liberace, Enoch Light, Mark Lindsay, Johnny Mathis, the Monkees, the Music Machine, Wayne Newton, Roy Orbison, Johnny Paycheck, Elvis Presley, Boots Randolph, Cliff Richard, Billy Joe Royal, Frank Sinatra, Smash Mouth, the Specials, Barbra Streisand, Third World, Tina Turner, UB40, Gary Puckett & the Union Gap, Urge Overkill, the Ventures, Bobby Vinton, Junior Walker & the All-Stars, Roger Whittaker, Andy Williams and Bobby Womack.

Neil Diamond - www.neildiamond.com

Neil Diamond Performances on Video Here. http://chuckbenjamin.vodpod.com/video/15734-neil-diamond-cherry-cherry
http://chuckbenjamin.vodpod.com/video/25635-neil-diamond-kentucky-woman
http://video.aol.com/video/music-neil-diamond-solitary-man-aol-sessions/1797559
http://video.aol.com/video/music-neil-diamond-sweet-caroline-aol-sessions/1797560