Lenny Williams

ABC Records was an American record label, founded in New York City in 1955 as ABC-Paramount Records. It originated as the main popular music label operated the Am-Par Record Corporation, the music subsidiary of the American Broadcasting Company . ABC-Paramount Records' first president was Samuel H.... Clark. Am-Par also established the Impulse! jazz label in 1961 and subsequently acquired a number of other labels before the entire division was sold to MCA Records in 1979. ABC-Paramount -- the direct antecedent of the present-day American Broadcasting Company -- evolved from federal antitrust actions taken against the movie studios and broadcasting companies in the 1940s and early 1950s. As a result of a 1943 Federal Communications Commission action against anti-competitive practices, the Radio Corporation of America was forced to sell off its broadcast subsidiary the Blue Network, the sister network of NBC, and Blue was purchased by the American Broadcasting System, Inc.
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Fantasy Records is a United States-based record label that was founded by Max and Sol Weiss in 1949 in San Francisco, California. They had previously operated a record-pressing plant called Circle Record Company before forming the Fantasy label. The early years of the company were dedicated to... issuing recordings by Dave Brubeck, Cal Tjader, Vince Guaraldi, and other jazz artists. The label was the first to record in-person performances by Lenny Bruce. Fantasy's first subsidiary label, formed in 1951, was Galaxy Records. The labels were named in honor of fantasy and science fiction magazines. In the mid-1950s, Saul Zaentz joined the company and eventually instigated the company's major expansion. In 1965, another subsidiary label was formed which was short lived, Scorpio Records, in an attempt to capitalize on the British invasion sound. In 1967, Zaentz led a consortium that bought out the Weiss brothers. The following year, Fantasy's most successful act emerged when the local group Creedence Clearwater Revival, which he managed, released its first hit record, "Susie Q," in 1968.
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Warner Bros. Records Inc. is an American record label. It was the foundation label of the present-day Warner Music Group, and now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of that corporation. It maintains a close relationship with its former parent, Warner Bros. Pictures, although the two companies... are independently owned. Rob Cavallo currently serves as Chairman of the company. Warner Bros. Records was originally established in 1958 as the recorded music division of the American movie studio Warner Bros. Pictures. For most of its existence it was one of a group of labels owned and operated by larger parent corporations. The sequence of companies that controlled Warner Bros. and its allied labels evolved through a convoluted series of corporate mergers and acquisitions from the early 1960s to the early 2000s. Over this period, Warner Bros. Records grew from a struggling minor player in the industry to become one of the top recording labels in the world. In 2003 these music assets were divested by their then owner Time Warner and purchased by a private equity group. This independent company traded as the Warner Music Group , before being bought by Access Industries in 2011.
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Rhythm and blues, often abbreviated to R&B, is a genre of popular African-American music that originated in the 1940s. The term was originally... used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular. The term has subsequently had a number of shifts in meaning. In the early 1950s, the term rhythm and blues was frequently applied to blues records. Starting in the mid-1950s, after this style of music contributed to the development of rock and roll, the term "R&B" became used to refer to music styles that developed from and incorporated electric blues, as well as gospel and soul music. By the 1970s, rhythm and blues was used as a blanket term for soul and funk. In the 1980s, a newer style of R&B developed, becoming known as "Contemporary R&B". Jerry Wexler of Billboard magazine coined the term "rhythm and blues" in 1948 as a musical marketing term in the United States. It replaced the term "race music", which originally came from within the black community, but was deemed offensive in the postwar world.
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