Sting

The Police were an English rock band formed in London in 1977. For the vast majority of their history, the band consisted of Sting , Andy Summers ... and Stewart Copeland . The Police became globally popular in the late 1970s and are generally regarded as one of the first New Wave groups to achieve mainstream success, playing a style of rock that was influenced by punk, reggae, and jazz. Their 1983 album, Synchronicity, was number one on both the UK Albums Chart and the US Billboard 200, and sold over 8,000,000 copies in the US. The group disbanded in 1986, but reunited in early 2007 for a one-off world tour lasting until August 2008. The Police have sold more than 50 million albums worldwide, and were the world's highest-earning musicians in 2008, thanks to their reunion tour. The Police were founded by American expatriate Stewart Copeland in early 1977. After the demise of his progressive rock band Curved Air, Copeland was eager to form a new three-piece group and join the burgeoning London punk scene.
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Band Aid was a charity supergroup featuring leading British and Irish musicians and recording artists. It was founded in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge... Ure to raise money for anti-poverty efforts in Ethiopia by releasing the song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" for the Christmas market that year. On 25 November 1984, the song was recorded at Sarm West Studios in Notting Hill, London, and was released in the UK four days later. The single surpassed the hopes of the producers to become the Christmas number one on that release. Two subsequent re-recordings of the song to raise further money for charity also topped the charts. The original was produced by Midge Ure. The 12" version was mixed by Trevor Horn. The name 'Band Aid' was chosen as a pun on the name of a well-known brand of adhesive bandage, also referring to musicians working as a band to provide aid and alluding to the fact that any help stemming from their efforts is likened to a band-aid on a very serious wound. The group has formed on three occasions, each time from the most successful British, Irish, Belgian and American pop music performers of the time, to record the same song at the same time of year.
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Deutsche Grammophon is a German classical record label which was the foundation of the future corporation to be known as PolyGram. It is now part of Universal Music Group since its acquisition and absorption of PolyGram in 1999, and it is also UMG's oldest active label. It is also the oldest... surviving established record company. Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft was founded in 1898 by German-born United States citizen Emile Berliner as the German branch of his Berliner Gramophone Company. Based in the city of Hannover , the company had links with the U.S. Victor Talking Machine Company and the British Gramophone Company, but those links were severed at the onset of World War I. In 1941 Deutsche Grammophon was purchased by the Siemens & Halske electronics company. In 1949, Deutsche Grammophon sold the German rights of the His Master's Voice trademark to the Electrola Records unit of EMI. The dog and gramophone were replaced by the crown of tulips, designed by Siemens advertising consultant Hans Domizlaff. In 1962 Siemens formed a joint venture with Netherlands-based Philips to create the DGG/PPI Record Group, which became PolyGram Records in 1972.
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Universal Music Group is a multinational music company. It is the largest of the "big four" record companies by its leading market share and its multitude of global operations. Universal Music Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of French media conglomerate Vivendi. Universal Music Group owns a... music publisher, Universal Music Publishing Group, which became the world's largest following the 2007 acquisition of BMG Music Publishing. The UMG corporate headquarters are located in Santa Monica, California, United States. "Universal Music" was once the music company attached to film studio Universal Pictures. Its origins go back to the formation of the American branch of Decca Records in 1934. The Decca Corporation of England spun American Decca off in 1939. MCA Inc. bought American Decca in 1962. The present organization was formed when its parent company Seagram purchased PolyGram and merged it with Universal Music Group in 1998. However, the name first appeared in 1996 when MCA Music Entertainment Group was renamed Universal Music Group.
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Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in black communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a... mix of African and European music traditions. Its black African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swung note. From its early development until the present day jazz has also incorporated music from American popular music. As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing, Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz, cool jazz, avant-garde jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz in various forms, soul jazz, jazz fusion and jazz rock, smooth jazz, jazz-funk, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, cyber jazz, Indo jazz, M-Base, nu jazz, urban jazz and other ways of playing the music. In a 1988 interview, trombonist J.J. Johnson said, "Jazz is restless.
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Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has... its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music. Rock music also drew strongly on a number of other genres such as blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz, classical and other musical sources. Musically, rock has centered around the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with bass guitar and drums. Typically, rock is song-based music usually with a 4/4 time signature utilizing a verse-chorus form, but the genre has become extremely diverse and common musical characteristics are difficult to define. Like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis. The dominance of rock by white, male musicians has been seen as one of the key factors shaping the themes explored in rock music. Rock places a higher degree of emphasis on musicianship, live performance, and an ideology of authenticity than pop music.
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Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican... music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady. Reggae is most easily recognized by the rhythmic accents on the off-beat, usually played by guitar or piano , known as the skank. This pattern accents the second and fourth beat in each bar and combines with the drums emphasis on beat three to create a unique feel and sense of phrasing in contrast to most other popular genres focus on beat one, the "downbeat". The tempo of reggae is usually felt as slower than the popular Jamaican forms, ska and rocksteady, which preceded it. It is this slower tempo, the guitar/piano offbeats, the emphasis on the third beat, and the use of syncopated, melodic bass lines that differentiates reggae from other music, although other musical styles have incorporated some of these innovations separately. The 1967 edition of the Dictionary of Jamaican English lists reggae as "a recently estab. sp.
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