Problem: Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music is a studio album by American R&B singer-songwriter and musician Ray Charles. It was recorded by Charles in February 1962 at Capitol Studios in New York City and at United Recording Studios in Hollywood, then released in April of that year by ABC-Paramount Records. The album departed stylistically from the singer's previous rhythm and blues music. It featured country, folk, and Western music standards reworked by Charles in popular song forms of the time, including R&B, pop, and jazz.

Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was the 18th overall LP Charles had recorded. According to him, the title of the album was conceived by producer Sid Feller and ABC-Paramount's executives and management people. The recording sessions for the album took place at three sessions in mid-February 1962. The first two sessions were set on February 5 and 7 at Capitol Studios in New York, New York, at which one half of the album was recorded and produced. The other half was recorded on February 15 of that same year at United Recording Studios in Hollywood, California. Instead of drawing what he should record from memory and his knowledge of country music, Charles asked Feller, his newly appointed A&R (Artists and Repertoire) man, to research top country standards through major country music publishers.  By canvassing premier country publishing companies, such as Acuff-Rose Publishing (which featured the Hank Williams catalog) and Hill & Range Songs (most of which were located in Nashville, Tennessee), Feller amassed around 250 songs on tape for Charles to consider recording for Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. From New York City, Feller sent the recordings to Charles, who was living in California at the time, for him to choose. According to music essayist Daniel Cooper:  While his selections provided the album's country and western foundation, the musical arrangements represented its contemporary influence. Eager to display his big band ensemble in studio, Charles enlisted premier jazz arrangers Gerald Wilson and Gil Fuller, while Marty Paich, who was active in the West Coast jazz scene, was hired to arrange the lush strings and chorus numbers. Despite enlisting a roster of professional arrangers and musicians, Charles intended to control the artistic direction of the recordings. To indicate specific licks he wanted emphasized for certain songs, Charles would put together voice-and-piano demos and pass them along to the arrangers, informing them of what he wanted to do with specific sounds. According to Feller, at one point during recording, Charles rewrote an entire botched arrangement and dictated the parts to each of the 18 backing musicians.

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Answer with quotes: Charles asked Feller, his newly appointed A&R (Artists and Repertoire) man, to research top country standards through major country music publishers.


Problem: Pierrot (French pronunciation:  [pjeRo]) is a stock character of pantomime and commedia dell'arte whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comedie-Italienne; the name is a diminutive of Pierre (Peter), via the suffix -ot. His character in contemporary popular culture--in poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, as well as works for the stage, screen, and concert hall--is that of the sad clown, pining for love of Columbine, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin. Performing unmasked, with a whitened face, he wears a loose white blouse with large buttons and wide white pantaloons. Sometimes he appears with a frilled collaret and a hat, usually with a close-fitting crown and wide round brim, more rarely with a conical shape like a dunce's cap.

He is sometimes said to be a French variant of the sixteenth-century Italian Pedrolino, but the two types have little but their names ("Little Pete") and social stations in common. Both are comic servants, but Pedrolino, as a so-called first zanni, often acts with cunning and daring, an engine of the plot in the scenarios where he appears. Pierrot, on the other hand, as a "second" zanni, is a static character in his earliest incarnations, "standing on the periphery of the action", dispensing advice that seems to him sage, and courting--unsuccessfully--his master's young daughter, Columbine, with bashfulness and indecision.  His origins among the Italian players in France are most unambiguously traced to Moliere's character, the lovelorn peasant Pierrot, in Don Juan, or The Stone Guest (1665). In 1673, probably inspired by Moliere's success, the Comedie-Italienne made its own contribution to the Don Juan legend with an Addendum to "The Stone Guest", which included Moliere's Pierrot. Thereafter the character--sometimes a peasant, but more often now an Italianate "second" zanni--appeared fairly regularly in the Italians' offerings, his role always taken by one Giuseppe Giaratone (or Geratoni, fl. 1639-1697), until the troupe was banished by royal decree in 1697.  Among the French dramatists who wrote for the Italians and who gave Pierrot life on their stage were Jean Palaprat, Claude-Ignace Brugiere de Barante, Antoine Houdar de la Motte, and the most sensitive of his early interpreters, Jean-Francois Regnard. He acquires there a very distinctive personality. He seems an anomaly among the busy social creatures that surround him; he is isolated, out of touch. Columbine laughs at his advances; his masters who are in pursuit of pretty young wives brush off his warnings to act their age. His is a solitary voice, and his estrangement, however comic, bears the pathos of the portraits--Watteau's chief among them--that we will encounter in the centuries to come.

Who banished the troupe?

Answer with quotes:
royal decree in 1697.