Bill Curreri spent most of his career outside of the music industry. After 30 years in marketing and advertising, he released his debut album, Long Time Gone, at age 63. The self-taught guitarist grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, where he played in garage bands as a teenager and through college. After college, […]
When Lita Ford took the music world by storm in 1975 with the all-female rock group, The Runaways, she didn’t have female role models to look up to.
David Hunt grew up in a poor family in Lexington, North Carolina. Like many teenagers of the 1960s, he picked up the guitar and became a songwriter and singer in a band. “When I was 15 or 16 we recorded an album,” he recalls. “We used to do all the college tours, and I’d sing […]
For lifelong musician David Cassidy, you might say that music and show business are in his blood. And it all began long before he became a household name on The Partridge Family. “Both my parents were from musical families and in the theater,” Cassidy says. “My father [Jack Cassidy] was a brilliant singer, and my […]
The thing about life is that everything you know and plan can change on a dime. That’s what happened to Justin Echols in January 2003, when the Oklahoma City Police Officer and Army Reservist was involved in a head-on collision.
Ray Kurzweil was described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. The magazine Inc. ranked him number eight among entrepreneurs in the US, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Kurzweil as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. He founded Kurzweil Musical Systems in 1982, when he applied reading machine technologies designed for the disabled to musical purposes.
“Although we couldn’t afford piano lessons when I was in grade school, my mother bought me a John Thompson beginning piano book so I could learn on my own,” says Nawal Motawi owner of Motawi Tileworks in Ann Arbor, Michigan, recalling her childhood. “My mother also showed me the fingerings, bit by bit, for interesting […]
Sculptor Alan LeQuire is well-known for his iconic Nashville sculptures, including Musica (above), a centerpiece of the city’s Music Row, and a full-scale recreation of Athena, which resides in Music City’s Parthenon. He is also a recreational musician. For the past 10 years, the artist has dedicated a part of his talents to a very […]
Paul Adelstein first became interested in music as a youngster in Chicago. “I didn’t have much aptitude for reading music, but I loved to play,” says the actor, who began piano lessons at age 10.
“There really is a rift between athletics and arts at school, and I want to be an ambassador for how we can overcome some of those issues,” he says. “It puts a lot of pressure on young adults, especially when they have outside influences.” Utecht is the son of two athletes, but his mom was […]