MARCH 23

JOHNNY GUARNERI + MICHAEL NYMAN

1917 Johnny Guarnieri (23 March 1917 – 7 January 1985) was an American virtuoso jazz and stride pianist, born in New York City, perhaps best-known for his big band stints with Benny Goodman in 1939 and with Artie Shaw in 1940. Guarnieri is also noted for his embellishment and juxtaposition of jazz with classical piano, such as Scarlatti and Beethoven. In the early 1980s, Johnny Guarnieri recorded "Johnny Guarnieri plays Duke Ellington" on a Bosendorfer Grand "SE" player piano, for the Live-Performance Jazz Series.


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1944 Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE (born 23 March 1944) is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano. His operas include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Letters, Riddles and Writs, Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs, Facing Goya, Man and Boy: Dada, Love Counts, and Sparkie: Cage and Beyond, and he has written six concerti, four string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band, with and without whom he tours as a performing pianist. Nyman has stated his preference for writing opera to other sorts of music.

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