--- More info about Sally Fletcher

From Album: "Liona Boyd ~ The Romantic Guitar Of Liona Boyd"

Liona Maria Carolynne Boyd, CM (born July 11, 1949) is a Canadian classical guitarist.

You can think of Liona Boyd as the woman who surreptitiously dated Pierre Elliott Trudeau while he was Canadian prime minister. Or the musician requested by Judge Lance Ito to entertain restless O.J. Simpson trial jurors. If you listen to her play, you can just as easily consider her one of the best guitarists in the world. After coming to Canada from her native England at age six, Boyd asked her parents for a guitar eight years later as a Christmas present. She took lessons from the legendary Julian Bream and Andres Segovia. She graduated with honors from the University of Toronto and won first prize in the Canadian National Music Competition. After studying privately in Paris for two years Boyd ... Read More...

From Album: "Wayne Gratz ~ Somewhere in Time: Songs of Endless Love".

Born in Winston Salem, North Carolina, in June of 1954, Wayne acquired his love for music at a early age. At the age of five, Wayne moved to Reading, Pennsylvania. Inspired by his kindergarten teacher, Wayne began playing the piano at age six and studied piano into his high school years. He then began studying guitar. With the onset of cool keyboard bands such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, and Genesis, Wayne decided to return to the keyboards.

In addition to his love for music, Wayne also did pretty well at swimming, competing at statewide high school meets. "Since you can’t really make a living at swimming," Gratz says , "I decided to keep music as my main focus. " A resident of Reading, PA from the age of five through high school, Wayne played in various rock bands. After high school, he began touring the U.S and Canada, ending up in Orlando, Florida in 1976.

From 1989 to 2002, Wayne released 7 albums of original compositions on the Narada Label and 4 albums of cover music on the Enso label. Wayne also contributed to some of the most memorable compositions on Narada’s best selling collections, The Wilderness Collection, A Childhood Remembered, Piano Solos, and 2 Christmas Collection albums. All these albums are still ditributed by Capitol Records and EMI and are available at most digital download centers.

Wayne started his own label Wayne Gratz Music in 2002 and has recorded and produced 5 albums, to include Sleepy Baby Suite, Christmas Remembered, Soul to Soul, Light Lands and Shoreline and the most recent project, Two Views. In addition, his music has been used for the Olympic games specialtysegments, NBC television specials, and background music for numerous other television/radio advertisements, to include a Tiger Woods segment and background music for Thomas Kinkade’s new DVD. Wayne’s music isfeatured on Music Choice and can be heard on Whisperings Solo Piano Radio, WLOQ, and numerous radio stations around the world. 

~ From www.waynegratz.com

From Album: David Osborne ~ Movie Matinee

David Osborne: Furthering the Tradition of Romantic Piano

Known as the “Pianist to the Presidents”, Osborne’s credentials are many.  The list of  White House performances include Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. David has performed numerous times for President and Mrs. George W. Bush in the White House.  Osborne is a regular performer for Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in Plains, Georgia.  He created and organized President Carter’s 75th birthday tribute in 1999.  Jimmy Carter has said that “David is one of the finest pianist in the United States.” And President Bush said “That boy can play!” at the White House in 2003.

Osborne performs currently at his new home the Bellagio Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip.  He was a fixture at Caesars Palace for 12 years.  He is featured at the Petrossian Bar and The Baccarat Bar at the Bellagio. His music includes romantic, classical, jazz, pop, inspirational, patriotic and Broadway show tunes.  Osborne’s music encompasses 22 cd’s currently on sale through the Northstar Music label available at gift stores and Borders Books. His record sales near five million. His latest recording is available at Hallmark Gold Crown Stores, “Simply Romantic”. ~ Read more ...

From Album: Tracy Wong(黄莺莺) ~ Chariots Of Fire

From Album: Esteban: All My Love

Esteban is a classically trained guitarist who infusses flamenco and ethnic flair into his music.

This virtuoso flamenco guitarist, who studied with no less an authority than Andres Segovia, crossed over to the pop audience by widening his stylistic palette, and expanded that audience a thousandfold by hawking his wares on TV infomercials. The public took the bait in a big way, putting album after album of Esteban's music into the Billboard charts. Like many of his other efforts, Esteban's ALL MY LOVE showcases the guitarist's undeniably impressive fretwork in a variety of settings from simple and poignant to lushly romantic. If you're a pop fan looking to dip a tentative toe in the exotic waters of flamenco music, ALL MY LOVE (or for that matter, virtually any other Esteban release) might be just what you need.

From Album: Andre Rieu: Romantic Moments,

André Léon Marie Nicolas Rieu (born October 1, 1949) is a Dutch violinist, conductor, and composer best known for creating an international revival in waltz music with his "Johann Strauss Orchestra". In April 2009 (Australia) /June 2009 (UK), he made a cameo appearance as himself on "Ramsay Street" in the long-running Australian soap opera Neighbours.

André Rieu was born into a musical family on October 1, 1949 in Maastricht in the Netherlands. He began studying violin at the age of five. His father was a conductor. From a very young age he developed a fascination with orchestra. He studied violin at the Conservatoire Royal in Liège and in the Conservatorium Maastricht, (1968–1973). His teachers included Jo Juda and Herman Krebbers. From 1974 to 1977, he attended the Music Academy in Brussels, studying with André Gertler, winning the Premier Prix at the academy. ... more info from Wiki

From Album:"The Essential Ray Conniff [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED] "

Joseph Raymond Conniff (November 6, 1916 – October 12, 2002) was an American musician. He was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and learned to play the trombone from his father. He studied music arranging from a course book.

The man who popularized wordless vocal choruses and light orchestral accompaniment on a mix of popular standards and contemporary hits of the 1960s, Ray Conniff was a trombone player for Bunny Berigan’s Orchestra and Bob Crosby’s Bobcats before being hired as an arranger by Mitch Miller for Columbia Records in 1954. After he wrote the charts for several sizeable Columbia hits during the mid-’50s, Conniff became a solo artist as well, applying his arranging techniques to instrumental easy-listening for the booming adult album market. The result, twelve Top Ten LPs and well over 50 million total albums sold, cemented his status as one of the top LP sellers of all time, but his increasingly watered-down and commercially focused arrangements gained few young fans by the end of the 1960s. Though he continued recording and touring the world into the 1990s, Conniff’s albums slipped off the charts in the early ’70s.

Born in November 1916 in Attleboro, Massachusetts, Ray Conniff gained much of his musical experience inside the home. His father, a trombone player, led a local band while his mother played the piano. Ray began leading a local band while in high school — picking up the trombone for the first time not long before — and began writing arrangements for it; after graduation, he moved to Boston and began playing with Dan Murphy’s Musical Skippers (besides playing and arranging, Conniff drove the band around). By the mid-’30s, he was ready for the big time, landing in New York just after the birth of the fertile swing era. He comped around Manhattan for several years, and by 1937 landed an arranging/playing job with Bunny Berigan. Two years later, he moved to Bob Crosby’s Bobcats, one of the hottest bands of the time, though Conniff stayed for only a year before joining up with Artie Shaw and later Glen Gray.

From Album:"Peter Nero's Greatest Hits"

From Album:"Mannheim Steamroller: Romantic Themes"

Mannheim Steamroller is an "18th century classical rock" group founded by Chip Davis, and co-founded by Jackson Berkey, well-known for their modern recordings of holiday music (notably Christmas). The group has sold 27 million albums in the U.S. alone.

...More info about Mannheim Steamroller

Official site of Mannheim Steamroller