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Canada has given us many great musicians and while some have been in relative obscurity for their whole careers, there are others who managed to make themselves widely known due to their amazing musical skills.
A great Canadian musician who played a very important role in the making of several forms of jazz, like cool jazz, free jazz and jazz fusion was Gil Evans, who lived from 1912 to 1988. Gil Evans had a very fruitful career that was full of collaborations with other artists, but he’s now widely known as Miles Davis’ most frequent collaborator. They first worked together in 1957 when Miles Davis signed a new contract with Columbia Records and he was searching for arrangers. Gil Evans’ name quickly came up and from their collaborations three albums came to fruition: Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain.
Gil Evans lived a long life filled with other musical collaborations and for his long and fruitful career he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1986. Evans died in Mexico in 1988. He was 76.
Another great and renowned Canadian artist is Janina Fiakolwska, who is a classical pianist. She was born in 1951 in Montreal, Quebec to a Canadian mother and a Polish father. Janina, coming from a family with an extensive musical background, was somewhat of a piano prodigy as she started playing it at the age of 4. Then at the age of 12 she made her debut with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra as a piano soloist and from thereafter she has gone on to win numerous and prestigious awards. Janina is also a graduate student of the famed Juilliard School of Music. She is specialized in classical and romantic repertoires and she’s well known for her astonishing renditions of the works of Liszt and Chopin.
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