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Paul Mauriat (Marseille, 4 March 1925 – 3 November 2006 in Perpignan) was a French orchestra leader, specializing in light music. Mauriat grew up in Marseilles and began leading his own band during the Second World War. In the 1950s he became musical director to at least two well-known French singers, Charles Aznavour and Maurice Chevalier, touring with them respectively. Mauriat composed the music for several French soundtracks (also released on Bel-Air) including Un Taxi Pour Tobrouk (1961), Horace 62 (1962) and Faites Sauter La Banque (1964). Many of Mauriat's recordings are recompositions of other composers' songs and music. Mauriat...

Maurizio is the operating name of Moritz Von Oswald, the Berlin-based musician and entrepreneur who owns a half-share in Basic Channel Records and co-produced the label's various releases, a wildly influential series of fuzzy EPs with purposefully low production values recorded under the aliases Cyrus, Quadrant, Phylyps and Radiance. Von Oswald reserved his solo work for the Basic Channel sub-label M, which issued a half-dozen Maurizio EPs during the mid-'90s. Understandably, the Maurizio sound is quite similar to Basic Channel's, though Von Oswald is often more taken with pounding dub basslines and a somewhat cleaner production style, which gives his...

Joseph-Maurice Ravel (7th March 1875–28th December 1937) was a French composer and pianist. His piano music, chamber music, and orchestral works have become staples in the repertoire. Ravel's piano compositions, such as Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit are virtuosic, and his orchestrations, such as Daphnis et Chloé and his orchestral arrangement of Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, are notable for the effective use of tonal color and variety of sound and instrumentation. To the general public he is probably best known for his orchestral work, Boléro, which he considered a trivial work and once described as "a...