Today in Jewish Musical History January 1, 1966: Simon & Garfunkels Sounds of Silence reaches #1. Simon was born on October 13, 1941, in Newark, New Jersey, to Hungarian Jewish parents. The musician Donald Fagen has described Simons childhood as that of a certain kind of New York Jew, almost a stereotype, really, to whom music and baseball are very important. Garfunkel is Jewish; his paternal grandparents emigrated from Iași in Romania. At his Bar Mitzvah in 1954, Garfunkel sang as a cantor and performed over four hours of his repertoire to his family. In early 1964, Simon and Garfunkel got an audition with Columbia Records, whose executive Clive Davis was impressed enough to sign the duo to a contract to produce an album. Columbia decided that the two would be called simply Simon & Garfunkel, instead of the groups previous name Tom and Jerry. Simon said in 2003 that this renaming as Simon & Garfunkel was the first time that artists ethnic names had been used in pop music. Simon has won 12 Grammy Awards (one of them a Lifetime Achievement Award) and five Grammy nominations, the most recent for his album Youre the One in 2001. In 1998 he received a Grammy Hall of Fame Award for the Simon & Garfunkel album Bridge Over Troubled Water. He received an Oscar nomination for the song Father and Daughter in 2002. He is also a two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; as a solo artist in 2001, and in 1990 as half of Simon & Garfunkel. Garfunkel has won six Grammy awards one Britannia award and nominated for a Golden Globe for best supporting actor in a motion picture for Carnal Knowledge. youtu.be/y6cR5furQac
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 17:52:15 +0000
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