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Keith Noel Emerson (born 2 November 1944) is an English keyboardist and composer. He was formerly a member of the Keith Emerson Trio, John Brown's Bodies, The T-Bones, The V.I.P.'s, P.P. Arnold's backing band, The Nice, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP), one of the early supergroups. Emerson first found success with The Nice in the late 1960s before going on to become a founding member of ELP in 1970. ELP were critically and commercially successful through much of the 1970s, becoming one of the best-known progressive rock groups of the era. Following the break-up of ELP, ''circa'' 1979, Emerson had modest success with Emerson, Lake & Powell in the 1980s as well as with 3, with the album ''To the Power of Three.'' ELP reunited during the early 1990s, releasing the album ''Black Moon''. Emerson also reunited The Nice in 2002 for a tour. His latest album, ''The Three Fates Project'', was released in 2012. Emerson is widely regarded as one of the top keyboard players of the progressive rock era.〔 "No one else captured the hearts of fledgling rock keyboardists through the '70s and '80s the way he did."〕 Allmusic refers to Emerson as "perhaps the greatest, most technically accomplished keyboardist in rock history".〔"Keith Emerson has proven himself perhaps the greatest, most technically accomplished keyboardist in rock history."〕 ==Biography== Emerson was born in Todmorden, Yorkshire while his family had been evacuated from the south coast of England during the war, and grew up in the seaside resort of Worthing, West Sussex. As a child, he learned western classical music, from which he derived a lot of inspiration to create his own style, combining classical music, jazz, and rock themes. Emerson became intrigued with the Hammond organ after hearing jazz organist Jack McDuff perform "Rock Candy" and it subsequently became his instrument of choice for performing in the late 1960s. This blending of elements is illustrated in his participation in the 1969 ''Music From Free Creek'' "supersession" project, where Emerson performs with drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Chuck Rainey covering, among other tracks, the Eddie Harris instrumental "Freedom Jazz Dance". Emerson acquired his first Hammond organ when he was 15 or 16, an L-100, on hire purchase. The flamboyance that Emerson came to be known for began quite by chance when a fight broke out during a V.I.P.s performance in France. The band told him to keep playing so he made some explosion and machine gun sounds with his Hammond organ, which stopped the fight; everyone looked on with amazement. The other band members told him to do it at the next concert, which he did with success. Emerson first heard a Moog when a record shop owner played ''Switched-On Bach'' for him. Emerson said: ''"My God that's incredible, what is that played on?" The owner then showed him the album cover. So I said, "What is that?" And he said, "That's the Moog synthesizer." My first impression was that it looked a bit like electronic skiffle."''〔 Without one of his own, Emerson borrowed Mike Vickers' Moog for an upcoming The Nice concert at the Royal Festival Hall, London with the Royal Philharmonic. Mike helped patch the Moog and the concert was a great success. Emerson's performance of Also sprach Zarathustra from the recently released ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' was a show stopper. Emerson: ''"I thought this was great. I've got to have one of these."''〔 With ELP's record deal with Atlantic came funds to buy the Moog. Keith: ''"It cost a lot of money and it arrived and I excitedly got it out of the box stuck it on the table and thought, 'Wow That's Great! a Moog synthesizer () How do you switch it on?...There were all these leads and stuff, there was no instruction manual."'' Mike Vickers came through by patching it to produce six sounds and those six sounds became the foundation of ELP's sound.〔 In 1969, Emerson incorporated the Moog modular synthesiser into his battery of keyboards. While other artists such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had used the Moog in studio recordings, Emerson was the first artist to tour with one. Emerson's use of the Moog was so important to the development of new models that he was given prototypes, such as the Constellation he took on one tour〔 and the Apollo, which had its debut on the opening track of ''Brain Salad Surgery'', "Jerusalem." The Moog was a temperamental device; the oscillators went out of tune with temperature change. Emerson: ''"I had my faithful roady Rocky tune the instrument to A 440 just prior to the audience coming in, but once the audience came into the auditorium and the temperature rose up then everything went out of tune."''〔 His willingness to experiment with the Moog led to unexpected results, such as the time he stumbled into the signature sound for Hoedown, one of ELP's most popular tunes. Emerson: ''"We'd started working on that arrangement and then I hit, I don't know what, I switched a blue button and I put a patch cord in there, but anyway 'whoooeee.'"''〔 The so-called "Monster Moog," built from numerous modules, weighed in at a whopping 550 pounds, stood 10 feet tall and took 4 roadies to move. Even with its unpredictability, it became an indispensable component of not only ELP's concerts but also Emerson's.〔 "Mr. Emerson's towering, 10-foot-tall, 550-pound ''Monster Moog,'' as he called it, was an indispensable part of the group's concerts, even though it was often unreliable and difficult to play."〕 He is known for his technical skill and for his live antics, including using knives to wedge down specific keys of his Hammond organ during solos, playing the organ upside down while having it lie over him and backwards while standing behind it, and has cited guitarist Jimi Hendrix and English organist Don Shinn as his chief theatrical influences. He also employed a special rig to rotate his piano end-over-end while he was playing it, though this of course is purely for visual effect, as a piano cannot operate as an instrument while upside down. In a 22 July 2014 (interview ), Classic Rock Music Journalist (Ray Shasho ) asked Keith Emerson about the origin behind the 'flying piano' and about the difficulty of performing while spinning in the air ... Emerson responded ... "I think having a pilot's license helped a little bit. One of my road crew said we found this guy that used to work in the circus and he does a lot of things for TV and special effects and he's made something that might interest you, it's a piano that spins round, and I immediately responded, oh that sounds interesting. I happened to be within the New York area and I was driven over to Long Island to a guy called Bob McCarthy, and there in the background he had this piano situated. So he called his wife down from upstairs and said, darling could you demonstrate this for Keith? I looked on, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. His wife comes down and sits on the seat and up she goes in the air and proceeds to spin around. I thought, well that's great! Then Bob asked me, do you want to have a go at it? …Yea, okay. You need to understand, below the keyboard there's an inverted-tee, like a bar. You wrap your legs around the down pipe and put your heels under the inverted-tee. Then you go up in the air and try and do your best to play. It was a little difficult to play at first because of the centrifugal force, so it wasn't easy. I think we actually used it for the first time at Madison Square Garden, it was a Christmas concert. People in the audience were so astounded they couldn't quite believe what they were seeing. Later on that coming year the California Jam came up and I said we have to do that there. Bob drove the whole contraption down to the California Jam and there was very little space to set it up. There were loads of bands up on that stage, all having to do their set and then getting their equipment off. Now, with the moog, the Hammonds, Carl's gongs and everything, it was hard enough to just get that off stage. We had the spinning piano and everything that went along with it and we tried to find a place to situate it. It ended up going just at the end of the stage, so when the piano went up it was literally over the heads of the audience. After that every TV show I did came the question … Keith, how do you spin around on that piano? I'd say what about my music? When I had the honor of meeting the great jazz pianist Dave Brubeck just before he died, he said, Keith you've got to tell me how do you spin around on that piano? Dave Brubeck was 90 years old then and I said, ‘Dave, don't try it!’” Emerson has performed several notable rock arrangements of classical compositions, ranging from J. S. Bach via Modest Mussorgsky to 20th-century composers such as Béla Bartók, Aaron Copland, Leoš Janáček and Alberto Ginastera. Occasionally Emerson has quoted from classical and jazz works without giving credit, particularly early in his career, from the late 1960s until 1972. The song "Rondo" by The Nice is a 4/4 interpretation of ''Blue Rondo à la Turk'' by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, originally in 9/8 time signature. The piece is introduced by an extensive excerpt from Bach's ''Italian Concerto'', third movement. With the additions of Bach and Emerson's own improvisations, the work may be regarded as Emerson's personal arrangement of Brubeck's classic. On ELP's eponymous first album, Emerson's classical quotes went largely uncredited. "The Barbarian" is heavily influenced by "Allegro barbaro" by Bartók, and "Knife Edge" was virtually a note-for-note restatement of "Sinfonietta" by Janáček. Note-for-note extracts were taken from pieces by Bartók, Janáček and Bach, mixed in with some original material, and credited completely to Emerson, Lake, Palmer and roadie Richard Fraser. By 1971, with the releases '' Pictures at an Exhibition'' and ''Trilogy'', Emerson began to fully credit classical composers, Modest Mussorgsky for the piano piece which inspired the first album, and Aaron Copland for "Hoedown" on the second. Emerson was adamant that he did not use Maurice Ravel's orchestration of ''Pictures at an Exhibition'' in developing his own version. Emerson provided music for a number of films since 1980, including Dario Argento's ''Inferno'' (1980), the action thriller ''Nighthawks'' (1981), Lucio Fulci's ''Murder Rock'' (1984), Michele Soavi's horror film ''The Church'' (1989), and, more recently, ''Godzilla: Final Wars'' (2004). He was also the composer for the short-lived 1994 US animated television series ''Iron Man''. In 1990 Emerson toured with The Best, a short-lived supergroup which also included John Entwistle, Joe Walsh, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter and Simon Phillips. In 2002 Emerson re-formed and toured with The Nice, though performing a longer set of ELP music using a backing band including guitarist/vocalist Dave Kilminster. In 2004, Emerson published his autobiography entitled ''Pictures of an Exhibitionist'', which dealt with his entire career, particularly focusing on his early days with The Nice, and his nearly career-ending nerve-graft surgery in 1993. Emerson was the headliner of both the first and third Moogfest, a festival held in honour of Robert Moog at the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in New York City in 2004 and 2006 respectively. Emerson opened the Led Zeppelin reunion/Ahmet Ertegun tribute concert at the O2 Arena in London on 10 December 2007, along with Chris Squire and Alan White (Yes) and Simon Kirke (Bad Company/Free). The supergroup played the new arrangement of Fanfare for the Common Man. The album ''Keith Emerson Band Featuring Marc Bonilla'' was released in August 2008. He toured with his own band in Russia, the Baltic States and Japan between August and October 2008. The tour band members were Marc Bonilla, Travis Davis and Tony Pia. On 30 June 2009, Emerson appeared as a guest during Spinal Tap's 'One Night Only World Tour' at Wembley Arena, during the songs "Short And Sweet" and "Heavy Duty". In March 2010, Emerson received a Frankfurt Music Prize from the city of Frankfurt. In the same month, Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra made a premier performance of "Tarkus" arranged by a renowned Japanese composer Takashi Yoshimatsu. Emerson toured with Greg Lake in the US and Canada during spring of 2010, doing a series of "An Intimate Evening with Emerson and Lake" duo shows in which they performed newly arranged versions of the music of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, The Nice, and King Crimson as well as Emerson's new original composition. On 25 July 2010, a one-off Emerson, Lake & Palmer reunion concert closed the High Voltage Festival as the main act in Victoria Park, East London to commemorate the band's 40th anniversary. In September 2010, Emerson released a message stating "During a routine medical examination, a colonoscopy revealed a rather dangerous polyp in my lower colon. It is of the conclusion of the doctors here in London that I must undergo surgery immediately. Unfortunately, the timing of this urgent surgery does not allow me to start touring in early October because of the required period of hospitalization and recuperation. I must remain optimistic that all will turn out well". In September 2011, Emerson began working with the renowned conductor Terje Mikkelsen, along with the Keith Emerson Band featuring Marc Bonilla and The Munich Radio Orchestra on new orchestral renditions of ELP classics and their new compositions. The project "The Three Fates" were premiered in Norway early September 2012 supervised and some performed by Norwegian professor and musician Bjørn Ole Rasch for the Simax Label. Recent years, several notable classic music composers, conductors and musicians have been performing various orchestral versions of Emerson's compositions, such as ''"Tarkus"'' and "Piano Concerto No.1", around the world. As of 2012, the documentary film about Emerson "Emerson: Pictures of an Exhibitionist" is in post production. He occasionally sits in with jazz orchestras performing new arrangements of ELP pieces as well as standard jazz pieces. In 2014 Emerson was inducted into the Hammond Hall of Fame.〔()〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Keith Emerson」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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