🎻The Greats

In 1781, fed up with being treated as a servant, Mozart sought permission to resign from Archbishop Colloredo's household; the archbishop's chief steward, Count Arco, physically threw him out of the room — 'with a kick on my arse,' Mozart wrote to his father — the humiliating act that ended his court employment for good and pushed him into freelance life in Vienna.

In 1808 Beethoven was offered a salaried position as Kapellmeister in Kassel; to keep him in Vienna, three aristocrats — Archduke Rudolph, Prince Kinsky and Prince Lobkowitz — signed a contract in 1809 guaranteeing him an annuity of roughly 4,000 florins a year for life, on the sole condition that he stay in Austria and compose, making him arguably the first major composer paid simply to be himself rather than to serve a court.

From the 1930s, Umm Kulthum's first-Thursday-of-the-month concerts, broadcast live on Cairo Radio, drew such devotion that streets emptied and cafés gathered crowds around radios to listen; she would repeat a single emotionally charged line dozens of times at the crowd's shouted urging, a call-and-response tradition known as tarab, stretching songs composed to run twenty minutes into performances lasting well over an hour.

Shankar moved into guru Allauddin Khan's household in Maihar in 1938 and lived there for roughly seven years under strict gharana discipline, practicing for hours daily; he later said this immersive guru-shishya apprenticeship, not any conservatory, made him a musician. At the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, part of the crowd applauded loudly after his opening tuning, mistaking it for the performance itself.

For the 1959 album Kind of Blue, Davis gave his band only sketched scales and modes rather than fully written chord changes, and the musicians largely improvised their solos on first or near-first takes with almost no rehearsal. Pianist Bill Evans's own liner notes compared the sessions to a tradition of spontaneous ink painting that allows no correction, and the record went on to become the best-selling jazz album of all time.

After Fela's 1977 album Zombie mocked Nigerian soldiers as mindless zombies obeying orders, roughly a thousand soldiers stormed his Kalakuta Republic compound, beat residents, and threw his elderly mother, activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, from a second-floor window — injuries from which she died the following year. Fela responded by delivering her coffin to the doorstep of the military headquarters in Lagos and writing 'Coffin for Head of State' about the raid.

N'Dour's mother was a griotte who sang praise songs at ceremonies, and he began performing in her circle as a child even though his father's side of the family was not griot by caste, a mixed lineage he has said complicated his early claim to the tradition. His 1994 duet with Neneh Cherry, '7 Seconds,' sung partly in Wolof, English and French, topped the French singles chart and introduced mbalax's polyrhythms to a global pop audience.