Capitol Records in the context of "Music Corporation of America"

Cool jazz is a style and genre of modern jazz music inspired by bebop and big band that arose in the United States after World War II. It is characterized by relaxed tempos and a lighter tone than that used in the fast and complex bebop style. Cool jazz often employs formal arrangements and incorporates elements of classical music. Broadly, the genre refers to a number of post-war jazz styles employing a more subdued approach than that of contemporaneous jazz idioms. As Paul Tanner, Maurice Gerow, and David Megill suggest, "the tonal sonorities of these conservative players could be compared to pastel colors, while the solos of [Dizzy] Gillespie and his followers could be compared to fiery red colors."

The term cool started being applied to this music around 1953, when Capitol Records released the album Classics in Jazz: Cool and Quiet. Mark C. Gridley, writing in the All Music Guide to Jazz, identifies four overlapping sub-categories of cool jazz:

Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson (born October 25, 1984), known professionally as Katy Perry, is an American singer, songwriter, and television personality. She is one of the best-selling music artists in history, having sold over 151 million records worldwide. Perry is known for her influence on pop music and her camp style, being dubbed the "Queen of Camp" by Vogue and Rolling Stone. The world's highest-paid female musician in 2015 and 2018, she was named by Billboard as one of the greatest pop stars of the 21st century.

At 16, Perry released a gospel album titled Katy Hudson (2001) under Red Hill Records, which was unsuccessful. She moved to Los Angeles at 17 to venture into secular music, and later adopted her stage name from her mother's maiden name. Perry recorded an album while signed to Columbia Records, but was dropped before signing to Capitol Records. She rose to fame with One of the Boys (2008), a pop rock album containing her debut single "I Kissed a Girl" and follow-up single "Hot n Cold", which reached number one and three on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 respectively.

Brian Douglas Wilson (June 20, 1942 – June 11, 2025) was an American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer who co-founded the Beach Boys and received widespread recognition as one of the most innovative and significant musical figures of his era. His work was distinguished for its high production values, complex harmonies and orchestrations, vocal layering, and introspective or ingenuous themes. He was also known for his versatile head voice and falsetto.

Wilson's formative influences included George Gershwin, the Four Freshmen, Phil Spector, and Burt Bacharach. In 1961, he began his professional career as a member of the Beach Boys, serving as the band's songwriter, producer, co-lead vocalist, bassist, keyboardist, and de facto leader. After signing with Capitol Records in 1962, he became the first pop musician credited for writing, arranging, producing, and performing his own material. He also produced acts such as the Honeys and American Spring. By the mid-1960s he had written or co-written more than two dozen U.S. Top 40 hits, including the number-ones "Surf City" (1963), "I Get Around" (1964), "Help Me, Rhonda" (1965), and "Good Vibrations" (1966). He is considered the first rock producer to apply the studio as an instrument and one of the first music producer auteurs.

Pet Sounds is the eleventh studio album by the American rock band the Beach Boys, released on May 16, 1966, by Capitol Records. It was produced, arranged, and primarily composed by Brian Wilson with guest lyricist Tony Asher. Recorded largely between January and April 1966, it furthered the orchestral sound introduced in The Beach Boys Today! (1965). Initially promoted as "the most progressive pop album ever", Pet Sounds is recognized for its ambitious production, sophisticated harmonic structures, and coming of age themes. It is widely regarded as among the greatest and most influential albums in music history.

Wilson viewed Pet Sounds as a solo album and attributed its inspiration partly to marijuana use and an LSD–rooted spiritual awakening. Galvanized by the work of his rivals, he aimed to create "the greatest rock album ever made", surpassing the Beatles' Rubber Soul (1965) and extending Phil Spector's Wall of Sound innovations. His orchestrations blended pop, jazz, exotica, classical, and avant-garde elements, combining rock instrumentation with layered vocal harmonies, found sounds, and instruments not normally associated with rock, such as French horn, flutes, Electro-Theremin, bass harmonica, bicycle bells, and string ensembles. Featuring the most complex and challenging instrumental and vocal parts of any Beach Boys album, it was their first in which studio musicians, such as the Wrecking Crew, largely replaced the band on their instruments, and the first time any group had departed from their usual small-ensemble pop/rock band format to create a full-length album that could not be replicated live. Its unprecedented total production cost exceeded $70,000 (equivalent to $680,000 in 2024).

Brooks & Dunn are an American country music duo consisting of Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn, both of whom are vocalists and songwriters. The duo was founded in 1988 through the suggestion of songwriter and record producer, Tim DuBois. Before their formation, both members were solo recording artists, having each charted two solo singles in the 1980s. Kix Brooks also released an album for Capitol Records in 1989 and wrote hit singles for other artists.

The duo signed to Arista Nashville after their formation. They have recorded eleven studio albums, one Christmas album, and five compilation albums for the label. They also have released 50 singles, of which 20 went to number one on the Hot Country Songs charts and 19 more reached top 10. Two of these number-one songs, "My Maria" (a cover of the B.W. Stevenson song) and "Ain't Nothing 'bout You", were the top country songs of 1996 and 2001, respectively, according to the Billboard Year-End charts. The latter is also the duo's longest-lasting number-one single on that chart at six weeks. Several of their songs have also reached the Billboard Hot 100, with the number-25 peaks of "Ain't Nothing 'bout You" and "Red Dirt Road" being their highest there. Brooks and Dunn also won the Country Music Association Vocal Duo of the Year award every year between 1992 and 2006, except for 2000. Brooks and Dunn won the award again in 2024. Two of their songs won the Grammy Award for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal: "Hard Workin' Man" in 1994 and "My Maria" in 1996. All but two of the duo's studio albums are certified platinum or higher by the Recording Industry Association of America; their highest-certified is their 1991 debut album, Brand New Man, which is certified sextuple-platinum for shipments of six million copies.

Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musical directions in a roughly five-decade career that kept him at the forefront of many major stylistic developments in jazz.

Born into an upper-middle-class family in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis, Davis started on the trumpet in his early teens. He left to study at Juilliard in New York City, before dropping out and making his professional debut as a member of saxophonist Charlie Parker's bebop quintet from 1944 to 1948. Shortly after, he recorded the Birth of the Cool sessions for Capitol Records, which were instrumental to the development of cool jazz. In the early 1950s, while addicted to heroin, Davis recorded some of the earliest hard bop music under Prestige Records. After a widely acclaimed comeback performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, he signed a long-term contract with Columbia Records, and recorded the album 'Round About Midnight in 1955. It was his first work with saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers, key members of the sextet he led into the early 1960s. During this period, he alternated between orchestral jazz collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, such as the Spanish music–influenced Sketches of Spain (1960), and band recordings, such as Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959). The latter recording remains one of the most popular jazz albums of all time, having sold over five million copies in the U.S.