Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

Nicholls, Horatio.

See Wright, Lawrence.

Nicholls, John

(b c1627; bur. Durham, 6 June 1681). English cathedral musician. He was a lay clerk of Durham Cathedral from the Restoration until his death. In September 1665 he and John Foster tuned the organ in the bishop's private chapel at Bishop Auckland. In July 1677 he was appointed master of the ‘petty’ school on Palace Green, and put a deputy in this position when he was appointed Master of the Choristers (but not organist) in 1677. He was described by Bishop Cosin as ‘a diligent, painfull man’. His full setting of O pray for the peace of Jerusalem (GB-DRc, Lbl) may have been composed before 1660, his verse anthem, I will give thanks unto thee, O Lord and Short Service (both GB-DRc and incomplete), after 1677. All three compositions are included on Durham's oldest service sheet, that for June 1680.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Ornsby, ed.: The Correspondence of John Cosin, D.D., lii (Durham, 1868); lv (Durham, 1870)

R.T. Daniel and P. le Huray: The Sources of English Church Music, 1549–1660, EECM, suppl.i (1972)

B. Crosby: ‘A Seventeenth-Century Service Sheet’, MT, cxxi (1980), 399–401

B. Crosby: Durham Cathedral: Choristers and their Masters (Durham, 1980)

B. Crosby: A Catalogue of Durham Cathedral Music Manuscripts (Oxford, 1986)

B. Crosby: The Choral Foundation of Durham Cathedral, c.1350–c.1650 (diss., U. of Durham, 1992)

I. Spink: Restoration Church Music, 1660–1714 (Oxford, 1995)

PETER LE HURAY

Nicholo del Proposto.

See Niccolò da Perugia.

Nichols, Red [Ernest Loring]

(b Ogden, UT, 8 May 1905; d Las Vegas, NV, 28 June 1965). American jazz cornettist and bandleader. He studied the cornet with his father, a college music teacher, and acquired a sure technique. In 1923 he moved to New York, where he soon became a highly regarded sideman and the most prolifically recorded white jazz bandleader of the late 1920s; for the Brunswick label he recorded under the name Red Nichols and his Five Pennies. From 1925 he also played in Broadway pit orchestras, and in 1929–31 he led the orchestras for Gershwin’s musicals Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy. In the mid-1930s he worked for CBS radio and in the late 1930s he led a big band, but in 1944 he returned to small-group jazz. In 1959 Nichols played for the soundtrack of The Five Pennies, a film based loosely on his life, as a result regaining much of his earlier popularity. He toured the Near East in 1960 and Europe in 1964.

Nichols’s playing has often been compared with that of Bix Beiderbecke, with whom he shared a strong attack and clear tone, though his style was more rhythmically incisive, angular and polished, and of a narrower emotional range. His many recordings of 1926–8 (for example, That’s no bargain, 1926, Bruns.) are the most progressive white jazz of the period in concept and execution, with wide-ranging harmonies and balanced ensemble; at this time his groups included such important musicians as Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Vic Berton, Jimmy Dorsey, Adrian Rollini, Fud Livingston, Pee Wee Russell and Miff Mole; later bands featured Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw at formative stages of their careers. However, the innovative style of these groups was almost entirely superseded by the swing style of the 1930s, to which Nichols turned as a bandleader and occasionally as a performer. His later small groups attempted to recapture the sound of his performances from the 1920s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Ferguson: ‘The Five Pennies’, Jazzmen, ed. F. Ramsey and C.E. Smith (New York, 1939/R), 221–42

W. Backensto: ‘The Red Nichols Story’, Record Research, no.12 (1957), 3–11 [incl. discography]

G. Johnson: The Five Pennies: the Biography of Jazz Band Leader Red Nichols (New York, 1959)

H.H. Lange: Loring ‘Red’ Nichols: ein Porträt (Wetzlar, 1960)

W. Backensto: ‘Red Nichols Memorial Issue’, Record Research, nos.96–7 (1969), 2–18 [incl. discography]

Personal papers in US-EU and private collection of recordings in US-Lu

JAMES DAPOGNY/R

Nichols, Roger (David Edward)

(b Ely, 6 April 1939). English musicologist. He read music at Oxford (1959–64, BA 1962), and after teaching music at Bishop’s Stortford College (1964–6) and at St Michael’s College, Tenbury (1966–73), he was Haywood Research Fellow in music at Birmingham University (1974–6) and a part-time lecturer in music at the Open University (1975–6). He held positions as lecturer in music at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1976 and at Birmingham University in 1978; since then he has worked as a freelance writer and broadcaster. His main area of research is French music since 1870 and he has edited a series of critical editions of Ravel’s solo piano works as well as piano and chamber works by Satie. He specializes in documenting contemporary accounts of the lives of composers and has translated the letters of Berlioz and Debussy.

WRITINGS

Debussy (London, 1972/R)

Messiaen (London, 1975, 2/1986)

Ravel (London, 1977)

ed., with F. Lesure: Debussy Letters (London, 1987) [trans. by R. Nichols]

ed.: Ravel Remembered (London, 1987)

ed., with R. Langham Smith: Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande (Cambridge, 1989) [incl. ‘Pelléas in Performance’, 140–83]

Debussy Remembered (London, 1991)

Conversations with Madeleine Milhaud (London, 1996)

Mendelssohn Remembered (London, 1997)

The Life of Debussy (Cambridge, 1998)