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Highly individual American drummer, bandleader and jazz visionary who toured with Lena Horne in the 1950s

A hundred years into its evolution, jazz incorporates ethnic and European classical instruments, drum machines and DJs spinning decks. A half-century or so ago, hardware habits were more cut and dried. A jazz big band had trumpets, trombones, saxes and a rhythm section. A small band had a rhythm section, a sax and trumpet, with maybe a guitar or a vibraphone. One that featured a (very quiet) guitarist, a flute or clarinet, a cellist, and a drummer who preferred mallets to sticks seemed like a strange beast in the jazz forest.

But the groups of the American drummer Chico Hamilton, who has died aged 92, did feature such instrumentation and, contrary to the jazz orthodoxies of the 1950s, they were for a time runaway successes. Hamilton led West Coast bands in that decade that came...

CANNES -- Dutch investment group MediciArts has acquired German music production and sales company EuroArts Medien for an undisclosed sum, the companies said Monday. The deal gives MediciArts full control of the Berlin-based company, a leading producer and licenser of classical music programming. EuroArts has a massive library of music performances from such conductors as Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim and Claudio Abbado. In addition to classical music productions, EuroArts has produced a number of documentaries and feature films, including Julian Benedikt's Jazz Seen and Blue Note and Tomasz Wiszniewski's Where Eskimos Live.