Are the roches still alive
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The Roches, a New York-based trio of female folksingers (sisters Maggie, Terre and Suzzy Roche), made a career our of simple tunes enhanced with old-fashioned vocal harmonies. Paul Simon helped Maggie and Terre record Seductive Reasoning (Columbia, 1975). Despite Down The Dream and Underneath the Moon, the duo was again relegated to the cafe` of the Greenwich Village. Suzzy joined her two elder sisters for Roches (Warner, 1979), the album (almost entirely composed by Maggie) that another luminary, Robert Fripp, helped them make. This time their virtuoso vocalizing, that harks back to the tradition of barbershop quartets and doo-wop (We, Hammond Song, The Train, Mr Sellack, Married Men), establish them as a sensation of the new wave, although they were almost the antithesis of the new wave. The amateurish attitude was most of the charm.
A drummer and a bassist turned Nurds (1980) into a more professional affair, but the album simply lacked good songs. The Roches continued recording every 3/4 years. Keep on Doing (1982
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Women’s History Month: Spotlight on The Roches
Vocal trio Maggie, Terre, and Suzzy Roche were born in Park Ridge, New Jersey, in the 1950s. Maggie and Terre started playing guitar together when Maggie was 13 and Terre was 12, and Maggie started writing songs as soon as she learned to play. Since the sisters didn’t have many opportunities to play in Park Ridge, they went into New York City during the Christmas season and entertained passersby with their singing of Christmas carols. Their father also took them to Greenwich Village to audition for Izzy Young’s folk music show at WBAI. Dave Van Ronk heard them that day and introduced them to his wife and manager Terri Thal, who set them up at the Bitter End and helped them get an audition for the college coffee house circuit. Maggie and Terre left school to tour college campuses in the late 1960s. When they returned, the duo contributed backup vocals to Paul Simon’s 1973 album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, and Simon, whom they had met in 1970 when he invited them into his songwriting course at NYU, produced Maggie a
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Léon Roches
Léon Roches (September 27, 1809, Grenoble – 1901) was a representative of the French government in Japan from 1864 to 1868.
Léon Roches was a student at the Lycée Gabriel-Faure [fr] in Tournon-sur-Rhône, and followed an education in Law. After only 6 months at university, he quit to assist friends of his father as a trader in Marseilles.[1]
North Africa
When Léon's father acquired a plantation in Algeria, Léon left France to join him on June 30, 1832. Léon spent the next 32 years on the African continent.[1] He learned the Arab language very rapidly and after only two years was recruited as translator for the French Army in Africa. He served as an Officer (Sous-Lieutenant) of cavalry in the Garde Nationale d'Algerie from 1835 to 1839. General Bugeaud asked him to negotiate with Abd-el-Kader in order to bring about the cessation of hostilities against the French. He is noted as having been highly respected by Arab chieftains.[1]
Under Bugeaud's recommendation, Roches joined the French Foreign Ministry a
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