Tommy Watt

Tommy Watt (31 October 1925, Glasgow - 20 May 2006, Bristol, England) was a Scottish jazz bandleader.

Watt was hired as a pianist by Carl Barriteau at age 17, and served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He moved to London following the war, where he played with Ambrose, Harry Roy, and Ken Mackintosh. He teamed up with actor Brian Rix, whom he had met during the war, in 1955 to record a demo, which eventually led to a contract with the BBC. After making appearances behind Matt Monro, Watt was hired by Parlophone for session and arranging work. In 1956 Watt put together his first big band, which played at Quaglino's, a London restaurant. Among his sidemen were Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Ross, Jackie Armstrong, Tommy McQuater, Bert Courtley, and Phil Seaman.

Watt became one of the better-known British bandleaders of the 1950s, winning an Ivor Novello Award for the song "Overdrive" and releasing their first LP record in 1958. Watt's arrangements of Count Basie songs so impressed Basie himself that he incorporated some of Watt's changes into his own performances. After disbanding his ensemble, Watt worked with Rix on stage shows and films, including the 1961 movies The Night We Got the Bird and Nothing Barred. He led the BBC Northern Dance Orchestra and the BBC Big Band briefly in the early 1960s, but squabbles with management quickly ended this contract. In 1964 he assembled the Centre 42 Big Band, and through the end of the decade wrote for television and directed singers Tommy Cooper and Freddie Starr.

Watt

The watt (symbol: W) is a derived unit of power in the International System of Units (SI), named after the Scottish engineer James Watt (1736–1819). The unit is defined as joule per second and can be used to express the rate of energy conversion or transfer with respect to time. It has dimensions of L²MT⁻³.

Examples

When an object's velocity is held constant at one meter per second against constant opposing force of one newton the rate at which work is done is 1 watt.

In terms of electromagnetism, one watt is the rate at which work is done when one ampere (A) of current flows through an electrical potential difference of one volt (V).

Two additional unit conversions for watt can be found using the above equation and Ohm's Law.

Where ohm () is the SI derived unit of electrical resistance.

Watt (novel)

Watt was Samuel Beckett's second published novel in English, largely written on the run in the south of France during the Second World War and published by Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press in 1953 (an extract had been published in the Dublin literary review, Envoy, in 1950). A French translation followed in 1968.

Content

Narrated in four parts, it describes Watt's journey to, and within, Mr Knott's house; where he becomes the reclusive owner's manservant, replacing Arsene, who delivers a long valedictory monologue at the end of section one. In section two Watt struggles to make sense of life at Mr Knott's house, experiencing deep anxiety at the visit of the piano tuning Galls, father and son, and a mysteriously language-resistant pot, among other incidents. In section three, which has a narrator called Sam, Watt is in confinement, his language garbled almost beyond recognition, while the narrative veers off on fantastical tangents such as the story of Ernest Louit's account to a committee of Beckett's old university, Trinity College, Dublin of a research trip in the West of Ireland. The shorter fourth section shows Watt arriving at the railway station from which, in the novel's skewed chronology, he sets out on a journey to the institution he has already reached in section three.

Watt (surname)

The surname Watt may refer to: