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IC 405 (also known as the Flaming Star Nebula, SH 2-229, or Caldwell 31) is an emission and reflection nebula in the constellation Auriga north of the celestial equator, surrounding the bluish, irregular variable star AE Aurigae. It shines at magnitude +6.0. Its celestial coordinates are RA 05h 16.2m dec +34° 28′. It is located near the emission nebula IC 410, the open clusters M38 and M36, and the K-class star Iota Aurigae.
more...Kenneth Charles “Jethro” Burns (March 10, 1920 – February 4, 1989) was an American mandolinist and one-half of the comedy duo Homer and Jethro with Henry D. “Homer” Haynes.
Burns was born in Conasauga, Tennessee, on March 10, 1920. His family moved to Knoxville, Tennesseewhen he was three. In 1936, he auditioned for a talent contest at Knoxville radio station WNOX where he met Henry Haynes, also 16. The two formed a duo and WNOX program director Lowell Blanchard gave them the stage names Homer and Jethro after forgetting their names on the air.
more...Norman L. Blake (born March 10, 1938) is a traditional American stringed instrument artist and songwriter. He is half of the eponymous Norman & Nancy Blake band with his wife, Nancy Blake.
Blake was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and grew up in Sulphur Springs, Alabama. He listened to old-time and country music on the radio by the Carter Family, the Skillet Lickers, Roy Acuff, and the Monroe Brothers (Charlie and Bill Monroe). He learned guitar at age 11 or 12, then mandolin, dobro, and fiddle in his teens. When he was 16, he dropped out of school to play music professionally.
In the 1950s, Blake joined the Dixieland Drifters and performed on radio broadcasts, then joined the Lonesome Travelers. When he was drafted in 1961, he served as an Army radio operator in the Panama Canal Zone. He started a popular band known as the Kobbe Mountaineers. A year later, while he was on leave, he recorded the album Twelve Shades of Bluegrass with the Lonesome Travelers.
more...Ronnie Earl (born Ronald Horvath, March 10, 1953, Queens, New York, United States) is an American blues guitarist and music instructor.
Earl who grew up collecting various music records, pursued a degree in Special Education and Education at Boston University. He became interested in guitar after attending a Muddy Waters concert and began playing in the Boston blues scene. He later joined the band Roomful of Blues and started a solo career in 1986. In 1984, Earl formed his band, The Broadcasters, which released multiple albums over the years. Diagnosed with medical ailments in 2000, he scaled back on touring and later reformed the Broadcasters with a new lineup. As a four-time Blues Music Award winner for Guitar Player of the Year, Earl has also been an Associate Professor of Guitar at Berklee College of Music and released an instructional video. His band, Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters, celebrated their 30th anniversary in 2018 and released their 26th studio album, Mercy Me, in 2022.
more...Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks is growing brighter. Currently visible with small telescopes and binoculars the Halley-type comet could reach naked eye visibility in the coming weeks. Seen despite a foggy atmosphere, the comet’s green coma and long tail hover near the horizon, in this well-composed deep night skyscape from Revuca, Slovakia recorded on March 5. In the sky above the Halley-type comet, the Andromeda (right) and Triangulum galaxies flank bright star Mirach, beta star of the constellation Andromeda. The two spiral galaxies are members of our local galaxy group and over 2.5 million light-years distant. Comet Pons-Brooks is a periodic visitor to the inner Solar System and less than 14 light-minutes away. Reaching its perihelion on April 21, this comet should be visible in the sky during the April 8 total solar eclipse.
more...Ustad Zakir Hussain (born 9 March 1951) is an Indian tabla player, composer, percussionist, music producer and film actor. He is the eldest son of tabla player Alla Rakha. He is widely considered as one of the greatest tabla players of all time.
He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1988, the Padma Bhushan in 2002, and the Padma Vibhushan in 2023, by the Government of India. On 8 February 2009 for 51st Grammy Awards, Hussain won the Grammy in the Contemporary World Music Album category for his collaborative album Global Drum Projectwith Mickey Hart, Sikiru Adepoju & Giovanni Hidalgo.
He was also awarded the Govt of India’s Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1990, Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship, Ratna Sadsya in 2018. In 1999, he was awarded the United States National Endowment for the Arts‘ National Heritage Fellowship, the highest award given to traditional artists and musicians. Hussain has a total of 5 Grammy awards equalling the tallies of the late sitar maestro Ravi Shankar and the master conductor Zubin Mehta; they are all in top spot, incidentally, on the list of Indians with the most Grammy wins. He received 3 Grammy Awards in February 2024.
more...Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman (March 9, 1930 – June 11, 2015 Fort Worth, TX) was an American jazzsaxophonist, trumpeter, violinist, and composer. He is best known as a principal founder of the free jazzgenre, a term derived from his 1960 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. His pioneering works often abandoned the harmony-based composition, tonality, chord changes, and fixed rhythm found in earlier jazz idioms. Instead, Coleman emphasized an experimental approach to improvisation, rooted in ensemble playing and blues phrasing. AllMusic called him “one of the most beloved and polarizing figures in jazz history,” noting that while “now celebrated as a fearless innovator and a genius, he was initially regarded by peers and critics as rebellious, disruptive, and even a fraud.”
Born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, Coleman taught himself to play the saxophone when he was a teenager. He began his musical career playing in local R&B and bebop groups, and eventually formed his own group in Los Angeles featuring members such as Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins. In November 1959, his quartet began a controversial residency at the Five Spot jazz club in New York City and he released the influential album The Shape of Jazz to Come, his debut LP on Atlantic Records. Coleman’s subsequent Atlantic releases in the early 1960s would profoundly influence the direction of jazz in that decade, and his compositions “Lonely Woman” and “Broadway Blues” became genre standards that are cited as important early works in free jazz.
In the mid 1960s, Coleman left Atlantic for labels such as Blue Note and Columbia Records, and began performing with his young son Denardo Coleman on drums. He explored symphonic compositions with his 1972 album Skies of America, featuring the London Symphony Orchestra. In the mid-1970s, he formed the group Prime Time and explored electric jazz-funk and his concept of harmolodic music. In 1995, Coleman and his son Denardo founded the Harmolodic record label. His 2006 album Sound Grammar received the Pulitzer Prize for Music, making Coleman the second jazz musician ever to receive the honor.
more...Dorothy Jacqueline Keely (March 9, 1928 – December 16, 2017), professionally known as Keely Smith, was an American jazz and popular music singer, who performed and recorded extensively in the 1950s with then-husband Louis Prima, and throughout the 1960s as a solo artist.
Smith married Prima in 1953. The couple were stars throughout the entertainment business, including stage, television, motion pictures, hit records, and cabaret acts. They won a Grammy in 1959, its inaugural year, for their smash hit, “That Old Black Magic”, which remained on the charts for 18 weeks. Smith was born in Norfolk, Virginia; her ancestry was Irish and Cherokee.
more...Friday March 8th 6pm Shabbat Service with Inbal Sharett-Singer, Jayson Rodovsky, Jeff Bailey, Pete Whitman and mick laBriola.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZBFGYjjHUE
more...The Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Doradus, is more than a thousand light-years in diameter, a giant star forming region within nearby satellite galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud. About 180 thousand light-years away, it’s the largest, most violent star forming region known in the whole Local Group of galaxies. The cosmic arachnid sprawls across this magnificent view, an assembly of image data from large space- and ground-based telescopes.Within the Tarantula (NGC 2070), intense radiation, stellar winds, and supernova shocks from the central young cluster of massive stars cataloged as R136 energize the nebular glow and shape the spidery filaments. Around the Tarantulaare other star forming regions with young star clusters, filaments, and blown-out bubble-shaped clouds. In fact, the frame includes the site of the closest supernova in modern times, SN 1987A, at lower right. The rich field of view spans about 2 degrees or 4 full moons in the southern constellation Dorado. But were the Tarantula Nebula closer, say 1,500 light-years distant like the Milky Way’s own star forming Orion Nebula, it would take up half the sky.
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Juan de Dios Ventura Soriano (8 March 1940 – 28 July 2021), better known as Johnny Venturanicknamed El Caballo Mayor, was a Dominican singer and band leader of merengue and salsa.
In 2004, he received the Latin Grammy Award for Best Merengue/Bachata Album for his album Sin Desperdicio; also, he was nominated for Best Merengue Album (2006), Best Contemporary Tropical Album(2010) and Best Salsa Album (2016) categories. In 2006, he received the Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2022, he entered the Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame.
The merengue legend was a legislator of the Lower House between 1982 and 1986. He also served as vicemayor of Santo Domingo from 1994 to 1998, and as mayor of Santo Domingo from 1998 to 2002.
more...Richard George Fariña (March 8, 1937 – April 30, 1966) was an American folksinger, songwriter, poet and novelist.
Fariña was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States, the son of an Irish mother, Theresa Crozier, and a Cuban father of Galician origin, also named Richard Fariña. He grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn Technical High School. He earned an academic scholarship to Cornell University, starting as an engineering major, but later switching to English. While at Cornell he published short stories for local literary magazines and for national periodicals, including Transatlantic Review and Mademoiselle. Fariña became good friends with Thomas Pynchon, David Shetzline, and Peter Yarrowwhile at Cornell. He was suspended for alleged participation in a student demonstration against campus regulations, and although he later resumed his status as a student, he dropped out in 1959, just before graduation. On April 30, 1966, two days after the publication of his novel, Fariña attended a book-signing ceremony at a Carmel Valley Village bookstore, the Thunderbird. Later that night Fariña was killed on a motorcycle ride heading east toward the rural Cachagua area of Carmel Valley.
more...Gábor István Szabó (March 8, 1936 – February 26, 1982) was a Hungarian-American guitarist whose style incorporated jazz, pop, rock, and Hungarian music.
Szabó was born in Budapest, Hungary. He began playing guitar at the age of 14. In the aftermath of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, he moved to California and later attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston between 1958 and 1960. In 1961, Szabó became member of a quintet that was led by Chico Hamilton and included Charles Lloyd,[2]playing what has been described as chamber jazz, with “a moderate avant-gardism.” Szabó was influenced by the rock music of the 1960s, particularly the use of feedback. In 1965 he was in a jazz pop group led by Gary McFarland, then worked again with Lloyd in an energetic quartet with Ron Carter and Tony Williams. The song “Gypsy Queen” from Szabó’s debut solo album Spellbinder became a hit for rock guitarist Carlos Santana. During the late 1960s, Szabó worked in a group with guitarist Jimmy Stewart. He started the label Skye Records with McFarland and Cal Tjader.
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