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Stephen Ray Vaughan (also known as SRV; October 3, 1954 – August 27, 1990) was an American musician, best known as the guitarist and frontman of the blues rock trio Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. Although his mainstream career spanned only seven years, he is regarded as one of the most influential musicians in the history of blues music, and one of the greatest guitarists of all time. He was the younger brother of guitarist Jimmie Vaughan.
Born and raised in Dallas, Vaughan began playing guitar at age seven, initially inspired by his elder brother, Jimmie Vaughan. In 1972, he dropped out of high school and moved to Austin, where he began to gain a following after playing gigs on the local club circuit. Vaughan joined forces with Tommy Shannon on bass and Chris Layton on drums as Double Trouble in 1978 and established it as part of the Austin music scene; it soon became one of the most popular acts in Texas. He performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1982, where David Bowie saw him play. Bowie contacted him for a studio gig that resulted in Vaughan playing blues guitar on the album Let’s Dance (1983), before being discovered by John Hammond who interested major label Epic Records in signing Vaughan and his band to a record deal. Within months, they achieved mainstream success for the critically acclaimed debut album Texas Flood. With a series of successful network television appearances and extensive concert tours, Vaughan became the leading figure in the blues revival of the 1980s. Playing his guitar behind his back or plucking the strings with his teeth as Jimi Hendrixdid, he earned fame in Europe, which later resulted in breakthroughs for guitar players like Robert Cray, Jeff Healey, Robben Ford, and Walter Trout, amongst others.
During the majority of his life, Vaughan struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction. He also struggled with the personal and professional pressures of fame and his marriage to Lenora “Lenny” Bailey. He successfully completed rehabilitation and began touring again with Double Trouble in November 1986. His fourth and final studio album In Step reached number 33 in the United States in 1989; it was one of Vaughan’s most critically and commercially successful releases and included his only number-one hit, “Crossfire”. He became one of the world’s most highly demanded blues performers, and he headlined Madison Square Garden in 1989 and the Beale Street Music Festival in 1990.
On August 27, 1990, Vaughan and four others were killed in a helicopter crash in East Troy, Wisconsin, after performing with Double Trouble at Alpine Valley Music Theatre. An investigation concluded that the cause of the accident was pilot error and Vaughan’s family later filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Omniflight Helicopters which was settled out of court. Vaughan’s music continued to achieve commercial success with several posthumous releases and has sold over 15 million albums in the United States alone. In 2003, David Fricke of Rolling Stone ranked him the seventh greatest guitarist of all time. Vaughan was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, along with Double Trouble bandmates Chris Layton, Tommy Shannon, and Reese Wynans.
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There are two different types of nebulae brought to you in this Picture of the Week. Each appears with a distinct colour in the visible sky and are captured here using the wide-field camera OmegaCAM on the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean desert.
The large, bright emission nebula at the centre, IC1284, is a star-forming region composed primarily of hydrogen. Its rosy glow comes from electrons within the hydrogen atoms: they’re excited by the radiation from young stars, but then they lose energy and emit a specific colour or wavelength of light. One of the filters on OmegaCAM lets through this particular reddish colour, hence the nebula’s look. Meanwhile, another colour filter highlights the blue reflection nebulae NGC6589 and NGC6590 in the lower right corner. The dust in a reflection nebula preferentially scatters shorter, bluer wavelengths of light from nearby stars, which is what gives these nebulae their eerie glow. It’s the same reason why the sky is blue!
The frame of this image covers an area roughly equivalent in the sky to a full Moon. This image was captured as part of a large ESO public survey, the VST Photometric H alpha Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+), which observes nebulae and stars in visible light to help astronomers understand how stars are born, live and die.
1966 Kenny Rittenhouse received a Bachelor’s Degree in music from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1988 and a Master of Music in Jazz Studies from the University of Maryland in 2006. He also did graduate work on trumpet and in jazz at the Eastman School of Music, and at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA where he studied with Roger Sherman of the Pittsburgh Symphony. Since 1990 Mr. Rittenhouse has been a member of The United States Army Band (Pershing’s Own) in Washington, DC., the premier band of the Army, and currently performs with The U.S. Army Blues Jazz Ensemble. As member of the Army Blues, he has shared the stage alongside Ernie Andrews, Kevin Mahogany, Lou Rawls, Wycliff Gordon, Doc Severinsen, Arturo Sandoval, and Sean Jones. As a member of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, he has toured nationally and internationally with jazz flutist Hubert Laws and vocalist Kurt Elling. As a past member of the Pittsburgh Jazz Orchestra led by trumpeter Sean Jones, he has shared the stage with Jazz legends such as Jimmy Heath, Ahmad Jamal, and Freddy Cole. Mr. Rittenhouse currently holds the Applied Trumpet Instructor position at Morgan State University. Before teaching at Morgan State, he taught Jazz Trumpet at George Mason University for the past 14 years. For over 25 years Mr. Rittenhouse has led his own jazz quartet performing in and around the Washington, DC area with many great jazz artists including Larry Willis, Ralph Peterson, Don Braden, Buck Hill, and Steve Wilson, and Butch Warren. The Kenny Rittenhouse Ensemble is one of the hardest swinging jazz groups in the greater DC metro area. The group, under the direction of trumpeter Kenny Rittenhouse, was formed several years ago and has appeared in such venues as Blues Alley, Bohemian Caverns, and Twins Jazz Club. The group recorded their first release (a sextet) in 2006 titled “The Francis Suite”. Their second release, recorded in February 2013 is titled “New York Suite”. It’s a hard swinging septet playing mostly original songs highlighting traditional straight ahead jazz with a bit of Funk & R&B in the mix. The ensemble performs with intensity and fervor, focusing on the concept of “swing”, paying homage to the blue note recording artist of the 60’s. These gifted performers pride themselves on presenting bop/post bop styles and modern originals as well as establishing a report with their audience that few others produce.
more...Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner CBE (born 2 October 1951), known as Sting, is an English musician and actor. He was the frontman, songwriter and bassist for new wave band the Police from 1977 until their breakup in 1986. He launched a solo career in 1985 and has included elements of rock, jazz, reggae, classical, new-age, and worldbeat in his music.
As a solo musician and a member of the Police, Sting has received 17 Grammy Awards: he won Song of the Year for “Every Breath You Take“, three Brit Awards, including Best British Male Artist in 1994 and Outstanding Contribution in 2002, a Golden Globe, an Emmy, and four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. In 2019, he received a BMI Award for “Every Breath You Take” becoming the most-played song in radio history. In 2002, Sting received the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and was also inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Police in 2003. In 2000, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for recording. In 2003, Sting received a CBE from Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace for services to music. He was made a Kennedy Center Honoree at the White House in 2014 and was awarded the Polar Music Prize in 2017. In May 2023, he was made an Ivor Novello Fellow.
With the Police, Sting became one of the world’s best-selling music artists. Solo and with the Police combined, he has sold over 100 million records. In 2006, Paste ranked him 62nd of the 100 best living songwriters. He was 63rd of VH1‘s 100 greatest artists of rock, and 80th of Q‘s 100 greatest musical stars of the 20th century. He has collaborated with other musicians on songs such as “Money for Nothing” with Dire Straits, “Rise & Fall” with Craig David, “All for Love” with Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart, “You Will Be My Ain True Love” with Alison Krauss, and introduced the North African music genre raï to Western audiences through the hit song “Desert Rose” with Cheb Mami. In 2018, he released the album 44/876, a collaboration with Jamaican musician Shaggy, which won the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album in 2019.
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Howard Mancel Roberts (October 2, 1929 – June 28, 1992) was an American jazz guitarist, educator, and session musician.
Roberts was born in Phoenix, Arizona to Damon and Vesta Roberts, and began playing guitar at the age of 8 – a Gibson manufactured $18 Kalamazoo student model acoustic given to him by his parents at Christmas. He took lessons from Horace Hatchett who commented to Roberts’ father that Roberts, at the age of 15, “…has his own style of playing and there’s nothing else I can show him. He plays better than I do.” By the time he was 15 he was playing professionally locally, predominantly blues based music, where he learned from a number of black musicians, trumpeter Art Farmer being among that group. In 1992 Roberts was quoted in “The Independent Newsletter” by Steve Voce saying he considered that early experience to be “the most valuable” to him in his development as a player. At the time Roberts and his close friend and roommate, guitarist Howard Heitmeyer, would start their day by practicing 3 or 4 hours, catch an afternoon movie, returning to practice until they went to the clubs in the evening.
When Roberts reached the age of 17 he was involved with a class that was begun by Joseph Schillinger, a composer/theorist. Fabian Andre had been commissioned to teach the class. Some of the students who had taken the class included George Gershwin, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Oscar Levant. Schillinger applied mathematical principles to art which appealed to Roberts. To be able to take the course he made a deal with Andre; he’d sweep the floors after class to help defray the cost of his tuition. By the late ‘40s Roberts was playing with one of his boyhood friends, Pete Jolly – a well known jazz pianist – and they toured Washington and Idaho in early 1950.
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Ellen McIlwaine (October 1, 1945 – June 23, 2021) was an American-born singer-songwriter and musician best known for her career as a solo singer, songwriter and slide guitarist.
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, United States, McIlwaine was adopted by missionaries and raised in Kobe, Japan, giving her exposure to multiple languages and cultures. She attended the Canadian Academyschool in Kobe, graduating in 1963. Her first experience in music was playing on piano Ray Charles, Fats Domino and Professor Longhair songs that she heard on Japanese radio. On moving back to the United States she bought a guitar, beginning a stage career in Atlanta, Georgia in the mid-1960s.[citation needed]
In 1966, McIlwaine had a stint in New York City’s Greenwich Village where she opened every night at the Cafe Au Go Go, playing with Jimi Hendrix, and opening for Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Big Joe Williams.[citation needed] She returned to Atlanta to form the band Fear Itself, a psychedelic blues rock band.
more...David “Dave” Holland (born 1 October 1946) is an English cellist, double bassist, bass guitarist, composer and bandleader who has been performing and recording for five decades. He has lived in the United States since the early 1970s.
His extensive discography ranges from solo performances to pieces for big band. Holland runs his own independent record label, Dare2, which he launched in 2005.
Holland formed his first working quintet in 1983, and over the next four years released Jumpin’ In, Seeds of Time, and The Razor’s Edge, featuring alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, trumpeter Wheeler and trombonist Julian Priester (or Robin Eubanks). Subsequently, he formed the Dave Holland Trio (with Coleman and DeJohnette) for the 1988 album Triplicate, and teamed with Coleman, electric guitarist Kevin Eubanks and drummer Marvin “Smitty” Smithfor Extensions. He also recorded Life Cycle, an album of compositions played on solo cello.
The bassist also continued to collaborate with his peers, often connecting with figures from the previous generation of jazz icons. In 1989, Holland teamed with drummer Billy Higgins and pianist Hank Jones to record The Oracle, and joined drummer Roy Haynes and guitarist Pat Metheny in 1989 to record Question and Answer.
more...Albert Gene Collins, known as Albert Collins and the Ice Breakers(October 1, 1932 – November 24, 1993), was an American electric blues guitarist and singer with a distinctive guitar style. He was noted for his powerful playing and his use of altered tunings and a capo. His long association with the Fender Telecaster led to the title “The Master of the Telecaster”.
Collins was born in Leona, Texas, on October 1, 1932. He was introduced to the guitar at an early age by his cousin Lightnin’ Hopkins, also a Leona resident, who played at family gatherings. The Collins family relocated to Marquez, Texas, in 1938 and to Houston in 1941, where he attended Jack Yates High School. Collins took piano lessons when he was young, but when his piano tutor was unavailable his cousin Willow Young would lend Albert his guitar and taught him the altered tuning that he used throughout his career. Collins tuned his guitar to an open F-minor chord (FCFA♭CF), with a capo at the 5th, 6th or 7th fret. At the age of sixteen, he decided to concentrate on learning the guitar after hearing “Boogie Chillen’” by John Lee Hooker.
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NGC 6946, sometimes referred to as the Fireworks Galaxy, is a face-on intermediate spiral galaxywith a small bright nucleus, whose location in the sky straddles the boundary between the northernconstellations of Cepheus and Cygnus. Its distance from Earth is about 25.2 million light-years or 7.72 megaparsecs, similar to the distance of M101 (NGC 5457) in the constellation Ursa Major. Both were once considered to be part of the Local Group, but are now known to be among the dozen bright spiral galaxies near the Milky Way but beyond the confines of the Local Group. NGC 6946 lies within the Virgo Supercluster.
The galaxy was discovered by William Herschel on 9 September 1798. Based on an estimation by the Third Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies (RC3) in 1991, the galaxy has a D25 B-band isophotal diameter of 26.77 kiloparsecs (87,300 light-years). It is heavily obscured by interstellar matter due to its location close to the galactic plane of the Milky Way. Due to its prodigious star formation it has been classified as an active starburst galaxy. NGC 6946 has also been classified as a double-barred spiral galaxy, with the inner, smaller bar presumably responsible for funneling gas into its center.
Franklin Joseph Lymon (September 30, 1942 – February 27, 1968 Washington Heights, NY) was an American rock and roll/rhythm and blues singer and songwriter, best known as the boy soprano lead singer of the New York City-based early rock and roll doo-wop group The Teenagers. The group was composed of five boys, all in their early to mid-teens. The original lineup of the Teenagers, an integrated group, included three African-American members, Frankie Lymon, Jimmy Merchant, and Sherman Garnes; and two Puerto Ricanmembers, Joe Negroni and Herman Santiago. The Teenagers’ first single, 1956’s “Why Do Fools Fall in Love“, was also their biggest hit. After Lymon went solo in mid-1957, both his career and that of the Teenagers fell into decline. He was found dead at the age of 25 on the floor of his grandmother’s bathroom from a heroin overdose. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 as a member of the Teenagers. His life was dramatized in the 1998 film Why Do Fools Fall in Love.
more...Oscar Pettiford (September 30, 1922 – September 8, 1960) was an American jazz double bassist, cellist and composer. He was one of the earliest musicians to work in the bebop idiom.
Pettiford was born in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, United States. His mother identified as being of Choctawdescent, and his father Harry “Doc” Pettiford identified as half Cherokee and half African American.
He grew up playing in the family band in which he sang and danced before switching to piano at the age of 12, then to double bass when he was 14. He is quoted as saying he did not like the way people were playing the bass, so he developed his own way of playing it. Despite being admired by the likes of Milt Hintonat the age of 14, he gave up in 1941 as he did not believe he could make a living. Five months later, he once again met Hinton, who persuaded him to return to music.
In 1942, he joined the Charlie Barnet band and in 1943 gained wider public attention after recording with Coleman Hawkins on his “The Man I Love“.[1] Pettiford also recorded with Earl Hines and Ben Websteraround this time. After he moved to New York, he was one of the musicians (together with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke) who in the early 1940s jammed at Minton’s Playhouse, where the music style developed that later was called bebop. He and Dizzy Gillespie led a bop group in 1943.In 1945, Pettiford went with Hawkins to California, where he appeared in The Crimson Canary, a mystery movie known for its jazz soundtrack, which also featured Josh White. He then worked with Duke Ellington from 1945 to 1948 and for Woody Herman in 1949, before working mainly as a leader in the 1950s.
As a leader he inadvertently discovered Cannonball Adderley. After one of his musicians had tricked him into letting Adderley, an unknown music teacher, onto the stand, he had Adderley solo on a demanding piece, on which Adderley performed impressively.
Pettiford is considered the pioneer of the cello as a solo instrument in jazz music. He first played the cello as a practical joke on his band leader (Woody Herman), when he walked off stage during his solo spot and came back, unexpectedly with a cello and played on that. In 1949, after suffering a broken arm, Pettiford found it impossible to play his bass, so he experimented with a cello a friend had lent him. Tuning it in fourths, like a double bass, but one octave higher, Pettiford found it possible to perform during his rehabilitation (during which time his arm was in a sling) and made his first recordings with the instrument in 1950. The cello thus became his secondary instrument, and he continued to perform and record with it throughout the remainder of his career.
He recorded extensively during the 1950s for the Debut, Bethlehem and ABC Paramount labels among others. During the mid-1950s he played on the first three albums Thelonious Monk recorded for the Riverside label.
Between 1954 and 1958, Pettiford also led sextets, big bands and jazz orchestras which played dates in Manhattan venues like Birdland, where he continued to explore unusual instrumental voicing including French horns and harp. The reedist and composer Gigi Gryce collaborated with Pettiford on the novel arrangements for the orchestra’s hi-fi albums.
In 1958, Pettiford moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, and started recording for European companies. After his move to Europe he often performed with European musicians, like Attila Zoller, and also with other Americans who had settled in Europe, such as Bud Powell and Kenny Clarke.
He died in 1960 in Copenhagen shortly before his 38th birthday, from a virus closely related to polio.
more...Bernard “Buddy” Rich (September 30, 1917 – April 2, 1987 Brooklyn, NY) was an American jazz drummer, songwriter, conductor, and bandleader. He is considered one of the most influential drummers of all time.
Rich was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He discovered his affinity for jazz music at a young age and began drumming at the age of two. He began playing jazz in 1937, working with acts such as Bunny Berigan, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, and Harry James. From 1942 to 1944, Rich served in the U.S. Marines. From 1945 to 1948, he led the Buddy Rich Orchestra. In 1966, he recorded a big-band style arrangement of songs from West Side Story. He found lasting success in 1966 with the formation of the Buddy Rich Big Band, also billed as the Buddy Rich Band and The Big Band Machine.
Rich was known for his virtuoso technique, power, and speed. He was an advocate of the traditional grip, though he occasionally used matched grip when playing the toms. Despite his commercial success and musical talent, Rich never learned how to read sheet music, preferring to listen to drum parts and play them from memory.
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