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Grant Green (June 6, 1935 – January 31, 1979) was an American jazz guitarist and composer.

Recording prolifically for Blue Note Records as both leader and sideman, Green performed in the hard bop, soul jazz, bebop, and Latin-tinged idioms throughout his career. Critics Michael Erlewine and Ron Wynnwrite, “A severely underrated player during his lifetime, Grant Green is one of the great unsung heroes of jazz guitar … Green’s playing is immediately recognizable – perhaps more than any other guitarist.” Critic Dave Hunter described his sound as “lithe, loose, slightly bluesy and righteously groovy”. He often performed in an organ trio, a small group featuring a Hammond organ and drummer.

Apart from fellow guitarist Charlie Christian, Green’s primary influences were saxophonists, particularly Charlie Parker, and his approach was therefore almost exclusively linear rather than chordal. He thus rarely played rhythm guitar except as a sideman on albums led by other musicians. The simplicity and immediacy of Green’s playing, which tended to avoid chromaticism, derived from his early work playing rhythm and bluesand, although he achieved a synthesis of this style with bop, he was a highly skilled blues and funk guitarist and returned to this style in his later career.

Grant Green was born on June 6, 1935 in St. Louis, Missouri to John and Martha Green. His father was at various times a laborer and a Saint Louis policeman. While in New York to play an engagement at George Benson‘s Breezin’ Lounge, he collapsed in his car of a heart attack and died on January 31, 1979.

Peter Erskine (born June 5, 1954) is an American jazz drummer who was a member of the jazz fusiongroups Weather Report and Steps Ahead. Erskine was born in Somers Point, New Jersey, U.S. He began playing the drums at the age of four. He graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, then studied percussion at Indiana University.

His professional music career started in 1972 when he joined the Stan Kenton Orchestra. After four years with Kenton, he joined Maynard Ferguson for two years. In 1978, he joined Weather Report, joining Jaco Pastorius in the rhythm section. After four years and five albums with Weather Report and the Jaco Pastorius big band’s Word of Mouth, he joined Steps Ahead.

In 1983, he performed on the Antilles Records release Swingrass ’83. He toured the US in 1992 with Chick Corea.

Jerry González (June 5, 1949 – October 1, 2018) was an American bandleader, trumpeter and percussionist of Puerto Rican descent. Geraldo, his father, was a singer in a band and worked for Las Villas, a chain of stores selling Latin American products. Jerry, who liked the trumpet and studied it carefully, but also the congas was a member of Cal Tjader Callen Radcliffe Tjader Jr. an American Jazz musician, known as the most successful non-Latino of Latin Jazz. Together Jerry Gonzalez with his brother, bassist Andy González, played an important role in the development of Latin Jazz during the late 20th century. During the 1970s, both played alongside Eddie Palmieri and in Manny Oquendo‘s Conjunto Libre, and from 1980 to 2018 they directed The Fort Apache Band. From 2000 to 2018, Jerry González resided in Madrid, where he fronted Los Piratas del Flamenco and El Comando de la Clave. In October 2018, he died of a heart attack after a fire in his home in Madrid.

Jerry González was born in 1949 in Manhattan, on 158th Street and 3rd Avenue, and moved to the Edenwald Houses in the Eastchester section of the Bronx at the age of 4.

Laura Phillips “Laurie” Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She became more widely known outside the art world when her song “O Superman” reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981. Her debut album Big Science was released the following year. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.

Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she collaborated with Interval Research to develop an instrument she called a “talking stick,” a six-foot-long (1.8 m) baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds.

Anderson met singer-songwriter Lou Reed in 1992, and she was married to him from April 2008 until his death in 2013.

Laura Phillips Anderson was born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, on June 5, 1947, the daughter of Mary Louise (née Rowland) and Arthur T. Anderson. She had seven siblings, and on weekends she studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and played with the Chicago Youth Symphony.

Gordon “Specs” Powell (June 5, 1922 – September 15, 2007) was a jazz drummer who began performing in the swing era.

Specs was the first black staff musician hired by CBS in 1943. Born in New York City, he started on piano but became exclusively a drummer in the late 1930s. He worked with Edgar Hayes (1939), Benny Carter (1941–42), and Ben Webster. He played percussion on the Ed Sullivan Show in the early 1960s and remained active professionally until the 1970s. At some point in the early 1960s he approached the Latin percussion maker Martin Cohen and had Cohen make for him an early (perhaps the first) bongo stand. In 2004 he was inducted into the Big Band Jazz Hall of Fame.

Powell was also a photographer, and his photographic archives of 2500 images are preserved in the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge. He died in San Diego of kidney disease at the age of 85.

Francisco de Jesús Rivera Figueras (born 4 June 1948), known as Paquito D’Rivera, is a Cuban-American alto saxophonist, clarinetist and composer. He was a member of the Cuban songo band Irakere and, since the 1980s, he has established himself as a bandleader in the United States. His smooth saxophone tone and his frequent combination of Latin jazz and classical music have become his trademarks.

Francisco de Jesús Rivera Figueras was born on 4 June 1948 in Havana, Cuba. His father played classicalsaxophone, entertained his son with Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman records, and he sold musical instruments. He took D’Rivera to clubs like the Tropicana (frequented by his musician friends and customers) and to concert bands and orchestras.

At age five, D’Rivera began saxophone lessons by his father. In 1960, he attended the Havana Conservatory of Music, where he learned saxophone and clarinet and met Chucho Valdés. In 1965, he was a featured soloist with the Cuban National Symphony Orchestra. He and Valdés founded Orchestra Cubana de Música Moderna and then in 1973 the group Irakere, which fused jazz, rock, classical, and Cuban music.

Oliver Edward Nelson (June 4, 1932 – October 28, 1975) was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, arranger, composer, and bandleader. His 1961 Impulse! album The Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961) is regarded as one of the most significant recordings of its era. The centerpiece of the album is the definitive version of Nelson’s composition, “Stolen Moments“. Other important recordings from the 1960s are the albums More Blues and the Abstract Truth (1964) and Sound Pieces (1966), both also on Impulse!.

Oliver Nelson was born into a musical family in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. His brother was a saxophonist who played with Cootie Williams in the 1940s, and his sister sang and played piano. Nelson began learning to play the piano when he was six and started on the saxophone at the age of 11. Beginning in 1947, he played in “territory” bands in and around Saint Louis, before joining the Louis Jordan band, where he stayed from 1950 to 1951, playing alto saxophone and arranging charts for Jordan’s band. Nelson died of a heart attack on October 28, 1975, at the age of 43. It is widely believed that Nelson’s commitment to his work resulted in lengthy periods of stress which contributed to his premature death.

American jazz drummer, born June 4, 1926 in New York; died March 7, 1982 in Los Angeles.
Thomas has recorded with Charlie Parker (1946), Howard McGhee and Benny Carter (1947), Dexter Gordon (1947, 1952, 1955), Stan Kenton (1949), Wardell Gray (1950), Hampton Hawes (1955-1956), and Sonny Criss (1956-57).

Eddie “Chank” Willis (June 3, 1936 – August 20, 2018) was an American soul musician. Willis played electric guitar and occasional electric sitar for Motown‘s in-house studio band, The Funk Brothers, during the 1960s and early 1970s.

Born in Grenada, Mississippi, Willis was known for his signature style of muted guitar riffs which added a distinctive tone or “color” to the beat, often timed with the snare, of the hundreds of hit songs recorded at Hitsville U.S.A. for Motown artists. Among the recordings Willis performed on are “Please Mr. Postman” by The Marvelettes, “The Way You Do the Things You Do” by The Temptations, “You Keep Me Hanging On” by The Supremes, and “I Was Made to Love Her” by Stevie Wonder.

Influences for Willis included Chet Atkins, Wes Montgomery, and Albert King. He played a Gibson Firebirdguitar on most of his early 1960s work, later moving on to use a Gibson ES-335. On recordings such as The Supremes’ “No Matter What Sign You Are”, Willis performed on a Coral sitar. He accepted an offer from Phil Collins to perform on his album of Motown and 1960s soul classics, Going Back. Willis died on August 20, 2018 in Gore Springs, Mississippi from complications of polio at the age of 82.