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Dee Dee Bridgewater (née Denise Garrett, May 27, 1950) is an American jazz singer and actress. She is a three-time Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, as well as a Tony Award-winning stage actress. For 23 years, she was the host of National Public Radio’s syndicated radio show JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater. She is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Born Denise Eileen Garrett in Memphis, Tennessee, she was raised Catholic in Flint, Michigan. Her father, Matthew Garrett, was a jazz trumpeter and teacher at Manassas High School, and through his playing, she was exposed to jazz early on. At the age of 16, she was a member of a Rock and R&B trio, singing in clubs in Michigan. At 18, she studied at Michigan State University before she went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With the school’s jazz band, she toured the Soviet Union in 1969.

Clifford Everett “Bud” Shank Jr. (May 27, 1926 – April 2, 2009) was an American alto saxophonist and flautist. He rose to prominence in the early 1950s playing lead alto and flute in Stan Kenton‘s Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra and throughout the decade worked in various small jazz combos. He spent the 1960s as a first-call studio musician in Hollywood. In the 1970s and 1980s, he performed regularly with the L. A. Four. Shank ultimately abandoned the flute to focus exclusively on playing jazz on the alto saxophone. He also recorded on tenor and baritone sax. His most famous recording is probably the version of “Harlem Nocturne” used as the theme song in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. He is also well known for the alto flute solo on the song “California Dreamin’” recorded by The Mamas & the Papas in 1965.

Bud Shank was born in Dayton, Ohio, United States. He began playing the clarinet in Vandalia, Ohio, but switched to saxophone before attending the University of North Carolina. While at UNC, Shank was initiated into the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. In 1946, he worked with Charlie Barnet before moving on to Kenton and the West coast jazz scene. He also had a strong interest in what might now be termed world music, playing Brazilian-influenced jazz with Laurindo Almeida in 1953 and 1954.

Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen , 27 May 1946 – 19 April 2005), also known by his abbreviated nickname NHØP, was a Danish jazz double bassist. Pedersen was born in Osted, near Roskilde, on the Danish island of Zealand, the son of a church organist. As a child, Ørsted Pedersen played piano, but from the age of 13, he started learning to play upright bassand at the age of 14, while studying, he began his professional jazz career in Denmark with his first band, Jazzkvintet 60 (Danish for Jazz Quintet 60). By the age of fifteen, he had the ability to accompany leading musicians at nightclubs, working regularly at Copenhagen’s Jazzhus Montmartre, after his debut there on New Year’s Eve 1961, when he was only 15. When seventeen, he had already turned down an offer to join the Count Basie orchestra, mainly because he was too young to get legal permission to live and work as a musician in the United States.

Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. (May 27, 1935 – September 12, 2022) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and radio personality. Lewis recorded over 80 albums and received five gold records and three Grammy Awards in his career. His album The In Crowd earned Lewis critical praise and the 1965 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance. His best known singles include “The ‘In’ Crowd“, “Wade in the Water“, and “Sun Goddess“. Until 2009, he was the host of the Ramsey Lewis Morning Show on the Chicago radio station WNUA.

Lewis was also active in musical education in Chicago. He founded the Ramsey Lewis Foundation, established the Ravinia’s Jazz Mentor Program, and served on the board of trustees for the Merit School of Music and The Chicago High School for the Arts.

Ramsey Lewis was born on May 27, 1935, in Chicago to Ramsey Lewis Sr. and Pauline Lewis. His father was a church choir director and Lewis felt that his father influenced him to study music. When it was decided that his older sister, Lucille, would take piano lessons and not Ramsey also (because their father felt he could only afford lessons for one child), Ramsey threw a fit. His father relented and somehow found the money. Thus Lewis began taking piano lessons at the age of four with Ernestine Bruce, the church pianist and organist. When Lewis was 11, Bruce suggested he study with Dorothy Mendelssohn at the Chicago Musical College. Mendelssohn taught him classical technique with the philosophy that “it freed the performer from the thinking about the notes so he could concentrate on the music.” Lewis realized what she meant when he saw Wynton Kelly with the Miles Davis group, Kelly asked him to play something, and Kelly complimented him by saying “Boy, I wish I had technique.”

Rubén González Fontanills (26 May 1919 – 8 December 2003) was a Cuban pianist. Together with Lilí Martínez and Peruchín he is said to have “forged the style of modern Cuban piano playing in the 1940s”.

Between the 1940s and his retirement in the 1980s, he played with Cuba’s most successful acts, including Paulina Álvarez, Arsenio Rodríguez, Orquesta América del 55, Orquesta Riverside and Enrique Jorrín. In the 1990s, he came out of retirement to play in the revival ensembles Afro-Cuban All Stars and Buena Vista Social Club, also recording solo material and performing live until 2002.

González was born in Santa Clara, Cuba, on 26 May 1919. His family moved to the small village of Encrucijada when he was 6 years old. He took up the piano at age seven and graduated from the Cienfuegos Conservatory at age 15.

Angela Isadora Duncan (May 26, 1877 or May 27, 1878 – September 14, 1927) was an American dancer and choreographer, who was a pioneer of modern contemporary dance, who performed to great acclaim throughout Europe and the US. Born and raised in California, she lived and danced in Western Europe, the US and the Soviet Union from the age of 22 until her death at age 50 when her scarf became entangled in the wheel and axle of the car in which she was travelling in Nice, France.

Angela Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco, the youngest of the four children of Joseph Charles Duncan (1819–1898), a banker, mining engineer and connoisseur of the arts, and Mary Isadora Gray (1849–1922).

On the night of September 14, 1927, in Nice, France, Duncan was a passenger in an Amilcar CGSS automobile owned by Benoît Falchetto [fr], a French-Italian mechanic. She wore a long, flowing, hand-painted silk scarf, created by the Russian-born artist Roman Chatov, a gift from her friend Mary Desti, the mother of American filmmaker, Preston Sturges. Desti, who saw Duncan off, had asked her to wear a cape in the open-air vehicle because of the cold weather, but she would agree to wear only the scarf. As they departed, she reportedly said to Desti and some companions, “Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire !” (“Farewell, my friends. I go to glory!”); but according to the American novelist Glenway Wescott, Desti later told him that Duncan’s actual parting words were, “Je vais à l’amour”(“I am off to love”). Desti considered this embarrassing, as it suggested that she and Falchetto were going to her hotel for a tryst.

Her silk scarf, draped around her neck, became entangled around the open-spoked wheels and rear axle, pulling her from the open car and breaking her neck. Desti said she called out to warn Duncan about the scarf almost immediately after the car left. Desti took Duncan to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Soulful diva Tina Turner, who had a lengthy run of ’60s and ’70s R&B hits and struck major pop stardom in the ’80s, died Wednesday in Switzerland. She was 83.

“Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock’n Roll’ has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Kusnacht near Zurich, Switzerland. With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model,” her representative said in a statement to Variety.

More than a decade after her crossover hit “Proud Mary” with husband Ike, Tina Turner ascended to the pinnacle of pop fame with the 1984 Capitol Records album “Private Dancer.” The collection, which spawned a trio of top-10 pop hits, sold five million copies and garnered four Grammy Awards. Though she never matched that breakthrough solo success, she recorded and toured profitably until her retirement in 2000.

Raw-voiced, leggy, peripatetic and provocative onstage, the magnetic Turner segued effortlessly into bigscreen roles, appearing as the Acid Queen in Ken Russell’s 1975 adaptation of the Who’s rock opera “Tommy” and as villainess Aunty Entity in George Miller’s action sequel “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.” She sang the title song, penned by Bono and the Edge of U2, for the 1995 James Bond pic “GoldenEye.”

The winner of eight Grammys, Turner was a 1991 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and was recognized at the 2005 Kennedy Center Honors for her career achievements.

Turner was still in her teens when she began recording with future husband Ike Turner; their tumultuous partnership produced 15 years of popular singles, culminating in the 1971 crossover smash “Proud Mary.” However, in 1976 the vocalist fled her abusive marriage; she detailed her violence-scarred relationship in the 1986 bestseller “I, Tina,” which served as the basis for the 1993 biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It.”

She was born Anna Mae Bullock in the farming community of Nutbush, Tenn. (a locale she would commemorate in the self-penned 1973 song “Nutbush City Limits”). With older her sister Ruby, she was shuttled between various relatives as a child; her mother left her abusive father when she was 11. At 16, the girls were reunited with their mother in St. Louis.