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The 4th day of a Rhythm Roots Workshop Residency at Lincoln Elementary in Ivanhoe, MN on the South Dakota boarder. Mounting performances for our exciting concert tomorrow at 2pm. K thru 6th grades will perform rhythms from around the world and sing and chant a Celebration of Diversity.
A mere 46 million light-years distant, spiral galaxy NGC 2841 can be found in planet Earth’s night sky toward the northern constellation of Ursa Major. This sharp image centered on the gorgeous island universe also captures spiky foreground Milky Way stars and more distant background galaxies within the same telescopic field of view. It shows off the bright nucleus of NGC 2841, along with its inclined galactic disk, and faint outer regions. Dust lanes, small star-forming regions, and young star clusters are embedded in the galaxy’s patchy, tightly wound spiral arms. In contrast, many other spirals exhibit broader, sweeping arms with large star-forming regions. NGC 2841 has a diameter of over 150,000 light-years, making it even larger than our own Milky Way. X-ray images suggest that extreme outflows from giant stars and stellar explosions create plumes of hot gas extending into a halo around NGC 2841.
Yvette Marie Stevens (born March 23, 1953), better known by her stage name Chaka Khan is an American singer. Her career has spanned more than five decades, beginning in the 1970s as the lead vocalist of the funk band Rufus. Known as the “Queen of Funk“, Khan was the first R&Bartist to have a crossover hit featuring a rapper, with “I Feel for You” in 1984. Khan has won ten Grammy Awards and has sold an estimated 70 million records worldwide.
With Rufus, she achieved four gold singles, four gold albums, and two platinum albums. In the course of her solo career, Khan achieved three gold singles, three gold albums, and one platinum album with I Feel for You. She has collaborated with Steve Winwood, Ry Cooder, Robert Palmer, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Guru, Chicago, De La Soul, Mary J. Blige, among others. In December 2016, Billboard magazine ranked her as the 65th most successful dance club artist of all time. She was ranked at No. 17 in VH1‘s original list of the 100 Greatest Women of Rock & Roll. Khan has been nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame three times as a solo artist and four times as a member of Rufus featuring Chaka Khan; the first time in 2012 as a member of Rufus.
Yvette Marie Stevens was born on March 23, 1953, into an artistic, bohemian household in Chicago, Illinois. The eldest of five children born to Charles Stevens and Sandra Coleman, she has described her father as a beatnik and her mother as “able to do anything”. She was raised in the Hyde Park area, “an island in the middle of the madness” of Chicago’s rough South Side housing projects. Her sister Yvonne later became a successful musician in her own right, under the name Taka Boom. Her only brother, Mark, who formed the funk group Jamaica Boys and was a member of Aurra, also became a successful musician. She has two other sisters, Zaheva Stevens and Tammy McCrary.
more...David Samuel Pike (March 23, 1938 – October 3, 2015) was an American jazz vibraphone and marimbaplayer. He appeared on many albums by Nick Brignola, Paul Bley and Kenny Clarke, Bill Evans, and Herbie Mann. He also recorded extensively as leader, including a number of albums on MPS Records.
He learned drums at the age of eight and was self-taught on vibraphone. Pike made his recording debut with the Paul Bley Quartet in 1958. He began putting an amplifier on his vibes, when working with flautist Herbie Mann in the early-1960s. By the late-1960s, Pike’s music became more exploratory, contributing a unique voice and new contexts that pushed the envelope in times remembered for their exploratory nature. The Doors of Perception, released in 1970 for the Atlantic Records subsidiary Vortex Records, and produced by former boss Herbie Mann, explored ballads, modal territory, musique concrète, with free and lyrical improvisation, and included musicians including alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, bassist Chuck Israels and pianist Don Friedman.
more...Iverson Minter (March 23, 1932 – February 25, 2012), known as Louisiana Red, was an American blues guitarist, harmonica player, and singer, who recorded more than 50 albums. He was best known for his song “Sweet Blood Call”.
Born in Bessemer, Alabama, Minter lost his parents early in life; his mother died of pneumoniashortly after his birth, and his father was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in 1937. He was brought up by a series of relatives in various towns and cities. Red recorded for Chess in 1949, before joining the Army. He was trained as a parachutist with the 82nd Airborne and was sent to Korea in 1951. The 82nd Airborne was not deployed as a complete unit in Korea, but soldiers from this unit were dispatched as Rangers in the 2nd, 3rd and 7th Infantry Divisions. Minter said he was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division.
more...Granville Henry “Stick” McGhee (March 23, 1918 – August 15, 1961) was an American jump bluesguitarist, singer and songwriter, best known for his blues song “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee”, which he wrote with J. Mayo Williams
McGhee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee. He received his nickname when he was a child. He used a stick to push a wagon carrying his older brother Brownie McGhee, who had contracted polio. Granville began playing the guitar when he was thirteen years old. After his freshman year he dropped out of high school and worked with his father at the Eastman Kodak subsidiary, Tennessee Eastman Company in Kingsport. In 1940, Granville quit his job and moved to Portsmouth, Virginia, and then to New York City. He entered the military in 1942 and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After being discharged in 1946, he settled in New York.
more...“I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoic thought, it will be possible…to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.”
Salvador Dali, 1930
The 3rd day of the Rhythm Roots Workshop Residency at Lincoln Elementary in Ivanhoe, MN. Exploring international rhythms and culture.
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The most distant object easily visible to the unaided eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy, over two million light-years away. Without a telescope, even this immense spiral galaxyappears as an unremarkable, faint, nebulous cloud in the constellation Andromeda. But a bright white nucleus, dark winding dust lanes, luminous blue spiral arms, and bright red emission nebulas are recorded in this stunning fifteen-hour telescopic digital mosaic of our closest major galactic neighbor. But how do we know this spiral nebula is really so far away? This question was central to the famous Shapley-Curtis debate of 1920. M31’s great distance was determined in the 1920s by observations that resolved individual stars that changed their brightness in a way that gave up their true distance. The result proved that Andromeda is just like our Milky Way Galaxy — a conclusion making the rest of the universe much more vast than had ever been previously imagined.
Fred Anderson (March 22, 1929 – June 24, 2010) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist who was based in Chicago, Illinois. Anderson’s playing was rooted in the swing music and hard bop idioms, but he also incorporated innovations from free jazz. Anderson was also noted for having mentored numerous young musicians. Critic Ben Ratliff called him “a father figure of experimental jazz in Chicago”. Writer John Corbett referred to him as “scene caretaker, underground booster, indefatigable cultural worker, quiet force for good.” In 2001, author John Litweiler called Anderson “the finest tenor saxophonist in free jazz/underground jazz/outside jazz today.” Anderson was born in Monroe, Louisiana. When he was ten, his parents separated, and he moved to Evanston, Illinois, where he initially lived with his mother and aunt in a one-room apartment. When Anderson was a teenager, a friend introduced him to the music of Charlie Parker, and he soon decided he wanted to play saxophone, purchasing his first instrument for $45.
more...Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber Kt (born 22 March 1948), is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre. Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. He has composed 21 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass.
Several of his songs have been widely recorded and were successful outside of their parent musicals, such as “Memory” from Cats, “The Music of the Night” and “All I Ask of You” from The Phantom of the Opera, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” from Evita, and “Any Dream Will Do” from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. In 2001, The New York Timesreferred to him as “the most commercially successful composer in history”. The Daily Telegraph ranked him the “fifth most powerful person in British culture” in 2008, lyricist Don Black writing “Andrew more or less single-handedly reinvented the musical.”
He has received a number of awards, including a knighthood in 1992, followed by a peerage for services to the arts, six Tonys, three Grammys (as well as the Grammy Legend Award), an Academy Award, 14 Ivor Novello Awards, seven Olivier Awards, a Golden Globe, a Brit Award, the 2006 Kennedy Center Honors, the 2008 Classic Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, and an Emmy Award. He is one of 18 people to have won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is an inductee into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, and is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors.
His company, the Really Useful Group, is one of the largest theatre operators in London. Producers in several parts of the UK have staged productions, including national tours, of the Lloyd Webber musicals under licence from the Really Useful Group. Lloyd Webber is also the president of the Arts Educational Schools, London, a performing arts school located in Chiswick, West London. He is involved in a number of charitable activities, including the Elton John AIDS Foundation, Nordoff Robbins, Prostate Cancer UK and War Child. In 1992, he started the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation which supports the arts, culture, and heritage of the UK. In 2014 he designed a Cats-themed Paddington Bear statue, which was auctioned to raise funds for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).
more...George Washington Benson (born March 22, 1943) is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He began his professional career at the age of 19 as a jazz guitarist.
A former child prodigy, Benson first came to prominence in the 1960s, playing soul jazz with Jack McDuff and others. He then launched a successful solo career, alternating between jazz, pop, R&B singing, and scat singing. His album Breezin’ was certified triple-platinum, hitting no. 1 on the Billboard album chart in 1976.His concerts were well attended through the 1980s, and he still has a large following. Benson has won ten Grammy Awards and has been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Benson was born and raised in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At the age of seven, he first played the ukulele in a corner drug store, for which he was paid a few dollars. At age eight, he played guitar.
more...Leo “Bud” Welch (March 22, 1932 – December 19, 2017) was an American gospel blues musician and guitarist. He started his music career in 2014, with the release of the album Sabougla Voices by Big Legal Mess Records. His subsequent studio album, I Don’t Prefer No Blues, also recorded for Big Legal Mess, was released in 2015.
Welch was born on March 22, 1932, in the town of Sabougla, Mississippi. He was a lumberjack for 30 years while he learned his musical craft in the Mississippi Delta, where he learned to play various instruments, including the fiddle, harmonica, and guitar.
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The Taurus molecular cloud has several bright stars, but it is the dark dust that really draws attention. The pervasive dust has waves and ripples and makes picturesque dust bunnies, but perhaps more importantly, it marks regions where interstellar gas is dense enough to gravitationally contract to form stars. In the image center is a light cloud lit by neighboring stars that is home not only to a famous nebula, but to a very young and massive famous star. Both the star, T Tauri, and the nebula, Hind’s Variable Nebula, are seen to vary dramatically in brightness — but not necessarily at the same time, adding to the mystery of this intriguing region. T Tauri and similar stars are now generally recognized to be Sun-like stars that are less than a few million years old and so still in the early stages of formation. The featured image spans about four degrees not far from the Pleiades star cluster, while the featured dust field lies about 400 light-years away.
David Perry Lindley (March 21, 1944 – March 3, 2023) was an American musician who founded the rock band El Rayo-X and worked with many other performers including Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, Warren Zevon, Curtis Mayfield and Dolly Parton. He mastered such a wide variety of instruments that Acoustic Guitar magazine referred to him not as a multi-instrumentalist but instead as a “maxi-instrumentalist.” On stage, Lindley was known for wearing garishly colored polyester shirts with clashing pants, gaining the nickname the Prince of Polyester.
The majority of the instruments that Lindley played are string instruments, including violin, acoustic and electric guitar, upright and electric bass, banjo, mandolin, dobro, hardingfele, bouzouki, cittern, bağlama, gumbus, charango, cümbüş, oud and zither. He was the unparalleled master of the lap steel guitar in the rock music sphere, and an expert in Hawaiian-style slide guitar blues. Multi-instrumentalist Ben Harperacknowledges Lindley as an important influence.
Lindley was a founding member of the 1960s psychedelic band Kaleidoscope and worked as musical director for several touring artists. He occasionally scored and composed music for film.
David Perry Lindley was born in San Marino, California, to Margaret (née Wells) and John Lindley on March 21, 1944. When Lindley was growing up in Los Angeles, his father had an extensive collection of 78 rpm records that included Korean folk and Indian sitar music, as well as Spanish classical guitarists Andrés Segovia and Carlos Montoya.
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