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In traditional cuadro flamenco and theatrical performances, bulerías is presented with each dancer performing a short variation and returning back into the cuadro flamenco formation as another dancer enters the performance area. Dancers often try to “out-dance” one another, dance teasingly about each other, spoof the audience, or dance one’s mind. Intricate combinations of palmas and jaleo (shouts of encouragement, including “Olé”) are provided by the other performers, and often by knowledgeable aficionados.

Though open to much variation and interpretation, the generally accepted skeletal framework for the dance includes:

​Entrada/Salida – The dancer enters while the guitarist plays. The dancer can also enter during a song.

Llamada – A movement cue to the guitarist and singer that the dancer is about to perform a new letra.

Letras – The singer sings a letra while the dancer dances. A dancer can insert a remate (flashy punch of percussion and movement) between the 1st and 2nd lines of the song, while the singer pauses for 12 counts (respira).

​Desplante llamada – A one- or two-compás footwork and movement break.

​Dance variation/s-  A number of things can occur at this point.

​Choreography – The primary dance variation, often including codified movement patterns of counter- clockwise circles and diagonal patterns traveling across the floor. Many of these patterns are traditional, and have been passed down from artist to artist for generations.

​Contra tiempo palmas

​A second llamada leading to a second letra.

​An escobilla  – Long sets of footwork sequences

​Closing desplante llamada – The final cue for an exit

​Salida/Cierre  – A closing dance pattern, generally moving across stage. Often also called the cierre.

Frederick Nathaniel Hibbert, OJ (8 December 1942 – 11 September 2020), better known as Toots Hibbert, was a Jamaican singer and songwriter who was the lead vocalist for the reggae and ska band Toots and the Maytals. A reggae pioneer, he performed for six decades and helped establish some of the fundamentals of reggae music. Hibbert’s 1968 song “Do the Reggay” is widely credited as the genesis of the genre name reggae. His band’s album True Love won a Grammy Award in 2005.

Hibbert was born on 8 December 1942 in May Pen, Jamaica, the youngest of his siblings. Hibbert’s parents were both strict Seventh-day Adventist preachers so he grew up singing gospel music in a church choir. Both parents died young and, by the age of 11, Hibbert was an orphan who went to live with his brother John in the Trenchtown neighborhood of Kingston. While working at a local barbershop, he met his future bandmates Raleigh Gordon and Jerry Matthias.

James Oscar Smith (December 8, 1925 – February 8, 2005) was an American jazz musician whose albums often appeared on Billboard magazine charts. He helped popularize the Hammond B-3 organ, creating a link between jazz and 1960s soul music.

In 2005, Smith was awarded the NEA Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honor that America bestows upon jazz musicians.

There is confusion about Smith’s birth year, with sources citing either 1925 or 1928. Born James Oscar Smith in Norristown, Pennsylvania, he joined his father doing a song-and-dance routine in clubs at the age of six. He began teaching himself to play the piano. When he was nine, Smith won a Philadelphia radio talent contest as a boogie-woogie pianist. After a period in the U.S. Navy, he began furthering his musical education in 1948, with a year at Royal Hamilton College of Music, then the Leo Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia in 1949. He began exploring the Hammond organ in 1951. From 1951 to 1954, he played piano, then organ in Philly R&B bands like Don Gardner and the Sonotones. He switched to organ permanently in 1954 after hearing Wild Bill Davis.

Cleopatra Brown (December 8, 1907 or 1909 – April 15, 1995), known as Cleo Brown, C. Patra Brown or Cleo Patra Brown, was an American blues and jazz vocalist and pianist. She was the first woman instrumentalist to receive the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship.

While Brown’s place of birth has been published as Meridian, Mississippi, Brown told W. Balliett in a 1986 interview published in The New Yorker that she was born in De Kalb, Mississippi shortly before her father took a position as a pastor in Meridian. She played piano in the Baptist church as a child. In 1919 her family moved to Chicago, and she began learning piano from her brother who worked with “Pine Top” Smith, playing boogie-woogie for dances. From around 1923 she worked in vaudeville, as well as taking gigs in clubs. In 1935, she replaced Fats Waller as pianist on New York radio station WABC.

From the 1930s to the 1950s she toured the United States regularly, recording for Decca Records (among other labels) along the way and recording many humorous, ironic titles such as “Breakin’ in a New Pair of Shoes”, “Mama Don’t Want No Peas and Rice and Coconut Oil“, “When Hollywood Goes Black and Tan”, and “The Stuff Is Here and It’s Mellow”. Her stride piano playing was often compared to Fats Waller, and she is credited as an influence on Dave Brubeck, who played during the intermissions of her shows, and Marian McPartland. She played regularly at clubs in Chicago, toured widely, and recorded for both Decca and Capitol Records.

Harold Forster Chapin (December 7, 1942 – July 16, 1981) was an American singer-songwriter, philanthropist, and hunger activist best known for his folk rock and pop rock songs. He achieved worldwide success in the 1970s. Chapin, a Grammy Award-winning artist and Grammy Hall of Fame inductee, has sold over 16 million records worldwide.

Chapin recorded a total of 11 albums from 1972 until his death in 1981. All 14 singles that he released became hits on at least one national music chart.

As a dedicated humanitarian, Chapin fought to end world hunger. He was a key participant in the creation of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger in 1977. In 1987, Chapin was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his humanitarian work.

On the afternoon of July 16, 1981, Chapin was driving on the Long Island Expressway en route to perform at a free benefit concert at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, New York, that evening. At 12:27 PM, Chapin was fatally injured in a fiery traffic collision with a semi-trailer truck outside Jericho, New York. Passers-by managed to help the unconscious Chapin out of his engulfed 1975 Volkswagen Rabbit and he was immediately taken by helicopter to the nearby Nassau County Medical Center where he was pronounced dead at 1:05 PM due to internal bleeding.

Mads Vinding (born 7 December 1948, Copenhagen, Denmark) is a Danish jazz double-bassist.

Vinding began his professional career when he was 16 as the house bassist for Jazzhus Montmartre, a jazz club in Copenhagen. He has played on more than 800 recordings and more than 1000 Radio/TV shows.

Louis Leo Prima (December 7, 1910 – August 24, 1978 NOLA) was an American singer, songwriter, bandleader, and trumpeter. While rooted in New Orleans jazz, swing music, and jump blues, Prima touched on various genres throughout his career: he formed a seven-piece New Orleans-style jazz band in the late 1920s, fronted a swing combo in the 1930s and a big band group in the 1940s, helped to popularize jump blues in the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s, and performed frequently as a Vegas lounge act beginning in the 1950s.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, his music further encompassed early R&B and rock ‘n’ roll, boogie-woogie, and Italian folk music, such as the tarantella. Prima made prominent use of Italian music and language in his songs, blending elements of his Italian and Sicilian identity with jazz and swing music. At a time when ethnic musicians were discouraged from openly stressing their ethnicity, Prima’s conspicuous embrace of his Sicilian ethnicity opened the doors for other Italian-American and ethnic American musicians to display their ethnic roots.

Prima is also known for providing the voice for the orangutan King Louie in the 1967 Disney film The Jungle Book.

Stars are forming. The mountain is actually a column of gas and dust in the picturesque Eagle Nebula (M16). A pillar like this is so low in density that you could easily fly though it — it only appears solid because of its high dust content and great depth. The glowing areas are lit internally by newly formed stars. These areas shine in red and infrared light because blue light is scattered away by intervening interstellar dust. The featured image was captured recently in near-infrared light in unprecedented detail by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched late last year. Energetic light, abrasive winds, and final supernovas from these young stars will slowly destroy this stellar birth column over the next 100,000 years.

Miroslav Ladislav Vitouš (born 6 December 1947) is a Czech jazz bassist.

Born in Prague, Vitouš began the violin at age six, switching to piano after about three years, and then to bass at age fourteen. As a young man in Europe, Vitouš was a competitive swimmer. One of his early music groups was the Junior Trio with his brother Alan on drums and Jan Hammer on keyboards. He studied music at the Prague Conservatory under František Pošta, and won a music contest in Vienna that gave him a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music.

Miles Davis saw Vitouš playing with Clark Terry in 1967 and invited him to join his group in New York City.

Eddie Gladden (December 6, 1937 – September 30, 2003) was an American jazz drummer.

Gladden played professionally from 1962 in his hometown of Newark. In 1972 he began working with James Moody. During the rest of his career he worked with Eddie Jefferson, Richie Cole, Cecil Payne, Horace Silver, David Fathead Newman, Larry Young, Freddie Roach, Jimmy McGriff, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Kirk Lightsey, Clifford Jordan, Albert Dailey, Jimmy Ponder, Shirley Scott, and Mickey Tucker, among others. He played in Dexter Gordon‘s quartet from 1977, touring and recording.

He died of a heart attack in Newark at the age of 65.