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What is pictured are foreground clouds on Earth crossing in front of the Moon. The Moon shows a slight crescent phase with most of its surface visible by reflected Earthlight, known as Da Vinci glow. The Sun directly illuminates the brightly lit lunar crescent from the bottom, which means that the Sun must be below the horizon and so the image was taken before sunrise. This double take-inducing picture was captured on 2019 December 24, two days before the Moon slid in front of the Sun to create a solar eclipse. In the foreground, lights from small Guatemalan towns are visible behind the huge volcano Pacaya.
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Akiko Tsuruga (敦賀明子, Tsuruga Akiko) is a jazz composer, Hammond B-3 organist and pianist from Osaka, Japan.
She was born in Osaka. Her parents bought her a small organ when she was three and she started learning to play standards. At high school, she listened to Hammond B3 players including Jimmy Smith, then Charles Earland, Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff and Dr. Lonnie Smith.
A graduate of the Osaka College of Music, she has resided in New York City since 2001. After moving to the US, she had lessons from Lonnie Smith.
In addition to her solo work, she plays as a sideman in various groups in New York. She has accompanied Lou Donaldson since 2007.
more...Seiji Ozawa (小澤 征爾, Ozawa Seiji, September 1, 1935 – February 6, 2024) was a Japanese conductor known internationally for his work as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, and especially the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), where he served from 1973 for 29 years. After conducting the Vienna New Year’s Concert in 2002, he was director of the Vienna State Opera until 2010. In Japan, he founded the Saito Kinen Orchestra in 1984, their festival in 1992, and the Tokyo Opera Nomori in 2005.
Ozawa rose to fame after he won the 1959 Besançon competition. He was invited by Charles Munch, then the music director of the BSO, for the following year to Tanglewood, the orchestra’s summer home, where he studied with Munch and Pierre Monteux. Winning the festival’s Koussevitzky Prize earned him a scholarship with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic and brought him to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, who made him his assistant with the New York Philharmonic in 1961. He became artistic director of the festival and education program in Tanglewood in 1970, together with Gunther Schuller. In 1994, the new main hall there was named after him.
Ozawa conducted world premieres such as György Ligeti‘s San Francisco Polyphony in 1975 and Olivier Messiaen‘s opera Saint François d’Assise in Paris in 1983. He received numerous international awards. Ozawa was the first Japanese conductor recognized internationally and the only one of superstar status.
more...Gene Harris (born Eugene Haire, September 1, 1933 – January 16, 2000 Benton Harbor, MI) was an American jazz pianist known for his warm sound and blues and gospel infused style that is known as soul jazz.
From 1956 to 1970, he played in The Three Sounds trio with bassist Andy Simpkins and drummer Bill Dowdy. During this time, The Three Sounds recorded regularly for Blue Note and Verve.
He mostly retired to Boise, starting in the late 1970s, although he performed regularly at the Idanha Hotel there. Ray Brown convinced him to go back on tour in the early 1980s. He played with the Ray Brown Trio and then led his own groups, recording mostly on Concord Records, until his death from kidney failure in 2000. One of his most popular numbers was his “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a live version of which is on his Live at Otter Crest album, published by Concord. The singer Niki Haris is his daughter.
more...Lecil Travis Martin (September 1, 1931 – April 12, 1999 Ovilla, TX), whose stage name was Boxcar Willie, was an American country music singer-songwriter, who sang in the “old-time hobo” music style, complete with overalls, and a floppy hat. “Boxcar Willie” was originally a character in a ballad he wrote, but he later adopted it as his own stage name. His early musical career was parallel to service as an enlisted flight engineer in the United States Air Force.
more...Arthur Edward Pepper Jr. (September 1, 1925 – June 15, 1982) was an American jazz musician, most known as an alto saxophonist. He occasionally performed and recorded on tenor saxophone, clarinet (his first instrument) and bass clarinet. Active primarily in West Coast jazz, Pepper first came to prominence in Stan Kenton‘s big band. He was known for his emotionally charged performances and several stylistic shifts throughout his career, and was described by critic Scott Yanow as having “attained his goal of becoming the world’s greatest altoist” at the time of his death in 1982. Art Pepper was born in Gardena, California, United States. His mother was a 14-year-old runaway; his father, a merchant seaman. Both were violent alcoholics, and when Pepper was still quite young, he was sent to live with his paternal grandmother. He expressed early musical interest and talent, and he was given lessons. He began playing clarinet at the age of nine, switched to alto saxophone at 13, and immediately began jamming on Central Avenue, the black nightclub district of Los Angeles.
more...Galaxies of the NGC 7771 Group are featured in this intriguing skyscape. Some 200 million light-years distant toward the constellation Pegasus, NGC 7771 is the large, edge-on spiral near center, about 75,000 light-years across, with two smaller galaxies below it. Large spiral NGC 7769 is seen face-on to the right. Galaxies of the NGC 7771 group are interacting, making repeated close passages that will ultimately result in galaxy-galaxy mergers on a cosmic timescale. The interactions can be traced by distortions in the shape of the galaxies themselves and faint streams of stars created by their mutual gravitational tides. But a clear view of this galaxy group is difficult to come by as the deep image also reveals extensive clouds of foreground dust sweeping across the field of view. The dim, dusty galactic cirrus clouds are known as Integrated Flux Nebulae. The faint IFN reflect starlight from our own Milky Way Galaxy and lie only a few hundred light-years above the galactic plane.
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“Spider” John Koerner (August 31, 1938 – May 18, 2024) was an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He was best known as a guitarist and vocalist in the blues trio Koerner, Ray & Glover, with Dave Ray and Tony Glover. He also made albums as a solo performer and with Willie Murphy, and was an important mentor to the young Bob Dylan.
In a profile of Koerner for the magazine fRoots in 2010, Ian Anderson wrote that “Spider John Koerner is an American national treasure, a genuine folk blues hero. Bizarrely, most of his fellow countrypersons remain blissfully unaware of this, in spite of his being one of the key figures of the 1960s folk boom.” The Encyclopedia of Popular Musiccalled him “one of the most talented songwriters of his generation.”
more...Paul Winter (born August 31, 1939 Altoona, PA) is an American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. He is a pioneer of world music and earth music, which interweaves the voices of the wild with instrumental voices from classical, jazz and world music. The music is often improvised and recorded in nature to reflect the qualities brought into play by the environment.
In 1967 he started the Paul Winter Consort, influenced by Heitor Villa-Lobos and other Brazilian music, to give ensemble playing and soloing equal importance, analogous to a democracy where every voice would count. He borrowed the name from English Elizabethan theater of the 16th and 17th centuries, when bands combined woodwinds, strings, and percussion, the same families of instruments he wanted to combine in his contemporary consort. With this group, he became one of the earliest creators of world music.
Recordings of humpback whales in 1968 influenced his music, and his desire to become an environment activist. In 1977, his album Common Ground was his first to incorporate sounds of whales, eagles, and wolves into his music. The Paul Winter Consort recorded during the 1960s and 1970s. Four albums for A&M were produced by Phil Ramone and Paul Stookey. Astronauts of Apollo 15 took the Consort’s album Road to the moon with them and named two craters after the songs “Ghost Beads” and “Icarus”. George Martin produced the album Icarus and considered it one of the best he produced. The band Oregon was formed by band members who worked on this album: Ralph Towner, Paul McCandless, Glen Moore, and Collin Walcott.
In the early 1980s, Winter began traveling to the Soviet Union. In 1984, he ventured as far as Lake Baikal in Siberia, and found it so beautiful that he returned to try to protect it. In 1984, he became friends with Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Winter took part in the U.S.–Soviet Space Bridge to encourage collaboration between Russians and Americans. On a tour of the Soviet Union in 1986, the Consort performed with the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble at Moscow University. During the next year the two bands recorded the album EarthBeat in Moscow and New York. It was the first album of music created together by Americans and Russians.
In 1980, Winter founded Living Music Records as a forum for his musical and ecological vision. The name alludes to his desire to make timeless music in natural acoustic spaces like stone churches, canyons, and barns.
more...Sir George Ivan Morrison OBE (born 31 August 1945) is a singer-songwriter and musician from Northern Ireland whose recording career spans seven decades.
Morrison began performing as a teenager in the late 1950s, playing a variety of instruments including guitar, harmonica, keyboards and saxophone for various Irish showbands, covering the popular hits of that time. Known as “Van the Man” to his fans, Morrison rose to prominence in the mid-1960s as the lead singer of the Belfast R&Bband Them, with whom he wrote and recorded “Gloria“, which became a garage bandstaple. His solo career started under the pop-hit oriented guidance of Bert Berns with the release of the hit single “Brown Eyed Girl” in 1967.
After Berns’s death, Warner Bros. Records bought Morrison’s contract and allowed him three sessions to record Astral Weeks (1968). While initially a poor seller, the album has come to be regarded as a classic. Moondance (1970) established Morrison as a major artist, and he built on his reputation throughout the 1970s with a series of acclaimed albums and live performances.
Much of Morrison’s music is structured around the conventions of soul music and early rhythm and blues. An equal part of his catalogue consists of lengthy, spiritually inspired musical journeys that show the influence of Celtic tradition, jazz and stream of consciousness narrative, such as the album Astral Weeks. The two strains together are sometimes referred to as “Celtic soul”, and his music has been described as attaining “a kind of violent transcendence”.
Morrison’s albums have performed well in the UK and Ireland, with more than 40 reaching the UK top 40. He has scored top ten albums in the UK in four consecutive decades, following the success of 2021’s Latest Record Project, Volume 1. Eighteen of his albums have reached the top 40 in the United States, twelve of them between 1997 and 2017. Since turning 70 in 2015, he has released – on average – more than an album a year. He has received two Grammy Awards, the 1994 Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, the 2017 Americana Music Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting and has been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fameand the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2016, he was knighted for services to the music industry and to tourism in Northern Ireland.
more...Friday August 30th 2024 6pm Temple Israel Erev Shabbat Service with Inbal Sharett-Singer, Jayson Rodovsky, Jeff Bailey, Pete Whitman and mick laBriola.
more...The glowing red clouds seen in this Picture of the Week show dense gas regions where new stars are being born in the RCW 106 region. But only 1% of this gas will actually go on to create stars, and astronomers don’t know why this percentage is so low. We do know that star formation takes place when regions of these huge clouds of cold gas are able to clump together and eventually collapse into newborn stars, which happens at a critical density. But once we go past that density, do even denser regions produce even more stars, and could this help to explain the 1% mystery? New results from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics (link accessible from 20 August), suggest this is not the case: denser regions are not more efficient at forming stars. This is perhaps explained by the way these denser clouds fragment into filamentary structures and cores out of which stars will form, but leaves many questions still to be answered. This Picture of the Week highlights these areas of interest. The image imposes a red map of dense gas, imaged with the ArTéMiS camera at APEX, over an optical image taken with the VLT Survey Telescope. While APEX continues to investigate this stellar mystery, we can expect to see many more stunning images like this.
more...Lucious Brinson Johnson (August 30, 1934 – March 18, 1976), known as Luther “Georgia Boy” Johnson, was an American Chicago blues and electric bluesguitarist, singer and songwriter. AllMusic journalist Ron Wynn stated, “Johnson’s own inimitable vocals, raspy lines and tart guitar eventually create his own aura… a good, occasionally outstanding blues artist.”
Johnson was born Lucious Brinson Johnson in Davisboro, Georgia. He was raised on a farm and taught himself to play guitar. After completing his service in the US Army, Johnson played guitar with the Milwaukee Supreme Angels, a local gospel group in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. However, he gravitated towards blues and formed his own trio in Milwaukee. He relocated to Chicago, Illinois, in the early 1960s. He backed Elmore James prior to James’s death in 1963, and joined Muddy Waters‘ backing band in 1966. Johnson worked with various musicians during this period, including Chicago Bob Nelson. He recorded his debut album, Come On Home, in 1968, with Muddy Waters’ band.
more...Robert Dennis Crumb (/krʌm/; born August 30, 1943) is an American cartoonist who often signs his work R. Crumb. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk cultureof the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture.
Crumb contributed to many of the seminal works of the underground comix movement in the 1960s, including being a founder of the first successful underground comix publication, Zap Comix, contributing to all 16 issues. He was additionally contributing to the East Village Other and many other publications, including a variety of one-off and anthology comics. During this time, inspired by psychedelics and cartoons from the 1920s and 1930s, he introduced a wide variety of characters that became extremely popular, including countercultural icons Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, and the images from his Keep On Truckin’ strip. Sexual themes abounded in all these projects, often shading into scatological and pornographic comics. In the mid-1970s, he contributed to the Arcade anthology; following the decline of the underground, he moved towards biographical and autobiographical subjects while refining his drawing style, a heavily crosshatched pen-and-ink style inspired by late 19th- and early 20th-century cartooning. Much of his work appeared in a magazine he founded, Weirdo (1981–1993), which was one of the most prominent publications of the alternative comics era. As his career progressed, his comic work became more autobiographical.
In 1991 Crumb was inducted into the comic book industry’s Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, and in 1994 the Terry Zwigoff film Crumb explored his artistic career and personal life. He was married to cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, with whom he frequently collaborated. Their daughter Sophie Crumb has also followed a cartooning career.
more...McKinley Howard “Kenny” Dorham (August 30, 1924 – December 5, 1972) was an American jazz trumpeter, composer, and occasional singer. Dorham’s talent is frequently lauded by critics and other musicians, but he never received the kind of attention or public recognition from the jazz establishment that many of his peers did. For this reason, writer Gary Giddins said that Dorham’s name has become “virtually synonymous with ‘underrated’.” Dorham also composed the jazz standard “Blue Bossa“, which was first recorded by his associate Joe Henderson.
Dorham was one of the most active bebop trumpeters. Early in his career, he played in the big bands of Lionel Hampton, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, and Mercer Ellington, and in Charlie Parker‘s quintet. He joined Parker’s band in December 1948. He was a charter member of the original cooperative the Jazz Messengers. He also recorded as a sideman with Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins, and he replaced Clifford Brownin the Max Roach Quintet after Brown’s death in 1956. In addition to sideman work, Dorham led his own groups, including the Jazz Prophets (formed shortly after Art Blakey took over the Jazz Messengers name). The Jazz Prophets, featuring a young Bobby Timmons on piano, bassist Sam Jones, and tenorman J. R. Monterose, with guest Kenny Burrell on guitar, recorded a live album, ‘Round About Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia, in 1956 for Blue Note. During his final years, Dorham suffered from kidney disease, from which he died on December 5, 1972, aged 48.
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