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Eddie Harris

October 20, 2024

Eddie Harris (October 20, 1934 – November 5, 1996) was an American jazz musician, best known for playing tenor saxophone and for introducing the electrically amplified saxophone. He was also fluent on the electric piano and organ. His best-known compositions are “Freedom Jazz Dance”, popularized by Miles Davis in 1966, and “Listen Here”.

Harris was born and grew up in Chicago. His father was from Cuba and his mother from Mississippi. He studied music under Walter Dyett at DuSable High School, as had many other successful Chicago musicians (including Nat King Cole, Clifford Jordan, Johnny Griffin, Gene Ammons, Julian Priester, and others). He later studied music at Roosevelt University; by that time he was proficient on piano, vibraphone, and tenor saxophone. While in college he performed professionally with Gene Ammons.

After college, Harris was drafted into the United States Army and while serving in Europe, he was accepted into the 7th Army Band which also included Don Ellis, Leo Wright, and Cedar Walton.

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Jelly Roll Morton

October 20, 2024

Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (Lemott, later Morton; c. September 20, 1890 – July 10, 1941), known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer of Louisiana Creole descent. Morton was jazz’s first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential characteristics when notated. His composition “Jelly Roll Blues“, published in 1915, was one of the first published jazz compositions. He also claimed to have invented the genre.

Morton also wrote “King Porter Stomp“, “Wolverine Blues“, “Black Bottom Stomp“, and “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say”, the last being a tribute to New Orleans musicians from the turn of the 20th century.

Morton’s claim to have invented jazz in 1902 was criticized. Music critic Scott Yanow wrote, “Jelly Roll Morton did himself a lot of harm posthumously by exaggerating his worth … Morton’s accomplishments as an early innovator are so vast that he did not really need to stretch the truth.” Gunther Schuller says of Morton’s “hyperbolic assertions” that there is “no proof to the contrary” and that Morton’s “considerable accomplishments in themselves provide reasonable substantiation.

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Charles Ives

October 20, 2024

Charles Edward Ives (October 20, 1874 – May 19, 1954 Danbury, CT) was an American modernist composer, actuary and businessman. Ives was among the earliest renowned American composers to achieve recognition on a global scale. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Later in life, the quality of his music was publicly recognized through the efforts of contemporaries like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, and he came to be regarded as an “American original”. He was also among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements, and quarter tones. His experimentation foreshadowed many musical innovations that were later more widely adopted during the 20th century. Hence, he is often regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the 20th century.

Sources of Ives’s tonal imagery included hymn tunes and traditional songs; he also incorporated melodies of the town band at holiday parade, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, sentimental parlor ballads, and the melodies of Stephen Foster.

 

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World Music Seun Kuti & Egypt 80

October 20, 2024

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Daily Roots Don Carlos

October 20, 2024

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Cosmos LDN 4

October 19, 2024
LDN 43 appears as a dusty dark Cosmic Bat. Located about 1400 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, this molecular cloud is dense enough to block light not only from background stars, but from wisps of gas lit up by the nearby reflection nebula LBN 7. Far from being a harbinger of death, this 12-light year-long filament of gas and dust is actually a stellar nursery. Glowing with eerie light, the bat is lit up from inside by dense gaseous knots that have just formed young stars.
Snaking across the starfields of the constellation Ophiuchus, LDN 43 is an obscure dark nebula and star forming region that contains the embedded reflection nebulae RNO 90 and RNO 91, which are illuminated by young stellar objects (YSO).
LDN 43 has received lots of attention from professional astronomers seeking to understand the mysteries of star formation. It is one of the closest star forming regions with a distance of slightly more than 500 light years.
The area around it suffers from a high degree of dust extinction. This is best illustrated by the interstellar reddening of the majority of the stars in this image as well a few distant background galaxies. Any light traveling from these sources passes through this veil of dust, which absorbs the blue light making everything appear more red than it actually is. Interstellar dust extinction is prevalent in many parts of the Milky Way and many galaxies would shine more brightly if not for this intervening dust.
Observations with radio telescopes have uncovered multiple molecular outflows in the vicinity of RNO 91, which are an indicator of the energetic activity of nascent YSO’s. The outflows have carved out a cavity in the surrounding dark cloud, which is illuminated by the source of RNO 91, a type of YSO known as a T Tauri star. This is known to be encircled by a protoplanetary disk, which is a solar system in the making.
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Peter Tosh

October 19, 2024

Winston Hubert McIntosh OM GCOT (19 October  1944 – 11 September 1987), professionally known as Peter Tosh, was a Jamaican reggae musician. Along with Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer, he was one of the core members of the band the Wailers (1963–1976), after which he established himself as a successful solo artist and a promoter of Rastafari. He was murdered in 1987 during a home invasion.

Tosh was born Winston Hubert McIntosh in Westmoreland, the westernmost parish of Jamaica. He was abandoned by his parents and “shuffled among relatives”. When McIntosh was fifteen, his aunt died and he moved to Trenchtown in Kingston, Jamaica. He was educated in Bluefields up to age 17, then moved to Kingston to live with his aunt. He began an apprenticeship as a welder.

He first learned guitar after watching a man in the country play a song that captivated him. He watched the man play the same song for half a day, memorizing everything his fingers were doing. He then picked up the guitar and played the song back to the man. The man then asked McIntosh who had taught him to play; McIntosh told him that he had. During the early 1960s, as an aspiring musician, Tosh went to vocal teacher Joe Higgs, who gave free music lessons to young people. Through his contact with Higgs, Tosh met Robert Nesta Marley (Bob Marley) and Neville O’Reilly Livingston (Bunny Wailer). He then changed his name to Peter Tosh and the trio started singing together in 1962. Higgs taught the trio to harmonise and while developing their music, they would often play on the street corners of Trenchtown.

Tosh said he did not have any money in the house, after which Lobban and the fellow gunmen began opening fire in a reckless manner. Tosh was shot twice in the head and killed. Herbalist Wilton “Doc” Brown and disc jockey Jeff ‘Free I’ Dixon also died as a result of wounds sustained during the robbery. Several others in the house were wounded, including Tosh’s common law wife Andrea Marlene Brown, Free I’s wife Yvonne (“Joy”); Tosh’s drummer Carlton “Santa” Davis, and musician Michael Robinson.

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Farid al-Atrash

October 19, 2024

Farid al-Atrash (Arabic: فريد الأطرش; October 19, 1917 – December 26, 1974), also spelled Farid El-Atrache, was a Syrian-Egyptian singer, oudist, composer, and actor. Although born in Syria, he immigrated to Egypt at the age of nine with his mother and siblings, where he eventually became one of the most noted figures in 20th-century Arabic music.

Al-Atrash embarked on a highly successful career spanning more than four decades, recording 500 songs and starring in 31 movies. He is also widely regarded for his virtuosity on the Arabic oud, and has sometimes been given the epithet “King of the Oud” (“Malek al-Oud”).

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World Music Asro & Gangbé Brass Band

October 19, 2024

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Daily Roots The Viceroys

October 19, 2024

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Sukkot 2024 Chag Sameach

October 18, 2024

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Temple Israel Sukkot and Erev Shabbat Service

October 18, 2024

Friday October 18th 2024 6pm Sukkot Service with Inbal Sharett-Singer, Jayson Rodovsky, Jeff Bailey, Pete Whitman and mick laBriola.

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Cosmos Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS

October 18, 2024

On October 14 it was hard to capture a full view of Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. Taken after the comet’s closest approach to our fair planet, this evening skyview almost does though. With two telephoto frames combined, the image stretches about 26 degrees across the sky from top to bottom, looking west from Gates Pass, Tucson, Arizona. Comet watchers that night could even identify globular star cluster M5 and the faint apparition of periodic comet 13P Olbers near the long the path of Tsuchinshan-ATLAS’s whitish dust tail above the bright comet’s coma. Due to perspective as the Earth is crossing the comet’s orbital plane, Tsuchinshan-ATLAS also has a pronounced antitail. The antitail is composed of dust previously released and fanning out away from the Sun along the comet’s orbit, visible as a needle-like extension below the bright coma toward the rugged western horizon.

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Esperanza Spalding

October 18, 2024

Esperanza Emily Spalding (stylized in lowercase, born October 18, 1984) is an American bassist, singer, songwriter, and composer. Her accolades include five Grammy Awards, a Boston Music Award, a Soul Train Music Award, and two honorary doctorates: one from her alma mater Berklee College of Music and one from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Spalding began playing music professionally in her childhood, performing as a violinist in the Chamber Music Society of Oregon at age five. She was later both self-taught and trained on other instruments, including guitar and bass. Her proficiency earned her academic scholarships to Portland State University and Berklee College of Music, both of which she attended, studying music.

Spalding released her first album, Junjo, in 2006 on the Spanish label Ayva Musica, after which she signed with the independent American label Heads Up, who released her 2008 self-titled album. Her third studio album, Chamber Music Society (2010), was a commercial success, charting at number 34 on the Billboard 200, and resulting in Spalding winning her first Grammy Award for Best New Artist. She saw further acclaim for her fourth release, Radio Music Society (2012), which earned the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album, as well as the track “City of Roses” winning for Best Arrangement, Instrument and Vocals.

After spending the following several years performing as a supporting band player, Spalding released her fifth studio album, a funk rock-inspired concept album titled Emily’s D+Evolution, co-produced by Tony Visconti, on Concord Records. The following year, she released the album Exposure, which was limited to 7,777 copies. Her subsequent sixth studio record, 12 Little Spells, was released in 2019, and peaked at number one on Billboard’s Top Jazz Albums. The album also saw Spalding nominated for two Grammy Awards, winning in the Best Jazz Vocal Album category.

In addition to writing and performing music, Spalding has also worked as an instructor, first at the Berklee College of Music, beginning at age 20. In 2017, Spalding was appointed professor of the practice of music at Harvard University, a position from which she resigned in 2022.

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Wynton Marsalis

October 18, 2024

Wynton Learson Marsalis (born October 18, 1961) is an American trumpeter, composer, and music instructor, who is currently the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He has been active in promoting classical and jazz music, often to young audiences. Marsalis has won nine Grammy Awards, and his oratorio Blood on the Fields was the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Marsalis is the only musician to have won a Grammy Award in both jazz and classical categories in the same year.

Marsalis was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 18, 1961, and grew up in the suburb of Kenner. He is the second of six sons born to Dolores Ferdinand Marsalis and Ellis Marsalis Jr., a pianist and music teacher. He was named after jazz pianist Wynton Kelly. Branford Marsalis is his older brother and Jason Marsalis and Delfeayo Marsalis are younger. All three are jazz musicians. While sitting at a table with trumpeters Al Hirt, Miles Davis, and Clark Terry, his father jokingly suggested that he might as well get Wynton a trumpet, too. Hirt volunteered to give him one, so at the age of six Marsalis received his first trumpet.

Although he owned a trumpet when he was six, he did not practice much until he was 12. He attended Benjamin Franklin High School and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. He studied classical music at school and jazz at home with his father. He played in funk bands and a marching band led by Danny Barker. He performed on trumpet publicly as the only black musician in the New Orleans Civic Orchestra. After winning a music contest at fourteen, he performed Joseph Haydn’s trumpet concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic. Two years later he performed Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major by Bach. At seventeen, he was one of the youngest musicians admitted to Tanglewood Music Center. Marsalis applied to only two music colleges, the Juilliard School and Northwestern University. He was accepted to both schools and chose to attend the former.

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Laura Nyro

October 18, 2024

Laura Nyro ( born Laura Nigro; October 18, 1947 – April 8, 1997) was an American songwriter and singer. She achieved critical acclaim with her own recordings, particularly the albums Eli and the Thirteenth Confession (1968) and New York Tendaberry (1969), and had commercial success with artists such as Barbra Streisand and the 5th Dimension recording her songs. Wider recognition for her artistry was posthumous, while her contemporaries such as Elton John idolized her. She was praised for her emotive three-octave mezzo-soprano voice.

Between 1968 and 1970, a number of artists had hits with her songs: the 5th Dimension with “Blowing Away“, “Wedding Bell Blues“, “Stoned Soul Picnic“, “Sweet Blindness“, and “Save the Country“; Blood, Sweat & Tears and Peter, Paul and Mary with “And When I Die“; Three Dog Night and Maynard Fergusonwith “Eli’s Comin’“; and Barbra Streisand with “Stoney End“, “Time and Love”, and “Hands off the Man (Flim Flam Man)”. Nyro’s best-selling single was her recording of Carole King‘s and Gerry Goffin‘s “Up on the Roof“.

Nyro was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010, and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.

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Billy Cox

October 18, 2024

William “Billy” Cox (born October 18, 1941 Wheeling, WV) is an American bassist, best known for performing with Jimi Hendrix. Cox is the only surviving musician to have regularly played with Hendrix: first when both were in the Army, then in 1969 with the experimental group that backed Hendrix at Woodstock (informally referred to as “Gypsy Sun and Rainbows”), followed by the trio with drummer Buddy Miles that recorded the live Band of Gypsys album, and, lastly, The Cry of Love Tour trio with Mitch Mitchell back on drums. Cox continues to perform dates with the Band of Gypsys Experience and the Experience Hendrix Tour.

In addition to Hendrix, he has either been a member of the house or touring band or recorded sessions for Sam Cooke, Slim Harpo, Joe Simon, Charlie Daniels, John McLaughlin, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, Lou Rawls, Etta James, Jackie Wilson and Little Richard.

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Chuck Berry

October 18, 2024

Charles Edward Anderson Berry (October 18, 1926 – March 18, 2017 St Louis) was an American singer, guitarist and songwriter who pioneered rock and roll. Nicknamed the “Father of Rock and Roll“, he refined and developed rhythm and blues into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive with songs such as “Maybellene” (1955), “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956), “Rock and Roll Music” (1957), and “Johnny B. Goode” (1958). Writing lyrics that focused on teen life and consumerism, and developing a music style that included guitar solos and showmanship, Berry was a major influence on subsequent rock music.

Born into a middle-class black family in St. Louis, Berry had an interest in music from an early age and gave his first public performance at Sumner High School. While still a high school student, he was convicted of armed robbery and was sent to a reformatory, where he was held from 1944 to 1947. After his release, Berry settled into married life and worked at an automobile assembly plant. By early 1953, influenced by the guitar riffs and showmanship techniques of the blues musician T-Bone Walker, Berry began performing with the Johnnie Johnson Trio. His break came when he traveled to Chicago in May 1955 and met Muddy Waters, who suggested he contact Leonard Chess, of Chess Records. With Chess, he recorded “Maybellene”—Berry’s adaptation of the country song “Ida Red“—which sold over a million copies, reaching number one on Billboard magazine’s rhythm and blues chart.

By the end of the 1950s, Berry was an established star, with several hit records and film appearances and a lucrative touring career. He had also established his own St. Louis nightclub, Berry’s Club Bandstand.He was sentenced to three years in prison in January 1962 for offenses under the Mann Act—he had transported a 14-year-old girl across state lines for the purpose of having sexual intercourse. After his release in 1963, Berry had several more successful songs, including “No Particular Place to Go“, “You Never Can Tell“, and “Nadine“. However, these did not achieve the same success or lasting impact of his 1950s songs, and by the 1970s he was more in demand as a nostalgia performer, playing his past material with local backup bands of variable quality. In 1972, he reached a new level of achievement when a rendition of “My Ding-a-Ling” became his only record to top the charts. His insistence on being paid in cash led in 1979 to a four-month jail sentence and community service, for tax evasion.

Berry was among the first musicians to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on its opening in 1986; he was cited for having “laid the groundwork for not only a rock and roll sound but a rock and roll stance.”[8] Berry is included in several of Rolling Stone magazine’s “greatest of all time” lists; he was ranked fifth on its 2004 and 2011 lists of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time and 2nd greatest guitarist of all time in 2023. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll includes three of Berry’s: “Johnny B. Goode”, “Maybellene”, and “Rock and Roll Music”. “Johnny B. Goode” is the only rock-and-roll song included on the Voyager Golden Record.

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Flamenco Fridays Camarón

October 18, 2024

Soleares

The presence of a dancer expands the overall form of a soleares performance to include footwork. The dancer also has a role in each part of a performance. 

  1. Entrada/Salida 

    • The dancer’s entrance, usually performed to a guitarist’s falseta or rhythm music. Also often performed as the singer performs the temple/salida.

  2. Llamada A cue for the singer 

    • Often percussive and marked by bold gestures, the llamada cues the singer to sing the first letra.

  3. Letra

    • The dancer interprets the mood and rhythm of the singer’s letra, often using traditional steps, phrases and patterns. Most letras are approximately 7-8 sets of compás (sets of 12 count phrases).

  4. Falseta

    • It isn’t standard practice, but a guitarist will often perform one of more falsetas for the dancer to interpret lyrically. This section usually occurs after a letra.

  5. Subida, palmas, escobilla

    • The dancer will often use footwork or palmas to speed up the tempo (the subida), leading either into a fast, repetitive footwork sequence that leads into the escobilla.

  6. Llamada, letra, subida, remate

    • The sequence of steps described above, from llamada through subida, is often repeated with a second letra building up to a remate (a finish/finishing moment). This pattern may be repeated for a third letra as well, again culminating in a remate.

  7. Escobillas

    • Long sequences of footwork, accompanied on the guitar either playing a palo seco (dry) or performing a standardized arpeggio pattern.

  8. Bulerías, Finale

    • A soleares performance will often close with a transition into a bulerías, a faster form with a related underlying compás. This may be brief, just long enough to get the dancer off stage, or as long or longer than the initial soleares. The dancer may also choose to transition to soléa por bulerías briefly, and then into bulerías.

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Daily Roots Paula Clarke

October 18, 2024

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