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Prince Lincoln Thompson

June 18, 2022

Prince Lincoln Thompson, known as Sax (10 July 1949 in Jonestown, Kingston, Jamaica – 14 January 1999 in London, England), was a Jamaican singer, musician and songwriter with the reggae band the Royal Rasses, and a member of the Rastafari movement. He was noted for his high falsetto singing voice, very different from his spoken voice.

He began his recording career as a harmony singer along with Cedric Myton of The Congos in 1967, in a band called The Tartans, who then split up in 1969. In 1971 he was taken on by Coxsone Dodd, and recorded three songs with him at Studio One called “Daughters of Zion”, “True Experience” and “Live Up to Your Name”. In 1974, he recorded the Humanity album with Cedric Myton, Clinton Hall and Keith Peterkin, and set up the God Sent label. He had two hit singles with “Kingston 11” and “Love the Way It Should Be”.

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Paul McCartney

June 18, 2022

Sir James Paul McCartney CH MBE (born 18 June 1942) is an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame as co-lead vocalist, co-songwriter and bassist for the Beatles. One of the most successful composers and performers of all time, he is known for his melodic approach to bass-playing, versatile and wide tenor vocal range, and musical eclecticism, exploring styles ranging from pre-rock ‘n’ roll pop to classicaland electronica. His songwriting partnership with John Lennon remains the most successful in history.

Born in Liverpool, McCartney taught himself piano, guitar and songwriting as a teenager, having been influenced by his father, a jazz player, and rock ‘n’ roll performers such as Little Richard and Buddy Holly. He began his career when he joined Lennon’s skiffle group, the Quarrymen, in 1957, which evolved into the Beatles in 1960. Sometimes called “the cute Beatle”, McCartney later involved himself with the London avant-garde and spearheaded the incorporation of experimental aesthetics into the Beatles’ studio productions. Starting with the 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, he gradually became the band’s de facto leader, providing the creative impetus for most of their music and film projects. Many of his Beatles songs, including “And I Love Her“, “Yesterday“, “Eleanor Rigby“, and “Blackbird“, rank among the most covered songs in history.

After the Beatles disbanded, he debuted as a solo artist with the 1970 album McCartney and formed the band Wings with his first wife, Linda, and Denny Laine. Led by McCartney, Wings was one of the most successful bands of the 1970s, with more than a dozen international top 10 singles and albums. He resumed his solo career in 1980 and has toured as a solo artist since 1989. Without Wings, his UK or US number-one hits have included “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” (with Linda), “Coming Up“, “Pipes of Peace“, “Ebony and Ivory” (with Stevie Wonder), and “Say Say Say” (with Michael Jackson). Beyond music, he has taken part in projects to promote international charities related to such subjects as animal rights, seal hunting, land mines, vegetarianism, poverty, and music education.

McCartney has written or co-written 32 songs that have topped the Billboard Hot 100, and, as of 2009, had sales of 25.5 million RIAA-certified units in the US. His honours include two inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (as a member of the Beatles in 1988 and as a solo artist in 1999), an Academy Award, 18 Grammy Awards, an appointment as a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1965 and a knighthood in 1997 for services to music. As of 2020, he is one of the wealthiest musicians in the world, with an estimated fortune of £800 million.

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Ray McKinley

June 18, 2022

Ray McKinley (June 18, 1910 – May 7, 1995) was an American jazz drummer, singer, and bandleader.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, United States, McKinley’s parents bought him his first drum set at the age of nine. Soon after he began playing with a local band called The Jolly Jazz Band in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. He left home when he was 15 and played with Milt Shaw’s Detroiters and the Smith Ballew and Duncan-Marin bands. His first substantial professional engagement came in 1934 with the Dorsey Brothers’ Orchestra. It was with the Smith Ballew band in 1929 that McKinley met Glenn Miller. The two formed a friendship that lasted from 1929 until Miller’s death in 1944. McKinley and Miller joined the Dorsey Brothers in 1934. Miller left for Ray Noble in December 1934, while McKinley remained.

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Ray Bauduc

June 18, 2022

Ray Bauduc (June 18, 1906 – January 8, 1988) was an American jazz drummer best known for his work with the Bob Crosby Orchestra and their band-within-a-band, the Bobcats, between 1935 and 1942. He is also known for his shared composition of “Big Noise from Winnetka,” a jazz standard. Bauduc was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. He was the son of cornetist Jules Bauduc. His older brother, Jules Jr., was a banjoist and bandleader. His sister was also a musician, a pianist. Bauduc’s youthful work in New Orleans included performing in the band of Johnny Bayersdorffer, and on radio broadcasts. His New Orleans origin instilled in him a love for two-beat drumming, which he retained when he played with Bob Crosby’s swing-era big band. In 1926, he moved to New York City to join Joe Venuti‘s band. His other work in the 1920s included recording with the Original Memphis Five and the Scranton Sirens, which included Tommy Dorsey and Jimmy Dorsey.

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World Music Moktar Gania & Gnawa Soul

June 18, 2022

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Daily Roots Junior Reid

June 18, 2022

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Cosmos M63

June 17, 2022

The famous Sunflower Galaxy, Messier 63 (or NGC 5055), is a spiral galaxy located about 29 millions light-years away in the northern constellation of Canes Venatici.
The shape or morphology of this galaxy has a classification of SAbc, indicating a spiral form with no central bar (SA) and moderate to loosely wound arms (bc).
As there is a general lack of large-scale continuous spiral structure in visible light, it is considered a flocculent galaxy. However, when observed in the near infrared, a symmetric two-arm structure is seen with each arm wrapping 150° around the galaxy and extending out to 13,000 light-years from the nucleus. The halo feature around M63 is consistent with a giant stellar stream that originated from the accretion of a dwarf satellite sometime within the last 5 billion years. There are quite a lot of galaxies and galaxy clusters in the area and many big HII regions inside M63.

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Chuck Rainey

June 17, 2022

Charles Walter Rainey III (born June 17, 1940) is an American bass guitarist who has performed and recorded with many well-known acts, including Aretha Franklin, Steely Dan, and Quincy Jones. Rainey is credited for playing bass on more than 1,000 albums, and is one of the most recorded bass players in the history of recorded music.

Rainey was born in Cleveland, Ohio on June 17, 1940, and grew up in Youngstown. His parents were both amateur pianists. He learned piano, violin, and trumpet as a child and majored in brass instruments in college. He attended Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee. Rainey began playing bass guitar in the military.

After leaving the military, Rainey joined a local band. His first big professional gig was playing with Big Jay McNeely. He then joined up with Sil Austin to tour Canada and New York. In 1962, Rainey joined King Curtis and his All-Star band; in 1965, they opened for The Beatles’ 1965 US tour. He joined Quincy Jones‘s big band in 1972. By the 1970s he had played with Jerome Richardson, Grady Tate, Mose Allison, Gato Barbieri, and Gene Ammons, as well as with Eddie Vinson at the 1971 Montreux Festival.

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Tony Scott

June 17, 2022

Tony Scott (born Anthony Joseph Sciacca June 17, 1921 – March 28, 2007) was an American jazz clarinetist and arranger with an interest in folk music around the world. For most of his career he was held in high esteem in new-age music circles because of his involvement in music linked to Asian cultures and to meditation.

Born in Morristown, New Jersey, United States, Scott attended Juilliard School from 1940 to 1942. In the 1950s he worked with Sarah Vaughanand Billie Holiday. He also had a young Bill Evans and Paul Motian as side-men on several albums released between 1957 and 1959. In the late 1950s, he won on four occasions the DownBeat critics poll for clarinetist in 1955, 1957, 1958 and 1959. He was known for a more “cool” style on the instrument than his peer Buddy DeFranco who often played a more aggressive bebop style.

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Igor Stravinsky

June 17, 2022

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ComSE (17 June [O.S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music.

Stravinsky’s compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring(1913). The last transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky’s enduring reputation as a revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His “Russian phase”, which continued with works such as Renard, L’Histoire du soldat, and Les noces, was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassicism. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue, and symphony) and drew from earlier styles, especially those of the 18th century. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells, and clarity of form and instrumentation.

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Flamenco Fridays Carmen Amaya

June 17, 2022

Entrada – Entrance, often performed to a guitar falseta or to the singer’s entrance (salida) ti ri ti tran, tran…

Llamada – The dancer’s call starting on count 1, indicating that a new section is about to begin. This can be a long sequence of footwork or just one or two sets of compás (12 or 24 counts). This is also the cue for the singer’s entrance.

Letra – The dancer’s call starting on count 1, indicating that a new section is about to begin. This can be a long sequence of footwork or just one or two sets of compás (12 or 24 counts). This is also the cue for the singer’s entrance.

First Escobilla – The first extended footwork section. The dancer displays virtuosic footwork here while the guitar plays a standardized arpeggio pattern. The singer doesn’t usually sing during an escobilla. This builds to a subída, two or more sets of compás in which the dancer builds to a climax.

Silencio – This is a traditional 6-12 compás falseta performed by the guitarist. The music is slow and in the parallel minor key. The dancer interprets the music, usually in a lyrical rather than percussive manner. The final compás moves back to the major key and the original tempo, leading to the castellana.

Castellana – This is a combination footwork/remate section that leads away from the silencio into an escobilla. Usually 4 compás long, the singer sings the traditional ‘tiriti tran tran tran” or a shortened verse. This generally ends with one or more sets of compás for the remate. This section is not always performed, but is often included in a completely traditional version of the dance.

Seco – This footwork section is often performed a palo seco, where the guitar acts as a rhythm instrument as the guitarist strums muted strings, and palmistas perform strong palmas. The dancer can establish the tempo with palmas and traveling steps for two or more compás, and will continue on to perform many intricate footwork variations.

Third Escobilla – The guitar returns with traditional escobilla music while the dancer performs more intricate footwork variations.

Cambio – The traditional escobilla starts on count 1 of the compás while the Bulerías de Ca’i, the closing section, starts on beat 12. In the cambio section, the guitarist and dancer move the accent structure to beat 12 to segue into the bulerías.

Buleria de C’ai – Bulerías de Ca’i is performed as a finale/remate for the entire dance. The singer sings the traditional bulerías de Ca’i in a major key. This section transitions into the salida/cierre with a desplante llamada – a standardized 12 to 24 count pattern that is the bridge/cue into Bulerías e Ca’i.

Salida – The dancer dances off stage to traditional closing music. The dancer can also end on stage, but will usually perform a long traveling pattern leading to the closing cierre.

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Daily Roots The Chosen Brothers

June 17, 2022

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Cosmos NGC 7020

June 16, 2022

NGC 7020, a barred lenticular galaxy in the southern constellation Pavo, holds a geometric mystery. Clear but subtle in this image from Gemini South, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, the core of NGC 7020 is visibly hexagonal in shape. A hexagon is not a common shape for any celestial body, let alone an entire galaxy. To form a hexagonal structure such as this, a considerable number of stars must orbit in a very narrow band. This orbital path includes two denser regions of stars seen on the left and right sides of the hexagon, which are known as “ansae”. NGC 7020’s unusual shape seems to be the product of a very rare orbital resonance, or an as-yet-unknown phenomenon.  The 8-meter Gemini South telescope is located on Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes. Along with the other half of the international Gemini observatory, Gemini North in Hawai‘i, these two telescopes give us a deep view of the entire night sky.

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Lucky Thompson

June 16, 2022

EliLuckyThompson (June 16, 1924 – July 30, 2005) was an American jazz tenor and soprano saxophonist whose playing combined elements of swing and bebop. Although John Coltrane usually receives the most credit for bringing the soprano saxophone out of obsolescence in the early 1960s, Thompson (along with Steve Lacy) embraced the instrument earlier than Coltrane.

Thompson was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and moved to Detroit, Michigan, during his childhood. Thompson had to raise his siblings after his mother died, and he practiced saxophone fingerings on a broom handle before acquiring his first instrument. He joined Erskine Hawkins‘ band in 1942 upon graduating from high school.

After playing with the swing orchestras of Lionel Hampton, Don Redman, Billy Eckstine (alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker), Lucky Millinder, and Count Basie, he worked in rhythm and blues and then established a career in bebop and hard bop, working with Kenny Clarke, Miles Davis, Gillespie and Milt Jackson.

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Al Viola

June 16, 2022

Alfred Viola (June 16, 1919 – February 21, 2007) was an American jazz guitarist who worked with Frank Sinatra for 25 years. He played the mandolin on the soundtrack of the film The GodfatherViola grew up in an Italian family in Brooklyn and learned to play the guitar and mandolin as a teenager. He enlisted in the Army during World War II from 1942 to 1945 and played in an Army jazz band. After he was discharged in 1946, he and Page Cavanaugh, whom he had met while serving in the Army, formed a trio with bassist Lloyd Pratt. The band appeared in several films, including Romance on the High Seas with Doris Day, and played a few dates in 1946 and 1947 with Frank Sinatra. Viola continued to work with Sinatra regularly, accompanying him on several hundred studio recordings and concert dates between 1956 and 1980.

 

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FREE UKRAINE Trio Mandili

June 16, 2022

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Daily Roots Earl Sixteen

June 16, 2022

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Cosmos Virgo Cluster

June 15, 2022

The Virgo Cluster of Galaxies is the closest cluster of galaxies to our Milky Way Galaxy. The Virgo Cluster is so close that it spans more than 5 degrees on the sky – about 10 times the angle made by a full Moon. With its heart lying about 70 million light years distant, the Virgo Cluster is the nearest cluster of galaxies, contains over 2,000 galaxies, and has a noticeable gravitational pull on the galaxies of the Local Group of Galaxies surrounding our Milky Way Galaxy. The cluster contains not only galaxies filled with stars but also gas so hot it glows in X-rays. Motions of galaxies in and around clusters indicate that they contain more dark matter than any visible matter we can see. Pictured here, the heart of the Virgo Cluster includes bright Messier galaxies such as Markarian’s Eyes on the upper left, M86 just to the upper right of center, M84 on the far right, as well as spiral galaxy NGC 4388 at the bottom right.

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Harry Nilsson

June 15, 2022

Harry Edward Nilsson III (June 15, 1941 – January 15, 1994), sometimes credited as Nilsson, was an American singer-songwriter who achieved the peak of his commercial success in the early 1970s. His work is characterized by pioneering vocal overdub experiments, returns to the Great American Songbook, and fusions of Caribbean sounds. A tenor with a 3+12 octave range, Nilsson was one of the few major pop-rock recording artists to achieve significant commercial success without ever performing major public concerts or undertaking regular tours.

Born in Brooklyn, Nilsson moved to Los Angeles as a teenager to escape his family’s poor financial situation. While working as a computer programmer at a bank, he grew interested in musical composition and close-harmony singing, and was successful in having some of his songs recorded by various artists such as the Monkees. In 1967, he debuted on RCA Victor with the LP Pandemonium Shadow Show, followed by a variety of releases that include a collaboration with Randy Newman (Nilsson Sings Newman, 1970) and the original children’s story The Point! (1971). He created the first remix album (Aerial Pandemonium Ballet, 1971) and recorded the first mashup song (“You Can’t Do That“, 1967). His most commercially successful album, Nilsson Schmilsson (1971), produced the international top 10 singles “Without You” and “Coconut“. His other top 10 hit, “Everybody’s Talkin’” (1968), was featured prominently in the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy. A version of Nilsson’s “One“, released by Three Dog Night in 1969, also reached the U.S. top 10.

During a 1968 press conference, the Beatles were asked what their favorite American group was and answered “Nilsson”. Sometimes called “the American Beatle“, he soon formed close friendships with John Lennon and Ringo Starr. In the 1970s, Nilsson, Lennon and Starr were members of the Hollywood Vampires drinking club, embroiling themselves in a number of widely publicized, alcohol-fueled incidents. They produced one collaborative album, Pussy Cats (1974). After 1977, Nilsson left RCA, and his record output diminished. In response to Lennon’s 1980 murder, he took a hiatus from the music industry to campaign for gun control. For the rest of his life, he recorded only sporadically. In 1994, Nilsson died of a heart attack while in the midst of recording what became his last album, Losst and Founnd (2019).

The craft of Nilsson’s songs and the defiant attitude he projected remain touchstones for later generations of indie rock musicians. Nilsson was voted No. 62 in Rolling Stones 2015 list of the “100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time“, where he was described as “a pioneer of the Los Angeles studio sound” and “a crucial bridge” between 1960s psychedelia and the 1970s singer-songwriter era. The RIAA certified Nilsson Schmilsson and Son of Schmilsson (1972) as gold records, indicating over 500,000 units sold each. He earned Grammy Awards for two of his recordings; Best Contemporary Vocal Performance, Male in 1970 for “Everybody’s Talkin'” and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male in 1973 for “Without You”.

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Nasheet Waits

June 15, 2022

Nasheet Waits NY June 15th 1971 is an American jazz drummer.

Son of percussionist Freddie Waits, Nasheet Waits is a New York native who has been active on the jazz scene since early in his life. Before pursuing a music career, he studied psychology and history at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He also holds a degree from Long Island University in music. While studying at L.I.U, instructor Michael Carvin secured Waits a spot in the percussion ensemble M’Boom, started by drummer Max Roach and Freddie Waits, in 1970. Waits has recorded or performed with Fred Hersch, Antonio Hart, Joe Lovano, Jason Moran, Andrew Hill, Ron Carter, Tony Malaby, Bunky Green, William Parker, Eddie Gómez, Casimir Liberski, John Medeski, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and Mark Turner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Y98Ncz71k

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