Blog

World Music Noori & his Dorpa Band

June 6, 2022

more...

Daily Roots Michael Prophet

June 6, 2022

more...

Diego LaBriola Memorial 6-5-22

June 5, 2022

Sunday June 5th 2022. 20 years since the death of Diego. Memorial site at 3932 Cedar Ave S Minneapolis today. https://diego-labriola.virtual-memorials.com

 

more...

Cosmos NGC 3372

June 5, 2022

The Carina Nebula or Eta Carinae Nebula (catalogued as NGC 3372; also known as the Great Carina Nebula) is a large, complex area of bright and dark nebulosity in the constellation Carina, and it is located in the Carina–Sagittarius Arm. The nebula is approximately 8,500 light-years (2,600 pc) from Earth.

The nebula has within its boundaries the large Carina OB1 association and several related open clusters, including numerous O-type stars and several Wolf–Rayet stars. Carina OB1 encompasses the star clusters Trumpler 14 and Trumpler 16. Trumpler 14 is one of the youngest known star clusters at half a million years old. Trumpler 16 is the home of WR 25, currently the most luminous star known in our Milky Way galaxy, together with the less luminous but more massive and famous Eta Carinae star system and the O2 supergiant HD 93129A. Trumpler 15, Collinder 228, Collinder 232, NGC 3324, and NGC 3293 are also considered members of the association. NGC 3293 is the oldest and furthest from Trumpler 14, indicating sequential and ongoing star formation.

The nebula is one of the largest diffuse nebulae in our skies. Although it is four times as large as and even brighter than the famous Orion Nebula, the Carina Nebula is much less well known due to its location in the southern sky. It was discovered by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille in 1752 from the Cape of Good Hope.

more...

Laurie Anderson

June 5, 2022

Laura Phillips Anderson (born June 5, 1947), known as Laurie Anderson, is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She became more widely known outside the art world when her single “O Superman” reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.

Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she collaborated with Interval Research to develop an instrument she called a “talking stick,” a six-foot (1.8 m) long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds.

Anderson met singer-songwriter Lou Reed in 1992, and she was married to him from April 2008 until his death in 2013.

more...

Peter Erskine

June 5, 2022

Peter Erskine (born June 5, 1954) is an American jazz drummer who was a member of the jazz fusion groups Weather Report and Steps Ahead.

Erskine was born in Somers Point, New Jersey, U.S. He began playing the drums at the age of four. He graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, then studied percussion at Indiana University. His professional music career started in 1972 when he joined the Stan Kenton Orchestra. After three years with Kenton, he joined Maynard Ferguson for two years. In 1978, he joined Weather Reportjoining Jaco Pastorius in the rhythm section. After four years and five albums with Weather Report and the Jaco Pastorius big band’s Word of Mouth, he joined Steps Ahead.

In 1983, he performed on the Antilles Records release Swingrass ’83. He toured the US in 1992 with Chick Corea.

Erskine splits his time as a musician and a professor at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California.

He was featured on Kate Bush‘s 2005 album Aerial, where Erskine teamed with bass player Eberhard Weber. Diana Krall, Eliane Elias, Queen Latifah and Linda Ronstadt, as well as Scottish and Finnish classical orchestras, have had Erskine perform as a featured musician.

more...

Jerry González

June 5, 2022

Jerry González (June 5, 1949 – October 1, 2018) was an American bandleader, trumpeter and percussionist of Puerto Rican descent. Together with his brother, bassist Andy González, he played an important role in the development of Latin jazz during the late 20th century. During the 1970s, both played alongside Eddie Palmieri and in Manny Oquendo‘s Conjunto Libre, and from 1980 to 2018 they directed The Fort Apache Band. From 2000 to 2018, Jerry González resided in Madrid, where he fronted Los Piratas del Flamenco and El Comando de la Clave. In October 2018, he died of a heart attack after a fire in his home in Madrid.

Jerry González was born in 1949 in Manhattan, on 158th Street and 3rd Avenue, and moved to the Edenwald Houses in the Eastchester section of the Bronx at the age of 4. He was raised in a strong musical atmosphere, with the strains of Latin, Afro-Cuban and jazz music always in his ear, establishing his musical appreciation and molding his future work as an artist. His father, Jerry González Sr., was a master of ceremonies and lead singer for bands during the Palladium era and sang with musicians like Claudio Ferrer. In junior high school he began playing trumpet and congas and jamming with local bands. After deciding this was his calling, González completed his formal studies at New York College of Music and New York University. He started his professional career playing with Lewellyn Mathews in the 1964 New York World’s Fair. In 1970 he started playing congas with Dizzy Gillespie. With Gillespie’s support and encouragement, González was able to fuse the African-based rhythms onto jazz elements without compromising the essence of either.

more...

SAVE UKRAINE GO_A

June 5, 2022

more...

Daily Roots Dennis Matumbi

June 5, 2022

more...

Patty Lacy

June 4, 2022

Performing for Patty Lacy with Victor Zupanc for Sauer Foundation Saturday June 4th 2022 6-7pm

more...

Cosmos Tau Herculids

June 4, 2022

On May 31 tens of parallel meteor streaks were recorded in this 8 degree wide field of view of planet Earth’s limb from space. The image is one of a series of 5 minute long observations by the orbiting Yangwang-1 space telescope. It was captured at 03:43 UT, near the peak of the Tau Herculid meteor shower. As predicted, the meteor shower was an active one this year, caused as Earth swept through a relatively dense stream of debris from disintegrating Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, but was lacking bright meteors. Nearly all of the Tau Herculid meteors in the Yangwang-1 image are too faint to be detected by groundbased instruments. But on that date patient earthbound skywatchers under clear skies still enjoyed a memorable showing of the Tau Herculids.

more...

Mikey Dread

June 4, 2022

Michael George Campbell (4 June 1954 – 15 March 2008), better known as Mikey Dread, was a Jamaican singer, producer, and broadcaster. He was one of the most influential performers and innovators in reggae music.

Born in Port Antonio, one of five children, from an early age, Campbell showed a natural aptitude for engineering and electronicsAs a teenager he performed with the Safari and Sound of Music sound systems, and worked on his high school’s radio station.

He studied electrical engineering at the College of Arts, Science and Technology, and in 1976, started out as an engineer with the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC). Campbell wasn’t impressed that the JBC’s playlists mainly consisted of bland, foreign pop music at a time when some of the most potent reggae was being recorded in Jamaica. He convinced his JBC bosses to give him his own radio program called Dread at the Controls, where he played almost exclusively reggae. Before long, Campbell (now using the DJ name Mikey Dread) had the most popular program on the JBC. Well known for its fun and adventurous sonic style, Dread at the Controls became a hit all over Jamaica. Examples of Mikey Dread’s distinctive radio chatter can be heard on the US release of the RAS label LP African Anthem Dubwise.

more...

Paquito D’Rivera

June 4, 2022

Francisco de Jesús Rivera Figueras (born 4 June 1948), known as Paquito D’Rivera, is a Cuban-American alto saxophonist, clarinetist and composer. He was a member of the Cuban songo band Irakereand, since the 1980s, he has established himself as a bandleader in the United States. His smooth saxophone tone and his frequent combination of Latin jazz and classical music have become his trademarks.

Francisco de Jesús Rivera Figueras was born on 4 June 1948 in Havana, Cuba. His father played classical saxophone, entertained his son with Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman records, and he sold musical instruments. He took D’Rivera to clubs like the Tropicana (frequented by his musician friends and customers) and to concert bands and orchestras.

At age five, D’Rivera began saxophone lessons by his father. In 1960, he attended the Havana Conservatory of Music, where he learned saxophone and clarinet and met Chucho Valdés. In 1965, he was a featured soloist with the Cuban National Symphony Orchestra. He and Valdés founded Orchestra Cubana de Música Moderna and then in 1973 the group Irakere, which fused jazz, rock, classical, and Cuban music.

more...

Anthony Braxton

June 4, 2022

Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945 Chicago) is an American experimental composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist who is best known for playing saxophones, particularly the alto. Braxton grew up on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, and was a key early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He received great acclaim for his 1969 doubleLP record For Alto, the first full-length album of solo saxophone music.

A prolific composer with a vast body of cross-genre work, the MacArthur Fellow and NEA Jazz Master has released hundreds of recordings and compositions. During six years signed to Arista Records, the diversity of his output encompassed work with many members of the AACM, including duets with co-founder and first president Muhal Richard Abrams; collaborations with electronic musician Richard Teitelbaum; a saxophone quartet with Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett; compositions for four orchestras; and the ensemble arrangements of Creative Orchestra Music 1976, which was named the 1977 DownBeat Critics’ Poll Album of the Year. Many of his projects are ongoing, such as the Diamond Curtain Wall works, in which Braxton implements audio programming language SuperCollider;[8]the Ghost Trance Music series, inspired by his studies of the Native American Ghost Dance; and Echo Echo Mirror House Music, in which musicians “play” iPods containing the bulk of Braxton’s oeuvre. He has released the first six operas in a series called the Trillium Opera Complex.

Braxton identifies as a “trans-idiomatic” composer and has repeatedly opposed the idea of a rigid dichotomy between improvisation and composition. He has written extensively about the “language music” system that forms the basis for his work and developed a philosophy of “world creativity” in his Tri-Axium Writings.

Braxton taught at Mills College from 1985 to 1990 and was Professor of Music at Wesleyan University from 1990 until his retirement at the end of 2013. He is the artistic director of the Tri-Centric Foundation, a nonprofit he founded in 1994 to support the preservation and production of works by Braxton and other artists “in pursuit of ‘trans-idiomatic’ creativity.

more...

Oliver Nelson

June 4, 2022

Oliver Edward Nelson (June 4, 1932 – October 28, 1975) was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, arranger, composer, and bandleader. His 1961 Impulse! album The Blues and the Abstract Truth(1961) is regarded as one of the most significant recordings of its era. The centerpiece of the album is the definitive version of Nelson’s composition, “Stolen Moments“. Other important recordings from the early 1960s are More Blues and the Abstract Truth and Sound Pieces, both also on Impulse!.

Oliver Nelson was born into a musical family in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. His brother was a saxophonist who played with Cootie Williams in the 1940s, and his sister sang and played piano. Nelson began learning to play the piano when he was six and started on the saxophone at eleven. Beginning in 1947 he played in “territory” bands in and around Saint Louis before joining the Louis Jordan band where he stayed from 1950 to 1951, playing alto saxophone and arranging charts for Jordan’s band.

In 1952, Nelson underwent military service in the United States Marines Corps playing woodwinds in the 3rd Marine Division band in Japan and Korea. It was in Japan that Nelson attended a concert by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra and heard Maurice Ravel‘s Ma mere l’Oye and Paul Hindemith‘s Symphony in E Flat. Nelson later recalled that this “‘was the first time that I had heard really modern music for back in St. Louis I hadn’t even known that Negroes were allowed to go to concerts. I realized everything didn’t have to sound like Beethoven or Brahms … . It was then that I decided to become a composer’.

more...

STAND WITH UKRAINE The Hardness

June 4, 2022

more...

Daily Roots Merger

June 4, 2022

more...

Cosmos Milky Way

June 3, 2022

With this creative astro-collaboration you can follow the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy as it bridges northern and southern hemisphere skies. To construct the expansive composite nightscape, skies over Observatorio El Sauce in Chile (top) were imaged on the same date but 6 hours later than the skies over the Saint-Veran observatory in the French Alps. The 6 hour time-lag allowed Earth’s rotation to align the Milky Way above domes at the two sites. All exposures were made with similar cameras and lenses mounted on simple tripods. A faint greenish airglow is visible in the dark Chilean sky that also features the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds near the observatory dome. In the French Alps light pollution is apparent, but the distant Andromeda Galaxy can still be spotted near the horizon in the northern night. On planet Earth the two observatories are separated by about 10,000 kilometers.

more...

Curtis Mayfield

June 3, 2022

Curtis Lee Mayfield (3 June 1942 – 26 December 1999 Chicago, Ill) was an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and record producer, and one of the most influential musicians behind soul and politically conscious African-American music. He first achieved success and recognition with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-inducted group The Impressions during the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and the 1960s, and later worked as a solo artist.

Mayfield started his musical career in a gospel choir. Moving to the North Side of Chicago, he met Jerry Butler in 1956 at the age of 14, and joined the vocal group The Impressions. As a songwriter, Mayfield became noted as one of the first musicians to bring more prevalent themes of social awareness into soul music. In 1965, he wrote “People Get Ready” for the Impressions, which was ranked at no. 24 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The song received numerous other awards, and was included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll, as well as being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998.

After leaving the Impressions in 1970 in the pursuit of a solo career, Mayfield released several albums, including the soundtrack for the blaxploitation film Super Fly in 1972. The soundtrack was noted for its socially conscious themes, mostly addressing problems surrounding inner city minorities such as crime, poverty and drug abuse. The album was ranked at no. 72 on Rolling Stone’s list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Mayfield was paralyzed from the neck down after lighting equipment fell on him during a live performance at Wingate Field in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York, on 13 August 1990.[10] Despite this, he continued his career as a recording artist, releasing his final album New World Order in 1996. Mayfield won a Grammy Legend Award in 1994 and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. He is a double inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a member of the Impressions in 1991, and again in 1999 as a solo artist. He was also a two-time Grammy Hall of Fame inductee. He died from complications of type 2 diabetes at the age of 57 on 26 December 1999. Mayfield died from complications of type 2 diabetes at 7:20 AM (11:20 GMT) on Sunday, 26 December 1999, at the North Fulton Regional Hospital in Roswell, Georgia. He was survived by his wife, Altheida Mayfield; his mother, Mariam Jackson; 10 children; two sisters, Carolyn Falls and Judy Mayfield; a brother, Kenneth Mayfield; and seven grandchildren.

more...

Grachan Moncur III

June 3, 2022

Grachan Moncur III (born June 3, 1937) is an American jazz trombonist. He is the son of jazz bassist Grachan Moncur II and the nephew of jazz saxophonist Al Cooper.

Born in New York City, United States, (his paternal grandfather was from the Bahamas) and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Grachan Moncur III began playing the cello at the age of nine, and switched to the trombone when he was 11. In high school, he attended the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina, the private school where Dizzy Gillespie had studied. While still at school, he began sitting in with touring jazz musicians on their way through town, including Art Blakey and Jackie McLean, with whom he formed a lasting friendship.

After high school, Moncur toured with Ray Charles (1959–62), Art Farmer and Benny Golson‘s Jazztet (1962), and Sonny Rollins. He took part in two Jackie McLean albums for Blue Note in the early 1960s, One Step Beyond and Destination… Out!, to which he also contributed the bulk of compositions. He recorded two albums of his own for Blue Note, Evolution (1963) with Jackie McLean and Lee Morgan, and Some Other Stuff (1964) with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.

Moncur joined Archie Shepp‘s ensemble, and recorded with other avant-garde players such as Marion Brown, Beaver Harris and Roswell Rudd (another free jazz trombonist). During a stay in Paris in the summer of 1969, he recorded two albums as a leader for the BYG Actuel label, New Africa and Aco Dei de Madrugada, as well as appearing as a sideman on other releases of the label. In 1974, the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra commissioned him to write Echoes of Prayer (1974), a jazz symphony featuring a full orchestra plus vocalists and jazz soloists. His sixth album as a leader, Shadows (1977) was released only in Japan. Unfortunately, he was subsequently plagued by health problems and copyright disputes and recorded only rarely. Through the 1980s, he recorded with Cassandra Wilson (1985), played occasionally with the Paris Reunion Band and Frank Lowe, appeared on Big John Patton‘s Soul Connection (1983), but mostly concentrated on teaching. In 2004, he re-emerged with a new album, Exploration, on Capri Records featuring Moncur’s compositions arranged by Mark Masters for an octet including Tim Hagans and Gary Bartz.

more...