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Bill Kreutzmann

May 7, 2022

William Kreutzmann Jr. (/ˈkrɔɪtsmɑːn/ KROYTS-mahn; born May 7, 1946) is an American drummer and founding member of the Grateful Dead rock band. He played with the Grateful Dead for its entire thirty-year career, usually alongside fellow drummer Mickey Hart, and has continued to perform with former members of the Grateful Dead in various lineups, and with his own bands BK3, 7 Walkers and Billy & the Kids.

Kreutzmann started playing drums at the age of 13. At first he practiced on a Slingerland drum kit lent to him. As a teenager, he was practicing drums alone in a large building at his high school when Aldous Huxley and another man walked in. Huxley told Bill he’d never heard anything like it, and encouraged him in his drumming – despite the fact Bill had been told by his sixth grade music teacher that he could not keep a beat. Kreutzmann continued to practice a great deal. His earliest enthusiasm was for the music of Ray Charles and other R&B musicians. He has explained that later he learned some advanced technique or tricks from Mickey Hart.

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Johannes Brahms

May 7, 2022

Johannes Brahms; 7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897) was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, he spent much of his professional life in Vienna. He is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the “Three Bs” of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.

Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, voice, and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire.

Brahms has been considered both a traditionalist and an innovator, by his contemporaries and by later writers. His music is rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. Embedded within those structures are deeply romantic motifs. While some contemporaries found his music to be overly academic, his contribution and craftsmanship were admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms’s works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers.

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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

May 7, 2022

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. He wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, the Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy, several symphonies, and the opera Eugene Onegin.

Although musically precocious, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant. There was scant opportunity for a musical career in Russia at the time and no system of public music education. When an opportunity for such an education arose, he entered the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1865. The formal Western-oriented teaching that he received there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five with whom his professional relationship was mixed.

Tchaikovsky’s training set him on a path to reconcile what he had learned with the native musical practices to which he had been exposed from childhood. From that reconciliation, he forged a personal but unmistakably Russian style. The principles that governed melody, harmony and other fundamentals of Russian music ran completely counter to those that governed Western European music, which seemed to defeat the potential for using Russian music in large-scale Western composition or for forming a composite style, and it caused personal antipathies that dented Tchaikovsky’s self-confidence. Russian culture exhibited a split personality, with its native and adopted elements having drifted apart increasingly since the time of Peter the Great. That resulted in uncertainty among the intelligentsia about the country’s national identity, an ambiguity mirrored in Tchaikovsky’s career.

Despite his many popular successes, Tchaikovsky’s life was punctuated by personal crises and depression. Contributory factors included his early separation from his mother for boarding school followed by his mother’s early death; the death of his close friend and colleague Nikolai Rubinstein; and the collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck, who was his patroneven though they never met. His homosexuality, which he kept private, has traditionally also been considered a major factor though some musicologists now downplay its importance. Tchaikovsky’s sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera, but there is an ongoing debate as to whether cholera was indeed the cause, and also whether the death was accidental or intentional.

While his music has remained popular among audiences, critical opinions were initially mixed. Some Russians did not feel it was sufficiently representative of native musical values and expressed suspicion that Europeans accepted the music for its Western elements. In an apparent reinforcement of the latter claim, some Europeans lauded Tchaikovsky for offering music more substantive than base exoticism and said he transcended stereotypes of Russian classical music. Others dismissed Tchaikovsky’s music as “lacking in elevated thought” and derided its formal workings as deficient because they did not stringently follow Western principles.

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FREE UKRAINE The Ukrainian Folk

May 7, 2022

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Daily Roots Yami Bolo

May 7, 2022

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Cosmos NGC 3572

May 6, 2022

NGC 3572. A beautiful emission nebula and star cluster it sails far southern skies within the nautical constellation Carina. Stars from NGC 3572 are toward top center in the telescopic frame that would measure about 100 light-years across at the cluster’s estimated distance of 9,000 light-years. The visible interstellar gas and dust is part of the star cluster’s natal molecular cloud. Dense streamers of material within the nebula, eroded by stellar winds and radiation, clearly trail away from the energetic young stars. They are likely sites of ongoing star formation with shapes reminiscent of the Tadpoles of IC 410 better known to northern skygazers. In the coming tens to hundreds of millions of years, gas and stars in the cluster will be dispersed though, by gravitational tides and by violent supernova explosions that end the short lives of the massive cluster stars.

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David Friesen

May 6, 2022

David Friesen (born May 6, 1942 in Tacoma, Washington) is an American jazz bassist. He plays double bass and electric upright bass.

Friesen began playing bass while serving in the United States Army in Germany. He played with John Handy and Marian McPartland and following this, with Joe Henderson; in 1975, he toured in Europe with Billy Harper. His first album as a session leader appeared that year. In 1976, he began collaborating with guitarist John Stowell; the pair would work together often. He appeared with Ted Curson at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1977. Following this, he worked with Ricky Ford, Duke Jordan, Mal Waldron, and Paul Horn. His 1989 album Other Times, Other Places reached No. 11 on the U.S. Billboard Top Jazz Albums chart. He has also played with Chick Corea, Michael Brecker, Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon, Kenny Garrett, Dizzy Gillespie, and Mal Waldron.

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Hasaan Ibn Ali

May 6, 2022

Hasaan Ibn Ali (born William Henry Langford, Jr.;  May 6, 1931 – 1980) was an American jazz pianist and composer.

Ibn Ali was strongly influenced by Elmo Hope, and his playing was rapid and intense, retaining a sense of rhythm even when his style became increasingly unconventional. Only one recording of his playing – The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan – was released in his lifetime. Ibn Ali built a reputation in Philadelphia, where he influenced musicians including John Coltrane, but he remained little known elsewhere.

Hasaan Ibn Ali was born William Henry Langford, Jr. in Philadelphia on May 6, 1931. His mother was a domestic worker.[4] In 1946 (aged 15), he toured with trumpeter Joe Morris‘s rhythm and blues band. In 1950, he played locally with Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, J. J. Johnson, Max Roach, and others. Based in Philadelphia, Ibn Ali freelanced and acquired a reputation locally as “an original composer and theorist”, in musicologist Lewis Porter‘s words. The pianist performed with Horace Arnold in New York City in 1959, and again in 1961–62, in a trio with Henry Grimes.

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Flamenco Fridays Rosario la Tremendita

May 6, 2022

Tientos, a slow cante jondo music and dance in a four-count rhythm, was first developed by the singer Enrique el Mellizo (1848 -1906) as an expressive variation of the Tangos. Poet Federico García Lorca considered the Tientos to be almost liturgical in its solemnity. Traditional Tientos lyrics – letras – set a dark mood, and have to do with loss, unrequited love, imprisionment, longing for freedom and other serious messages. Dancers strive to capture this mood in their solos.

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Daily Roots Anthony B

May 6, 2022

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A Challenge to Change with Zamya Theater 5-5-22

May 5, 2022

Performance of Challenge to Change by Zamya Theater Homeless Theater Project @ Opportunity Center at Catholic Charities in St Paul 130pm performance. Music by mick laBriola.

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Cosmos NGC 3521

May 5, 2022

Gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 3521 is a mere 35 million light-years away, toward the northern springtime constellation Leo. Relatively bright in planet Earth’s sky, NGC 3521 is easily visible in small telescopes but often overlooked by amateur imagers in favor of other Leo spiral galaxies, like M66 and M65. It’s hard to overlook in this colorful cosmic portrait though. Spanning some 50,000 light-years the galaxy sportscharacteristic patchy, irregular spiral arms laced with dust, pink star forming regions, and clusters of young, blue stars. This deep image also finds NGC 3521 embedded in fainter, gigantic, bubble-like shells. The shells are likely tidal debris, streams of stars torn from satellite galaxies that have undergone mergers with NGC 3521 in the distant past.

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Michele Ramo

May 5, 2022
Guitarist, Violinist, Mandolinist, Composer, Teacher, Clinician May 5th 1964
(Pronounced: Me-kel-ay), was born Michele Pugliese-Ramo in the Italian Mediterranean fishing town of Mazara Del Vallo, Italy – on the coast of Sicily. He grew up in a small village of 300. His playgrounds were vast grape-vineyards, rocky hillsides and olive orchards… sheep & rock-lizards. He played guitar with the barbers in the little town square and hid his school books in the fields of ancient volcanic caves because he only wanted to ‘play music’ – not go to school! At age 13 he entered music conservatory where he took up violin studies. By 17 he had his first professional contract with the Italian State Opera House “Teatro Massimo” in Palermo. After five years in various Italian state symphony orchestras at age 23, Michéle, always the ‘independent doer’, made musical shock waves within his circles by quitting and moving to the United States to pursue his work as a composer and instrumentalist in jazz. His first stop: New York City. Unable to speak English and soon out of money he went to Detroit where he knew a friend from his town. For the next twelve years Detroit was his home where he was befriended by Jazz greats such as trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, pianists Harold Mckinney, Ken Cox and Teddy Harris Jr., drummers Roy Brooks and Lawrence G. Williams … It was here he continued on the guitar and put the violin away for ten years. He met singer Heidi Hepler who had been living and performing in Rome, Italy… She heard the violin one day… Well, it is out of the case now!

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Stanley Cowell

May 5, 2022

Stanley Cowell (May 5, 1941 – December 17, 2020) was an American jazz pianist and co-founder of the Strata-East Records label. Cowell was born in Toledo, Ohio. He began playing the piano around the age of four, and became interested in jazz after seeing Art Tatum at the age of six. Tatum was a family friend.

After high school, Cowell studied at Oberlin College and received a graduate degree in classical piano from the University of Michigan. During his time at college, he played with jazz multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk, which proved to be formative for the pianist. He moved to New York in the mid-1960s.

Cowell played with Marion Brown, Max Roach, Bobby Hutcherson, Clifford Jordan, Harold Land, Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz. Cowell played with trumpeter Charles Moore and others in the Detroit Artist’s Workshop Jazz Ensemble in 1965–66.

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J. B. Lenoir

May 5, 2022

J. B. Lenoir ; March 5, 1929 – April 29, 1967) was an American blues guitarist and singer-songwriter, active in the Chicago blues scene in the 1950s and 1960s.

Lenoir was born in Monticello, Mississippi.His full given name was simply “J. B.”; the letters were not initials. Lenoir’s guitar-playing father introduced him to the music of Blind Lemon Jefferson, which became a major influence. During the early 1940s, Lenoir worked with the blues artists Sonny Boy Williamson II and Elmore James in New Orleans.He was later influenced by Arthur Crudup and Lightnin’ Hopkins. 

Lenoir died on April 29, 1967, in Urbana, Illinois, at the age 38, of injuries he had suffered in a car crash three weeks earlier.

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SUPPORT UKRAINE Mutyn Village Women Folk Choir

May 5, 2022

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Daily Roots Michael Rose

May 5, 2022

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May the 4th Be With You

May 4, 2022

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Cosmos NGC 896

May 4, 2022

NGC 896 is an emission nebula located in the constellation Cassiopeia. This nebula is part of the Heart nebula (IC 1805). It consists of the shiny part on the western edge of IC 1805. NGC 896 was discovered by the German-British astronomer William Herschel in 1787. Located about 7,500 light-years from Earth in the brightest part of the Heart Nebula, is the brilliant NGC 896 Emission Nebula in constellation Cassiopeia.

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Sharon Jones

May 4, 2022

Sharon Lafaye Jones (May 4, 1956 – November 18, 2016) was an American soul and funk singer. She was the lead singer of Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, a soul and funk band based in Brooklyn, New York. Jones experienced breakthrough success relatively late in life, releasing her first record when she was 40 years old. In 2014, Jones was nominated for her first Grammy, in the category Best R&B Album, for Give the People What They Want.

Jones was born in Augusta, Georgia, the daughter of Ella Mae Price Jones and Charlie Jones, living in adjacent North Augusta, South CarolinaJones was the youngest of six children; her siblings are Dora, Charles, Ike, Willa and Henry. Jones’s mother raised her deceased sister’s four children as well as her own. She moved the family to New York City when Sharon was a young child. As children, she and her brothers would often imitate the singing and dancing of James Brown. Her mother happened to know Brown, who was also from Augusta.

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