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Ann Lee Peebles (born April 27, 1947) is an American retired singer and songwriter who gained popularity for her Memphis soul albums of the 1970s while signed to Hi Records. Her most successful singles include “I Can’t Stand the Rain“, which she wrote with her husband Don Bryant and radio broadcaster Bernie Miller, and “I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down“. In 2014, she was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame.
more...James Lee Keltner (born April 27, 1942) is an American drummer and percussionist known primarily for his session work. He was characterized by Bob Dylan biographer Howard Sounes as “the leading session drummer in America”.
Keltner was inspired to start playing because of an interest in jazz, but the popularity of jazz was declining during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it was the explosion of pop/rock in the mid-1960s that enabled him to break into recording work in Los Angeles. His first gig as a session musician was recording “She’s Just My Style” for the pop group Gary Lewis and the Playboys.
Keltner’s music career was hardly paying a living, and for several years at the outset he was supported by his wife. Toward the end of the 1960s, he finally began getting regular session work and eventually became one of the busiest drummers in Los Angeles. His earliest credited performances on record were with Gabor Szabo on the 1968 album Bacchanal.
more...Conrad Henry Kirnon (April 27, 1927 – November 30, 1994) known professionally as Connie Kay, was an American jazz and R&B drummer, who was a member of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Self-taught on drums, Kay began performing in Los Angeles in the mid-1940s. His drumming is recorded in The Hunt, the recording of a famous Los Angeles jam session featuring the dueling tenors of Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray on July 6, 1947. He recorded with Lester Young‘s quintet from 1949 to 1955 and with Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis.
Kay did R&B sessions for Atlantic Records in the early to mid-1950s, and he was featured on hit records such as “Shake, Rattle and Roll” by Big Joe Turner and Ruth Brown‘s “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean“.
more...Theodore Marcus “Teddy” Edwards (April 26, 1924 – April 20, 2003) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Edwards played with many jazz musicians, including his personal friend Charlie Parker, Roy Milton, Wynonie Harris, Vince Guaraldi, Joe Castro and Ernie Andrews. A 1947 recording with Dexter Gordon, The Duel, was an early challenge to another saxophonist, an approach he maintained whenever possible, including a recording with Houston Person. One such duel took place in the 1980s at London’s 100 Club with British tenor Dick Morrissey. In 1964, Edwards played with Benny Goodman at Disneyland, and at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
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Rehearsals Saturday & Sunday April 26th/27th Powderhorn Park. Preparing for MAYDAY Celebration on Sunday May 4th. Featuring Grandma Powderhorn. I’ll be there today. Dress rehearsal Saturday May 3rd 1030-130pm
Some 170,000 light-years across and over 200 million light-years away toward the constellation Virgo, the magnificent spiral galaxy is seen face-on in Hubble’s view. Within the galactic disk, loose streamers of star forming regions lie along the galaxy’s flocculent spiral arms. But the most striking feature of NGC 5335 is its prominent central bar. Seen in about 30 percent of galaxies, including our Milky Way, bar structures are understood to channel material inward toward the galactic center, fueling star formation. Of course, distant background galaxies are easy to spot, scattered around the sharp Hubble image. Launched in 1990, Hubble is now celebrating its 35th year exploring the cosmos from orbit around planet Earth.
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Padú del Caribe (Father of the Caribbean, born Juan Chabaya Lampe; April 26, 1920 – November 28, 2019) was an Arubanmusician and songwriter who had been recording and composing for several decades. He wrote “Aruba Dushi Tera“, a waltz that is now the national anthem for Aruba and was long a rallying cry for separation from the Netherlands Antilles, which was achieved in 1986.
more...Shankar Lakshminarayana (born 26 April 1950), better known as L. Shankar, is an Indian violinist, singer and composer who also goes by the stage nameShenkar. Known for his innovative contributions to world music, he is often regarded as one of the pioneers of East-West fusion, blending the rich traditions of Indian classical with Western genres such as rock, pop, jazz, and electronic music. Music critic Jerry Ozipko described L. Shankar as “having improvised some of the most daring, exuberant, and technically proficient music imaginable” on the violin while Simon Dove, from Bazaar Magazine said Shankar’s “phenomenal capacity for improvisation remains unsurpassed.” His extensive body of work spans a wide spectrum of genres, encompassing vocal and instrumental compositions. He has released 28 solo albums, the two latest being Full Moon and Over the Stars, which were released in September and August 2024, respectively. Shankar is credited with inventing the stereophonic Double violin (known as the LSD – L.Shankar Double Violin), which covers the orchestral string family’s range.
His world music albums with the band Shakti during the mid-70s became the ‘standard to gauge the playing and composing abilities of any world musician following in Shakti’s expansive wake”. According to Downbeat’s Critics Poll, he was listed fourth among Established Violinists, and came in second in the “Talent Deserving Wider Recognition” division in 1978. In 1990, Shankar’s talam-bending (time cycles of 9 3/4 & 6 3/4 beats) Pancha Nadai Pallavi‘ album was on the Billboard top ten world music chart for three months becoming the first traditional Indian record to reach those heights. His 1995 Raga Abheri album was nominated for a Grammy Award, in the Best World Music Album category.
With Peter Gabriel, he worked on the Grammy winning album Passion (1989), the soundtrack album for Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988),and wrote and performed vocals on Mel Gibson‘s ‘The Passion of the Christ’(2004) which won a Dove Award for Instrumental Album of the Year at the 36th GMA Dove Awards. He also worked on the soundtrack for the 2002 film Queen of the Damned with Jonathan Davis and Richard Gibbs and recorded eight songs of which five were picked for the movie. Additionally, he collaborated on the original score for NBC’s hit TV series Heroes with Wendy & Lisa. Shankar is ranked amongst the greatest violinists of popular music by Digital Dream Door.
more...John Ned Shines (April 26, 1915 – April 20, 1992) was an American blues singer and guitarist.
Shines was born in Frayser, Tennessee, today a neighborhood of Memphis. He was taught to play the guitar by his mother and spent most of his childhood in Memphis, playing slide guitar at an early age in juke joints and on the street. He moved to Hughes, Arkansas, in 1932 and worked on farms for three years, putting aside his music career. A chance meeting with Robert Johnson, his greatest influence, gave him the inspiration to return to music. In 1935, Shines began traveling with Johnson, touring in the United States and Canada. They parted in 1937, one year before Johnson’s death.
more...Vassar Carlton Clements (April 25, 1928 – August 16, 2005) was an American jazz, swing, and bluegrass fiddler. Clements has been dubbed the Father of Hillbilly Jazz, an improvisational style that blends and borrows from swing, hot jazz, and bluegrass along with roots also in country and other musical traditions. He was posthumously inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2018.
more...Friday April 25th 2025 630pm Shabbat for the Soul service with Jennifer Struss-Klein, Tami Morse, Adam Dorn, Julie Kogan White and mick laBriola.
more...Gum 37, also known as RCW54c, is a region of diffuse HII emission in the constellation Carina. This nebula is also known as the Southern Tadpole Nebula. The elephant-trunk-shaped clouds of gas and dust are highly compressed gaseous structures. Their collapse gives rise to new stars. It is these massive young stars that light up the nebula.
The nebula is located some 6,000 light-years from Earth.
Carl Allen (born April 25, 1961) is an American jazz drummer. Allen attended William Paterson University.
He has worked with a wide variety of musicians, including Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, George Coleman, Phil Woods, the Benny Green Trio, and Rickie Lee Jones.
It was with Green that Allen met bassist Christian McBride. The two have teamed up frequently, working for many combos of big name leaders. McBride recruited Allen for his band, Christian McBride & Inside Straight. Allen is that quintet’s drummer for both its first recording, Kinda Brown, and its road tours.
In 1988, Allen and Vincent Herring founded Big Apple Productions, which produced several albums featuring young jazz performers.
He joined the faculty of The Juilliard School in 2001 and became the Artistic Director of Jazz Studies in 2008. He was replaced as director by Wynton Marsalis in 2013 and left Juilliard at the end of the academic year.
In 2011, Allen appeared as himself in two episodes of the HBO series Tremé in a studio recording scene in New York City.
In 2014, he formed his own group, The Art of Elvin, to pay tribute to drummers Art Blakey and Elvin Jones. The band debuted at the Percussive Arts Society (PAS) conference in Indianapolis, Indiana with Allen on drums, Freddie Hendrix (trumpet), Tivon Pennicott(tenor sax), Xavier Davis (piano), and Yasushi Nakamura (bass).
In 2021, Allen joined the faculty of the University of Missouri – Kansas City (UKMC) Conservatory as the William D. and Mary Grant Endowed Professor of Jazz Studies.
more...Albert Nelson (April 25, 1923 – December 21, 1992), known by his stage name Albert King, was an American guitarist and singer who is often regarded as one of the greatest and most influential blues guitarists of all time. He is perhaps best known for his popular and influential album Born Under a Bad Sign (1967) and its title track. He, B. B. King, and Freddie King, all unrelated, were known as the “Three Kings of the Blues”. The left-handed Albert King was known for his “deep, dramatic sound that was widely imitated by both blues and rock guitarists”.
He was once nicknamed “The Velvet Bulldozer” because of his smooth singing and large size – he stood taller than average, with sources reporting 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) or 6 ft 7 in (2.01 m), and weighed 250 lb (110 kg) – and also because he drove a bulldozer in one of his day jobs early in his career.
King was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1983. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. In 2023, he was ranked number 22 on Rolling Stone‘s 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.
more...Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996) was an American singer, songwriter and composer, sometimes referred to as the “First Lady of Song”, “Queen of Jazz”, and “Lady Ella”. She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing, timing, intonation, absolute pitch, and a “horn-like” improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.
After a tumultuous adolescence, Fitzgerald found stability in musical success with the Chick Webb Orchestra, performing across the country but most often associated with the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. Her rendition of the nursery rhyme “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” helped boost both her and Webb to national fame. After taking over the band when Webb died, Fitzgerald left it behind in 1942 to start her solo career. Her manager was Moe Gale, co-founder of the Savoy, until she turned the rest of her career over to Norman Granz, who founded Verve Records to produce new records by Fitzgerald. With Verve, she recorded some of her more widely noted works, particularly her interpretations of the Great American Songbook.
Fitzgerald also appeared in films and as a guest on popular television shows in the second half of the twentieth century. Outside her solo career, she created music with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and The Ink Spots. These partnerships produced songs such as “Dream a Little Dream of Me“, “Cheek to Cheek“, “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall“, and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)“. In 1993, after a career of nearly sixty years, she gave her last public performance. Three years later, she died at age 79 after years of declining health. Her accolades included 14 Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts, the NAACP‘s inaugural President’s Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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