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Roosevelt Holts was born in 1905 near the town of Tylertown in the state of Mississippi . In the 1930s, Roosevelt Holts played a little amateur guitar; his meeting with Tommy Johnsonwill change his life. Tommy Johnson is then married to Rosa Yongblood, cousin of Holts. Johnson and Holts get to know each other and Johnson teaches Holts the blues. When Johnson and his wife left Tylertown around 1937 to live in Jackson , the state capital, Roosevelt Holts followed them. He and Tommy are going to perform together in the city and those around it. After a year, Roosevelt returns to his hometown where he regularly performs. He learned the bottleneck technique from CP Martinand plays in the cities of the Delta ; at that time, he was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. Released, he moved to Bogalusa , Louisiana , where he found employment at a paper mill. A work accident made him handicapped and prevented him from carrying any heavy load . He then worked as a farmer and hardly played until he was discovered by researcher David Evans who recorded him for the first time in 1968. A few records and a few tours in the United States followed in the 1970s. Age makes him leave the studios and he dies onin the city of Franklinton .
more...Performing at Mount Zion Temple Friday January 14th 2022 630pm
more...An island universe of billions of stars, NGC 1566 lies about 60 million light-years away in the southern constellation Dorado. Popularly known as the Spanish Dancer galaxy, it’s seen face-on from our Milky Way perspective. A gorgeous grand design spiral, this galaxy’s two graceful spiral arms span over 100,000 light-years, traced by bright blue star clusters, pinkish starforming regions, and swirling cosmic dust lanes. NGC 1566’s flaring center makes the spiral one of the closest and brightest Seyfert galaxies. It likely houses a central supermassive black hole wreaking havoc on surrounding stars, gas, and dust. In this sharp southern galaxy portrait, the spiky stars lie well within the Milky Way.
Steve Jordan (born January 14, 1957) is an American musical director, producer, songwriter, and musician. During the 1970s and 1980s, he was a member of the bands for the television shows Saturday Night Live and Late Night with David Letterman.
In the early 1980s, Jordan was a member of the band “Eye Witness“, along with Anthony Jackson on bass, and Manolo Badrena on percussion. Since the mid 1980s, Jordan has also been a member of the X-Pensive Winos, the side project of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. Jordan and Richards have been production and songwriting partners on many of Richards’s solo works. In 2005, he became a member of the John Mayer Trio.Jordan also formed the band “The Verbs”, which he fronts, with his wife Meegan Voss. In August 2021, Jordan replaced the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts.
Jordan attended New York City’s High School of Music and Art, graduating in 1974.
Jordan was a teenager when he became an honorary member of Stevie Wonder’s band “WonderLove“. He also was a substitute drummer in the band “Stuff” in 1976 and played with Joe Cockeron his American tour. Later, he played drums for the Saturday Night Live band in the 1970s. When John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd toured as The Blues Brothers in the late 1970s, Jordan was their drummer, and recorded on their resulting albums, credited as Steve “Getdwa” Jordan. He did not, however, appear in the movie of the same name. Jordan also played in the New York “24th Street Band” with Will Lee, Clifford Carter, and Hiram Bullock which later became Paul Shaffer and the World’s Most Dangerous Band, which played on Late Night with David Letterman from 1982 to 1986.
more...Allen Richard Toussaint (/ˈtuːsɑːnt/; January 14, 1938 – November 10, 2015) was an American musician, songwriter, arranger and record producer, who was an influential figure in New Orleans rhythm and blues from the 1950s to the end of the century, described as “one of popular music’s great backroom figures”. Many musicians recorded Toussaint’s compositions, including “Whipped Cream“, “Java“, “Mother-in-Law“, “I Like It Like That“, “Fortune Teller“, “Ride Your Pony“, “Get Out of My Life, Woman“, “Working in the Coal Mine“, “Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky”, “Freedom For the Stallion”, “Here Come the Girls“, “Yes We Can Can“, “Play Something Sweet“, and “Southern Nights“. He was a producer for hundreds of recordings, among the best known of which are “Right Place, Wrong Time“, by his longtime friend Dr. John, and “Lady Marmalade” by Labelle.
The youngest of three children, Toussaint was born in 1938 in New Orleans and grew up in a shotgun house in the Gert Town neighborhood, where his mother, Naomi Neville (whose name he later adopted pseudonymously for some of his works), welcomed and fed all manner of musicians as they practiced and recorded with her son. His father, Clarence, worked on the railway and played trumpet. Allen Toussaint learned piano as a child and took informal music lessons from an elderly neighbor, Ernest Pinn. In his teens he played in a band, the Flamingos, with the guitarist Snooks Eaglin, before dropping out of school. A significant early influence on Toussaint was the syncopated “second-line” piano style of Professor Longhair.
more...Clarence George Carter (born January 14, 1936) is an American blues and soul singer, songwriter, musician and record producer. His most successful songs include “Slip Away“, “Back Door Santa” (both released 1968), “Patches” (1970) and “Strokin” (1986).
Born blind in Montgomery, Alabama on January 14, 1936, Carter attended the Alabama School for the Blind in Talladega, Alabama, and Alabama State College in Montgomery, graduating in August 1960 with a Bachelor of Science degree in music. His professional music career began with friend Calvin Scott, signing to the Fairlane label to release “I Wanna Dance But I Don’t Know How”, as Clarence & Calvin, the following year. After the 1962 release of “I Don’t Know (School Girl),” the pair joined Duke Records, renaming themselves the C & C Boys and releasing four singles for the label, though none were commercially successful. In 1965 the duo recorded “Step by Step” at Rick Hall‘s FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals; it was released on the Atlantic Records‘ subsidiary Atco label, but it also failed to chart.
more...Grady Tate (January 14, 1932 – October 8, 2017)[1] was an American jazz and soul-jazz drummer and baritone vocalist. In addition to his work as sideman, Tate released many albums as leader and lent his voice to songs in the animated Schoolhouse Rock! series.
Tate was born in Hayti, Durham, North Carolina, United States. In 1963 he moved to New York City, where he became the drummer in Quincy Jones‘s band.
Grady Tate’s drumming helped to define a particular hard bop, soul jazz and organ trio sound during the mid-1960s and beyond. His slick, layered and intense sound is instantly recognizable for its understated style in which he integrates his trademark subtle nuances with sharp, crisp “on top of the beat” timing (in comparison to playing slightly before, or slightly after the beat). The Grady Tate sound can be heard prominently on many of the classic Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery albums recorded on the Verve label in the 1960s.
During the 1970s he was a member of the New York Jazz Quartet. In 1981 he played drums and percussion for Simon and Garfunkel’s Concert in Central Park.
more...Kenneth Vincent John Wheeler, OC (14 January 1930 – 18 September 2014) was a Canadian composer and trumpet and flugelhorn player, based in the U.K. from the 1950s onwards.
Most of his performances were rooted in jazz, but he was also active in free improvisation and occasionally contributed to rock music recordings. Wheeler wrote over one hundred compositions and was a skilled arranger for small groups and large ensembles. Wheeler was the patron of the Royal Academy Junior Jazz course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5ReeUBVwmQ
more...Verdiales are a Flamenco music style, and song form belonging to cante chico.
Originating in Almogía, near the Spanish port of Málaga in Andalucía, it is based upon the fandango. For this reason, the verdiales are sometimes known as fandangos de Málaga.
Normally played in the key of E phrygian (key of C major with his fifth sharp) and rarely in A minor, the verdiales have a 12-count rhythm similar to the soleares, and bulerías.
Listen to verdiales(2:18, 502Kb). This example shows some of the more common falsetas you are likely to hear at an informal flamenco performance.
more...
Supernova remnant Simeis 147. Also cataloged as Sharpless 2-240 it goes by the popular nickname, the Spaghetti Nebula. Seen toward the boundary of the constellations Taurus and Auriga, it covers nearly 3 degrees or 6 full moons on the sky. That’s about 150 light-years at the stellar debris cloud’s estimated distance of 3,000 light-years. This composite includes image data taken through narrow-band filters where reddish emission from ionized hydrogen atoms and doubly ionized oxygen atoms in faint blue-green hues trace the shocked, glowing gas. The supernova remnant has an estimated age of about 40,000 years, meaning light from the massive stellar explosion first reached Earth 40,000 years ago. But the expanding remnant is not the only aftermath. The cosmic catastrophe also left behind a spinning neutron star or pulsar, all that remains of the original star’s core.
Vido William Musso (January 16, 1913 – January 9, 1982) was an American jazz saxophonist.
Musso moved with his family from Sicily to the U.S. in July 1920, having arrived at the Port of New York on the Italian steamship Patria. They lived in Detroit, where Musso started learning to play clarinet. Ten years later, he went to Los Angeles and formed a big band with Stan Kenton in 1935.Musso dropped out the next year to work with Gus Arnheim, Benny Goodman, and Gene Krupa. He accompanied Billie Holiday and pianist Teddy Wilson on recordings in the late 1930s. He replaced Bunny Berigan as the leader of his band and tried unsuccessfully at other times during the 1930s and 1940s to be a big band leader. But most of his career was spent as a sideman. After returning to Goodman, he was a member of big bands led by Harry James, Woody Herman, and Tommy Dorsey. He went back to play with Kenton during the middle 1940s. Having moved to California, he retired around 1975.
more...Joe Pass (born Joseph Anthony Jacobi Passalaqua; January 13, 1929 – May 23, 1994) was an American jazz guitarist. Pass worked often with pianist Oscar Peterson and vocalist Ella Fitzgerald.
Pass found work as a performer as early as age 14. He played with bands led by Tony Pastor and Charlie Barnet, honing his guitar skills while learning the ropes to the music industry. He began traveling with small jazz groups and moved from Pennsylvania to New York City. Within a few years he had developed an addiction to heroin. He moved to New Orleans for a year and played bebop for strippers. Pass revealed to Robert Palmer of Rolling Stone that he had suffered a “nervous breakdown” in New Orleans “because [he] had access to every kind of drug there and was up for days […] [he] would come to New York a lot, then get strung out and leave.” Pass spent much of the 1950s in and out of prison for drug-related convictions. In the same Rolling Stone interview, Pass said, “staying high was my first priority; playing was second; girls were third. But the first thing really took all my energy.” He recovered after a two-and-a-half-year stay in the Synanon rehabilitation program. Pass largely put music on hiatus during his prison sentence.
Pass recorded a series of albums during the 1960s for Pacific Jazz Records, including Catch Me, 12-String Guitar, For Django, and Simplicity. In 1963, he received Downbeat magazine’s New Star Award. He also played on Pacific Jazz recordings by Gerald Wilson, Bud Shank, and Les McCann. He toured with George Shearing in 1965. During the 1960s, he did mostly TV and recording session work in Los Angeles. Norman Granz, the producer of Jazz at the Philharmonic and the founder of Verve Records, signed Pass to Pablo Records in December 1973. In 1974, Pass released his solo album Virtuoso on Pablo. Also in 1974, Pablo released the album The Trio with Pass, Oscar Peterson, and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. He performed with them on many occasions throughout the 1970s and 1980s. At the Grammy Awards of 1975, The Trio won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance by a Group. As part of the Pablo roster, Pass recorded with Benny Carter, Milt Jackson, Herb Ellis, Zoot Sims, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie.
more...Melba Doretta Liston (January 13, 1926 – April 23, 1999) was an American jazz trombonist, arranger, and composer. Other than those playing in all-female bands she was the first woman trombonist to play in big bands during the 1940s and 1960s, but as her career progressed she became better known as an arranger, particularly in partnership with pianist Randy Weston. Other major artists with whom she worked include Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane and Count Basie.
Liston was born in Kansas City, Missouri. At the age of seven, Melba’s mother purchased her a trombone. Her family encouraged her musical pursuits, as they were all music lovers. Liston was primarily self-taught, but she was “encouraged by her guitar-playing grandfather”, with whom she spent significant time learning to play spirituals and folk songs. At the age of eight, she was good enough to be a solo act on a local radio station. At the age of 10, she moved to Los Angeles, California. She was classmates with Dexter Gordon, and friends with Eric Dolphy. After playing in youth bands and studying with Alma Hightower, she joined the big band led by Gerald Wilson in 1944.
more...Daniel Moses Barker (January 13, 1909 – March 13, 1994) was an American jazz musician, vocalist, and author from New Orleans. He was a rhythm guitarist for Cab Calloway, Lucky Millinder and Benny Carter during the 1930s.
One of Barker’s earliest teachers in New Orleans was fellow banjoist Emanuel Sayles, with whom he recorded. Throughout his career, he played with Jelly Roll Morton, Baby Dodds, James P. Johnson, Sidney Bechet, Mezz Mezzrow, and Red Allen. He also toured and recorded with his wife, singer Blue Lu Barker. From the 1960s, Barker’s work with the Fairview Baptist Church Brass Band was pivotal in ensuring the longevity of jazz in New Orleans, producing generations of new talent, including Wynton and Branford Marsalis who played in the band as youths.
Danny Barker was born to a family of musicians in New Orleans in 1909, the grandson of bandleader Isidore Barbarin and nephew of drummers Paul Barbarin and Louis Barbarin. He took up clarinet and drums before switching to a ukulele that his aunt got him, and then a banjo from his uncle or a trumpeter named Lee Collins.
Barker began his career as a musician in his youth with his streetband the Boozan Kings, and also toured Mississippi with Little Brother Montgomery. In 1930, he moved to New York City and switched to the guitar. On the day of his arrival in New York, his uncle Paul took him to the Rhythm Club, where he saw an inspiring performance by McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. It was their first performance in New York as a band.
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