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Dinah Washington (born Ruth Lee Jones; August 29, 1924 – December 14, 1963) was an American singer and pianist, who has been cited as “the most popular black female recording artist of the 1950s songs”. Primarily a jazz vocalist, she performed and recorded in a wide variety of styles including blues, R&B, and traditional pop music, and gave herself the title of “Queen of the Blues”. She was a 1986 inductee of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.
Ruth Lee Jones was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Alice and Ollie Jones, and moved to Chicago as a child. She became deeply involved in gospel music and played piano for the choir in St. Luke’s Baptist Church while still in elementary school. She sang gospel music in church and played piano, directing her church choir in her teens and was a member of the Sallie Martin Gospel Singers. When she joined the Sallie Martin group, she dropped out of Wendell Phillips High School. She sang lead with the first female gospel singers formed by Sallie Martin, who was co-founder of the Gospel Singers Convention. Her involvement with the gospel choir occurred after she won an amateur contest at Chicago’s Regal Theater where she sang “I Can’t Face the Music”. Early in the morning of December 14, 1963, Washington’s sixth husband, football great Dick “Night Train” Lane, went to sleep with Washington and awoke later to find her slumped over and not responsive. Dr. B. C. Ross pronounced her dead at the scene at age 39. An autopsy later showed a lethal combination of secobarbital and amobarbital, prescriptions for her insomnia and diet, which contributed to her death. She is buried in the Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois.
more...Charles Parker Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955), nicknamed “Bird” and “Yardbird,” was an American jazz saxophonist, band leader and composer. Parker was a highly influential soloist and leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and advanced harmonies. Parker was a blazingly fast virtuoso and introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas into jazz, including rapid passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions. Primarily a player of the alto saxophone, Parker’s tone ranged from clean and penetrating to sweet and somber.
Parker acquired the nickname “Yardbird” early in his career on the road with Jay McShann. This, and the shortened form “Bird,” continued to be used for the rest of his life, inspiring the titles of a number of Parker compositions, such as “Yardbird Suite,” “Ornithology,” “Bird Gets the Worm,” and “Bird of Paradise.” Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual rather than just an entertainer.
Charlie Parker Jr. was born in Kansas City, Kansas, at 852 Freeman Avenue, and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, near Westport and later – in high school – near 15th and Olive Street. He was the only child of Charles Parker and Adelaide “Addie” Bailey, who was of mixed Choctaw and African-American background. He attended Lincoln High School in September 1934, but withdrew in December 1935, just before joining the local musicians’ union and choosing to pursue his musical career full-time. His childhood sweetheart and future wife, Rebecca Ruffin, graduated from Lincoln High School in June 1935. Parker died on March 12, 1955, in the suite of his friend and patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter at the Stanhope Hotel in New York City, while watching The Dorsey Brothers‘ Stage Show on television. The official causes of death were lobar pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, but Parker also had an advanced case of cirrhosis and had suffered a heart attack. The coroner who performed his autopsy mistakenly estimated Parker’s 34-year-old body to be between 50 and 60 years of age.
more...My daughter Maya was born on the Mississippi the year the Twins won the World Series. Mother of two, wife, sister and daughter. Love you baby girl!
Believed to be the cosmic fire of creation by the Maya of Mesoamerica, M42 blazes brightly in the constellation Orion. Popularly called the Orion Nebula, this stellar nursery has been known to many different cultures throughout human history. The nebula is only 1,500 light-years away, making it the closest large star-forming region to Earth and giving it a relatively bright apparent magnitude of 4. Because of its brightness and prominent location just below Orion’s belt, M42 can be spotted with the naked eye, while offering an excellent peek at stellar birth for those with telescopes. It is best observed during January.
The Mayan culture’s likening of the Orion Nebula to a cosmic fire of creation is very apt. The nebula is an enormous cloud of dust and gas where vast numbers of new stars are being forged. Its bright, central region is the home of four massive, young stars that shape the nebula. The four hefty stars are called the Trapezium because they are arranged in a trapezoidal pattern. Ultraviolet light unleashed by these stars is carving a cavity in the nebula and disrupting the growth of hundreds of smaller stars.
Philip William Seamen (28 August 1926 – 13 October 1972) was an English jazz drummer.
With a background in big band music, Seamen played and recorded in a wide range of musical contexts with virtually every key figure of 1950s and 1960s British jazz. Notable examples included Joe Harriott, Tubby Hayes, Stan Tracey, Ronnie Scott, Denny Termer, Dick Morrissey, Harold McNair, Don Rendell, Victor Feldman, Dizzy Reece, Tony Coe, Tony Lee, and George Chisholm, among others. Later in his career he worked with Alexis Korner and Georgie Fame, and had a spell with Ginger Baker’s Air Force, the leader of the band being Seamen’s foremost disciple. Addiction to alcohol and other drugs hampered his career.
Seamen began playing drums at the age of six, turning professional at the age of 18 by joining Nat Gonella and his Georgians in 1944. In 1946, aged 20, he spent a year with Gordon Homer at the Coronation Ballroom in Ramsgate. Brian Fahey, composer, stated, “This was a very good big band. I wrote a lot of scores for it. I did my first broadcast with Gordon. Phil Seamen, only 20 then, was the drummer and it was obvious to me that he was destined to become one of the most exciting drummers in the world.” He joined the Tommy Sampson Orchestra in 1948, and by 1949, Seamen and tenor saxist Danny Moss had formed a bebop quintet from within the ranks and which was featured on a radio broadcast by the orchestra in September 1949.
more...Joseph Shabalala (28 August 1940 – 11 February 2020), born Bhekizizwe Joseph Siphatimandla Mxoveni Mshengu Bigboy Shabalala, was a South African singer and musician who was the founder and musical director of the choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
Shabalala was born in the town of Ladysmith (eMnambithi district) in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa. His parents, Jonathan Mluwane Shabalala and Nomandla Elina Shabalala, raised Joseph and his six siblings on a white-owned farm called Tugela. His father died in the late 1940s; Joseph, being the eldest, had to take care of the family. He left the farm, however, in 1958 to search for work in the nearby city of Durban.
During this time, he was spotted by a well-known group, the Durban Choir, after he delighted audiences with his smooth guitar playing and soprano voice. When he joined the choir, he attempted to teach them some of his new compositions, namely his first song “Nomathemba” (which was made into a play in 1995). They refused, and so he left them after only two years.
In 1958, Shabalala discovered an isicathamiya group, The Highlanders, led by his hero Galiyane Hlatshwayo. Hlatshwayo was the man who encouraged Shabalala to use his voice powerfully. Shabalala formed his own group the following year 1959, Ezimnyama (“The Black Ones”). A series of dreams he had in his sleep in December 1960 was a major turning point in the formation of the group; when he saw how well his group did in the once-weekly isicathamiya competitions, he renamed them Ladysmith Black Mambazo, “Mambazo” meaning axe, referring to how the group chopped down the other choirs by winning almost every time.
more...Kenneth Sidney “Kenny” Drew (August 28, 1928 – August 4, 1993) was an American jazz pianist.
Drew was born in New York City, United States, and received piano lessons from the age of five. He attended the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan. Drew’s first recording, in 1950, was with Howard McGhee, and over the next two years he worked in bands led by Buddy DeFranco, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, among others. After a brief period with his own trio in California, Drew returned to New York, playing with Dinah Washington, Johnny Griffin, Buddy Rich, and several others over the following few years. He led many recording sessions throughout the 1950s, and in 1957 appeared on John Coltrane‘s album, Blue Train.
Drew was one of the American jazz musicians who settled in Europe around this period: he moved to Paris in 1961 and to Copenhagen three years later.[3] While he sacrificed much of the interest of the American jazz audience, he gained a wide following across Europe. Kenny Drew was a well-known figure on the Copenhagen jazz scene, recording many sessions with the Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. “Living in Copenhagen, and travelling out from there,” Drew remarked, “I have probably worked in more different contexts than if I had stayed in New York where I might have got musically locked in with a set-group of musicians. This way, I have been able to keep my musical antennas in shape, while at the same time I have had more time to study and also get deeper into my own endeavors.”
Drew and Dexter Gordon appeared on screen in Ole Ege’s theatrically released hardcore pornographic film, Pornografi – en musical (1971), for which they composed and performed the score.
more...Ustad Vilayat Khan (28 August 1928 – 13 March 2004) was an Indian classical sitar player. Along with Imdad Khan, Enayat Khan, and Imrat Khan, he is credited with the creation and development of gayaki ang (an attempt to mimic the sound of the human voice) on the sitar.
He recorded his first 78-RPM disc at the age of 6, and gave his last concert in 2004 at the age of 75. He has composed the music for several films, including Jalsaghar (1958), The Guru (1969), and Kadambari (1976). He gave a chance to newcomer Kavita Krishnamurthy in Kadambari and it was the first song in her career.
Vilayat was born in Gouripur, Mymensingh in then East Bengal in British India and current Bangladesh. His father Enayat Khan was recognised as a leading sitar and surbahar (bass sitar) player of his time, as had been his grandfather, Imdad Khan, before him. He was taught in the family style, known as the Imdadkhani gharana by his father and other relatives in the family. Imdadkhani gharana is also called Etawah gharana known after a small city close to Agra where Imdad Khan lived. This family represents the sixthh generation of musicians that dates back to the Mughal Empire.
more...the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula winds through the emission nebula and young star cluster complex IC 1396, in the high and far off constellation of Cepheus. Also known as vdB 142, seen on the left the cosmic elephant’s trunk is over 20 light-years long. Removed by digital processing, no visible stars are in this detailed telescopic close-up view highlighting the bright swept-back ridges that outline pockets of cool interstellar dust and gas. But the dark, tendril-shaped clouds contain the raw material for star formation and hide protostars within. Nearly 3,000 light-years distant, the relatively faint IC 1396 complex covers a large region on the sky, spanning over 5 degrees. This starless rendition spans a 1 degree wide field of view though, about the angular size of 2 full moons. Of course the dark shapes below and right, marching toward the winding Elephant’s Trunk, are known to some as The Caravan.
Alice Coltrane (née McLeod; August 27, 1937 – January 12, 2007), also known by her adopted Sanskrit name Turiyasangitananda, was an American jazz musician and composer, and in her later years a swamini. An accomplished pianist and one of the few harpists in the history of jazz, she recorded many albums as a bandleader, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s for Impulse! and other major record labels.She was married to jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane, with whom she performed in 1966–1967. She founded the Vedantic Center in 1975 and the Shanti Anantam Ashram in California in 1983, where she served as spiritual director. On July 3, 1994, Swamini rededicated and inaugurated the land as Sai Anantam Ashram.
Coltrane was born Alice McLeod on August 27, 1937, in Detroit, Michigan, and grew up in a musical household. Her mother, Anna McLeod, was a member of the choir at her church, and her half brother, Ernest Farrow, became a jazz bassist. With the encouragement of her father, Alice McLeod pursued music and started to perform in various clubs around Detroit, until moving to Paris in the late 1950s. She studied classical music, and also jazz with Bud Powell in Paris, where she worked as the intermission pianist at the Blue Note Jazz Club in 1960. It was there that McLeod appeared on French television in a performance with Lucky Thompson, Pierre Michelot and Kenny Clarke.[4] She married Kenny “Pancho” Hagood in 1960 and had a daughter with him. The marriage ended soon after, on account of Hagood’s developing heroin addiction, and McLeod was forced to move back to Detroit with her daughter. She continued playing jazz as a professional in Detroit, with her own trio and as a duo with vibraphonist Terry Pollard. In 1962–63 she played with Terry Gibbs‘ quartet, during which time she met John Coltrane. In 1965 they were married in Juárez, Mexico. John Coltrane became stepfather to Alice Coltrane’s daughter Michelle, and the couple had three children together: John Jr. (1964, a bassist who died in a car accident in 1982); Ravi (b. 1965, a saxophonist); and Oranyan (b. 1967, a DJ). Oranyan later played saxophone with Santana for a period of time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H6sRYIaChw
more...Lester Willis Young (August 27, 1909 – March 15, 1959), nicknamed “Pres” or “Prez”, was an American jazz tenor saxophonist and occasional clarinetist. Coming to prominence while a member of Count Basie‘s orchestra, Young was one of the most influential players on his instrument. In contrast to many of his hard-driving peers, Young played with a relaxed, cool tone and used sophisticated harmonies, using what one critic called “a free-flo
Lester Young was born in Woodville, Mississippi, on August 27, 1909. His mother was Lizetta Young (née Johnson), and his father was Willis Handy Young, originally from Louisiana. Lester had two siblings – Leonidas Raymond, who became a drummer, and Irma Cornelia. He grew up in a musical family. His father was a teacher and band leader, and several other relatives performed professionally. Young made his final studio recordings and live performances in Paris in March 1959 with drummer Kenny Clarke at the tail end of an abbreviated European tour during which he ate next to nothing and drank heavily. On a flight to New York City, he suffered from internal bleeding due to the effects of alcoholism and died in the early morning hours of March 15, 1959, only hours after arriving back in New York, at the age of 49.
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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. The most notable aspect of the slow Tientos tempo is the beat structure. Where the first beat in Tangos is subdued, it is strongly emphasized in the Tientos, as is the “and” of the second beat.
more...The Omega Nebula, also known as the Swan Nebula, Checkmark Nebula, Lobster Nebula, and the Horseshoe Nebula (catalogued as Messier 17 or M17 or NGC 6618) is an H II region in the constellation Sagittarius. It was discovered by Philippe Loys de Chéseaux in 1745. Charles Messier catalogued it in 1764. It is by some of the richest starfields of the Milky Way, figuring in the northern two-thirds of Sagittarius.
The Omega Nebula is between 5,000 and 6,000 light-years from Earth and it spans some 15 light-years in diameter. The cloud of interstellar matter of which this nebula is a part is roughly 40 light-years in diameter and has a mass of 30,000 solar masses. The total mass of the Omega Nebula is an estimated 800 solar masses.
Branford Marsalis (born August 26, 1960) is an American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. While primarily known for his work in jazz as the leader of the Branford Marsalis Quartet, he also performs frequently as a soloist with classical ensembles and has led the group Buckshot LeFonque. From 1992 to 1995 he led the Tonight Show Band.
Marsalis was born on August 26, 1960, in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, and raised in New Orleans. He is the son of Dolores (née Ferdinand), a jazz singer and substitute teacher, and Ellis Louis Marsalis, Jr., a pianist and music professor. His brothers Jason Marsalis, Wynton Marsalis, and Delfeayo Marsalis are also jazz musicians.
more...Leon Redbone (born Dickran Gobalian, August 26, 1949 – May 30, 2019) was an American singer-songwriter and musician specializing in jazz, blues, and Tin Pan Alley classics. Recognized by his hat (often a Panama hat), dark sunglasses, and black tie, Redbone was born in Cyprus of Armenian ancestry and first appeared on stage in Toronto, Canada, in the early 1970s. He also appeared on film and television in acting and voice-over roles.
In concert Redbone often employed comedy and demonstrated his skill in guitar playing. Recurrent gags involved the influence of alcohol and claiming to have written works originating well before he was born – Redbone favored material from the Tin Pan Alley era, circa 1890 to 1910. He sang the theme to the 1980s television series Mr. Belvedere and released eighteen albums.
Redbone was elusive about his origins, and never explained the origin of his stage name. According to a Toronto Star report in the 1980s, he was once known as Dickran Gobalian, and he came to Canada from Cyprus in the mid-1960s and changed his name via the Ontario Change of Name Act. Biographical research published in 2019 corroborated his birth name, and stated that his family was of Armenian origin.[2] His parents lived in Jerusalem, but fled in 1948 to Nicosia, Cyprus, where Redbone was born. By 1961, the family had moved to London, England, and by 1965 to Toronto.
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