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Steven Benjamin Goodman (July 25, 1948 – September 20, 1984) was an American folk and country singer-songwriter from Chicago. He wrote the song “City of New Orleans,” which was recorded by Arlo Guthrie and many others including John Denver, The Highwaymen, and Judy Collins; in 1985, it received a Grammy award for best country song, as performed by Willie Nelson. Goodman had a small but dedicated group of fans for his albums and concerts during his lifetime. His most frequently sung song is the Chicago Cubs anthem, “Go Cubs Go“. Goodman died of leukemia in September 1984.

Born on Chicago’s North Side to a middle-class Jewish family, Goodman began writing and performing songs as a teenager, after his family had moved to the near north suburbs. He graduated from Maine East High School in Park Ridge, Illinois, in 1965, where he was a classmate of Hillary Clinton‘s. Before that, however, he began his public singing career by leading the junior choir at Temple Beth Israel in Albany Park. In the fall of 1965, he entered the University of Illinois and pledged the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity, where he, Ron Banyon, and Steve Hartmann formed a popular rock cover band, “The Juicy Fruits”. He left college after one year to pursue his musical career. In the early spring of 1967, Goodman went to New York, staying for a month in a Greenwich Village brownstone across the street from the Cafe Wha?, where Goodman performed regularly during his brief stay there.

Donald Johnson Ellis (July 25, 1934 – December 17, 1978) was an American jazz trumpeter, drummer, composer, and bandleader. He is best known for his extensive musical experimentation, particularly in the area of time signatures. Later in his life he worked as a film composer, contributing a score to 1971’s The French Connection and 1973’s The Seven-Ups. Ellis was born in Los Angeles, California, on July 25, 1934. His father was a Methodist minister and his mother a church organist. He attended West High School in Minneapolis, MN. After attending a Tommy Dorsey Big Band concert, he first became interested in jazz. Other early inspirations were Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. He graduated from Boston University in 1956 with a music composition degree.

Ellis’s last known public performance took place on April 21, 1978, at the Westside Room in Century City. After this, his doctor ordered him to refrain from touring and playing trumpet because it was too stressful on his heart. On December 17, 1978, after seeing a Jon Hendricks concert, Ellis suffered a fatal heart attack at his North Hollywood home where his parents were staying with him. His heart condition is believed to have been cardiac arrhythmia. He was 44. Ellis was buried in the Sheltering Hills section, of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Hollywood Hills, California.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mmaBEpZfdE

Semmangudi Radhakrishna Srinivasa Iyer (25 July 1908 – 31 October 2003) was an Indian Carnatic vocalist. He, along with his contemporaries G.N. Balasubramaniam and Madurai Mani Iyer, are referred to as the 20th century male trinity of Carnatic music. He was the youngest recipient of the Sangeetha Kalanidhi awarded by the Music Academy in 1947 and has received many awards including Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushanfrom the Government of India, Sangeet Natak Academy award (1953), Isai Perarignar from Government of Tamil Nadu and Kalidas Samman from Government of Madhya Pradesh. He was affectionately addressed as “Semmangudi Maama” (Semmangudi Uncle) by his disciples. He was also considered the “Pitamaha” or the grand sire of modern Carnatic Music. He was conferred with an honorary doctorate by University of Kerala in 1979.

Cornelius “Johnny” Hodges (July 25, 1907 – May 11, 1970) was an American alto saxophonist, best known for solo work with Duke Ellington‘s big band. He played lead alto in the saxophone section for many years. Hodges was also featured on soprano saxophone, but refused to play soprano after 1946. He is considered one of the definitive alto saxophone players of the big band era (along with Benny Carter).

After beginning his career as a teenager in Boston, Hodges began to travel to New York and played with Lloyd Scott, Sidney Bechet, Luckey Robertsand Chick Webb. When Ellington wanted to expand his band in 1928, Ellington’s clarinet player Barney Bigard recommended Hodges. His playing became one of the identifying voices of the Ellington orchestra. From 1951 to 1955, Hodges left the Duke to lead his own band, but returned shortly before Ellington’s triumphant return to prominence – the orchestra’s performance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival.

Hodges was born in the Cambridgeport neighborhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to John H. Hodges and Katie Swan Hodges, both originally from Virginia. After moving for a short period of time to North Cambridge, the family moved to Hammond Street in the South End of Boston, where he grew up with baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, and saxophonists Charlie Holmes and Howard E. Johnson. His first instruments were drums and piano. While his mother was a skilled piano player, Hodges was mostly self-taught.

Jon Faddis (born July 24, 1953) is an American jazz trumpet player, conductor, composer, and educator, renowned for both his playing and for his expertise in the field of music education. Upon his first appearance on the scene, he became known for his ability to closely mirror the sound of trumpet icon Dizzy Gillespie, who was his mentor along with pianist Stan Kenton and trumpeter Bill Catalano.

Jon Faddis was born in Oakland, California, in 1953. At 18, he joined Lionel Hampton‘s big band before joining the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestraas lead trumpet. After playing with Charles Mingus in his early twenties, Faddis became a noted studio musician in New York City, appearing on many pop recordings in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Charles McPherson (born July 24, 1939) is an American jazz alto saxophonist born in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in Detroit, Michigan, who worked intermittently with Charles Mingus from 1960 to 1974, and as a performer leading his own groups.

McPherson also was commissioned to help record ensemble renditions of pieces from Charlie Parker on the 1988 soundtrack for the film Bird.

Billy Taylor (July 24, 1921 – December 28, 2010) was an American jazz pianist, composer, broadcaster and educator. He was the Robert L. Jones Distinguished Professor of Music at East Carolina University in Greenville, and from 1994 was the artistic director for jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

A jazz activist, Taylor sat on the Honorary Founders Board of The Jazz Foundation of America, an organisation he founded in 1989, with Ann Ruckert, Herb Storfer and Phoebe Jacobs, to save the homes and the lives of America’s elderly jazz and blues musicians, later including musicians who survived Hurricane Katrina.

Taylor was a jazz educator, who lectured in colleges, served on panels and travelled worldwide as a jazz ambassador. Critic Leonard Feather once said, “It is almost indisputable that Dr. Billy Taylor is the world’s foremost spokesman for jazz.”

Taylor was born in Greenville, North Carolina, but moved to Washington, D.C., when he was five years old. He grew up in a musical family and learned to play different instruments as a child, including guitar, drums and saxophone. He was most successful at the piano, and had classical piano lessons with Henry Grant, who had educated Duke Ellington a generation earlier. Taylor made his first professional appearance playing keyboard at the age of 13 and was paid one dollar.

Lakshminarayana Subramaniam (born 23 July 1947) is an Indian violinist, composer and conductor, trained in the classical Carnatic music Subramaniam was born to V. Lakshminarayana Iyer and Seethalakshmi, both accomplished musicians. He lived in Jaffna during his younger years, taking up music studies before the age of five. He began training in violin under the tutelage of his father, Professor V. Lakshminarayana. “Mani”, as he is fondly known by fellow musicians and his family, gave his first public performance at the age of six.

His uncles include Ramnad Raghavan and Ramnad Krishnan. His brothers are also acclaimed musicians, and include the violinist-composers L. Shankar (alias. Shenkar), and the late L. Vaidyanathan. He has released recordings with both.

Steve Lacy (July 23, 1934 – June 4, 2004), born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York City, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone. Coming to prominence in the 1950s as a progressive dixieland musician, Lacy went on to a long and prolific career. He worked extensively in experimental jazz and to a lesser extent in free improvisation, but Lacy’s music was typically melodic and tightly-structured. Lacy also became a highly distinctive composer, with compositions often built out of little more than a single questioning phrase, repeated several times.

The music of Thelonious Monk became a permanent part of Lacy’s repertoire after a stint in the pianist’s band, with Monk’s songs appearing on virtually every Lacy album and concert program; Lacy often partnered with trombonist Roswell Rudd in exploring Monk’s work. Beyond Monk, Lacy performed the work of jazz composers such as Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington and Herbie Nichols; unlike many jazz musicians he rarely played standard popular or show tunes.

William Thomas “Champion Jack” Dupree (July 23, 1909 or July 4, 1910 – January 21, 1992) was an American blues and boogie-woogie pianist and singer. His nickname was derived from his early career as a boxer.

Dupree was a New Orleans blues and boogie-woogie pianist, a barrelhouse “professor”. His father was from the Belgian Congo and his mother was part African American and Cherokee. His birth date has been given as July 4, July 10, and July 23, 1908, 1909,^[1] or 1910; the researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc give July 4, 1910.

He was orphaned at the age of eight and sent to the Colored Waifs Home in New Orleans, an institution for orphaned or delinquent boys (about six years previously, Louis Armstrong had also been sent to the Home, after being arrested as a “dangerous and suspicious character”).^[3] Dupree taught himself to play the piano there and later apprenticed with Tuts Washington and Willie Hall,^[4][5] whom he called his father and from whom he learned “Junker’s Blues“. He was also a “spy boy” for the Yellow Pocahontas tribe of the Mardi Gras Indians. He soon began playing in barrelhouses and other drinking establishments.

Reflecting its origin as a remate to the soleares, the underlying form of bulerías is simple. Bulerías cantes consist of three or four eight-syllable lines, and there is great flexibility in the way artists choose to treat those three or four lines. The singer may give one or two compáses to each line, or they can stretch them out, decorating each syllable with melismatic flourishes, or repeating them for rhythmic or emotional effect.

​The guitarist follows the singer’s phrasing, underscoring the implied harmony, adding falsetas and maintaining the rhythmic pulse. Performing without a singer, a guitarist will string together a series of falsetas in a way that may imitate the form of letras.

A dancer will usually dance while the letra is being sung, and also dance between letras. A dancer can also dance during short breaks within the letras (a respira for the singer; a remate for the dancer). A dancer will use transitional phrases, including palmas en contra tiempo, remates and llamadas, and desplante llamadas to move from one section of the dance to another, cueing the musicians at each transition.

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There are distinctive differences in dance styles for the bulerías depending on where and when the dance is performed. If it is a professional performance at a concert or theatrical show, the dancer will include 1 to 2 letras, add an escobilla, and perform an ornate traveling exit, the salida (also often called the cierre). If the dancer is performing bulerías at a flamenco party (juerga), small event, or with family and friends, the dance takes on a more personal touch that may or may not include all of the above named sections. See below for a more detailed description of each section of the dance.