Blog
NGC 4725 is an intermediate barred spiral galaxy with a prominent ring structure, located in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices near the north galactic pole. It was discovered by German-born British astronomer William Herschel on April 6, 1785. The galaxy lies at a distance of approximately 40 megalight-years from the Milky Way. NGC 4725 is the brightest member of the Coma I Group of the Coma-Sculptor Cloud, although it is relatively isolated from the other members of this group. This galaxy is strongly disturbed and is interacting with neighboring spiral galaxy NGC 4747, with its spiral arms showing indications of warping. The pair have an angular separation of 24′, which corresponds to a projected linear separation of 370 kly. A tidal plume extends from NGC 4747 toward NGC 4725.
more...Thurston Harris (July 11, 1931 – April 14, 1990) was an American singer and songwriter, best known for his 1957 hit “Little Bitty Pretty One“. Harris first appeared on record in 1953. He was the vocalist for South Central Los Angeles R&B band the Lamplighters. He remained with the band as it evolved through several name changes, from the Tenderfoots to the Sharps. In 1954, the Lamplighters appeared at the Tenth Cavalcade of Jazz concert at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles produced by Leon Hefflin Sr. alongside Count Basie, Louis Jordon, the Flairs, Perez Prado, Christine Kittrell, and Ruth Brown.
more...Michael Rose (born 11 July 1957) is a Jamaican reggae singer. He is most widely known for a successful tenure as the lead singer for Black Uhuru from 1977 to 1984, followed by a lengthy solo career. He has been praised as “one of Jamaica’s most distinguished singers” and for launching a distinctive form of reggae singing that originated in his home neighborhood of Waterhouse in Kingston.
Rose began performing at talent contests and in the Jamaican hotel circuit as a teenager, and recorded his first single “Woman a Gineal fe True” at age 15 with producer Newton Simmons. Rose’s childhood friend Sly Dunbar then introduced him to producer Niney the Observer, with whom he recorded several singles in 1972. Rose also recorded a song with Lee “Scratch” Perry during this period.
more...7-11-1938
Terry Garthwaite is an internationally known singer, songwriter, composer, producer, and teacher. Her recording career dates back to the late 1960s when she and Toni Brown formed the rock group Joy of Cooking. She recorded several albums with the band, and then a dozen others by herself or in collaboration with other jazz and blues musicians.
Terry has also produced recordings by other artists including Jasmine, Rosalie Sorrels, Rhiannon, Nicholas, Glover &Wray, Hunter Davis, Robin Flower, and Ferron, whose Garthwaite-produced Shadows on a Dime was awarded four stars by Rolling Stone.
In performance she has shared the stage with such artists as BB King, Janis Joplin, Bonnie Raitt, The Band, Allen Ginsberg, Santana, Rosalie Sorrels and writer Bobbie Hawkins at venues that include Carnegie Hall, the Joseph Papp Theater, the Hollywood Bowl, and Canadian Folk Festivals.
Terry’s recent recordings and writing reflect an awareness of the healing nature of music. In 1992 she recorded her critically acclaimed Affirhythms – rhythmic affirmation chantsongs, and followed it in 2000 with Sacred Circles, songs of hope and heart.
In 2006, Terry began collaborating again with Toni Brown to put together a Joy of Cooking compilation. They pored through old tapes of live performances and studio forays–from their earliest beginnings in 1968–to find the best material with the best performances. The result is the double CD “Back to Your Heart”, one disc of studio takes of never-released songs, and the other a live Berkeley concert from the early ’70s.
She’s published a book, Joy of Sound – Explorations in Awareness Through Sound and Song, that includes vocal games/exercises and a CD of chants, as well as a couple of small books of Alliterhythms–pithy positive songs and sayings in alliteration. Most of her songs are available in her songbooks.
Terry’s music is an array of songs and sounds that encourages empowerment and delight, and radiates the healing nature of music. She currently leads vocal retreats, drum circles, and classes in singing together, playing with sound, and digging the musical garden.
These three bright nebulae are often featured on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius and the crowded starfields of the central Milky Way. In fact, 18th century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged two of them; M8, the large nebula above center, and colorful M20 below and left in the frame. The third emission region includes NGC 6559, right of M8 and separated from the larger nebula by a dark dust lane. All three are stellar nurseries about five thousand light-years or so distant. Over a hundred light-years across the expansive M8 is also known as the Lagoon Nebula. M20’s popular moniker is the Trifid. Glowing hydrogen gas creates the dominant red color of the emission nebulae. But for striking contrast, blue hues in the Trifid are due to dust reflected starlight. The broad interstellar skyscape spans almost 4 degrees or 8 full moons on the sky. 4100ly
more...Arlo Davy Guthrie (born July 10, 1947) is an American folk singer-songwriter. He is known for singing songs of protest against social injustice, and storytelling while performing songs, following the tradition of his father, Woody Guthrie. Guthrie’s best-known work is his debut piece, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree“, a satirical talking bluessong about 18 minutes in length that has since become a Thanksgiving anthem. His only top-40 hit was a cover of Steve Goodman‘s “City of New Orleans“. His song “Massachusetts” was named the official folk song of the state, in which he has lived most of his adult life. Guthrie has also made several acting appearances. He is the father of four children, who have also had careers as musicians.
more...Béla Anton Leoš Fleck (born July 10, 1958) is an American banjo player. An acclaimed virtuoso, he is an innovative and technically proficient pioneer and ambassador of the banjo, playing music from bluegrass, jazz, classical, rock and various world music genres. He is best known for his work with the bands New Grass Revival and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. Fleck has won 17 Grammy Awards and been nominated 39 times.
In 2020, he was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame as a member of New Grass Revival.
more...Edward Lee Morgan (July 10, 1938 – February 19, 1972) was an American jazztrumpeter and composer. One of the key hard bop musicians of the 1960s and a cornerstone of the Blue Note label, Morgan came to prominence in his late teens, recording with bandleaders like John Coltrane, Curtis Fuller, Dizzy Gillespie, Hank Mobley and Wayne Shorter, and playing in Art Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers.
Morgan stayed with Blakey until 1961 and started to record as leader in the late ’50s. Morgan’s solo recordings often alternated between conventional hard bop sessions and more adventurous post-bop and avant-garde experiments, many of which did not see release during his lifetime. His composition “The Sidewinder“, on the album of the same name, became a surprise crossover hit on the pop and R&B charts in 1964. After a second stint in Blakey’s band, Morgan continued to work prolifically as both a leader and a sideman until his death in 1972.
Edward Lee Morgan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, on July 10, 1938, the youngest of Otto Ricardo and Nettie Beatrice Morgan’s four children.
Originally interested in the vibraphone, he soon showed a growing enthusiasm for the trumpet. Morgan could also play the alto saxophone. On his thirteenth birthday, his sister Ernestine gave him his first trumpet. His primary stylistic influence was Clifford Brown, with whom he took a few lessons as a teenager. Morgan was killed in the early hours of February 19, 1972, at Slugs’ Saloon, a jazz club in New York City‘s East Village where his band was performing. Following an altercation between sets, Morgan’s common-law wife Helen Moore (a.k.a. Helen Morgan) shot him.
more...Fulton Allen (July 10, 1904 – February 13, 1941), known as Blind Boy Fuller, was an American blues guitarist and singer. Fuller was one of the most popular of the recorded Piedmont blues artists, along with Blind Blake, Josh White, and Buddy Moss.
Allen was born in Wadesboro, North Carolina, United States, one of ten children of Calvin Allen and Mary Jane Walker. Most sources date his birth to 1907, but the researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc indicate 1904. After the death of his mother, he moved with his father to Rockingham, North Carolina. As a boy he learned to play the guitar and also learned from older singers the field hollers, country rags, traditional songs and blues popular in poor rural areas.
He married young, to Cora Allen, and worked as a laborer. He began to lose his eyesight when he was in his mid-teens. According to the researcher Bruce Bastin, “While he was living in Rockingham he began to have trouble with his eyes. He went to see a doctor in Charlotte who allegedly told him that he had ulcers behind his eyes, the original damage having been caused by some form of snow-blindness.” Only the first part of this diagnosis was correct. A 1937 eye examination attributed his vision loss to the long-term effects of untreated neonatal conjunctivitis.
more...L1527, shown in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), is a molecular cloud that harbors a protostar. It resides about 460 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. The more diffuse blue light and the filamentary structures in the image come from organic compounds known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), while the red at the center of this image is an energized, thick layer of gases and dust that surrounds the protostar. The region in between, which shows up in white, is a mixture of PAHs, ionized gas, and other molecules.
more...John Graham “Mitch” Mitchell (9 July 1946 – 12 November 2008) was an English drummer and child actor, best known for his work in the Jimi Hendrix Experience, for which he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2009. In 2016, Mitchell was ranked number 8 in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the “100 Greatest Drummers of All Time.
He spent his final days celebrating Hendrix’s music on the 2008 Experience Hendrix Tour. For nearly four weeks the tour travelled on an 18-city tour of the US, finishing in Portland, Oregon. The tour also featured Billy Cox, Buddy Guy, Jonny Lang, Robby Krieger, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Eric Johnson, Cesar Rosas, David Hidalgo, Brad Whitford, Hubert Sumlin, Chris Layton, Eric Gales, and Mato Nanji.
Five days after the tour ended, Mitchell died in his sleep on 12 November, in his room at the Benson Hotel in Portland of natural causes.[24] Mitchell had been in ill health for many years due to an immune system disorder and cancer. Mitchell had earlier bouts with extreme fatigue but had recovered from them after a few days’ rest in 2007 and 2008.
more...Haydée Mercedes “La Negra” Sosa (Latin American Spanish: ; 9 July 1935 – 4 October 2009) was an Argentine singer who was popular throughout Latin America and many countries outside the region. With her roots in Argentine folk music, Sosa became one of the preeminent exponents of El nuevo cancionero. She gave voice to songs written by many Latin American songwriters. Her music made people hail her as the “voice of the voiceless ones”. She was often called “the conscience of Latin America.
Sosa performed in venues such as the Lincoln Center in New York City, the Théâtre Mogador in Paris, the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, as well as sold-out shows in New York’s Carnegie Hall and the Roman Colosseum during her final decade of life. Her career spanned four decades and she was the recipient of six Latin Grammy awards (2000, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011), including a Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004 and two posthumous Latin Grammy Award for Best Folk Album in 2009 and 2011. She won the Premio Gardel in 2000, the main musical award in Argentina. She served as an ambassador for UNICEF.
more...More Posts
- Bola Sete
- Flamenco Fridays with Sabicas
- Daily Roots with Culture
- The Cosmos with NGC 6231
- Linda Ronstadt
- Washboard Sam
- Philly Joe Jones
- Sadik Hakim
- World Music with Rocky Dawuni
- World Music with Barlast
- Daily Roots with Junior Kelly
- The Cosmos with a Lunar Halo over ESO’s La Silla Observatory
- Angélique Kidjo
- Alan Dawson
- Kenny Napper
- Woody Guthrie
- World Music with Neli Andreeva
- Daily Roots with Dennis Brown & Prince Mohammed
- The Cosmos with IC 2944
- Roger McGuinn