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Jorge López Ruiz ( La Plata , April 1, 1935- Buenos Aires , December 11, 2018) was an Argentine musician , composer and double bass performer, performer and arranger of various genres of popular music, especially jazz. .His work includes El grito (1967) and Bronca Buenos Aires (1970), banned by the military dictatorship . In popular music he has been arranger and composer of themes for Sandro , Leonardo Favio and Piero , among others.
He was a regular participant in a series of meetings of improvisation and casual folk experimentation house Eduardo Lagos , named humorously by Hugo Diaz as folkloréishons , which in the manner of the jam sessions of the jazz , used to gather Lagos, Astor Piazzolla and Diaz, with other musicians such as López Ruiz himself, Oscar Cardozo Ocampo , Domingo Cura and Oscar López Ruiz , among others. With his quartet he was awarded by the Konex Foundation as one of the 5 best jazz groups of the decade in Argentina.
more...Irving Sidney “Duke” Jordan (April 1, 1922 – August 8, 2006) was an American jazz pianist.
Jordan was born in New York and raised in Brooklyn where he attended Boys High School. An imaginative and gifted pianist, Jordan was a regular member of Charlie Parker‘s quintet during 1947–48, which also featured Miles Davis. He participated in Parker’s Dial sessions in late 1947 that produced “Dewey Square”, “Bongo Bop”, “Bird of Paradise”, and the ballad “Embraceable You“. These performances are featured on Charlie Parker on Dial.
more...Lucille Bogan (April 1, 1897 – August 10, 1948) was an American classic female blues singer and songwriter, among the first to be recorded. She also recorded under the pseudonym Bessie Jackson. Music critic Ernest Borneman noted that Bogan was one of “the big three of the blues”, along with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Many of Bogan’s songs have been recorded by later blues and jazz musicians. Many of her songs were sexually explicit, and she was generally considered to have been a dirty bluesmusician.
She was born Lucille Anderson in Amory, Mississippi, and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1914, she married Nazareth Lee Bogan, a railwayman, and gave birth to a son, Nazareth Jr., in either 1915 or 1916. She later divorced Bogan and married James Spencer, who was 22 years younger than her.
more...To play on Carl Sagan’s famous words “If you wish to make black hole jets, you must first create magnetic fields.” The featured image represents the detected intrinsic spin direction (polarization) of radio waves. The polarizationi is produced by the powerful magnetic field surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of elliptical galaxy M87. The radio waves were detected by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which combines data from radio telescopes distributed worldwide. The polarization structure, mapped using computer generated flow lines, is overlaid on EHT’s famous black hole image, first published in 2019. The full 3-D magnetic field is complex. Preliminary analyses indicate that parts of the field circle around the black hole along with the accreting matter, as expected. However, another component seemingly veers vertically away from the black hole. This component could explain how matter resists falling in and is instead launched into M87’s jet.
more...Frederick William Green (March 31, 1911 – March 1, 1987) was an American swing jazz guitarist who played rhythm guitar with the Count Basie Orchestra for almost fifty years.
Green was born in Charleston, South Carolina on March 31, 1911. He was exposed to music from an early age, and learned the banjo before picking up the guitar in his early teenage years. A friend of his father by the name of Sam Walker taught a young Freddie to read music, and keenly encouraged him to keep up his guitar playing. Walker gave Freddie what was perhaps his first gig, playing with a local community group of which Walker was an organizer. Another member of the group was William “Cat” Anderson, who went on to become an established trumpeter, working with notable figures such as Duke Ellington.
more...Red Norvo (born Kenneth Norville, March 31, 1908 – April 6, 1999) was an American musician, one of jazz‘s early vibraphonists, known as “Mr. Swing”. He helped establish the xylophone, marimba, and vibraphone as jazz instruments. His recordings included “Dance of the Octopus”, “Bughouse”, “Knockin’ on Wood”, “Congo Blues”, and “Hole in the Wall”.
Red Norvo was born in Beardstown, Illinois, United States. His career began in Chicago with a band called “The Collegians” in 1925. He played with many other bands, including an all-marimba band on the vaudeville circuit, and the bands of Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, and Woody Herman. He recorded with Mildred Bailey (his wife), Billie Holiday, Dinah Shore and Frank Sinatra. Norvo and his wife were known as “Mr. and Mrs. Swing.” He appeared as himself in the film Screaming Mimi (1958) and in Ocean’s 11, accompanying Dean Martin while he sang “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?“.
more...Major Merriweather (March 31, 1905 – February 23, 1953), better known as Big Maceo Merriweather, was an American pianist and blues singer. He was mainly active in Chicago through the 1940s.
Born in Newnan, Georgia, he was a self-taught pianist. In the 1920s, he moved to Detroit, Michigan, to begin his music career. He moved to Chicago in 1941, where he made the acquaintance of Tampa Red. Red introduced him to Lester Melrose of RCA Victor and its subsidiary label Bluebird Records, who signed Merriweather to a recording contract.
His first record was “Worried Life Blues” (1941), which became a blues hit and remained his signature piece. The song had elements derived from Sleepy John Estes‘ “Someday, Baby”. Other classic piano blues recordings followed, such as “Chicago Breakdown”, “Texas Stomp”, and “Detroit Jump“. His piano style was developed from players like Leroy Carr and Roosevelt Sykes and from the boogie-woogie style of Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons. He in turn influenced other musicians, such as Little Johnny Jones and Henry Gray, the latter of whom credited Merriweather with helping him launch his career as a blues pianist.
more...Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March [O.S. 21 March] 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Brandenburg Concertos and the Goldberg Variations, and for vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival, he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time.
The Bach family already counted several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician in Eisenach. After being orphaned at age 10, he lived for five years with his eldest brother Johann Christoph, after which he continued his musical formation in Lüneburg. From 1703 he was back in Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant churches in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen and, for longer stretches of time, at courts in Weimar, where he expanded his organ repertory, and Köthen, where he was mostly engaged with chamber music. From 1723 he was employed as Thomaskantor (cantor at St. Thomas) in Leipzig. He composed music for the principal Lutheran churches of the city, and for its university’s student ensemble Collegium Musicum. From 1726 he published some of his keyboard and organ music. In Leipzig, as had happened during some of his earlier positions, he had difficult relations with his employer, a situation that was little remedied when he was granted the title of court composer by his sovereign, Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, in 1736. In the last decades of his life he reworked and extended many of his earlier compositions. He died of complications after eye surgery in 1750 at the age of 65.
Bach enriched established German styles through his mastery of counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organisation, and his adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France. Bach’s compositions include hundreds of cantatas, both sacred and secular. He composed Latin church music, Passions, oratorios, and motets. He often adopted Lutheran hymns, not only in his larger vocal works, but for instance also in his four-part chorales and his sacred songs. He wrote extensively for organ and for other keyboard instruments. He composed concertos, for instance for violin and for harpsichord, and suites, as chamber music as well as for orchestra. Many of his works employ the genres of canon and fugue.
Throughout the 18th century Bach was primarily valued as an organist, while his keyboard music, such as The Well-Tempered Clavier, was appreciated for its didactic qualities. The 19th century saw the publication of some major Bach biographies, and by the end of that century all of his known music had been printed. Dissemination of scholarship on the composer continued through periodicals (and later also websites) exclusively devoted to him, and other publications such as the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV, a numbered catalogue of his works) and new critical editions of his compositions. His music was further popularised through a multitude of arrangements, including, for instance, the Air on the G String, and of recordings, such as three different box sets with complete performances of the composer’s oeuvre marking the 250th anniversary of his death.
more...What are those red filaments in the sky? They are a rarely seen form of lightning confirmed only about 30 years ago: red sprites. Recent research has shown that following a powerful positive cloud-to-ground lightning strike, red sprites may start as 100-meter balls of ionized air that shoot down from about 80-km high at 10 percent the speed of light. They are quickly followed by a group of upward streaking ionized balls. The featured image was taken earlier this year from Las Campanas observatory in Chile over the Andes Mountains in Argentina. Red sprites take only a fraction of a second to occur and are best seen when powerful thunderstorms are visible from the side.
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Norah Jones (born Geethali Norah Jones Shankar; March 30, 1979 NY) is an American singer, songwriter, actress and pianist. She has won multiple awards and has sold more than 50 million records worldwide.Billboard named her the top jazz artist of the 2000s decade. She has won nine Grammy Awards and was ranked 60th on Billboard magazine’s artists of the 2000s decade chart.
In 2002, Jones launched her solo music career with the release of Come Away with Me, which was a fusion of jazz with country, blues, folk and pop. It was certified diamond, selling over 27 million copies. The record earned Jones five Grammy Awards, including the Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best New Artist. Her subsequent studio albums—Feels Like Home (2004), Not Too Late (2007), and The Fall (2009) all gained platinumstatus, selling over a million copies each. They were also generally well received by critics. Jones’s fifth studio album, Little Broken Hearts, was released on April 27, 2012; her sixth, Day Breaks, was released on October 7, 2016. Her seventh studio album, Pick Me Up Off the Floor, was released on June 12, 2020. Jones made her feature film debut as an actress in My Blueberry Nights, which was released in 2007 and was directed by Wong Kar-Wai.
Jones is the daughter of Indian sitar master and composer Ravi Shankar and concert producer Sue Jones, and is the half-sister of fellow musicians Anoushka Shankar and Shubhendra Shankar.
more...Eric Patrick Clapton, CBE (born 30 March 1945) is an English rock and blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He is the only three-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: once as a solo artist and separately as a member of the Yardbirds and of Cream. Clapton has been referred to as one of the most important and influential guitarists of all time. Clapton ranked second in Rolling Stone‘s list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time“and fourth in Gibson‘s “Top 50 Guitarists of All Time”. He was also named number five in Time magazine’s list of “The 10 Best Electric Guitar Players” in 2009.
After playing in a number of different local bands, Clapton joined the Yardbirds in 1963, replacing founding guitarist Top Topham. Dissatisfied with the change of the Yardbirds sound from blues rock to a more radio-friendly pop rock sound, Clapton left in 1965 to play with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, with whom he played on one album. After leaving Mayall in 1966, he formed the power trio Cream with drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce, in which Clapton played sustained blues improvisations and “arty, blues-based psychedelic pop”.[6] After Cream broke up in November 1968, he formed blues rock band Blind Faith with Baker, Steve Winwood, and Ric Grech, recording one album and performing on one tour before they broke up, leading Clapton to embark on a solo career in 1970.
Alongside his solo career, he also performed with Delaney & Bonnie and Derek and the Dominos, with whom he recorded “Layla“, one of his signature songs. He continued to record a number of successful solo albums and songs over the next several decades, including a 1974 cover of Bob Marley‘s “I Shot the Sheriff” (which helped reggae reach a mass market),[7] the country-infused Slowhand album (1977) and the pop rock of 1986’s August. Following the death of his son Conor in 1991, Clapton’s grief was expressed in the song “Tears in Heaven“, which appeared on his Unplugged album, and in 1996 he had another top-40 hit with the R&B crossover “Change The World“, and in 1998 released the Grammy award-winning “My Father’s Eyes“. Since 1999, he has recorded a number of traditional blues and blues rock albums and hosted the periodic Crossroads Guitar Festival. His most recent studio album is 2018’s Happy Xmas.
Clapton has received 18 Grammy Awards as well as the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. In 2004 he was awarded a CBE at Buckingham Palace for services to music. He has received four Ivor Novello Awards from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, including the Lifetime Achievement Award. In his solo career, Clapton has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. In 1998, Clapton, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, founded the Crossroads Centre on Antigua, a medical facility for recovering substance abusers.
more...Astrud Gilberto (Brazilian Portuguese: [aʃˈtɾud ʒiwˈbɛʁtu]; born Astrud Evangelina Weinert, March 29, 1940) is a Brazilian samba and bossa novasinger. She became popular in the 1960s after her performance of the song “The Girl from Ipanema“.
Astrud Gilberto was born Astrud Evangelina Weinert, the daughter of a Brazilian mother and a German father, in the state of Bahia, Brazil. She was raised in Rio de Janeiro. Her father was a language professor and she became fluent in several languages. She married João Gilberto in 1959 and had a son, João Marcelo Gilberto. She has another son from a second marriage, Gregory Lasorsa. Later she began a relationship with her husband’s musical collaborator, American jazz saxophone player Stan Getz. She emigrated to the United States in 1963, residing in the U.S. from that time. Astrud and João divorced in the mid-1960s.
more...John Lee Curtis “Sonny Boy” Williamson (March 30, 1914 – June 1, 1948) was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter. He is often regarded as the pioneer of the blues harp as a solo instrument. He played on hundreds of recordings by many pre–World War II blues artists. Under his own name, he was one of the most recorded blues musicians of the 1930s and 1940s and is closely associated with Chicago producer Lester Melrose and Bluebird Records. His popular songs, original or adapted, include “Good Morning, School Girl“, “Sugar Mama“, “Early in the Morning“, and “Stop Breaking Down“.
Williamson’s harmonica style was a great influence on postwar performers. Later in his career, he was a mentor to many up-and-coming blues musicians who moved to Chicago, including Muddy Waters. In an attempt to capitalize on Williamson’s fame, Aleck “Rice” Miller began recording and performing as Sonny Boy Williamson in the early 1940s, and later, to distinguish the two, John Lee Williamson came to be known as Sonny Boy Williamson I or “the original Sonny Boy”.
Williamson was born in Madison County, Tennessee, near Jackson, in 1914. His original recordings are in the country blues style, but he soon demonstrated skill at making the harmonica a lead instrument for the blues and popularized it for the first time in a more urban blues setting. He has been called “the father of modern blues harp”. While in his teens he joined Yank Rachell and Sleepy John Estes, playing with them in Tennessee and Arkansas. In 1934 he settled in Chicago.
more...Messier 64, also known as the Evil Eye or Sleeping Beauty Galaxy, may seem to have evil in its eye because all of its stars rotate in the same direction as the interstellar gas in the galaxy’s central region, but in the opposite direction in the outer regions. Captured here in great detail by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, enormous dust clouds obscure the near-side of M64‘s central region, which are laced with the telltale reddish glow of hydrogen associated with star formation. M64 lies about 17 million light years away, meaning that the light we see from it today left when the last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees roamed the Earth. The dusty eye and bizarre rotation are likely the result of a billion-year-old merger of two different galaxies.
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