Blog
Edward Brian “Tubby” Hayes (30 January 1935 – 8 June 1973) was an English jazz multi-instrumentalist, best known for his tenor saxophoneplaying in groups with fellow sax player Ronnie Scott and with trumpeter Jimmy Deuchar.
Hayes was born in St Pancras, London, England, and brought up in London. His father was a BBC studio violinist who gave his son violin lessons from an early age. By the age of ten, Hayes was playing the piano, and started on the tenor sax at 11.
more...Ahmed Abdul-Malik (born Jonathan Tim, Jr.; January 30, 1927 – October 2, 1993) was an American jazz double bassist and oud player.
Abdul-Malik is remembered for integrating Middle Eastern and North African music styles in his jazz music. He was a bass player for Art Blakey, Earl Hines, Randy Weston, and Thelonious Monk, among others.
more...Bettye LaVette (born Betty Jo Haskins, January 29, 1946) is an American soul singer-songwriter who made her first record at sixteen, but achieved only intermittent fame until 2005, with her album I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise. Her eclectic musical style combines elements of soul, blues, rock and roll, funk, gospel, and country music.
more...
NGC 613 is a barred spiral galaxy located 67 million light years away in the southern constellation of Sculptor. This galaxy was discovered in 1798 by German-English astronomer William Herschel, then re-discovered and catalogued by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop. It was first photographed in 1912, which revealed the spiral form of the nebula. During the twentieth century, radio telescope observations showed that a linear feature in the nucleus was a relatively strong source of radio emission.
NGC 613 is inclined by an angle of 37° to the line of sight from the Earth along a position angle of 125°.The morphological classification of NGC 613 is SBbc(rs), indicating that it is a spiral galaxy with a bar across the nucleus (SB), a weak inner ring structure circling the bar (rs), and moderate to loosely wound spiral arms (bc). The bar is relatively broad but irregular in profile with a position angle that varies from 115–124° and dust lanes located along the leading edges. Star formation is occurring at the ends of the bar and extending along the well-defined spiral arms. The central bulge is readily apparent, with a radius of 14″.
The classification of the nucleus is of type HII, indicating a match to the spectrum of an H II region. Near the core, the stars have a velocity dispersion of 136 ± 20 km/s. The nucleus is a source of radio emission with the form of an inner ring with a radius of about 1,100 ly (350 pc) and a linear feature that is perhaps perpendicular to it. The latter consists of three discrete blobs spanning approximately 2,000 ly (600 pc).Observations suggest the presence of a supermassive black hole at the core with a mass in the range (1.9–9.6) × 107 times the mass of the Sun.
more...James Lee Jamerson (January 29, 1936 – August 2, 1983) was an American bass player. He was the uncredited bassist on most of the Motown Records hits in the 1960s and early 1970s (Motown did not list session musician credits on their releases until 1971), and is now regarded as one of the most influential bass players in modern music history. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. As a session musician he played on twenty-three Billboard Hot 100 number one hits, as well as fifty-six R&B number one hits.
In its special issue “The 100 Greatest Bass Players” in 2017, Bass Player magazine ranked Jamerson number one and the most influential bass guitarist. In 2020, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Jamerson number one in its list of the 50 greatest bassists of all time. A native of Edisto Island, South Carolina, he was born to James Jamerson Sr. and Elizabeth Bacon. He was raised in part by his grandmother who played piano, and his aunt who sang in church choir. Long troubled by alcoholism, Jamerson died of complications from cirrhosis of the liver, heart failure and pneumonia on August 2, 1983, in Los Angeles. He is interred at Detroit’s historic Woodlawn Cemetery.
more...Edwin Thomas “Ed” Shaughnessy ( Jersey City , January 29, 1929 – Calabasas , May 24, 2013 ) was an American drummer . Although he is best known for his collaborations with Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Band, Ed has worked intensively (during his almost seventy-year career) with many artists, including: George Shearing , Jack Teagarden , Charlie Ventura (in the 40s ) and the bands of Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey (in the 1950s). In the 1960s he worked with Count Basie instead before joining the Tonight Show Band. He also took part in a drum competition with Buddy Rich .
Despite being best known as a Big Band drummer, Shaughnessy also played in small groups with Gene Ammons , Roy Eldridge , Billie Holiday , Mundell Lowe , Teo Macero , Charles Mingus , Shirley Scott , Jack Sheldon , Horace Silver and many others.
more...Cantes por bulerías began with Jerezano singer Loco Mateo (c. 1832-1890), who would conclude his specialty, the soleares, with a remate(ending) por bulerías. Bulerías is closely associated with the City of Jerez de la Frontera, specifically Barrio San Miguel, the home of many of flamenco’s most influential artists, including Loco Mateo, Agujetas, and Don Antonio Chacón. Rooted in the soleares, the bulerías also has aspects of older flamenco forms including jaleos and bamberas. The word ‘bulerías” comes from the word “burlar,” meaning to mock, outwit, or escape danger.
more...Spiral galaxy Messier 66 lies a mere 35 million light-years away. The gorgeous island universe is about 100 thousand light-years across, similar in size to the Milky Way. This reprocessedHubble Space Telescope close-up view spans a region about 30,000 light-years wide around the galactic core. It shows the galaxy’s disk dramatically inclined to our line-of-sight. Surrounding its bright core, the likely home of a supermassive black hole, obscuring dust lanes and young, blue star clusters sweep along spiral arms dotted with the tell-tale glow of pinksh star forming regions. Messier 66, also known as NGC 3627, is the brightest of the three galaxies in the gravitationaly interacting Leo Triplet.
more...
Osbourne Ruddock (28 January 1941 – 6 February 1989), better known as King Tubby, was a Jamaican sound engineer who greatly influenced the development of dub in the 1960s and 1970s.
Tubby’s innovative studio work, which saw him elevate the role of the mixing engineer to a creative fame previously only reserved for composers and musicians, would prove to be influential across many genres of popular music. He is often cited as the inventor of the concept of the remix that later became ubiquitous in dance and electronic music production. Singer Mikey Dread stated, “King Tubby truly understood sound in a scientific sense. He knew how the circuits worked and what the electrons did. That’s why he could do what he did”.
King Tubby’s first interaction with the music industry came in the late 1950s with the rising popularity of Jamaican sound systems, which were to be found all over Kingston and which were developing into enterprising businesses. As a talented radio repairman, Tubby soon found himself in great demand by most of the major sound systems of Kingston, as the tropical weather of the Caribbean island (often combined with sabotage by rival sound system owners) led to malfunctions and equipment failure. Tubby owned an electrical repair shop on Drumalie Avenue, Kingston, that fixed televisions and radios. It was here that he built large amplifiers for the local sound systems. In 1961–62, he built his own radio transmitter and briefly ran a pirate radio station playing skaand rhythm and blues which he soon shut down when he heard that the police were looking for the perpetrators. Tubby would eventually form his own sound system, Tubby’s Hometown Hi-Fi, in 1968. It became a crowd favourite due to the high quality sound of his equipment, exclusive releases and Tubby’s own echo and reverb sound effects, at that point something of a novelty. The sound also launched the career of U-Roy, its featured toaster
King Tubby was shot and killed on 6 February 1989, outside his home in Duhaney Park, Kingston, upon returning from a session at his Waterhouse studio.
more...Bob Moses (born January 28, 1948) is an American jazz drummer. Moses played with Roland Kirk in 1964–65 while he was still a teenager. In 1966 he and Larry Coryell formed The Free Spirits, a jazz fusionensemble, and from 1967 to 1969 he played in Gary Burton‘s quartet. He played on the landmark 1967 Burton album A Genuine Tong Funeral, but due to creative disputes with the album’s composer Carla Bley the drummer was credited as “Lonesome Dragon”. Moses and Bley would later reconcile and he became a vocal booster for her music.
Moses also recorded with Burton in the 1970s, in addition to work with Dave Liebman/Open Sky, Pat Metheny, Mike Gibbs, Hal Galper, Gil Goldstein, Steve Swallow, Steve Kuhn/Sheila Jordan(from 1979 to 1982), George Gruntz, and Emily Remler (from 1983 to 1984). In the early 1970s he was a member of Compost with Harold Vick, Jumma Santos, Jack Gregg and Jack DeJohnette.
more...Ronnie Scott OBE (born Ronald Schatt, 28 January 1927 – 23 December 1996) was a British jazz tenor saxophonist and jazz club owner. He co-founded Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, one of the world’s most popular jazz clubs, in 1959. Ronnie Scott was born in Aldgate, East London, into a Jewish family. His father, Joseph Schatt, was of Russian ancestry, and his mother Sylvia’s family attended the Portuguese synagogue in Alie Street. Scott attended the Central Foundation Boys’ School.
Scott began playing in small jazz clubs at the age of 16. His claim to fame was that he was taught to play by “Vera Lynn’s father-in-law!”. He toured with trumpeter Johnny Claes from 1944 to 1945 and with Ted Heath in 1946. He worked with Ambrose, Cab Kaye, and Tito Burns. He was involved in the short-lived musicians’ co-operative Club Eleven band and club (1948–50) with Johnny Dankworth. Scott became an acquaintance of the arranger/composer Tadd Dameron, when the American was working in the UK for Heath, and is reported to have performed with Dameron as the pianist, at one Club Eleven gig.
more...NGC 5775 is a spiral galaxy, a member of the Virgo Cluster, that lies at a distance of about 70 million light-years. Although the spiral is tilted away from us, with only a thin sliver in view, such a perspective can be advantageous for astronomers. For instance, astronomers have previously used the high inclination of this spiral to study the properties of the halo of hot gas that is visible when the galaxy is observed at X-ray wavelengths.
more...Henri Texier (born 27 January 1945) is a French jazz double bassist.
At the age of sixteen, fascinated by the double bass, Texier became a self-taught bassist, crediting Wilbur Ware most as an influence. He formed his first group with Georges Locatelli, Alain Tabar-Nouval, Jean-Max Albert and Klaus Hagel, inspired by the music of Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman. In spite of an almost absence of recorded documents this group represents one of the first expressions of free jazz in France (1965).
Throughout the 1970s Texier remained active in Europe on the jazz scene, performing with musicians such as Gordon Beck, John Abercrombie and Didier Lockwood, among others. In 1982 he formed a quartet with Louis Sclavis. With the trio Romano-Sclavis-Texier, he collaborated in three albums having for theme Africa as seen by the photographer Guy Le Querrec: Carnet de routes, Suite africaine and African Flashback.
more...More Posts
- Tribute to Bill Thompson
- The Cosmos with Simeis 147
- Alphonse Mouzon Day
- Charlie Palmieri Day
- Sal Salvador Day
- Coleman Hawkins Day
- World Fusion with Altin Gün
- Daily Roots with Winston Jarrett
- The Cosmos with Arp 273
- Duane Allman Day
- Meredith Monk Day
- Dr John Day
- World Music with Otava Yo
- Daily Roots with the Uplifters
- The Cosmos with Westerhout 40
- Ofra Haza Day
- Kenny Werner Day
- José Molina Dia
- Ray Collins Day
- World Music with Oj Tak