mick laBriola

Aurelio Martínez Suazo, the Honduran musician who championed his country’s Garifuna people (also known as the Garínagu) and brought the music to wider international attention, has died. Martínez was one of 13 people killed last night (Monday, March 17) in a small plane crash off the coast of the Caribbean island of Roatán, according to The Associated Press. He was 55 years old.

Born in the isolated town of Plaplaya, in Honduras’ Gracias a Dios district, in 1969, Martínez participated in traditional Garifuna rituals from a young age. Typically performed on acoustic guitar with percussive accompaniment, Garifuna songs combine West African rhythms with Latin, reggae, and calypso music. At the age of 14, Martínez moved to the port city La Ceiba, where he began performing in various latin jazz ensembles. Eventually, he formed his first group, Lita Ariran, whose 1995 album, Songs of the Garifuna, made them one of the first Garifuna bands distributed on an international label.

Two years later, Martínez met Andy Palacio, a fellow rising star in Garifuna music from Belize, when the two recorded the duet “Lánarime Lamiselu” for Stonetree Records’ compilation Paranda: Africa in Central America. He put out his debut solo album, Garifuna Soul, in 2004, and, in 2005, was elected as the first member of African descent in the National Congress of Honduras, where he fought for the rights of the Garifuna community. Following Palacio’s death, in 2008, however, Martínez returned to music, and would go on to release three more studio LPs under the moniker Aurelio: Laru Beya, in 2011, Lándini, in 2014, and Darandi, in 2017. Last year, Lándini was named as one of the best Latin American albums of all time in the Los 600 discos de Latinoamérica, a list project compiled by music journalists from the region.

Aurelio Martínez Suazo (26 September 1969 – 17 March 2025), professionally known as Aurelio, was a Honduran singer-songwriter and politician. Known for his Garifuna music, he was considered a cultural ambassador of the Garifuna people. According to The Guardian, he became the leading Garifuna performer after the death of musician Andy Palacio. His acclaimed album “Laru Beya” was considered among the best albums of Latin American music, according to Los 600 de Latinoamérica, a 2024 ranking made by Latin American music critics.

March equinox and the northern hemisphere spring. Famous as the Leo Triplet, the three magnificent galaxies found in the prominent constellation Leo gather here in one astronomical field of view. Crowd pleasers when imaged with even modest telescopes, they can be introduced individually as NGC 3628 (bottom left), M66 (middle right), and M65 (top center). All three are large spiral galaxies but tend to look dissimilar, because their galactic disks are tilted at different angles to our line of sight. NGC 3628, also known as the Hamburger Galaxy, is temptingly seen edge-on, with obscuring dust lanes cutting across its puffy galactic plane. The disks of M66 and M65 are both inclined enough to show off their spiral structure. Gravitational interactions between galaxies in the group have left telltale signs, including the tidal tails and warped, inflated disk of NGC 3628 and the drawn out spiral arms of M66. This gorgeous view of the region spans over 1 degree (two full moons) on the sky. Captured with a telescope from Sawda Natheel, Qatar, planet Earth, the frame covers over half a million light-years at the Leo Trio’s estimated 30 million light-year distance.

Edward James “Son” House Jr. (March 21, 1902 – October 19, 1988) was an American Delta blues singer and guitarist, noted for his highly emotional style of singing and slide guitar playing.

After years of hostility to secular music, as a preacher and for a few years also working as a church pastor, he turned to blues performance at the age of 25. He quickly developed a unique style by applying the rhythmic drive, vocal power and emotional intensity of his preaching to the newly learned idiom. In a short career interrupted by a spell in Parchman Farm penitentiary, he developed his musicianship to the point that Charley Patton, the foremost blues artist of the Mississippi Delta region, invited him to share engagements and to accompany him to a 1930 recording session for Paramount Records.

Issued at the start of the Great Depression, the records did not sell and did not lead to national recognition. Locally, House remained popular, and in the 1930s, together with Patton’s associate Willie Brown, he was the leading musician of Coahoma County. There he was a formative influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. In 1941 and 1942, House and the members of his band were recorded by Alan Lomax and John W. Work for the Library of Congress and Fisk University. The following year, he left the Delta for Rochester, New York, and gave up music.

In 1964, Alan Wilson, co-founder of the band Canned Heat, found House and had him listen to his old recordings. He encouraged him to find his way back to the music and from this collaboration, Father of Folk Blues was born. Wilson even played second guitar on “Empire State Express” and the harp on ”Levee Camp Moan”. Son’s manager Dick Waterman said,” Al Wilson helped Son House find Son House”. He relearned his repertoire and established a career as an entertainer, performing for young, mostly white audiences in coffeehouses, at folk festivals and on concert tours during the American folk music revival, billed as a “folk blues” singer. He recorded several albums and some informally taped concerts have also been issued as albums. In 2017, his single “Preachin’ the Blues” was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.