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William McKinley “Red” Garland Jr. (May 13, 1923 – April 23, 1984) was an American modern jazzpianist. Known for his work as a bandleader and during the 1950s with Miles Davis, Garland helped popularize the block chord style of playing in jazz piano.
William “Red” Garland was born in 1923 in Dallas, Texas. He began his musical studies on the clarinet and alto saxophone, having studied with saxophonist Buster “Prof” Smith, who had been an early mentor of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker in Kansas City. He joined the United States Army in 1941 and was stationed in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. While there, Garland began to learn the piano with Army pianists John Lewis (not to be confused with John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet) and Lee Barnes. At this time, he was also an amateur boxer, having fought Sugar Ray Robinson but losing the match. After being discharged from the military in 1944, Garland played locally around Texas until 1946 when he joined the trumpet player Hot Lips Page’s band, playing with him until a tour ended in New York in March 1946. Garland decided to stay in New York and soon found work there and also in Philadelphia. While in New York, Garland was recommended to singer Billy Eckstine, who hired him for several weeks.
more...Ian Ernest Gilmore Evans (né Green; May 13, 1912 – March 20, 1988) was a Canadian–American jazzpianist, arranger, composer and bandleader. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest orchestrators in jazz, playing an important role in the development of cool jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, and jazz fusion. He is best known for his acclaimed collaborations with Miles Davis.
more...Tanjore Balasaraswati, also known as Balasaraswati (13 May 1918 – 9 February 1984), was an Indian dancer, and her rendering of Bharatanatyam, a classical dance style originated in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, made this style of dancing well known in different parts of India and many parts of the world.
She was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1957 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1977, the third and the second highest civilian honours given by the Government of India. In 1973, she was awarded the Sangeetha Kalanidhi by the Madras Music Academy. In 1981 she was awarded the Sangeetha Kalasikhamani award of The Indian Fine Arts Society, Chennai.
more...NGC 1893 is an open cluster in the constellation Auriga. It is about 12,400 light years away. The star cluster is embedded in the Tadpole Nebula (HII region IC 410).
more...Gabriel Urbain Fauré (French:[ɡabʁi.ɛl yʁbɛ̃ foʁe]; 12 May 1845 – 4 November 1924) was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Sicilienne, nocturnes for piano and the songs “Après un rêve” and “Clair de lune”. Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodicallycomplex style.
more...Stephen Lawrence Winwood (born 12 May 1948) is an English musician and songwriter whose genres include blue-eyed soul, rhythm and blues, blues rock and pop rock. Though primarily a guitarist, keyboard player and vocalist, prominent for his distinctive soulful high tenor voice, Winwood plays other instruments proficiently, including drums, mandolin, bass and saxophone.
Winwood achieved fame during the 1960s and 1970s as an integral member of three major bands: the Spencer Davis Group (1964–1967), Traffic (1967–1969 and 1970–1974) and Blind Faith (1969). During the 1980s, his solo career flourished and he had a number of hit singles, including “While You See a Chance” (1980) from the album Arc of a Diver and “Valerie” (1982) from Talking Back to the Night (“Valerie” became a hit when it was re-released with a remix from Winwood’s 1987 compilation album Chronicles). His 1986 album Back in the High Life marked his career zenith, with hit singles including “Back in the High Life Again“, “The Finer Things“, and the US Billboard Hot 100 number one hit “Higher Love“. He found the top of the Hot 100 again with “Roll with It” (1988) from the album of the same name, with “Holding On” also charting highly the same year. Although his hit singles ceased after the 1980s, he continued to release new albums up to 2008, when Nine Lives, his latest album, was released.
In 2004, Winwood was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Traffic. He has won two Grammy Awards and an Ivor Novello Award, and has been honored as BMI Icon. In 2008, Rolling Stone ranked Winwood number 33 on its list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.
more...Gary George Peacock (May 12, 1935 – September 4, 2020) was an American jazz double bassist. He recorded a dozen albums under his own name, and also performed and recorded with major jazz figures such as avant garde saxophonist Albert Ayler, pianists Bill Evans, Paul Bley and Marilyn Crispell, and as a part of Keith Jarrett’s “Standards Trio” with drummer Jack DeJohnette. The trio existed for over thirty years, and recorded over twenty albums together. DeJohnette once stated that he admired Peacock’s “sound, choice of notes, and, above all, the buoyancy of his playing.” Marilyn Crispell called Peacock a “sensitive musician with a great harmonic sense.”
Peacock was born in Burley, Idaho, on May 12, 1935; his father worked as a business consultant for grocery stores, and his mother was a homemaker. He grew up in Yakima, Washington, where he attended Yakima Senior High School, now called A.C. Davis High School. His earliest musical experiences involved playing piano, trumpet, and drums. When he was 15, he heard live jazz for the first time, attending a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert featuring Oscar Peterson and Ray Brown. Peacock graduated in 1953; while playing for his class, he had a profound experience, stating: “I was playing the drums, and had the experience of being played rather than playing… I realized that something transformative had happened… and there was this certainty. From the bottom of my feet to the top of my head, it was totally clear: ‘Oh, this is the direction to go.
more...The Merope Nebula (also known as Tempel’s Nebula and NGC 1435) is a diffuse reflection nebulain the Pleiades star cluster, surrounding the 4th magnitude star Merope. It was discovered on October 19, 1859 by the German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel. The discovery was made using a 10.5 cm refractor. John Herschel included it as 768 in his General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars but never observed it himself.
The Merope Nebula has an apparent magnitude starting at 13 and quickly dimming by a factor of about 15, making most of the nebula dimmer than magnitude 16. It is illuminated entirely by the star Merope, which is embedded in the nebula. It contains a bright knot, IC 349, about half an arcminute wide near Merope, which was discovered by Edward Emerson Barnard in November 1890. It is naturally very bright but is almost hidden in the radiance of Merope. It appears blue in photographs because of the fine carbon dust spread throughout the cloud. Though it was once thought the Pleiades formed from this and surrounding nebulae, it is now known that the Pleiades nebulosity is caused by a chance encounter with the cloud.
more...Claude Hudson “Butch” Trucks (May 11, 1947 – January 24, 2017) was an American drummer. He was best known as a founding member of The Allman Brothers Band, for which he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. Trucks was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida.
Prior to joining the Allman Brothers, Trucks played in various groups before forming the 31st of Februaryas a student at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, in the mid-1960s. He joined the Allman Brothers Band in 1969. Their 1971 live release, At Fillmore East, represented an artistic and commercial breakthrough. The group became one of the most popular bands of the era on the strength of their live performances and several successful albums. Though the band broke up and re-formed various times, Trucks remained a constant in their 45-year career. Trucks died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on January 24, 2017.
more...Eric Victor Burdon (born 11 May 1941) is an English singer and songwriter. He was previously the lead vocalist of the R&B and rock band the Animals and the funk band War. He is regarded as one of the British Invasion‘s most distinctive singers with his deep, powerful blues-rock voice. Burdon is also known for his intense stage performances.
In 2008, he was ranked 57th in Rolling Stone‘s list of “The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time”.
more...Carla Bley (born Lovella May Borg; May 11, 1936 – October 17, 2023) was an American jazz composer, pianist, organist, and bandleader. An important figure in the free jazz movement of the 1960s, she was perhaps best known for her jazz opera Escalator over the Hill (released as a triple LP set), as well as a book of compositions that have been performed by many other artists, including Gary Burton, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell, Art Farmer, Robert Wyatt, John Scofield, and her ex-husband Paul Bley. She was a pioneer in the development of independent artist-owned record labels, and recorded over two dozen albums between 1966 and 2019.
Bley was born in Oakland, California, in 1936, to Swedish parents. Her father, Emil Borg, a piano teacher and church choirmaster, encouraged her to sing and to learn to play the piano; her mother, Arline Anderson, died of a heart attack when Bley was eight years old. After giving up church to immerse herself in roller skating at the age of fourteen, she moved to New York City at seventeen and became a cigarette girl at Birdland, where she met jazz pianist Paul Bley, who encouraged her to start composing.She toured with him under the name Karen Borg before changing her name in 1957 to Carla Borg. She married Bley and took his name the same year, later divorcing. She kept the surname professionally thereafter.
more...Friday May 10th 2024 6:00 p.m. Erev Shabbat Service Commemorating Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut.
Music with Inbal Sharett-Singer, Jayson Rodvsky, Jeff Bailey, Pete Whitman and mick LaBriola. Erev Shabbat honoring and celebrating 76 years since Israel’s founding. Cantor Sharett-Singer will be joined by two local Israeli musicians, Ben Bitton and Ilan Zeroni, who will showcase a sermon-in-song filled with the duality of our Jewish nation that moves from sadness to joy.
more...Serpens South is a relatively dense star cluster of about 7 x 10 light-years in diameter, located approximately 848 light-years away from Earth in the southern portion of the Serpens cloud, a star-forming molecular cloud in the constellation of Serpens (the Snake), which also hosts the famous and massive Serpens star cluster.
Human families may be bonded by blood, but stellar families are united by gravity. A family of stars, or star cluster, can contain hundreds or thousands of members. The Serpens South star cluster contains some 50 young stars – “siblings” – 35 of which are protostars, or stellar infants, that are just beginning to form. This star cluster was uncovered by infrared observations of the Spitzer Space Telescope. At visible wavelengths the stars are completely obscured by interstellar dust in the Serpens cloud.
The discovery of Serpens South is a direct result of the Gould’s Belt Legacy project, which aims to study all prominent star-forming regions within about 1,600 light-years of Earth. These regions together form a ring of molecular clouds and associated young stars known as the Gould’s Belt. The discovery will lead astronomers to more clues about how these cosmic families, which contain hundreds of gravitationally bound stars, form and interact.
In this image, the Serpens South stars are shown as green, yellow, and orange specks, sitting atop a black line that runs through the middle of the image. The “line” is a long, dense patch of cosmic dust and gas, which is currently condensing to form stars. Stars form when thick cosmic clouds collapse. Tints of green represent hot hydrogen gas. Spitzer can see this hydrogen gas “fingerprint” when the high-speed jets shooting out of the young stars violently collide with cool gas in the surrounding cloud. Wisps of red in the background are organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). On Earth, PAHs are found on charred barbeque grills and in sooty automobile exhaust.
This picture is composed of three images taken on August 8, 2007 with the Spitzer Space telescope’s Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) at 3.6 (blue), 4.5 (green), and 5.8 (red) microns. North is up.
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