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Paul Gonsalves (July 12, 1920 – May 15, 1974) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist best known for his association with Duke Ellington. At the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, Gonsalves played a 27-chorus solo in the middle of Ellington’s “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue“, a performance credited with revitalizing Ellington’s waning career in the 1950s.
Born in Brockton, Massachusetts, to Cape Verdean parents, Gonsalves’ first instrument was the guitar, and as a child he was regularly asked to play Cape Verdean folk songs for his family. He grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and played as a member of the Sabby Lewis Orchestra. His first professional engagement in Boston was with the same group on tenor saxophone, in which he played before and after his military service during World War II. Before joining Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1950, he had also played in big bands led by Count Basie (1947–1949) and Dizzy Gillespie(1949–1950).
more...Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1961, Marta grew up surrounded by music. Her mother, a music teacher, studied with Zoltan Kodaly, a famous composer and a great scholar specialized in his country’s traditional music.
more...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujCXnuansSQ
more...Variable star R Aquarii is actually an interacting binary star system, two stars that seem to have a close, symbiotic relationship. About 710 light years away, this intriguing system consists of a cool red giant star and hot, dense white dwarf star in mutual orbit around their common center of mass. The binary system’s visible light is dominated by the red giant, itself a Mira-type long period variable star. But material in the cool giant star’s extended envelope is pulled by gravity onto the surface of the smaller, denser white dwarf, eventually triggering a thermonuclear explosion and blasting material into space. The featured image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the still-expanding ring of debris which spans less than a light year and originated from a blast that would have been seen in the early 1770s. The evolution of less understood energetic events producing high energy emission in the R Aquarii system has been monitored since 2000 using Chandra X-ray Observatory data.
more...Tomasz Stańko (born July 11, 1942) is a Polish trumpeter, composer and improviser. Often recording for ECM Records, Stańko is strongly associated with free jazz and the avant-garde.
Coming to prominence in the early 1960s alongside pianist Adam Makowicz in the Jazz Darings, Stańko later collaborated with pianist Krzysztof Komeda, notably on Komeda’s pivotal 1966 album Astigmatic. In 1968, Stańko formed an acclaimed quintet that included Zbigniew Seifert on violin and alto saxophone, and in 1975 he formed the Tomasz Stańko-Adam Makowicz Unit.
more...Clyde Edric Barron Bernhardt (July 11, 1905 – May 20, 1986) was an American jazz trombonist.
Bernhardt was born in Gold Hill, North Carolina, and raised there and in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He started playing trombone at age 17, and in the 1920s played with a variety of lesser-known ensembles, such as Bill Eady‘s Ellwood Syncopators, Tillie Vennie, Odie Cromwell‘s Wolverine Syncopators, Charlie Grear‘s Original Midnite Ramblers, the Richard Cheatham Orchestra, the Whitman Sisters, Honey Brown‘s Orchestra, Henry P. McClane’s Society Orchestra[2] and Ray Parker. He worked with King Oliver in 1931, and through the middle of the decade did stints with Alex Hill, The Alabamians, Billy Fowler, Ira Coffey‘s Walkathonians, and Vernon Andrade.
In 1937 he joined Edgar Hayes‘s orchestra, remaining there through 1942, then worked with Jay McShann, Cecil Scott, Luis Russell, Leonard Feather, Pete Johnson, Wynonie Harris, Claude Hopkins, and Paul and Dud Bascomb. He led his own ensemble, called the Blue Blazers, before returning to play with Russell from 1948-51. He recorded as a leader between 1946 and 1953, and on some of the recordings he sings under the pseudonym Ed Barron.
more...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blHNjVk2ORw
more...NGC 3576 is a minor nebula in the Sagittarius arm of the galaxy a few thousand light-years away from the Eta Carinae nebula. This nebula even received six different classification numbers. Currently, astronomers call the entire nebula NGC 3576. A popular nickname is “The Statue of Liberty Nebula” because of the distinctive shape in the middle of the nebula. The name was first suggested in 2009 by Dr. Steve Mazlin, a member of Star Shadows Remote Observatory (SSRO).
6,000 ly distance.
more...
Béla Anton Leoš Fleck (born July 10, 1958) is an American banjo player. An innovative and technically proficient banjo player, he is best known for his work with the bands New Grass Revival and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones.
A native of New York City, Fleck was named after Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, Austrian composer Anton Webern, and Czech composer Leoš Janáček. He was drawn to the banjo at a young age when he heard Earl Scruggs play the theme song for the television show Beverly Hillbillies and when he heard “Dueling Banjos” by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell on the radio. At age fifteen, he received his first banjo from his grandfather.[4]During the train ride home, a man volunteered to tune the banjo and suggested he learn from the book How to Play the Five String Banjo by Pete Seeger. He attended the High School of Music & Art in New York City, playing French horn until he flunked and was transferred to the choir, though he spent most of his time on the banjo. He studied the book Bluegrass Banjo by Pete Wernick and took lessons from Erik Darling, Marc Horowitz, and Tony Trischka
more...Edward Lee Morgan (July 10, 1938 – February 19, 1972) was an American jazz trumpeter. Known mainly as one of the key hard bop musicians of the 1960s, Morgan came to prominence in his late teens, recording on John Coltrane‘s Blue Train (1957) and with the band of drummer Art Blakeybefore launching a solo career. Morgan stayed with Blakey until 1961 and started to record as leader soon after. His song “The Sidewinder“, on the album of the same name, became a surprise crossover hit on the pop and R&B charts in 1964, while Morgan’s recordings found him touching on other styles of music as his artistry matured. Soon after The Sidewinder was released, Morgan rejoined Blakey for a short period of time. After leaving Blakey for the final time, Morgan continued to work prolifically as both a leader and a sideman with the likes of Hank Mobley and Wayne Shorter, becoming, in the words of critic Steve Huey, “[a] cornerstone of the Blue Note label roster”. Morgan’s career was cut short at the age of 33, when his common-law wife shot and killed him following a confrontation at Slug’s Saloon.
Edward Lee Morgan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 10, 1938, the youngest of Otto Ricardo and Nettie Beatrice Morgan’s four children.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXrSOnaqFv4&t=11s
more...Blind Boy Fuller (born Fulton Allen, July 10, 1904 or 1907 – February 13, 1941) was an American blues guitarist and singer. Of the recorded Piedmont blues artists, a group that includes Blind Blake, Josh White, and Buddy Moss, Fuller was one of the most popular with rural African Americans.
Allen was born in Wadesboro, North Carolina, 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdIdGoyzoxQ
more...Omar Bashir was born in 1970 in Budapest, Hungary. He started playing the ‘ud at 5, next to his father, Munir Bashir, the Iraqi virtuoso who first made the oud a solo recital instrument and popularized it in the West. At 7, Omar Bashir joined the Baghdad Music and Ballet School. He would eventually become a teacher there and set up his own band of 24 musicians specializing in traditional Iraqi music. They performed regularly across Egypt, Russia, Turkey and many Arabic countries.
more...NGC 6300 is an intriguing barred spiral galaxy in the constellation of Ara. This near-infrared image with FLAMINGOS-2 shows the galaxy’s complex arm structure forming a spectacular ring of star formation. The galaxy’s bar also has a strong vein of dust that almost obscures its bright active nucleus –– whose prodigious energy is the result of matter accreting onto a black hole with an estimated mass of 280,000 Suns.
NGC 6300 is a barred Seyfert spiral galaxy located in the constellation Ara. It is designated as SB(rs)b in the galaxy morphological classification scheme and was discovered by the Scottish astronomer James Dunlop on 30 June 1826. NGC 6300 is located at about 51 million light years away from earth. It is suspected that a massive black hole (300,000 times the mass of Sun) may be at its center, pulling all the nearby objects into it. In turn, it emits large amounts of X-rays.
more...John Graham “Mitch” Mitchell (9 July 1946 – 12 November 2008) was an English drummer who was best known for his work in the Jimi Hendrix Experience. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2009.
Mitchell was born in Ealing, Middlesex to Phyliss C (née Preston) and Thomas J Mitchell. Mitchell and some writers note his birthdate as 9 July 1946, although several others incorrectly indicate that he was born in 1947. As a teenager, he starred in a children’s television programme, Jennings at School, and starred in a leading role in the 1960 British film Bottoms Up with Jimmy Edwards. Mitchell became a musician through working at Jim Marshall‘s drum shop on Saturdays while still at school. One of his first bands was the Soul Messengers, formed at the Ealing Club with saxophonist Terry Marshall, son of Jim Marshall. Early in his career, he gained considerable musical experience as a touring and session musician, working with Pete Nelson and the Travellers, Frankie Reid and the Casuals (1962), Johnny Harris and the Shades, the Pretty Things, Bill Knight & the Sceptres, the Riot Squad, and the Who as a session drummer while the band was in the process of replacing Doug Sandom with Keith Moon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KCUg-JmTog
more...Colin James Bailey (born July 9, 1934) is British-born American jazz drummer.
Born in Swindon, England, 1934. Bailey learned to play drums as a child, studying formally from age seven. His first band was the Nibs, when he was 7, which consisted of 2 accordions, banjo and drums. He toured with Winnefred Atwell from 1952-1956, and performed at the London Palladium for Queen Elizabeth (1952). He lived in Australia from 1958 into the early 1960s, playing in the staff band for Channel 9 TV. In Sydney he played with Bryce Rohde and the Australian Jazz Quartet, backing musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan. When the AJQ toured the U.S., Bailey was hired by Vince Guaraldi, With Monty Budwig on bass. This trio played with Jimmy Witherspoon, Ben Webster, and Gene Ammons for the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco. In 1962 they recorded the album Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus, which included the hit “Cast Your Fate To The Wind“. In 1963 he moved to Los Angeles to play with the Victor Feldman Trio, and in 1965 he recorded the soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas with Vince Guaraldi in Whitney Studios in Glendale, CA. Bailey worked with Clare Fischer (1963–1964), Joe Pass (for 14 years, and made 14 records) and Miles Davis (1963). He toured worldwide with Benny Goodman in 1964-1965, played on The first Regis Philbin show with Terry Gibbs, and toured with George Shearing (1964-1967). In 1967 he recorded with Frank Sinatra and Tom Jobim. He also spent time with Chet Baker, Ray Brown, João Gilberto, and Blossom Dearie (1975).
more...From Chile
more...This remarkable picture from the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows one of the most perfect geometrical forms created in space. It captures the formation of an unusual pre-planetary nebula, known as IRAS 23166+1655, around the star LL Pegasi (also known as AFGL 3068) in the constellation of Pegasus (the Winged Horse).
The striking picture shows what appears to be a thin spiral pattern of astonishingly regularity winding around the star, which is itself hidden behind thick dust. The spiral pattern suggests a regular periodic origin for the nebula’s shape. The material forming the spiral is moving outwards a speed of about 50 000 km/hour and, by combining this speed with the distance between layers, astronomers calculate that the shells are each separated by about 800 years.
The spiral is thought to arise because LL Pegasi is a binary system, with the star that is losing material and a companion star orbiting each other. The spacing between layers in the spiral is expected to directly reflect the orbital period of the binary, which is indeed estimated to be also about 800 years.
The creation and shaping of planetary nebulae is an exciting area of stellar evolution. Stars with masses from about half that of the Sun up to about eight times that of the Sun do not explode as supernovae at the ends of their lives. Instead a more regal end awaits them as their outer layers of gas are shed and drift into space, creating striking and intricate structures that to Earth-bound observers often look like dramatic watercolour paintings. IRAS 23166+1655 is just starting this process and the central star has yet to emerge from the cocoon of enveloping dust.
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