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Kálmán Balogh is one of the leading Hungarian cimbalom players, descending from a famous dynasty of Hungarian Gypsy musicians. His virtuosity is matched only by his understanding and respect of his heritage. A graduate of Ferenc Listz Academy of Music of Budapest, he has completed many successful tours throughout the world with various ensembles, including three tours in North America.
The cimbalom, a sort of oversized autoharp or duclcimer played with mallets like a vibraphone, possesses piano like percussive abilities to drive a band rhythmically or take the melodic lead. In Kálmán Balogh’s expert hands, the cimbalom can do both simultaneously. His mastery of this unique and rare Hungarian folk instrument has mesmerized audiences.
more...Orion Nebula
This image, obtained during the late commissioning phase of the GeMS adaptive optics system, with the Gemini South AO Imager (GSAOI) on the night of December 28, 2012, reveals exquisite details in the outskirts of the Orion Nebula. The large adaptive optics field-of-view (85 arcseconds across) demonstrates the system’s extreme resolution and uniform correction across the entire field. The three filters used for this composite color image include [Fe II], H2, and, K(short)-continuum (2.093 microns) for blue, orange, and white layers respectively. The natural seeing while these data were taken ranged from about 0.8 to 1.1 arcseconds, with AO corrected images ranging from 0.084 to 0.103 arcsecond. Each filter had a total integration (exposure) of 600 seconds. In this image, the blue spots are clouds of gaseous iron “bullets” being propelled at supersonic speeds from a region of massive star formation outside, and below, this image’s field-of-view. As these “bullets” pass through neutral hydrogen gas it heats up the hydrogen and produces the pillars that trace the passage of the iron clouds. Principal Investigator(s): John Bally and Adam Ginsberg, University of Colorado and the GeMS/GSAOI commissioning team; Data processing/reduction (using the Gemini IRAF package v1.12beta): Rodrigo Carrasco, Gemini Observatory; Color image composite: Travis Rector, University of Alaska Anchorage.
more...
Josef Erich “Joe” Zawinul (7 July 1932 – 11 September 2007) was an Austrian jazz keyboardist and composer.
First coming to prominence with saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, Zawinul went on to play with trumpeter Miles Davis, and to become one of the creators of jazz fusion, an innovative musical genre that combined jazz with elements of rock and world music. Later, he co-founded the groups Weather Report and The Zawinul Syndicate. He pioneered the use of electric piano and synthesizer, and was named “Best Electric Keyboardist” twenty-eight times by the readers of Down Beat magazine.
A number of prominent musical artists have honored Zawinul with compositions, including Brian Eno‘s instrumental “Zawinul/Lava”, John McLaughlin‘s instrumental “Jozy”, Warren Cuccurullo‘s “Hey Zawinul”, Bob Baldwin‘s “Joe Zawinul”, Chucho Valdés‘s “Zawinul’s Mambo”, Biréli Lagrène‘s instrumental “Josef” and Toninho Horta‘s instrumental “Balada para Zawinul”.
more...Henry “Hank” Mobley (July 7, 1930 – May 30, 1986) was an American hard bop and soul jazz tenor saxophonist and composer. Mobley was described by Leonard Feather as the “middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone”, a metaphor used to describe his tone, that was neither as aggressive as John Coltrane nor as mellow as Stan Getz, and his style that was laid-back, subtle and melodic, especially in contrast with players like Sonny Rollins and Coltrane. The critic Stacia Proefrock claimed he is “one of the most underrated musicians of the bop era.”
Mobley was born in Eastman, Georgia, but was raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, near Newark. When he was 16, an illness kept him in the house for several months. His grandmother thought of buying a saxophone to help him occupy his time, and it was then that Mobley began to play. He tried to enter a music school in Newark, but could not, since he was not a resident, so he kept studying through books at home.
more...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OJnW2LbUw4
more...Sh2-155 (also designated Sharpless 155 or S155) is a diffuse nebula in the constellation Cepheus, within a larger nebula complex containing emission, reflection, and dark nebulosity. It is widely known as the Cave Nebula, though that name was applied earlier to Ced 201, a different nebula in Cepheus. Sh2-155 is an ionized H II region with ongoing star formation activity, at an estimated distance of 725 parsecs (2400 light-years) from Earth.
Sh2-155 was first noted as a galactic emission nebula in 1959 in the extended second edition of the Sharpless catalogue, being a part of the much larger Cep OB3 Association. Although Sh2-155 is relatively faint for amateur observation, some of its structure may be seen visually through a moderately sized telescope under dark skies.
Sh2-155 lies at the edge of the Cepheus B cloud (part of the Cepheus molecular cloud), and is ionized by young stars from the Cep OB3 association. It has been suggested that radiation from the hot O-type star HD 217086 is compressing the region, triggering the formation of a new generation of stars.
more...Michael Shrieve (born July 6, 1949, in San Francisco) is an American drummer, percussionist, and composer. He is best known as the drummer of the rock band Santana. He played on its albums from 1969 to 1974.[1] When he was 20, Shrieve was one of the youngest musicians to perform at Woodstock in 1969. His drum solo during “Soul Sacrifice” in the Woodstock film has been described as “electrifying”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFhcVmD9lIs
more...Luigi Paulino Alfredo Francesco Antonio Balassoni (July 6, 1924 – February 14, 2009), known by the stage name Louie Bellson (his own preferred spelling, although he is often seen in sources as Louis Bellson), was an American jazz drummer. He was a composer, arranger, bandleader, and jazz educator, and is credited with pioneering the use of two bass drums.
Bellson was an internationally acclaimed artist who performed in most of the major capitals around the world. Bellson and his wife, actress and singer Pearl Bailey (married from 1952 until Bailey’s death in 1990), had the second highest number of appearances at the White House (only Bob Hopehad more).
Bellson was a vice president at Remo, a drum company. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1985.
Bellson was born in Rock Falls, Illinois in 1924 and started playing drums at three years of age. At 15, he pioneered using two bass drums at the same time. At age 17, he triumphed over 40,000 drummers to win the Slingerland National Gene Krupa contest.
After graduating from high school, he worked with big bands throughout the 1940s, with Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, and Duke Ellington. In 1952, he married jazz singer Pearl Bailey. During the 1950s, he played with the Dorsey Brothers, Jazz at the Philharmonic, acted as Bailey’s music director, and recorded as a leader for Norgran Records and Verve Records.
more...World Music on Flamenco Fridays with David Cerreduela performing Rondena.
A Rondeña is a palo or musical form of flamenco originating in the town of Ronda in the province of Málaga in Spain.
In common with other palos originating in Málaga, the rondeña antedated flamenco proper and became incorporated into it during the 19th century.
The rondeña has its origin in the fandango malagueño and it is said that it is “the oldest fandango actually known”.
According to the experts, the name does not derive from “nocturnal rounds”, as some have suggested, but is based solely on the name of the town Ronda.
The rondeña spread enormously throughout Andalusia in the 19th century, to such an extent that numerous foreign observers, touring the region at the time, referred to it later in their writings.
Flamenco guitarist from the neighborhood of “Caño Roto”, one of the cradles of flamenco in Madrid.
Currently he is one of the most sought-after guitarists in the flamenco field. He has worked with most of the great flamenco stars such as Antonio Canales, Sara Baras, Enrique Morente and others, who have their music in their shows, since he is one of the flamenco guitarists with the most personality for his musical language and sound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx9ySvREn4M
more...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdFY9OMHvhg
more...BEAU KOO JACKS Mardi Gras NOLA music
JULY 5TH 2018 1130pm-1230am
Nomad Pub on the West Bank Minneapolis
Elton James Birthday
with Van Nixon, Jamie Carter, Todd Matheson, Paul Strickland, Larry McCabe with special guests David Hamilton and Eric Hohn. And mick laBriola bringing on the Gris Gris.
more...NGC 1032 is located about a hundred million light years away in the constellation Cetus (The Sea Monster). Although beautiful, this image perhaps does not do justice to the galaxy’s true aesthetic appeal: NGC 1032 is actually a spectacular spiral galaxy, but from Earth, the galaxy’s vast disc of gas, dust and stars is seen nearly edge-on.
A handful of other galaxies can be seen lurking in the background, scattered around the narrow stripe of NGC 1032. Many are oriented face-on or at tilted angles, showing off their glamorous spiral arms and bright cores. Such orientations provide a wealth of detail about the arms and their nuclei, but fully understanding a galaxy’s three-dimensional structure also requires an edge-on view. This gives astronomers an overall idea of how stars are distributed throughout the galaxy and allows them to measure the “height” of the disc and the bright star-studded core.
more...Jaime Royal “Robbie” Robertson, OC (born July 5, 1943), is a Canadian musician, songwriter, film composer, producer, actor, and author.
Robertson is best known for his work as lead guitarist and primary songwriter for The Band, and for his career as a solo recording artist. His work with The Band was instrumental in creating the Americana music genre. Robertson has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame as a member of The Band, and has been inducted to Canada’s Walk of Fame, both with The Band and on his own. He is ranked 59th in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 greatest guitarists.
As a songwriter, Robertson is credited for writing “The Weight“, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down“, “Up on Cripple Creek“, “Broken Arrow“, “Somewhere Down the Crazy River“, and many others. He has been inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Songwriters.
more...Overton Amos Lemons (July 5, 1913 – October 7, 1966), known as Smiley Lewis, was an American New Orleans rhythm and blues singer and guitarist. The music journalist Tony Russell wrote that “Lewis was the unluckiest man in New Orleans. He hit on a formula for slow-rocking, small-band numbers like ‘The Bells Are Ringing’ and ‘I Hear You Knocking‘ only to have Fats Domino come up behind him with similar music more ingratiatingly delivery. Lewis was practically drowned in Domino’s backwash.”
Lemons was born in DeQuincy, Louisiana, a rural hamlet near Lake Charles, to Jeffrey and Lillie Mae Lemons. He was the second of three sons. His mother died while he was a child, and later he named a song and several automobiles after her. In his mid-teens, he hopped a slow-moving freight train with some friends, who jumped off when the train began to speed up. Lewis alone remained on the train, getting off when it reached its stop in New Orleans. He found boarding with a Caucasian family in the Irish Channel neighborhood and eventually adopted their surname, Lewis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuxjKSM15p4
more...Aladár Csiszár is one of the last great gypsy fiddlers from an area of Transylvania called Székelyföld [Land of the Secklers]. He is the most important informance from this region where folk music was preserved throughout the centuries. He was born into a Gypsy dynasty of musicians and has played all his life for communities surrounding his birthplace. His playing may be characterized by wild improvisations, commendable musicianship and charismatic style.
more...The Fireworks Galaxy
NGC 6946 is a face-on intermediate spiral galaxy with a small bright nucleus, whose location in the sky straddles the boundary between the northern constellations of Cepheus and Cygnus. Its distance from Earth is about 22.5 million light-years or 6.8 megaparsecs, similar to the distance of M101 (NGC 5457) in the constellation Ursa Major. Both were once considered to be part of the Local Group. but are now known to be among the dozen bright spiral galaxies near the Milky Way but beyond the confines of the Local Group. NGC 6946 lies within the Virgo Supercluster.
Discovered by William Herschel on 9 September 1798, this well-studied galaxy has a diameter of approximately 40,000 light-years, about one-third of the Milky Way’s size, and it contains roughly half the number of stars as the Milky Way. The galaxy is heavily obscured by interstellar matter as it lies quite close to the galactic plane of the Milky Way. Due to its prodigious star formation it has been classified as an active starburst galaxy.
Various unusual celestial objects have been observed within NGC 6964. This includes the so-called ‘Red Ellipse’ along one of the northern arms that looks like a super-bubble or very large supernova remnant, and which may have been formed by an open cluster containing massive stars. There are also two regions of unusual dark lanes of nebulosity, while within the spiral arms several regions appear devoid of stars and gaseous hydrogen, some spanning up to two kiloparsecs across. A third peculiar object, discovered in 1967, is now known as “Hodge’s Complex”. This was once thought to be a young supergiant cluster, but in 2017 it was conjectured to be an interacting dwarf galaxy superimposed on NGC 6964.
Ten supernovae have been observed in NGC 6946 in the last century: SN 1917A, SN 1939C, SN 1948B, SN 1968D, SN 1969P, SN 1980K, SN 2002hh, SN 2004et, SN 2008S, and SN 2017eaw. For this reason NGC 6946 in 2005 was dubbed the Fireworks Galaxy, a name becoming increasingly popular. NGC 6946 has an unusually high rate of supernovae production compared to our Milky Way galaxy, whose rate averages just one supernova event per century. This is the more remarkable as our Galaxy comprises twice as many stars.
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