mick laBriola

Don Drummond (12 March 1932– 6 May 1969) was a Jamaican ska trombonist and composer. He was one of the original members of The Skatalites, and composed many of their tunes.

Drummond was born at the Jubilee Hospital in Kingston, Jamaica, to Doris Monroe and Uriah Drummond. He was educated at Kingston’s Alpha Boys School, where he later taught his younger schoolmate Rico Rodriguez to play the trombone.

His musical career began in 1950 with the Eric Dean’s All-Stars where he performed jazz. He continued into the 1960s with others, including Kenny Williams.

After performing jazz for a decade, Drummond began performing ska and in 1964 Don joined The Skatalites. With Drummond’s politicized conversion to the Rastafari movement, other band members followed his lead. He became a household name in Jamaica, before suffering mental problems. He was rated by pianist George Shearing to be among the world’s top five trombone players.

In 1965 Drummond was convicted of the murder of his longtime girlfriend, Anita “Marguerita” Mahfood, an exotic rhumba dancer and singer, on 1 January 1965. He was ruled criminally insane and imprisoned at Bellevue Asylum, Kingston, where he remained until his death four years later. The official cause of death was “natural causes”, possibly heart failure caused by malnutrition or improper medication, but other theories were put forward; some of his colleagues believed it was a government plot against the Kingston musical scene, and some believed that he was killed by gangsters as revenge for the murder of Mahfood. Heather Augustyn, author of a biography of Drummond published in 2013 claimed to have proved that Drummond’s death was caused by his medications.

In 2013, a ballet telling the story of Drummond’s life was performed by the National Dance Theatre Company. Created by Clive Thompson, the ballet is titled Malungu, which was Mahfood’s pet name for Drummond.

In 2013 a comprehensive biography of Don Drummond was published by McFarland Publishing. Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World’s Greatest Trombonist by Heather Augustyn features a foreword by Delfeayo Marsalis.

World Music from Guinea Bissau

I Heart is Clean

3-12-18

Herbig-Haro 24

This might look like a double-bladed lightsaber, but these two cosmic jets actually beam outward from a newborn star in a galaxy near you. Constructed from Hubble Space Telescope image data, the stunning scene spans about half a light-year across Herbig-Haro 24 (HH 24), some 1,300 light-years away in the stellar nurseries of the Orion B molecular cloud complex. Hidden from direct view, HH 24‘s central protostar is surrounded by cold dust and gas flattened into a rotating accretion disk. As material from the disk falls toward the young stellar object it heats up. Opposing jets are blasted out along the system’s rotation axis. Cutting through the region’s interstellar matter, the narrow, energetic jets produce a series of glowing shock fronts along their path.

Robert Keith “Bobby” McFerrin Jr. (born March 11, 1950) is an American jazz vocalist and conductor. A ten-time Grammy Award winner, he is known for his unique vocal techniques, such as singing fluidly but with quick and considerable jumps in pitch—for example, sustaining a melody while also rapidly alternating with arpeggios and harmonies—as well as scat singing, polyphonic overtone singing, and improvisational vocal percussion. He is widely known for performing and recording regularly as an unaccompanied solo vocal artist. He has frequently collaborated with other artists from both the jazz and classical scenes.

McFerrin’s song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was a No. 1 U.S. pop hit in 1988 and won Song of the Year and Record of the Year honors at the 1989 Grammy Awards. McFerrin has also worked in collaboration with instrumentalists, including pianists Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Joe Zawinul, drummer Tony Williams, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

As a vocalist, McFerrin often switches rapidly between modal and falsetto registers to create polyphonic effects, performing both the main melodyand the accompanying parts of songs. He makes use of percussive effects created both with his mouth and by tapping on his chest. McFerrin is also capable of multiphonic singing.

A document of McFerrin’s approach to singing is his 1984 album The Voice, the first solo vocal jazz album recorded with no accompaniment or overdubbing.

McFerrin’s first recorded work, the self-titled album Bobby McFerrin, was not produced until 1982, when McFerrin was already 32 years old. Before that, he had spent six years developing his musical style, the first two years of which he attempted not to listen to other singers at all, in order to avoid sounding like them. He was influenced by Keith Jarrett, who had achieved great success with a series of improvised piano concerts including The Köln Concert of 1975, and wanted to attempt something similar vocally.

Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla (Spanish pronunciation: [pjaˈsola], Italian pronunciation: [pjatˈtsɔlla]; March 11, 1921 – July 4, 1992) was an Argentine tango composer, bandoneon player, and arranger. His oeuvre revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style termed nuevo tango, incorporating elements from jazz and classical music. A virtuoso bandoneonist, he regularly performed his own compositions with a variety of ensembles.

In 1992, American music critic Stephen Holden described Piazzolla as “the world’s foremost composer of tango music”.

Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 1921, the only child of Italian immigrant parents, Vicente “Nonino” Piazzolla and Assunta Manetti.His paternal grandfather, a sailor and fisherman named Pantaleo (later Pantaleón) Piazzolla, had immigrated to Mar del Plata from Trani, a seaport in the southeastern Italian region of Apulia, at the end of the 19th century. His mother was the daughter of two Italian immigrants from Lucca in Tuscany.

Alex or Aleck Miller (né Ford, possibly March 11, 1897 – May 24, 1965), known later in his career as Sonny Boy Williamson, was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter. He was an early and influential blues harp stylist who recorded successfully in the 1950s and 1960s. Miller used various names, including Rice Miller and Little Boy Blue, before calling himself Sonny Boy Williamson, which was also the name of a popular Chicago blues singer and harmonica player. To distinguish the two, Miller has been referred to as Sonny Boy Williamson II.

He first recorded with Elmore James on “Dust My Broom“. Some of his popular songs include “Don’t Start Me Talkin’“, “Help Me“, “Checkin’ Up on My Baby“, and “Bring It On Home“. He toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival and recorded with English rock musicians, including the Yardbirds, the Animals, and Jimmy Page. “Help Me” became a blues standard, and many blues and rock artists have recorded his songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATelIX-_RMs

Renata Rosa born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1973.

THE HEPTONES – Temptation, Botheration & Tribulation

3-11-18

NGC 2403 (also Caldwell 7) is an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Camelopardalis. NGC 2403 is an outlying member of the M81 Group, and is approximately 8 million light-years distant. It bears a striking similarity to M33, being about 50,000 light years in diameter and containing numerous star-forming H II regions. The northern spiral arm connects it to a Star forming region NGC 2404. NGC 2403 can be observed using 10×50 binoculars.

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The galaxy was discovered by William Herschel in 1788. Allan Sandage detected Cepheid variables in NGC 2403 using the Hale telescope, giving it the distinction of being the first galaxy beyond the Local Group within which a Cepheid was discovered. He derived a distance of a mere 8 thousand light years. Today, it is thought to be a thousand times further away at about 8 million light years (2.5 Mpc).

Ronnie Earl (born Ronald Horvath, March 10, 1953, Queens, New York, United States) is an American blues guitarist and music instructor.

Earl collected blues, jazz, rock and soul records while growing up. He studied American History at C.W. Post College on Long Island for a year and a half, then moved to Boston to pursue a Bachelor’s Degree in Special Education and Education at Boston University where he would graduate in 1975.He spent a short time teaching handicapped children. During his college years, he attended a Muddy Waters concert at the Jazz Workshop in Boston. After seeing Waters perform, Earl took a serious interest in the guitar, which he had first picked up in 1973. His first job was as a rhythm guitarist at The Speakeasy, a blues club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In addition to playing in the Boston blues scene, Earl traveled twice by Greyhound Bus to Chicago, where he was introduced to the Chicago blues scene by Koko Taylor.

Later he traveled to New Orleans and Austin, Texas, where he spent time with Kim Wilson, Jimmie Vaughan and The Fabulous Thunderbirds. In 1979 he joined the band Roomful of Blues as lead guitarist.

John Donald “Don” Abney (March 10, 1923 – January 20, 2000) was an American jazz pianist.

Abney was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He studied piano and french horn at the Manhattan School of Music, and he played the latter in an Army band during military service.

After returning from the army he played in ensembles with Wilbur de Paris, Bill Harris, Kai Winding, Chuck Wayne, Sy Oliver, and Louis Bellson. He had a sustained career as a session musician, playing on recordings for Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, Oscar Pettiford, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Eartha Kitt, and Pearl Bailey. He also played on a large number of recordings for more minor musicians and on R&B, pop, rock, and doo wop releases.

” Mamadou Diabaté is a kora player. He began playing quite early in his life, became known as a musician in the area of Mali in which he lived, and has since moved to the United States, recording five albums.”

Jah Jah Reader Than Dread

3-10-18

Combined image data from the massive, ground-based VISTA telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope was used to create this wide perspective of the interstellar landscape surrounding the famous Horsehead Nebula. Captured at near-infrared wavelengths, the region’s dusty molecular cloud sprawls across the scene that covers an angle about two-thirds the size of the Full Moon on the sky. Left to right the frame spans just over 10 light-years at the Horsehead’s estimated distance of 1,600 light-years. Also known as Barnard 33, the still recognizable Horsehead Nebula stands at the upper right, the near-infrared glow of a dusty pillar topped with newborn stars. Below and left, the bright reflection nebula NGC 2023 is itself the illuminated environs of a hot young star. Obscuring clouds below the base of the Horsehead and on the outskirts of NGC 2023 show the tell-tale far red emission of energetic jets, known as Herbig-Haro objects, also associated with newborn stars.

Zakir Hussain (Hindi: ज़ाकिर हुसैन, Urdu: ذاکِر حُسَین‬‎; born 9 March 1951) is an Indian tabla player in Hindustani classical music, musical producer, film actor and composer.

He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1988, and the Padma Bhushan in 2002, by the Government of India. He was also awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1990, given by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, India’s National Academy of Music, Dance & Drama. In 1999, he was awarded the United States National Endowment for the Arts‘ National Heritage Fellowship, the highest award given to traditional artists and musicians.

Hussain was born to the legendary tabla player Alla Rakha. He attended St. Michael’s High School in Mahim, and graduated from St. Xavier’s, Mumbai.

Hussain was a child prodigy. His father taught him Pakhawaj from the age of 3 years. Zakir’s father Alla Rakha belonged to the tradition of tabla-playing known as the Punjab baaj, one of the six main traditions (baaj) of north Indian tabla drumming, the others being Delhi, Benares, Ajrara, Farrukhabad, and Lucknow.

He was touring by the age of eleven. He went to the United States in 1969 to do his PhD at the University of Washington, receiving a doctorate in music. After that he began his international career, including more than 150 concert dates a year.

Lloyd Price (born March 9, 1933) is an American R&B vocalist, known as “Mr. Personality”, after one of his million-selling hits. His first recording, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy“, was a hit for Specialty Records in 1952. He continued to release records, but none were as popular until several years later, when he refined the New Orleans beat and achieved a series of national hits. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.

Price was born and grew up in Kenner, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans. He had formal training in playing the trumpet and piano, sang in his church’s gospel choir, and was a member of a combo in high school. His mother, Beatrice Price, owned the Fish ‘n’ Fry Restaurant, and Price picked up lifelong interests in business and food from her.

Art Rupe, the owner of Specialty Records, based in Los Angeles, came to New Orleans in 1952 to record the distinctive style of rhythm and blues developing there, which had been highly successful for his competitor Imperial Records. Rupe heard Price’s song “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” and wanted to record it. Because Price did not have a band, Rupe hired Dave Bartholomew to create the arrangements and Bartholomew’s band (plus Fats Domino on piano) to back Price in the recording session. The song was a massive hit. His next release, “Oooh, Oooh, Oooh”, cut at the same session, was a much smaller hit. Price continued making recordings for Speciality, but none of them reached the charts at that time.

In 1954, he was drafted and sent to Korea. When he returned he found he had been replaced by Little Richard. In addition, his former chauffeur, Larry Williams, was also recording for the label, having released “Short Fat Fannie“.

Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman (March 9, 1930– June 11, 2015) was an American jazz saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, and composer. He was one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s, a term he invented with the name of his 1961 album. His “Broadway Blues” has become a standard and has been cited as a key work in the free jazz movement. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994. His album Sound Grammar received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music.

From the beginning of his career, Coleman’s music and playing were in many ways unorthodox. His approach to harmony and chord progression was far less rigid than that of bebop performers; he was increasingly interested in playing what he heard rather than fitting it into predetermined chorus-structures and harmonies. His raw, highly vocalized sound and penchant for playing “in the cracks” of the scale led many Los Angeles jazz musicians to regard Coleman’s playing as out-of-tune. He sometimes had difficulty finding like-minded musicians with whom to perform. Nevertheless, pianist Paul Bley was an early supporter and musical collaborator.

In 1958, Coleman led his first recording session for Contemporary, Something Else!!!!: The Music of Ornette Coleman. The session also featured trumpeter Don Cherry, drummer Billy Higgins, bassist Don Payne and Walter Norris on piano.

1959 was a notably productive year for Coleman. His last release on Contemporary was Tomorrow Is the Question!, a quartet album, with Shelly Manne on drums, and excluding the piano, which he would not use again until the 1990s. Next Coleman brought double bassist Charlie Haden – one of a handful of his most important collaborators – into a regular group with Cherry and Higgins. (All four had played with Paul Bley the previous year.) He signed a multi-album contract with Atlantic Records, who released The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959. It was, according to critic Steve Huey, “a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven’t come to grips with.” While definitely – if somewhat loosely – blues-based and often quite melodic, the album’s compositions were considered at that time harmonically unusual and unstructured. Some musicians and critics saw Coleman as an iconoclast; others, including conductor Leonard Bernstein and composer Virgil Thomson regarded him as a genius and an innovator.”^[12] Jazzwise listed it #3 on their list of the 100 best jazz albums of all time.

World Music on Flamenco Fridays with Sabicas.

Sabicas (nombre propio: Agustín Castellón Campos) (16 de marzo de 1912 – 14 de abril de 1990) fue un guitarrista flamenco de origen romaní.
Sabicas nació en Pamplona, España, y comenzó a tocar la guitarra a la edad de cinco años e hizo su debut en el espectáculo dos años después. Su estilo temprano fue influenciado por Ramón Montoya, a quien se relacionó por el lado de su madre de la familia. La amplia colaboración con importantes cantaores (cantaores flamencos) de la época lo ayudó a desarrollar su estilo personal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=914BKzWaxj4

Daily Roots with the Meditations

3-9-18