Blog
Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is caught in this alluring telescopic mosaic. The scene is anchored below by bright star Eta Geminorum, at the foot of the celestial twin, while the Jellyfish Nebula is the brighter arcing ridge of emission with tentacles dangling below and left of center. In fact, the cosmic jellyfish is part of bubble-shaped supernova remnant IC 443, the expanding debris cloud from a massive star that exploded. Light from the explosion first reached planet Earth over 30,000 years ago. Like its cousin in astrophysical waters the Crab Nebula supernova remnant, the Jellyfish Nebula is known to harbor a neutron star, the remnant of the collapsed stellar core. An emission nebula cataloged as Sharpless 249 fills the field at the upper right. The Jellyfish Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away. At that distance, this narrowband composite image presented in the Hubble Palette would be about 300 light-years across.
more...Chaka Khan (born Yvette Marie Stevens, March 23, 1953) is an American recording artist whose career has spanned five decades, beginning in the 1970s as the lead vocalist and focal point of the funk band Rufus. Known as the Queen of Funk, Khan was the first R&B artist to have a crossover hit featuring a rapper, with “I Feel for You” in 1984. Khan has won ten Grammys and has sold an estimated 70 million records worldwide.
In the course of her solo career, Khan has achieved three gold singles, three gold albums and one platinum album with I Feel for You. With Rufus, she achieved four gold singles, four gold albums, and two platinum albums. She has collaborated with Ry Cooder, Robert Palmer, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Guru, and Mary J. Blige, among others. In December 2016, Billboard magazine ranked her as the 65th most successful dance artist of all time. She was ranked at number 17 in VH1‘s original list of the 100 Greatest Women of Rock & Roll. She has been nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice; she was first nominated as member of Rufus in 2011.
Chaka Khan was born Yvette Marie Stevens on March 23, 1953 into an artistic, bohemian household in Chicago, Illinois. The eldest of five children born to Charles Stevens and Sandra Coleman, she has described her father as a beatnik and her mother as “able to do anything.” She was raised in the Hyde Park area, “an island in the middle of the madness” of Chicago’s rough South Side housing projects.[6] Her sister Yvonne later became a successful musician in her own right under the name Taka Boom. Her only brother, Mark, who formed the funk group Aurra, also became a successful musician. She has two other sisters, Zaheva Stevens and Tammy McCrary.
more...David Samuel Pike (March 23, 1938 – October 3, 2015) was a jazz vibraphone and marimba player. He appears on many albums by Nick Brignola, Paul Bley and Kenny Clarke, Bill Evans, and Herbie Mann. He also recorded extensively as leader, including a number of albums on MPS Records.
He learned drums at the age of eight and was self-taught on vibes. Pike made his recording debut with the Paul Bley Quartet in 1958. He began putting an amplifier on his vibes when working with flautist Herbie Mann in the early 1960s. By the late 1960s, Pike’s music became more exploratory, contributing a unique voice and new contexts that pushed the envelope in times remembered for their exploratory nature. Doors of Perception, released in 1970 for the Atlantic Records subsidiary Vortex Records and produced by former boss Herbie Mann, explored ballads, modal territory, musique concrète, with free and lyrical improvisation, and included musicians like alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, bassist Chuck Israelsand pianist Don Friedman.
more...Iverson Minter (March 23, 1932 – February 25, 2012), known as Louisiana Red, was an African-American blues guitarist, harmonica player, and singer, who recorded more than 50 albums. He was best known for his song “Sweet Blood Call“.
Born in Bessemer, Alabama,[3] Minter lost his parents early in life; his mother died of pneumonia shortly after his birth, and his father was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in 1937. He was brought up by a series of relatives in various towns and cities. Red recorded for Chess in 1949, before joining the Army. He was trained as a parachutist with the 82nd Airborne and was sent to Korea in 1951. The 82nd Airborne was not deployed as a complete unit in Korea, but soldiers from this unit were dispatched as Rangers in the 2nd, 3rd and 7th Infantry Divisions. Minter said he was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division.
more...Granville Henry “Sticks” McGhee (March 23, 1918 – August 15, 1961) was an African-American jump blues guitarist, singer and songwriter, best known for his blues song “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee”, which he wrote with J. Mayo Williams
McGhee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee. He received his nickname when he was a child. He used a stick to push a wagon carrying his older brother Brownie McGhee, who had contracted polio. Granville began playing the guitar when he was thirteen years old. After his freshman year he dropped out of high school and worked with his father at the Eastman Kodak subsidiary, Tennessee Eastman Company in Kingsport. In 1940 Granville quit his job and moved to Portsmouth, Virginia, and then to New York City. He entered the military in 1942 and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After being discharged in 1946, he settled in New York.
more...World Music on Flamenco Fridays.
Dos niños que se convirtieron en artistas. El peso de la herencia que ambos soportan hace que fluya el arte a raudales.
more...Shiny NGC 253 is one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, and also one of the dustiest. Some call it the Silver Dollar Galaxy for its appearance in small telescopes, or just the Sculptor Galaxy for its location within the boundaries of the southern constellation Sculptor. Discovered in 1783 by mathematician and astronomer Caroline Herschel, the dusty island universe lies a mere 10 million light-years away. About 70 thousand light-years across, NGC 253 is the largest member of the Sculptor Group of Galaxies, the nearest to our own Local Group of Galaxies. In addition to its spiral dust lanes, tendrils of dust seem to be rising from a galactic disk laced with young star clusters and star forming regions in this sharp color image. The high dust content accompanies frantic star formation, earning NGC 253 the designation of a starburst galaxy. NGC 253 is also known to be a strong source of high-energy x-rays and gamma rays, likely due to massive black holes near the galaxy’s center. Take a trip through extragalactic space in this short video flyby of NGC 253.
more...
George Benson (born March 22, 1943) is an American musician, guitarist, and singer-songwriter. He began his professional career at 21 as a jazzguitarist. Benson uses a rest-stroke picking technique similar to that of gypsy jazz players such as Django Reinhardt.
A former child prodigy, Benson first came to prominence in the 1960s, playing soul jazz with Jack McDuff and others. He then launched a successful solo career, alternating between jazz, pop, R&B singing, and scat singing. His album Breezin’ was certified triple-platinum, hitting no. 1 on the Billboardalbum chart in 1976. His concerts were well attended through the 1980s, and he still has a large following. Benson has been honored with a staron the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Benson was born and raised in the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At the age of seven, he first played the ukulele in a corner drug store, for which he was paid a few dollars. At the age of eight, he played guitar in an unlicensed nightclub on Friday and Saturday nights, but the police soon closed the club down. At the age of 9, he started to record. Out of the four sides he cut, two were released: “She Makes Me Mad” backed with “It Should Have Been Me”, with RCA-Victor in New York; although one source indicates this record was released under the name “Little Georgie”,while the 45rpm label is printed with the name George Benson.The single was produced by Leroy Kirkland for RCA’s rhythm and blues label, Groove Records. As he has stated in an interview, Benson’s introduction to showbusiness had an effect on his schooling. When this was discovered (tied with the failure of his single) his guitar was impounded. Luckily, after he spent time in a juvenile detention centre his stepfather made him a new guitar.*
more...Jon Hassell (born March 22, 1937) is an American trumpet player and composer. He is known for developing the musical concept known as “Fourth World,” which sees him unify ideas from minimalism, various world music sources, and his electronic manipulation of the trumpet. He has collaborated with artists such as Brian Eno, the Theatre of Eternal Music, Talking Heads, Farafina, Peter Gabriel, Ani DiFranco, and Ry Cooder.
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, United States, Hassell received his master’s degree from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. During this time he became involved in European serial music, especially the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and so after finishing his studies at Eastman, he enrolled in the Cologne Course for New Music (founded and directed by Stockhausen) for two years. Hassell returned to the U.S. in 1967, where he met Terry Riley in Buffalo, New York and performed on the first recording of Riley’s seminal work In C in 1968. He pursued his Ph.D.in musicology in Buffalo and performed in La Monte Young‘s “Dream House” (a.k.a. Theatre of Eternal Music) in New York City.
more...Fred Anderson (March 22, 1929 – June 24, 2010) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist who was based in Chicago, Illinois. Anderson’s playing was rooted in the swing music and hard bop idioms, but he also incorporated innovations from free jazz, rendering him, as critics Ron Wynn and Joslyn Layne have written, “a seminal figure among Chicago musicians in the ’60s.”
Anderson was born Monroe, Louisiana. He grew up in the Southern United States and learned to play the saxophone by himself when he was a teenager. Anderson moved his family to Evanston, Illinois in the 1940s. He studied music formally at the Roy Knapp Conservatory in Chicago, and had a private teacher for a short time. Fred worked installing carpet for decades to sustain his music and his family, before opening up a succession of important Chicago nightclubs. Despite Anderson’s prominence as an avant-garde musician, his guiding inspiration was Charlie Parker, portraits of whom are prominently displayed at Anderson’s club, the Velvet Lounge.
He was one of the founders of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and an important member of the musical collective. In the early 1960s Anderson formed his own group, playing his original compositions, with Vernon Thomas on drums, Bill Fletcher on bass, and his partner for many years, the Chicago jazz trumpeter Billy Brimfield.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMeOE8RX0tE
more...Sally Nyolo was born in a small village called Eyen-Meyong, in southern Cameroon.
more...RHYTHM ROOTS WORKSHOP
Wednesday March 21st 2018 noon-2pm
Partnership Resources Inc Minneapolis
With the GOLD STARS percussion ensemble with Fartun, Katrina, Tami, Darani, Maria, Brad, Monique, Mohamed, Breanna and Daisy.
more...
NGC 3972, also known as LEDA 37466 and IRAS 11531+5535, lies approximately 59 million light-years away from Earth.
First discovered by the British astronomer William Herschel in 1789, the galaxy is a member of the M109 group of galaxies, also known as the NGC 3992 Group or Ursa Major cloud.
In 2011, Chinese astronomers Zhangwei Jin and Xing Gao observed a Type Ia supernova, called SN 2011by, in NGC 3972.
All of these supernovae peak at the same brightness and are brilliant enough to be seen over relatively longer distances.
NGC 3972 also contains many pulsating stars called Cepheid variables.
These stars change their brightness at a rate matched closely to their intrinsic luminosity, making them ideal cosmic lighthouses for measuring accurate distances to relatively nearby galaxies.
Astronomers search for Cepheid variables in nearby galaxies which also contain a Type Ia supernova so they can compare the true brightness of both types of stars.
That brightness information is used to calibrate the luminosity of Type Ia supernovae in far-flung galaxies so that they can calculate the galaxies’ distances from Earth.
Once astronomers know accurate distances to galaxies near and far, they can determine and refine the expansion rate of the Universe.
This image of NGC 3972 was taken in 2015 with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3(WFC3), as part of a project to improve the precision of the Hubble constant.
more...Yoshio Suzuki (Bassist, Composer/Arranger)
March 21, 1946
Born in Kiso-Fukushima, Nagano Prefecture, Japan.
Mr. Suzuki grew up in a musical family where his father was a violin craftsman, his mother a piano teacher, and his uncle, the founder of the world renowned “Suzuki Method”. He learnt piano and violin as a child and also played guitar during high school. He played piano in the Waseda University Modern Jazz ensemble.
Upon graduation, Mr. Suzuki started his professional career as a pianist. Soon he started studying under Japanese jazz icon, Sadao Watanabe. Around this time, Mr. Watanabe advised him to pursue bass as his main instrument.
From 1969 ~ ’73 he was the bass chair for Sadao Watanabe group and Masabumi Kikuchi group.
In October 1973, he moved to New York and started his career in America.
In 1974 he worked for Stan Getz as his regular bassist. Furthermore, he was the bassist for the legendary group “Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers” from 1975 ~ ’76.
From 1976 ~ ’80, Mr. Suzuki worked mainly with Bill Hardman&Junior Cook band. He also led his own group in New York City featuring David Liebman on saxophone. During this period, he also worked with Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz, and Chet Baker. Simultaneously, he studied classical composition. By blending his jazz, classical and Japanese influences, he created a unique composing style and a musical voice.
Mr. Suzuki returned to Japan in 1985 and formed his own group MATSURI.
In 1992, he signed a contract with Video Arts Music and released an all -original composition featured album “THE MOMENT”(recorded in NY) from the ONE VOICE label. His proceeding releases also feature all original compositions of his own.
In 1993 He formed his own group EAST BOUNCE featuring Souichi Noriki (p, key), Masahiro Fujioka (sax) and Cecil Monroe (ds).
more...Solomon Burke (born James Solomon McDonald, March 21, 1940 – October 10, 2010 Philadelphia,PA) was an American preacher and singer who shaped the sound of rhythm and blues as one of the founding fathers of soul music in the 1960s. He has been called a “a key transitional figure bridging R&B and soul”, and was known for his “prodigious output”.
He had a string of hits including “Cry to Me“, “If You Need Me“, “Got to Get You Off My Mind“, “Down in the Valley” and “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love“. Burke was referred to as “King Solomon”, the “King of Rock ‘n’ Soul”, “Bishop of Soul” and the “Muhammad Ali of soul”. Due to his minimal chart success in comparison to other soul music greats such as James Brown, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding, Burke has been described as the genre’s “most unfairly overlooked singer” of its golden age. Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler once referred to Burke as “the greatest male soul singer of all time”
more...Eddie James “Son” House, Jr. (March 21, 1902 – October 19, 1988 Lyon, MS) 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 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 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, a group of young record collectors discovered House, whom they knew of from his records issued by Paramount and by the Library of Congress. With their encouragement, 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. House died in 1988.
In addition to his early influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, he was an inspiration to John Hammond, Alan Wilson (of Canned Heat), Bonnie Raitt, the White Stripes, Dallas Green and John Mooney.
more...More Posts
- World Music with Trio Peligroso
- Daily Roots with Prince Lincoln And The Royal Rasses
- The Cosmos with NGC 3921
- James Taylor Day
- Al Jarreau Day
- Don Drummond Day
- World Music with Binhan
- Daily Roots with Cornell Campbell
- The Cosmos with HH 24
- Bobby McFerrin Day
- Astor Piazzolla Day
- Sonny Boy Williamson II Day
- World Music with Renata Rosa
- Daily Roots with the Heptones
- The Cosmos with NGC 2403
- Ronnie Earl Day
- Don Abney Day
- World Music with Mamadou Diabaté
- Daily Roots with Linval Thompson
- The Cosmos with Barnard 33