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Skip James

June 9, 2024

Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James (June 9, 1902 – October 3, 1969) was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter. AllMusic stated: “Coupling an oddball guitar tuning set against eerie, falsetto vocals, James’ early recordings could make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.”

His guitar playing is noted for its dark, minor-key sound, played in an open D-minor tuning with an intricate fingerpicking technique. James first recorded for Paramount Records in 1931, but these recordings sold poorly, having been released during the Great Depression, and he drifted into obscurity.

After a long absence from the public eye, James was rediscovered in 1964 by blues enthusiasts including John Fahey, helping further the blues and folk music revival of the 1950s and early 1960s. During this period, James appeared at folk and blues festivals, gave concerts around the country, and recorded several albums for various record labels. His songs have influenced generations of musicians and have been adapted by numerous artists. He has been hailed as “one of the seminal figures of the blues”.

Nehemiah Curtis James was born on June 9, 1902, in a segregated hospital near Bentonia, Mississippi.His mother Phyllis worked as a cook and babysitter on the Woodbine Plantation, which was 15 miles south of Yazoo City. His father Eddie James, a bootlegger who was described as a “local lowlife” by Stephen Calt, left the family around 1907. He later reformed and became a preacher. As a youth, James heard local musicians, such as Henry Stuckey, from whom he learned to play the guitar, and the brothers Charlie and Jesse Sims. His mother bought him a $2.50 guitar, which was his first instrument. James later began playing the organ in his teens. He later left Bentonia in 1919, and began working on road construction and levee-building crews in Mississippi in the early 1920s, and wrote what is perhaps his earliest song, “Illinois Blues”, about his experiences as a laborer. He began playing the guitar in open D-minor tuning.

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Kenny Barron

June 9, 2024

Kenny Barron (born June 9, 1943) is an American jazz pianist, who has appeared on hundreds of recordings as leader and sideman and is considered one of the most influential mainstream jazz pianists since the bebop era.

Barren was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He had four siblings; his eldest brother was tenor saxophonist Bill Barron (1927–1989). At the age of 15, Barron played briefly with Mel Melvin’s orchestra. In 1959, still at school, Barron had local gigs with saxophonist Jimmy Heath. He also played a gig with Yusef Lateef two months before graduating high school.

A few days after graduating, Barron set off on a week-long tour with Lateef. Seeking to further his musical career, Barron moved to New York in 1961. He soon had a regular spot in saxophonist James Moody‘s band, and in the same year he was briefly a sideman with bands led by Lou Donaldson, Roy Haynes, and Lee Morgan. Barron then joined Dizzy Gillespie‘s band, with which he toured internationally between 1962 and 1966. Barron was briefly a member of the Jazztet around 1962, but did not record with them. In the 1960s, he also married and moved to Brooklyn.

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Les Paul

June 9, 2024

Lester William Polsfuss (June 9, 1915 – August 12, 2009), known as Les Paul, was an American jazz, country, and blues guitarist, songwriter, luthier, and inventor. He was one of the pioneers of the solid-bodyelectric guitar, and his prototype, called the Log, served as inspiration for the Gibson Les Paul. Paul taught himself how to play guitar, and while he is mainly known for jazz and popular music, he had an early career in country music. In the 1950s, he and his wife, singer and guitarist Mary Ford, recorded numerous records, selling millions of copies.

Paul is credited with many recording innovations. His early experiments with overdubbing (also known as sound on sound), delay effects such as tape delay, phasing, and multitrack recording were among the first to attract widespread attention. His licks, trills, chording sequences, fretting techniques, and timing set him apart from his contemporaries and inspired many guitarists of the present day.

Among his many honors, Paul is one of a handful of artists with a permanent exhibit in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is prominently named by the music museum on its website as an “architect” and a “key inductee” with Sam Phillips and Alan Freed. Paul is the only inductee in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Paul was born Lester William Polsfuss in Waukesha, Wisconsin, to George and Evelyn (Stutz) Polsfuss, both of German ancestry. His only sibling, Ralph, was seven years older. Paul’s mother was related to the founders of Milwaukee’s Valentin Blatz Brewing Company and the makers of the Stutzautomobile. His parents divorced when he was a child. His mother simplified their Prussian family name first to Polfuss, then to Polfus, although Les Paul never legally changed his name. Before taking the stage name Les Paul, he performed as Red Hot Red and Rhubarb Red.

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World Music Asmâa Hamzoui & Bnat Timbouktou

June 9, 2024

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Daily Roots King Tubby

June 9, 2024

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Alien Conspiracy

June 8, 2024

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Cosmos Abell 2744

June 8, 2024

This deep field mosaicked image presents a stunning view of galaxy cluster Abell 2744 recorded by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam. Also dubbed Pandora’s Cluster, Abell 2744 itself appears to be a ponderous merger of three different massive galaxy clusters. It lies some 3.5 billion light-years away, toward the constellation Sculptor. Dominated by dark matter, the mega-cluster warps and distorts the fabric of spacetime, gravitationally lensingeven more distant objects. Redder than the Pandora cluster galaxies many of the lensed sources are very distant galaxies in the early Universe, their lensed images stretched and distorted into arcs. Of course distinctive diffraction spikes mark foreground Milky Way stars. At the Pandora Cluster’s estimated distance this cosmic box spans about 6 million light-years. But don’t panic. You can explore the tantalizing region in a 2 minute video tour.

 

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Derek Trucks

June 8, 2024

Derek Trucks (born June 8, 1979) is an American guitarist, songwriter, and founder of The Derek Trucks Band. He became an official member of The Allman Brothers Band in 1999. In 2010, he formed the Tedeschi Trucks Band with his wife, blues singer/guitarist Susan Tedeschi. His musical style encompasses several genres and he has twice appeared on Rolling Stones list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. He is the nephew of the late Butch Trucks, drummer for the Allman Brothers.

Trucks was born in Jacksonville, Florida. According to Trucks, the name of Eric Clapton‘s band, Derek and the Dominos, had “something to do with the name [Derek] if not the spelling”.

Trucks bought his first guitar at a yard sale for $5 at age nine and became a child prodigy, playing his first paid performance at age 11. Trucks began playing the guitar using a slide because it allowed him to play the guitar despite his small hands as a young guitarist. By his 13th birthday, Trucks had played alongside Buddy Guy and toured with Thunderhawk.

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Tony Rice

June 8, 2024

David Anthony Rice (June 8, 1951 – December 25, 2020) was an American bluegrass guitarist. He was an influential acoustic guitar player in bluegrass, progressive bluegrass, newgrass and acoustic jazz.He was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2013.

Rice’s music spans the range of acoustic from traditional bluegrass to jazz-influenced New Acoustic music to songwriter-oriented folk. Over the course of his career, he played alongside J. D. Crowe and the New South, David Grisman (during the formation of “Dawg Music”) and Jerry Garcia, led his own Tony Rice Unit, collaborated with Norman Blake, recorded with his brothers Wyatt, Ron, and Larry, and co-founded the Bluegrass Album Band. He recorded with drums, piano, soprano sax, as well as with traditional bluegrass instrumentation.

Rice was born in Danville, Virginia, but grew up in Los Angeles, California, where his father, Herb Rice, introduced him to bluegrass. Tony and his brothers learned the fundamentals of bluegrass and country music from L.A. musicians like the Kentucky Colonels, led by Roland and Clarence White. Clarence White in particular became a huge influence on Rice. Crossing paths with fellow enthusiasts like Ry Cooder, Herb Pedersen and Chris Hillman reinforced the strength of the music he had learned from his father.

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Bill Watrous

June 8, 2024

William Russell Watrous III (June 8, 1939 – July 2, 2018) was an American jazz trombonist. He is perhaps best known for his rendition of Sammy Nestico‘s arrangement of the Johnny Mandel ballad “A Time for Love”, which he recorded on a 1993 album of the same name. A self-described “bop-oriented” player, he was well known among trombonists as a master technician and for his mellifluous sound.

He was born in Middletown, Connecticut, United States. Watrous’ father, also a trombonist, introduced him to the instrument at an early age. While serving in the U.S. Navy, Watrous studied with jazz pianist and composer Herbie Nichols. His first professional performances were in Billy Butterfield‘s band.

Watrous’ career blossomed in the 1960s. He played and recorded with many prominent jazz musicians, including Count Basie, Maynard Ferguson, Woody Herman, Quincy Jones, Johnny Richards, and trombonist Kai Winding. He also played with Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan. He played in the Merv Griffin Show house band from 1965 – 1968 and worked as a staff musician for CBS from 1967 – 1969.

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Robert Schumann

June 8, 2024

Robert Schumann (German: [ˈʁoːbɛʁt ˈʃuːman]; 8 June 1810 – 29 July 1856) was a German composer, pianist, and music critic of the Romantic era.

Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony, to a comfortable middle-class family with no musical connections, and was initially unsure whether to pursue a career as a lawyer or to make a living as a pianist-composer. He studied law at Leipzig and Heidelberg Universities but his main interests were music and Romantic literature. From 1829 he was a student of the piano teacher Friedrich Wieck, but his hopes for a career as a virtuoso pianist were frustrated by a worsening problem with his right hand, and he concentrated on composition. His early works were mainly piano pieces, including the large-scale Carnaval (1834–1835). He was a co-founder of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Musical Journal) in 1834 and edited it for ten years. In his writing for the journal and in his music he distinguished between two contrasting aspects of his personality, dubbing these alter egos “Florestan” for his impetuous self and “Eusebius” for his gentle poetic side.

Despite the bitter opposition of Wieck, who did not regard his pupil as a suitable husband for his daughter, Schumann married Wieck’s daughter Clara in 1840. The marriage was followed by prolific composing, first of songs and song‐cycles including Frauenliebe und Leben (“Woman’s Love and Life”) and Dichterliebe(“Poet’s Love”). Schumann turned his attention to orchestral music in 1841, and in the following two years to chamber music and choral works.

Clara Schumann became a leading concert pianist, and toured Russia in 1844. Her husband went with her but after the tour his physical and mental health was poor for some months. The couple moved to Dresden, living there until 1850. In 1846 Clara gave the first performance of Robert’s Piano Concerto and their friend Felix Mendelssohn conducted the premiere of Schumann’s Second Symphony. The Schumanns moved to Düsseldorf in 1850 in the hope that his appointment as the city’s director of music would provide financial stability, but he was not a good conductor and had to resign after three years. In 1853 the Schumanns met the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms, whom Schumann praised in an article in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The following year Schumann’s always precarious mental health deteriorated gravely. He threw himself into the River Rhine but was rescued and taken to a private sanatorium near Bonn, where he lived for more than two years, dying there at the age of 46.

Schumann was recognised in his lifetime for his piano music – often subtly programmatic – and his songs. His other works were less generally admired, and for many years there was a widespread belief that those from his later years lacked the inspiration of his early music. More recently this view has been less prevalent, but it is still his piano works and songs from the 1830s and 1840s on which his reputation is primarily based.

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World Music Tito Rinesi & the Dargah Ensemble

June 8, 2024

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Daily Roots Itals

June 8, 2024

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Temple Israel Rabbi Moss Celebration

June 7, 2024

Erev Shabbat Service with Celebration of Board Leadership and Farewell to Rabbi Moss

Friday 6-7-24 6pm Shabbat Erev Service celebrating Tobias Moss work at Temple Israel and his farewell new adventure working at a synagogue in Vienna, Austria. I sat in with Tobias Moss group Jewbalayla last summer and he made it so much fun. Tobias is a real inspiration and talent that bring a unique and generous blessing to his community. Accompaniment by Jayson Rodovsky, Jeff Bailey, Peter Whitman and mick LaBriola.

 

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Cosmos Sh2-308

June 7, 2024

Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,000 light-years away toward the well-trained constellation Canis Major and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon. That correspondsto a diameter of 60 light-years at its estimated distance. The massive star that created the bubble, a Wolf-Rayet star, is the bright one near the center of the nebula. Wolf-Rayet stars have over 20 times the mass of the Sun and are thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova phase of massive star evolution. Fast winds from this Wolf-Rayet star create the bubble-shaped nebula as they sweep up slower moving material from an earlier phase of evolution. The windblown nebula has an age of about 70,000 years. Relatively faint emission captured by narrowband filters in the deep image is dominated by the glow of ionized oxygen atoms mapped to a blue hue. Presenting a mostly harmless outline, SH2-308 is also known as The Dolphin-head Nebula.

 

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Johnny Clegg

June 7, 2024

Jonathan Paul Clegg, OBE OIS (7 June 1953 – 16 July 2019) was a South African musician, singer-songwriter, dancer, anthropologist and anti-apartheid activist.

He first performed as part of a duo – Johnny & Sipho – with Sipho Mchunu which released its first single, Woza Friday in 1976. The two then went on to form the band Juluka which released its debut album in 1979. In 1986, Clegg founded the band Savuka, and also recorded as a solo act, occasionally reuniting with his earlier band partners. Sometimes called Le Zoulou Blanc (French: [lə zulu blɑ̃], for “The White Zulu“), he was an important figure in South African popular music and a prominent white figure in the resistance to apartheid, becoming for a period the subject of investigation by the security branch of the South African Police. His songs mixed English with Zulu lyrics, and also combined working class African music with various forms of Western popular music.

Clegg was born on 7 June 1953 in Bacup, Lancashire, to an English father of Scottish descent, Dennis Clegg, and a Rhodesian mother, Muriel (Braudo). Clegg’s mother’s family were Jewish immigrants from Belarus and Poland and Clegg had a secular Jewish upbringing, learning about the Ten Commandmentsbut refusing to have a bar mitzvah or even associate with other Jewish children at school. He moved with his mother to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) at age 6 months, and his parents divorced soon afterwards. At age six, he moved to South Africa with his mother, also spending part of a year in Israel during his childhood.

He grew up in Yeoville, then a predominantly Jewish inner city neighbourhood of Johannesburg. He encountered the demi-monde of the city’s Zulu migrant workers’ music and dance. Under the tutelage of Charlie Mzila, a flat cleaner by day and musician by night, Clegg mastered both the Zulu language and the maskandi guitar and the isishameni dance styles of the migrants. Clegg’s involvement with black musicians often led to arrests for trespassing on government property and for contravening the Group Areas Act. He was first arrested at the age of 15 for violating apartheid-era laws in South Africa banning people of different races from congregating together after curfew hours.

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‘Speedy’ Acquaye

June 7, 2024

Nii Moi ‘Speedy’ Acquaye, percussionist: born Accra, Ghana 7 June 1931; died London 15 September 1993.

SPEEDY ACQUAYE was one of a long line of African musicians whose presence in Britain since at least Elizabethan times has provided a cogent reminder of modern music’s rich and diverse origins.

For over 40 years his challenging remarks and gap-toothed grin were as familiar around Soho as many of the quarter’s better-documented denizens. But in Britain’s careless tradition of paying scant attention to the individuality of black people, he often experienced anonymous status. Those who knew him and his sturdy drumming knew better. Born in Accra in what was then the Gold Coast, Acquaye played a small drum, a parental gift, before starting school at 12. Teenage bands and encouragement from an older cousin failed to interest him in a musical career and he joined the Army briefly before heading for England. Pantomime (Man Friday in a Nottingham production) provided his show-business entry, London the stimulation for the rest of his life.

Soho in the 1950s teemed with small black clubs; here Acquaye found fellow Africans and local modern jazz players who admired their music. He worked with the saxophonists Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott and the redoubtable drummer Phil Seamen, then followed other African percussionists into Kenny Graham’s adventurous Afro-Cubists.

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Tina Brooks

June 7, 2024

Harold FloydTinaBrooks (June 7, 1932 – August 13, 1974) was an American jazz tenor saxophonistand composer best remembered for his work in the hard bop style.

Harold Floyd Brooks was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and was the brother of David “Bubba” Brooks. The nickname “Tina”, pronounced Teena, was a variation of “Teeny”, a childhood moniker. His favourite tune was “My Devotion”. He studied harmony and theory with Herbert Bourne.

Initially, he studied the C-melody saxophone, which he began playing shortly after he moved to New York with his family in 1944. Brooks’ first professional work came in 1951 with rhythm and blues pianist Sonny Thompson, and in 1955 Brooks played with vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. Brooks also received less-formal guidance from trumpeter and composer “Little” Benny Harris, who led the saxophonist to his first recording as a leader. Harris recommended Brooks to Blue Note producer Alfred Lion in 1958.

Brooks is best known for his recordings for the Blue Note label between 1958 and 1961, recording as a sideman with Kenny Burrell, Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, Freddie Redd, and Jimmy Smith. Around the same period, Brooks was McLean’s understudy in The Connection, a play by Jack Gelber with music by Redd, and performed on an album of music from the play on Felsted Records, a session which also featured Howard McGhee.

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Tal Farlow

June 7, 2024

Talmage Holt Farlow (June 7, 1921– July 25, 1998) was an American jazz guitarist. He was nicknamed “Octopus” because of how his large, quick hands spread over the fretboard.

Talmage Holt Farlow was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, United States. He taught himself how to play guitar, which he started when he was 22 years old. He learned chord melodies by playing a mandolin tuned like a ukulele. He said playing the ukulele was the reason he used the higher four strings on the guitar for the melody and chord structure, with the two bottom strings for bass counterpoint, which he played with his thumb. His only professional training was as an apprentice sign painter. He requested the night shift so he could listen to big band standards on the shop radio. He listened to Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, and Eddie Lang. His career was influenced by hearing Charlie Christian playing electric guitar with the Benny Goodmanband. He said he made his own electric guitar because he could not afford to purchase one.

Farlow employed artificial harmonics and tapped his guitar for percussion, creating a flat, snare drum sound or a hollow backbeat like the bongos. His large, quick hands earned him the nickname “The Octopus”.

He caught the public’s attention in 1949 when he was in a trio with Red Norvo and Charles Mingus. In 1953, he was a member of the Gramercy Five led by Artie Shaw, and two years later he led his own trio with Vinnie Burke and Eddie Costa in New York City. After getting married in 1958, he partially retired and settled in Sea Bright, New Jersey, returning to a career as a sign painter.  He continued to play occasional dates in local clubs. In 1962 the Gibson Guitar Corporation, with Farlow’s participation, produced the “Tal Farlow” model. In 1976, Farlow started recording again. A documentary about him was released in 1981.

Later in his career Tal performed as a member of Great Guitars with a DVD released in 2005 after his death.

Farlow died of esophageal cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City on July 25, 1998, at the age of 77.

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Flamenco Fridays ANGELES TOLEDANO

June 7, 2024

Solea usually played por medio (on the sixth string in E phyrgian, relative to the capo) and at a slow tempo – commonly around 90 beats per minute. Solea performance also often involves rubato, the expressive speeding up and slowing down of tempo at the discretion of the performer.

The compas of solea emphasizes the 3, 6, 8, 10, and 12 beats:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Solea is sometimes called “mother of palos.” Though it is not the oldest (siguiriyas is older), there are a number of palos that derive their compas from solea include solea por buleria, the palos in the cantiñas group, like alegria, romera, mirabra, caracoles and, to a certain extent, buleria.

 

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