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Neville O’Riley Livingston OM OJ (10 April 1947 – 2 March 2021), known professionally as Bunny Wailer, was a Jamaican singer-songwriter and percussionist. He was an original member of reggae group The Wailers along with Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. A three-time Grammy Award winner, he is considered one of the longtime standard-bearers of reggae music. He was also known as Jah B, Bunny O’Riley,and Bunny Livingston.
more...The jet: it is being expelled by a star system just forming and is cataloged as Herbig-Haro 49 (HH 49). The star system expelling this jet is not visible — it is off to the lower right. The complex conical structure featured in this infrared image by the James Webb Space Telescope also includes another jet cataloged as HH 50. The fast jet particles impact the surrounding interstellar gas and form shock waves that glow prominently in infrared light — shown here as reddish-brown ridges. This JWST image also resolved the mystery of the unusual object at HH 49‘s tip: it is a spiral galaxy far in the distance. The blue center is therefore not one star but many, and the surrounding circular rings are actually spiral arms. 625ly
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Florence Beatrice Price (née Smith; April 9, 1887 – June 3, 1953) was an American classical composer, pianist, organist and music teacher. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was active in Chicago from 1927 until her death in 1953. Price is noted as the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra. Price composed over 300 works: four symphonies, four concertos, as well as choral works, art songs, chamber music and music for solo instruments. In 2009, a substantial collection of her works and papers was found in her abandoned summer home.
more...Carl Lee Perkins (April 9, 1932 – January 19, 1998) was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter. A rockabilly great and pioneer of rock and roll, he began his recording career at the Sun Studio, in Memphis in 1954. Among his best known songs are “Blue Suede Shoes“, “Honey Don’t“, “Matchbox” and “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby“.
According to fellow musician Charlie Daniels, “Carl Perkins’ songs personified the rockabilly era, and Carl Perkins’ sound personifies the rockabilly sound more so than anybody involved in it, because he never changed.” Perkins’s songs were recorded by artists (and friends) as influential as Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Ricky Nelson, and Eric Clapton which further cemented his prominent place in the history of popular music.
Nicknamed the “King of Rockabilly“, Perkins was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His recording of “Blue Suede Shoes” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
more...Stephen Kendall Gadd (born April 9, 1945) is an American jazz fusion drummer, percussionist, and session musician. Gadd is one of the best-known and most highly regarded session and studio drummers in the industry, recognized by his induction into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1984. Gadd’s performances on Paul Simon‘s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover“ (1976) and “Late in the Evening“ (1980), Herbie Mann‘s “Hi-jack” (1975) and Steely Dan‘s “Aja“ (1977) are examples of his style. He has worked with other popular musicians from many genres including Van McCoy, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, Chick Corea, Chuck Mangione, Randy Crawford, Eric Clapton, Michel Petrucciani, and David Gilmour.
more...Beau De Glen “Mance” Lipscomb (April 9, 1895 – January 30, 1976) was an American blues singer, guitarist and songster.
Lipscomb was born April 9, 1895, near Navasota, Texas. His father had been born into slavery in Alabama; his mother was half African American and half Native American.As a youth, Lipscomb took the name Mance (short for emancipation) from a friend of his oldest brother, Charlie. His father left home when he was a child, so he had to leave school after the third grade to work in the fields alongside his mother. For most of his life, Lipscomb supported himself as a tenant farmer in Texas. His mother bought him a guitar and he taught himself to play by watching and listening. He became an accomplished performer then and played regularly for years at local gatherings, mostly what he called “Saturday night suppers” hosted by someone in the area. He and his wife regularly hosted such gatherings for a while. Until around 1960, most of his musical activity took place within what he called his “precinct”, the area around Navasota, Texas.
He was discovered and recorded by Mack McCormick and Chris Strachwitz in 1960, during a revival of interest in the country blues. He recorded many albums of blues, ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, and folk music (most of them released by Strachwitz’s Arhoolie Records), singing and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. Lipscomb had a “dead-thumb” finger-picking guitar technique and an expressive voice. He honed his skills by playing in nearby Brenham, Texas, with a blind musician, Sam Rogers.
more...Paul Jeffrey (April 8, 1933 – March 20, 2015) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist, arranger, and educator. He was a member of Thelonious Monk‘s regular group from 1970–1975, and also worked extensively with other musicians such as Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Lionel Hampton and B.B. King.
more...This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the unbarred spiral galaxy NGC 4414, roughly 51 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices. You can see an old image of NGC 4414 that features Hubble data from 1995 and 1999 here, which was captured as one of the telescope’s primary missions to determine the distance to galaxies. This was achieved as part of an ongoing research effort to study Cepheid variable stars. Cepheids are a special type of variable star with very stable and predictable brightness variations. The period of these variations depends on physical properties of the stars such as their mass and true brightness. This means that astronomers, just by looking at the variability of their light, can find out about the Cepheids’ physical nature, which then can be used very effectively to determine their distance. For this reason cosmologists call Cepheids ‘standard candles’. Astronomers have used Hubble to observe Cepheids, like those that reside in NGC 4414, with extraordinary results. The Cepheids have then been used as stepping-stones to make distance measurements for supernovae, which have, in turn, given a measure for the scale of the Universe. Today we know the age of the Universe to a much higher precision than before Hubble: around 13.7 billion years. [Image description: A large spiral galaxy is seen tilted diagonally. The arms of the galaxy’s disc are speckled with glowing patches; some are blue in colour, others are pink, showing gas illuminated by new stars. A faint glow surrounds the galaxy, which lies on a dark, nearly empty background. The galaxy’s centre glows in white.] Links Image B (closeup of NGC 4414’s supernovae) Pan of NGC 4414.
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Julian Charles John Lennon (born John Charles Julian Lennon; 8 April 1963) is an English musician, photographer, author, and philanthropist. He is the son of Beatlesmember John Lennon and his first wife Cynthia; Julian is named after his paternal grandmother Julia. Julian inspired three Beatles songs: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (1967), “Hey Jude” (1968), and “Good Night” (1968).
Lennon started a music career in 1984 with the album Valotte, best known for “Too Late for Goodbyes” and the title track, and has since released six more albums. He has held exhibitions of his fine-art photography and has written several children’s books. In 2006, Lennon produced the environmental documentary film Whaledreamers, which won eight international awards. In 2007, he founded The White Feather Foundation (TWFF), whose stated mission goal is to address “environmental and humanitarian issues”.
In 2020, Lennon was executive producer of the Netflix documentary Kiss the Groundabout regenerative agriculture and the follow-up film Common Ground. In 2022, Lennon was executive producer of the documentary film Women of the White Buffalo, which chronicles the lives of women living on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
more...Santiago Jiménez Jr. (aka Santiago Henriquez Jiménez) (born April 8, 1944) is an American folk musician who received a National Heritage Fellowship in 2000 for lifetime achievement in traditional Tex-Mex/folk music, and a National Medal of Arts in 2016. He has been nominated for three Grammys.
more...Carmen Mercedes McRae (April 8, 1920 – November 10, 1994 Harlem) was an American jazzsinger. She is considered one of the most influential jazz vocalists of the 20th century and is remembered for her behind-the-beat phrasing and ironic interpretation of lyrics. In her late teens and early twenties, McRae played piano at Minton’s Playhouse, sang as a chorus girl, and worked as a secretary. It was at Minton’s where she met trumpeterDizzy Gillespie, bassist Oscar Pettiford, and drummer Kenny Clarke, had her first important job as a pianist with Benny Carter’s big band (1944), worked with Count Basie(1944) and under the name “Carmen Clarke” (having married Clarke)[4] made her first recording as pianist with the Mercer Ellington Band (1946–47). But it was while working in Brooklyn that she came to the attention of Decca‘s Milt Gabler. Her five-year association with Decca yielded 12 LPs.
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