A camera on board the uncrewed Orion spacecraft captured this view on December 5 as Orion approached its return powered flyby of the Moon. Below one of Orion’s extended solar arrays lies dark, smooth, terrain along the western edge of the Oceanus Procellarum. Prominent on the lunar nearside Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms, is the largest of the Moon’s lava-flooded maria. The lunar terminator, shadow line between lunar night and day, runs along the left of the frame. The 41 kilometer diameter crater Marius is top center, with ray crater Kepler peeking in at the edge, just right of the solar array wing. Kepler’s bright rays extend to the north and west, reaching the dark-floored Marius. Of course the Orion spacecraft is now headed toward a December 11 splashdown in planet Earth’s water-flooded Pacific Ocean.
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James Douglas Morrison (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971 Melbourne, FL) was an American singer, poet and songwriter who was the lead vocalist of the rock band the Doors. Due to his wild personality, poetic lyrics, distinctive voice, unpredictable and erratic performances, and the dramatic circumstances surrounding his life and early death, Morrison is regarded by music critics and fans as one of the most influential frontmen in rock history. Since his death, Morrison’s fame has endured as one of popular culture’s top rebellious and oft-displayed icons, representing the generation gap and youth counterculture.
Together with pianist Ray Manzarek, Morrison founded the Doors in 1965 in Venice, California. The group spent two years in obscurity until shooting to prominence with their number-one single in the United States, “Light My Fire“, taken from their self-titled debut album. Morrison recorded a total of six studio albums with the Doors, all of which sold well and received critical acclaim. He was well known for improvising spoken word poetry passages while the band played live. Manzarek said Morrison “embodied hippie counterculture rebellion”.
Morrison developed an alcohol dependency throughout the band’s career, which at times affected his performances on stage. On July 3, 1971, Morrison died unexpectedly in Paris at the age of 27, amid several conflicting witness reports. His premature death is often linked with the 27 Club. Since no autopsy was performed, the cause of Morrison’s death remains disputed.
Although the Doors recorded two more albums after Morrison died, his death severely affected the band’s fortunes, and they split up two years later. In 1993, Morrison was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with the other Doors members. In 2011, a Rolling Stone readers’ pick placed Morrison in fifth position on the magazine’s “Best Lead Singers of All Time”, and in another Rolling Stone list of “The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time”, he was rank 47th. He was also ranked the 22nd greatest singer in rock by Classic Rock magazine.
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Frederick Nathaniel Hibbert, OJ (8 December 1942 – 11 September 2020), better known as Toots Hibbert, was a Jamaican singer and songwriter who was the lead vocalist for the reggae and ska band Toots and the Maytals. A reggae pioneer, he performed for six decades and helped establish some of the fundamentals of reggae music. Hibbert’s 1968 song “Do the Reggay” is widely credited as the genesis of the genre name reggae. His band’s album True Love won a Grammy Award in 2005.
Hibbert was born on 8 December 1942 in May Pen, Jamaica, the youngest of his siblings. Hibbert’s parents were both strict Seventh-day Adventist preachers so he grew up singing gospel music in a church choir. Both parents died young and, by the age of 11, Hibbert was an orphan who went to live with his brother John in the Trenchtown neighborhood of Kingston. While working at a local barbershop, he met his future bandmates Raleigh Gordon and Jerry Matthias.
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Jean Sibelius born Johan Julius Christian Sibelius; 8 December 1865 – 20 September 1957) was a Finnish composer of the late Romantic and early-modern periods. He is widely regarded as his country’s greatest composer, and his music is often credited with having helped Finland develop a national identity during its struggle for independence from Russia.
The core of his oeuvre is his set of seven symphonies, which, like his other major works, are regularly performed and recorded in Finland and countries around the world. His other best-known compositions are Finlandia, the Karelia Suite, Valse triste, the Violin Concerto, the choral symphony Kullervo, and The Swan of Tuonela(from the Lemminkäinen Suite). His other well-known works include pieces inspired by nature, Nordic mythology, and the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala; over a hundred songs for voice and piano; incidental music for numerous plays; the opera Jungfrun i tornet (The Maiden in the Tower); chamber music, piano music, Masonic ritual music, and 21 publications of choral music.
Sibelius composed prolifically until the mid-1920s, but after completing his Seventh Symphony (1924), the incidental music for The Tempest (1926), and the tone poem Tapiola (1926), he stopped producing major works in his last 30 years—a stunning and perplexing decline commonly referred to as the “silence of Järvenpää“, (the location of his home). Although he is reputed to have stopped composing, he attempted to continue writing, including abortive efforts on an eighth symphony. In later life, he wrote Masonic music and reedited some earlier works, while retaining an active but not always favourable interest in new developments in music.
The Finnish 100 mark note featured his image until 2002, when the euro was adopted. Since 2011, Finland has celebrated a flag flying day on 8 December, the composer’s birthday, also known as the Day of Finnish Music. In 2015, in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Sibelius’s birth, a number of special concerts and events were held, especially in Helsinki, the Finnish capital.
see full post...James Oscar Smith (December 8, 1925 – February 8, 2005) was an American jazz musician whose albums often appeared on Billboard magazine charts. He helped popularize the Hammond B-3 organ, creating a link between jazz and 1960s soul music.
In 2005, Smith was awarded the NEA Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honor that America bestows upon jazz musicians.
There is confusion about Smith’s birth year, with sources citing either 1925 or 1928. Born James Oscar Smith in Norristown, Pennsylvania, he joined his father doing a song-and-dance routine in clubs at the age of six. He began teaching himself to play the piano. When he was nine, Smith won a Philadelphia radio talent contest as a boogie-woogie pianist. After a period in the U.S. Navy, he began furthering his musical education in 1948, with a year at Royal Hamilton College of Music, then the Leo Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia in 1949. He began exploring the Hammond organ in 1951. From 1951 to 1954, he played piano, then organ in Philly R&B bands like Don Gardner and the Sonotones. He switched to organ permanently in 1954 after hearing Wild Bill Davis.
see full post...Cleopatra Brown (December 8, 1907 or 1909 – April 15, 1995), known as Cleo Brown, C. Patra Brown or Cleo Patra Brown, was an American blues and jazz vocalist and pianist. She was the first woman instrumentalist to receive the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship.
While Brown’s place of birth has been published as Meridian, Mississippi, Brown told W. Balliett in a 1986 interview published in The New Yorker that she was born in De Kalb, Mississippi shortly before her father took a position as a pastor in Meridian. She played piano in the Baptist church as a child. In 1919 her family moved to Chicago, and she began learning piano from her brother who worked with “Pine Top” Smith, playing boogie-woogie for dances. From around 1923 she worked in vaudeville, as well as taking gigs in clubs. In 1935, she replaced Fats Waller as pianist on New York radio station WABC.
From the 1930s to the 1950s she toured the United States regularly, recording for Decca Records (among other labels) along the way and recording many humorous, ironic titles such as “Breakin’ in a New Pair of Shoes”, “Mama Don’t Want No Peas and Rice and Coconut Oil“, “When Hollywood Goes Black and Tan”, and “The Stuff Is Here and It’s Mellow”. Her stride piano playing was often compared to Fats Waller, and she is credited as an influence on Dave Brubeck, who played during the intermissions of her shows, and Marian McPartland. She played regularly at clubs in Chicago, toured widely, and recorded for both Decca and Capitol Records.
see full post...A mere seven hundred light years from Earth, toward the constellation Aquarius, a sun-like star is dying. The dying star’s last few thousand years have produced the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), a well studied and nearby example of a Planetary Nebula, typical of this final phase of stellar evolution. Combining narrow band image data from emission lines of hydrogen atoms in red and oxygen atoms in blue-green hues, it shows tantalizing details of the Helix, including its bright inner region about 3 light-years across. The white dot at the Helix’s center is this Planetary Nebula’s hot, central star. A simple looking nebula at first glance, the Helix is now understood to have a surprisinglycomplex geometry.
Harold Forster Chapin (December 7, 1942 – July 16, 1981) was an American singer-songwriter, philanthropist, and hunger activist best known for his folk rock and pop rock songs. He achieved worldwide success in the 1970s. Chapin, a Grammy Award-winning artist and Grammy Hall of Fame inductee, has sold over 16 million records worldwide.
Chapin recorded a total of 11 albums from 1972 until his death in 1981. All 14 singles that he released became hits on at least one national music chart.
As a dedicated humanitarian, Chapin fought to end world hunger. He was a key participant in the creation of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger in 1977. In 1987, Chapin was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his humanitarian work.
On the afternoon of July 16, 1981, Chapin was driving on the Long Island Expressway en route to perform at a free benefit concert at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, New York, that evening. At 12:27 PM, Chapin was fatally injured in a fiery traffic collision with a semi-trailer truck outside Jericho, New York. Passers-by managed to help the unconscious Chapin out of his engulfed 1975 Volkswagen Rabbit and he was immediately taken by helicopter to the nearby Nassau County Medical Center where he was pronounced dead at 1:05 PM due to internal bleeding.
see full post...Thomas Alan Waits (born December 7, 1949 Pomona, CA) is an American musician, composer, songwriter, and actor. His lyrics often focus on the underbelly of society and are delivered in his trademark deep, gravelly voice. He worked primarily in jazz during the 1970s, but his music since the 1980s has reflected greater influence from blues, rock, vaudeville, and experimental genres.
Waits was born and raised in a middle-class family in California. Inspired by the work of Bob Dylan and the Beat Generation, he began singing on the San Diego folk music circuit as a young man. He relocated to Los Angeles in 1972, where he worked as a songwriter before signing a recording contract with Asylum Records. His first albums were the jazz-oriented Closing Time (1973) and The Heart of Saturday Night (1974), which reflected his lyrical interest in nightlife, poverty, and criminality. He repeatedly toured the United States, Europe, and Japan, and attracted greater critical recognition and commercial success with Small Change (1976), Blue Valentine (1978), and Heartattack and Vine (1980). He produced the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola‘s film One from the Heart (1981), and subsequently made cameo appearances in several Coppola films.
In 1980, Waits married Kathleen Brennan, split from his manager and record label, and moved to New York City. With Brennan’s encouragement and frequent collaboration, he pursued a more experimental and eclectic musical aesthetic influenced by the work of Harry Partch and Captain Beefheart. This was reflected in a series of albums released by Island Records, including Swordfishtrombones (1983), Rain Dogs (1985), and Franks Wild Years (1987). He continued appearing in films, notably starring in Jim Jarmusch‘s Down by Law (1986), and also made theatrical appearances. With theatre director Robert Wilson, he produced the musicals The Black Rider (1990) and Alice (1992), first performed in Hamburg. Having returned to California in the 1990s, his albums Bone Machine (1992), The Black Rider(1993), and Mule Variations (1999) earned him increasing critical acclaim and multiple Grammy Awards. In the late 1990s, he switched to the record label ANTI-, which released Blood Money (2002), Alice (2002), Real Gone (2004), and Bad as Me (2011).
Despite a lack of mainstream commercial success, Waits has influenced many musicians and gained an international cult following, and several biographies have been written about him. In 2015, he was ranked at No. 55 on Rolling Stone‘s “100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time“. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.
see full post...Mads Vinding (born 7 December 1948, Copenhagen, Denmark) is a Danish jazz double-bassist.
Vinding began his professional career when he was 16 as the house bassist for Jazzhus Montmartre, a jazz club in Copenhagen. He has played on more than 800 recordings and more than 1000 Radio/TV shows.
see full post...Louis Leo Prima (December 7, 1910 – August 24, 1978 NOLA) was an American singer, songwriter, bandleader, and trumpeter. While rooted in New Orleans jazz, swing music, and jump blues, Prima touched on various genres throughout his career: he formed a seven-piece New Orleans-style jazz band in the late 1920s, fronted a swing combo in the 1930s and a big band group in the 1940s, helped to popularize jump blues in the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s, and performed frequently as a Vegas lounge act beginning in the 1950s.
From the 1940s through the 1960s, his music further encompassed early R&B and rock ‘n’ roll, boogie-woogie, and Italian folk music, such as the tarantella. Prima made prominent use of Italian music and language in his songs, blending elements of his Italian and Sicilian identity with jazz and swing music. At a time when ethnic musicians were discouraged from openly stressing their ethnicity, Prima’s conspicuous embrace of his Sicilian ethnicity opened the doors for other Italian-American and ethnic American musicians to display their ethnic roots.
Prima is also known for providing the voice for the orangutan King Louie in the 1967 Disney film The Jungle Book.
see full post...Stars are forming. The mountain is actually a column of gas and dust in the picturesque Eagle Nebula (M16). A pillar like this is so low in density that you could easily fly though it — it only appears solid because of its high dust content and great depth. The glowing areas are lit internally by newly formed stars. These areas shine in red and infrared light because blue light is scattered away by intervening interstellar dust. The featured image was captured recently in near-infrared light in unprecedented detail by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched late last year. Energetic light, abrasive winds, and final supernovas from these young stars will slowly destroy this stellar birth column over the next 100,000 years.
Miroslav Ladislav Vitouš (born 6 December 1947) is a Czech jazz bassist.
Born in Prague, Vitouš began the violin at age six, switching to piano after about three years, and then to bass at age fourteen. As a young man in Europe, Vitouš was a competitive swimmer. One of his early music groups was the Junior Trio with his brother Alan on drums and Jan Hammer on keyboards. He studied music at the Prague Conservatory under František Pošta, and won a music contest in Vienna that gave him a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music.
Miles Davis saw Vitouš playing with Clark Terry in 1967 and invited him to join his group in New York City.
see full post...Eddie Gladden (December 6, 1937 – September 30, 2003) was an American jazz drummer.
Gladden played professionally from 1962 in his hometown of Newark. In 1972 he began working with James Moody. During the rest of his career he worked with Eddie Jefferson, Richie Cole, Cecil Payne, Horace Silver, David Fathead Newman, Larry Young, Freddie Roach, Jimmy McGriff, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Kirk Lightsey, Clifford Jordan, Albert Dailey, Jimmy Ponder, Shirley Scott, and Mickey Tucker, among others. He played in Dexter Gordon‘s quartet from 1977, touring and recording.
He died of a heart attack in Newark at the age of 65.
see full post...Francis Dunlop (December 6, 1928 – July 7, 2014) was an American jazz drummer.
Dunlop, born in Buffalo, New York, grew up in a musical family and began playing guitar at age nine and drums at ten. He was playing professionally by age 16 and received some classical education in percussion. He toured with Big Jay McNeely and recorded with Moe Koffman in 1950 before serving in the Army during the Korean War. After his discharge he played with Sonny Stitt, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins (1958, 1966–67), Maynard Ferguson (1958–60), Lena Horne, Duke Ellington (1960), and Thelonious Monk (1960–64); it is for his recordings with the last of these that he is principally remembered. Later in his life he recorded with Lionel Hampton (1975–81), Earl Hines (1973–74), Ray Crawford, and Joe Zawinul.
In 1984, Dunlop retired, having recorded on over 100 albums.
His brother, Boyd Lee Dunlop, was a jazz pianist who was “rediscovered” while living at a nursing home in Buffalo. He was profiled in a New York Times article in December, 2011.
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