mick’s blog

Sonny Rollins

September 7, 2022

Walter TheodoreSonnyRollins (born September 7, 1930) is an American jazz tenor saxophonist who is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians. In a seven-decade career, he has recorded over sixty albums as a leader. A number of his compositions, including “St. Thomas“, “Oleo“, “Doxy“, “Pent-Up House”, and “Airegin“, have become jazz standards. Rollins has been called “the greatest living improviser” and the “Saxophone Colossus”.

Rollins was born in New York City to parents from the United States Virgin Islands. The youngest of three siblings, he grew up in central Harlem and on Sugar Hillreceiving his first alto saxophone at the age of seven or eight. He attended Edward W. Stitt Junior High School and graduated from Benjamin Franklin High Schoolin East Harlem. Rollins began piano lessons at age nine. At 14, he picked up the alto saxophone, and finally switched to tenor at the age of 16 after being influenced by his idol Coleman Hawkins. During his high school years, he played in a band with other future jazz legends Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew, and Art Taylor.

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World Fusion Adam Rudolph’s Go: Organic Orchestra

September 7, 2022

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Daily Roots Derrick Morgan

September 7, 2022

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Drummie Zeb Memorial

September 6, 2022

Musician Angus “Drummie Zeb” Gaye, the lead vocalist and drummer for the British reggae band Aswad, has died aged 62, according to a statement.

“It is with deepest regret and profound loss that we have to announce the passing of our brother Angus ‘Drummie’ Gaye,” the band said. “Drummie has left us to join our ancestors and leaves a huge void both personally and professionally.”

Aswad, the trio of Angus Gaye, Brinsley Forde and Tony Robinson, were the first reggae band in the UK signed to an international label, Island Records, in the 1970s, and swiftly became a classic British reggae act creating 15 albums in two decades.

Angus Gaye (24 September 1959 – 2 September 2022), better known as Drummie Zeb, was a British musician. He was the drummer and lead singer for the reggae band Aswad, as well as a record producer for other artists.
Gaye was born in London on 24 September 1959. His parents immigrated to the United Kingdom from Carriacou, Grenada, as part of the Windrush generation. He studied at Holland Park School in his hometown where he met his future bandmates Tony Robinson and Brinsley Forde.
In 1975 Gaye saw an advertisement for the band Aswad and turned up for the audition, where he was successful in getting the part of the drummer. He served as the lead singer and as a drummer for the group. They became the first British reggae group to sign with an international label, signing up with Island Records in 1975.

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Cosmos Iridescent Pileus Cloud

September 6, 2022

Pictured, behind this darker cloud, is a pileus iridescent cloud, a group of water droplets that have a uniformly similar size and so together diffractdifferent colors of sunlight by different amounts. The featured image was taken last month in Puer, Yunnan Province, China. Also captured were unusual cloud ripples above the pileus cloud. The formation of a rare pileus cloud capping a common cumulus cloud is an indication that the lower cloud is expanding upward and might well develop into a storm.

 

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Roger Waters

September 6, 2022

George Roger Waters (born 6 September 1943) is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. In 1965, he co-founded the progressive rock band Pink Floyd. Waters initially served as the bassist, but following the departure of singer-songwriter Syd Barrett in 1968, he also became their lyricist, co-lead vocalist and conceptual leader until his departure in 1983.

Pink Floyd achieved international success with the concept albums The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979), and The Final Cut (1983). By the early 1980s, they had become one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful groups in popular music. Amid creative differences, Waters left in 1985 and began a legal dispute over the use of the band’s name and material. They settled out of court in 1987.

Waters’s solo work includes the studio albums The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking (1984), Radio K.A.O.S. (1987), Amused to Death (1992), and Is This the Life We Really Want? (2017). In 2005, he released Ça Ira, an opera translated from Étienne and Nadine Roda-Gils’ libretto about the French Revolution.

In 1990, Waters staged one of the largest rock concerts in history, The Wall – Live in Berlin, with an attendance of 450,000. As a member of Pink Floyd, he was inducted into the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Later that year, he reunited with Pink Floyd bandmates Nick Mason, Richard Wright, and David Gilmour for the Live 8 global awareness event, the group’s only appearance with Waters since 1981. He has toured extensively as a solo act since 1999; he performed The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety for his world tour of 2006–2008, and the Wall Live tour of 2010–2013 was the highest-grossing tour by a solo artist at the time.

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Charles Moffett

September 6, 2022

Charles Moffett (September 6, 1929 – February 14, 1997) was an American free jazz drummer.

Moffett was born in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended I.M. Terrell High School with Ornette Coleman. Before switching to drums, Moffett began his musical career as a trumpeter. At age 13, he played trumpet with Jimmy Witherspoon, and later formed a band, the Jam Jivers, with fellow students Coleman and Prince Lasha. After switching to drums, Moffett briefly performed with Little Richard.

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Eddie Duran

September 6, 2022

Edward Lozano Duran (September 6, 1925 – November 22, 2019) was an American jazz guitarist from San Francisco. He recorded often with Vince Guaraldi and was a member of the Benny Goodman orchestra during the 1970s.

Duran started on piano at age seven and switched to guitar at 12. By fifteen he was performing professionally with jazz musicians who visited San Francisco in the 1940s and 1950s. He was in a trio with his brothers, Carlos Duran and Manny Duran, from 1948 to 1952. Beginning in the 1950s, he worked in San Francisco with Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, Red Norvo, George Shearing, and Flip Phillips.

Around 1957, Duran was the guitarist in the CBS Radio Orchestra under the direction of Ray Hackett for the Bill Weaver Show, a variety show broadcast by CBS’s San Francisco affiliate, KQW, later renamed KCBS, from the Palace Hotel. While playing with the CBS Orchestra, Duran met Brunell and performed on her debut album, Intro to Jazz of the Italian-American. The album was recorded by San Francisco Jazz Records, a short-lived label that was part of the production of the radio station.

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Jimmy Reed

September 6, 2022

Mathis James Reed (September 6, 1925 – August 29, 1976) was an American blues musician and songwriter. His particular style of electric blueswas popular with blues as well as non-blues audiences. Reed’s songs such as “Honest I Do” (1957), “Baby What You Want Me to Do” (1960), “Big Boss Man” (1961), and “Bright Lights, Big City” (1961) appeared on both Billboard magazine’s rhythm and blues and Hot 100 singles charts.

Reed influenced other musicians, such as Elvis Presley, Hank Williams Jr., and the Rolling Stones, who recorded his songs. Music critic Cub Kodadescribes him as “perhaps the most influential bluesman of all,” due to his easily accessible style.

Reed was born in Dunleith, Mississippi, United States. He learned the harmonica and guitar from his friend Eddie Taylor. After several years of busking and performing there, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1943. He was then drafted into the U.S. Navy and served in World War II. He was discharged in 1945 and returned briefly to Mississippi, marrying his girlfriend, Mary (henceforth known as Mama Reed). He then moved to Gary, Indiana, to work at an Armour meat-packing plant. Mama Reed was an uncredited background singer on many of his recordings, notably the hits “Baby What You Want Me to Do“, “Big Boss Man” and “Bright Lights, Big City“.

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World Music Väsen

September 6, 2022

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Daily Roots Sly Dunbar and the Revolutionaries

September 6, 2022

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Happy Labor Day 2022

September 5, 2022

The Labor Movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress…. MLK

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Cosmos SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461

September 5, 2022

Two overlapping spiral galaxies are pictured in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The two galaxies, which have the uninspiring names SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461, lie more than a billion light-years from Earth. Despite appearing to collide in this image, the alignment of the two galaxies is likely just by chance — the two are not actually interacting. While these two galaxies might simply be ships that pass in the night, Hubble has captured a dazzling array of interacting galaxies in the past. This image is one of many Hubble observations delving into highlights of the Galaxy Zoo project. Originally established in 2007, the Galaxy Zoo project and its successors are massive citizen science projects which crowdsource galaxy classifications from a pool of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. These volunteers classify galaxies imaged by robotic telescopes and are often the first to ever set eyes on an astronomical object.  Over the course of the original Galaxy Zoo project, volunteers discovered a menagerie of weird and wonderful galaxies such as unusual 3-armed spiral galaxies and colliding ring galaxies. The astronomers coordinating the project applied for Hubble time to observe the most unusual inhabitants of the Galaxy Zoo — but true to the project’s crowdsourced roots, the list of targets was chosen by a public vote.

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Buddy Miles

September 5, 2022

George AllenBuddyMiles Jr. (September 5, 1947 – February 26, 2008), was an American composer, drummer, guitarist, vocalist and producer. He was a founding member of the Electric Flag (1967), a member of Jimi Hendrix‘s Band of Gypsys (1969–1970), founder and leader of the Buddy Miles Express and later, the Buddy Miles Band. Miles also played and recorded with Carlos Santana and others. Additionally, he sang lead vocals on the critically and commercially acclaimed “California Raisins” claymation TV commercials and recorded two California Raisins R&B albums.

Miles was born in Omaha, Nebraska, United States, on September 5, 1947. Buddy’s father played upright bass for Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, and others. By age twelve, Miles had begun touring with his father’s band, the Bebops. He played with his father’s band for several years. Given the nickname “Buddy” by his aunt after the drummer Buddy Rich, he was often seen as a teenager hanging out and recording at Universal Promotions Corporation recording studios, which later became Rainbow Recording Studios.

Miles did not finish high school. In order to become a professional musician, he dropped out of Omaha North High in 1965. Omaha North High awarded him an honorary degree in 1998.

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Al Stewart

September 5, 2022

Alastair Ian Stewart (born 5 September 1945) is a Scottish singer-songwriter and folk-rock musician who rose to prominence as part of the British folk revival in the 1960s and 1970s. He developed a unique style of combining folk-rock songs with delicately woven tales of characters and events from history.

Stewart is best known for his 1976 hit single “Year of the Cat“, from the platinum album of the same name. Though Year of the Cat and its 1978 platinum follow-up Time Passages brought Stewart his biggest worldwide commercial successes, earlier albums such as Past, Present and Future from 1973 are often seen as better examples of his intimate brand of historical folk-rock, a style to which he returned in later albums.

Stewart is a key figure in British music and he appears throughout the musical folklore of the revivalist era. He played at the first-ever Glastonbury Festival in 1970, knew Yoko Ono before she met John Lennon, and shared a London flat with a young Paul Simon who was collaborating with Bruce Woodley of The Seekers. Stewart hosted at the Les Cousins folk club in London in the 1960s.

Stewart has released 16 studio and three live albums since his debut album Bed-Sitter Images in 1967, and continues to tour extensively in the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK. His most recent release, Uncorked, was released on Stewart’s independent label, Wallaby Trails Recordings, in 2009.

Stewart has worked with Peter White, Alan Parsons, Jimmy Page, Richard Thompson, Rick Wakeman, Francis Monkman, Tori Amos, and Tim Renwick, and more recently has played with Dave Nachmanoff and former Wings lead-guitarist Laurence Juber.

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Lars Danielsson

September 5, 2022

Lars Danielsson (born 5 September 1958) is a Swedish jazz bassist, composer, and record producer.

Danielsson was born in Smålandsstenar, and was educated at the music conservatory in Gothenburg. He plays double bass, electric bass and cello. In 1985, he formed a quartet with saxophonist Dave Liebman, pianist Bobo Stenson and drummer Jon Christensen that sometimes used Danielsson’s name, producing several albums. He also worked with big bands.

He played and recorded with John Scofield, Jack DeJohnette, Mike Stern, Billy Hart, Charles Lloyd, Terri Lyne Carrington, Leszek Możdżer, Joey Calderazzo, Gino Vannelli and Dave Kikoski. Since 1980, he has released solo albums with the Lars Danielssons Quartet. In these albums, Alex Acuña, John Abercrombie, Bill Evans, Kenny Wheeler, Rick Margitza and Niels Lan Doky were featured.

As a producer, Danielsson has been responsible for productions with Cæcilie Norby and the Danish radio orchestra.

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John Cage

September 5, 2022

John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992 LA, CA) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard ,use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage’s romantic partner for most of their lives. Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not “four minutes and 33 seconds of silence,” as is often assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance.[7][8] The work’s challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage’s major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text decision-making tool, which uses chance operations to suggest answers to questions one may pose, became Cage’s standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as “a purposeless play” which is “an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living”.

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FREE UKRAINE World Music DakhaBrakha

September 5, 2022

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Daily Roots Burning Spear

September 5, 2022

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Cosmos NGC 7331 Group

September 4, 2022

NGC 7331 Group is a visual grouping of galaxies in the constellation Pegasus. Spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is a foreground galaxy in the same field as the collection, which is also called the Deer Lick Group. It contains four other members, affectionately referred to as the “fleas”: the lenticular or unbarred spirals NGC 7335 and 7336, the barred spiral galaxy NGC 7337 and the elliptical galaxy NGC 7340. These galaxies lie at distances of approximately 332, 365, 348 and 294 million light years, respectively. Although adjacent on the sky, this collection is not a galaxy group, as NGC 7331 itself is not gravitationally associated with the far more distant “fleas”; indeed, even they are separated by far more than the normal distances (~2 Mly) of a galaxy group.

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