Jules Shungu Wembadio Pene Kikumba (14 June 1949 – 24 April 2016), known professionally as Papa Wemba , was a Congolese singer and musician who played Congolese rumba, soukous, and ndombolo. Dubbed the “King of Rumba Rock”, he was one of the most popular musicians of his time in Africa and played an important role in world music. He was also a fashion icon who popularized the Sape look and style through his musical group Viva la Musica, with whom he performed on stages throughout the world.
Papa Wemba’s road to fame and prominence began when he joined the music group Zaiko Langa Langa in the late 1960s. This was followed by his success as a founding member both of Isifi Lokole and then Yoka Lokole, along with a short stint as a member of Afrisa International for a few months. During these early stages of his career, he was establishing a style that included traditional Congolese rumba and soukous, infused with traditional African sounds, Caribbean rhythms, rock and soul.But Wemba gained international success and status with his band Viva La Musica, especially after he took them to Paris, France in the early 1980s. It was there that Wemba was able to achieve more of an “eclectic sound” in his work,inf luenced by western popular music that reflected a European flavor and style, referred to as “Europop.
see full post...William Henry Marcus Miller Jr. (born June 14, 1959) is an American multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, composer, producer and singer, best known as a bassist. He has worked with trumpeter Miles Davis, pianist Herbie Hancock, singer Luther Vandross, and saxophonist David Sanborn, among others. His collaboration with Vandross was especially close: Miller co-produced and served as the arranger for most of Vandross’s albums, and co-wrote (with Vandross) many of his songs, including the hits “I Really Didn’t Mean It“, “Any Love“, “Power of Love/Love Power” and “Don’t Want to Be a Fool“. He also co-wrote the 1988 single “Da Butt” for Experience Unlimited. Miller was the main songwriter and producer on three of Miles Davis’s albums: Tutu (1986), Music from Siesta (1987), and Amandla(1989).
Miller was born in Brooklyn, New York City, United States, and raised in a musical family. His father, William Miller, was a church organist and choir director; Miller is jazz pianist Wynton Kelly‘s cousin.Miller is classically trained as a clarinetist and also plays keyboards, saxophone and guitar. He began to work regularly in New York City, eventually playing bass and writing music for jazz flutist Bobbi Humphrey and keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith. Miller became a session musician. Miller’s earliest influences include James Jamerson and Larry Graham.
see full post...Kenny Drew Jr. (June 14, 1958 – August 3, 2014) was an American jazz pianist. His music is known for its hard-swinging bluesy sound and large, two-handed rooty chords contrasting with fast runs. The son of jazz pianist Kenny Drew, he did not credit his father as an influence.
His initial study was in classical music with his aunt and grandmother. In his teens he became interested in jazz and pop, but initially worked in funk bands. Later he went into jazz piano and in 1990 won The Great American Jazz Piano Competition in Jacksonville, Florida. Drew continued to perform jazz, but he also performed some chamber music. His style has some similarities to his father’s, but is different enough to generally avoid comparison; he was considered the more eclectic of the two men.
Drew attended Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, for a period during 1977 to 1978. There, he became pianist for the Iona College Singers, an entertainment troop promoting the college’s name and goodwill among local high schools, retirement homes and the like in the Northeast region of the US.
Drew cited Thelonious Monk as an influence and like Monk often recorded (and performed) solo.
Drew died at home in St. Petersburg, Florida, on August 3, 2014.
see full post...Autry DeWalt Mixon Jr. (June 14, 1931 – November 23, 1995), known professionally as Junior Walker, was an American multi-instrumentalist (primarily saxophonist and vocalist) who recorded for Motownduring the 1960s. He also performed as a session and live-performing saxophonist with the band Foreigner during the 1980s.
Walker was born Autry DeWalt Mixon Jr. on June 14, 1931, in Blytheville, Arkansas, but grew up in South Bend, Indiana. He began playing saxophone while in high school, and his saxophone style was the anchor for the sound of the bands he later played in.
His career started when he developed his own band in the mid-1950s as the Jumping Jacks. His longtime friend and drummer Billy Nicks (1935–2017) formed his own group, the Rhythm Rockers. Periodically, Nicks would sit in on Jumping Jack’s shows, and Walker would sit in on the Rhythm Rockers shows.
Nicks obtained a permanent gig at a local TV station in South Bend, Indiana, and asked Walker to join him and keyboard player Fred Patton permanently. Nicks asked Willie Woods (1936–1997), a local singer, to perform with the group; Woods would learn how to play guitar. When Nicks was drafted into the United States Army, Walker convinced the band to move from South Bend to Battle Creek, Michigan. While performing in Benton Harbor, Walker found a drummer, Tony Washington, to replace Nicks. Eventually, Fred Patton left the group, and Victor Thomas stepped in. The original name, The Rhythm Rockers, was changed to “The All Stars.” Walker’s style was inspired by jump blues and early R&B, particularly players like Louis Jordan, Earl Bostic, and Illinois Jacquet.
see full post...The Whirlpool Galaxy is a classic spiral galaxy. At only 30 million light years distant and fully 60 thousand light years across, M51, also known as NGC 5194, is one of the brightest and most picturesque galaxies on the sky. The featured image is a digital combination of images taken in different colors by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, highlighting many sharp features. Anyone with a good pair of binoculars, however, can see this Whirlpool toward the constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici). M51 is aspiral galaxy of type Sc and is the dominant member of a whole group of galaxies. Astronomers speculate that M51‘s spiral structure is primarily due to its gravitational interaction with the smaller galaxy on the image left.
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Baaba Maal (born 13 June 1953) is a Senegalese singer and guitarist born in Podor, on the Senegal River. In addition to acoustic guitar, he also plays percussion. He has released several albums, both for independent and major labels. In July 2003, he was made a UNDP Youth Emissary.
Maal sings primarily in Pulaar and promotes the traditions of the Pulaar-speaking people, who live on either side of the Senegal River in the ancient Senegalese kingdom of Futa Tooro.
Maal was expected to follow in his father’s profession and become a fisherman. However, under the influence of his lifelong friend and family gawlo, blind guitarist Mansour Seck, Maal devoted himself to learning music from his mother and his school’s headmaster. He went on to study music at the university in Dakar before leaving for postgraduate studies on a scholarship at Beaux-Arts in Paris.
see full post...Attila Cornelius Zoller (June 13, 1927 – January 25, 1998) was a Hungarian jazz guitarist. After World War II, he escaped the Soviet takeover of Hungary by fleeing through the mountains on foot into Austria. In 1959, he moved to the U.S., where he spent the rest of his life as a musician and teacher.
Zoller was born in Visegrád, Hungary. As a child, he learned violin from his father, a professional violinist. While in school, he played flugelhorn and bass before choosing guitar. He dropped out of school and played in jazz clubs in Budapest while Russia occupied Hungary. He fled Hungary in 1948 as the Soviet Union was establishing communist military rule. He escaped on foot, carrying his guitar through the mountains into Austria. He settled in Vienna, became an Austrian citizen, and started a jazz group with accordionist Vera Auer.
In the mid-1950s, Zoller moved to Germany and played with German musicians Jutta Hipp and Hans Koller. When American jazz musicians passed through, such as Oscar Pettiford and Lee Konitz, they persuaded him to move to the United States. He moved to the U.S. after receiving a scholarship to the Lenox School of Jazz. One of his teachers was guitarist Jim Hall and his roommate was Ornette Coleman, who got him interested in free jazz.
From 1962–1965, Zoller performed in a group with flautist Herbie Mann, then Lee Konitz and Albert Mangelsdorff. Over the years, he played and recorded with Benny Goodman, Stan Getz, Red Norvo, Jimmy Raney, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Shirley Scott, Cal Tjader, Jimi Hendrix, and in New York City jazz clubs in the 1960s with pianist Don Friedman.
see full post...William M. “Wild Bill” Moore (June 13, 1918 – August 1, 1983) was an American R&B and jazz tenor saxophone player. Moore earned a modest hit on the Hot R&B charts with “We’re Gonna Rock, We’re Gonna Roll”, which also was one of the earliest rock and roll records.
Moore was born in Detroit Michigan and began playing the alto saxophone at an early age. However, prior to his musical career, he was an amateur boxer, winning Michigan’s Golden Gloves light heavyweight championship in 1937, before briefly turning professional. By the early 1940s, Moore abandoned his boxing career in favor of music, and was inspired by musicians Chu Berry and Illinois Jacquet to switch to tenor saxophone. In 1944, he made his recording debut, accompanying Christine Chatman, the wife of Memphis Slim, for Decca Records. Between 1945 and 1947, Moore was performing and recording in Los Angeles with Slim Gaillard, Jack McVea, Big Joe Turner, Dexter Gordon, and played on Helen Humes’ hit recording, “Be-Baba-Leba”.
In 1947 he moved back to Detroit and began recording with his own band, which included baritone player Paul Williams, later famous for “The Hucklebuck”. In December of that year, he recorded “We’re Gonna Rock, We’re Gonna Roll” for the Savoy label which was a modest hit and is remembered today as one of many candidates for the first rock and roll record. It was one of the first records played by Alan Freed on his “Moondog” radio shows in 1951. However, by the standards of its time it was quite a primitive recording, notable mainly for the juxtaposition of the words “rock” and “roll”, and the battling saxophones of Moore and Williams. In 1949, he cut “Rock And Roll”, reportedly featuring Scatman Crothers on vocals.
Moore continued recording and playing in clubs in and around Detroit. In this period he also recorded several jazz albums for the Jazzland label. In 1971, he was sought out by Marvin Gaye to play saxophone on the album What’s Going On, notably the track “Mercy Mercy Me“.
Eventually he returned to Los Angeles, California and lived there until his death, aged 65.
see full post...The arms of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1672 sweep across this Image of the Week, captured by the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. NGC 1672 is something of a celestial mystery, as it is difficult to define its galactic activity. The nucleus is surrounded by a ring of hot gas filled with individual point sources of X-ray light, in other words bright, newly formed stars. However, the luminous nucleus of NGC 1672 itself shines brightly in various types of light from X-ray to infrared. Known as a Seyfert Type 2 nucleus, it’s an example of a specific type of active galactic nucleus (AGN) and likely a supermassive black hole. Fragile young stars and a destructive AGN shouldn’t necessarily be so close together, and their proximity in this galaxy creates a conundrum. Galaxies like NGC 1672 can open up new pathways to understanding the activities and behaviors of galaxies, and in turn be pieced together to discern the long-term evolution of galaxies.
Data for this image were collected using the Dark Energy Camera on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope for the Dark Energy Survey, which mapped millions of galaxies to determine the nature of dark energy. The analysis of data from the Dark Energy Survey is supported by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, and the Dark Energy Camera science archive is curated by the Community Science and Data Center at NOIRLab.
Geri Antoinette Allen (June 12, 1957 – June 27, 2017) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and educator. In addition to her career as a performer and bandleader, Allen was also an associate professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh and the director of the university’s Jazz Studies program.
Allen was born in Pontiac, Michigan, on June 12, 1957, and grew up in Detroit. “Her father, Mount Allen Jr, was a school principal, her mother, Barbara, a government administrator in the defence industry.” Allen was educated in Detroit Public Schools. She started playing the piano at the age of seven, and settled on becoming a jazz pianist in her early teens.
Allen graduated from Howard University‘s jazz studies program in 1979. She then continued her studies: with pianist Kenny Barron in New York; and at the University of Pittsburgh, where she completed a master’s degree in ethnomusicology in 1982. After this, she returned to New York.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlCQaz37Sbw
see full post...Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea (June 12, 1941 – February 9, 2021) was an American jazz composer, pianist, keyboardist, bandleader, and occasional percussionist. His compositions “Spain“, “500 Miles High“, “La Fiesta”, “Armando’s Rhumba”, and “Windows” are widely considered jazz standards. As a member of Miles Davis‘s band in the late 1960s, he participated in the birth of jazz fusion. In the 1970s he formed Return to Forever. long with McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, and Keith Jarrett, Corea is considered one of the foremost jazz pianists of the post-John Coltrane era.
Corea continued to collaborate frequently while exploring different musical styles throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He won 27 Grammy Awards and was nominated over 60 times.
Armando Corea was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on June 12, 1941, to parents Anna (née Zaccone) and Armando J. Corea. He was of southern Italian descent, his father having been born to an immigrant from Albi comune, in the Province of Catanzaro in the Calabria region. His father, a trumpeter who led a Dixieland band in Boston in the 1930s and 1940s, introduced him to the piano at the age of four. Surrounded by jazz, he was influenced at an early age by bebop and Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Horace Silver, and Lester Young. When he was eight, he took up drums, which would influence his use of the piano as a percussion instrument.
Corea developed his piano skills by exploring music on his own. A notable influence was concert pianist Salvatore Sullo, from whom Corea started taking lessons at age eight and who introduced him to classical music, helping spark his interest in musical composition. He also spent several years as a performer and soloist in the St. Rose Scarlet Lancers, a drum and bugle corps based in Chelsea.
Given a black tuxedo by his father, he started playing gigs while still in high school. He enjoyed listening to Herb Pomeroy‘s band at the time and had a trio that played Horace Silver’s music at a local jazz club. He eventually moved to New York City, where he studied music at Columbia University, then transferred to the Juilliard School. He quit both after finding them disappointing, but remained in New York.
Corea began his professional recording and touring career in the early 1960s with Mongo Santamaria, Willie Bobo, Blue Mitchell, Herbie Mann, and Stan Getz. He recorded his debut album, Tones for Joan’s Bones, in 1966 (not released until 1968). Two years later he released a highly regarded trio album, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, with drummer Roy Haynes and bassist Miroslav Vitous.
In 1968, Corea began recording and touring with Miles Davis, appearing on the widely praised Davis studio albums Filles de Kilimanjaro, In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew and On the Corner, as well as the later compilation albums Big Fun, Water Babiesand Circle in the Round.
see full post...Marcus Batista Belgrave (June 12, 1936 – May 24, 2015) was an American jazz trumpet player from Detroit, born in Chester, Pennsylvania. He recorded with numerous musicians from the 1950s onwards. Belgrave was inducted into the class of 2017 of the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame in Detroit, Michigan.
Belgrave was tutored by Clifford Brown before joining the Ray Charles touring band. Belgrave later worked with Motown Records, and recorded with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Gunther Schuller, Carl Craig, Max Roach, Ella Fitzgerald, Charles Mingus, Tony Bennett, La Palabra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dizzy Gillespie, Odessa Harris and John Sinclair, plus more recently with his wife Joan Belgrave, among others.
Belgrave was an occasional faculty member at Stanford Jazz Workshop and a visiting professor of jazz trumpet at the Oberlin Conservatory.
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The Whirlpool Galaxy Galaxy (M51), is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici. It is estimated to be 23-million light-years away. The Whirlpool Galaxy is located at the coordinates RA 13h 29m 53s | Dec +47° 11′ 43″. It can be spotted in a pair of binoculars by moving from the bright star Alkaid in Ursa Major, towards Cor Caroli in Canes Venatici. Messier 51 is a northern hemisphere deep-sky object that is bright enough to observe in amateur telescopes. It is a popular choice for amateur astrophotographers during galaxy season.
Bernard Lee “Pretty” Purdie (born June 11, 1941) is an American drummer, and an influential R&B, soul and funk musician. He is known for his precise musical time keeping and his signature use of triplets against a half-time backbeat: the “Purdie Shuffle.” He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2013.
Purdie recorded Soul Drums (1968) as a band leader and although he went on to record Alexander’s Ragtime Band, the album remained unreleased until Soul Drums was reissued on CD in 2009 with the Alexander’s Ragtime Band sessions. Other solo albums include Purdie Good! (1971), Soul Is… Pretty Purdie (1972) and the soundtrack for the blaxploitation film Lialeh (1973).
In the mid-1990s he was a member of The 3B’s, with Bross Townsend and Bob Cunningham.
Purdie was born on June 11, 1941 in Elkton, Maryland, US, the eleventh of fifteen children. At an early age he began hitting cans with sticks and learned the elements of drumming techniques from overhearing lessons being given by Leonard Heywood. He later took lessons from Heywood and played in Heywood’s big band. Purdie’s other influences at that time were Papa Jo Jones, Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, Joe Marshall, Art Blakey, as well as Cozy Cole, Sticks Evans, Panama Francis, Louis Bellson, and Herbie Lovelle.
In 1961, he moved from his home town of Elkton, Maryland, to New York City. There he played sessions with Mickey and Sylvia and regularly visited the Turf Club on 50th and Broadway, where musicians, agents, and promoters met and touted for business. It was during this period that he played for the saxophonist Buddy Lucas, who nicknamed him ‘Mississippi Bigfoot’. Eventually Barney Richmond contracted him to play session work.
Purdie was contracted by arranger Sammy Lowe to play a session with James Brown in 1965 and recording session records also show that Purdie played on “Ain’t That A Groove” at the same session. Purdie is credited on the James Brown’s albums Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud (1969) and Get on the Good Foot (1972).
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