mick’s blog

World Music Memorial for Joanne Shenandoah

November 24, 2021

Award-Winning Native American Singer Joanne Shenandoah Dies at 64

Joanne Shenandoah, one of the leading artists in the Native American music scene, passed away on Monday, November 22, 2021.Joanne Shenandoah was an influential singer and the recipient of numerous Native American Music Awards.The Native American Music Awards issued this statement: “It is with deep sorrow and profound sadness that the Native American Music Awards & Association (NAMA) share in the outpouring of grief of our beloved friend, Lifetime Achievement honoree, and 14 time Award winner, Joanne Shenandoah, following the announcement of her passing.

On Monday, November 22nd approaching midnight EST, Joanne Shenandaoh died at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona following complications of abdominal bleeding and suffering a cardiac arrest. She was surrounded by her husband, Doug George-Kanentiio and daughter Leah.

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Daily Roots with Winston McAnuff

November 24, 2021

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World Music with Miroca Paris

November 23, 2021

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The Cozmos with the Sun from NuSTAR

November 23, 2021

Sunspots themselves are a bit cooler than the surrounding solar surface because the magnetic fields that create them reduce convective heating. It is therefore unusual that regions overhead — even much higher up in the Sun’s corona — can be hundreds of times hotter. To help find the cause, NASA directed the Earth-orbiting Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) satellite to point its very sensitive X-ray telescope at the Sun. Featured here is the Sun in ultraviolet light, shown in a red hue as taken by the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Superimposed in false-colored green and blue is emission above sunspots detected by NuSTAR in different bands of high-energy X-rays, highlighting regions of extremely high temperature. Clues about the Sun’s atmospheric heating mechanisms come from NuSTAR images like this and shed light on solar nanoflares and microflares as brief bursts of energy that may drive the unusual heating.

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Johnny Mandel

November 23, 2021

John Alfred Mandel (November 23, 1925 – June 29, 2020) was an American composer and arranger of popular songs, film music and jazz. The musicians he worked with include Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Anita O’Day, Barbra Streisand, Tony Bennett, Diane Schuur and Shirley Horn. He won 5 Grammy Awards – from 17 nominations; his first nomination was for his debut film score for the multi-nominated 1958 film I Want to Live!.

Mandel was born in Manhattan on November 23, 1925. His father, Alfred, was a garment manufacturer who ran Mandel & Cash; his mother, Hannah (Hart-Rubin), had aimed to be an opera singer and discovered her son had perfect pitch at the age of five. His family was Jewish. They moved to Los Angeles in 1934, after his father’s business collapsed during the Great Depression. Mandel was given piano lessons, but switched to the trumpet and later the trombone.

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Ray Drummond

November 23, 2021

Ray Drummond (born November 23, 1946 in Brookline, Massachusetts) is a jazz bassist and teacher. He also has an MBA from Stanford University, hence his linkage to the Stanford Jazz Workshop. He can be heard on hundreds of albums and co-leads The Drummonds with Renee Rosnes and (not related) Billy Drummond.

Drummond has been a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey, since 1980 with his wife, Susan, and his daughter, Maya.

He is the elder brother of David Drummond, senior vice president, corporate development and chief legal officer of Google Inc.

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R.L. Burnside

November 23, 2021

R. L. Burnside (November 23, 1926 – September 1, 2005) was an American blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. He played music for much of his life but received little recognition before the early 1990s. In the latter half of that decade, Burnside recorded and toured with Jon Spencer, garnering crossover appeal and introducing his music to a new fan base in the punk and garage rock scenes.

Burnside was born in 1926 to Earnest Burnside and Josie Malone, in either Harmontown, College Hill, or Blackwater Creek, all of which are in the rural part of Lafayette County, Mississippi, near the area that would be covered by Sardis Lake a few years later. His first name is given variously as R. L., Rural, Robert Lee, Rule, or Ruel. His father left the family early on, and R. L. grew up with his mother, grandparents, and several siblings.

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Daily Roots with the Viceroys

November 23, 2021

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The Cozmos with SGAS 0033+02

November 22, 2021

This star- and galaxy-studded image was captured by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), using data that were collected for scientific purposes. The object of interest was a galaxy that is visible in the bottom right corner of the image, named SGAS 0033+02. What makes this particular galaxy interesting is a little unusual — it appears not just once in this image, but three times. The thrice-visible galaxy is a little difficult to spot: it appears once as a curved arc and twice more as small round dots around the star. SGAS 0033+02’s multiple appearances in the same image are not the result of an error, but instead are due to a remarkable phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when the light from a very distant galaxy — such as SGAS 0033+02 — is curved (or ‘lensed’) by the gravity of a massive celestial object that lies in the foreground, between the distant galaxy and the Earth. SGAS 0033+02 was discovered by its namesake, the Sloan Giant Arcs Survey (SGAS), which aimed to identify highly magnified galaxies that were gravitationally lensed by foreground galaxy clusters. SGAS 0033+02 is of special interest because of its highly unusual proximity in the sky to a very bright star. The star is useful, because it can be used to calibrate and correct observations of the lensed SGAS 0033+02.

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Aston Barrett

November 22, 2021

Aston Francis Barrett (born 22 November 1946), often called “Family Man” or “Fams” for short, is a retired Jamaican musician and Rastafarian.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Aston “Family Man” Barrett was one of the Barrett brothers (the other being the younger brother on drums Carlton “Carly” Barrett) who played with Bob Marley & The Wailers, The Hippy Boys and Lee Perry‘s The Upsetters. He was the bandleader of Marley’s backing band, as well as co-producer of the albums, and the man in charge of the overall song arrangements.

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Max Romeo

November 22, 2021

Max Romeo (born Maxwell Livingston Smith, 22 November 1944) is a Jamaican reggae and roots reggae recording musician who has achieved chart success in his home country and in the United Kingdom. He had several hits with the vocal group the Emotions. His song “Wet Dream” (1968) included overtly sexual lyrics and launched a new style of reggae.

Born in St. D’Acre, St. Ann, Jamaica, Romeo left home at the age of 14 and worked on a sugar plantation outside Clarendon, before winning a local talent competition when he was 18. This prompted a move to the capital, Kingston, in order to embark on a musical career.

In 1965, Romeo joined up with Kenneth Knight and Lloyd Shakespeare in The Emotions, whilst also working in sales for the Caltone label. The group were unsuccessful in auditions for other producers, but Ken Lack offered them an audition after overhearing Smith singing to himself while working. In 1966, the group had their first hit, with the Lack-produced “(Buy You) A Rainbow”.The Emotions went on to release several hit singles. and by 1968, the singer, by that point known as Max Romeo began his solo career in 1968, but did not have any great successes on the charts. Romeo returned to The Emotions, now recording for Phil Pratt, and founded a new band, The Hippy Boys.

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Jesse Colin Young

November 22, 2021

Perry Miller (born November 22, 1941), known professionally as Jesse Colin Young, is an American singer and songwriter. He was a founding member and lead singer of the 1960s group the Youngbloods. After their dissolution in 1972, Young embarked on a solo career, releasing a series of successful albums through Warner Bros. Records, including Song for Juli (1973), Light Shine (1974), Songbird (1975) and the live album On the Road(1976). Young continued to release music in the 1980s with Elektra Records and Cypress Records, before deciding to release music through his personal label, Ridgetop Music, in 1993. After the Mount Vision Fire in 1995, Young relocated with his family to a coffee plantation in Hawaii, periodically releasing music. Young received a diagnosis of “chronic Lyme disease” in 2012, and decided to retire from music. He began performing again in 2016 with his son Tristan, releasing a new album Dreamers in 2019 through BMG.

Young’s song “Sunlight” was covered by Three Dog Night on their album Naturally (1970), and “Darkness, Darkness” by Robert Plant in 2002, which received a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.

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Jimmy Knepper

November 22, 2021

James Minter Knepper (November 22, 1927 – June 14, 2003) was an American jazz trombonist. In addition to his own recordings as leader, Knepper performed and recorded with Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman, Claude Thornhill, Stan Kenton, Benny Goodman, Gil Evans, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, Toshiko Akiyoshi and Lew Tabackin, and, most famously, Charles Mingus in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Knepper died in 2003 of complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Knepper was born in Los Angeles, California, United States, the second son of a nurse and a police officer. His parents divorced shortly after his birth, and his mother had to take her abusive husband to court in order to get child support. He and his older brother, Robert, were sent to several boarding and military schools, Page Military Academy and St. John’s Military Academy, while their mother worked. He picked up his first instrument, an alto horn, at the age of six while he was a pupil there. His first teacher persuaded him to put aside the alto and pick up the trombone because, as he said, he had a “trombone mouth”. He played his first professional gigs in Los Angeles, and traveled to Spokane, Washington, at the age of 15. He graduated high school, and later attended classes at Los Angeles Community College.

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Hoagy Carmichael

November 22, 2021

Hoagland Howard Carmichael (November 22, 1899 – December 27, 1981) was an American songwriter, musician, actor, singer, and attorney. American composer and author Alec Wilder described Carmichael as the “most talented, inventive, sophisticated and jazz-oriented of all the great craftsmen” of pop songs in the first half of the 20th century. Carmichael was one of the most successful Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the 1930s, and was among the first singer-songwriters in the age of mass media to utilize new communication technologies such as television, electronic microphones, and sound recordings.

Carmichael composed several hundred songs, including 50 that achieved hit record status. He is best known for composing the music for “Stardust“, “Georgia on My Mind” (lyrics by Stuart Gorrell), “The Nearness of You“, and “Heart and Soul” (in collaboration with lyricist Frank Loesser), four of the most-recorded American songs of all time. He also collaborated with lyricist Johnny Mercer on “Lazybones” and “Skylark“. Carmichael’s “Ole Buttermilk Sky” was an Academy Award nominee in 1946, from Canyon Passage, in which he co-starred as a musician riding a mule. “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening“, with lyrics by Mercer, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1951. Carmichael also appeared as a character actor and musical performer in 14 films, hosted three musical-variety radio programs, performed on television, and wrote two autobiographies.

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World Fusion with Anoushka Shankar

November 22, 2021

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Daily Roots with Ini Kamoze

November 22, 2021

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The Cozmos with C/2021 A1 Leonard

November 21, 2021

Comet C/2021 A1 (Leonard) was discovered as a faint smudge in January 2021 when it was out past Mars — but its orbit will take the giant shedding ice-ball into the inner Solar System, passing near both Earth and Venus in December before it swoops around the Sun in early January 2022. Although comets are notoriously hard to predict, some estimations have Comet Leonard brightening to become visible to the unaided eye in December. Comet Leonard was captured just over a week ago already sporting a green-tinged coma and an extended dust tail. The featured picture was composed from 62 images taken through a moderate-sized telescope — one set of exposures tracking the comet, while another set tracking the background stars. The exposures were taken from the dark skies above the Eastern Sierras (Mountains), near June Lake in California, USA. Soon after passing near the Earth in mid-December, the comet will shift from northern to southern skies.

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Björk

November 21, 2021

Björk Guðmundsdóttir OTF (/bjɜːrk/ BYURK; Icelandic: [pjœr̥k ˈkvʏðmʏntsˌtouʰtɪr̥] (About this soundlisten); born 21 November 1965) is an Icelandic singer, songwriter, composer, record producer, actress and DJ. Over her four-decade career, she has developed an eclectic musical style that draws on influences and genres including electronic, pop, experimental, trip hop, alternative, classical, and avant-garde music.

Born and raised in Reykjavík, Björk began her music career at the age of 11 and gained international recognition as the lead singer of the alternative rock band the Sugarcubes. After the band’s breakup in 1992, Björk embarked on a solo career, coming to prominence with albums such as Debut(1993), Post (1995), and Homogenic (1997), while collaborating with a range of artists and exploring a variety of multimedia projects. Her other albums include Vespertine (2001), Medúlla (2004), Volta (2007), Biophilia (2011), Vulnicura (2015) and Utopia (2017).

Several of Björk’s albums have reached the top 20 on the US Billboard 200 chart. As of 2015, she had sold between 20 and 40 million records worldwide. 31 of her singles have reached the top 40 on pop charts around the world, with 22 top-40 hits in the UK, including the top-10 singles “It’s Oh So Quiet“, “Army of Me“, and “Hyperballad” and the top-20 singles “Play Dead“, “Big Time Sensuality“, and “Violently Happy“. Her accolades and awards include the Order of the Falcon, five BRIT Awards, and 15 Grammy nominations. In 2015, Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.[7][8] Rolling Stone named her the 60th greatest singer and the 81st greatest songwriter.

Björk starred in the 2000 Lars von Trier film Dancer in the Dark, for which she won the Best Actress Award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “I’ve Seen It All“. Biophilia was marketed as an interactive app album with its own education program. Björk has also been an advocate for environmental causes in Iceland. A retrospective exhibition dedicated to Björk was held at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2015.

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Alphonse Mouzon

November 21, 2021

Alphonse Lee Mouzon (November 21, 1948 – December 25, 2016) was an American jazz fusion drummer and the owner of Tenacious Records, a label that primarily released Mouzon’s recordings. He was a composer, arranger, producer, and actor. He gained popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Mouzon, of African, French, and Blackfoot descent, was born on November 21, 1948, in Charleston, South Carolina. He received his first musical training at Bonds-Wilson High School, and moved to New York City upon graduation. He studied drama and music at the City College of New York, as well as medicine at Manhattan Medical School. He continued receiving drum lessons from Bobby Thomas, the drummer for jazz pianist Billy Taylor. He played percussion in the 1968 Broadway show Promises, Promises, and he then worked with pianist McCoy Tyner. He spent a year as a member of the jazz fusion band, Weather Report. After that Mouzon signed as a solo artist to the Blue Note label in 1972.Mouzon’s visibility increased during his tenure with guitarist Larry Coryell‘s Eleventh House fusion band from 1973 to 1975. Albums from this period include Introducing the Eleventh House, Level One, Mind Transplant (a solo album), and in 1977, a reconciliation recording with Coryell entitled Back Together Again.

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Dr John

November 21, 2021

Malcolm John Rebennack Jr. (November 20, 1941 – June 6, 2019), better known by his stage name Dr. John, was an American singer and songwriter. His music combined blues, pop, jazz, boogie-woogie, funk, and rock and roll.

Active as a session musician from the late 1950s until his death, he gained a following in the late 1960s after the release of his album Gris-Grisand his appearance at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music. He typically performed a lively, theatrical stage show inspired by medicine shows, Mardi Gras costumes, and voodoo ceremonies. Rebennack recorded thirty studio albums and nine live albums, as well as contributing to thousands of other musicians’ recordings. In 1973, he achieved a top 10 hit single with “Right Place, Wrong Time“.

Rebennack was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on November 20, 1941. He was the son of Dorothy (Cronin) and Malcolm John Rebennack, and had German, Irish, Spanish, English, and French heritage. His father ran an appliance shop in the East End of New Orleans, fixing radios and televisions and selling records. Growing up in the 3rd Ward of New Orleans, he found early musical inspiration in the minstrel tunes sung by his grandfather and a number of aunts, uncles, sister, and cousins who played piano. He did not take music lessons before his teens and endured only a short stint in choir before getting kicked out. His father exposed him as a young boy to jazz musicians King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, who later inspired his 2014 release, Ske-Dat-De-Dat: The Spirit of Satch. Throughout his adolescence, his father’s connections enabled him access to the recording rooms of rock artists, including Little Richard and Guitar Slim. Later he began to perform in New Orleans clubs, mainly on guitar, and played on stage with various local artists.[

When he was about 13 years old, Rebennack met Professor Longhair. Impressed by the professor’s flamboyant attire and striking musical style, Rebennack soon began performing with him, and began his life as a professional musician. He later recalled that his debut in the studio, in about 1955 or 1956, came when he was signed as a songwriter and artist by Eddie Mesner at Aladdin Records. He joined the musicians’ union at the end of 1957, with the help of Danny Kessler, and then considered himself to be a professional musician.

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Interviews