John Edward Prine (October 10, 1946 – April 7, 2020) was an American country folk singer-songwriter. He was active as a composer, recording artist, live performer, and occasional actor from the early 1970s until his death. He was known for an often humorous style of original music that has elements of protest and social commentary.
Born and raised in Maywood, Illinois, Prine learned to play the guitar at the age of 14. He attended classes at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. After serving in West Germany with the U.S. Army, he returned to Chicago in the late 1960s, where he worked as a mailman, writing and singing songs first as a hobby, and then becoming a club performer.
A member of Chicago’s folk revival, Prine credited film critic Roger Ebert and singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson with discovering him, resulting in the production of Prine’s eponymous debut album with Atlantic Records in 1971. The acclaim earned by this LP led Prine to focus on his musical career, and he recorded three more albums for Atlantic. He then signed with Asylum Records, where he recorded an additional three albums. In 1981, he co-founded Oh Boy Records, an independent record label with which he would release most of his subsequent albums.
Widely cited as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation, Prine was known for humorous lyrics about love, life, and current events, as well as serious songs with social commentary and songs that recollect melancholy tales from his life. In 2020, he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2009, Bob Dylan told The Huffington Post, “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene. Sam Stone featuring the wonderfully evocative line: ‘There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes, and Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose.’ All that stuff about ‘Sam Stone’, the soldier junkie daddy, and ‘Donald and Lydia’, where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that.
see full post...Julian Clifford Mance, Jr. (October 10, 1928 – January 17, 2021), known as Junior Mance, was an American jazz pianist and composer.
Mance was born in Evanston, Illinois. When he was five years old, Mance started playing piano on an upright in his family’s home in Evanston. His father, Julian, taught Mance to play stride piano and boogie-woogie. With his father’s permission, Mance had his first professional gig in Chicago at the age of ten when his upstairs neighbor, a saxophone player, needed a replacement for a pianist who was ill. Mance was known to his family as “Junior” (to differentiate him from his father), and the nickname stuck with him throughout his professional career.
Mance’s mother encouraged him to study medicine at nearby Northwestern University in Evanston, but agreed to let him attend Roosevelt College in Chicago instead. Despite urging him to enroll in pre-med classes, Mance signed up for music classes, though he found that jazz was forbidden by the faculty, and did not finish out the year.
see full post...Thelonious Sphere Monk (/θəˈloʊniəs/, October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982 Rocky Mount, NC) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including “‘Round Midnight“, “Blue Monk“, “Straight, No Chaser“, “Ruby, My Dear“, “In Walked Bud“, and “Well, You Needn’t“. Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington.
Monk’s compositions and improvisations feature dissonances and angular melodic twists and are consistent with his unorthodox approach to the piano, which combined a highly percussive attack with abrupt, dramatic use of switched key releases, silences, and hesitations.
Monk was renowned for a distinct look which included suits, hats, and sunglasses. He was also noted for an idiosyncratic habit during performances: while other musicians continued playing, Monk would stop, stand up, and dance for a few moments before returning to the piano.
Monk is one of five jazz musicians to have been featured on the cover of Time magazine (the others being Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and Wynton Marsalis).
see full post...The Sadr Region (also known as IC 1318 or the Gamma Cygni Nebula) is the diffuse emission nebula surrounding Sadr (γ Cygni) at the center of Cygnus’s cross. The Sadr Region is one of the surrounding nebulous regions; others include the Butterfly Nebula and the Crescent Nebula. It contains many dark nebulae in addition to the emission diffuse nebulae.
Sadr itself has approximately a magnitude of 2.2. The nebulous regions around the region are also fairly bright.
Kenny Garrett (born October 9, 1960) is an American post-bop jazz saxophonist and flautist who gained recognition in his youth as a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra and of Miles Davis‘s band. Since then, he has pursued a solo career.
Kenny Garrett was born in Detroit, Michigan, on October 9, 1960. His father was a carpenter who played tenor saxophone as a hobby. Garrett’s own career as a saxophonist took off when he joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra, under the leadership of Mercer Ellington, in 1978. Garrett also played and recorded with Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, and Woody Shaw before developing his career as a leader.
In 1984, Garrett recorded his first album as a bandleader, Introducing Kenny Garrett, on the CrissCross label. In the year, he became the founding member of Out of the Blue which was produced by Blue Note Records. In 1986, Garrett became a member of Art Blakey’s The Jazz Messengers.
He signed to the Warner Bros. Records label, and beginning with Black Hope, in 1992, he recorded eight albums for them. Garrett’s music sometimes exhibits Asian influences, an aspect which is especially prevalent in his 2006 Grammy-nominated recording Beyond the Wall. Garrett joined the “Five Peace Band” of Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Christian McBride and Brian Blade/Vinnie Colaiuta around 2008. The CD Five Peace Band – Live won a Grammy Award in 2010.
see full post...Abdullah Ibrahim (born Adolph Johannes Brand on 9 October 1934 and formerly known as Dollar Brand) is a South African pianist and composer. His music reflects many of the musical influences of his childhood in the multicultural port areas of Cape Town, ranging from traditional African songs to the gospel of the AME Church and Ragas, to more modern jazz and other Western styles. Ibrahim is considered the leading figure in the subgenre of Cape jazz. Within jazz, his music particularly reflects the influence of Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington. He is known especially for “Mannenberg“, a jazz piece that became a notable anti-apartheid anthem.
During the apartheid era in the 1960s Ibrahim moved to New York City and, apart from a brief return to South Africa in the 1970s, remained in exile until the early ’90s. Over the decades he has toured the world extensively, appearing at major venues either as a solo artist or playing with other renowned musicians, including Max Roach, Carlos Ward and Randy Weston, as well as collaborating with classical orchestras in Europe. With his wife, the jazz singer Sathima Bea Benjamin, he is father to the New York underground rapper Jean Grae, as well as to a son, Tsakwe.
Ibrahim was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on 9 October 1934, and was baptized Adolph Johannes Brand. He attended Trafalgar High School in Cape Town’s District Six, and began piano lessons at the age of seven, making his professional debut at 15. He is of mixed-race heritage, making him a Coloured person according to the apartheid system. His mother played piano in a church, the musical style of which would remain an influence; in addition, he learned to play several genres of music during his youth in Cape Town, including marabi, mbaqanga, and American jazz. He became well known in jazz circles in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
see full post...Yusef Abdul Lateef (born William Emanuel Huddleston; October 9, 1920 – December 23, 2013) was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer, and prominent figure among the Ahmadiyya Community in America.
Although Lateef’s main instruments were the tenor saxophone and flute, he also played oboe and bassoon, both rare in jazz, and non-western instruments such as the bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, xun, arghul and koto. He is known for having been an innovator in the blending of jazz with “Eastern” music. Peter Keepnews, in his New York Times obituary of Lateef, wrote that the musician “played world music before world music had a name”.
Lateef’s books included two novellas entitled A Night in the Garden of Love and Another Avenue, the short story collections Spheres and Rain Shapes, also his autobiography, The Gentle Giant, written in collaboration with Herb Boyd. Along with his record label YAL Records, Lateef owned Fana Music, a music publishing company. Lateef published his own work through Fana, which includes Yusef Lateef’s Flute Book of the Blues and many of his own orchestral compositions.
Lateef was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee as William Emanuel Huddleston. His family moved, in 1923, to Lorain, Ohio, and again in 1925, to Detroit, Michigan, where his father changed the family’s name to “Evans”.
see full post...Dionisio Ramón Emilio Valdés Amaro (October 9, 1918 – March 22, 2013), better known as Bebo Valdés, was a Cuban pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger. He was a central figure in the golden age of Cuban music, especially due to his big band arrangements and compositions of mambo, chachachá and batanga, a genre he created in 1952. He was the director of the Radio Mil Diez house band and the Tropicana Cluborchestra, before forming his own big band, Orquesta Sabor de Cuba, in 1957. However, after the end of the Cuban Revolution, in 1960, Bebo left his family behind and went into exile in Mexico before settling in Sweden, where he remarried. His musical hiatus lasted until 1994, when a collaboration with Paquito D’Rivera brought him back into the music business. By the time of his death in 2013, he had recorded several new albums, earning multiple Grammy Awards. His son Chucho Valdés is also a successful pianist and bandleader.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kulur750-PQ
see full post...This starfield spans about three full moons (1.5 degrees) across the heroic northern constellation of Perseus. It holds the famous pair of open star clusters, h and Chi Persei. Also cataloged as NGC 869 (top) and NGC 884, both clusters are about 7,000 light-years away and contain stars much younger and hotter than the Sun. Separated by only a few hundred light-years, the clusters are both 13 million years young based on the ages of their individual stars, evidence that they were likely a product of the same star-forming region. Always a rewarding sight in binoculars, the Double Cluster is even visible to the unaided eye from dark locations. But a shroud of guitar strings was used to produce diffraction spikes on the colorful stars imaged in this vibrant telescopic view.
born 10-8-1927 McKinney, TX died 1-3-1995 Las Vegas, NV American R&B Drummer
Long before I knew his name, I was hooked on Al Duncan’s playing. In the autumn of 1963 the Impressions’ “It’s All Right” came on the radio, with its beautiful drum fills. Over the next couple of years there followed a procession of Curtis Mayfield-written songs by the Impressions and Major Lance, driven — like “Delilah”and “I Need You” — by that very distinctive drumming, so clean and relaxed.
Along with Motown’s Benny Benjamin in Detroit and Stax’s Al Jackson Jr in Memphis, Duncan propelled the cream of mid-’60s soul. Eventually I discovered his name, along with the information that he played a lot of blues, R&B and soul sessions in Chicago for Vee-Jay, Chess and other labels before being supplanted by a younger man, Maurice White (later, of course, the co-founder of Earth Wind & Fire). But I didn’t know anything else until this week, when I bought the new issue of Blues & Rhythm, the fine British monthly magazine, and there he was on the cover.
The story is an interview taped in 1975 in Santa Monica by the writer Bill Greensmith, and never previously published. Duncan talks at length about his entire career, from his early days as an aspirant jazz drummer in Texas and Kansas City, playing with the bandleaders Ernie Fields and Jay McShann, to his collaborations with Mayfield, Little Walter, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Willie Dixon, Phil Upchurch and many others, and his move in the 1970s to Los Angeles, where he played with people like Red Holloway but seemingly failed to break into the session scene.
He died on January 3, 1995, aged 68. For me, this interview is priceless testimony from a man whose playing has been part of my life for more than half a century. So thanks, Bill Greensmith, for disinterring it, and to the editors of Blues & Rhythm for not only publishing it but making Al Duncan their cover star.
see full post...Harold Joseph Singer (October 8, 1919 – August 18, 2020), also known as Hal “Cornbread” Singer, was an American R&B and jazz bandleader and saxophonist.
Harold Joseph Singer was born in Greenwood, an African American district of Tulsa, Oklahoma to father Charles and mother Anna Mae. His father was employed by an oil drilling tools manufacturer and his mother was a caterer. He was a survivor of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre during which his family’s home was burnt down. Singer and his mother were helped to travel to Kansas City during the riot by his mother’s white employer. There they waited out the violence with family until they could return. The official records of Singer’s birth were destroyed during the violence.
see full post...Park Frederick “Pepper” Adams III (October 8, 1930 – September 10, 1986) was an American jazz baritone saxophonist and composer. He composed 42 pieces, was the leader on eighteen albums spanning 28 years, and participated in 600 sessions as a sideman. He worked with an array of musicians, and had especially fruitful collaborations with trumpeter Donald Byrd and as a member of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band.
Pepper Adams was born in Highland Park, Michigan, to father Park Adams II and mother Cleo Marie Coyle. Both of his parents were college graduates, with each spending some time at the University of Michigan. Due to the onset of the Great Depression, Adams’ parents separated to allow his father to find work without geographic dependence. In the fall of 1931, Adams moved with his mother to his extended family’s farm near Columbia City, Indiana, where food and support were more readily available. In 1933, Adams began playing piano. His father having reunited with the family, they moved to Rochester, New York, in 1935 and in that city he began his musical efforts on tenor sax and clarinet. Two years later, Adams began deepening his developing passion for music by listening to Fats Waller‘s daily radio show. He was also influenced at a young age by listening to Fletcher Henderson‘s big band radio broadcasts out of Nashville, Jimmie Lunceford, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway. Adams would later describe “[his] time up until the age of eight or so [as] really just traveling from one place to another”. As early as 4th grade, Adams sold cigarettes and candy door-to-door in order to contribute to his family’s income for essential items.
see full post...Owen Joseph “Sonny” Igoe (October 8, 1923 – March 28, 2012) was an American jazz drummer and music educator who, toured with the orchestras of Tommy Reed (1913–2012), Les Elgart, Ina Ray Hutton, Benny Goodman, and Woody Herman from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s.
From the mid-1940s to 1988, he performed on over 79 recordings with bands and artists, including The Buddy Stewart (1922–1950) Quintet, Benny Goodman and His Orchestra, Woody Herman and His Orchestra, Frances Wayne with Neal Hefti and His Orchestra, Rita Moss with the George Williams Orchestra, Charlie Ventura, Tony Bennett, Billy Maxted and His Manhattan Jazz Band, The Chuck Wayne Quintet, The Don Elliott Quintet, Joe Wilder, Phil Napoleon and His Original Memphis Five, Sammy Spear (né Samuel Shapiro; 1909–1975), Pee Wee Erwin, Joe Williams, Marlene Ver Planck (born 1933), Savina (Savina J. Hartwell; 1926–1992), Dick Meldonian (né Richard Anthony Meldonian; born 1930), and Doctor Billy Dodd. A longtime resident of Emerson, New Jersey, Igoe grew up in Ridgewood and was attending Ridgewood High School when he got his start after winning a Gene Krupa drumming contest.
see full post...Alegrías is the best known form in a family of lively, vibrant songs known as Cantiñas. Cantiñas developed during the Peninsular War in the early 19th Century when Spanish partisans gathered on the Atlantic coast near Cádiz to launch the first attacks against Napoleon. The music of Cádiz blended with jotas from Aragón, and the Cantiñas and its variations were born: Cantiñas, Alegrías, Mirabrás, Caracoles and Romeras. The Alegrías emerged as the most popular version in this style. If you hear a flamenco singer announce “Ahora, algo de Ca’i.” (Now, something from Cadíz) you know s/he is going to sing some form of an Alegrias. Alegrías is a fairly simple song form and its major tonality is familiar to anyone raised on Western music. However, it is also one of the most complicated dance forms in flamenco, with numerous sections and changes in tempo, mood and phrase structure.
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