Eugene Joseph Wright (May 29, 1923 – December 30, 2020) was an American jazz bassist who was a member of the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Wright was a cornetist at high school and led the 16-piece band Dukes of Swing in his 20s. He was largely self-taught on bass until his early 30s, when he studied privately with Paul Gregory and others. Walter Page was Wright’s idol.

He became more successful at the peak of the swing era, with bandleaders including Count Basie and Erroll Garner. Playing with Billie Holidayand Charlie Parker, after the swing era ended, he demonstrated his versatility in bebop with such musicians as Sonny Stitt as well as in Latin jazz with Cal Tjader. He also played with Lonnie Simmons, Gene Ammons, and Arnett Cobb in the late ’40s and early ’50s, then worked with Buddy DeFranco from 1952 to 1955, touring Europe with him. He played in the Red Norvo trio in 1955 and toured Australia with them. He was featured in a film short with Charlie Barnet.

Wright’s most notable work was with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, which he joined in 1958. He remained with Brubeck until 1968, as part of the classic line-up with Paul Desmond and Joe Morello, and featured in Brubeck’s notable standards “Take Five” and “Blue Rondo à la Turk“. He recorded more than 30 albums with the group. Brubeck himself wrote that Wright “grounded the group”, allowing them “to play other tempos and do polyrhythmic things and he wouldn’t budge from this grounded beat”.

Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual (Spanish pronunciation: [iˈsak alˈβeniθ]; 29 May 1860 – 18 May 1909) was a Spanish virtuoso pianist, composer, and conductor. He is one of the foremost composers of the Post-Romantic era who also had a significant influence on his contemporaries and younger composers. He is best known for his piano works based on Spanish folk music idioms.^[1]

Transcriptions of many of his pieces, such as Asturias (Leyenda), Granada, Sevilla, Cadiz, Córdoba, Cataluña, Mallorca, and Tango in D, are important pieces for classical guitar, though he never composed for the guitar. The personal papers of Albéniz are preserved in, among other institutions, the Biblioteca de Catalunya.

The reddened shadow of planet Earth plays across the lunar disk in this telescopic image taken on May 26 near Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. On that crisp, clear autumn night a Perigee Full Moon slid through the northern edge of the shadow’s dark central umbra. Short for a lunar eclipse, its total phase lasted only about 14 minutes. The Earth’s shadow was not completely dark though. Instead it was suffused with a faint red light from all the planet’s sunsets and sunrises seen from the perspective of an eclipsed Moon, the reddened sunlight scattered by Earth’s atmosphere. The HDR composite of 6 exposures also shows the wide range of brightness variations within Earth’s umbral shadow against a faint background of stars.

Leland Bruce Sklar (born May 28, 1947) is an American electric bass guitarist and session musician. He is a member of the Los Angeles-based instrumental group The Section, who served as the de facto house band of Asylum Records and were one of the progenitors of the soft rock sound prevalent on top-40 radio in the 1970s and 1980s. Besides appearing as the backing band on numerous recordings by artists such as Jackson Browne, Carole King, Phil Collins, Linda Ronstadt, and James Taylor, the Section also released three solo albums of instrumental rock. Both in The Section and separately, Sklar has contributed to over 2,000 albums as a session musician. He also has toured with James Taylor, Toto, Phil Collins and other major rock and pop acts, and recorded many soundtracks to films and television shows.

Sklar studied at California State University, Northridge. It was during that time he met James Taylor, who invited him to play bass at some venues. They both thought that the work would be short-term, but soon Taylor’s career took off with his first hit records, and Sklar came into the limelight and was asked to record with other artists. In the late ‘60s he was briefly the bass player of the band Wolfgang, which featured Ricky Lancelotti as their vocalist. However, their only recordings were unreleased demo tracks. In the 1970s, Sklar worked so frequently with drummer Russ Kunkel, guitarist Danny Kortchmar, and keyboardist Craig Doerge that they eventually became known as “The Section” and recorded three albums under that name between 1972 and 1977.

Russell Donald Freeman (May 28, 1926 – June 27, 2002) was a bebop and cool jazz pianist and composer.

Initially, Freeman was classically trained. His reputation as a jazz pianist grew in the 1940s after working with Art Pepper and Shorty Rogers. He played with Charlie Parker on the 1947 “Home Cooking” jazz session. Numerous collaborations followed in the 1950s with Chet Baker, Shelly Manne, and Art Pepper. These collaborations included the Jazz Immortal CD recorded with Russ Freeman and jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown in 1954, which included leading musicians Brown and Zoot Sims. On the Jazz Immortal CD, Russ Freeman was able to play in a combo that recorded many Clifford Brown compositions.

In 1957, he collaborated with André Previn on the album Double Play!, where they both played piano, accompanied only by Manne on drums.

In 1988, Keith Jarrett performed a version of Freeman’s “The Wind” in a solo concert in Paris, which is featured on his album Paris Concert. In 1991, Mariah Carey wrote her own lyrics to “The Wind” for her album Emotions. Freeman had written “The Wind” with original lyrics by Jerry Gladstone; it had been performed as an instrumental piece during the 1950s and 1960s by the likes of Baker, Leo Wright, and Stan Getz, and had been sung by vocalist June Christy (on The Misty Miss Christy). Freeman’s piano is featured on Baker’s 1954 recording of “The Wind” (featured on Chet Baker & Strings). Freeman remained busy in music throughout his life, transitioning from jazz pianist to film scoring and composition before his death in Las Vegas in 2002.

Freeman was married three times, and he had one daughter, Paula Kenley Freeman, from his second marriage. He had no grandchildren. His daughter moved from Seattle to live in the Netherlands in 2009, and an interview about her relationship with her father appeared in the May 2009 issue of the European magazine, PianoWereld.

Aaron Thibeaux “T-Bone” Walker (May 28, 1910 – March 16, 1975) was an American blues guitarist, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who was a pioneer and innovator of the jump blues and electric blues sound. In 2018 Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 67 on its list of “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”. In March 1975, Walker died due to health issues in his Los Angeles home.

Aaron Thibeaux Walker was born in Linden, Texas, of African-American and Cherokee descent. His parents, Movelia Jimerson and Rance Walker, were both musicians. His stepfather, Marco Washington, taught him to play the guitar, ukulele, banjo, violin, mandolin, and piano.

Walker began his career as a teenager in Dallas in the 1920s. His mother and stepfather (a member of the Dallas String Band) were musicians, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, a family friend, sometimes came over for dinner. Walker left school at the age of 10, and by 15 he was a professional performer on the blues circuit. Initially, he was Jefferson’s protégé and would guide him around town for his gigs. In 1929, Walker made his recording debut with Columbia Records, billed as Oak Cliff T-Bone, releasing the single “Wichita Falls Blues” backed with “Trinity River Blues”. Oak Cliff is the community in which he lived at the time, and T-Bone is a corruption of his middle name. The pianist Douglas Fernell played accompaniment on the record.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y_kAtUXlA0

Andrew Dewey Kirk (May 28, 1898 – December 11, 1992) was a jazz saxophonist and tubist who led the Twelve Clouds of Joy, a band popular during the swing era.

Kirk grew up in Denver, Colorado, where he was tutored by Wilberforce Whiteman, Paul Whiteman‘s father. Kirk started his musical career playing with George Morrison’s band, but then went on to join Terrence Holder‘s Dark Clouds of Joy. In 1929 he was elected leader after Holder departed. Renaming the band Clouds of Joy, Kirk also relocated the band from Dallas, Texas, to Kansas City, Missouri. Although named the Clouds of Joy, the band has also been known as the Twelve Clouds of Joy due to the number of musicians in the band. They set up in the Pla-Mor Ballroom on the junction of 32nd and Main in Kansas City and made their first recording for Brunswick Records that same year. Mary Lou Williams came in as pianist at the last moment, but she impressed Brunswick’s Dave Kapp, so she became a member of the band.

Kirk moved the band to Kansas City, and since their first recordings in 1929–1930, they grew popular as they epitomized the Kansas City jazz sound. In mid-1936, he was signed to Decca and made scores of popular records until 1946. He presumably disbanded and reformed his band during that 6-year recording layoff, as his 1929–1930 Brunswick appeared to have sold well enough to stay in the catalog through the period and 1933-34 pressings (with the mid-1930s label variations) have been seen.

In 1938, Kirk and band held the top spot of the Billboard chart for 12 weeks with “I Won’t Tell a Soul (I Love You)”, written by Hughie Charles and Ross Parker, featuring Pha Terrell on vocals. In 1942, Kirk and His Clouds of Joy recorded “Take It and Git”, which on October 24, 1942, became the first single to hit number one on the Harlem Hit Parade, the predecessor to the Billboard R&B chart. In 1943, with June Richmond on vocals, he had a number 4 hit with “Hey Lawdy Mama“.

There are many who believe that the bulerías por soleá are different from the soleá por bulerías. This is the only style that has two names. In the primitive slate plates they appear many times with the title of bulerías. The style receives several alternative names: soleá por bulería, soleabulería, bulerías al blow, and surely the most appropriate bulería to hear what Jerez says.

The rhythmic-harmonic framework of the bulerías por soleá also supports other styles such as romances , alboreás , bamberas and jaleos .

Its melody is clearly different from that of soleá , since it is precisely a bulería . In order not to doubt whether a style is a soleá or a bulería por soleá, we recommend speeding up the rhythm and assessing whether or not the cante becomes a bulería.

It is not a soleá performed faster, it is a bulería said in soleá time.

The formal structure of bulerías por soleá tends to follow the following scheme: First, an introductory style, a variant of short Jerez bulería said in medium time; in the second couplet we find a fleeting step to the major, to finish off with a brave cante, which some interpreters tend to do without if the chosen key is particularly high.

The bulerías models to listen to have been classified by Luis Soler Guevara and Ramón Soler Díaz in their book ‘Los cantes de Antonio Mairena’. Classification that, as in the case of soleares and seguiriyas (see), we have followed. Norman Paul Kliman on the web portal   www.canteytoque.es  has designed a page with audios of  soleares and  seguiriyas that we have also followed in this section of  bulerías por soleá .

NGC 246 (also known as the Skull Nebula or Caldwell 56) is a planetary nebula in the constellationCetus. The nebula and the stars associated with it are listed in several catalogs, as summarized by the SIMBAD database. It is roughly 1,600 light-years away. The nebula’s central star is the 12th magnitude white dwarf HIP 3678. Among some amateur astronomers, NGC 246 is known as the “Pac-Man Nebula” because of the arrangement of its central stars and the surrounding star field.

Dee Dee Bridgewater (née Denise Garrett, May 27, 1950) is an American jazz singer. She is a three-time Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, as well as a Tony Award-winning stage actress. For 23 years, she was the host of National Public Radio’s syndicated radio show JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater. She is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Born Denise Eileen Garrett in Memphis, Tennessee, she was raised Catholic in Flint, Michigan. Her father, Matthew Garrett, was a jazz trumpeter and teacher at Manassas High School, and through his playing, she was exposed to jazz early on. At the age of sixteen, she was a member of a Rock and R&B trio, singing in clubs in Michigan. At 18, she studied at Michigan State University before she went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With the school’s jazz band, she toured the Soviet Union in 1969.

The next year, she met trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, and after their marriage, they moved to New York City, where Cecil played in Horace Silver‘s band. In the early 1970s, Bridgewater joined the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra as lead vocalist. This marked the beginning of her jazz career, and she performed with many of the great jazz musicians of the time, such as Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Wayne Garfield, and others. She performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1973. In 1974, her first solo album, entitled Afro Blue, appeared, and she performed on Broadway in the musical The Wiz. For her role as Glinda the Good Witch she won a Tony Award in 1975 as “Best Featured Actress”, and the musical also won the 1976 Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gns8Mto6T4

Clifford Everett “Bud” Shank Jr. (May 27, 1926 – April 2, 2009) was an American alto saxophonist and flautist. He rose to prominence in the early 1950s playing lead alto and flute in Stan Kenton‘s Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra and throughout the decade worked in various small jazz combos. He spent the 1960s as a first-call studio musician in Hollywood. In the 1970s and 1980s, he performed regularly with the L. A. Four. Shank ultimately abandoned the flute to focus exclusively on playing jazz on the alto saxophone. He also recorded on tenor and baritone sax. His most famous recording is probably the version of Harlem Nocturne used as the theme song in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. He is also well known for the alto flute solo on the song “California Dreamin’” recorded by The Mamas & the Papas in 1965.

Bud Shank was born in Dayton, Ohio. He began with clarinet in Vandalia, Ohio, but had switched to saxophone before attending the University of North Carolina. While at UNC, Shank was initiated into the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. In 1946 he worked with Charlie Barnet before moving on to Kenton and the West coast jazz scene. He also had a strong interest in what might now be termed world music, playing Brazilian-influenced jazz with Laurindo Almeida in 1953–54. In 1958 he is the first American jazz musician to record in Italy with an Italian jazz orchestra conducted by Ezio Leoni(aka Len Mercer), paving the way for Chet Baker and others who would follow Shank’s tracks recording in Milan with Maestro Leoni. His world music collaborations continued in 1962, fusing jazz with Indian traditions in collaboration with Indian composer and sitar player Ravi Shankar.

In 1974, Shank joined with Ray Brown, Shelly Manne (replaced by Jeff Hamilton after 1977), and Laurindo Almeida to form the group the L.A. Four, who recorded and toured extensively through 1982. Shank helped to popularize both Latin-flavored and chamber jazz music, and as a musician’s musician also performed with orchestras as diverse as the Royal Philharmonic, the New American Orchestra, the Gerald Wilson Big Band, Stan Kenton‘s Neophonic Orchestra, and Duke Ellington.

Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (Danish pronunciation: [ne̝lsˈhene̝ŋ ˈɶɐ̯steð ˈpʰeðɐsn̩], 27 May 1946 – 19 April 2005), also known by his abbreviated nickname NHØP, was a Danish jazz double bassist.

Ørsted Pedersen was born in Osted, near Roskilde, on the Danish island of Zealand, the son of a church organist. As a child, Ørsted Pedersen played piano, but from the age of 13, he started learning to play upright bass and at the age of 14, while studying, he began his professional jazz career in Denmark with his first band, Jazzkvintet 60 (Danish for Jazz Quintet 60). By the age of fifteen, he had the ability to accompany leading musicians at nightclubs, working regularly at Copenhagen’s Jazzhus Montmartre, after his debut there on New Year’s Eve 1961, when he was only 15. When seventeen, he had already turned down an offer to join the Count Basie orchestra, mainly because he was too young to get legal permission to live and work as a musician in the United States.

The Montmartre was a regular stop-off for touring American Jazz stars, and as a member of the house band, the young Ørsted Pedersen performed with saxophonists such as Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Stan Getz, and pianist Bill Evans, with whom he toured in Europe in 1965. During the 1960s, Ørsted Pedersen played with a series of other important American jazzmen who were touring or resident in Denmark, including Ben Webster, Brew Moore, Bud Powell, Count Basie, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Jackie McLean, and vocalist Ella Fitzgerald. He also played with Jean-Luc Ponty, and became the bassist of choice whenever a big-name musician was touring Copenhagen.

He was awarded Best Bass Player of the Year by Downbeat Critics’ Poll in 1981.

Kenny Dennis (born May 27, 1930) is a Philadelphia-born American jazz drummer. He has played on albums for Nancy Wilson, Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, Johnny Griffin, Oscar Brown Jr., Charles Mingus, Billy Taylor, and Mal Waldron.

Dennis began his musical career in the United States Army Band, playing drums in three bands from 1948-1952. After being discharged, he connected with junior high school mate, pianist Ray Bryant and became part of The Ray Bryant Trio along with Jimmy Rowser on bass. They became the house trio at the North Philadelphia Jazz Club, Blue Note where they played for such jazz artists as Kai Winding, Chris Connor and Sonny Stitt. His career next took him to New York, where he worked with artists including Miles Davis, Phineas Newborn, Jr., Billy Taylor, Erroll Garner, Charles Mingus and Sonny Rollins.

In 1957, Dennis performed in Sonny Rollins’s Trio with bassist Wendell Marshall at Carnegie Hall—a historic performance that was commemorated in 2007 with a 50th anniversary concert. Dennis moved to California, when Miles Davis recommended him to Lena Horne. Recording credits include recordings with such artists as Michel Legrand, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Nancy Wilson, Gerald Wilson and poet Langston Hughes.

Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. (born May 27, 1935) is an American jazz composer, pianist and radio personality. Lewis has recorded over 80 albums and has received five gold records and three Grammy Awards so far in his career.

Ramsey Lewis was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Ramsey Lewis Sr. and Pauline Lewis. He began taking piano lessons at the age of four. Lewis would eventually join a jazz group called the clefs. He later formed the Ramsey Lewis Trio with drummer Isaac “Red” Holt and bassist Eldee Young. They eventually joined up with Chess Records.

During 1956 the trio issued their debut album, Ramsey Lewis and his Gentle-men of Swing. Following their 1965 hit “The In Crowd” (the single reached No. 5 on the pop charts, and the album No. 2) they concentrated more on pop material. Young and Holt left in 1966 to form Young-Holt Unlimited and were replaced by Cleveland Eaton and Maurice White. White left to form Earth, Wind & Fire and was replaced by Morris Jennings in 1970. Later, Frankie Donaldson and Bill Dickens replaced Jennings and Eaton; Felton Crews also appeared on many 1980’s releases.

By 1966, Lewis was one of the nation’s most successful jazz pianists, topping the charts with “The In Crowd”, “Hang On Sloopy“,and “Wade in the Water“. All three singles each sold over one million copies and were awarded gold discs. Many of his recordings attracted a large non-jazz audience. In the 1970s, Lewis often played electric piano, although by later in the decade he was sticking to acoustic and using an additional keyboardist in his groups.