mick’s blog

Max Roach

January 10, 2021

Maxwell Lemuel Roach (January 10, 1924 – August 16, 2007) was an American jazz drummer and composer. A pioneer of bebop, he worked in many other styles of music, and is generally considered one of the most important drummers in history. He worked with many famous jazz musicians, including Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Abbey Lincoln, Dinah Washington, Charles Mingus, Billy Eckstine, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, and Booker Little. He was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1992. Roach also co-led a pioneering quintet along with trumpeter Clifford Brown and the percussion ensemble M’Boom. He made numerous musical statements relating to the civil rights movement. Max Roach was born to Alphonse and Cressie Roach in the Township of Newland, Pasquotank County, North Carolina, which borders the southern edge of the Great Dismal Swamp. The Township of Newland is sometimes mistaken for Newland Town in Avery County, North Carolina. Although his birth certificate lists his date of birth as January 10, 1924, Roach has been quoted by Phil Schaap, saying that his family believed he was actually born on January 8, 1925.

Roach’s family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, when he was four years old. He grew up in a musical home with his gospel singer mother. He started to play bugle in parades at a young age. At the age of 10, he was already playing drums in some gospel bands.

In 1942, as an 18-year-old recently graduated from Boys High School, he was called to fill in for Sonny Greer with the Duke Ellington Orchestra performing at the Paramount Theater in Manhattan. He starting going to the jazz clubs on 52nd Street and at 78th Street & Broadway for Georgie Jay’s Taproom, where he played with schoolmate Cecil Payne. His first professional recording took place in December 1943, backing Coleman Hawkins.

He was one of the first drummers, along with Kenny Clarke, to play in the bebop style. Roach performed in bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Bud Powell, and Miles Davis. He played on many of Parker’s most important records, including the Savoy Records November 1945 session, which marked a turning point in recorded jazz. His early brush work with Powell’s trio, especially at fast tempos, has been highly praised.

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World Music with Breabach

January 10, 2021

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Daily Roots with Joe Tex & U Black

January 10, 2021

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Surviving the Pandemic and Realizing Racial Justice

January 9, 2021

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The Cosmos with the ALMA Milky Way

January 9, 2021

The Milky Way glitters brightly over ALMA antennas, in this image taken by the ESO Ultra High Definition Expedition team as they capture the site in 4K quality. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array is an astronomical interferometer of 66 radio telescopes in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, which observe electromagnetic radiation at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths.

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Dave Matthews

January 9, 2021

David John Matthews (born January 9, 1967) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, actor and record label owner, best known as the lead vocalist, songwriter and guitarist for the Dave Matthews Band (DMB). Matthews was born in Johannesburg, and moved frequently between South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States while growing up. Matthews started playing acoustic guitar at the age of nine.

From 1991 to 2003, Matthews predominantly focused on songwriting and performing with the Dave Matthews Band, which he started in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1991. Since then, he has also done various solo performances and produced other records. During the period from 2000 to 2010, his band sold more tickets and earned more money than any other act in North America. The band’s 2012 album Away from the World made them the only group to have six consecutive studio albums debut at number one on the Billboard charts. This record was extended to seven consecutive number one albums with the 2018 release, Come Tomorrow.

In addition to music, Matthews has had multiple acting roles.[5] He has also won two Grammy Awards: one with the Dave Matthews Band in 1997 for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group (“So Much to Say“) and one in 2004 for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance (“Gravedigger“) from his solo album.

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Jimmy Page

January 9, 2021

James Patrick Page OBE (born 9 January 1944) is an English musician, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and record producer who achieved international success as the guitarist and founder of the rock band Led Zeppelin.

Page is prolific in creating guitar riffs and his varied style involves various guitar tunings, technical and melodic solos and aggressive, distorted guitar tone as well as his folk and eastern influenced acoustic work. He is also noted for occasionally playing his guitar with a cello bow to create a droning sound texture to the music.

Page began his career as a studio session musician in London and, by the mid-1960s, alongside Big Jim Sullivan, was one of the most sought-after session guitarists in Britain. He was a member of the Yardbirds from 1966 to 1968. When The Yardbirds broke up, he founded Led Zeppelin, which was active from 1968–1980. Following the death of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, he participated in a number of groups throughout the 1980s and 1990s, notably XYZ, The Firm, The Honeydrippers, Coverdale–Page, and Page and Plant. Since 2000, Page has participated in various guest performances with many artists, both live and in studio recordings, and participated in a one-off Led Zeppelin reunion in 2007 that was released as the 2012 concert film Celebration Day. Along with The Edge and Jack White, he participated in the 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud.

Page is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential guitarists of all time.Rolling Stone magazine has described Page as “the pontiff of power riffing” and ranked him number three in their list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”, behind Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. In 2010, he was ranked number two in Gibson‘s list of “Top 50 Guitarists of All Time” and, in 2007, number four on Classic Rocks “100 Wildest Guitar Heroes”. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice: once as a member of the Yardbirds (1992) and once as a member of Led Zeppelin (1995).

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Joan Baez

January 9, 2021

Joan Chandos Baez (/bz/; born January 9, 1941 Staten Island, NY) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and activist. Her contemporary folk music often includes songs of protest or social justice. Baez has performed publicly for over 60 years, releasing over 30 albums. Fluent in Spanish and English, she has also recorded songs in at least six other languages.

Baez is generally regarded as a folk singer, but her music has diversified since the counterculture era of the 1960s and encompasses genres such as folk rock, pop, country, and gospel music. She began her recording career in 1960 and achieved immediate success. Her first three albums, Joan Baez, Joan Baez, Vol. 2 and Joan Baez in Concert, all achieved gold record status. Although a songwriter herself, Baez generally interprets other composers’ work, having recorded songs by the Allman Brothers Band, the Beatles, Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen, Woody Guthrie, Violeta Parra, the Rolling Stones, Pete Seeger, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, and many others. She was one of the first major artists to record the songs of Bob Dylan in the early 1960s; Baez was already an internationally celebrated artist and did much to popularize his early songwriting efforts.[8][9] On her later albums she has found success interpreting the work of more recent songwriters, including Ryan Adams, Josh Ritter, Steve Earle, Natalie Merchant, and Joe Henry.

Baez’s acclaimed songs include “Diamonds & Rust” and covers of Phil Ochs‘s “There but for Fortune” and The Band‘s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down“. She is also known for “Farewell, Angelina“, “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word“, “Forever Young“, “Here’s to You“, “Joe Hill“, “Sweet Sir Galahad” and “We Shall Overcome“. Baez performed fourteen songs at the 1969 Woodstock Festival and has displayed a lifelong commitment to political and social activism in the fields of nonviolence, civil rights, human rights, and the environment. Baez was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 7, 2017.

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Bucky Pizzarelli

January 9, 2021

He was the father of jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli and double bassist Martin Pizzarelli. He worked for NBC as a staffman for Dick Cavett (1971) and ABC with Bobby Rosengarden in (1952). The list of musicians he collaborated with includes Benny Goodman, Les Paul, Stéphane Grappelli, and Antônio Carlos Jobim. Pizzarelli cited as influences Django Reinhardt, Freddie Green, and George Van Eps.

Pizzarelli was born on January 9, 1926, in Paterson, New Jersey. He learned to play guitar and banjo at a young age. His uncles, Pete and Bobby Domenick, were professional musicians, and sometimes the extended family would gather at one of their homes with their guitars for jam sessions. Pizzarelli cited blind accordion player Joe Mooney as an inpiriation. Mooney led a quartet that included Pizzarelli’s uncle, Bobby Domenick. During high school, Pizzarelli was the guitarist for a small band that performed classical music.

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Kenny Clarke

January 9, 2021

Kenneth Clarke Spearman (January 9, 1914 – January 26, 1985), nicknamed Klook, was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. A major innovator of the bebop style of drumming, he pioneered the use of the Ride cymbal to keep time rather than the hi-hat, along with the use of the bass drum for irregular accents (“dropping bombs“).

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he was orphaned at the age of about five and began playing the drums when he was eight or nine on the urging of a teacher at his orphanage. Turning professional in 1931 at the age of seventeen, he moved to New York City in 1935 when he began to establish his drumming style and reputation. As the house drummer at Minton’s Playhouse in the early 1940s, he participated in the after-hours jams that led to the birth of bebop. After military service in the US and Europe between 1943 and 1946, he returned to New York, but from 1948 to 1951 he was mostly based in Paris. He stayed in New York between 1951 and 1956, performing with the Modern Jazz Quartet and playing on early Miles Davis recordings. He then moved permanently to Paris, where he performed and recorded with European and visiting American musicians and co-led the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band between 1961 and 1972. He continued to perform and record until the month before he died of a heart attack in January 1985.

Clarke was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on January 9, 1914 as the youngest of two sons, to Martha Grace Scott, a pianist from Pittsburgh, and Charles Spearman, a trombonist from Waycross, Georgia. The family home was on Wylie Avenue in the Lower Hill District of Pittsburgh. Clarke’s father left the household to start a new family in Yakima, Washington, and his mother, who began a relationship with a Baptist preacher shortly afterwards, died suddenly in her late twenties when Clarke was about five, leaving him an orphan. He and his brother were placed in the Coleman Industrial Home for Negro Boys. . He played in the orphanage’s marching band on the snare drum, which he had taken up on the urging of a teacher at about age eight or nine, after trying a few brass instruments. When he was young he also played the piano, on which his mother had taught him to play simple tunes, along with the pump organ at the parish church, for which he played hymns and composed pieces that were introduced there.

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World Music with Vusi Mahlasela

January 9, 2021

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Daily Roots with Junior Marvin

January 9, 2021

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Surviving the Pandemic and Realizing Racial Justice

January 8, 2021

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The Cosmos with NGC 1365

January 8, 2021

Barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 is truly a majestic island universe some 200,000 light-years across. Located a mere 60 million light-years away toward the chemical constellation Fornax, NGC 1365 is a dominant member of the well-studied Fornax Cluster of galaxies. This impressively sharp color image shows the intense, reddish star forming regions near the ends of central bar and along the spiral arms, with details of the obscuring dust lanes cutting across the galaxy’s bright core. At the core lies a supermassive black hole. Astronomers think NGC 1365’s prominent bar plays a crucial role in the galaxy’s evolution, drawing gas and dust into a star-forming maelstrom and ultimately feeding material into the central black hole.

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Dave Weckl

January 8, 2021

Dave Weckl (born January 8, 1960) is an American jazz fusion drummer and leader of the Dave Weckl Band. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2000.

Weckl started playing his first set of drums at age 8 in his spare room along to records. He later played in the living room, sometimes with his father on piano. Weckl studied at the University of Bridgeport.[2] Starting out on the New York fusion scene in the early 1980s, Weckl soon began working with artists such as Paul Simon, George Benson, Michel Camilo, Robert Plant and Anthony Jackson.

He was with the Chick Corea Elektric Band from 1985 to 1991. During this time, he performed on many albums and also appeared with Corea’s Akoustic Band. He “augmented his work with Corea by continuing his session work and appearing often with the GRP All-Star Big Band“. Weckl has released a series of instructional videotapes. His first recording as leader was in 1990 – Master Plan, for GRP. This was followed by Heads Upin 1992, and Hard-Wired in 1994. Later on, Weckl recorded and toured with guitarist Mike Stern.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiNfjYUTPMs

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David Bowie

January 8, 2021

David Robert Jones (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016), known professionally as David Bowie (/ˈbi/, UK also /ˈbəʊi/ BOH-ee), was an English singer-songwriter and actor. He was a leading figure in the music industry and is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. He was acclaimed by critics and musicians, particularly for his innovative work during the 1970s. His career was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, with his music and stagecraft having a significant impact on popular music. During his lifetime, his record sales, estimated at over 100 million records worldwide, made him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. In the UK, he was awarded ten platinum album certifications, eleven gold and eight silver, and released eleven number-one albums. In the US, he received five platinum and nine gold certifications. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. Rolling Stone placed him among its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time and named him the “Greatest Rock Star Ever” following his death in 2016.

Born in Brixton, South London, Bowie developed an interest in music as a child. He studied art, music and design before embarking on a professional career as a musician in 1963. “Space Oddity“, released in 1969, was his first top-five entry on the UK Singles Chart. After a period of experimentation, he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with his flamboyant and androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust. The character was spearheaded by the success of Bowie’s single “Starman” and album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which won him widespread popularity. In 1975, Bowie’s style shifted towards a sound he characterised as “plastic soul“, initially alienating many of his UK fans but garnering him his first major US crossover success with the number-one single “Fame” and the album Young Americans. In 1976, Bowie starred in the cult film The Man Who Fell to Earth, directed by Nicolas Roeg, and released Station to Station. In 1977, he further confounded expectations with the electronic-inflected album Low, the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno that came to be known as the “Berlin Trilogy“. “Heroes” (1977) and Lodger (1979) followed; each album reached the UK top five and received lasting critical praise.

After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single “Ashes to Ashes“, its album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), and “Under Pressure“, a 1981 collaboration with Queen. He reached his commercial peak in 1983 with Let’s Dance; its title tracktopped both UK and US charts. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including industrial and jungle. He also continued acting; his roles included Major Jack Celliers in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth (1986), Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (2006), among other film and television appearances and cameos. He stopped touring after 2004 and his last live performance was at a charity event in 2006. In 2013, Bowie returned from a decade-long recording hiatus with The Next Day. He remained musically active until his death of liver cancer at his home in New York City, two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his final album, Blackstar (2016). Blackstar won British Album of the Year at the 2017 Brit Awards and five Grammy Awardsat the 2017 Grammy Awards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI66hcu9fIs

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Bill Graham

January 8, 2021

Bill Graham (born Wulf Wolodia Grajonca; January 8, 1931 – October 25, 1991) was a German-American impresario and rock concert promoterfrom the 1960s until his death in 1991 in a helicopter crash. On July 4, 1939, he was sent from Germany to France to escape the Nazis. At age 10, he settled into a foster home in the Bronx, New York. Graham graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and subsequently from City College with a business degree.

In the early 1960s, Graham moved to San Francisco, and, in 1965, began to manage the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He had teamed up with local Haight Ashbury promoter Chet Helms and Family Dog, and their network of contacts, to organize a benefit concert, then promoted several free concerts. This eventually turned into a profitable full-time career and he assembled a talented staff. Graham had a profound influence around the world, sponsoring the musical renaissance of the ’60s from the epicenter, San Francisco. Chet Helms and then Bill Graham made famous the Fillmoreand Winterland Ballroom; these turned out to be a proving grounds for rock bands and acts of the San Francisco Bay area including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, who were first managed, and in some cases developed, by Chet Helms.

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Kelucharan Mohapatra

January 8, 2021

Kelucharan Mohapatra (8 January 1926 – 7 April 2004) was a legendary Indian classical dancer, guru, and exponent of Odissi dance, who is credited with the revival and popularizing of this classical dance form in the 20th century. He is the first person to receive the Padma Vibhushan from Odisha.

A noted Sanskrit poet of India writes on this Guru: Saango-paanga-subhangi-laasya-madhuram samteerna-nrutyaarnavam, which translates as – “Each fraction of his dancing body leads to paramount sweetness, through miraculous poses and postures. In fact, Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra crossed the ocean of styles.

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Elvis Presley

January 8, 2021

Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977 Tupelo, MS), also known simply as Elvis, was an American singer, musician and actor. He is regarded as one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century and is often referred to as the “King of Rock and Roll” or simply “the King”. His energized interpretations of songs and sexually provocative performance style, combined with a singularly potent mix of influences across color lines during a transformative era in race relations, led him to great success—and initial controversy.

Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, with his family when he was 13 years old. His music career began there in 1954, recording at Sun Records with producer Sam Phillips, who wanted to bring the sound of African-American music to a wider audience. Presley, on rhythm acoustic guitar, and accompanied by lead guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, was a pioneer of rockabilly, an uptempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country music and rhythm and blues. In 1955, drummer D. J. Fontana joined to complete the lineup of Presley’s classic quartet and RCA Victor acquired his contract in a deal arranged by Colonel Tom Parker, who would manage him for more than two decades. Presley’s first RCA single, “Heartbreak Hotel“, was released in January 1956 and became a number-one hit in the United States. With a series of successful network television appearances and chart-topping records, he became the leading figure of the newly popular sound of rock and roll.

In November 1956, Presley made his film debut in Love Me Tender. Drafted into military service in 1958, Presley relaunched his recording career two years later with some of his most commercially successful work. He held few concerts, however, and guided by Parker, proceeded to devote much of the 1960s to making Hollywood films and soundtrack albums, most of them critically derided. In 1968, following a seven-year break from live performances, he returned to the stage in the acclaimed television comeback special Elvis, which led to an extended Las Vegas concert residency and a string of highly profitable tours. In 1973, Presley gave the first concert by a solo artist to be broadcast around the world, Aloha from Hawaii. Years of prescription drug abuse severely compromised his health, and he died suddenly in 1977 at his Graceland estate at the age of 42.

With his rise from poverty to significant fame, Presley’s success seemed to epitomize the American Dream. He is the best-selling solo music artist of all time, and was commercially successful in many genres, including pop, country, R&B, adult contemporary, and gospel. He won three Grammy Awards, received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at age 36, and has been inducted into multiple music halls of fame. Presley holds several records; the most RIAA certified gold and platinum albums, the most albums charted on the Billboard 200, and the most number-one albums by a solo artist on the UK Albums Chart and the most number-one singles by any act on the UK Singles Chart. In 2018, Presley was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Tampa Red

January 8, 2021

Hudson Whittaker (born Hudson Woodbridge, January 8, 1903 – March 19, 1981), known as Tampa Red, was an American Chicago bluesmusician. He is best known as a blues guitarist who had a distinctive single-string slide style. His songwriting and his bottleneck technique influenced other leading Chicago blues guitarists, such as Big Bill Broonzy, Robert Nighthawk and Muddy Waters, and many others, including Elmore James and Mose Allison. In a career spanning over 30 years, he also recorded pop, R&B and hokum songs. His best-known recordings include “Anna Lou Blues”, “Black Angel Blues“, “Crying Won’t Help You”, “It Hurts Me Too“, and “Love Her with a Feeling“.

Tampa Red was born Hudson Woodbridge in Smithville, Georgia. His parents died when he was a child, and he moved to Tampa, Florida, where he was raised by his aunt and grandmother and adopted their surname, Whittaker. He emulated his older brother, Eddie, who played the guitar, and he was especially inspired by an old street musician called Piccolo Pete, who first taught him to play blues licks on the guitar.

In the 1920s, having already perfected his slide technique, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, and began his career as a musician, adopting the name “Tampa Red”, with reference to his childhood home and his light-colored skin. His big break came when he was hired to accompany Ma Rainey. He began recording in 1928, with “It’s Tight Like That”, in a bawdy and humorous style that became known as hokum. His early recordings were mostly collaborations with Thomas A. Dorsey, known as Georgia Tom. The two recorded almost 90 sides, sometimes as the Hokum Boys or, with Frankie Jaxon, as Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band.

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