Thelonious Sphere Monk (/θəˈloʊniəs/, October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982 Rockymount, 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. His style was not universally appreciated; the poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin dismissed him as “the elephant on the keyboard”.

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).

Monk was friends with poet Allen Ginsberg who introduced him to Timothy Leary. Monk was one of several artists Leary wanted to recruit for his studies on the effects of psilocybin in creative individuals.

Harry “Sweets” Edison (October 10, 1915 – July 27, 1999) was an American jazz trumpeter and a member of the Count Basie Orchestra. His greatest impact was as a Hollywood studio musician, whose muted trumpet can be heard backing singers, most notably Frank Sinatra.

Edison was born in Columbus, Ohio, United States. He spent his early childhood in Louisville, Kentucky, being introduced to music by an uncle. After moving back to Columbus at the age of twelve, the young Edison began playing the trumpet with local bands.

In 1933, he became a member of the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra in Cleveland. Afterwards, he played with the Mills Blue Rhythm Band and Lucky Millinder. In 1937, he moved to New York and joined the Count Basie Orchestra. His colleagues included Buck Clayton, Lester Young (who named him “Sweets”), Buddy Tate, Freddie Green, Jo Jones, and other original members of that famous band. In a 2003 interview for the National Museum of American History, drummer Elvin Jones explained the origin of Edison’s nickname: “Sweets had so many lady friends, he was such a handsome man. He had all these girls all over him all the time, that’s why they called him Sweets.

At around 60 million light-years from Earth, the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1365 is captured beautifully in this image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Located in the constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), the blue and fiery orange swirls show us where stars have just formed and the dusty sites of future stellar nurseries.

At the outer edge of the image, enormous star-forming regions within NGC 1365 can be seen. The bright, light-blue regions indicate the presence of hundreds of baby stars that formed from coalescing gas and dust within the galaxy’s outer arms.

This Hubble image was captured as part of a joint survey with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. The survey will help scientists understand how the diversity of galaxy environments observed in the nearby Universe, including NGC 1365 and previous ESA/Hubble Pictures of the Week such as NGC 2835 and NGC 2775, influence the formation of stars and star clusters. Expected to image over 100 000 gas clouds and star-forming regions beyond our Milky Way, the PHANGS survey is expected to uncover and clarify many of the links between cold gas clouds, star formation and the overall shape and morphology of galaxies.

Jesús Valdés Rodríguez, better known as Chucho Valdés (born October 9, 1941), is a Cuban pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger whose career spans over 50 years. An original member of the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna, in 1973 he founded the group Irakere, one of Cuba’s best-known Latin jazz bands. Both his father, Bebo Valdés, and his son, Chuchito, are pianists as well. As a solo artist, he has won four Grammy Awards and three Latin Grammy Awards.

Chucho Valdés’s first recorded sessions as a leader took place in late January 1964 in the Areíto Studios of Havana (former Panart studios) owned by the newly formed EGREM. These early sessions included Paquito D’Rivera on alto saxophone and clarinet, Alberto Giral on trombone, Julio Vento on flute, Carlos Emilio Morales on guitar, Kike Hernández on double bass, Emilio del Monte on drums and Óscar Valdés Jr. on congas. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, these would be the members of his jazz combo, whose lineup would often change, sometimes including bassists Cachaíto and later Carlos del Puerto, and drummers Guillermo Barreto and later Enrique Plá.

John Winston Ono Lennon MBE (born John Winston Lennon, 9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English singer, songwriter and peace activist who gained worldwide fame as the founder, co-lead vocalist, and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in musical history. In 1969, he started the Plastic Ono Band with his second wife, Yoko Ono. After the Beatles disbanded in 1970, Lennon continued as a solo artist and as Ono’s collaborator.

Born in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager. In 1956, he formed his first band, the Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles in 1960. He was initially the group’s de facto leader, a role gradually ceded to McCartney. Lennon was characterised for the rebellious nature and acerbic wit in his music, writing, drawings, on film and in interviews. In the mid-1960s, he had two books published: In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, both collections of nonsensical writings and line drawings. Starting with 1967’s “All You Need Is Love“, his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement and the larger counterculture.

From 1968 to 1972, Lennon produced more than a dozen records with Ono, including a trilogy of avant-garde albums, his first solo LP John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, and the international top 10 singles “Give Peace a Chance“, “Instant Karma!“, “Imagine” and “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)“. In 1969, he held the two week-long anti-war demonstration Bed-Ins for Peace. After moving to New York City in 1971, his criticism of the Vietnam Warresulted in a three-year attempt by the Nixon administration to deport him. In 1975, Lennon disengaged from the music business to raise his infant son Sean and, in 1980, returned with the Ono collaboration Double Fantasy. He was shot and killed in the archway of his Manhattan apartment building by a Beatles fan, Mark David Chapman, three weeks after the album’s release.

As a performer, writer or co-writer, Lennon had 25 number one singles in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Double Fantasy, his best-selling solo album, won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year the year following his death. In 1982, the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music was posthumously honoured to him.^[4] In 2002, Lennon was voted eighth in a BBC poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer of all time and included him as a solo artist in their list of the 100 greatest artists of all time. In 1987, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Lennon was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, as a member of the Beatles in 1988 and as a solo artist in 1994.

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.

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 also used a number of 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 wrote and published a number of books including 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.

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.

Mohammad Reza Shajarian, one of the most important performers of Persian classical music, passed away today, October 8, 2020 in Tehran, Iran. Shajarian’s son, acclaimed vocalist and tombak player, Homayoun Shajarian, disclosed the news in an announcement on Instagram, stating he “flew to meet his beloved“.

Mohammad Reza Shajarian was a living legend In Persian classical music, with one of the most distinguishable voices in Iran. His vocal style was enjoyable, soulful, and energetic. Shajarian was regarded as a national treasure and was a key source of inspiration for musicians and music lovers. His singing was technically faultless, powerful, and emotional. In the music of Iran, traditional singing is the most demanding art to master, but Shajarian achieved this at a very early age.

Born in 1940 in the city of Mash’had in northeastern Iran, Mohammad Reza Shajarian started singing spiritual songs at the age five under the supervision of his father. Only a few years later his gifted talent was to be renowned throughout the town of Mash’had. His effort at first was on the local folk music of his native province, Khorasan (East Iran). At the age of 12, Mohammad Reza Shajaria was familiarizing himself with the traditional song repertoire, studying the Radif, but he also became interested in traditional music from Khorasan and the other regions of Iran.

Shajarian became a schoolteacher and had liberty to study all forms of traditional music and gradually relinquished religious singing. On his arrival in Teheran, Shajarian met Ahmad Ebadi, the great setar maestro. He studied under some of the most distinguished artists such as Reza Gholi Mirza Zelli, Ghamar-ol Molouk Vaziri, Eghbal-Soltan Azar, Taaj Esfahani Noor-Ali Khan Boroomand and Taher Zadeh Esfahani.

Fandango de Huelva is a fundamental palo (style) of flamenco. Within the branch of flamenco known as fandango there are styles known as ‘fandangos locales’ or ‘fandangos comarcales’ and also ‘fandangos personales’ which are sometimes known as ‘fandangos artisticos’ or ‘fandangos naturales’. Fandango de Huelva is a regional style of fandango (fandangos locales) and within this regional style there are even more variations that are connected to local areas within Huelva as well as personal styles of different singers. Fandango de Huelva is unique in that is has a strict compás and structure that may be danced whereas most other styles of fandango are free of compás (cante libre). The compás of Fandango de Huelva is 12 but it is generally counted as a 6 beat cycle.

ESO’s Very Large Telescope has been used to obtain this view of the nebula LHA 120-N 44 surrounding the star cluster NGC 1929. Lying within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way, this region of star formation features a colossal superbubble of material expanding outwards due to the influence of the cluster of young stars at its heart that sculpts the interstellar landscape and drives forward the nebula’s evolution. distance 170,ooo ly

Highly influential reggae producer Bunny ‘Striker’ Lee, a cornerstone of Jamaican music, passed away on October 6, 2020.

Edward O’Sullivan Lee was born in the Greenwich Farm section of Kingston, Jamaica in 1941. He joined the music industry in 1962 through his brother-in-law, singer Derrick Morgan, obtaining a job as a record plugger (promote) for Duke Reid’s famed Treasure Isle label.

By the mid-1960s, Lee was working with Ken Lack’s Caltone imprint, producing his first record, Lloyd Jackson & the Groovers’ “Listen to the Beat,” in 1967.

His first significant hit, Roy Shirley’s “Music Field,” followed later that year on the WIRL label, and upon founding his own label, he produced a series of well-received sides including Morgan’s “Hold You Jack,” Slim Smith’s “My Conversation,” and Pat Kelly’s “Little Boy Blue.”

Bunny ‘Striker’ Lee pioneered the art of dub, developing new studio along with his engineer, the famous King Tubby.

In his later years, Lee was one of the key contributors to the celebrated re-issue label Blood & Fire, contributing songs from his own catalogue of recordings to the well-regarded imprint. He continued to produce music throughout his life, independently releasing his work with partners Jet Star, Greensleeves, Super Power and VP Records among others.

Highly influential reggae producer Bunny ‘Striker’ Lee, a cornerstone of Jamaican music, passed away on October 6, 2020.

Edward O’Sullivan Lee was born in the Greenwich Farm section of Kingston, Jamaica in 1941. He joined the music industry in 1962 through his brother-in-law, singer Derrick Morgan, obtaining a job as a record plugger (promote) for Duke Reid’s famed Treasure Isle label.

By the mid-1960s, Lee was working with Ken Lack’s Caltone imprint, producing his first record, Lloyd Jackson & the Groovers’ “Listen to the Beat,” in 1967.

His first significant hit, Roy Shirley’s “Music Field,” followed later that year on the WIRL label, and upon founding his own label, he produced a series of well-received sides including Morgan’s “Hold You Jack,” Slim Smith’s “My Conversation,” and Pat Kelly’s “Little Boy Blue.”

Bunny ‘Striker’ Lee pioneered the art of dub, developing new studio along with his engineer, the famous King Tubby.

In his later years, Lee was one of the key contributors to the celebrated re-issue label Blood & Fire, contributing songs from his own catalogue of recordings to the well-regarded imprint. He continued to produce music throughout his life, independently releasing his work with partners Jet Star, Greensleeves, Super Power and VP Records among others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsU-jJAwGiI

John William Cummings (October 8, 1948 – September 15, 2004 Forest Hills, NY), known professionally as Johnny Ramone, was an American guitarist, songwriter, actor and author, best known for being the guitarist for the punk rock band the Ramones. He was a founding member of the band, and–along with vocalist Joey Ramone–remained a constant member throughout his entire career.

In 2009, he appeared on Time‘s list of “The 10 Greatest Electric-Guitar Players”. He ranked No. 8 on Spin‘s 2012 list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” and No. 28 on Rolling Stone‘s similarly-titled 2015 list.

Alongside his music career, Johnny appeared in nearly a dozen films (including Rock ‘n’ Roll High School) and documentaries. He also made television appearances in such shows as The Simpsons (1F01 “Rosebud“, 1993) and Space Ghost Coast to Coast (Episode 5 “Bobcat”).

His autobiography, entitled Commando, was released posthumously in 2012. The book was reviewed by numerous well-known publications including Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, the Houston Chronicle, the National Post, PopMatters, and MTV, which called the book a must-have for any Ramones fan. In the book Johnny talks passionately about his love of baseball and of collecting baseball cards and movie posters, particularly horror-related posters. He was a devoted and lifelong fan of the New York Yankees.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WgdD3F73CY

Richard Daniel (Dick) Burnett (October 8, 1883 – January 23, 1977) was an American folk musician and songwriter from Kentucky.

Burnett was born near Monticello, Kentucky. Blind for most of his life, he was a full-time travelling entertainer. With fiddler Leonard Rutherford he formed a long touring partnership, and a brief recording career in which they cut a number of popular and influential sides with Burnett on banjo or guitar. Both men also sang.

Burnett has been described as “one of the great natural songsters, a man who collected, codified, and transmitted some of our best traditional songs. Dick was also a skilful composer and folk poet of considerable skill; his “Man of Constant Sorrow” remains one of the most evocative country songs.”

Burnett was born in the area around the head of Elk Springs, about seven miles north of Monticello. He remembered little of his farming parents. His father died when he was only four and his mother died when he was twelve. Burnett did say that his mother told him how his father would carry him in his arms when he was only four years old and he would help his dad sing. It is notable that Burnett’s grandparents were of German and English descent and that particular ancestral influence would be instrumental in forming Burnett’s musical career. At the age of seven, Burnett was playing the dulcimer; at nine he was playing the banjo, and at thirteen he had learned to play the fiddle. Unusually for the time, he also learned the guitar, which was still a novelty in that area.

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.