Valaida Snow (June 2, 1904 – May 30, 1956) was an African-American jazz musician and entertainer.

She was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Raised on the road in a show-business family, she learned to play cello, bass, banjo, violin, mandolin, harp, accordion, clarinet, trumpet, and saxophone by the time she was 15. She also sang and danced.

After focusing on the trumpet, she quickly became so famous at the instrument that she was named “Little Louis” after Louis Armstrong, who called her the world’s second best jazz trumpet player besides himself. Contemporary critics Krin Gabbard and Will Friedwald have commented on her approach to playing like Armstrong. Gabbard said she developed a “distinctly Armstrongian style” and Friedwald said she “mimicked” Armstrong. In a 1928 performance in Chicago at the Sunset Café, Snow played the trumpet, sang. Then seven pairs of shoes were placed in a row at the front of the stage, and she danced in each pair for one chorus. The dances and shoes to match were: soft-shoe, adagio shoes, tap shoes, Dutch clogs, Chinese straw sandals, Turkish slippers, and the last pair, Russian boots. “When Louis Armstrong saw the show one night, he continued clapping after others had stopped and remarked, ‘Boy I never saw anything that great’.

Malian vocalist

Southern part of the spectacular N44 H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The green colour indicates areas that are particularly hot. The field measures 27.5 x 26.5 square arcminutes. North is up and East is left.

N44 is an emission nebula with superbubble structure located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way in the constellation Dorado. Originally catalogued in Karl Henize‘s “Catalogue of H-alpha emission stars and nebulae in the Magellanic Clouds” of 1956, it is approximately 1,000 light-years wide and 160,000-170,000 light-years distant.N44 has a smaller bubble structure inside known as N44F. The superbubble structure of N44 itself is shaped by the radiation pressure of a 40-star group located near its center; the stars are blue-white, very luminous, and incredibly powerful. N44F has been shaped in a similar manner; it has a hot, massive central star with an unusually powerful stellar wind that moves at 7 million kilometers per hour. This is because it loses material at 100 million times the rate of the Sun, or approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000 tons per year. However, varying density in the N44 nebula has caused the formation of several dust pillars that may conceal star formation. This variable density is likely caused by previous supernovae in the vicinity of N44; many of the stars that have shaped it will eventually also end as supernovae. The past effects of supernovae are also confirmed by the fact that N44 emits x-rays.

Ronald David Wood (born 1 June 1947) is an English rock musician, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, artist, author and radio personality best known as a member of The Rolling Stones since 1975, as well as a member of Faces and the Jeff Beck Group.

Wood began his career in 1964, when he joined The Birds on guitar. He then joined the mod group The Creation, but remained with the group only for a short time and appeared on a small number of singles. Wood joined the Jeff Beck Group in 1967 as a bass player. The band released two albums, Truth and Beck-Ola, which became moderate successes.

The group split in 1969, and Wood departed along with lead vocalist Rod Stewart to join former Small Faces members Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan and Kenney Jones in a new group named Faces. The group found great success in the UK and mainland Europe, though were relegated to cult status in the United States. Faces released its debut album, First Step, in 1970. The group went on to release Long Player and A Nod Is As Good As a Wink… to a Blind Horse in 1971. Their last LP, titled Ooh La La, was released in 1973.

As the group began to split, Wood started several solo projects, eventually recording his first solo LP, I’ve Got My Own Album to Do, in 1974. The album featured bandmate McLagan as well as former Beatle George Harrison and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, a longtime friend of Wood’s. Richards soon invited Wood to join the Rolling Stones, after the departure of Mick Taylor. Wood joined in 1975 and has remained a member ever since.

Herbie Lovelle (1 June 1924 – April 8, 2009) was an American drummer, who played jazz, R&B, rock, and folk. He was also a studio musician and an actor.

Lovelle’s uncle was the drummer Arthur Herbert. Lovelle began his career with the trumpeter, singer and band leader Hot Lips Page in the late 1940s, then played in the 1950s with the saxophonist Hal Singer, Johnny Moore‘s Three Blazers and the pianist Earl Hines. Through working for both Lucky Thompson and Jimmy Rushing of Count Basie’s Orchestra, he became house drummer at the Savoy Ballroom in New York City for much of the 1950s. He toured with the tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb and the pianist Teddy Wilson in 1954. In 1959 he contributed to the pianist Paul Curry’s album Paul Curry Presents the Friends of Fats, released on the Golden Crest label.

In the early years of television, he performed with the King Guion Orchestra on the Jerry Lester Show and the Ed Sullivan Show. In 1966, he was the lead drummer for the Sammy Davis, Jr. TV show.

Lovelle began playing more R&B in the 1950s and worked as a studio musician, often with Sam Taylor. He played on albums by Bob Dylan (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan), Pearls Before Swine, Eric Andersen, David Blue, John Denver, Tom Rush, B. B. King, John Martyn (Stormbringer!), the Strangeloves, the McCoys, and the Monkees. He continued working as a studio musician well into the 1980s.

Lafayette Leake (June 1, 1919 – August 14, 1990) was a blues and jazz pianist, organist, vocalist and composer who played for Chess Records as a session musician, and as a member of the Big Three Trio, during the formative years of Chicago blues. He played piano on many of Chuck Berry‘s recordings.

Leake was born in Winona, Missouri, in 1919. Information about his early years is sparse, but in the early 1950s he joined the Big Three Trio (replacing Leonard Caston) and began his association with Chess Records, where he worked closely with bassist, producer, and songwriter Willie Dixon.

World Music on Flamenco Fridays

Beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is nearly 175,000 light-years across, larger than our own Milky Way. It lies some 30 million light-years distant in the southern constellation Pavo, its galactic disk tilted towards our line of sight. This Hubble close-up of the nearby island universe spans about 24,000 light-years across NGC 6744’s central region in a detailed portrait that combines visible light and ultraviolet image data. The giant galaxy’s yellowish core is dominated by the visible light from old, cool stars. Beyond the core are pinkish star forming regions and young star clusters scattered along the inner spiral arms. The young star clusters are bright at ultraviolet wavelengths, shown in blue and magenta hues.

Louis Hayes (born May 31, 1937) is an American jazz drummer.

His father played drums and piano and his mother played the piano. He refers to the early influence of hearing jazz, especially hearing big bands on the radio. His main influence was Philly Joe Jones and he was mentored by Jo Jones. His three main associations were with Horace Silver‘s Quintet (1956–1959), the Cannonball Adderley Quintet (1959–1965), and the Oscar Peterson Trio (1965–1967). Hayes often joined Sam Jones, both with Adderley and Peterson, and in freelance settings.

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

Albert “Tootie” Heath (born May 31, 1935) is an American jazz hard bop drummer, the brother of tenor saxophonist Jimmy Heath and the double-bassist Percy Heath.

He first recorded in 1957 with John Coltrane. From 1958 to 1974 he worked with, among others, J. J. Johnson, Wes Montgomery, Art Farmer and Benny Golson‘s Jazztet, Cedar Walton, Bobby Timmons, Kenny Drew, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Herbie Hancock, Friedrich Gulda, Nina Simone, and Yusef Lateef. In 1975, he, Jimmy and Percy formed the Heath Brothers. He remained with the group until 1978, then left to freelance. He has recorded extensively throughout his career.

Among his many workshop and classroom teaching assignments, Tootie Heath is a regular instructor at the Stanford Jazz Workshop.

Tootie Heath is now the producer and leader of The Whole Drum Truth, a jazz drum ensemble featuring Ben Riley, Ed Thigpen, Jackie Williams, Billy Hart, Charlie Persip, Leroy Williams and Louis Hayes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw4I30YsWUs

James Wesley “Red” Holloway (May 31, 1927 – February 25, 2012) was an American jazz saxophonist.

Born in Helena, Arkansas, Holloway started playing banjo and harmonica, switching to tenor saxophone when he was 12 years old. He graduated from DuSable High School,^[3] where he had played in the school big band with Johnny Griffin and Eugene Wright, and attended the Conservatory of Music, Chicago. He joined the Army when he was 19 and became bandmaster for the U.S. Fifth Army Band, and after completing his military service returned to Chicago and played with Yusef Lateef and Dexter Gordon, among others. In 1948 he joined blues vocalist Roosevelt Sykes, and later played with other rhythm & blues musicians such as Willie Dixon, Junior Parker, and Lloyd Price.

In the 1950s he played in the Chicago area with Billie Holiday, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Ben Webster, Jimmy Rushing, Arthur Prysock, Dakota Staton, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Wardell Gray, Sonny Rollins, Red Rodney, Lester Young, Joe Williams, Redd Foxx, B.B. King, Bobby Bland, and Aretha Franklin. During this period, he also toured with Sonny Stitt, Memphis Slim and Lionel Hampton. He became a member of the house band for Chance Records in 1952. He subsequently appeared on many recording sessions for the Chicago-based independents Parrot, United and States, and Vee-Jay.

from Haiti

In this image, two spiral galaxies, similar in looks to the Milky Way, are participating in a cosmic ballet, which, in a few billion years, will end up in a complete galactic merger — the two galaxies will become a single, bigger one.

Located about 150 million light-years away in the constellation of Canis Major (the Great Dog), NGC 2207 — the larger of the two — and its companion, IC 2163, form a magnificent pair. English astronomer John Herschel discovered them in 1835.

The fatal gravitational attraction of NGC 2207 is already wreaking havoc throughout its smaller partner, distorting IC 2163’s shape and flinging out stars and gas into long streamers that extend over 100,000 light-years. The space between the individual stars in a galaxy is so vast, however, that when these galaxies collide, virtually none of the stars in them will actually physically smash into each other.

This image was captured with the ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera (EFOSC2) through three wide band filters (B, V, R). EFOSC2 has a 4.1 x 4.1 arcminute field of view and is attached to the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

born May 30th 1962

Darrell Grant, performer, composer and Portland State University professor, has built an international reputation as a stellar pianist and versatile musician. A gifted artist whose four previous recordings have topped jazz charts, Darrell explores the lyricism and soul of songs with beauty, joy and passion. He has appeared on major concert stages from the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall to the Monterey, Telluride and San Francisco Jazz Festivals. He has been a guest on Marian McPartland’s “Piano Jazz” on NPR and toured internationally with many jazz legends.

Born in 1962 in Philadelphia, Grant moved to Denver, CO, as a young child. Starting piano lessons before his teens, Grant was enough of a prodigy that he joined the Boulder, CO-based Pearl Street Jazz Band, a young but internationally renowned traditional New Orleans-style combo, at the age of 15, touring worldwide with the group for two years. Grant won a scholarship to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, at the age of 17; while at Eastman, Grant focused on performance studies over theory, which he covered in his graduate studies in jazz theory and composition at the University of Miami.

Dave McKenna (May 30, 1930 – 18 October 18, 2008) was an American jazz pianist known primarily as a solo pianist and for his “three-handed” swing style. He was a significant figure in the evolution of jazz piano.

At age 15, McKenna worked in big bands with Charlie Ventura (1949) and Woody Herman’s Orchestra (1950–’51). He then spent two years in the military before returning to Ventura (1953–’54). During his career he worked in swing and dixieland settings with Al Cohn, Eddie Condon Stan Getz, Gene Krupa, Zoot Sims, Joe Venuti^[1], and often with Bob Wilber and Bobby Hackett. McKenna released his first solo album in 1955. During the 1980s, he worked as a pianist at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston.

Benjamin David “Benny” Goodman (May 30, 1909 – June 13, 1986) was an American jazz clarinetist and bandleader known as the “King of Swing”.

In the mid-1930s, Goodman led one of the most popular musical groups in the United States. His concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City on January 16, 1938 is described by critic Bruce Eder as “the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history: jazz’s ‘coming out’ party to the world of ‘respectable’ music.”

Goodman’s bands launched the careers of many major jazz artists. During an era of racial segregation, he led one of the first well-known integrated jazz groups. Goodman performed nearly to the end of his life while exploring an interest in classical music.

Goodman was born in Chicago, the ninth of twelve children of poor Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire. His father, David Goodman (1873–1926), came to America in 1892 from Warsaw in partitioned Poland, and became a tailor. His mother, Dora (née Grisinsky, 1873–1964), came from Kovno, partitioned Poland. His parents met in Baltimore, Maryland, and moved to Chicago before Benny was born. With little income and a large family, they moved to the low-rent Maxwell Street neighborhood, an overcrowded slum near the railroad yards and surrounding factories, populated mostly by Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants.

Gjallarhorn rejuvenated traditional music rooted in the Swedish folk music of Finland. Their music was a modern echo of the ancient Nordic folk tradition with mythical medieval ballads, whirling minuets, prayers in runo-metric chanting and ancient Icelandic rÍmur (sung poetry) epics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cnON5E8NuU