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Leopoldo F. Fleming

September 16, 2023

Leopoldo F. Fleming (born September 16, 1939 in Puerta de Tierra, Puerto Rico) is an American jazz musician (percussion, composition, arrangement).

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Fleming, who came from a family of musicians, grew up first in Puerto Rico, from 1947 on Saint Thomas and from 1951 in New York City. He played congas as a child; his father taught him Latin rhythms. At the age of 15 he accompanied dancers as a percussionist. Shortly afterwards he played in a Latin big band led by Red Dixon and Jesse DeVore.

In 1965, Hugh Masekela brought him into Miriam Makeba’s accompanying trio, in which he worked until the mid-1970s. He toured internationally with Makeba and was also involved in their albums such as Click Song and Pata Pata. Since 1971 he was also a member of Nina Simone’s band, with whom he worked until the 1980s. He also worked as a theater musician. He was musical director of LeRoi Jones’ Slaveship in Brooklyn; In this production by Gilbert Moses he appeared with Archie Shepp. He also composed for the American children’s television series Vegetable Soup.

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Earl Klugh

September 16, 2023

Earl Klugh born September 16, 1953) is an American acoustic guitarist and composer. He has won one Grammy award and thirteen nominations. Klugh was awarded the “1977 Best Recording Award For Performance and Sound” for his album “Finger Painting” by “Swing Journal” a Japanese jazz magazine.

At the age of six, Klugh commenced training on the piano until he switched to the guitar at the age of ten. At the age of thirteen, Klugh was captivated by the guitar playing of Chet Atkins when Atkins made an appearance on the Perry Como Show. Klugh was a performing guest on several of Atkins’ albums. Atkins, reciprocating as well, joined Earl on his Magic In Your Eyes album. Klugh also appeared with Atkins on several television programs, including Hee Haw and a 1994 TV special titled “Read my Licks”. Klugh was also influenced by Bob James, Ray Parker Jr, Wes Montgomery and Laurindo Almeida. His sound is a blend of these jazz, pop and rhythm and blues influences, forming a potpourri of sweet contemporary music original to only him.

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Charlie Byrd

September 16, 2023

Charlie Lee Byrd (September 16, 1925 – December 2, 1999) was an American jazz guitarist. Byrd was best known for his association with Brazilian music, especially bossa nova. In 1962, he collaborated with Stan Getz on the album Jazz Samba, a recording which brought bossa nova into the mainstream of North American music.

Byrd played fingerstyle on a classical guitar.

Charlie Byrd was born in 1925 in Suffolk, Virginia, and grew up in the borough of Chuckatuck. His father, a mandolinist and guitarist, taught him how to play the acoustic steel guitar at age 10. Byrd had three brothers, Oscar, Jack, and Gene “Joe” Byrd, who was a bass player. In 1942, Byrd entered the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and played in the school orchestra. In 1943, he was drafted into the United States Army, saw combat in World War II, and was stationed in Paris in 1945. There he played in an Army Special Services band and toured occupied Europe in the all-soldier production G.I. Carmen.

After the war, Byrd returned to the United States and studied composition and jazz theory at the Harnett National Music School in Manhattan, New York City. During this time, he began playing a classical guitar. After moving to Washington, D.C., in 1950, he studied classical guitar with Sophocles Papas for several years. In 1954, he became a pupil of the Spanish classical guitarist Andrés Segovia and spent time studying with him in Italy.

Byrd’s earliest and greatest influence was the gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, whom he saw perform in Paris.

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B. B. King

September 16, 2023

Riley B. King (September 16, 1925 – May 14, 2015), known professionally as B. B. King, was an American blues guitarist, singer, songwriter, and record producer. He introduced a sophisticated style of soloing based on fluid string bending, shimmering vibrato, and staccato picking that influenced many later blues electric guitar players. AllMusic recognized King as “the single most important electric guitarist of the last half of the 20th century”.

King was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and is one of the most influential blues musicians of all time, earning the nickname “The King of the Blues”, and is considered one of the “Three Kings of the Blues Guitar” (along with Albert King and Freddie King, none of whom are related). King performed tirelessly throughout his musical career, appearing on average at more than 200 concerts per year into his 70s. In 1956 alone, he appeared at 342 shows.

King was born on a cotton plantation of Berclair, near the city of Itta Bena, Mississippi, and later worked at a cotton gin in Indianola, Mississippi. He was attracted to music and taught himself to play guitar and began his career in juke joints and local radio. He later lived in Memphis and Chicago; then, as his fame grew, he toured the world extensively. King died at 89 in Las Vegas in 2015.

Riley B. King was born on September 16, 1925, on a cotton plantation of Berclair named Bear Creek in Leflore County, near the city of Itta Bena, Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers Albert and Nora Ella King. When King was four years old, his mother left his father for another man, so he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Elnora Farr, in Kilmichael, Mississippi, then in Lexington. As a teen, he moved to Indianola, which he referred to as his hometown and he later worked at a cotton gin. King served in the U.S. Army during World War II but was released after being ruled as “essential to the war economy” based on his experience as a tractor driver.

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World Music Tinariwen

September 16, 2023

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Daily Roots Scientist

September 16, 2023

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Cosmos LMC

September 15, 2023

The 16th century Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth. As a result, two fuzzy cloud-like objects easily visible to southern hemisphere skygazers are known as the Clouds of Magellan, now understood to be satellite galaxies of our much larger, spiral Milky Way galaxy. About 160,000 light-years distant in the constellation Dorado, the Large Magellanic Cloud is seen in this sharp galaxy portrait. Spanning about 15,000 light-years or so, it is the most massive of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies and is the home of the closest supernova in modern times, SN 1987A. The prominent patch above center is 30 Doradus, also known as the magnificent Tarantula Nebula, a giant star-forming region about 1,000 light-years across.

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Bobby Short

September 15, 2023

Robert Waltrip Short (September 15, 1924 – March 21, 2005)  was an American cabaret singer and pianist, who interpreted songs by popular composers from the first half of the 20th century such as Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Richard A. Whiting, Vernon Duke, Noël Coward and George and Ira Gershwin.

Short also championed African-American composers of the same period such as Eubie Blake, James P. Johnson, Andy Razaf, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, presenting their work not in a polemical way, but as simply the obvious equal of that of their white contemporaries.

Short’s dedication to his great love – what he called the “Great American Song” – left him equally adept at performing the witty lyrics of Bessie Smith‘s “Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer)” or Gershwin and Duke’s “I Can’t Get Started“. Short stated his favorite songwriters were Ellington, Arlen and Kern, and he was instrumental in spearheading the construction of the Ellington Memorial in New York City. He was a friend of Tom Jobim and was present during the composer’s final days in New York City.

Short was born in Danville, Illinois, where two of his school classmates were Dick Van Dyke and Donald O’Connor.  He began performing piano in dance halls and saloons, and as a busker, after leaving home at age 11 for Chicago with his mother’s permission.

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Arvell Shaw

September 15, 2023

Arvell Shaw (September 15, 1923 – December 5, 2002) was an American jazz double-bassist, best known for his work with Louis Armstrong.

He was born on September 15, 1923 in St. Louis, Missouri Shaw learned to play tuba in high school, but switched to bass soon after. In 1942 he worked with Fate Marable on riverboats traveling on the Mississippi River, then served in the Navy from 1942 to 1945.  After his discharge he played with Armstrong in his last big band, from 1945 to 1947.  Shaw and Sid Catlett then joined the Louis Armstrong All-Stars until 1950, when Shaw broke off to study music.  He returned to play with Armstrong from 1952 to 1956,  and performed in the 1956 musical, High Society.

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Cannonball Adderley

September 15, 2023

Julian EdwinCannonballAdderley (September 15, 1928 – August 8, 1975) was an American jazz alto saxophonist of the hard bop era of the 1950s and 1960s.

Adderley is perhaps best remembered for the 1966 soul jazz single “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” which was written for him by his keyboardist Joe Zawinul and became a major crossover hit on the pop and R&B charts. A cover version by the Buckinghams, who added lyrics, also reached No. 5 on the charts. Adderley worked with Miles Davis, first as a member of the Davis sextet, appearing on the seminal records Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959), and then on his own 1958 album Somethin’ Else. He was the elder brother of jazz trumpeter Nat Adderley, who was a longtime member of his band.

Julian Edwin Adderley was born on September 15, 1928, in Tampa, Florida to high school guidance counselor and cornet player Julian Carlyle Adderley and elementary school teacher Jessie Johnson.Elementary school classmates called him “cannonball” (i.e., “cannibal”) after his voracious appetite. In July 1975, Adderley suffered a stroke from a cerebral hemorrhage and died four weeks later, on August 8, 1975, at St. Mary Methodist Hospital in Gary, Indiana. He was 46 years old. He was survived by his wife Olga James Adderley, parents Julian C. and Jessie L. Adderley, and brother Nat Adderley. He was buried in the Southside Cemetery, Tallahassee.

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Flamenco Fridays Jose Montoya Carpio El Berenjeno

September 15, 2023

Reflecting its origin as a remate to the soleares, the underlying form of bulerías is simple. Bulerías cantes consist of three or four eight-syllable lines, and there is great flexibility in the way artists choose to treat those three or four lines. The singer may give one or two compáses to each line, or they can stretch them out, decorating each syllable with melismatic flourishes, or repeating them for rhythmic or emotional effect. 

The guitarist follows the singer’s phrasing, underscoring the implied harmony, adding falsetas and maintaining the rhythmic pulse. Performing without a singer, a guitarist will string together a series of falsetas in a way that may imitate the form of letras.

A dancer will usually dance while the letra is being sung, and also dance between letras. A dancer can also dance during short breaks within the letras (a respira for the singer; a remate for the dancer). A dancer will use transitional phrases, including palmas en contra tiempo, remates and llamadas, and desplante llamadas to move from one section of the dance to another, cueing the musicians at each transition. 

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Daily Roots Johnny Clarke

September 15, 2023

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Cosmos NGC 7331

September 14, 2023

Spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is often touted as an analog to our own Milky Way. About 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus, NGC 7331 was recognized early on as a spiral nebula and is actually one of the brighter galaxies not included in Charles Messier’s famous 18th century catalog. Since the galaxy’s disk is inclined to our line-of-sight, long telescopic exposures often result in images that evokes a strong sense of depth. The effect is further enhanced in this sharp image by galaxies that lie beyond the gorgeous island universe. The most prominent background galaxies are about one tenth the apparent size of NGC 7331 and so lie roughly ten times farther away. Their close alignment on the sky with NGC 7331 occurs just by chance. Lingering above the plane of the Milky Way, this striking visual grouping of galaxies is known to some as the Deer Lick Group.

 

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Alberto Naranjo

September 14, 2023

Alberto Naranjo [nah-rahn’-ho] (September 14, 1941 – January 27, 2020) was a Venezuelan musician. His mother, the singer Graciela Naranjo, was a radio, film and television pioneer in her homeland. Largely self-taught, Naranjo embarked on a similar musical course, becoming – like his mother – one of Venezuela’s icons of contemporary popular music.

In his early years, Naranjo was influenced by diverse music genres such as jazz and classical, from Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington and Oliver Nelson; from Bud Powell to Thad Jones and Mel Lewis; from Béla Bartók to Claude Debussy, and specially, the music created by Tito Puente, one of the greatest all-time Latin jazz leaders. Puente revolutionised the role of the drums in stage performance, when he moved the drum kit and timbales from the back to the front of stage, highlighted it as a solo instrument, and demonstrated that a drummer can also be a gifted composer and arranger.

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Joseph Jarman

September 14, 2023

Joseph Jarman (September 14, 1937 – January 9, 2019) was an American jazz musician, composer, poet, and Shinshu Buddhist priest. He was one of the first members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

He was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, United States. Jarman grew up in Chicago, Illinois. At DuSable High School, he studied drums with Walter Dyett, switching to saxophone and clarinet when he joined the United States Army after graduation. During his time there, he was part of the 11th Airborne Division Band for a year.

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Cachao

September 14, 2023

Israel López Valdés (September 14, 1918 – March 22, 2008), better known as Cachao (/kəˈ/ kə-CHOW), was a Cuban double bassist and composer. Cachao is widely known as the co-creator of the mambo and a master of the descarga (improvised jam sessions). Throughout his career he also performed and recorded in a variety of music styles ranging from classical music to salsa. An exile in the United States since the 1960s, he only achieved international fame following a career revival in the 1990s.

Born into a family of musicians in Havana, Cachao and his older brother Orestes were the driving force behind one of Cuba’s most prolific charangas, Arcaño y sus Maravillas. As members of the Maravillas, Cachao and Orestes pioneered a new form of ballroom music derived from the danzón, the danzón-mambo, which subsequently developed into an international genre, mambo. In the 1950s, Cachao became famous for popularizing improvised jam sessions known as descargas. He emigrated to Spain in 1962, and moved to the United States in 1963, starting a career as a session and live musician for a variety of bands in New Yorkduring the rise of boogaloo, and later, salsa.

In the 1970s, Cachao fell into obscurity after moving to Las Vegas and later Miami, releasing albums sporadically as a leader. In the 1990s, he was re-discovered by actor Andy García, who brought him back to the forefront of the Latin music scene with the release of a documentary and several albums. Before his death in 2008, Cachao had earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and several Grammy Awards. He is ranked number 24 on Bass Player magazine’s list of “The 100 Greatest Bass Players of All Time”.

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World Music Tamana Parviz Meshkatian

September 14, 2023

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Daily Roots Roots Radics

September 14, 2023

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Cosmos NGC 4632

September 13, 2023

Galaxy NGC 4632 hides a secret from optical telescopes. It is surrounded by a ring of cool hydrogen gas orbiting at 90 degrees to its spiral disk. Such polar ring galaxies have previously been discovered using starlight. However, NGC 4632 is among the first in which a radio telescope survey revealed a polar ring. The featured composite image combines this gas ring, observed with the highly sensitive ASKAP telescope, with optical data from the Subaru telescope. Using virtual reality, astronomers separated out the gas in the main disk of the galaxy from the ring, and the subtle color gradient traces its orbital motion. Why do polar rings exist? They could be material pulled from one galaxy as it gravitationally interacts with a companion. Or hydrogen gas flows along the filaments of the cosmic web and accretes into a ring around a galaxy, some of which gravitationally contracts into stars.

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Vinny Appice

September 13, 2023

Vincent Samson Appice (born September 13, 1957) is an American rock and metal drummer best known for his work with the bands Dio, Black Sabbath, and Heaven & Hell. Of Italian descent, he is the younger brother of drummer Carmine Appice.

Appice took up the drums at the age of nine, taking lessons from the same teacher as his brother Carmine Appice. When he was sixteen, Appice and his band BOMF met John Lennon at Record Plant Studios. Lennon took a liking to the group and used them as a backing band in several performances, including the final one before his death. He moved on to record with Rick Derringer on Derringer (1976), Sweet Evil(1977), and Derringer Live (1977), before forming his own band Axis and recording It’s A Circus World(1978).

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