01-21: Peggy Lee & Nelson Riddle : Jump For Joy 1958 - Best Of Charles Brown 1945-1956 - Champion Jack Dupree : Blues for Everyone 1969 - Wolf-Ferrari Violin Concerto | Serenade for Strings / Hoelscher | Francis 1994

Not shown: Domenico Mazzocchi, John Vincent, John Gibbs & Peter Stadlen

1638 – Ignazio Donati (Italian composer)
1665 – Domenico Mazzocchi (Italian composer)
1851 – Albert Lortzing (German composer, actor & singer)
1876 – Therese [Müller] Grünbaum (Austrian soprano, creator of Eglantine in Weber’s Euryanthe)
1882 – Anton Emil Titl (Austrian composer & conductor)
1883 – Jacopo Tomadini (Italian priest, composer & organist)
1884 – Auguste Franchomme (French cellist & composer, friend of Mendelssohn & dedicatee of Chopin's Cello Sonata, Op. 65)
1888 – Stephan Hale Alonzo Marsh (English-born Australian composer & harpist, active also in the United States & Japan)
1891 – Calixa Lavallée (Canadian composer, pianist & teacher, active also in the United States, "O Canada")
1894 – Guillaume Lekeu (Belgian composer, pupil of Franck & D'Indy)
1931 – Felix Blumenfeld [Фе́ликс Блуменфе́льд] (Russian composer, conductor & pianist, pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, teacher of Horowitz)
1942 – Henryk Opieński (Polish composer, violinist, teacher & musicologist, early Chopin scholar & friend of Paderewski)
1948 – Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (Italian composer, conductor & teacher)
1959 – Lamar Stringfield (American composer, flutist, conductor & anthologist of American folk songs)
1961 – John Joseph Becker (American composer, one of the American Five)
1977 – John Vincent (American composer, conductor, teacher & author)
1977 – Zoltán Vásárhelyi (Hungarian choral conductor, composer, violinist & teacher)
1984 – Jackie Wilson (American R&B singer & songwriter, "Mr. Excitement", Billy Ward and His Dominoes)
1985 – Barbara Cowsill (American pop singer, The Cowsills)
1989 – Billy [Dorothy Lucille] Tipton (American jazz pianist, saxophonist & bandleader)
1992 – Champion Jack Dupree (American blues pianist & boxer)
1996 – John Gibbs (English baritone)
1996 – Peter Stadlen (Austrian-born British composer, pianist & musicologist, specialist in Beethoven)
1997 – Colonel Tom Parker [Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk] (Dutch-born American impresario, manager of Elvis Presley)
1999 – Charles Brown (American blues singer & pianist)
2002 – Peggy Lee [Norma Deloris Egstrom] (American jazz & pop singer, songwriter, composer & actress)
2007 – U;Nee [Heo Yoon] (Korean pop singer, rapper, dancer & actress)
2010 – Paul Quarrington (Canadian novelist, playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, musician & teacher)

Billy Tipton was a female pianist who began dressing as a man in the 1930s so it would be easier for her to find work playing in jazz clubs. But even long after the jazz world had become more receptive to female instrumentalists, she continued to dress and self-identify as a man. Billy Tipton was in fact a lesbian. And unbelievably enough, she somehow managed over the course of her life to fool five husbands, and several government agencies, into believing she was a man. It was only upon her death that the truth about her gender was revealed. One of the most astonishing stories in jazz history.

08-13: Massenet Werther Plasson - King Curtis Blues At Montreux - Cage / Tudor Indeterminacy - Dissection Maha Kali

Ordered chronologically. Trouble identifying them? Click here for a somewhat tagged image.

1808 – Henri Hardouin (French composer, organist & choirmaster, Reims Cathedral)
1841 – Bernhard Romberg (German cellist & composer)
1886 – Adolph von Doss (German Jesuit priest & composer)
1908 – Ira D. Sankey (American gospel singer & hymn composer)
1912 – Jules Massenet (French composer)
1916 – Fritz Steinbach (German conductor & composer, Brahms specialist)
1924 – Julián Aguirre (Argentine composer)
1928 – Fernand de La Tombelle (French composer, organist, actor & photographer)
1933 – Paul Hillemacher (French composer & pianist)
1946 – Valery Zhelobinsky (Russian composer & pianist)
1947 – Tobias Norlind (Swedish musicologist, ethnologist & music museum curator)
1953 – Dimitri Arakishvili (Georgian composer & ethnomusicologist)
1954 – Hermann von Waltershausen (German musicologist, composer & conductor)
1970 – Viktor Trambitsky (Belarusian composer)
1971 – King Curtis (American R&B, soul jazz & rock saxophonist)
1982 – Joe Tex American soul & funk singer & songwriter)
1996 – David Tudor (American pianist & experimental composer)
1998 – Nino Ferrer (Italian-born French singer, actor & jazz musician)
2000 – Nazia Hassan (Pakistani pop singer)
2003 – Ed Townsend (American attorney, songwriter & producer)
2006 – Jon Nödtveidt (Swedish black metal singer & guitarist, Dissection)
2011 – Topi Sorsakoski (Finnish popular singer)

Well, yesterday's "launch" sorta wiped me out. I'm gonna try to keep it shorter and sweeter from now on... but don't worry, I'll still be turning you on to interminable symphonies chock-full of sour dissonances.

Google gave me a bit of a surprise when I did an image search on "Henri Hardouin" because it was sure what I meant to type was "Henri Bardouin." So, I got images of a brand of Pastis, the anise-flavored liqueur the French drink on hot summer days. Funny, I was only just learning about this aperitif a few weeks ago from my French friend Steve on Facebook. Pastis is the traditional drink of Provence, in southeastern France, but M. Hardouin played the organ in the north of France, at Reims Cathedral, the traditional site where the kings of France were crowned. The region Reims is in - Champagne-Ardenne - has a traditional libation of its own, doesn't it? I'm thinking that's probably why they held the coronations there.

Ira D. Sankey was a singer, an early figure in Southern gospel music, and a writer of many hymns. He was associated with the Methodist evangelist minister Dwight L. Moody, and the two traveled throughout much of the United States, preaching and singing the gospel. On the evening of October 8th, 1871, they were holding a revival in Chicago when - well, I suppose what happened is that Mrs. O'Leary's cow was so overcome by the spirit, she kicked over a lantern right there in the hay-barn. Sankey and Moody barely escaped the ensuing conflagration with their lives, and watched most of Chicago burn to the ground from a rowboat in Lake Michigan.

Fernand de La Tombelle was one of those sickening people you just wanna slap - a Renaissance man living many decades after the concepts of "specialization" and "division of labor" had become pretty much standard for most of us mere mortals. Not only gifted as an organist and composer, he also did some work in the theater, wrote poetry, worked in the plastic arts, was an amateur astronomer, and, as you can see, also did some photography. That's kind of an interesting picture, isn't it? A photographer is photographing La Tombelle photographing something else. Maybe that something else is another photographer photographing the original photographer who's photographing La Tombelle. Nah... that'd be stupid.

Paul Joseph Guillaume Hillemacher was a composer who wrote more than a dozen operas in collaboration with his brother, Lucien Joseph Edouard Hillemacher. Lucien Joseph Edouard Hillemacher was not a librettist, though - he was also a composer. They wrote the music of their operas together, to librettos by others. The Hillemacher brothers composed these works under the name "P.L. Hillemacher."

I couldn't find an image of Viktor Trambitsky, so I just used one of a Russian edition of the play The Storm (1859) by Aleksandr Ostrovsky. The Storm has been an extremely popular play in most of Eastern Europe, and the subject of many musical and film adaptations. Tchaikovsky wrote a concert overture based on it. And Viktor Trambitsky wrote an opera based on it, which was produced in 1941. It's a bit of a coincidence, since we just remembered Leoš Janáček yesterday. He wrote his own opera based on The Storm in 1921: It was called Katya Kabanova. And now for yesterday's featured poopers: