09-26: Bartók Miraculous Mandarin | Music for Strings etc / Boulez - Baden Powell Solitude 1971 - The Audience With Betty Carter 1980 - Jonas Hellborg / Shawn Lane Zenhouse 1999 - Bessie Smith Empress of the Blues 1923-1933

1788 – François Bainville (French organist & composer)
1800 – William Billings (American choral composer & tanner)
1808 – Pavel Vranický [Paul Wranitzky] (Moravian composer & conductor, active in Austria)
1871 – Cipriani Potter (English composer, pianist & teacher)
1937 – Bessie Smith (American blues singer)
1944 – Ernst Isler (Swiss organist, pianist, composer & music critic)
1945 – Béla Bartók (Hungarian composer, pianist & folksong collector)
1968 – Władysław Kędra (Polish pianist)
1979 – Seymour Shifrin (American composer)
1983 – Tino Rossi (Corsican-born French cabaret singer & actor)
1989 – Hemanta Kumar Mukhopadhyay [হেমন্ত কুমার মুখোপাধ্যায়] (Indian singer & film composer, director & producer)
1991 – Billy Vaughn (American country, R&B & pop singer, multi-instrumentalist, orchestra leader, & A&R man for Dot Records)
1998 – Betty Carter (American jazz singer & songwriter)
2000 – Baden Powell [de Aquino] (Brazilian jazz & classical guitarist, composer & singer)
2003 – Shawn Lane (American rock & jazz guitarist & pianist, Black Oak Arkansas, Jonas Hellborg)
2003 – Robert Palmer (English rock, pop & R&B singer, songwriter & multi-instrumentalist)
2008 – Marc Moulin (Belgian jazz pianist, composer, journalist, humorist, economist, animator & radio producer)

Wow... what a bunch for today! A couple of amazing guitarists, a couple of amazing African-American women of song, a legendary Bengali singer & composer, a Corsican cabaret singer who made all the ladies swoon, a very talented Wallonian touche-à-tout, one of the great composers in early American history... and the greatest Hungarian composer of the 20th century!

Don't get any funny ideas, though... this is NOT a write-up. Like I said last time, it's gonna be boom-boom-boom for a few. And then some write-ups. "Boom-boom-boom"... do you know what that means? Of course you don't, all you readers from... everywhere in the world, including our first readers from Africa (the Sudan, to be specific - مرحبا! ترحيب !), who just showed up this past week. This is just a placeholder. One day, there will be an actual write-up here, and what you're reading now will be GONE... forever! Doesn't that make you feel sad? Tough shit. Oh, my. Did I use potty-mouth? Are you offended that I haven't classified this as an "adult" blog because of my foul language? Too fucking bad.

09-25: Led Zeppelin Outtakes 1968-1980 Studio & Live Soundboard Recordings : 11 Discs! - Alicia de Larrocha : Falla | Albéniz | Turina 1984

1619 – Francesco Soto de Langa (Spanish singer, composer & music director, active in Rome)
1716 – Johann Christoph Pez (German composer & music director)
1733 – Georg Motz (German cantor & composer)
1813 – Braz Francisco de Lima (Portuguese composer & music director)
1828 – Charlotta Seuerling (Swedish singer, harpsichordist, harpist, composer & poet, "The Blind Song-Maiden")
1849 – Johann Strauss I (Austrian composer, father of Johann II, Josef & Eduard)
1860 – Carl Friedrich Zöllner (German composer & choir director)
1920 – William F. Sudds (English-born American multi-instrumentalist, composer, teacher & music store owner)
1944 – Leo Justinus Kauffmann (Alsatian composer)
1959 – Ennio Porrino (Italian composer, pupil of Respighi)
1970 – Yefim Golyshev [Ефи́м Го́лышев] (Ukrainian painter, composer & violinist, active in Germany, Iberia, Brazil & France)
1980 – John Bonham (English rock drummer & songwriter, Led Zeppelin)
1985 – Albert Moeschinger (Swiss composer & pianist)
1997 – Jean Françaix (French composer, pianist & orchestrator)
1997 – Hélène Baillargeon (Canadian singer, actress & folklorist)
2009 – Alicia de Larrocha (Spanish pianist)

These next few posts are gonna come boom-boom-boom all in a row... I'll get around to the write-up eventually... when I do, expect to read about Charlotta Seuerling, Johann Strauss I, Yefim Golyshev, Jean Françaix, Alicia de Larrocha, and of course... John Bonham! John Henry Bonham!

09-24: Zeki Müren Saklı Kayıtlar 2 1960-1984 - Tallis Scholars Requiem : Victoria | Lobo | Cardoso - Henry Townsend Tired of Bein' Mistreated 1962

1605 – Manuel Mendes (Portuguese composer, teacher of Duarte Lôbo & Manuel Cardoso)
1646 – Duarte Lôbo [Eduardus Lupus] (Portuguese composer)
1753 – Georg Gebel der Jüngere (German composer & keyboardist)
1813 – André Grétry (French composer, known for his opéras comiques)
1855 – Alexandre Stiévenard (French clarinettist, teacher & composer)
1875 – William Walker (American shape-note singing master & tunebook compiler, The Southern Harmony) 
1881 – Luigi Ferdinando Casamorata (Italian music critic & composer)
1892 – Patrick Gilmore (Irish-born American composer, military bandmaster & cornettist)
1910 – Rudolf Dellinger (Bohemian German composer, music director & clarinettist)
1934 – Edwin Lemare (English organist & composer, active in the United States)
1949 – Pierre de Bréville (French composer, music critic & teacher)
1960 – Mátyás Seiber (Hungarian-born British composer & teacher)
1968 – Harry Robert Wilson (American choral director, arranger & composer)
1978 – Ruth Etting (American pop singer, actress & dancer)
1983 – Dame Isobel Baillie (Scottish soprano of oratorio & art song)
1991 – Peter Bellamy (English folk singer, concertinist & guitarist)
1993 – Ian Stuart Donaldson (English Neo-Nazi punk singer & songwriter, Skrewdriver)
1994 – Dalton Reed (American soul singer)
1996 – Zeki Müren (Turkish singer, composer & actor)
2003 – Rosalie Allen (American country singer, guitarist & disc jockey)
2006 – Henry "Mule" Townsend (American blues singer, guitarist & pianist)

Well, here we go again... closely associated folks pooping on the same day, years apart. This time it's Duarte Lôbo, composer from a splendid school of Portuguese polyphonic music that arose around 1600 (as per the article at top left, from the 2nd edition of Willi Apel's Harvard Dictionary of Music, 1969), passing away 41 years to the day after his old teacher, Manuel Mendes. And in remembering Lôbo (love how his name was Latinized as "Eduardus Lupus"... I suppose if he'd been active in England we'd also know him as "Eddie Wolf"...), we also get, as you'll see, another chance to remember Victoria... no, not Queen Victoria, you silly prat... Tomás Luis de Victoria, that other composer for whom this year is such a big death anniversary. (It's Gustav Mahler's death centennial, and Victoria's death quadricentennial... read more below.)

And remember how we remembered Henry Townsend's "retiring" wife Vernell just 3 days ago? Well, today we remember Henry Townsend's retiring wife Vernell's husband Henry! And somebody even bothered to snap a photo of him at some point in his life! Thank heaven for small wonders... (Read more below.)

Others worth mentioning. Ruth Etting was a "Ziegfeld star" and a very popular singer in the 1920s & 30s. "Shine On Harvest Moon" was one of her signature tunes, along with others such as "Button Up Your Overcoat." I love it when I put parts of my research into the collage itself... it's a real time-saver!

Irish-born bandmaster & composer Patrick Gilmore served on the Union side as a musician during the United States Civil War. He's remembered most, actually, for adding new lyrics to an already-existing piece of music: an Irish anti-war folk song called "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye." With Gilmore's new words, the song became known as "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," one of the most memorable songs to arise out of the Civil War period. I always thought that song sounded a bit like an Irish jig, and now I now why.

Peter Bellamy was a beloved English folk musician who shocked his colleagues and loved ones when he committed suicide in 1991. I'm not sure anyone has ever figured out exactly why he decided to do it.

But now let's talk about singer and actor Zeki Müren. I learned about Zeki through my Turkish friend, the lovely Pinar. Pinar means "spring" in Türkçe, as in "water source," and Pinar is certainly my source of knowledge about all things Turkish! As Pinar might say, "Zeki Müren süper oldu. Çok güzel bir sesi vardı. O Türkiye'nin her yerinde sevilen birisiydi. Ve o gay olduğunu. Gay gay gay. Süper gay!"

Yes, süper gay. Zeki Müren doesn't really have an equivalent in any other culture, but if you were to cross Elvis Presley with Liberace, and add more talent than either had, you'd be approaching what Zeki Müren was. He was a great singer of classical Turkish music, with flawless diction and a remarkable ear for the intonational subtleties and great expressive range of this music. He also helped keep this music alive by modernizing its sound for listeners of the younger generation.

One of the remarkable things about Müren was how his personal appearance changed over the course of his career, which began in the early 1950s. Over four decades, he gradually became more and more feminine-looking. In the collage above, you see how he looked in the 50s, and below that his transitional phase of the 60s, as photo-shopped into an image of the Turkish 20-lira note. By the 1980s, Zeki had gained quite a bit of weight, and was wearing his hair in a bouffant, making him look very matronly - as one blogger has put it, like the mother you might see on a television sit-com:

It's perhaps difficult to understand how such an androgynous figure could gain such acceptance and approval in a fairly conservative country like Turkey. I believe that, simply put, his enormous talent caused people to cut him some slack. Zeki Müren's flamboyant style also paved the way for later Turkish performers to push the envelope even further when it came to gender-identity issues and being more openly gay. (Müren led a largely reclusive life and never officially "came out" publicly.) Take for example the very popular singer and celebrity Bülent Ersoy, who began his career as a very cute young man:

but later underwent sexual reassignment surgery, although he chose to retain his masculine first name. Compared to current-day Bülent, even latter-day Zeki looks positively butch:

This year marks the 80th anniversary of Zeki Müren's birth, and the 15th anniversary of his death. He died while onstage during a concert he was giving in the city of İzmir, after being presented with a gift: the same microphone he'd used at his first-ever public concert, 45 years earlier. He was so surprised by this, and overcome with emotion, that he had a heart attack and died right there on the spot. The entire country of Turkey went into mourning.... (Read more below.)

09-23: Average White Band AWB 1974 - Etta Baker w/ Taj Mahal 2004 - Bellini La Sonnambula Cecilia Bartoli 2009

1700 – Nicolaus Adam Strungk (German composer & violinist)
1835 – Vincenzo Bellini (Italian opera composer)
1836 – Maria Malibran (French-born Spanish dramatic mezzo-soprano & guitarist)
1837 – R. J. S. Stevens (English composer & organist)
1896 – Gilbert Duprez (French dramatic tenor, teacher & composer)
1937 – Caro Roma [Carrie Northly] (American singer, popular songwriter & conductor)
1940 – Rhené-Bâton (French conductor & composer)
1970 – Bourvil [André Robert Raimbourg] (French actor & singer)
1973 – Manuel Borguñó (Spanish composer)
1974 – Robbie McIntosh (Scottish funk & R&B drummer, Average White Band)
1982 – Jimmy Wakely (American country singer, songwriter, guitarist & actor)
1984 – Anatoly Novikov [Анато́лий Но́виков] (Russian composer)
1987 – O. B. McClinton (American country singer, songwriter & guitarist)
1988 – Arwel Hughes (Welsh conductor & composer)
1995 – Booker T. Laury (American blues, gospel & jazz pianist & singer)
2004 – André Hazes (Dutch levenslied folk singer)
2006 – Sir Malcolm Arnold (English composer, conductor & trumpeter)
2006 – Etta Baker (American blues & folk guitarist, singer, songwriter & banjoist)

The Average White Band blew everybody away when they burst onto the international scene in 1973–74. They were anything but average, of course. The idea that a bunch of lads from Dundee, Scotland could be this soulful and this funky was nothing short of astonishing. So what a terrible loss it was for the band when so soon after their initial success, their 24-year-old drummer Robbie McIntosh became yet another drug-overdose statistic in the world of popular music. Members of the band were at an after-concert party in Los Angeles when McIntosh and bassist/guitarist Alan Gorrie were given a substance they believed was cocaine by the party's host. The drug turned out to be not cocaine, but heroin. By the time the two were discovered by Cher, who also happened to be at the party, McIntosh had already died. Cher managed to keep Gorrie conscious long enough for medical attention to arrive, saving his life; he remains in the AWB to this day. The band soldiered on, replacing McIntosh, ironically enough, with their first black member, Steve Ferrone, whose father was from Sierra Leone. The Average White Band remains one of the most enduring dance bands of the 70s funk-disco period, and has the distinction of being the 15th most-sampled group in history.

Three luminaries of 19th-century bel canto opera also figure on our list. Vincenzo Bellini was one of the great composers of the bel canto period, along with Giachino Rossini and Gaetano Donizetti. Known for his long, florid melodies, Bellini's most-performed operas today are La sonnambula (1831), Norma (1831), and his final work, I puritani (1835), which was not premiered until four months after his death of an intestinal infection at the age of 33. He lives on as one of opera's most popular composers, but not as one of the few cocktails it's acceptable to drink before noon. The "Bellini" is named not after the composer, but after 15th-century painter Giovanni Bellini: the color of the drink reminded its Venetian inventor of a particular shade of pink in one of the master's oils.

Mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran also lived a tragically short life, succumbing at age 28 to internal injuries she'd sustained months earlier in a fall from her horse. She might have survived if she hadn't stubbornly refused to be seen by a doctor. This should give you an idea of her personality - Malibran is considered, in fact, to have been the quintessential diva of opera. It's appropriate that Malibran should have passed away on the first anniversary of Bellini's death, since she was in fact known especially for both Bellini and Rossini roles. Bellini even made an adaptation of I Puritani to suit her slightly-lower voice for the role of Elvira, and had promised to write a new opera especially for her when his own death foiled those plans.

After all these enormously talented figures sadly dying in their 20s and early 30s, we can take some comfort in the life of tenor Gilbert Duprez, who lived to the ripe age of 89. Duprez was yet another star of bel canto, who created the role of Edgardo in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor in 1835. But he is perhaps better-known for having been the first tenor we know of to sing the infamous "high C" not in a falsetto voice, but from the chest voice, during a performance of Rossini's William Tell in 1831. Unfortunately, such vocal feats take a particular physical toll on singers, like Duprez, who are of small stature, and it wasn't many years before the excess wear and tear on his voice began to become apparent. After a slackening of his performing schedule in the 1840s, and a final performance of Lucia in 1851, Duprez retired from the stage and devoted the remainder of his life to teaching young singers and composing. And it's perhaps for this that he could credit his longevity. For the life of a busy opera singer is a lot like the life of a busy rock musician. Performing music for a living is in most cases hard, exhausting work!

09-22: Mahler 5 Abravanel 1974 - Schleiermacher Music at the Bauhaus 1999 - Brahms Stern Rose Ormandy 1964 - Eddie Fisher Sings Irving Berlin 1954

1905 – Célestine Galli-Marié (French operatic mezzo-soprano, creator of title role in Carmen)
1927 – Giannotto Bastianelli (Italian musicologist & author)
1935 – Karl Schröder II (German cellist, composer & conductor)
1959 – Josef Matthias Hauer (Austrian composer & music theorist)
1975 – Franz Salmhofer (Austrian composer, clarinetist, conductor & poet)
1981 – Harry Warren [Salvatore Antonio Guaragna] (American composer & lyricist of stage & screen)
1987 – Louis Kentner (Hungarian-born British pianist & composer)
1989 – Irving Berlin [Israel Isidore Baline] (Russian-born American composer & lyricist of stage & screen)
1993 – Maurice Abravanel (Greek-born Swiss-American conductor & pianist of Sephardic ancestry)
1994 – Teddy Buckner (American jazz trumpeter)
1994 – Leonard Feather (British-born American jazz music critic, pianist, composer & producer)
1994 – Mattie Moss Clark (American gospel choir director & mother of The Clark Sisters)
1995 – Dolly Collins (English folk keyboardist, arranger & composer, sister of Shirley)
2001 – Isaac Stern [Исаак Стерн] (Ukrainian-born American violinist)
2010 – Eddie Fisher (American pop singer & actor)

Ugh. These lists are going to have to be pared down brutally if I ever hope to get caught up. But do you like the color scheme I used today? I went with off-blah.

Yesterday we had two great electric bassists, one who outshone the other. Today it's the same deal, except with Tin Pan Alley songwriters: the great Harry Warren (42nd Street, etc.), being overshadowed by Irving Berlin, who was probably the greatest of them all.

We also have the creator of the title role in Bizet's Carmen, Célestine Galli-Marié, who was a high mezzo-soprano. For many years, such a mezzo was referred to as a "Galli-Marié."

There's also Josef Matthias Hauer, who came up with a system of composing with 12 tones just a year or two before Arnold Schoenberg did, although Hauer's methods were quite different. Central to the Hauer approach was the classification of any 12-tone succession into one of 44 tropes, or pairs of complementary unordered hexachords. You don't get it? That's okay, you don't have to understand everything. If you did, you'd be God, and just think how boring that would be. Seriously, doesn't God get bored, knowing there's nothing for Him to discover, nothing that will ever be mysterious to Him? Don't ponder that question. You'd be better off to stick with learning more about Hauer's tropes.

If you've got more than half a dozen jazz albums in your collection, at least one of them probably has liner notes written by Leonard Feather. Also along jazz lines, there's trumpeter Teddy Buckner, an old-time Dixielander, who not only sounded but also looked very much like Louis Armstrong.

Eddie Fisher passed away just last year. Most of you out there would probably know him better as Princess Leia's dad than for his singing.

Mattie Moss Clark was a pioneering figure in the world of gospel choir singing. The standard disposition of three-part harmony for such choirs was of her devising.

And from the world of classical performance, there's Maurice Abravanel, music director of the Utah Symphony between the late 40s & late 70s. He was another Mahlerian, and so we get another chance to remember Gustav Mahler during this, his death centenary. We'll have several more chances before the year is up, so don't worry that we've only addressed Mahler's 5th & 8th symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde so far.

And Issac Stern, one of the great violinists of the past century. My old violin teacher from high school was not fond of his sound. Her comment on him was "Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!" Yeah, he did crunch a bit with the bow. It was an assertive sound - not for everybody, I guess. I attended a master class Stern gave in the early 90s. He asked those assembled to raise their hands if they played the violin. Then he did the same for the cello. And the piano. And that was it. As a violist, I felt a bit left out. On the other hand, I was spared the embarrassment of anybody knowing I played the viola...

09-21: Jaco Pastorius DC 1982 - Bad Company Landover MD 1979 - Bo Carter Banana In Your Fruit Basket - William Henry Fry : Santa Claus Symphony | Niagara Symphony

1590 – Ascanio Trombetti (Italian composer & cornettist)
1809 – Alexander Reinagle (English-born American composer, organist & theater musician)
1812 – Emmanuel Schikaneder (German impresario, dramatist, actor, singer & composer, librettist of The Magic Flute)
1836 – John Stafford Smith (English church organist, composer & musicologist, "The Anacreontic Song")
1839 – Gottfried Weber (German music theorist, composer & jurist, inventor of Roman numeral harmonic analysis)
1860 – Arthur Schopenhauer (German philosopher)
1864 – William Henry Fry (American composer, music critic & journalist)
1953 – Roger Quilter (English composer of songs, operas & light orchestral music)
1956 – Robert Mills Delaney (American composer & teacher)
1961 – Maurice Delage (French composer & pianist)
1962 – Bo Carter [Armenter Chatmon] (American blues singer, songwriter & guitarist, Mississippi Sheiks)
1980 – Ernest White (Canadian organist, choirmaster, organ designer, teacher & music editor)
1981 – Tony Aubin (French composer & conductor, winner Prix de Rome 1930)
1987 – Jaco Pastorius (American jazz bass guitarist, composer, pianist & percussionist)
1995 – Vernell Townsend (American blues & gospel singer, wife of Henry)
2006 – Boz Burrell (English rock bass guitarist & singer, Bad Company & King Crimson)

I've decided that today I'm going to try to say a little something (and in most cases, rest assured, it will be very little) about every single person on the list, instead of just a few of them like I normally do. Are you ready? That's good, because I'm not...

The surname of Ascanio Trombetti's family means "little trumpets." That's because they were very talented wind players! So, it's an occupational surname. If your last name is Boulanger, or Becker, or Baker, it means you have an ancestor who was handy with the flour and the oven mittens.

Emmanuel Schikaneder was known in both Germany and Austria as a very talented comedic actor and singer, who built the popular Theater auf der Wieden in the Vienna suburbs. Today we remember him best as the librettist and creator of the role of Papageno for the Singspiel Die Zauberflöte, K. 620, Mozart's last completed opera.

Alexander Reinagle and John Stafford Smith both have ties to the early history of the United States. Reinagle was born in England, to a Hungarian father and a Scots mother. However, he's considered an American composer! As a young man in Edinburgh, Scotland he made his living in the shipping industry, and thus made many voyages to the British colonies. He then decided to settle in the brand new United States as a professional musician. He introduced the music of Haydn and Mozart to the city of Philadelphia, and befriended President George Washington, who attended many of Reinagle's concerts.

John Stafford Smith never made it to the Americas, but at least one of his compositions did. Smith, noted today as an early collector of the manuscripts of J. S. Bach, wrote a little tune as a teenager for the Anacreontic Society, a gentleman's club of amateur musicians in mid-18th-century London who took their name from Anacreon, the ancient Greek poet of wine, women, and song. The tune eventually became very popular all over Britain and in America as a drinking-song. But it was immortalized when Francis Scott Key added new words to it in 1814, after witnessing the successful defense of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor from an attack by the British Navy. The song, renamed "The Star-Spangled Banner," became a popular patriotic song in the United States, and was officially adopted as its national anthem in 1931.

Remaining in America for the moment, let's talk about William Henry Fry.  He was the first American-born composer to write for a large symphony orchestra, and to compose a publicly-performed opera (Leonora, 1845). He was also the first music critic (a fairly new profession at the time) to write for a major American newspaper, the New York Tribune, and to insist that his fellow Americans support music of their own country. Fry's symphonies mostly have extra-musical themes: the Niagara Symphony (1854) "uses eleven timpani to create the roar of the waters, snare drums to reproduce the hiss of the spray, and a remarkable series of discordant, chromatic descending scales to reproduce the chaos of the falling waters as they crash onto the rocks."

Gottfried Weber was responsible for this sort of thing:

So, if you've studied music, and have had to do this sort of thing, now you know who to blame.

The great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about aesthetics and music quite a bit. His works had a great influence on many of the more well-read musicians of the mid-to-late 19th century, most notably Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler.

Roger Quilter, English and gay, was a composer of many songs. His work had a big influence on Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine), also notable as a song composer.

I could discover little about either Robert Mills Delaney or Vernell Townsend, aside from what you can read in the blurbs I've included above in the collage. Damned right, Vernell was a "retiring" sort: there are plenty of photos of her husband Henry, but none of her, as far as I can tell. Didn't the two have any wedding photos taken? Perhaps Vernell Townsend, as nice as her voice sounds, was a vampiress.

Sticking with blues singers for the moment, there's Bo Carter, who was one of the famous Chatmon family of blues musicians. Carter reveled in lyrics of the double-entendre variety, with things like "Banana In Your Fruit Basket," "My Pencil Won't Write No More," and "Your Biscuits Are Big Enough For Me."

Maurice Delage was a pupil of Ravel and a member of Les Apaches, a group of Parisian musicians, artists & writers who met regularly in the first years of the 20th century. Many of Delage's works were influenced by his travels in India and elsewhere in Asia. One such work, Ragamalika (1912-22), is significant in that it includes a very early instance of prepared piano, Delage instructing that a piece of cardboard be placed under the strings of a low B-flat to imitate the sound of an Indian drum. It doesn't appear that John Cage, usually cited as the inventor of the prepared piano, was aware of Delage's early experiment, but it's interesting to note that the East also exerted a great influence on Cage's way of thinking about things.

Okay... honestly, I don't really have any more to say about Ernest White or Tony Aubin than what I already told you about them above in the list. But me telling you I'm not going to say any more about them counts as me saying something about them, doesn't it?

Finally, we have two great electric bassists. And it's just Boz Burrell's luck that the other one happens to be Jaco Pastorius, who makes pretty much any other electric bassist sound like crap! Of course, Burrell did a fine job as the bassist of Bad Company, and in the great deal of studio and touring work he did. But Pastorius was the single greatest bass guitarist who ever lived... you could have asked him, and he would have told you himself! No, Jaco was not known for his humility (or his sanity), but it's an undeniable fact that he is one of only four (4) bass players to have been inducted into the Downbeat Jazz Hall of Fame, and the only one of those four to be an electric bassist, rather than a player of the traditional upright variety.

Yes, Jaco Pastorius is without a doubt the star of the show today (sorry, Schopenhauer). As Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote "My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends - It gives a lovely light!" Pastorius was just such an artist. A sufferer from bipolar disorder, and from substance abuse issues, he was the toast of the jazz world in the 70s, only to gradually descend further and further into madness during the 80s, finally ending up as a street person, and being beaten to death outside a Ft. Lauderdale bar in 1987 at the age of 35. Jaco! Beautiful, amazing, tragic Jaco. At least we can take some solace in the recorded legacy he left for us.

Well, that wasn't so bad. I should try saying more about more of these poopers more in the future...

09-20: Sibelius 1 2 5 7 Barbirolli - Link 80 Killing Katie 1997 - Ben Webster Ballads 1955 - Gilles Binchois / Discantus 2009 - Sarasate Zigeunerweisen Heifetz 1937

1460 – Gilles Binchois (Franco-Flemish composer)
1590 – Lodovico Agostini (Italian composer, singer, priest & scholar)
1630 – Claudio Saracini (Italian composer, lutenist & singer)
1648 – Ivan Lukačić (Croatian-born composer & church musician, active in Italy)
1896 – Johan Gottfried Conradi (Norwegian conductor & composer)
1897 – Karel Bendl (Czech composer & conductor)
1908 – Pablo de Sarasate (Spanish violinist & composer)
1957 – Jean Sibelius (Finnish composer)
1957 – Heino Kaski (Finnish composer & pianist)
1960 – Michel Brusselmans (Belgian soundtrack composer)
1967 – Henri Mulet (French organist & composer)
1968 – Frank Pelleg (Czech-born Israeli harpsichordist, pianist, conductor, composer & teacher)
1973 – Ben Webster (American jazz tenor saxophonist & pianist)
1973 – Jim Croce (American singer-songwriter & guitarist)
1974 – Robert Herberigs (Belgian composer)
1984 – Steve Goodman (American folk singer-songwriter, "City of New Orleans")
1994 – Jule Styne (English-born American Broadway composer & pianist)
1994 – Jimmy Hamilton (American jazz clarinetist, tenor saxophonist, arranger, composer & teacher)
1996 – Paul Weston (American pop pianist, arranger, composer & conductor)
1997 – Nick Traina (American punk/ska singer, Link 80, son of Danielle Steel)
2006 – Armin Jordan (Swiss conductor)
2006 – John W. Peterson (American composer of hymns & cantatas)
2010 – Leonard Skinner (American high school gym teacher, namesake of Lynyrd Skynyrd)

Some great favorites here. Both Gilles Binchois and Ben Webster were one of the Big Three in their day. "Wha??" you say? That's right... Binchois, considered by some the finest melodist of the 15th century, was one of the most prominent members of the Burgundian School, along with Guillaume Dufay and John Dunstable - composers who served the court of Burgundy and represented the first generation of composers we think of as "Renaissance." And Ben Webster was one of the three greatest tenor sax players to come out of the swing era, along with Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young.

They called Webster "The Brute" or "Frog" because of the rough, raspy tone he used on rhythm tunes - although his sound became sweetly coy and sentimental on ballads. In fact, it's safe to say that with Ben Webster, we get a greater timbral variety, from wispy, breathy warbles to petulant growls, than we do with just about any other sax player in jazz. And look, there's reedman Jimmy Hamilton on the list, too! Both Webster and Hamilton were alumni of Duke Ellington's great orchestra in the 30s & 40s... Hamilton stayed on with Ellington for decades longer, but Webster had a falling-out with the Duke (in which he apparently cut up one of Ellington's suits - ouch!) and went off on his own in 1943. Webster would go on to do his best work in the 50s, perhaps most notably on Soulville from 1957, considered to be the very first soul jazz album in the history of jazz... and, soul.

The real bigwig on the list, however, is the national composer of Finland, Jean Sibelius. It must suck to be any Finnish composer coming after Sibelius - always being compared to this musical giant who had such an idiosyncratic artistic voice. And boy, it must have really sucked to be poor Heino Kaski... a much lesser-known Finnish composer, pooping on the same day as Sibelius. Sibelius, who for many years was widely performed little elsewhere than in the Nordic countries and Britain, is known primarily for his seven symphonies, his violin concerto, and his many symphonic poems based on Finnish lore and legend. He's also known as one of the last of the great late Romantic composers, who somewhat like Richard Strauss lived into the mid-20th century as a symbol of a bygone era as several fads of modernism came and went. Unlike Strauss, Sibelius decided he'd said all he wanted to by the late 1920s, and committed hardly a note to music paper for the last 30 years of his life, preferring instead to focus his energies on fostering interest in performances and recordings of his existing body of works. See you on the other side of the early retirement...