10-07: Ornette Coleman This Is Our Music 1960 - Dixie Dregs Atlanta 1982 - Morales : Missa Si Bona Suscepimus / Tallis Scholars - Mario Lanza EP : Granada | Lolita | 2 Rigoletto Arias

1553 – Cristóbal de Morales (Spanish composer)
1766 – André Chéron (French keyboardist, composer & conductor, teacher of Jean Marie Leclair)
1887 – George James Webb (English-born American composer)
1890 – John Hill Hewitt (American songwriter, playwright & poet)
1915 – Samuel Prowse Warren (Canadian-born American organist, choirmaster, music editor, composer & teacher)
1918 – Sir Hubert Parry (English composer, teacher & musicologist, "Jerusalem")
1925 – Hubert Platt Main (American teacher, publisher & hymn composer)
1959 – Mario Lanza (American tenor & movie star)
1966 – Grigoris Asikis [Γρηγόρης Ασίκης] (Turkish-born Greek rebetiko singer, songwriter & outi & bouzouki player)
1966 – Smiley Lewis (American R&B singer, songwriter & guitarist)
1976 – Nikolai Lopatnikoff (Estonian-born American composer)
1981 – Wouter Paap (Dutch composer, keyboardist & writer)
1988 – Billy Daniels (American pop singer & actor)
1992 – Ed Blackwell (American jazz drummer)
1998 – Arnold Jacobs (American tuba player & teacher, Chicago Symphony Orchestra)
2002 – Pierangelo Bertoli (Italian folk singer-songwriter, guitarist & political activist)
2003 – Arthur Berger (American composer & writer)
2006 – Abraham Afewerki (Eritrean pop, jazz, R&B & reggae singer, songwriter & guitarist)
2010 – T Lavitz (American jazz & rock keyboardist, reed player, composer & producer, Dixie Dregs, Jefferson Starship)

Cristóbal de Morales, a composer of sacred music, is regarded as the greatest Spanish composer of the Renaissance prior to Tomás Luis de Victoria. You'll recall, of course, that this year marks the 400th anniversary of Victoria's death, and thus we've been trying to pay particular attention to him.

Hubert Parry is best known for his setting in 1916 of a short poem which appears in the preface to William Blake's Milton, A Poem, first printed in 1808. Here is that preface as it appears in Blake's own illuminated version:

This of course is the anthem everyone knows as "Jerusalem." It's a song that's used for a number of particular occasions in England - it's sung, for example, at the end of the annual Labor Party conference, in some Anglican cathedrals on Jerusalem Sunday, and as the recessional music on St. George's Day, and by all those gathered each year as the closing music (save for the national anthem and the traditional "Auld Lang Syne") on the Last Night of the Proms, using an orchestration Edward Elgar made of the anthem in 1922.

Now, if you don't happen to be British, or Anglican, you may not know what Blake is talking about in the little poem set by Parry. He's making a reference to an old legend (whose veracity he does not take for granted - note that it's stated in the form of questions) that Jesus actually visited England, in Somerset, as a child or young man, in the vicinity of where Glastonbury Cathedral now stands, along with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea. It's one of several legends, Christian, Arthurian, and Neo-Pagan in nature, that surround this particular part of southwestern England, and made it one of the most popular tourist destinations in the British Isles many years before they started having a music festival there! What, exactly, Blake meant in his reference to the legend has been the subject of debate. But regardless of your status as regards citizenship, religion, or political affiliation, I think there's something in the combination of his words and Parry's music that really stirs the soul.

(More later... on Mario Lanza, Ed Blackwell, Pierangelo Bertoli, and Abraham Afewerki...)

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.)

08-27: Terrorizer : World Downfall 1989 - Josquin L'homme armé Masses : Tallis Scholars - Ella Fitzgerald Whisper Not 1967 - Beethoven Choral Fantasy : Serkin / Bernstein 1962

To represent Joan Cererols, I used the Basilica of Montserrat, his place of burial. Tagged image here.

1521 – Josquin des Prez (Franco-Flemish composer)
1680 – Joan Cererols (Spanish composer & Benedictine monk)
1746 – Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer (German composer & keyboardist)
1841 – Ignaz von Seyfried (Austrian conductor & composer, pupil of Mozart, friend of Beethoven)
1846 – Frantiszek Ścigalski (Polish composer, violinist & conductor)
1846 – Gottfried Wilhelm Fink (German theologian, poet, composer, writer & lecturer on music & music editor)
1855 – Francisco Eduardo da Costa (Portuguese pianist & composer)
1865 – Józef Nowakowski (Polish composer, pianist & teacher, friend of Chopin)
1867 – Karol Kątski (Polish violinist & composer)
1868 – Franz Xaver Schnyder von Wartensee (Swiss composer, pianist, conductor & writer on music)
1883 – August Friedrich Pott (German violinist & composer)
1887 – Wilhelm Volkmar (German organist & composer)
1922 – Carl Fuchs (German cellist, composer, teacher & writer on music)
1948 – Oscar Lorenzo Fernández (Brazilian composer, violinist, pianist, cellist & academician)
1948 – Oley Speaks (American songwriter & baritone singer)
1953 – Nicolai Berezowsky (Russian-born American violinist, composer & conductor)
1958 – Nina Garelli (Italian operatic soprano)
1962 – Carlos Lavín (Chilean composer & musicologist)
1964 – Aleksey Zhivotov (Russian composer)
1965 – Otto Reinhold (German composer)
1967 – Brian Epstein (English music entrepreneur & manager of The Beatles)
1976 – Mukesh (Indian Bollywood playback singer)
1979 – Bolesław Szabelski (Polish composer)
1981 – Joan Edwards (American jazz singer & philanthropist)
1990 – Stevie Ray Vaughan (American blues guitarist & singer)
1991 – Vince Taylor (English rock singer & songwriter, The Playboys, "Brand New Cadillac")
1994 – El Polaco [Roberto Goyeneche] (Argentine tango singer)
1994 – Thomas Hayward (American operatic tenor & teacher)
1995 – Marty Paich (American jazz arranger, pianist, composer & conductor)
1997 – Sotiria Bellou (Greek rebetiko singer)
2005 – Giorgos Mouzakis (Greek songwriter, trumpeter & composer of light music)
2006 – Jesse Pintado (Mexican-born American metal guitarist, Napalm Death)

On August 27th we remember one of history's greatest composers, Josquin; the greatest Spanish composer of Josquin's century, Victoria (who may have died on the 20th, not the 27th - I opted for the earlier date to remember him, considering how full-up the 27th is - I mean, just LOOK at that list); Beatles manager Brian Epstein; Bollywood playback singer Mukesh; Texas blues great Stevie Ray Vaughan; jazz arranger Marty Paich; grindcore guitar pioneer Jesse Pintado of Napalm Death; and a whole lot of other tuneful stiffs...

Such as Gottfried Wilhelm Fink. Fink was, among many other things, both a poet and a composer. Thus, many of his compositions are Lieder for which he set his own poems to music. I have no idea if they're any good. But, it is kind of interesting, and something you don't see every day in a 19th-century composer. Of course, much earlier, you had your medieval poet-composers: your troubadours, your trouvères, your Minnesänger. But eventually a division of labor between writing of lyrics and music became pretty standard, at least for professional songwriters.

Now, for folk musicians - itinerant minstrels, jongleurs, country blues singers and the like - it's always been a little different. But even up until the mid-20th century, lyrics and music of published songs were usually written by separate persons. Songwriters who did both, like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and (sometimes) Frank Loesser and Hoagy Carmichael were definitely exceptions to the rule. And that's for pop songwriting. In the classical world, such exceptions are still almost unheard-of, which is why Fink is quite remarkable. Rotten about his surname. With a name like Fink you don't get very far in the English-speaking world. Although in German, it merely means "finch," which is quite lovely. Seriously, take a look at these guys and tell me they aren't the most delightful creatures you've ever seen:

As you can see, some of them are more colorful than others.

Oscar Lorenzo Fernández was a Brazilian composer of Spanish descent. His nationalistic opera Malazarte (1931–33) is considered the first successful Brazilian opera of this type. Its Portuguese libretto by Graça Aranha was for some reason translated into Italian for its 1941 premiere at the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro. In 1936, Fernández founded the Conservatório Brasiliero de Música in Rio, which he directed until you-know-what happened.

Nicolai Berezowsky recalled in his memoire Duet with Nicky that as a young chorister in the Imperial Capella in St. Petersburg, the choir sometimes sang for the family of Tsar Nicholas and Rasputin. He says the choirboys would tear pages from their hymnals to make spit-balls which they would aim at Rasputin. After settling in New York, Berezowsky attended Juilliard and played in the 1st Violin section of the New York Philharmonic. He was a protégé of Serge Koussevitzky, who premiered his symphonies to great acclaim. In his lifetime, he was apparently a better-known composer than Aaron Copland.

Do you know who wrote the music to "On the Road to Mandalay," with words by Rudyard Kipling, that Frank Sinatra recorded for his 1958 album Come Fly With Me? - Oley Speaks. - That's nice, but what was the name of the composer? - Oley Speaks. - Okay, fine. You don't want to tell me his name. But could you at least tell me what this guy Oley is saying? - He's not saying anything. He's been dead for 63 years....