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Mitchell Herbert Ellis (August 4, 1921 – March 28, 2010) was an American jazz guitarist. Perhaps best known for his 1950s membership in the trio of pianist Oscar Peterson, Ellis was also a staple of west-coast studio recording sessions, and was described by critic Scott Yanow as “an excellent bop-based guitarist with a slight country…

Louis Daniel Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed Satchmo, Satch, and Pops, was an American trumpeter, composer, singer and occasional actor who was one of the most influential figures in jazz. His career spanned five decades, from the 1920s to the 1960s, and different eras in the history of jazz. In 2017,…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyUMZ4Tpp0U

Thin, red veins of energized gas mark the location of one of the larger supernova remnants in the Milky Way galaxy in this image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. A supernova “remnant” refers to the collective, leftover signs of an exploded star, or supernova. The red filaments in this image belong to a supernova remnant…

Roscoe Mitchell (born August 3, 1940) is an American composer, jazz instrumentalist, and educator, known for being “a technically superb – if idiosyncratic – saxophonist”. The Penguin Guide to Jazz described him as “one of the key figures” in avant-garde jazz; All About Jazz states that he has been “at the forefront of modern music”…

Charles James Shavers (August 3, 1920 – July 8, 1971) was an American swing era jazz trumpeter who played with Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone, Sidney Bechet, Midge Williams, and Billie Holiday. He was an arranger and composer, and one of his compositions, “Undecided“, is a jazz standard.[2] Charlie Shavers’ father (a…

Eddie Jefferson (August 3, 1918 – May 9, 1979) was a jazz vocalist and lyricist. He is credited as an innovator of vocalese, a musical style in which lyrics are set to an instrumental composition or solo. Jefferson himself claims that his main influence was Leo Watson. Perhaps his best-known song is “Moody’s Mood for…

World Music on Flamenco Fridays with Paco de Lucia and Ricardo Modrego Ricardo Modrego (19 October 1934 – 17 January 2017) was a Spanish flamenco guitarist from Madrid. He was the brother of Spanish-Flamenco dancer Nana Lorca. They both started their careers in Madrid in the early 1950s. By 1953 the well known brother and…