Bilal released a number of recordings. I learned of him first as a sideman to Abdul Abdul-Malik's 1963 album _The Eastern Moods of…_ He was born in June of 1928. As a young man during the 1940’s, Bilal Abdurahman worked as an illustrator for a local Brooklyn newspaper, while simultaneously studying music. He took special interest in the music and percussion instruments of the African continent. Like many Black American artists of the time, his interest in African art was coupled with a broader interest in African history, which led him to explore new spiritual traditions. In particular, he began to study Islam and the Afrocentric Hebrew tradition — both of which had become staples within the Black communities of New York City and several other American urban centers. During the 1950’s, the two participated in the famed weekly jam sessions at the Putnam Central Club that typified the remarkable jazz scene that flourished in Brooklyn during the era. These jam sessions were attended by jazz luminaries like Max Roach, Randy Weston, Wynton Kelly, Charles Mingus, and so many others. He passed away in 1988.
The Marble Index is the second solo album and third studio album by German musician Nico. This cut, arranged by John Cale a founding member of the Velvet Underground features Nico singing over a repetitive pipe organ. Jim Morrison, considered by Nico to be a soulmate, offered her a model for her writings by showing her how he worked on his poems, indicated by her use of internal rhymes. The album's release coincided with a change in Nico's look, when she adopted what has been called a _gothic horror princess_ persona[65] and _switched from dyed blonde to dark henna and started wearing black, heavy fabrics and boots_.[5] As a result, in addition to being a musical prototype for the goth subculture, Nico became a visual one as well.[38] Claire Marie Healy wrote, _Nico's visual statement of these years speaks of the power that comes with creating a new persona for yourself_[20] and she described the singer as _the first ever goth girl_.[20] By the early 1980s, many women began to dress like Nico; nicknamed _Nico-teens_, they were the first goth girls, encouraging a cult following for the singer. -wiki
Charles Arthur Russell Jr. (May 21, 1951 – April 4, 1992) was an American cellist, composer, producer, singer, and musician from Iowa, whose work spanned a disparate range of styles. Trained in contemporary experimental composition and Indian classical music, Russell relocated to New York in the mid-1970s, where he became associated with Lower Manhattan's avant-garde community and eventually embraced the city's disco scene. He briefly dated Allen Ginsberg in 1973, and had a bi-sexual lifestyle. Russell died from AIDS-related illnesses in 1992 at age 40, still in relative obscurity and poverty. Russell was prolific, but was also notorious for leaving songs unfinished and continually revising his music. Ernie Brooks said Russell _never arrived at a completed version of anything._ Peter Gordon stated, _his quest wasn't really to do a finished product but more to do with exploring his different ways of working musically._ He left behind more than 1,000 tapes when he died, 40 of them different mixes of one song. - wiki This music is pulled from a video shot by Russell and multimedia artist Phill Niblock in Arthur Russell's loft in 1985, featuring Russell singing and playing his cello.
Jazz double bassist Abdul-Malik (1927-1993) is remembered for integrating Middle Eastern and North African music styles in his jazz music as evidences by this oud performance by him. He played bass. Art Blakey, Earl Hines, Randy Weston, Ray Nance, and Thelonious Monk, among others. An interesting collaborator on his recordings was reed player Bilal Abdurhaman. With Malik is on this album: Bilal Abdurraham on alto, clarinet, Korean reed flute, and percussion, and William Henry Allen plays bass & percussion.
Marysia Starosta, is a Polish singer. Her debut album titled Maryland was released on November 24, 2008 by EMI Music Poland. From 2011 she worked with her former partner, rapper Sokół with whom she released two albums, both certified Platinum in Poland. - Wikipedia
As with so many albums being released in 2021/22, bass/clarinetist Alicia Lee has been deeply shaped by the isolation of the pandemic and the restrictions on performing music with others. - Bandcamp This was another born-of-pandemic selections. Lee teaches at the U of WI in Madison and performs with the NYC chamber group Decoda.
Johnson was born in Greeley, CO and studied privately with Morton Feldman in New York. From 1971 to 1983 he was a music critic for The Village Voice, writing about new music. During this period he also composed four of his best known works: An Hour for Piano (1971), The Four-Note Opera (1972), Failing: A very difficult piece for solo string bass (1975) and Nine Bells (1979). After 15 years in New York, he moved to Paris where he lives with his wife, the artist Esther Ferrer. This album was the start of a period of Johnson's experimentation with complex techniques using mathematical notions...he went on to collaborate with mathemeticians. exploring notions of self-similar melodies (Loops for orchestra, 1998), tiling patterns (Tilework, 2003), and block designs (Block Design for Piano, 2005), along with homometric pairs (Intervals, 2013). Johnson was born in Greeley, CO and studied privately with Morton Feldman in New York. From 1971 to 1983 he was a music critic for The Village Voice, writing about new music. During this period he also composed four of his best known works: An Hour for Piano (1971), The Four-Note Opera (1972), Failing: A very difficult piece for solo string bass (1975) and Nine Bells (1979). After 15 years in New York, he moved to Paris where he lives with his wife, the artist Esther Ferrer. This album was the start of a period of Johnson's experimentation with complex techniques using mathematical notions...he went on to collaborate with mathemeticians. exploring notions of self-similar melodies (Loops for orchestra, 1998), tiling patterns (Tilework, 2003), and block designs (Block Design for Piano, 2005), along with homometric pairs (Intervals, 2013).
Theirry is an accomplished French pianist who specialized in Chopin. One year after he made this recording, he abandoned music and became a Trappist monk. He lives to this day at Saint-Benoît d'En-Calcat monastary in southwest France.
Leslie Feist, known mononymously as Feist, is a Canadian indie pop singer-songwriter and guitarist, performing both as a solo artist and as a member of the indie rock group Broken Social Scene. Feist launched her solo music career in 1999 with the release of Monarch
This is a home-made recording. From his bandcamp page: I’m Suray Sertin, a Canadian record producer born in Laval, Québec. My sound is a result of what inspired me while growing up. As time goes on, the blend of diverse elements that I concoct keeps evolving naturally, often resulting in an unusual relationship between music and textures in a timeless, beautiful way.
Little known jazz cellist Calo Scott is of interest in this cut, with Waldron's first wife Elaine who sings. Billie Holiday was godmother to Elaine & Mal's first daughter. Scott is best remembered as a side man of Ahmed Abdul-Malik (see ITMOTO 1/29/21). He was born in Camaguey, Cuba, and moved to the USA when he was two-years old. He began studies on piano, chose to focus his studies on the saxophone in his teens, and started working as a professional musician with a US Army band in the 1949. In the early 1950s he was diagnosed with a rheumatic heart condition and subsequently switched to cello. His peers and critics later commented that his early work with the saxophone heavily informed his signature phrasings on the cello. He studied at the Third Street Settlement House (a community school founded in 1894 in the Lower East Side, which offered classes in contemporary music and dance). He began working as a freelance musician in New York City in the mid 1950s...from 1957 to 1974 he had participated in 23 recording sessions. Calo Scott was widely known for his unique habit of playing the cello while standing. Portraits of the artist suggest that he supported the cello’s weight with the assistance of wearing a saxophone-neck strap. -- wiki He performs on this 1958 Max Waldron date recorded in Hackensack, NJ with Julian Euell, (bass), Elvin Jones (drums), Eric Dixon (flute), Art Farmer (trumpet), and -- of course -- Waldron on the piano. Four years after this date, Waldron overdosed on herion and had a breakdown causing him to lose all ability to play or remember any music. He had a long, slow recovery and was eventually able to return to performing. - wiki.
Richard David James, best known by the alias Aphex Twin and less prominently as AFX, is a British musician, composer and DJ, born in Limerick, Ireland. James has been known to make _wild and essentially unverifiable claims_ about his personal life in interviews, including the claim that he inherited the name of a dead older brother. He has described himself as _just some irritating, lying, ginger kid from Cornwall who should have been locked up in some youth detention centre. I just managed to escape and blag it into music._ In a 1993 interview, he claimed to only sleep two to three hours per night. In the mid-1990s, James bought a disused bank in the Elephant & Castle area of London, where he claimed to live in a converted bank vault. He falsely claimed in a 2001 interview to have bought the steel structure in the centre of the Elephant Square roundabout, though this is in fact the Michael Faraday Memorial which houses an electricity substation for the London Underground. In the 1990s, James bought a 1950s armoured car, complete with a working machine gun, which he claimed to drive around Cornwall in lieu of a car. - wiki James claimed that it was inspired to write the music for this album by lucid dreaming, and likened the music to _standing in a power station on acid
This Chant of Compassion, performed by Plum Village sanga, is taken from the last of the five days of live streamed funeral rites for Thich Nhat Hanh, who passed away on January 22, 2022. The chant is articularly associated with the four-armed Shadakshari form of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. People from across the world participated in celebrating this master teacher, whom -- famously -- Martin Luther King, Jr. nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. He wrote a book in 2015 describing how he wanted to be remembered. _I have a disciple in Vietnam who wants to build a stupa for my ashes when I die. He and others want to put a plaque with the words, “Here lies my beloved teacher.” I told them not to waste the temple land...I suggested that, if they still insist on building a stupa, they have the plaque say, _I am not in here._ But in case people don’t get it, they could add a second plaque, _I am not out there either._ If still people don’t understand, then you can write on the third and last plaque, _I may be found in your way of breathing and walking._ -wiki
