Happy birthday to Hugo Blanco, one of the greats of Venezuelan music and the South American harp. The author of "Moliendo Café", written in 1958 and now a "world music" standard, Blanco was born in Caracas and learned to play the cuatro at 15. He fused Venezuelan folk music such as gaita and joropo with influences from Cuba and beyond. In the '60s he also introduced ska to Venezuela with his group Las Cuatro Monedas. Other notable songs of his include "La Vecina", which was featured in the Miami Vice TV show, and "La Rosa Blanca", which I first heard...

Happy birthday to the bop trumpeter Fats Navarro, good friend of Charles Mingus and a huge influence on Clifford Brown before Navarro's short life ended at just 26. Our Afro-Cuban-Chinese hero was from Key West and played in Florida and Cincinnati to begin his pro career. To Kansas City in '44, he started playing in the swing band of Andy Kirk before settling in NYC in '46. He joined Billy Eckstine's great band as well as participating in the bebop revolution with Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron, Kenny Clarke and others. As a bi-lingual Latino, he also spent time jamming...

Perhaps the first country blues star and indisputably the father of Texas style blues, the unique guitar stylist and impressive singer Lemon Henry Jefferson (aka "Blind Lemon Jefferson") was born without sight to a sharecropping family from Texas. He began playing guitar at 19 and soon after he befriended and played a bunch with Lead Belly in Dallas. In 1917 he hired young T-Bone Walker as a guide and it was Jefferson who was his guitar teacher. (He also taught Josh White). He made his first recordings in '25, gospel sides released as by "Deacon L.J. Bates". In '26 he first...

One of my very favorite wordsmiths, Leonard Cohen delivered some lyrics of the deepest and most imaginative variety, a man who could articulate any emotion in the heaviest and clearest poetic sense. No topic was off limits and no emotion was irrelevant. A Montreal native, Leonard began his career strictly as a poet (first published in '54) and novelist before delivering his debut album Songs of Leonard Cohen in '67. The album shook the expectations of lyricists with its uninhibited display of pain, joy, sexuality, sadness and mysticism. Every serious singer/songwriter had to up their game after this monumental set...

One of the most-called session men of his day, the Comanche/Kiowa tribal guitarist/pianist Jesse Ed Davis was born on this day in 1944. His father Jesse was a well-known "True Indian" painter. The younger Davis got his musical career started in his native Oklahoma in a band in the late '50s with future Blood Sweat & Tears vocalist Jerry Fisher. In the mid-'60s he went on the road as a member of Conway Twitty's band before settling in California. Through friends Leon Russell and Levon Helm he got acquainted with the studio scene and started working as a session man/secret...