Yes, I know it's the birthday today of a more famous pianist, Bill Evans, but I want to highlight Mal Waldron because I like his music better (it's just a matter of personal taste, pal) and I feel that he is underrated, despite a much-longer career than Evans. Born to West Indian parents in NYC, Mal grew up in Jamaica, Queens and took piano lessons before also playing alto sax in bands as a teenager. In the '40s he was witness to the bebop explosion and after college switched permanently to piano. Turning pro in '50, he cut first record...

Happy birthday to Al Hibbler, the uniquely gifted and underrated vocalist and civil rights activist who's career was disturbed by a near-blacklist recording ban due to his arrests in the movement. Born in Mississippi, he joined a choir at a school for the blind in Little Rock at age 12. He developed his baritone voice and started singing blues in the '30s. In the early '40s he sang in territory bands in the South and Midwest and also with Jay McShann (the same band with young Charlie Parker) where he made his first recorded appearance. In '43 he joined the...

Happy birthday to the man who James Brown owes his career to, Bobby Byrd. Byrd was JB's discoverer and longtime business partner, as well as a singer/composer of his own note. Byrd came from a gospel music family in Georgia and sang and played piano & organ. He and his siblings would take secular jobs in South Carolina, unbeknownst to his elders, and they got to be known in the region. Professional by 1952 when he met Brown during a prison baseball game and the Byrd family helped get him paroled. Upon release, Brown immediately joined Byrd's band The Famous...

Producer and vocalist Yabby You was one of reggae's most original characters as he was a Christian with dreadlocks, not a Rastafarian. That is how he came to be called "the Jesus Dread". Vivian Jackson grew up in extreme poverty in the ghettos of Kingston JA. Working at a blast furnace at age 12, he became partially crippled from malnutrition and lost the job as a result. Finding no promise in the streets, he was given a chance by King Tubby to cut an original single at Tubby's studio. "Conquering Lion" was released in 1972 and went straight to the...

A true innovator, Pierre Schaeffer was the father of musique-concrete. Not a trained musician but an admirer of Luigi Russolo, Schaeffer sought to dispense with music theory early on and create a new experimental music that utilized found sounds, pitched turntables, manipulated & spliced magnetic tape, looping & sampling, noise & distortion and other revolutionary techniques that have been endlessly used by artists since. He was Lee "Scratch" Perry, Christian Marclay, the Bomb Squad, Edgar Varese, Stockhausen and Pole before most of them were even born. You could also say that without Schaeffer's imagination the genres of electro-acoustic music, hiphop,...