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Happy birthday to tenor saxophone hero John Gilmore. A long-time member of Sun Ra's Arkestra, a major influence on John Coltrane and an icon Blowing Out Of Chicago. Gilmore started playing clarinet at 14 and tenor sax at 17 and he played with Earl Hines before joining Sun Ra's fledgling Arkestra in '53. He stayed with Ra for over forty years, recording on every single Arkestra record until '95 (including most of the legendary Ra-produced doo-wop sides). He brought a gifted and harmonically advanced style and could play sweet to ferocious, but bop & blues was always his main language....

One of Chilé's national heroes, Víctor Jara was a martyred nueva-canción folk singer and songwriter who was victim of the bloody US-funded Pinochet coup and horrific ensuing violence. He was murdered and his body thrown into the street. This post honoring Jara on his birthday could also be considered a "fuck you" to the United States' continued program of destabilizing countries around the globe for the benefit of fat cats at the top of the stinking, rotting capitalist pile of garbage. Growing up very poor, his violent father left the family but his mother encouraged education before she died in...

Feliz anniversário para Tim Maia, the fun & lovable Brazilian soul singer and MPB star who's direct honesty appealed to his fans. Born Sebastião Rodrigues Maia from a favela of Rio, the 18th of 19 children, he started as a drummer at 14 but soon became an excellent guitarist. He was a childhood friend of Roberto Carlos, Erasmo Carlos and Jorge Ben. He was in the doo-wop group The Sputniks with Roberto Carlos before adopting the name Tim Maia and going solo. He spent the early '60s in the US and recorded there with the doo-wop group The Ideals (the...

Born on this day was the great improvising bassist Sirone, who brought a highly intuitive, yet bluesy improvisational presence to the scene and contributing to several genre-defining classics of the '60s & '70s, not the least of which was his work with the collective Revolutionary Ensemble. From Atlanta, the former Norris Jones took up the trombone as a kid before moving to bass at 17. He started playing locally in the late '50s in a group with saxophonist George Adams. He was a sideman at sessions for Sam Cooke, Smokey Robinson and other R&B artists. In '65 he moved to...

Happy birthday to the beatnik poet/singer/artist/anarchist Tuli Kupferberg! From NYC, he founded a beat magazine, Birth, in 1958, publishing Allen Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima, Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka), Ted Joans and others. In 1964 he and Ed Sanders founded the unfiltered anti-pop group The Fugs, who released their humorous and crude tunes on ESP Disk and turned the NYC rock scene upside down (despite being the old man of the scene!). Tuli wrote several of their tunes, such as "CIA Man" and "Kill For Peace". He cut the bizarre spoken word album No Deposit, No Return in '66, the same...