News & Updates — Celebrate Icons

Happy birthday to the award-winning poet & spoken word performer Jayne Cortez. Her rhythmic and (anti)militant ways with words are captivating and inspiring. I see her as part of the take-no-shit, fire-as-spit population of radical and rhythmic poets of deep articulation like Amiri Baraka, Gil Scott-Heron, Nikki Giovanni, Last Poets, Suheir Hammad, Chuck D, Welfare Poets and others aligned with social justice, black power and fearless expression. She has written several books and made a bunch of records with funk & free-jazz musical backing, often times with Denardo Coleman (her son with Ornette Coleman) and associates called the Firespitters. She...

One half of the greatest soul music singing duo of all time, the Dave of Sam & Dave was the deeper-voiced of the two. Dave Prater came from Georgia and sang gospel, both as a child in church and professionally with the Sensational Hummingbirds. He hooked up with Sam Moore in '61 and they signed to Roulette, releasing a clutch of tunes often with Dave singing the lead and sometimes composing. In '64 they signed with Atlantic and made their records in Memphis at the famous Stax studio and the house band Booker T & the MG's. For a four-year...

Has there ever been a more mythical musician than blues icon Robert Johnson? He reportedly sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads to acquire his prodigious guitar talent. Little by little, blues historians have been trying to fill in the pieces. It seems that he was a gigolo who was not a star as a musician during his lifetime, but a well-traveled man who was respected for his talent wherever he went. He sang and played pop, jazz, blues and country music on street corners and parties (as well as practicing in graveyards at night) and has played...

She was the lady who swings the band. Mary Lou Williams may be not be considered a major jazz star but her contributions as a pianist, arranger, composer, teacher, radio host and historian are immense. She has been a professional since she was a little girl in Pittsburgh and was playing with Duke Ellington's Washingtonians at 13. She married saxophonist John Williams in 1927 and formed a band with him in Memphis before they both joined Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds of Joy in Oklahoma City in '29, with whom Mary Lou made her first recordings as the band's pianist, composer...

Cheikha Rimitti was a pioneering female raï singer in Algeria and beyond. She grew up in poverty before joining a song & dance troupe in the late '30s. She broke custom in the early '40s by singing about sex and booze in a deeply taboo environment in Algeria, using filthy slang and a deeper ("unfemale"?) voice in the process. In 1954 she encouraged young women to lose their virginity, causing a major scandal ("Charrak Gattà", a record still suppressed to this day). This found her banned in her homeland and she took to working in France and elsewhere, staying largely...