News & Updates — Celebrate Icons

Happy birthday to the great and influential bluesman Albert King, one of my all time favorites. I saw him play back in the '80s when I was a kid and it left a HUGE impression on me. A major guitar figure (who was a left-hander playing "backwards") and an excellent singer, he was born in the Mississippi Delta area. His first professional gigs were in Arkansas and he eventually moved North. Some of his earliest recordings were as a drummer for Jimmy Reed. He had limited success in the '50s in Chicago & St Louis but really found his fame...

The speed metalist of the hard bop saxophone players, the tenor runs of Johnny Griffin could waste most competitors and his stretch in the '50s/early '60s with Blue Note, Riverside and Jazzland is hard to beat. He co-led a band with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and was a memorable feature with some of Thelonious Monk's best line-ups. He came out of that jazz factory of Chicago's DuSable High and got early gigs with T-Bone Walker, Lionel Hampton and Arnett Cobb. He was old enough to have been part of the bop generation, despite not making a record 'til '53. He joined...

The great tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson came out of Wayne State University, where he was classmates with Yusef Lateef, Donald Byrd and Barry Harris. After leaving the Army in '62 he went to NYC and hooked up with Kenny Dorham & Dexter Gordon and then joined Horace Silver's group, soloing on the hit "Song For My Father". He became a go-to tenor for sessions at Blue Note records (appearing with Silver, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Grant Green, McCoy Tyner, Larry Young and tons more), including releasing several albums on the label as a leader. In the...

Louis Barron together with his wife Bebe were early pioneers of American electronic music and created the film score for MGM's awesome 1956 Sc-Fi flick Forbidden Planet. The "electronic tonalities" of the soundtrack made it the world's first entirely electronic film score. Louis Barron was an electrician who custom-built his own circuits which the couple overloaded. They generated the sounds using a ring modulator, and they further fucked with the sounds by manipulating the tape and adding reverb, etc. They improvised along the way, trying to craft the sounds along to the actions of the characters as best they could....

One of early rock & roll's greatest voices, Roy Orbison, was born 80 years ago today. Mixing country, rockabilly and pop with meticulous recording and deep lyrics with that amazing voice, there was only one Roy Orbison, the man who dressed in black with dyed black hair and dark sunglasses standing motionless on stage delivering the songs with otherworldliness. He toured with Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys and his songs were covered by the Everly Brothers, Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, Glenn Campbell and others. We salute you, Lefty Wilbury.