News & Updates — vintage footage

Happy birthday to that bitter bastard genius, the incomparable Miles Davis!! From bebop to cool jazz to modal to out-funk/fusion to pop, Miles played it all and never cared what the critics thought of him! My personal favorite era was his '70s hard-avant-funk, some of which sounds so brutal that it borders on proto-death metal!

Happy birthday to Levon Helm, drummer and vocalist for The Band, bringing classic American roots, country, blues, gospel, R&B, rockabilly and rock into a popular mixture. From Arkansas, he started playing music at a young age, with Bill Monroe as a first major influence. Another early influence was James "Peck" Curtis, drummer for Sonny Boy Williamson II. He started his first band in the mid '50s and was inspired after witnessing early performances by Elvis Presley, Bo Diddley and other greats. In the late '50s he joined Ronnie Hawkins' band. Several members of that band became known as Levon &...

One of the many Jews to contribute immensely to the classic NYC salsa scene, Barry Rogers was a Bronx-bred trombonist who was a first call of many Latin bandleaders, as well as a founding member of the excellent '70s fusion group Dreams (along with Billy Cobham, The Brecker Brothers, John Abercrombie and others). Neighborhood-wise, he came up in mambo & jazz territory. A jazzer at his core, Rogers started playing in Latin bands in the mid '50s. He led the Hugo Dickens group, of which many of the best players of the day (Marty Sheller, Hubert Laws, Bobby Porcelli, Pete...

The cult jazz artist Rufus Harley started out like any other Philly kid, taking lessons from Dennis Sandole, playing saxophone and other reeds, jamming with Philly scenesters like John Coltrane and Philly Joe Jones and gigging as a professional tenor player in his teens. But hearing the Scottish bagpipes during JFK's funeral procession got him really obsessed and he became the first bagpiper of jazz. After months of practicing the instrument (he even held them "wrong") to the dismay of his neighbors who would call the pigs (to which he would say "Officer, do I look Scottish to you?"--Harley was...

Today is the birthday of Jeffrey Hyman aka Joey Ramone, front man of The Ramones and pop-punk idol. He came out of Forest Hills, Queens with his love of '60s rock, girl groups and glam and joined Sniper in the early '70s playing shows with groups like the NY Dolls and Suicide. In '74 he formed the Ramones (the name a reference to a Paul McCartney pseudonym). Joey was originally the drummer of the band, but being an excellent self-taught singer it wasn't long before he was the frontman to one of the best punk bands in the world for...