News & Updates — vintage footage

The King of the Congas, Tata Güines was a shoe-maker and a bassist before he became one of the most prestigious and important percussionists in Cuban music. After some early study with Chano Pozo, his professional career took off in the '50s, playing in Havana with the likes of Arsenio Rodriguez, Bebo Valdés, Chico O'Farrill, Peruchín, Cachao, Frank Emilio Flynn and others. In '52 he toured South America with Jose Fajardo. In 1957 he went to NYC, where he worked with Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Josephine Baker and others. He became a featured soloist on the NYC scene, helping...

A very significant 20th-century composer, Bernard Herrmann is best known for his film scores, especially for Alfred Hitchcock. A Russian-American Jew, he grew up in NYC and found work as a composer and conductor in the world of classical music after his schooling at Julliard. During the Great Depression of the '30s he was able to put together his own orchestra of out-of-work musicians and played the music of underknown composers, including Charles Ives, whom Herrmann championed. He did a lot of work for Orson Welles, including scoring Welles' first film Citizen Kane, as well as several radio works such as...

David "Honeyboy" Edwards lived to be nearly a hundred years old! The Delta bluesman was playing concerts right up until the day he died and I was fortunate enough to catch him with Corey Harris in Massachusetts many moons ago. Not only had he been a living, breathing representative of live old school Delta blues well into the new millennium, but he was doubly important to blues scholars as a man who could fill in some details on long-gone figures, such as his close friend Robert Johnson, whom he toured with and was present the night Johnson was poisoned. He...

Shout-out to the Bollywood film composer extraordinaire Rahul Dev Burman, born today in 1939. As someone who didn't grow up with Bollywood movies, my big ears found some of the wacky, funky, psychedelic soundtracks that seemed to annoy my Hindi friends. Often times the craziest tunes to my ears would be from R.D. Burman. His wife was the great singer Asha Bhosle, who often worked with him. He has been a popular presence in Hindi film music since the mid-'60s and continues to be popular long after his passing. Often a trendsetter in the industry, his soundtracks included Indian folk...

Bill Broonzy had a long and distinguished career, from spirituals to jazz to country blues to urban and back to folksy. One of 17 children born to a Southern family (precise date and location, unsure), he grew up in Arkansas. His first instrument was a cigar-box fiddle and he sang spirituals. He was a preacher, farmer, soldier and husband for awhile before he went north to Chicago around 1920. In Chicago he started playing guitar and gigging, signed to Paramount and released his first sides in 1927. He did some recording in NYC and toured with Memphis Minnie as her...