The great Nuyorican percussionist, bandleader and composer Ray Barretto (Mr Hard Hands) retains a huge legacy, greatly influencing many percussionists and Latino jazz artists, and standing as a towering figure in the landscape of salsa music. He was checking out the bebop scene in the late '40s and honing his chops before getting the tap to play with Charlie Parker. He then worked in Tito Puente's band for four years in the late '50s. In the '60s he was a first-call percussionist for sessions at various jazz labels (Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, etc), as well as playing with Herbie Mann....

On this day of birth for many great musicians, I have to give a nod to a personal favorite of mine, the outsider rockabilly/country wildman Hasil Adkins. A one-redneck band who could play percussion and guitar at the same time, this guy whooped it up like a punk rocker before such thing existed, with some of the most bizarre stories ever set to song. His songs talked about sex, chicken, hot dogs, aliens, his car (which he named "the Hunchin' Wagon), dealings with the law, decapitating heads, eating peanut butter on the moon and other crucial issues of his world,...

Singer and songwriter Tammi Terrell's star burned bright in her short career, one marked by abuse and tragedy yet she remains a popular artist 45 years after her death. From Philadelphia, two things happened that would positively and negatively affect her life: she was found to have immense talent and was also often subdued by intense migraine headaches (the latter of which started happening after she was raped by neighborhood boys, later convicted, at 11). She hit the road as a teenager with Patti LaBelle and Gary US Bonds and recorded for Wand and Chess Records subsidiary Checker. She sang...

Maya Deren was the mother of American avant-garde cinema. Her films were surreal and intense, full of symbolism and incredibly strange ideas. Check out The Very Eye of Night, Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land. She was a Ukrainian Jew who fled to the US with her family to escape the ethnic-cleansing pogrom. Her first husband was a socialist activist who she married at 18. Her second husband, famous European photographer Alexander Hammid, was co-collaborator on Meshes and her third husband, Japanese-American composer Teiji Ito, made some amazing soundtracks to these films. John Cage and Marcel Duchamp were involved...

Happy born day shout-out to Lincoln "Style" Scott, the great Jamaican drummer with Dub Syndicate, the Roots Radics (who became the Channel One house band around '79) and about a million Adrian Sherwood/On-U Sound projects. His earliest record appearances were with Sugar Minott ("Hard Time Pressure") and David Isaacs. In '78 he became drummer for Prince Far-I & the Arabs, who were also largely the same group as Sherwood's Creation Rebel. With the Radics he helped lay the foundation for what became known as dancehall music. He played with Gregory Isaacs (that's Scott on "Night Nurse"), Barrington Levy, Eek-A-Mouse, Bunny...