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.

Charles Mingus, along with Israel "Cachao" Lopez and William Parker, are my favorite bassists of all time. Add that Mingus is one of the greatest composers to ever walk the planet and his notoriously prickly personality and you have a genuine one-of-a-kind icon of insane genius. Deeply bluesy, gospel-inspired, funky and experimental, his music brought "jazz" to a whole 'nother level. As with Duke Ellington, he wrote compositions for specific players in mind, while engaging every member of the band. His music was also deeply politicized. Coming from Watts, he grew up poor but still learned the cello. He started...

Despite the working name of "Joe Cuba", the conguero Gilberto Calderon was actually a Nuyorican who grew up in Spanish Harlem. Since the first album in 1962 and into the '70s, the Joe Cuba Sextet were a very important and influential band on the newer generation of Latino musicians. With the two-tongued vocal duo of Cheo Feliciano (singing in Español) and Jimmy Sabater (singing in English) they scored a bunch of smash hits and helped fuel the boogaloo craze of the mid-'60s, fusing the soul music influence with Afro-Cuban rhythms. The group's albums contained burning hot descargas, jumping boogaloos and...