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Happy birthday to that great hard bop pianist Horace Silver! He was of Cape Verdean heritage but grew up in Connecticut. He studied classical music as well as taking in the music of Cabo Verde that his father taught him. As a teenager he gigged on both piano and tenor sax. After playing with Stan Getz in Hartford in '50 he went on tour with him. He moved to NYC in '51 and started playing with Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and Lou Donaldson. In '52 he began working for Blue Note Records, as a session pianist and as a recording...

Happy birthday to another one they sometimes call The Fifth Beatle, Billy Preston. The future top session man grew up in Los Angeles a piano prodigy. At 10 he was performing with Mahalia Jackson and was on TV at 11 dueting with Nat King Cole. He played a young WC Handy in the biopic St Louis Blues in '58. He joined Little Richard's group in '62 as the band organist, meeting the Beatles in Germany. In '63 he played on Sam Cooke's absolute classic Night Beat. The same year Cooke produced Preston's first album, 16 Year Old Soul. He joined Ray...

A self-taught tenor saxophonist (and activist) from Chicago, Clifford Jordan was underrated and not a flashy type but he enjoyed a long career in jazz, traveling all over the world and lending his hand to various non-profits. While still in Chicago he played R&B, as well as bop with Max Roach and Sonny Stitt. In '57 he moved to NYC, and cut his first of three albums for Blue Note, the classic Blowing In From Chicago, co-led with Sun Ra's tenor man John Gilmore and featuring members of the Jazz Messengers. In the late '50s he worked in groups led...

Born on this day in 1938, the soulful Alton Ellis was one of the finest rocksteady singers Jamaica ever produced. With a career going back to the late '50s, he recorded early on doing ska, R&B and ballads in the duo Alton & Eddy (and with his sister Hortense) for Studio 1 and Randy's. He teamed with John Holt for awhile and started The Flames, recording for Treasure Isle & again Studio 1. The genre took its name from Ellis' 1967 recording "Rock Steady", helping establish the genre and making Ellis popular enough to tour England. Several more hits followed...

Happy birthday to the great Cuban tres player and son montuno legend, one of the founding fathers of salsa and mambo, Aresnio Rodríguez!! His 1940's & '50s conjuntos were major building blocks in creating the mambo style, adding conga, multiple trumpets, piano and tumbao basslines to the son cubano format, leading the way to mambo, salsa and timba to come. Born Ignacio Arsenio Travieso Scull, he came from Matanzas, Cuba. His family were African descendants who practiced Palo Monte. He was blinded at 7 years old when a horse kicked him in the face. He was a professional musician by...