News & Updates — Celebrate Icons

Happy birthday to the man who James Brown owes his career to, Bobby Byrd. Byrd was JB's discoverer and longtime business partner, as well as a singer/composer of his own note. Byrd came from a gospel music family in Georgia and sang and played piano & organ. He and his siblings would take secular jobs in South Carolina, unbeknownst to his elders, and they got to be known in the region. Professional by 1952 when he met Brown during a prison baseball game and the Byrd family helped get him paroled. Upon release, Brown immediately joined Byrd's band The Famous...

Producer and vocalist Yabby You was one of reggae's most original characters as he was a Christian with dreadlocks, not a Rastafarian. That is how he came to be called "the Jesus Dread". Vivian Jackson grew up in extreme poverty in the ghettos of Kingston JA. Working at a blast furnace at age 12, he became partially crippled from malnutrition and lost the job as a result. Finding no promise in the streets, he was given a chance by King Tubby to cut an original single at Tubby's studio. "Conquering Lion" was released in 1972 and went straight to the...

A true innovator, Pierre Schaeffer was the father of musique-concrete. Not a trained musician but an admirer of Luigi Russolo, Schaeffer sought to dispense with music theory early on and create a new experimental music that utilized found sounds, pitched turntables, manipulated & spliced magnetic tape, looping & sampling, noise & distortion and other revolutionary techniques that have been endlessly used by artists since. He was Lee "Scratch" Perry, Christian Marclay, the Bomb Squad, Edgar Varese, Stockhausen and Pole before most of them were even born. You could also say that without Schaeffer's imagination the genres of electro-acoustic music, hiphop,...

I love jazz violin and Stuff Smith was a major one. He came out of the swing era but played a Louie Armstrong-influenced progressive style with beboppers and even with Sun Ra, inspiring many jazz violinists since, including Billy Bang. And he was the first person to use electronic amplification for it. From Cleveland, Hezekiah Leroy Gordon Smith learned the instrument from his father before studying classical music. At 15 he toured with the Aunt Jemima Revue minstrel show. He played jazz professionally in Dallas starting in '26 and NYC starting in '35 after stints with Jelly Roll Morton and a...

A pioneer woman of jazz, Anna Mae Winburn directed the all-female, racially integrated International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a top attraction in the '40s. Although often looked at as a novelty act, the reality is that the band included top notch musicians whom were not given a fair respect in the male-dominated jazz world. From Indiana, Winburn came from a musically-inclined African-American family. She learned to sing and play piano & guitar. She worked in Lloyd Hunter's Serenaders, a popular Nebraska-based territory band of the swing era that included Preston Love. She also led an all-male band (including Charlie Christian!) in...