1. What do the following people have in common – Curtis Jackson III, Shawn Carter, Aubrey Graham, Sean Combs and Calvin Broadus Jr.? They are all –
a) North American rappers
b) jazz trumpeters
c) well-respected session musicians
d) the husbands of successful rock singers
e) both musicians and magicians
2. Which of these people is not a professional musician –
a) Little Stevie Wonder
b) Little Malcolm
c) Little Richard
d) Lil Wayne
e) Little Walter
3. What do the following people have in common – McKinley Morganfield, Chester Burnett, James Moore, Huddie Ledbetter and Edward Jones? They were all –
a) classical composers
b) saxophonists
c) born in Mississippi
d) blues musicians
e) shorter than one metre tall
4. Rapper Kodak Brown, Motown singer Smokey Robinson, Big Band leader Count Basie and pianist / composer / arranger Swee’ Pea Strayhorn all had the same first names. What was that name?
a) Edward
b) William
c) Joseph
d) John
e) Nigel
5. Who went by the title The Godfather of Soul?
a) James Brown
b) Sam Cooke
c) Otis Redding
d) Al Green
e) Machine Gun Kelly
6. Abel Makkonen Tesfaye is also known as –
a) The Weekend
b) The Long Weekend
c) The Weekand
d) The Weekafternext
e) The Weeknd
7. The first time an integrated musical group played professionally in the U.S. was in 1935 when The Benny Goodman Trio performed publicly with two Caucasians (clarinetist Benny Goodman and drummer Gene Krupa) joined by a black piano player. Who was that piano player?
a) Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines
b) Errol Garner
c) Teddy Wilson
d) Art Tatum
e) Ludwig van Beethoven
8. What do the following all have in common – Tony Allen, Max Roach, Tony Thompson, Warren ‘Baby’ Dodds, William ‘Cozy’ Cole. They are all –
a) Broadway stars
b) professional singers
c) they have nothing in common
d) professional drummers
e) they were all born in Amsterdam
9. Which of the following was not composed by the great composer / bandleader / pianist Duke Ellington –
a) Brown, Black and Beige
b) Black and Tan Fantasy
c) Take the A Train
d) Far East Suite
e) Sophisticated Lady
10. Which of the following statements about the great Louis Armstrong is false?
a) He used several nicknames, including Satchmo, Pops, Dipper, King Menelik, and Satchel Mouth
b) His mother was sixteen when Louis was born, his father soon after that abandoned the family
c) He always wore a star of David in honour of the Karnofsky family of Lithuanian Jews who he worked for starting at age six, and who took him in, fed him, and taught him how to “sing from the heart”
d) He once told Dwight Eisenhower, the president of the United States, to “go to Hell” because Eisenhower was doing nothing about the racism in the American south
e) He was a great fan of Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie
11. Which of these statements about the great African-American piano player James Booker is false –
a) James Booker was gay
b) James Booker had only one eye
c) James Booker was from New Orleans
d) James Booker was known as the black James Brown
e) James Booker died at the age of forty-three
12. Which of these statements is false –
a) Jimi Hendrix was the opening act for The Monkees in 1967
b) Boogie woogie piano player Clarence ‘Pinetop’ Smith died at the age of twenty-four from a gunshot wound during a dance hall fight in Chicago
c) On his debut album Prince sang lead and backing vocals, and played all the instruments including acoustic and electric guitars, bass, synth bass, piano, keyboard synths, bells, drums and percussion. He was also the producer, arranger, engineer and dust cover designer. He even composed seven of the nine songs and co-wrote the last two.
d) Ragtime / jazz pianist Eubie Blake, the son of former slaves, began taking piano lessons in 1894 and eighty-seven years later was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
e) After Frank Sinatra’s father Marty died young Frank’s mother Dolly married an African-American man and had a daughter, Natalina, giving Frank a mixed-race step-sister.
a) North American rappers. Curtis Jackson III is the real name of 50 Cent, Shawn Carter is the real name of Jay-Z, Aubrey Graham is the real name of Drake, Sean Combs is the real name of Puff Daddy / P. Diddy and Calvin Broadus Jr. is the real name of Snoop Dogg.
b) Little Malcolm. I know of no one named Little Malcolm, but Malcolm X’s birth name / slave name was Malcolm Little. Singer, songwriter, keyboardist, harmonica player Stevie Wonder went by the name Little Stevie Wonder as a child performer. Outrageous Little Richard was rock and roller Richard Penniman. Lil Wayne is rapper, singer, songwriter and record executive Dwayne Carter Junior. Little Walter was a singer, songwriter, guitarist, harmonica player Walter Jacobs.
d) blues musicians. McKinley Morganfield was the real name of Muddy Waters, Chester Burnett was the real name of Howlin’ Wolf, James Moore was the real name of Slim Harpo, Huddie Ledbetter was the real name of Lead Belly, and Edward Jones was the real name of Guitar Slim. Morganfield, Burnett and Jones were born in Mississippi, but Moore and Ledbetter were born in Louisiana.
b) William. Rapper Kodak Brown’s real name is Bill Kapri. Also Edward is the first name of Duke Ellington, Joseph is the first name of jazz pioneer / cornet player / bandleader King Oliver, and John is the real first name of Jimi Hendrix.
a) James Brown. Also George Kelly Barnes was a gangster whose weapon of choice, obviously, was a machine gun.
e) The Weeknd.
c) Teddy Wilson, known for his elegant playing. A little later African-American Lionel Hampton also joined up and the trio became the Benny Goodman Quartet.
d) professional drummers. Tony Allen played in Fela Kuti’s Africa ‘70 and the two of them invented Afrobeat. Max Roach led his own band, Tony Thompson was a member of both Chic and Power Station, Warren ‘Baby’ Dodds played in Fate Marable’s band with Louis Armstrong, and William ‘Cozy’ Cole was in Cab Calloway’s band.
c) Take the A Train. This song was a big hit for Duke Ellington but it was composed by his right hand man Billy Strayhorn. The A Train is the train that takes one from Manhattan up to Harlem in New York where Duke Ellington’s band was the house band at the Cotton Club.
e) Louis was not a fan of bebop. He called it “Chinese music”.
d) James Booker was known as the black James Brown. Think about it. Both James Booker and James Brown were black, therefore . . .
e) Frank Sinatra did not have a mixed-race step-sister named Natalina. Natalina was the real name of his mother who went by the name of Dolly.
You may have noticed that all the musicians mentioned here are male. March 8 is International Women’s Day so by then I should be able to put together another quiz, this time featuring female musicians. Of course every day is International Men’s Day.
A series of posts about important people long ago whose names are either forgotten, or were never well-known in the first place. The posts may also deal with little known aspects of the lives of famous people no longer alive.
According to Nietzsche, the madman crashed his lantern to the ground and proclaimed “God is dead, and we have killed Him” – Was he right?
Previous posts here (see links to previous ghost stories at the end of this post) have been about the great work done by many deeply religious people (Sophie Scholl, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, Stephen Biko, James Clerk Maxwell, Werner Heisenberg, Georg Cantor, Gregor Mendel).This post is about atheism and atheists (such as Albert Einstein, Gene Roddenberry and Daniel Radcliffe) but it is not an anti-theist post. Most atheists are fine with people being religious as long as they don’t try and force their religion down other people’s throats, or try to invade the Science classroom. Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are not representative of atheists.
Atheism versus theism has been perceived as a black and white issue. Not so. There are complexities and nuances that need to be addressed. There has also been a lot of nonsense and hateful unjustified rhetoric about atheism which needs to be challenged. It’s more complicated than it looks.
Now let me introduce you to a few ghosts.
He was taken from his cell. Once outside they proceeded to cut out his tongue. He was then tied to a stake and they set him on fire. The year was 1619 and the place was Toulouse, France. The victim’s name was Lucilio Vanini and his crime was publishing material in support of Naturalism (the belief that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes without giving any supernatural or spiritual significance to those causes). He was 34 years old when they killed him. Viktor Lennstrand was imprisoned for three months in 1888 for holding lectures critical of Christianity. He served another three months in prison in 1889 for blasphemy. Thomas Aitkenhead referred to the Old Testament as a fable, and he maintained that God and nature were the same thing. On Christmas Eve 1696 he was found guilty of blasphemy and a fortnight later he was hanged for his crime. He was twenty years old.
In 1593 Giordano Bruno was handed over to the Papal Inquisition and imprisoned for seven years. On February 19, 1600, he was removed from prison and burned at the stake. Bruno’s crime was that he argued that the universe had no centre, that there were an infinite number of worlds and there was nothing particularly special about Earth, and that there was no afterlife. In 1582 in Metz, Noel Journet was also taken out and burned at the stake. He had written two manuscripts which were deemed unacceptable by the religious powers that be. The first one described inconsistencies found in the Christian Bible (and there are inconsistencies – read what the gospels have to say about Christmas). The second did not deny the existence of God but he was burned at the stake for arguing that the Christian God was wicked and saying that Jesus Christ was not divine.
Fortunately we have progressed past such barbarities in at least some parts of the globe. The following people would have been tortured and burned at the stake once upon a time because they are all atheists – Kevin Bacon, Gene Wilder, Jodie Foster, Keanu Reeves, Billy Connolly, John Lennon, and Penn and Teller, among many others.
The Anthropocentric Conceit says humans are special, God’s children, important enough to have our prayers listened to and answered by a Supreme Being despite the immensity of the universe and the possible thousands of advanced life forms which may exist and also need His attention. Atheists conclude that the universe really doesn’t care what happens to the human race, or any other race, but the problem is that atheism only tells us what they deduce is not the case. It doesn’t give us a program for living given that God does not exist. Existentialism addresses the absence of God and the absurdity of existence, but not in any particularly constructive or optimistic fashion. At least Albert Camus attempted to find a way to psychologically handle the absurdity of existence. Eric Idle of Monty Python uses humour to deal with existential angst.
Though Atheism only tells us what we don’t believe, Rationalism and Skepticism tell us how to believe, and Humanism tells us about what we believe. The great philosophers tended to be focused on trying to figure out what Ethics is all about and how to lead a good life. The greatest philosophical work of the twentieth century, IMHO, ‘Principia Ethica’ by G.E. Moore, attempts to do just that, and the evidence points to Moore as being an atheist.
Anti-theism is not the same as atheism. Anti-theists are hostile toward God or God’s representatives on Earth, whereas atheists see no reason to be hostile toward something that does not exist or people who are serving a non-existent deity. Christopher Hitchens called himself an anti-theist and perceived God as a Big Brother totalitarian figure, i.e. if God did exist Hitchens would oppose and reject him. Atheists, however, often oppose the views held and actions taken by the church in the name of God (e.g. cultural genocide, child abuse, opposition to abortion and contraception, condemnation of the LGBTQI community, the German church which ignored or supported Hitler, clerics living well while their flocks live in grinding poverty etc.) but most atheists are not anti-theists. They recognize and applaud the many anonymous good works that are done by the religious. Atheists have no desire to convert people to atheism either, in contrast to many religious people who attempt to force their views on others, historically even torturing and killing people in order to convert them.
There are comedians such as George Carlin and Jim Jefferies who are extremely good at criticizing religious dogma. They can be quite extreme but in most civilized nations they are still able to deliver their material without negative consequences. They often display considerable anger in their routines but there is one atheist, Eddie Izzard, whose view of The Church of England is not laced with angry vitriol and bitterness – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unkWbEmtYXs&ab_channel=EddieIzzard .
There are many misconceptions about atheism –
1. Some people maintain that you can only be moral if you are religious. Shall we check the data on the number of religious people versus the number of atheists who commit or incite murder and other major crimes? One should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, not because God will punish you if you don’t or, as that old Christmas favourite ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ puts it “So be good for goodness sake.” Actions taken with a gun (or the threat of eternal damnation) pointing at your head are involuntary and a contract signed under duress is invalid.
2. In 1942 American army chaplain William Thomas Cummings fighting the Japanese in the Philippines during World War Two was the first to declare that there are no atheists in foxholes. This is stupid and insulting and it is not true for a start. An atheist risking her life for her country has to put up with persecution and ridicule a religious soldier does not. It insultingly implies that an atheist, when facing death, abandons her convictions and gets very religious very fast. It would not be surprising if the exact opposite occurred, that is a religious soldier, when faced with the horrors, cruelties and stochastic nature of deadly conflict might well become an atheist rather than believe in a God who doesn’t intervene in matters of horrific conflict.
3. There seems to be a feeling that atheists choose to be atheists. If there is no logical or empirical reason to believe in God, in fact there is overwhelming evidence against the idea of the existence of God, one has no choice but to become an atheist unless one is prone to rationalizing or wishful thinking.
4. Something called the infidel deathbeds prejudice goes back at least as far as 1886, and is a variation of the ‘no atheists in foxholes’ idea. Some religious people maintain that on their deathbeds atheists turn into screaming cowards begging for a priest. This was said of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. When the atheist philosopher David Hume was on his deathbed in 1776 he was serene and content, and still decidedly atheist, which greatly puzzled a religious friend of his who was present, the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson. Some atheists these days arrange for a witness to be present at their deaths to prove they went quietly to their demise.
5. Some maintain that because atheists don’t believe in God they don’t believe in anything. This is nonsense. Many of the things atheists believe in are the same as what others believe in, e.g. compassion for those who are suffering, the importance of civic responsibility, the veracities of science and mathematical realities, the beauty of nature and so on. Integrity, trustworthiness, benevolence and fairness are all quite possible without a supreme deity.
Atheists are often atheists simply because they have seen the flaws in all the standard arguments trying to prove the existence of God (the ontological argument, the teleological argument and so on). They are aware of scientific explanations for phenomena attributed to God. They see problems with some aspects of religious dogma, for example that unbaptized infants never make it to Heaven, or that God loves everyone but if you don’t follow God’s way you suffer eternal pain and damnation. There are examples of anti-Semitism and misogyny in the Bible, and at one point it equates pi (3.14159265…) to simply three. However this is not the place to discuss the pros and cons of arguments critical of religious documents / beliefs or the validity of religious arguments. One would need hundreds of screens worth of texts to do that objectively and fairly.
ATHEIST JODIE FOSTER IN 2010 By LGEPR – FlickrThis file comes from LG Electronics’s official Flickr.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing., CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40241857
Both atheists and religious individuals would condemn such things as the Inquisition and the Crusades. At the same time most atheists would also agree that many of the teachings of Jesus Christ were perfectly wonderful, and they would applaud the good work done by religious leaders such as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Joan of Arc and Maria Agnesi.
In my youth atheists were few and far between but that was the 1950’s. Now being an atheist is not such a big deal in Canada, or in places like New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and other developed countries. Unfortunately in the United States sending prayers to the steady parade of victims of gun violence is still standard practice, and presidents attend prayer breakfasts. Americans have “In God we trust” on their currency and stamps, and they pledge allegiance to “one nation under God” in their schools. American Christian fundamentalists hate and fear women, and racist and antisemitic white supremacists attack and kill others in the name of militant Christian Nationalism. Fortunately there are also plenty of Americans who are not religious bigots, and probably many for whom religion is just not that great a concern.
My wife’s parents were Roman Catholic and widely read in religious matters (not just Christianity). My wife’s uncle was a priest. Her Aunt Anne was a nun who helped found a progressive wing of the church (The Sisters of Service) who helped new immigrants arriving in Canada with little money and few resources. There was even an archbishop in my wife’s family. In all my years interacting with these people I never saw anyone attempt to convert non-Christians, and there was never a word of disrespect for other religions or atheism. My deeply Roman Catholic highly ethical father-in-law also openly condemned Pope Benedict XVI and was a supporter of Sinn Fein. My mother-in-law was a supporter of Liberation Theology, a movement condemned by the Pope for being Marxist (my own mother and now estranged sister were New Agers and as far as my father was concerned I may as well not have existed, so I may be biased). There are devoutly religious people as well as atheists both worthy of admiration, at least that’s my experience in Canada, and there is an enormous difference between the church leaders and the rank and file.
Thus the homily ends.
This post just scratches the surface. One can delve deeply into topics such as the Death of God phenomenon, various areas of ethical philosophy, methods of establishing truth (deduction, induction, obduction, reductio ad absurdum and so on), determinism / free will and morality, the long history of atheism, principles of coexistence, various arguments for and against the existence of God, the nature of God and on and on. These are matters for future posts. My post on the rise of Christian Nationalism can be found here –
Neil deGrasse Tyson has been called an atheist but he maintains that he is an agnostic. However, the term agnosticism is problematic and imprecise, and no longer used in serious academic discussions. Philosopher Antony Flew argues for replacing agnosticism with the term ‘negative atheism’ which says that faith in God is not justified (i.e. it is improbable that God exists). Positive atheism maintains that there is justification to believe that God does not exist. To avoid confusion about this, and other terminology, here is a set of definitions that might help. Theism and atheism come in many forms, as defined here:
AGNOSTICISM – See ATHEISM, NEGATIVE
APATHEISM – An attitude of apathy towards the existence or the non-existence of God.
ANTI-THEISM – The position that theism is dangerous, destructive and encouraging of harmful ideas and behaviour. Also see MISOTHEISM.
ATHEISM, NEGATIVE (IMPLICIT ATHEISM or WEAK ATHEISM, formerly known as AGNOSTICISM) – The position that faith in God is not justified (i.e. that the existence of God is improbable)
ATHEISM, POSITIVE (EXPLICIT ATHEISM or STRONG ATHEISM) – The position that there is justification to believe that God does not exist.
AUTOTHEISM – An autotheist is a person who thinks that she or he is divine.
CREATIONISM – An anti-science anti-evolution belief that the account of creation in the Christian Bible is accurate. Creationist claims are non-falsifiable. Intelligent Design Theory is a more modern version of Creationism.
DEISM – Belief in a deity established by reason and evidence. This does not require acceptance of the texts of The Bible, Qu’ran or other theological documents. A deist believes in a deity who creates the universe and then steps away and does not respond to human prayer or need. Several of the founding fathers of the United States were deists.
DYSTHEISM – The belief that a deity may not be completely good, for example trickster gods. An atheist may also view the Christian god of the Old Testament as angry, vengeful and hypocritical.
ECOHUMANISM – an attempt to combine the rejection of the Anthropocentric Conceit with Humanism.
EUHEMERISM – the belief that gods are deified men who lived long ago.
EUTHEISM – The belief that there is a God, and that God is good.
EXPLICIT ATHEISM – See ATHEISM, POSITIVE.
FIDEISM – Belief in God based on faith alone. The Father of Modern Skepticism, Martin Gardner, famous for his knowledgeable critiques of most religions, was often assumed to be an atheist but he was, by his own admission, a fideist and he happily acknowledged the irrationality of his position.
HENOTHEISM – The worship of a single Supreme Being without denying the existence or possibility of the existence of other lesser deities.
HUMANISM – A method of inquiry making use of science, reason and logic.
HUMANISM, RELIGIOUS – A view that retains some aspects of religious language but rejects the supernaturalist significance in those aspects.
HUMANISM, SECULAR – A view based on Naturalism combined with a cosmic perspective based on Science and a consequentalist ethical perspective.
IETSISM – A vague unspecified belief in an undetermined transcendent reality.
IMPLICIT ATHEISM – See ATHEISM, NEGATIVE.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEORY – see Creationism.
KATHENOTHEISM – The worship of one God at a time. For example, each deity is treated as supreme in turn in the Vedas as part of the belief known as Hinduism.
MALTHEISM – A term that emerged on Usenet in 1985 referring to a belief in an evil God. The belief asserts that even if the God of the Bible exists he is not worthy of worship due to his low moral standards.
MATERIALISM – The belief that there is no reality other than material reality; this is similar but not identical with Naturalism.
MISOTHEISM – The hatred of God. Very similar to but stronger than Antitheism. Antitheism includes opposition to a belief in God rather than a hatred of God herself.
MONOLATRY – The belief in the existence of many deities but with the consistent worship of just one of those deities
MONOTHEISM – The belief that there is only one deity (e.g. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism).
NATURALISM – The belief that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes without giving any supernatural or spiritual significance to those causes.
NIHILISM – The belief that nothing can be known with any confidence.
OMNISM – The recognition and respect for all religions and their deities, or the lack thereof.
PANENTHEISM – The belief that the divine intersects all aspects of the universe and even exists outside of space and time.
PANTHEISM – The belief that God and the universe are identical. The most notable pantheist was Spinoza who rejected the idea the God created the universe and he also rejected the existence of miracles. Both Voltaire and Frederick the Great regarded Spinoza as an atheist. Einstein famously said that his beliefs were the same as that of Spinoza and that he categorically denied the existence of a personal God who responds to prayer.
POLYTHEISM – Belief in more than one deity.
POLYTHEISM, HARD – The belief that deities are viewed as distinct entities (e.g. Hellenismos, Greek and Egyptian religions).
POLYTHEISM, SOFT – The belief that deities are subsumed into a greater whole (some sub-schools of Hinduism, e.g. Dvaita Vedanta and The Smarta Tradition)
SKEPTICISM – A method of thinking that requires certain standards to be met before an assertion, religious or non-religious, is deemed acceptable. It involves investigating whether a claim can be rejected on principle, whether there is evidence for the claim, whether counterexamples exist and so on. Martin gardner is considered to be the Father of Modern Skepticism.
STRONG ATHEISM – See ATHEISM, POSITIVE.
THEISM – The belief in a deity or deities. If theism is defined as belief in one Supreme Being then Polytheism is not in fact a variety of Theism.
THEOLOGICAL NONCOGNITIVISM – the belief that all talk of deities is inherently meaningless.
TRANSTHEISM – A religious philosophy that is neither theistic nor atheistic, e.g. Jainism.
Ginger Baker, B.J.Wilson, Chick Webb, Levon Helm, Gene Krupa, Charlie Watts, Keith Moon, Baby Dodds, Joe Morello, John Bonham and Tony Allen (Yuriko Seki, Matt Chamberlain, Ringo Starr)
A series of posts about important people long ago whose names are either forgotten, or were never well-known in the first place. The posts may also deal with little known aspects of the lives of famous people no longer alive.
Here’s a good old fashioned knock your socks off rock and roll clip from 1955 to start things off. Songs were much shorter then so this four minute clip features two songs. The lead performer is Little Richard but notice that his band features four, count them, four saxophones up front. The first song, LONG TALL SALLY, was one of Paul McCartney’s favourites (he was a Little Richard fanboy), and it includes a great tenor sax solo at the 56 second mark by Lee Allen (1927 – 1994) who also played in bands for Professor Longhair and Fats Domino. Here he leaps up on top of Richard’s piano for his solo. The second song is TUTTI FRUTTI and notice at the 2 minute 25 second mark rock and roll pioneer Bill Haley and two of his Comets listening at a table in the audience. The song uses a twelve bar chord progression. Don’t worry, the lyrics here have been censored. The song’s original lyrics reference certain activities which I will not describe here. Here’s the clip:
It was Antoine-Joseph ‘Adolphe’ Sax (1814 – 1894) who patented the saxophone in 1846. He also invented the saxotrumba, saxhorn and saxtuba, and he played the clarinet and flute as well. We have him to thank for the wailing saxes of rock and roll and the intricate modal structures of the bebop and free jazz saxophonists. Some of the greatest musical innovators (e.g. John Coltrane and Fela Kuti) were sax players, and though in the rock era the most popular instrument was the electric guitar, in the wild days of rock and roll the most popular instrument was the sax. Here are a few important and talented saxophonists.
DAVID BOWIE (1947 – 2016) – alto, tenor and baritone sax.
One could cover many screens about the intangible genius of David Bowie so suffice it to say that he was a great singer, musician and actor whose influence was immense (too bad about his pro-Nazi period). However, it is not well-known that he was also a saxophonist. This track is ALL THE YOUNG DUDES – from the concert in tribute to Freddie Mercury who had just died of AIDS. Besides Bowie on sax and vocals we also see Ian Hunter on lead vocals (from Mott the Hoople), the remaining members of Queen and guys from Def Leppard – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwXY_qpyc5k&ab_channel=HeliosNeo
He was a bandleader and composer. He pioneered the use of modal jazz and was a leading proponent of free jazz, working with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, and was and still is incredibly influential in the world of advanced jazz. He is not so well-known otherwise. His wife Alice, and their three children are all professional musicians as well. His recording ‘Giant Steps’ is considered by musicologists to exhibit the most difficult chord progression changes of any jazz recording. He was a heavy user of heroin and alcohol and was suffering from chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis when he died at the age of forty. On September 15, 1963, the KKK exploded a bomb at the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama killing four young girls. Coltrane wrote this song, called ALABAMA, in response to that murder. Elvin Jones is on drums, and the great McCoy Tyner is on piano – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saN1BwlxJxA&ab_channel=rogerb
FELA KUTI (1938 – 1997) – soprano sax
Fela Kuti is no unknown ghost in Africa, or in World Music circles. He is not a household name, however, in North America. There is a lot to say about this giant of African jazz, much of it controversial. He was a charismatic Nigerian bandleader, composer, saxophonist and political activist, and he and drummer Tony Allen invented Afrobeat which combines West African music (fuji music, highlife, salsa, calypso, Yoruba music) with jazz and funk. His mother was women’s rights activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. He was an aggressive critic of Nigeria’s military junta, particularly on his album ‘Zombie’ which was massively popular across Africa, and he was jailed on more than one occasion for being so relentlessly outspoken. Amnesty designated him a prisoner of conscience. Two of his sons, Femi Kuti (alto sax) and Seun Kuti (tenor sax) were also professional musicians. Most of his songs are lengthy but this 1978 clip is under seven minutes with Kuti singing, then playing keyboards, and finally playing sax – the song is called VIP – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBudKKJR2tE&ab_channel=HenrideSaussure
Also known as Bird, Parker was a bandleader, composer and saxophonist who was one of the creators of bebop (fast tempos, virtuoso technique, advanced harmonies) known for both his technical skills and innovations. He discovered, for example, that the twelve semitones of a chromatic scale could lead melodically into any key, opening up a whole new area to explore. He personified the jazz musician as intellectual rather than entertainer. He performed with legends such as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Christian. Parker was addicted to morphine and heroin, suffered from cirrhosis from his heavy drinking, attempted suicide twice and was institutionalized because of it. When he died at the age of thirty-four the coroner said he had the body of a sixty-year old. Here is his recording of YARDBIRD SUITE – his sax solo starts at the 44 second mark – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmroWIcCNUI&ab_channel=ConvertToMetal
FRANKIE ‘TRAM” TRUMBAUER (1901 – 1956) – alto, tenor and C melody saxophones
Trumbauer also played the clarinet and bassoon and was a great influence on another great sax player – Lester Young. The legendary Bix Beiderbecke (before he killed himself with alcohol at the age of 28) was also in Trumbauer’s band. Trumbauer was known for composing sophisticated, complex sax melodies. He was also a highly skilled test pilot who trained other pilots during World War Two. The following track features solos by jazz legends Artie Shaw and Bunny Berigan before they became legends. This track, recorded Nov. 20, 1934, is called TROUBLED – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6LrEkxolpk&ab_channel=Patricia13386
SAM BUTERA (1927 – 2009) – tenor sax
Born into an Italian-American family in New Orleans, Butera was comfortable with both Rhythm and Blues and Jazz, and was a composer, actor and singer as well as a saxophonist. He was the leader of The Witnesses for twenty years, the group that backed the hottest mainstream jazz act in the 1950’s – Louis Prima and Keely Smith. Here he is with Prima and Smith in 1959 – JUST A GIGOLO / I AIN’T GOT NOBODY – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSGVD2DgWy8&ab_channel=TheEdSullivanShow
DON REDMAN (1900 – 1964) – alto sax
Redman is one of those ghosts who were very important but now largely forgotten, a bandleader who didn’t have the same degree of fame as other bandleaders of his day such as Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. The great bands had great leaders and soloists but the unsung heroes were the arrangers, the people who sat down and figured out what all the instruments were going to play while the soloists concentrated on improvising their solos. The greatest of the big band arrangers was Don Redman. This track is called CHANT OF THE WEED, a song in praise of cannabis from 1931 back when it was illegal. This is the Don Redman Orchestra, Redman wrote the arrangement, and his alto sax solo starts at the 1 minute 25 second mark – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRhAP5ZafXY&list=RDEMAOnF871wrfVWtrgkgLlHOw&start_radio=1&ab_channel=warholsoup100
LEROI MOORE (1961 – 2008) – sopranino, soprano, alto, tenor and baritone sax
Moore was not only a founding member of The Dave Matthews Band he also arranged and composed some of their recordings. Besides playing saxophones he also played the flute, bass clarinet, oboe and penny whistle, and worked as a record producer. Moore was forty-six when he died of complications from an all-terrain vehicle accident. Here is the Dave Matthews Band performing the song TOO MUCH – co-written by Moore. He can be heard prominently starting at the 1 minute 29 second mark – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSPECzpKn4U&ab_channel=davematthewsbandVEVO
PAUL DESMOND (1924 – 1977) – alto saxophone
Here is the best of the lot. Every so often you get someone who just exudes natural musical talent. If they also have the self-discipline to develop their skills, and the luck to find a way to express it, you have extremely rare greatness. Paul Desmond fits the bill. He knew what notes to play and what notes not to play. He led his own group early on, he was a composer, and he was highly literate. He was the saxophonist in the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Unfortunately he was also a heavy smoker, a heavy drinker, and he used hallucinogens. He was only fifty-two when he died.
In the first of two tracks, here Paul is playing incredibly intricate contrapuntal melody lines against Dave’s lines on the piano. To my mind this is as good as the contrapuntal structures of Bach but Paul is improvising (though Bach was also a great improviser, which most people are not aware of). The main contrapuntal section begins at about the 3 minute 20 second mark, and the work is called BLUETTE – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX6CRLt6CLE&ab_channel=TamunaZurabishvili
In this second track the quartet is playing a track written by Desmond. As Brubeck says at the beginning, not only was the track difficult to compose since it is in 11 / 4 time, but it is extremely difficult to improvise in 11 / 4 time, as Paul does here, at breakneck speed no less. The track has a most unimaginative title – ELEVEN FOUR – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ga4IBcQBFc&ab_channel=Bundle813
A final cut – this sax solo by Dick Parry starts at the 1 minute 56 second mark. Parry is in his eighties and is still alive and kicking but the keyboardist, Richard Wright, has become a ghost. The song is MONEY. The time signature is the highly unusual 7 / 4 (a 3 2 2 beat pattern). The band is Pink Floyd and the occasion is Live 8. The event was momentous because the highly controversial bassist Roger Waters had left the band angrily years before, and sued other members of the band for various reasons, so this was the first time all four original members had played together in 24 years (Waters stated publicly that he had been in the wrong). Take a look at keyboardist Richard Wright at the 3 minute 47 second mark. Three years later he would be dead. This song is from the 1973 CD masterpiece ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, a highly influential work about time, death and insanity. It is the band’s most successful release reaching number one all over the world. The clip –
Rahsaan Roland Kirk (soprano sax, alto sax, tenor sax)
Femi Kuti (alto sax)
Seun Kuti (tenor sax)
Yusef Lateef (tenor sax)
Charles Lloyd (tenor sax)
Branford Marsalis (soprano sax, tenor sax)
Harold McNair (tenor sax)
GERRY MULLIGAN 1980s By William P. Gottlieb – Library of Congress. Cropped and retouched by uploader; see upload history below for unretouched original, and "other versions" for full-size with margins., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99378462
Gerry Mulligan (baritone sax)
Art Pepper (alto sax)
Sonny Rollins (tenor sax)
Pee Wee Russell (tenor sax)
Babe Russin (tenor sax)
David Sanborn (tenor sax)
Pharoah Sanders (soprano sax, tenor sax)
Tom Scott (soprano sax, alto sax, tenor sax and baritone sax)
Bud Shank (tenor sax)
Archie Shepp (tenor sax)
Wayne Shorter (soprano sax, tenor sax)
Zoot Sims (tenor sax)
Sonny Stitt (alto sax, tenor sax)
Barbara Thompson (soprano sax, alto sax and tenor sax)
Ben Webster (tenor sax)
Chris Wood (soprano sax, alto sax, tenor sax and baritone sax)
Ginger Baker, B.J.Wilson, Chick Webb, Levon Helm, Gene Krupa, Charlie Watts, Keith Moon, Baby Dodds, Joe Morello, John Bonham and Tony Allen (Yuriko Seki, Matt Chamberlain, Ringo Starr)
7 – Quantum realities, electromagnetism, genetic insights and the transfinite –
A series of posts about important people long ago whose names are either forgotten, or were never well-known in the first place. The posts may also deal with little known aspects of the lives of famous people no longer alive.
Mary sat quietly in the park in Miami, Florida, smiling down at two year old Charlotte in her baby carriage. Charlotte reached up happily to play with the green and gold bracelet Mary’s husband John had given Mary before he left for a tour of duty in the South Pacific. She turned and looked back at the gleaming Miami skyline behind her, then turned to gaze out across the serene Atlantic Ocean. World War Two finally seemed to be winding down. Looking up at the sky Mary noticed a small airplane flying overhead just as that aircraft released its gift to the city of Miami. The gift, an atomic bomb, vaporized Charlotte and her mother in 3.7 seconds, killing 102 000 people all together in Miami and surrounding area. That is thirty-four times the death toll of Nine Eleven. Tens of thousands more died of radiation effects in the months to come. A second bomb was dropped on Providence, Rhode Island three days later immediately killing 58 000.
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” – the Bhagavad Gita. These are the words quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb, when he first witnessed the destructive power of the nuclear weapons he and his Manhattan Project team had created.
WERNER HEISENBERG (1901 – 1976)
Of course this attack never happened, but what would the American reaction have been if it had? Would they still be talking about it 77 years later? How would it have been written up in the American history books? Would they have made movies and written novels about the attack? As it turns out, Adolf Hitler’s scientists during World War Two actually were working toward the construction of atomic weapons just as we were in the West. What if they had developed atomic weapons before we did? What would the American reaction be if the Nazis had dropped two atomic bombs on American cities and then defended the attacks by saying that it shortened the war and saved more lives than it destroyed in the long run? This was the argument given by those who defended the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I will leave up to you the task of investigating the vigorous debate still ongoing as to whether that argument is valid.
Sons of the Pioneers – Old Man Atom:
The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. It was a city with a population of about 350 000 people at the time, about the same as Miami, Florida in 1945. The bomb killed about 102 000 people immediately, mainly civilians, and thousands more died over time from radiation-related sickness. Three days later the United States dropped a second atomic bomb, this one on Nagasaki (which was about the same size as Providence, Rhode Island was in 1945). About 58 000 people, mostly civilians, were immediately killed by that bomb. To be fair, there are also those who maintain that the effects of the bombings have been focused on while other horrendous incidents, such as the fire bombing by the Allies of Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden during the war have been downplayed. I leave it up to you.
The man in charge of the German nuclear program (Uranverein) was Werner Heisenberg and they couldn’t have chosen a more brilliant man. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics “for the creation of quantum mechanics”, a momentous achievement (it was Einstein who nominated him for the prize). It was in 1927 that Heisenberg also came up with the ground-breaking Uncertainty Principle which demonstrated that the more you know about one aspect of an electron’s state the less you know about another aspect, an idea that led to the concept of electron probability clouds and other strange phenomena which are now accepted in mainstream physics and chemistry. Heisenberg also studied philosophy and religion, saying at one point that it was Plato who had the greatest influence on his thinking. He was also an accomplished classical pianist.
Many great German physicists fled Germany with the rise of Hitler but Heisenberg remained and some have condemned him for doing so. Hitler even placed him in charge of the German nuclear weapon development program. However recent strong credible evidence has emerged that clearly indicates that Heisenberg secretly impeded the progress of German atomic weapons development. He secretly expressed happiness, as well, at the fact that the Americans had come up with the atomic bomb before Hitler did. It seems that we have Heisenberg to thank for the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two and perhaps Miami and Providence were spared thanks to Heisenberg.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL (1831 – 1879)
When Albert Einstein visited Cambridge in 1922 and was told he had done great things standing on the shoulders of Newton Einstein replied, “No I didn’t. I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell”. In a survey of the hundred most prominent physicists on the planet, when asked to name the greatest physicists who ever lived Newton and Einstein (recognizable names) were first and second. Maxwell was third (how many people have heard of him?). It was Maxwell who devised the theory showing that electricity, magnetism and light are three forms of the same thing. This in turn led to his prediction of the existence of radio waves and he is also considered to be the founder of Electrical Engineering. Remember, he died way back in 1879.
Maxwell showed great promise young, was educated at home by his mother and, after she died of cancer when he was eight, by his father and his father’s sister-in-law. Later at the Edinburgh Academy he won the school’s scripture biography prize, as well as prizes in Mathematics, English and Poetry. He found his university classes simple and boring and began experimenting on his own, and later attended Cambridge where he thrived and completed a degree in Mathematics.
Thirty-seven phenomena, theorems, sets of equations and so on have been named after Maxwell, including an asteroid, a mountain range on Venus and a gap in the rings of Saturn. He was only forty-eight when he died of abdominal cancer, the same disease that killed his mother at the same age.
Genetics has become particularly prominent in the last few decades but it was Mendel who founded genetics almost two centuries ago. The man was also a mathematician, meteorologist, biologist and Franciscan friar. It was his botanical experiments conducted from 1856 to 1863 that led to his discovery and analysis of the rules of heredity. He coined the terms ‘dominant’ and ‘recessive’ and he demonstrated how genes determine an organism’s traits.
As a child he was a gardener and beekeeper, and as a teenager studied Philosophy and Physics at university. Later while he was in training to be a priest he also worked as a high school substitute teacher in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now The Czech Republic). In 1868 he rose to the level of Abbott of St. Thomas’ Abbey. The importance of his work went unrecognized until more than a decade after his death at which point his findings were verified and the modern age of Genetics was born.
Infinity is a perplexing phenomenon. For example, take the Natural Numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 . . . ). That is an infinite set. The set of odd numbers is, of course, also infinite however. So is the set of even numbers. Yet, astonishingly, there are just as many Natural Numbers as there are even numbers. How do we know? Well, we can match every single Natural Number with every single even number by simply doubling each Natural Number. One plus one doesn’t equal one, but infinity plus infinity does equal infinity. That’s because infinity is a condition, not a number.
Imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms (Hotel Infinity) and every room is occupied by a single guest. It turns out that if a new guest arrives the hotel manager can still put that new guest into an empty room without evicting any of the other guests and without putting more than one guest in any of the rooms. She can even accommodate an infinite number of new guests the same way. She can even accommodate an infinite number of infinite sets of new guests. I don’t have the space here to explain how this is possible but it is a fascinating tale. This hotel was the idea of famed logician David Hilbert ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel )
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment when it comes to analysing infinity was achieved by the German mathematician Georg Cantor. There is no such thing as The Largest Number because if there was one could simply add one to it to get an even larger number, so the number of Natural Numbers is the largest imaginable set of numbers one could conceive of. Right? Wrong. Cantor came up with a proof that as large as the set of Natural Numbers is, there is a larger set of numbers, i.e. the Real Numbers. Well over a century ago Cantor proved that some infinities are larger than others. These different sized infinities (he called them transfinite numbers) were so radical that Cantor suffered intense attacks from the mathematical establishment condemning his ideas even though the proofs were solid and his work is now viewed as perfectly valid. Most math historians also agree that the greatest achievement of twentieth century Mathematics is the development of Set Theory and Cantor was also one of a small handful of mathematicians who laid the foundations of Set Theory.
Sadly, Cantor suffered from periodic bouts of depression from 1884 to the end of his life. Cantor was institutionalized several times for mental instability throughout his life and at one point he abandoned Mathematics and lectured on Shakespeare’s plays instead. His deep religious convictions were also almost shaken during one particularly tough period. In 1913 Cantor was living in poverty, then throughout World War One he suffered from malnutrition, and he spent the last year of his life in a sanitarium where he died alone of a heart attack in 1918.
One thing that these four people had in common is that they held strong religious feelings.
According to The Kidd 
