12-01: Magic Sam : Black Magic 1968 - Black Sabbath w/ Ray Gillen San Antonio 1986 - Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelli : Nuages 1934-1941 - E J Moeran Symphony | Rhapsody : Fingerhut / Handley 2004

1635 – Melchior Teschner (German pastor, cantor & composer)
1651 – Diego Cristóbal de Isla (Spanish composer)
1707 – Jeremiah Clarke (English composer & organist)
1727 – Johann Heinrich Buttstett (German organist, composer & music theorist)
1729 – Christian Ludwig Boxberg (German composer, organist & author)
1755 – Maurice Greene (English composer & organist)
1808 – Anton Fischer (German opera composer)
1813 – Ferdinando Bertoni (Italian composer & organist)
1817 – Justin Heinrich Knecht (German composer, organist & music theorist)
1893 – Eduard Franck (German pianist, composer & teacher)
1925 – Vicente Arregui y Garay (Spanish composer)
1926 – Hans Heinrich XIV Bolko von Hochberg (German prince & composer)
1932 – Amadeu Vives i Roig (Spanish zarzuela composer)
1935 –  Richard Mayr (Austrian operatic bass-baritone)
1939 – Max Fiedler (German conductor & composer)
1945 – Harvey Bartlett Gaul (American composer, organist, choirmaster, lecturer, music critic & author)
1950 – E. J. Moeran (English composer of Irish descent, active also in Ireland)
1951 – Felix Petyrek (Czech-born Austrian composer, pianist & musicologist)
1954 – Fred Rose (American pop & country songwriter & music publishing executive)
1960 – Ion Vasilescu (Romanian composer)
1965 – Ersilde Cervi Caroli (Italian operatic soprano)
1968 – Nicolae Bretan (Romanian operatic composer, baritone, conductor & music critic)
1968 – Darío Moreno (Turkish singer, songwriter, guitarist & actor of Sephardic Jewish ancestry)
1969 – Magic Sam (American blues guitarist & singer)
1982 – Dorothy James (American composer & teacher)
1986 – Lee Dorsey (American R&B singer)
1986 – Horace Heidt (American jazz & pop pianist, bandleader & radio & TV personality)
1993 – Ray Gillen (American rock singer, Badlands, Black Sabbath, Phenomena)
1997 – Stéphane Grappelli (French jazz violinist)
2008 – Mikel Laboa (Basque singer, songwriter & guitarist)
2009 – Gustavo Adolfo Palma (Guatemalan singer & actor)

Well, I'm sorry. This is Black Sabbath with... not exactly their most famous singer. In fact, it's Black Sabbath with not even their most famous dead singer. In fact, it's Black Sabbath with not even the more famous of their two singers whose surnames are homophones of one another (the more famous in that case being Deep Purple's Ian Gillan).

To hear Black Sabbath with their most famous dead singer, you'll have to wait until whenever I get around to May 16th... which, at the rate things are going around here, might be sometime in July. To hear Black Sabbath with their most famous singer, you'll have to wait until someone in their current lineup (that's to say, their original lineup) poops. And honestly, that could happen either tomorrow, or decades after I've stopped doing this blog. Either way, you nasty little children of the grave are looking at a minimum wait of one month and four days, and a maximum wait of forever. Maybe you'd better try looking somewhere else!

10-16a: Sweelinck: Keyboard Music Koopman 1981 - Bantock The Cyprian Goddess etc. Handley 1995 - Benny Goodman Together Again! 1963 - Puccini Manon Lescaut : Tebaldi / Del Monaco 1954 - Strauss Till Eulenspiegel Gui 1947

1621 – Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (Dutch composer, teacher & organist, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam)
1655 – Joseph Solomon Delmedigo [ישר מקנדיא] (Crete-born Italian rabbi, author, physician, mathematician & music theorist, active in Europe & North Africa)
1750 – Sylvius Leopold Weiss (German composer & lutenist)
1814 – Juan José Landaeta (Venezuelan composer)
1893 – Carlo Pedrotti (Italian conductor & composer)
1920 – Alberto Nepomuceno (Brazilian composer, pianist, organist & conductor)
1946 – Sir Granville Bantock (English composer & conductor)
1949 – Hale Ascher VanderCook (American composer, conductor, cornettist & teacher, founder of VanderCook College of Music)
1959 – Minor Hall (American jazz drummer)
1973 – Gene Krupa (American jazz drummer & composer)
1975 – Vittorio Gui (Italian conductor)
1982 – Mario Del Monaco (Italian dramatic tenor)

October 16th wasn't a very good day for jazz drummers, was it? We just said goodbye to Art Blakely in edition 10-16b, and here in 10-16a we have Minor Hall, a major (heh) New Orleans drummer, who played with Kid Ory, among others, and Gene Krupa, almost surely the greatest drummer of the Big Band/Swing era, who's most famous for his work in the Benny Goodman orchestra, and his highly energetic, almost frenetic style of playing.

We also have Sweelinck, one of the most important keyboard composers active around 1600; Mario Del Monaco, one of the greatest operatic dramatic tenors of the 20th century; a couple of quite notable South American composers; Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, who sounds like a very interesting figure I must get to know better; and Granville Bantock, who provides an interesting comparison with Kaikhosru Sorabji, whom we only just remembered on the 10-15 edition.

For both composers were British and had a spiritual and aesthetic affinity with the East, but Sorabji also had ethnic roots there, while Bantock did not. For him, the legends of those exotic lands, which he toured briefly as a young man while conducting a musical comedy troupe, simply held a special fascination that stuck with him his entire life, and which permeates many of his works, most famously his epic choral work Omar Khayyám, based on the Rubaiyat of that 11th-century Persian poet.

Okay, so there's your write-up. Happy? Oh, I also moved the Follow & Subscribe gadgets to a more convenient place on the page. I think I may monetize the blog soon, so expect to see the place plastered with Donate buttons. I spend a lot of time working on this place, you know.