Dinah Washington

From The Newport Jazz Festival in 1959 with Max Roach on drums. As one youtube user commented. "Do you see who influenced Amy Winehouse?" In my opinion, Dinah surpasses them all as a blues singer, including Aretha
from wikipedia

Dinah Washington (August 29, 1924 – December 14, 1963) was a blues, R&B and jazz singer. Because of her strong voice and emotional singing, she is known as the Queen of the Blues. Despite dying at the early age of 39, Washington became one of the most influential vocalists of the twentieth century,credited among others as a major influence on Aretha Franklin.
Washington was born Ruth Lee Jones in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her family moved to Chicago while she was still a child. As a child in Chicago she played piano and directed her church choir. She later studied in Walter Dyett's renowned music program at DuSable High School. There was a period when she both performed in clubs as Dinah Washington while singing and playing piano in Sallie Martin's gospel choir as Ruth Jones.
Her penetrating voice, excellent timing, and crystal-clear enunciation added her own distinctive style to every piece she undertook. While making extraordinary recordings in jazz, blues, R&B and light pop contexts, Washington refused to record gospel music despite her obvious talent in singing it. She believed it wrong to mix the secular and spiritual, and after she had entered the non-religious professional music world she refused to include gospel in her repertoire. Washington began performing as a teenager in 1942 and soon joined Lionel Hampton's band. There is some dispute about the origin of her name. Some sources say the manager of the Garrick Stage Bar gave her the name Dinah Washington, while others say Hampton selected it.
In 1943 she began recording for Keynote Records and released "Evil Gal Blues," her first hit. By 1955 she had released numerous hit songs on the R&B charts, including "Baby, Get Lost," "Trouble in Mind," "You Don't Know What Love Is" (arranged by Quincy Jones), and a cover of "Cold, Cold Heart" by Hank Williams. In March of 1957 she married tenor saxophonist Eddie Chamblee (formerly on tour with Lionel Hampton), who led the band behind her. In 1958 she made a well-received appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival.
With "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes" 1959, Washington won a Grammy Award for Best Rhythm and Blues Performance. The song was her biggest hit, reaching #8 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The commercially driven album of the same name, with its heavy reliance on strings and wordless choruses, was slammed by jazz and blues critics for being too commercial and for straying from her blues roots. Despite this, the album was a huge success and Washington continued to favor more commercial, pop-oriented songs rather than traditional blues and jazz songs. Along with a string of other hits, she followed this with "September In The Rain," which reached #35 in the UK in November 1961 and #23 in the USA. In 1960, she also had two top-10 hit duets with Brook Benton: "Baby (You've Got What It Takes)" and "A Rockin' Good Way (To Mess Around and Fall In Love)." She also dealt in torch songs; her rendition of the popular standard "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" was well regarded.
Washington was married seven times in the U.S., with an eighth wedding performed in Stockholm, Sweden[citation needed], and divorced six times while having several lovers, including Quincy Jones)[citation needed], her young arranger. Legend has it that she wore mink in all weathers and carried two .45-caliber pistols with her. Although she had a reputation as imperious and demanding, many found her loving, funny, generous and forgiving[citation needed]. Audiences sensed this remarkable combination of qualities and loved her. In London she once declared, "...there is only one heaven, one earth and one queen...Queen Elizabeth is an impostor"; the crowd loved it[citation needed].
About six months after her marriage to football player Dick "Night Train" Lane, she died, aged 39, from an accidental overdose of prescription sleeping medication ingested on an empty stomach. Washington, who was 5'2" (1.58 m) tall and had fought weight problems for most of her life, was dieting to lose weight before a New Year's Eve party.
In 2007, R&B platinum-selling singer Deborah Cox reinterpreted the classic songs of Dinah Washington on her fourth album Destination Moon.
A recent surge in popularity can be credited to a promo being run by Doubletree Hotels which features "Relax Max", a catchy tune from the The Swingin' Miss "D" album.

Max Roach

A tribute video from youtube user dorton39
from wikipedia. It appears I share a birthday with this great man.

Maxwell Lemuel Roach (January 10, 1924 – August 16, 2007) was an American jazz percussionist, drummer, and composer.
A pioneer of bebop, Roach went on to work in many other styles of music, and is generally considered one of the most important drummers in history. He worked with many of the greatest jazz musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins and Clifford Brown.
Roach also led his own groups, and made numerous musical statements relating to the civil rights movement of African-Americans.
Roach was born in the Township of Newland Pasquotank County, North Carolina, which borders the southern edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, to Alphonse and Cressie Roach. Many confuse this with Newland Town in Avery County. Although Max's birth record lists his birth date as January 10, 1924, (Max has been quoted] by Phil Schaap as stating that his family believes he was born on January 8, 1924. His family moved to Brooklyn, New York when he was 4 years old. He grew up in a musical home, his mother being a gospel singer. He started to play bugle in parade orchestras at a young age. At the age of 10, he was already playing drums in some gospel bands. As an eighteen year-old fresh out of Boys' High School, Brooklyn, NY, (1942) he was called to fill in for Sonny Greer, and play with the Duke Ellington Orchestra performing at the NY Paramount Theatre.
In 1942, Roach started to go out in the jazz clubs of the 52nd Street and at 78th Street & Broadway for Georgie Jay's Taproom (playing with schoolmate Cecil Payne).
Roach's most significant innovations came in the 1940s, when he and jazz drummer, Kenny Clarke, devised a new concept of musical time. By playing the beat-by-beat pulse of standard 4/4 time on the "ride" cymbal instead of on the thudding bass drum, Roach and Clarke developed a flexible, flowing rhythmic pattern that allowed soloists to play freely. The new approach also left space for the drummer to insert dramatic accents on the snare drum, "crash" cymbal and other components of the trap set.
By matching his rhythmic attack with a tune's melody, Mr. Roach brought a newfound subtlety of expression to his instrument. He often shifted the dynamic emphasis from one part of his drum kit to another within a single phrase, creating a sense of tonal color and rhythmic surprise. The idea was to shatter musical conventions and take full advantage of the drummer's unique position. "In no other society", Roach once observed, "do they have one person play with all four limbs."
Virtually every jazz drummer plays in that manner today, but when Clarke and Mr. Roach introduced the new style in the 1940s, it was a revolutionary musical advance. "When Max Roach's first records with Charlie Parker were released by Savoy in 1945," jazz historian Burt Korall wrote in the "Oxford Companion to Jazz," "drummers experienced awe and puzzlement and even fear." One of those awed drummers, Stan Levey, summed up Mr. Roach's importance: "I came to realize that, because of him, drumming no longer was just time, it was music."
He was one of the first drummers (along with Kenny Clarke) to play in the bebop style, and performed in bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Bud Powell, and Miles Davis. Roach played on many of Parker's most important records, including the Savoy 1945 session, a turning point in recorded jazz.
He was given a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 1988, cited as a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, twice awarded the French Grand Prix du Disque, elected to the International Percussive Art Society's Hall of Fame and the Downbeat Magazine Hall of Fame, awarded Harvard Jazz Master, celebrated by Aaron Davis Hall, given eight honorary doctorate degrees, including degrees awarded by Medgar Evers College, CUNY, the University of Bologna, Italy and Columbia University[ While spending the later years of his life at the Mill Basin Sunrise assisted living home, in Brooklyn, Max was honored with a proclamation honoring his musical achievements by Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz.
There is a park in the Lambeth borough of London named after him.

Google Maps: Max Roach

from my google map of Homes of Famous Brooklynites and Other Places of Interest

The Harlem Globetrotters

I saw this youtube movie linked (the soundtrack got a little raunchy and since I'd like kids to use this site I substituted some more of the great Max Roach with the Clifford Brown quintet (Clifford Brown(tp),Max Roach(ds),Richie Powell(p),Harold Land(ts),George Morrow(b) playing
a segment of their "I'll Remember April") to the Chicagoist blog with this story

Last week we were channel surfing and came across "The Harlem Globetrotters: A New Generation" on Channel 50. We watched it for a little bit and were caught up in both the athleticism of the new Globetrotters and the timeless entertainment of their gags. It reminded us of the days when ABC's "Wide World of Sports" would showcase the team seemingly every other month. Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player to be associated with a Chicago team, but the Globetrotters are arguably the most recognizable squad to ever come out of Chicago. Originally called the Savoy Big Five, the team consisted of former students of Wendell Phillips High School brought together by Abe Saperstein as a means to draw crowds to the recently opened Savoy Ballroom at 4733 South Parkway. Saperstein eventually renamed them the "Harlem" Globetrotters because of the wide-reaching influence of the Harlem Renaissance on African-American culture at the time (an aside: the Globetrotters didn't play their first "home" game until 1968). It also flows off the tongue more freely than "Savoy Big Five" or even "Bronzeville Globetrotters."

from wikipedia

The Harlem Globetrotters is an exhibition basketball team that combines athleticism and comedy. Created by Abe Saperstein in 1926 in Chicago, Illinois, the team adopted the name Harlem because of its connotations as a major African-American community. Over the years they have played more than 20,000 exhibition games in 118 countries. Brother Bones's whistled version of "Sweet Georgia Brown" is the team's signature song. Globie has been their mascot since 1993.
There is no clear consensus as to the very beginnings of the Globetrotters. The official history ] contains several details which are clearly untrue, such as the team being organized in 1926 in the Savoy Ballroom, which opened in 1927. What is clear is that the genesis of the Globetrotters takes place in the South Side of Chicago in the 1920s, where all the original players grew up. Most of the players also attended Wendell Phillips High School. When the Savoy Ballroom opened in November of 1927, one of the premier attractions was the Savoy Big Five, a basketball team that played exhibitions before dances. In 1928, several players left the team in a dispute over bringing back other players who had left the team. That fall, several players led by Tommy Brookins formed a team called the "Globe Trotters" which would tour southern Illinois that spring. Abe Saperstein became involved with the team, though to exactly what extent is unclear. In any event, by 1929 Saperstein was touring Illinois and Iowa with his basketball team, called the "New York Harlem Globe Trotters". Saperstein decided to pick Harlem as their home city since Harlem was considered the center of African-American culture at the time, and an out of town team name would give the team more of a mystique. After four decades of existence, the Globetrotters played their first "home" game in Harlem in 1968.
The first star player of those early Globe Trotters (the name would be merged into one word later on) was Albert "Runt" Pullins, an adept dribbler and shooter. Soon he would be joined by 7'4" Inman Jackson, who played center and had a flair for showboating. They would originate the two roles that would stay with the 'trotters for decades, the showman and the dribbler.
The Globetrotters were initially a serious competitive team, and despite a flair for entertainment, they would only clown for the audience after establishing a safe lead in the game. In 1939, they accepted an invitation to participate in the World Professional Basketball Tournament, where they met the New York Rens in the semi-finals in the first big clash of the two greatest all-black professional basketball teams. The Rens defeated the Globetrotters and went on to win the Tournament, but in 1940 the Globetrotters avenged their loss by defeating the Rens in the quarterfinals and advancing to the championship game, where they beat the Chicago Bruins in overtime by a score of 37–36.
The Globetrotters beat the premier professional team, the Minneapolis Lakers (led by George Mikan), for two years in a row in 1948 and 1949, with the Lakers winning later contests. The February 1948 win (by a score of 61-59, on a buzzer beater) was a hallmark in professional basketball history, as the all-black Globetrotters proved they were on an equal footing with the all-white Lakers. Momentum for ending the National Basketball Association's color line grew, and in 1950, Chuck Cooper became the first black player drafted by an NBA team, the Boston Celtics. From that time on the Globetrotters had increasing difficulty attracting and retaining top talent.
Tony Peyton was the last living member of the original Globetrotters. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1996. He died in Midland, Texas, on July 23, 2007, at the age of eighty-five.

Famous Brooklyn African Americans

The images are from the Brooklyn Public Library's Digital Collection. The soundtrack is Joy Spring, featuring Clifford Brown on trumpet and Brooklyn's own Max Roach on drums.
Max lived at one time at 210 Putnam Avenue in Bedford Stuyvesant