James Marshall Hendrix
Pioneer master of the electric guitar
Although he gave only seven short years to his professional musical career, Jimi Hendrix, renamed James Marshall Hendrix by his father Al, had an impact that has lasted well beyond his untimely death at age 27. Forty years later, his achievements as a pioneering master of the electric guitar—including his innovative style of combining fuzz, feedback and controlled distortion which created a new musical form—still shine. As a record producer, he broke new ground using the recording studio as an extension of his music ideas by being one of the first to experiment with stereophonic and phasing effects for rock recording.
Entirely self taught, Hendrix was influenced by a wide range of musical styles including blues, jazz, R & B and, of course, rock. Of mixed Black-Cherokee ancestry, he was the first person inducted into the Native American Music Hall of Fame.
Prior to his dying, Hendrix produced seven albums including two compilation discs, and after his Sept. 18, 1970 death, 11 more studio albums were released including Valleys of Neptune in 2010.
Jazz icon Buddy Collette (born William Marcel Collette) died Sunday Sept. 19 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after suffering shortness of breath.
Buddy was a well-known saxophone, clarinet, and flute player who organized his own band at the age of 12 and started performing professionally by age of 17.
Collette contributed immensely to the jazz movement while he simultaneously rose to fame alongside life-long friends, bassist Charles Mingus, saxophonist Dexter Gordon, and drummer Chico Hamilton.
LOS ANGELES, Calif.—UCLA offered admission to 15,560 prospective freshman for fall 2011, out of a record 61,515 applicants, the university announced today.
Of the admitted applicants, 44.9 percent are Asian/Asian-American, 32.1 percent are white, 15.5 percent are Latino/Chicano, 3.4 percent are Black and 0.6 percent are Native American.
The prospective freshmen have an average GPA of 4.3.
We’re not called ‘Negroes’ anymore. It’s a racial identification from our past; we’ve moved on …now we’re black or African American. We rarely stop to think of the power behind the word ‘Negro,’ and that at one time in our history it stood for dignity, power, and love. It meant that none of us were free, until we were all free and that we had a special bond that manifested itself in education; honor and trusting in God to give us the strength to do what needed to be done.
Richard “Dick” Griffey, an iconic figure in the Black music who went from being a concert promoter to owning his own record label SOLAR (Sounds of Los Angeles Records)—credited for releasing hits such as “Fantastic Voyage” and “Rock Steady”—died Sept. 24, after complications from an earlier quadruple bypass surgery. He was 71.
SOLAR, founded in 1977, became the second largest African American-owned record company in the United States.
When 2nd Lt. Emily Perez was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, she became the first female African American officer to die in combat. Perez, an outstanding West Point graduate, was mourned by two communities because, while she looked like a Black woman, she came from a Black-Latino family.
