On April 25th

Egbert Roscoe Murrow was born on this date in 1908. He died in 1965.

A Murrow radio report from a bombing raid over Berlin (he made 25 bombing runs):

The clouds were gone and the sticks of incendiaries from the preceding waves made the place look like a badly laid out city with the streetlights on. The small incendiaries were going down like a fistful of white rice thrown on a piece of black velvet. As Jock hauled the Dog up again, I was thrown to the other side of the cockpit, and there below were more incendiaries, glowing white and then turning red. The cookies—the four-thousand-pound high explosives—were bursting below like great sunflowers gone mad. And then, as we started down again, still held in the lights, I remembered the Dog still had one of those cookies and a whole basket of incendiaries in its belly, and the lights still held us. And I was very frightened.

The above from a fine article last year by Nicholas Lehmann in The New Yorker.

Ella Fitzgerald
was born in Newport News, Virginia, on this date in 1918. Scott Yanow’s essay for the All Music Guide is first rate. It begins:

“The First Lady of Song,” Ella Fitzgerald was arguably the finest female jazz singer of all time (although some may vote for Sarah Vaughan or Billie Holiday). Blessed with a beautiful voice and a wide range, Fitzgerald could outswing anyone, was a brilliant scat singer, and had near-perfect elocution; one could always understand the words she sang. The one fault was that, since she always sounded so happy to be singing, Fitzgerald did not always dig below the surface of the lyrics she interpreted and she even made a downbeat song such as “Love for Sale” sound joyous. However, when one evaluates her career on a whole, there is simply no one else in her class.

There are many great Fitzgerald CDs but an excellent, inexpensive place to start is The Best of the Song Books.

Albert Nelson was born on this date in 1923 (he died in 1992). We know him as Albert King.

Albert King is truly a “King of the Blues,” although he doesn’t hold that title (B.B. does). Along with B.B. and Freddie King, Albert King is one of the major influences on blues and rock guitar players. Without him, modern guitar music would not sound as it does — his style has influenced both black and white blues players from Otis Rush and Robert Cray to Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. It’s important to note that while almost all modern blues guitarists seldom play for long without falling into a B.B. King guitar cliché, Albert King never does — he’s had his own style and unique tone from the beginning.

Albert King plays guitar left-handed, without re-stringing the guitar from the right-handed setup; this “upside-down” playing accounts for his difference in tone, since he pulls down on the same strings that most players push up on when bending the blues notes. King’s massive tone and totally unique way of squeezing bends out of a guitar string has had a major impact. (All Music)

One thought on “On April 25th”

  1. some really good guitarists have a signature sound– you can tell who’s playing within just a few seconds. hendrix comes to mind, albert collins, jeff beck, b.b., stevie ray…….but albert king and his flying V have the most distinctive voice of any of them, THAT sound –you know the one– that makes you sit up and listen immediately and go wthf.

    i’m at work and can’t stoke this thing up; the sound quality and performance appear good from here, seems to be from later in his career when he didn’t tour much– and it’s a full-length:

    i got to see albert king play around 1980. he didn’t come on until midnite (albert collins opened for him!) –he stood up there on stage like a black monolith in a blue suit wearing red-framed glasses and puffing pipesmoke into a surreal cloud around him in the floodlight. he didn’t stop squeezing out THAT sound until three o clock in the morning.

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