Birthdays on the Tube, 1-7 Nov

A continuing series celebrating musicians' birthdays.

6 November 1949: Virtuoso Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval co-founded Irakere with pianist Chucho Valdez in Havana. This is in 1988, after Sandoval had set up his own band, but before he defected. His technical ability is astonishing, even if his tendencies to be a terrible show-off only got worse once he left Cuba.

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2 November 1944: Keith Emerson made a career from recycling the classics, most famously as part of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, who traduced Mussorgsky and Bartok and others. His first hit was with The Nice, with their rather effective version of Leonard Bernstein's "America" from West Side Story (with quotes from Dvorak's New World Symphony), which Emerson described as "the first instrumental protest record" - the band sometimes burnt the American flag on stage while playing it. It was 1968.

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3 November 1933:  John Barry may be best known for the Bond tune, but he also did the The Ipcress File and several TV theme tunes, notably The Persuaders, a preposterous series featuring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis as Brett Sinclair and Danny Wilde. A big-screen re-make with Hugh Grant and George Clooney seems inevitable. The theme tune is much better than it needed to be. (Click on the video, and then the YouTube link)

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5 November 1921: The Hungarian virtuoso pianist Georges Cziffra is filmed warming up, outrageously improvising.

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2 November 1961: k d Lang's version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is one of more than 200 - including Jeff Buckley, John Cale, Bob Dylan, Katherine Jenkins and assorted Scandinavian pop stars. Alexandra Burke had a number one last year saying that the song "didn't do much for me". Cohen himself has asked for a moratorium on new versions. But besides Leonard's version and maybe Rufus Wainwright's, k d Lang's version is the most effective.

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1 November 1923: Victoria de los Angeles: There are some good videos of this sublime Spanish soprano singing arias from La Traviata and other operas on YouTube, but she always looks rather uncomfortable on stage. What she absolutely owned was Canteloube's Chants d'Auvergne, it's hard to imagine another singer coming close to her delicious interpretation. Enjoy the scenery.

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