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Eric Patrick Clapton (born March 30, 1945) is one of the most influential guitarists and singer-songwriters in modern music. Over six decades he has defined[…]

Elmore James (1918–1963) is one of the defining architects of postwar electric blues and a towering figure in slide-guitar playing. Nicknamed the “King of the[…]

Ella Jane Fitzgerald (1917–1996) is widely celebrated as the “First Lady of Song”—a jazz vocalist whose musical language was steeped in swing and bebop but[…]

Eddie Taylor (1923–1985) was one of the quiet architects of postwar Chicago blues. A Benoit, Mississippi native who became a first-call guitarist after moving north,[…]

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) was a pianist, bandleader, and composer whose output and influence tower over American music. Over a 50-year career he led[…]

Django Reinhardt (born Jean Reinhardt, January 23, 1910 – May 16, 1953) was a Belgian-born, Romani-French guitarist and composer who became one of jazz’s first[…]

Art Tatum (1909–1956) is widely regarded as one of the most astonishing pianists in jazz history—an improviser whose technique, harmonic imagination, and rhythmic command reset[…]

Art Blakey (1919–1990) was an American jazz drummer and bandleader—one of the defining architects of hard bop—whose group, the Jazz Messengers, doubled as a finishing[…]

Amos Milburn (1927–1980) was one of postwar America’s most exuberant blues and R&B pianists—a jump-blues hitmaker whose boogie-woogie drive, sly humor, and string of “drinking[…]

Robert Hicks (September 11, 1902 – October 21, 1931), known professionally as Barbecue Bob, was a defining voice of the Atlanta (Piedmont) country-blues scene. A[…]