Crib Notes

R. Timothy Brady is a soft-spoken young man whose immersion in the arts and sense of moral imperative has taken him on a mission to Iraq. Last Saturday, the composer/activist left Atlanta for Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region, to establish an English-language academy where he will teach music, all under the auspices of the nonprofit Soulbird Inc., of which Brady is founder and executive director.

One minor problem: Performing music in Iraq can get you killed.

“It’s been reported that 80 percent of Iraqi singers have left the country, because now all artists are targeted by terrorists and extremists for torture and murder,” says Brady. “So what Soulbird is doing is opening an academy in the relatively safer Kurdistan region of Iraq, in the city of Erbil, to provide a place for artists from all over Iraq to develop and study their craft in a safe and welcoming environment.”

Continue reading “Soulbird hopes to build a safe nest for Iraqi artists”

(Photo Courtesy R. Timothy Brady)

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On July 1, 1979, thirty years ago today, the original Sony Walkman made its public debut as the world’s first portable music player, making delivery of pre-recorded music on-the-go truly practical for the first time, and freeing listeners to take their tunes with them wherever they liked, essentially hands-free.

The grandfather of today’s hand-held digital audio players sold for $340 and weighed a little under one pound.  Although retailers were initially reluctant due to the Walkman’s high price, Sony sold over 30,000 in the first month alone, securing its place on store shelves. It also pushed the popularity of the compact audio cassette format higher than vinyl for a time until eventually replaced in popularity by compact discs.

While an international standard for compact audio cassette tapes had been around since the mid-1960s, battery operated recorders were comparatively large, heavy, clunky, of very poor sound quality by comparison, and not truly portable.
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Michael Jackson made the moonwalk world-famous during his performance in the 1983 TV special, Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever. But who inspired the King of Pop to make it his signature step? Here’s a glove full of earlier moonwalkers who could have influenced him in one way or another:

Jeffrey Daniel, a dancer/choreographer who worked with him on the “Bad” and “Smooth Criminal” videos, claimed in a recent NPR interview that he taught Jackson the move. Daniel moonwalked in on BBC television’s Top of the Pops in 1982 and says he got it from the Electric Boogaloos.

Tap dancer Bill Bailey, brother of singer Pearl Bailey, was the first to moonwalk on film, which he called “backslide,” in the 1943 classic Cabin in the Sky. Bailey can also be seen doing it at the end of a tap routine in 1955.

French mimes had a similar traditional move for “walking in place.” Marcel Marceau’s teacher, Jean-Louis Barrault did it with moving scenery in the 1945 French film Children of Paradise (“Les Enfants du paradis”).

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