April Musicians Birthdays with Stamps

It is time to celebrate April musicians birthdays with stamps. A lot of musicians and composers appear on stamps. You can read about many of them on this blog, from classical composers to American pop stars. Yet, in order to highlight a few more of these stamps and the musicians on them, I am sharing a monthly calendar of musicians birthdays. It will not even be close to complete. Yet, each moth I will select a few stamps from my collection and share them with links to relevant articles elsewhere on my blog. If you are looking for more musician birthdays you can check out this site.

The Birthdays

April 3
Eduardo Fuentes (1874-1944) was a Cuban composer.

April 4
Muddy Waters (1913-1983) was an American blues singer, guitarist, and songwriter.

April 7
Miyagi Michio (1894-1956) was a Japanese koto player and composer;
Billie Holiday (1915-1959) was an American jazz and blues singer; and
Ravi Shankar (1920-2012) was an Indian sitar player and composer. A virtuoso player, Shankar took North Indian classical music throughout the world. He became the most famous Indian musician in the world. Shankar also had an enormous impact on musicians in the western world including violinist Yehudi Menuhin, jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, and George Harrison of the Beatles.

April 8
Kumar Gandharva (1924-1992) was an Indian classical singer. As a child, he became known as a musical prodigy and gained the name Gandharva, which is a musical spirit in the mythology of Hinduism. He was a great innovator and experimented across Indian musical genres, sometimes creating controversy.

April 12
Lily Pons (1898-1976) was a French-American opera singer. She was especially well known as a coloratura soprano, singing the famous roles of Lakmé and Lucia di Lammermoor. She was associated for much of her career with The Metropolitan Opera in New York City, where she appeared nearly 300 times.

April 14
Ali Akbar Khan (1922-2009) was an Indian sarod player and composer. He was trained as a classical musician by his father, Allauddin Khan. Ali Akbar established a music school in 1956 that would grow to have several branches in Calcutta, Berkeley, California, and Basel, Switzerland. Khan helped to popularize Indian music in the West and was a composer of numerous ragas as well as film scores.

April 15
Bessie Smith (1894-1937) was an American blues singer. Smith was the most popular of the blues singers of the 1920s and 1930s and became known as the “Empress of the Blues.” She often sang about social conditions in songs like “Work House Blues,” “Prison Blues,” and “Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair.” Her style was very influential on blues and jazz singers who followed her.

April 19
Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983) was a French composer.

April 20
Lionel Hampton (1908-2002) was a jazz vibraphonist, pianist, percussionist, and bandleader. In the 1920s, he studied drums and xylophone. After hearing Louis Armstrong in Chicago, Hampton turned his attention towards jazz music. He began trying to copy Armstrong’s solos on the vibraphone and eventually played along with Armstrong, beginning his professional career as a vibraphonist.

April 21
Clara Ward (1924-1973) was an American gospel singer. She achieved success in the 1940s and 1950s as the leader of The Famous Ward Singers. This group came to prominence in 1943 following an appearance at the National Baptist Convention. This led to a national tour and to recording contracts. She was known for her religious compositions and for her influence on her protege Aretha Franklin.

April 22
Charles Mingus (1922-1979) was an American jazz bassist, composer, and bandleader.

April 23
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was a Russian pianist, conductor, and composer. He wrote many largescale works including the opera The Love for Three Oranges, the suite Lieutenant Kije, the ballet Romeo and Juliet, and the beloved Peter and the Wolf.

April 24
Christina Morfova (1887-1936) was a Bulgarian operatic soprano. Although she began school on Prague to study economics, she soon transferred over to the Prague Conservatory. In 1910, she made her operatic debut in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride. Early in her career she toured through Russia and the Balkans, gaining attention as a popular soprano. She went on to have an international career before dying unexpectedly in a car accident at the age of 47.

April 25
Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) was an American jazz singer. Born in Virginia, after the death of her mother when she was only 15, Ella Fitzgerald moved to Harlem in New York City. She sang on the street corners and heard the busting jazz scene. In November of 1934, she participated in an Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater where she won first prize. She went on to a dazzling career lasting seven decades.

April 26
Shyama Shastri (1762-1827) was an Indian composer. He is the oldest of the Trinity of Carnatic music, which also included Tyagaraja and Muthswami Dikshitar. Shastri is said to have composed three hundred pieces of music.

Ma Rainey (1886-1939) was an American blues singer.

April 29
Duke Ellington (1899-1974) was an American pianist, bandleader, and composer.