Happy Birthday to singer, actor and activist Harry Belafonte, who turns 90 today.
Below you can check out an early recording he made with the Zoot Sims Quintet below. It features Roy Haynes on drums. Haynes was one of the jazz musicians who got hip to Ivy in the mid-’50s, and I interviewed him in 2008 in my “Ivy League Jazz” story for Ralph Lauren Magazine, which led me to found this website. Then a few years ago I got to see Haynes, who’s still beating the skins, at the Newport Jazz Festival.
Belafonte is most associated with calypso music, and although his parents were of Jamaican descent and he spent some of his younger years there, he was born in Harlem. He continues his lifelong work as a civil rights and humanitarian activist. Learn more about him here at Biography.com. — CC
The United States’s first black male sex symbol (even for whites).
OVERRATED
WILL