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Sir John Dankworth, CBE (20 September 1927 – 6 February 2010), a mainstay of the British jazz scene for over 60 years, has died.

Saxophonist Sir John, 82, served as musical director to the likes of Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald.

Sir John, known as Johnny, died in a London hospital on Saturday. He had been ill for several months.

His wife, the singer Dame Cleo Laine, announced his death at a concert at their Buckinghamshire theatre, where she was performing with their children.

The concert on Saturday was celebrating 40 years of the theatre, which the couple founded in the grounds of their home in Wavendon. (BBC)

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Post the release of initial tour dates, American indie-rock band Vampire Weekend played the first of their UK dates in a special show at the De La Warr Pavilion in East Sussex. The band performed songs from their second album Contra as well as previous hits.

Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut album was released in January 2008 to critical success with the single A-Punk receiving heavy airplay on Alternative radio stations throughout the US. With comparisons to Paul Simon’s Graceland for the band’s Afro-pop style, as well as to The Kinks, new wave luminaries Haircut 100, and NYC’s The Walkmen.

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Love Never Dies...the sequel to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s record breaking musical The Phantom Of The Opera is scheduled to open at the Adelphi Theatre in London’s West End on 9 March 2010. It will be the first time a musical sequel is staged in the West End. Take a look at the original production shots of The Phantom Of The Opera to remind yourself of why this Lloyd Webber offering is likely to be one of the hottest tickets of the year.

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February 9th

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Forty-eight years after she first played Titania, Judi Dench returns to the role in Peter Hall’s production that sees the Fairy Queen as the ageing Queen Elizabeth I. A real coup for the Rose at Kingston.

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March 10th
Simon Russell Beale stars as the foppish Sir Harcourt Courtly and Fiona Shaw as the fox-hunting Lady Spanker in Nicholas Hytner’s revival of Dion Boucicault’s glorious English comedy London Assurance at the National Theatre.

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125 years
14th March 1885 Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado was first performed at the Savoy Theatre, London

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100 years
5th March 1910 Birth of Konstantin Sergeyev, Russian ballet dancer, director, and chief choreographer of the Mariinsky Ballet

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Important dates for the future
2013 – March 2nd the bicentennial of the birth of Richard Wagner

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On a cold winter's night a small private plane took off from Clear Lake, Iowa bound for Fargo, N.D. It never made its destination.

When that plane crashed, it claimed the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J.P. "Big Bopper" Richardson and the pilot, Roger Peterson. Three of Rock and Roll's most promising performers were gone.

Buddy Holly played rock and roll for only two short years, but the wealth of material he recorded in that time made a major and lasting impact on popular music. Holly was an innovator who wrote his own material and was among the first to exploit such advanced studio techniques as double-tracking. He pioneered and popularized the now-standard rock-band lineup of two guitars, bass and drums. In his final months, he even began experimenting with orchestration. Holly’s catalog of songs includes such standards of the rock and roll canon as “Rave On,” “Peggy Sue,” “That’ll Be the Day,” Oh Boy!” and “Maybe Baby.”

Though Holly lacked the arresting sexuality of Elvis Presley, he nonetheless cut an engaging, charismatic figure with his trademark horn-rimmed glasses and vocal hiccup. His creative self-reliance and energetic, inspired craftsmanship prefigured the coming wave of rock and rollers in the Sixties. Holly was a professed influence on the Beatles and Hollies (both of whom derived their names from his). Even the Rolling Stones had their first major British hit with Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”

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Rising young musician Ellie Goulding, a 23-year-old from Herefordshire, combines acoustic guitar with electronica and futuristic dance beats. She has come top of the BBC's Sound of 2010 list of emerging artists to watch this year with her pioneering music style dubbed "folktronica."

view images from the lastest London performance by ELLIE GOULDING

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