Context and question: Mandolin has also been used in blues music, most notably by Ry Cooder, who performed outstanding covers on his very first recordings, Yank Rachell, Johnny "Man" Young, Carl Martin, and Gerry Hundt. Howard Armstrong, who is famous for blues violin, got his start with his father's mandolin and played in string bands similar to the other Tennessee string bands he came into contact with, with band makeup including "mandolins and fiddles and guitars and banjos. And once in a while they would ease a little ukulele in there and a bass fiddle." Other blues players from the era's string bands include Willie Black (Whistler And His Jug Band), Dink Brister, Jim Hill, Charles Johnson, Coley Jones (Dallas String Band), Bobby Leecan (Need More Band), Alfred Martin, Charlie McCoy (1909-1950), Al Miller, Matthew Prater, and Herb Quinn.
Who played in the Singer and His Jug Band?
Answer: unanswerable
Context and question: In the mid 1970s, various American groups (some with ties to Downtown Manhattan's punk scene, including Television and Suicide) had begun expanding on the vocabulary of punk music. Midwestern groups such as Pere Ubu and Devo drew inspiration from the region's derelict industrial environments, employing conceptual art techniques, musique concrete and unconventional verbal styles that would presage the post-punk movement by several years. A variety of subsequent groups, including New York-based Talking Heads and Boston-based Mission of Burma, combined elements of punk with art school sensibilities. In 1978, the former band began a series of collaborations with British ambient pioneer and ex-Roxy Music member Brian Eno, experimenting with Dada-influenced lyrical techniques, dance music, and African polyrhythms. San Francisco's vibrant post-punk scene was centered around such groups as Chrome, the Residents and Tuxedomoon, who incorporated multimedia experimentation, film and ideas from Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty.
Who did the Talking Heads begin a series of collaborations with in 1978?
Answer: Brian Eno
Context and question: Avicenna's astronomical writings had some influence on later writers, although in general his work could be considered less developed than Alhazen or Al-Biruni. One important feature of his writing is that he considers mathematical astronomy as a separate discipline to astrology. He criticized Aristotle's view of the stars receiving their light from the Sun, stating that the stars are self-luminous, and believed that the planets are also self-luminous. He claimed to have observed Venus as a spot on the Sun. This is possible, as there was a transit on May 24, 1032, but Avicenna did not give the date of his observation, and modern scholars have questioned whether he could have observed the transit from his location at that time; he may have mistaken a sunspot for Venus. He used his transit observation to help establish that Venus was, at least sometimes, below the Sun in Ptolemaic cosmology, i.e. the sphere of Venus comes before the sphere of the Sun when moving out from the Earth in the prevailing geocentric model.
What Muslim astrologer did Avicenna influence?
Answer:
unanswerable