An ace is a playing card.

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The Aces, originally known as The Four Aces, were a Jamaican vocal group who are best known for their work with Desmond Dekker.

History

The initial line-up of The Aces consisted of Clive Campbell, Barry Howard, Carl Howard, and Patrick Howard. The group came to the attention of Dekker, who supported them when they auditioned for Leslie Kong at Beverley's studio in 1965. Kong employed the group as backing singers for Dekker and they can be heard on the song "Get Up Adinah" (credited as The Four Aces). They provided the backing vocals on Dekker's major hit "007 (Shanty Town)" as well as the track "Music Like Dirt (Intensified '68)" (the winning song of the 1968 Jamaica Independence Festival Song Contest). By 1967 the only remaining original members were Barry Howard and Winston Samuels and it is their backing vocals featured on "Israelites". Dekker's international success led to him touring overseas though The Aces did not accompany him due to Samuels refusal to fly (Samuels stating that "Rastas did not fly on iron birds") and Barry Howard's decision to emigrate to the United States. The Aces continued to record under their own name (without Dekker) and had a Jamaican hit in 1970 with "Mademoiselle Ninette". By 1971 the line-up had changed again, with Barry Howard now rejoined by Carl Hall. A string of hits followed with "Reggae Motion", "Take a Look", "Oh I Miss You", "Call Me Number One", "Be My Baby", and "Sad Sad Song". The song "Working on it Night and Day", though not a hit, did enter the pop charts in 1973. Little more was heard from the group until 1982 when they released "One Way Street".

The Aces was one of the earliest and most influential of the electric Chicago blues bands in the 1950s. Led by the guitarist brothers Louis and Dave Myers, natives of Byhalia, Mississippi, the brothers originally performed under the name The Little Boys; with the subsequent addition of harmonica player Junior Wells, they rechristened themselves the Three Deuces, followed by the Three Aces. The 1950 enlistment of drummer Fred Below prompted another name change, this time to the Four Aces; finally, to simplify matters once and for all, the group performed as just The Aces. Influenced in large part by jazz, they developed an urbane, sophisticated style well ahead of its time; in particular, Below's refined rhythms led to the rise of the blues shuffle beat, and helped launch the drums to a new prominence within the blues band hierarchy.

In 1952, Wells quit to join the Muddy Waters band, filling the vacancy created by the recent departure of Little Walter from Muddy's band; Walter himself quickly signed the remaining Aces as his new backing unit, renaming the trio The Jukes to capitalize on his current hit single, "Juke". A series of seminal recordings followed - "Mean Old World," "Sad Hours," "Off the Wall," and "Tell Me Mama" among them - before Louis' 1954 exit resulted in the Jukes' gradual dissolution as Little Walter's band, but freeing up the members to reform as a backing band for other Chicago blues musicians such as Otis Rush, Eddie Boyd, and others.

Ain (French pronunciation: ​[ɛ̃]; Arpitan: En) is a department named after the Ain River on the eastern edge of France. Being part of the region Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and bordered by the rivers Saône and Rhône, the department of Ain enjoys a privileged geographic situation. It has an excellent transport network (TGV, highways) and benefits from the proximity to the international airports of Lyon and Geneva.

Ain is composed of four geographically different areas (Bresse, Dombes, Bugey and Pays de Gex) which – each with its own characteristics – contribute to the diversity and the dynamic economic development of the department. In the Bresse agriculture and agro-industry are dominated by the cultivation of cereals, cattle breeding, milk and cheese production as well as poultry farming. In the Dombes, pisciculture assumes greater importance as does wine making in the Bugey. The high diversification of the department's industry is accompanied by a strong presence of the plastics sector in and around Oyonnax (so-called "Plastics Valley").

Ayin or Ayn is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʿAyin , Hebrew ʿAyin ע, Aramaic ʿĒ , Syriac ʿĒ ܥ, and Arabic ʿAyn ع (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only). ﻉ comes twenty‐first in the New Persian alphabet and eighteenth in Arabic hijaʾi order.

The ʿayin glyph in these various languages represents, or has represented, a voiced pharyngeal fricative (/ʕ/), or a similarly articulated consonant, which has no equivalent or approximate substitute in the sound‐system of English. There are many possible transliterations.

Origins

The letter name is derived from Proto-Semitic *ʿayn- "eye", and the Phoenician letter had an eye-shape, ultimately derived from the ı͗r hieroglyph

To this day, ʿayin in Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, and Maltese means "eye" and "spring" (ʿayno in Neo-Aramaic).

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Ο, Latin O, and Cyrillic О, all representing vowels.

The sound represented by ayin is common to much of the Afrasiatic language family, such as the Egyptian, Cushitic, and Semitic languages. Some scholars believe that the sound in Proto-Indo-European transcribed h₃ was similar, though this is debatable. (See Laryngeal theory.)

An ain is a spring in North Africa, which reaches the surface as a result of an artesian basin and is of particular importance in arid regions. It can produce a flow of water directly or result in evaporitic saline crusts. Known examples are found in the oases of the Tunisian region of Bled el Djerid and in the entire area around the depressions of Chott el Djerid and Chott el Gharsa. Here, there are water-bearing strata, usually of sand or sandstone, that act as aquifers in their function.