mick laBriola

Friday April 4th 2025 6pm Erev Shabbat Service with MJ Gilbert. Music with Inbal Sharett-Singer, Jayson Rodovsky, Jeff Bailey, Pete Whitman and mick laBriola.

Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros (4 April 1928 – 6 January 2016) was a Cuban trumpeter. He played with artists such as Arsenio Rodríguez, Generoso Jiménez, Chico O’Farrill, Orchestra Harlow, Eddie Palmieri, Cachao and Sonora Matancera. Due to his characteristic approach to Afro-Cuban trumpet playing as well as his extensive recording career, several monographs have been written on his music.

Hugh Ramapolo Masekela (4 April 1939 – 23 January 2018) was a South African trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, singer and composer who was described as “the father of South African jazz“. Masekela was known for his jazz compositions and for writing well-known anti-apartheid songs such as “Soweto Blues” and “Bring Him Back Home“. He also had a number-one US pop hit in 1968 with his version of “Grazing in the Grass“.

McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1913 – April 30, 1983), better known as Muddy Waters was an American blues singer-songwriter and musician who was an important figure in the post-World War II blues scene, and is often cited as the “father of modern Chicago blues“. His style of playing has been described as “raining down Deltabeatitude”.

Muddy Waters grew up on Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi, and by age 17 was playing the guitar and the harmonica, copying local blues artists Son House and Robert Johnson. In 1941, Alan Lomax and Professor John W. Work III of Fisk University recorded him in Mississippi for the Library of Congress. In 1943, he moved to Chicago to become a full-time professional musician. In 1946, he recorded his first records for Columbia Records and then for Aristocrat Records, a newly formed label run by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess.

Harmonic tension between the E major and F major chords is prevalent in the Soleá form, causing both harmonic and tension and resolve throughout a performance. A Soleá may include the escobilla section, where the beat shifts to a feeling of three (1,2,3, 4,5,6, 7,8,9, 10,11,12).

After a long night of dancing and singing lively toques, guitarists may play the Soleá as a melancholy conclusion. When the drinks are finished and there’s a stillness in the air, and the sun is on the verge of rising…play the Soleá.

April 3rd 1953 Craig Taubman, Jewish-American singer (Friday Night Live), born in Millington, Tennessee

Craig Taubman is a singer and composer, known both for his Jewish liturgical music for the synagogue and his popular contemporary music.
Taubman studied music at UCLA and moved to Israel and lived there for almost 3 years, where he played in several bands and ensembles. Later, he wrote a children’s album that led to a contract for music writing for the Disney channel. In 1997 Taubman was asked by Rabbi David Wolpe from the Conservative synagogue ‘Sinai Temple‘ in Los Angeles to write modern music for the Friday night prayer. “Friday Night Live” was performed in the synagogue once a month at first, and then every two weeks, and had a musical setting, with guitars, clarinets, keyboards, and several singers. Those events were popular among young audiences and were attended by more than 1500 people at a time. The songs that Taubman wrote for this setting were gathered in an album by the name “Friday Night Live”.

Taubman was also the producer of ‘Celebrate Hip-Hop’ a compilation of Jewish hip-hop worldwide that includes tracks by Mook E., Solomon & Socalled, Etan G., and the Hip Hop Hoodíos.