mick laBriola

Rehearsals Saturday & Sunday April 26th/27th Powderhorn Park. Preparing for MAYDAY Celebration on Sunday May 4th. Featuring Grandma Powderhorn. I’ll be there today. Dress rehearsal Saturday May 3rd 1030-130pm

Some 170,000 light-years across and over 200 million light-years away toward the constellation Virgo, the magnificent spiral galaxy is seen face-on in Hubble’s view. Within the galactic disk, loose streamers of star forming regions lie along the galaxy’s flocculent spiral arms. But the most striking feature of NGC 5335 is its prominent central bar. Seen in about 30 percent of galaxies, including our Milky Way, bar structures are understood to channel material inward toward the galactic center, fueling star formation. Of course, distant background galaxies are easy to spot, scattered around the sharp Hubble image. Launched in 1990, Hubble is now celebrating its 35th year exploring the cosmos from orbit around planet Earth.

Shankar Lakshminarayana (born 26 April 1950), better known as L. Shankar, is an Indian violinist, singer and composer who also goes by the stage nameShenkar. Known for his innovative contributions to world music, he is often regarded as one of the pioneers of East-West fusion, blending the rich traditions of Indian classical with Western genres such as rock, pop, jazz, and electronic music. Music critic Jerry Ozipko described L. Shankar as “having improvised some of the most daring, exuberant, and technically proficient music imaginable” on the violin while Simon Dove, from Bazaar Magazine said Shankar’s “phenomenal capacity for improvisation remains unsurpassed.” His extensive body of work spans a wide spectrum of genres, encompassing vocal and instrumental compositions. He has released 28 solo albums, the two latest being Full Moon and Over the Stars, which were released in September and August 2024, respectively. Shankar is credited with inventing the stereophonic Double violin (known as the LSD – L.Shankar Double Violin), which covers the orchestral string family’s range.

His world music albums with the band Shakti during the mid-70s became the ‘standard to gauge the playing and composing abilities of any world musician following in Shakti’s expansive wake”. According to Downbeat’s Critics Poll, he was listed fourth among Established Violinists, and came in second in the “Talent Deserving Wider Recognition” division in 1978. In 1990, Shankar’s talam-bending (time cycles of 9 3/4 & 6 3/4 beats) Pancha Nadai Pallavi‘ album was on the Billboard top ten world music chart for three months becoming the first traditional Indian record to reach those heights. His 1995 Raga Abheri album was nominated for a Grammy Award, in the Best World Music Album category.

With Peter Gabriel, he worked on the Grammy winning album Passion (1989), the soundtrack album for Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988),and wrote and performed vocals on Mel Gibson‘s ‘The Passion of the Christ’(2004) which won a Dove Award for Instrumental Album of the Year at the 36th GMA Dove Awards. He also worked on the soundtrack for the 2002 film Queen of the Damned with Jonathan Davis and Richard Gibbs and recorded eight songs of which five were picked for the movie. Additionally, he collaborated on the original score for NBC’s hit TV series Heroes with Wendy & Lisa. Shankar is ranked amongst the greatest violinists of popular music by Digital Dream Door.

Gum 37, also known as RCW54c, is a region of diffuse HII emission in the constellation Carina. This nebula is also known as the Southern Tadpole Nebula. The elephant-trunk-shaped clouds of gas and dust are highly compressed gaseous structures. Their collapse gives rise to new stars. It is these massive young stars that light up the nebula.
The nebula is located some 6,000 light-years from Earth.

Carl Allen (born April 25, 1961) is an American jazz drummer. Allen attended William Paterson University.

He has worked with a wide variety of musicians, including Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, George Coleman, Phil Woods, the Benny Green Trio, and Rickie Lee Jones.

It was with Green that Allen met bassist Christian McBride. The two have teamed up frequently, working for many combos of big name leaders. McBride recruited Allen for his band, Christian McBride & Inside Straight. Allen is that quintet’s drummer for both its first recording, Kinda Brown, and its road tours.

In 1988, Allen and Vincent Herring founded Big Apple Productions, which produced several albums featuring young jazz performers.

He joined the faculty of The Juilliard School in 2001 and became the Artistic Director of Jazz Studies in 2008. He was replaced as director by Wynton Marsalis in 2013 and left Juilliard at the end of the academic year.

In 2011, Allen appeared as himself in two episodes of the HBO series Tremé in a studio recording scene in New York City.

In 2014, he formed his own group, The Art of Elvin, to pay tribute to drummers Art Blakey and Elvin Jones. The band debuted at the Percussive Arts Society (PAS) conference in Indianapolis, Indiana with Allen on drums, Freddie Hendrix (trumpet), Tivon Pennicott(tenor sax), Xavier Davis (piano), and Yasushi Nakamura (bass).

In 2021, Allen joined the faculty of the University of Missouri – Kansas City (UKMC) Conservatory as the William D. and Mary Grant Endowed Professor of Jazz Studies.

Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996) was an American singer, songwriter and composer, sometimes referred to as the “First Lady of Song”, “Queen of Jazz”, and “Lady Ella”. She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing, timing, intonation, absolute pitch, and a “horn-like” improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.

After a tumultuous adolescence, Fitzgerald found stability in musical success with the Chick Webb Orchestra, performing across the country but most often associated with the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. Her rendition of the nursery rhyme “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” helped boost both her and Webb to national fame. After taking over the band when Webb died, Fitzgerald left it behind in 1942 to start her solo career. Her manager was Moe Gale, co-founder of the Savoy, until she turned the rest of her career over to Norman Granz, who founded Verve Records to produce new records by Fitzgerald. With Verve, she recorded some of her more widely noted works, particularly her interpretations of the Great American Songbook.

Fitzgerald also appeared in films and as a guest on popular television shows in the second half of the twentieth century. Outside her solo career, she created music with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and The Ink Spots. These partnerships produced songs such as “Dream a Little Dream of Me“, “Cheek to Cheek“, “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall“, and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)“. In 1993, after a career of nearly sixty years, she gave her last public performance. Three years later, she died at age 79 after years of declining health. Her accolades included 14 Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts, the NAACP‘s inaugural President’s Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Emission nebula NGC 6164 was created by a rare, hot, luminous O-type star, some 40 times as massive as the Sun. Seen at the center of the cosmic cloud, the star is a mere 3 to 4 million years old. In another three to four million years the massive star will end its life in a supernova explosion. Spanning around 4 light-years, the nebula itself has a bipolar symmetry. That makes it similar in appearance to more common and familiar planetary nebulae – the gaseous shrouds surrounding dying sun-like stars. Also like many planetary nebulae, NGC 6164 has been found to have an extensive, faint halo, revealed in this deep image of the region. Expanding into the surrounding interstellar medium, the material in the halo is likely from an earlier active phase of the O star. This gorgeous telescopic view is a composite of extensive narrow-band image data, highlighting glowing atomic hydrogen gas in red and oxygen in greenish hues, with broad-band data for the surrounding starfield. Also known as the Dragon’s Egg nebula, NGC 6164 is 4,200 light-years away in the right-angled southern constellation of Norma.