mick laBriola

Lawrence Roger Fast (born December 10, 1951) is an American synthesizer player and composer. He is best known for his 1975–1987 series of synthesizer music albums (Synergy) and for his contributions to a number of popular music acts, including Peter Gabriel, Foreigner, Nektar, Bonnie Tyler, and Hall & Oates.

Melbourne Robert Cranshaw (December 3, 1932 – November 2, 2016) was an American jazzbassist. His career spanned the heyday of Blue Note Records to his later involvement with the Musicians Union. He is perhaps best known for his long association with Sonny Rollins. Cranshaw performed in Rollins’s working band on and off for over five decades, starting with a live appearance at the 1959 Playboy jazz festival in Chicago and on record with the 1962 album The Bridge.

Cranshaw died at the age of 83 on November 2, 2016, in Manhattan, New York, from Stage IV cancer.

Eddie Jones (December 10, 1926 – February 7, 1959 Greenwood, MS), known as Guitar Slim, was an American guitarist in the 1940s and 1950s, best known for the million-selling song “The Things That I Used to Do“, for Specialty Records. It is listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. Slim had a major impact on rock and roll and experimented with distorted tones on the electric guitar a full decade before Jimi Hendrix.

Ray Willis Nance (December 10, 1913 – January 28, 1976) was an American jazz trumpeter, violinistand singer. He is best remembered for his long association with Duke Ellington and his orchestra. Ellington hired Nance to replace trumpeter Cootie Williams, who had joined Benny Goodman, in 1940.Nance’s first recorded performance with Ellington was at the Fargo, North Dakota ballroom dance.Shortly after joining the band, Nance was given the trumpet solo on the earliest recorded version of “Take the “A” Train“, which became the Ellington theme. Nance’s “A Train” solo is one of the most copied and admired trumpet solos in jazz history. Indeed, when Cootie Williams returned to the band more than twenty years later, he would play Nance’s solo on “A Train” almost exactly as the original.

Joan Anita Barbara Armatrading CBE (born 9 December 1950) is an English singer-songwriter and guitarist. Her first major commercial success came with her third and fourth albums, Joan Armatrading (1976) and Show Some Emotion (1977), and she continues to play live and record studio albums. A three-time Grammy Award nominee, Armatrading has also been nominated twice for BRIT Awards as Best Female Artist. She received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contemporary Song Collection in 1996.

Joan Anita Barbara Armatrading, the third of six children, was born in 1950 in the town of Basseterre in what was then the British colony of Saint Christopher and Nevis.

Daniel Ivan Hicks (December 9, 1941 – February 6, 2016 Little Rock, AK) was an American singer-songwriter and musician, and the leader of Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. His idiosyncratic style combined elements of cowboy folk, jazz, country, swing, bluegrass, pop, and gypsy music. He is perhaps best known for the songs “I Scare Myself” and “Canned Music”. His songs are frequently infused with humor, as evidenced by the title of his tune “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?” His album Live at Davies (2013) capped over forty years of music.

Writing about Hicks for Oxford American in 2007, critic David Smay said, “[T]here was a time from the ’20s through the ’40s when swing—’hot rhythm’—rippled through every form of popular music. That’s the music Dan Hicks plays, and there’s no single word for it because it wasn’t limited to any one genre. Django Reinhardt and the Mills Brothers and Spade Cooley and Hank Garland and the Boswell Sisters and Stuff Smith and Bing Crosby all swing. You can make yourself nutty trying to define what Dan Hicks is. Then again, you could just say: Dan Hicks swings.”

Donaldson Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II (December 9, 1932 – February 4, 2013 Detroit, MI) was an American jazz and rhythm & blues trumpeter and vocalist. A sideman for many other jazz musicians of his generation, Byrd was one of the few hard bop musicians who successfully explored funk and soul while remaining a jazz artist. As a bandleader, Byrd was an influence on the early career of Herbie Hancock and many others.

Junior Wells (born Amos Wells Blakemore Jr.; December 9, 1934 – January 15, 1998 West Memphis, TN) was an American singer, harmonica player, and recording artist. He is best known for his signature song “Messin’ with the Kid” and his 1965 album Hoodoo Man Blues, described by the critic Bill Dahl as “one of the truly classic blues albums of the 1960s”. Wells himself categorized his music as rhythm and blues.

Wells performed and recorded with various notable blues musicians, including Muddy Waters, Earl Hooker, and Buddy Guy. He remained a fixture on the blues scene throughout his career and also crossed over to rock audiences while touring with the Rolling Stones. Not long before Wells died, the blues historian Gerard Herzhaft called him “one of the rare active survivors of the ‘golden age of the blues'”.