mick laBriola

Jessie Hill (December 9, 1932 – September 17, 1996) was an American R&B and Louisiana blues singer and songwriter, best remembered for the classic song “Ooh Poo Pah Doo“.

Hill was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. By his teens he was playing drums in local bands, and in 1951 he formed his own group, the House Rockers. After periods performing as drummer with Professor Longhair and then Huey “Piano” Smith, Hill formed a new version of the House Rockers in 1958, which enabled him to focus on singing with the band. He is the grandfather of James and Troy Andrews.

The origins of “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” were apparently created from a tune played by a local pianist, who was known only as Big Four. Hill wrote the lyrics and melody, later expanding the work with an intro taken from Dave Bartholomew. It was further honed on stage, before Hill recorded a demo that he shopped to local record labels, finally recording a session at Cosimo Matassa‘s studio produced by Allen Toussaint.

Junior Wells (born Amos Wells Blakemore Jr.; December 9, 1934 – January 15, 1998) 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'”.

Wells may have been born in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised in West Memphis, Arkansas (some sources report that he was born in West Memphis). Initially taught by his cousin Junior Parker and by Sonny Boy Williamson II, Wells learned to play the harmonica skillfully by the age of seven.

Donald Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II (December 9, 1932 – February 4, 2013) 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.

Byrd was born in 1932 in Detroit, Michigan. His family came from the African-American middle-class. His father, Elijah Thomas Byrd, was a Methodist minister who greatly valued education and oversaw his son’s schooling. His mother, Cornelia Taylor, introduced Byrd to jazz music and it was her brother who gave Byrd his first trumpet. He attended Cass Technical High School. He performed with Lionel Hampton before finishing high school. During this period, his first professional recording session was in 1949 at Fortune Records in Detroit with the Robert Barnes Sextette for the single “Black Eyed Peas” / “Bobbin’ At Barbee’s.” After playing in a military band during a term in the United States Air Force, Byrd obtained a bachelor’s degree in music from Wayne State University and a master’s degree from Manhattan School of Music. While still at the Manhattan School, he joined Art Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers as Clifford Brown’s successor. In 1955, he recorded with Gigi Gryce, Jackie McLean and Mal Waldron. After leaving the Jazz Messengers in 1956, he performed with many leading jazz musicians of the day, including John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, and later Herbie Hancock.

James Douglas Morrison (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971) was an American singer-songwriter and poetwho was the lead vocalist and lyricist of the rock band the Doors. Due to his energetic persona, poetic lyrics, distinctive voice, erratic and unpredictable performances, along with the dramatic circumstances surrounding his life and early death, Morrison is regarded by music critics and fans as one of the most influential frontmen in rock history. Since his death, his fame has endured as one of popular culture’s top rebellious and oft-displayed icons, representing the generation gap and youth counterculture.

Together with pianist Ray Manzarek, Morrison founded the Doors in 1965 in Venice, California. The group spent two years in obscurity until shooting to prominence with their number-one hit single in the United States, “Light My Fire“, taken from their self-titled debut album. Morrison recorded a total of six studio albums with the Doors, all of which sold well and many of which received critical acclaim. He was well known for improvising spoken word poetry passages while the band played live. Manzarek said Morrison “embodied hippie counterculture rebellion”.

Morrison developed an alcohol dependency throughout his life, which at times affected his performances on stage. In 1971, Morrison died unexpectedly in a Paris apartment at the age of 27, amid several conflicting witness reports. His untimely death is often linked with the 27 Club. Since no autopsy was performed, the cause of Morrison’s death remains disputed.

Although the Doors recorded two more albums after Morrison died, his death severely affected the band’s fortunes, and they split up two years later. In 1993, Morrison was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with the other Doors members. Magazines including Rolling Stone, NME and Classic Rock, have ranked him among the greatest rock singers of all time.

James Oscar Smith (December 8, 1928 – February 8, 2005) was an American jazz musician whose albums often appeared on Billboard magazine charts. He helped popularize the Hammond B-3 organ, creating a link between jazz and 1960s soul music.

In 2005, Smith was awarded the NEA Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honor that America bestows upon jazz musicians. There is confusion about Smith’s birth year, with sources citing either 1925 or 1928. Born James Oscar Smith in Norristown, Pennsylvania, he joined his father doing a song-and-dance routine in clubs at the age of six. He began teaching himself to play the piano. When he was nine, Smith won a Philadelphia radio talent contest as a boogie-woogie pianist. After a period in the U.S. Navy, he began furthering his musical education in 1948, with a year at Royal Hamilton College of Music, then the Leo Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia in 1949. He began exploring the Hammond organ in 1951. From 1951 to 1954, he played piano, then organ in Philly R&B bands like Don Gardner and the Sonotones. He switched to organ permanently in 1954 after hearing Wild Bill Davis.

Cleopatra Brown (December 8, 1907 or 1909 – April 15, 1995), known as Cleo Brown, C. Patra Brown or Cleo Patra Brown, was an American blues and jazz vocalist and pianist. She was the first woman instrumentalist to receive the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship

While Brown’s place of birth has been published as Meridian, Mississippi, Brown told W. Balliett in a 1986 interview published in The New Yorker that she was born in De Kalb, Mississippi, shortly before her father took a position as a pastor in Meridian. She played piano in the Baptist church as a child. In 1919 her family moved to Chicago, and she began learning piano from her brother who worked with “Pine Top” Smith, playing boogie-woogie for dances.From around 1923 she worked in vaudeville, as well as taking gigs in clubs. In 1935, she replaced Fats Waller as pianist on New York radio station WABC.

b. James Jarrett Jnr., 8 December 1899, Cordele, Georgia, USA, d. 5 September 1995. Barrelhouse blues pianist Pigmeat Jarrett moved to Kentucky as a child where his Geechee father worked as a coalminer, his mother being half-Geechee, half-Cherokee. Some years later the family settled in Cincinnati, the city with which he would become synonymous. Jarrett attended the local Beecher Stowe School: ‘I got my nickname there from the teacher’, he told Living Blues magazine, ‘because every time she seen me I had a piece of hog.’ His mother sang at church, but would have nothing to do with the nascent blues movement, considering it to be the ‘devil’s music’. Her son did not share her opinion, picking up the basics from local ‘open house’ gatherings. Later he helped run whiskey from Newport during prohibition. He also began to play alongside local musicians and visiting stars such as Bessie Smith. His first ventures out of town came courtesy of covert train rides in cattle trucks – a method of transport he shared with bluesmen such as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leroy Carr.

In the 30s Jarrett found employment on steam paddlers, operating on the Ohio and Illinois Rivers. The Depression and the subsequent introduction of jukeboxes curtailed his employment somewhat, and for a time he joined a 16-piece house band, moving progressively into jazz as opportunities for blues artists dwindled. Later he started a small electrical shop. Despite his long career, Jarrett was recorded only once, when blues scholar Steve Tracy produced his 1980 album Look At The People. He was later honoured at the Cincinnati Public Library with a Pigmeat Jarrett Day in 1992 and also performed at the Chicago Blues Festival that year.

“Malagueñas” is a traditional flamenco style from Málaga. It comes from the ancient “fandangos malagueños”.

By the first half of the 19th century, it became a flamenco style. Although this singing hasn’t its own dance, it has a large melodic range. This is a ad libitum singing, singer extends intentionally some verses. Rhythm is sometimes delayed and some other times overtaken.

It is accompanied by a guitar which gains richness and complexity in “malagueña” melodies because of its rhythmic freedom. Unlike local “fandango”, “toque” of Malaga is getting slower and more sustained. Thus, it obtains an extraordinary richness.

“Malagueña” singing is composed by a “copla” of four or five eight-syllable verses. It is usually composed by six verses, as some of them are repeated. It is a solemn and melodious singing that acquires the category of “cante grande” (great singing) in the voices of Chacon and Enrique el Mellizo. There are several types of “malagueñas” due to personal creations of interpreters, either born in Malaga or other parts of Andalusia. Diego Clavel recorded 47 “malagueñas” forms.

Some authors consider that the first “malagueñas” born with Juan Breva. Others point to Juan Reyes “El Canario” as the creator of this genre. Álora, the town where “El Canario” was born, is considered as the origin of “malagueñas”. “Malagueñas” of “El Niño” Tomares are also well-known as well as the ones of “la Trini” and “Ojana”. Enrique “el Mellizo”, Chacon and Fosforito “El Viejo” were the creators of “malagueñas nuevas” (new version of “malagueñas”). An evolutionary leap, from which has been called “malagueñas de transición”.

Harold Forster Chapin (/ˈtʃeɪpɪn/ CHAY-pin; December 7, 1942 – July 16, 1981) was an American singer-songwriter, philanthropist, and hunger activist best known for his folk rock and pop rock songs. He achieved worldwide success in the 1970s. Chapin, a Grammy Award-winning artist and Grammy Hall of Fameinductee, has sold over 16 million records worldwide.

Chapin recorded a total of 11 albums from 1972 until his death in 1981. All 14 singles that he released became hits on at least one national music chart. Chapin’s best-known songs include “Taxi” and “Cat’s in the Cradle.”

As a dedicated humanitarian, Chapin fought to end world hunger. He was a key participant in the creation of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger in 1977. In 1987, Chapin was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his humanitarian work.

Mads Vinding (born 7 December 1948, Copenhagen, Denmark) is a Danish jazz double-bassist.

Vinding began his professional career when he was 16 as the house bassist for Jazzhus Montmartre, a jazz club in Copenhagen. He has played on more than 800 recordings and more than 1000 Radio/TV shows.

Louis Leo Prima (December 7, 1910 – August 24, 1978) was an American trumpeter, singer, entertainer, and bandleader. While rooted in New Orleans jazz, swing music, and jump blues, Prima touched on various genres throughout his career: he formed a seven-piece New Orleans-style jazz band in the late 1920s, fronted a swing combo in the 1930s and a big band group in the 1940s, helped to popularize jump blues in the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s, and performed frequently as a Vegas lounge act beginning in the 1950s.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, his music further encompassed early R&B and rock ‘n’ roll, boogie-woogie, and Italian folk music, such as the tarantella. Prima made prominent use of Italian music and language in his songs, blending elements of his Italian and Sicilian identity with jazz and swing music. At a time when ethnic musicians were discouraged from openly stressing their ethnicity, Prima’s conspicuous embrace of his Sicilian ethnicity opened the doors for other Italian-American and ethnic American musicians to display their ethnic roots.

Prima is also known for providing the voice for the orangutan King Louie in the 1967 Disney film The Jungle Book.