mick laBriola

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.

Zeki Müren  6 December 1931 – 24 September 1996) was a Turkish singer, composer, songwriter, actor and poet. Known by the nicknames “The Sun of Art” and “Pasha“, he was one of the prominent figures of Turkish classical music. Due to his contributions to the art industry, he was named a “State Artist” in 1991. He was the first singer to receive a gold certification in Turkey and throughout his career recorded and released hundreds of songs on cassettes and phonograph records.

Miroslav Ladislav Vitouš (born 6 December 1947) is a Czech jazz bassist.

Born in Prague, Vitouš began the violin at age six, switching to piano after about three years, and then to bass at age fourteen. As a young man in Europe, Vitouš was a competitive swimmer. One of his early music groups was the Junior Trio with his brother Alan on drums and Jan Hammer on keyboards. He studied music at the Prague Conservatory under František Pošta, and won a music contest in Vienna in 1966 that gave him a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, which he attended one year before going to Chicago to play with a group co-led by the classically inclined trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and flugelhorn pioneer Clark Terry.

Miles Davis saw Vitouš playing in Chicago with Brookmeyer and Terry in 1967 and invited him to join his own group playing at the Village Gate in New York City. It was with Davis that Vitouš first encountered saxophonist Wayne Shorter, keyboardist Herbie Hancock and the Davis-centric scene that was transforming mainstream jazz from late hard bop into what would be known as jazz fusion.

Joseph Francis Lamb (December 6, 1887 – September 3, 1960) was an American composer of ragtime music. Lamb, of Irish descent, was the only non-African American of the “Big Three” composers of classical ragtime, the other two being Scott Joplin and James Scott. The ragtime of Joseph Lamb ranges from standard popular fare to complex and highly engaging. His use of long phrases was influenced by classical works he had learned from his sister and others while growing up, but his sense of structure was potentially derived from his study of Joplin’s piano rags. By the time he added some polish to his later works in the 1950s, Lamb had mastered the classic rag genre in a way that almost no other composer was able to approach at that time, and continued to play it passably as well, as evidenced by at least two separate recordings done in his home, as well as a few recorded interviews.

Lamb was born in Montclair, New Jersey. The youngest of four children, he taught himself to play the piano and admired the early ragtime publications of Scott Joplin. His first known works were “Meet Me at the Chutes,” and “Idle Dreams”, at the age of 13 in 1900, but they are unpublished and assumed lost.