Blog
Honoring my dad Mike Labriola a WWII US Army veteran stationed in his homeland of Italy. Devastated & traumatized. Praying for Peace for Ukraine, Palestine and Israel. In addition to the total of 32 ongoing conflicts in the world right now, ranging from drug wars, terrorist insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, and civil wars. When will this stop?
more...
This broad, luminous red arc was a surprising visitor to partly cloudy evening skies over northern France. Captured extending toward the zenith in a west-to-east mosaic of images from November 5, the faint atmospheric ribbon of light is an example of a Stable Auroral Red (SAR) arc. The rare night sky phenomenon was also spotted at unusually low latitudes around world, along with more dynamic auroral displays during an intense geomagnetic storm. SAR arcs and their relation to auroral emission have been explored by citizen science and satellite investigations. From altitudes substantially above the normal auroral glow, the deep red SAR emission is thought to be caused by strong heating due to currents flowing in planet Earth’s inner magnetosphere. Beyond this SAR, the Milky Way arcs above the cloud banks along the horizon, a regular visitor to night skies over northern France.
more...Mario Pavone (November 11, 1940 – May 15, 2021) was an American jazz bassist, composer and bandleader. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead offers that Pavone was not only “great bass player [but also a] big-hearted mensch.”
Pavone was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. Pavone attended B. W. Tinker grammar school, Leavenworth High School, and the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he graduated with a B.S. in engineering. When his Town Plot neighbor, world-renowned guitarist Joe Diorio, recognized him as an unrealized musician Mario was inspired to take up the bass. Primarily self-taught, he was a natural on his instrument. Pavone began playing bass soon after witnessing John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard in 1961.
more...Ernestine Anderson (November 11, 1928 – March 10, 2016 Houston, TX) was an American jazz and blues singer. In a career spanning more than six decades, she recorded over 30 albums. She was nominated four times for a Grammy Award. She sang at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Monterey Jazz Festival (six times over a 33-year span), as well as at jazz festivals all over the world. In the early 1990s she joined Qwest Records, the label founded by fellow Garfield High School graduate Quincy Jones.
more...
Delores LaVern Baker (November 11, 1929 – March 10, 1997) was an American R&B singer who had several hit records on the pop chart in the 1950s and early 1960s. Her most successful records were “Tweedle Dee” (1955), “Jim Dandy” (1956), and “I Cried a Tear” (1958).
Baker was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. The Hall remarked that her “fiery fusion of blues, jazz and R&B showcased her alluring vocals and set the stage for the rock and roll surge of the Fifties”. From 1955 to 1965, 20 of her songs made the R&B charts. Over the years, Elvis Presley recorded eight Baker songs.
Baker was born Delores Evans in Chicago. She was raised in Calumet City, Illinois. Under her mother’s new surname, McMurley, Delores – on December 23, 1948, at age nineteen, in Cook County, Illinois – married Eugene Williams.
more...Mose John Allison Jr. (November 11, 1927 – November 15, 2016 Tallahatchie County, Mississippi) was an American jazz and blues pianist, singer, and songwriter. He became notable for playing a unique mix of blues and modern jazz, both singing and playing piano. After moving to New York in 1956, he worked primarily in jazz settings, playing with jazz musicians like Stan Getz, Al Cohn, and Zoot Sims, along with producing numerous recordings.
He is described as having been “one of the finest songwriters in 20th-century blues.” His songs were strongly dependent on evoking moods, with his individualistic, “quirky”, and subtle ironic humor. His writing influence on R&B had well-known fans recording his songs, among them Pete Townshend, who recorded his “Young Man Blues” for the Who‘s Live at Leeds album in 1970. John Mayall was one of dozens who recorded his classic, “Parchman Farm“, and Georgie Fame used many of Allison’s songs. Others who recorded his songs included Leon Russell (“I’m Smashed”) and Bonnie Raitt (“Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy”).
The 1980s saw an increase in his popularity with new fans drawn to his unique blend of modern jazz. In the 1990s he began recording more consistently. Van Morrison, Georgie Fame and Ben Sidran collaborated with him on a tribute album, Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison. The Pixies wrote the song “Allison” as a tribute.
Allison’s music had an important influence on other artists, such as Jimi Hendrix, J. J. Cale, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, Tom Waits, and Pete Townshend. He was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame in 2006.
more...Dominated by dark matter, massive cluster of galaxies Abell 2744 is known to some as Pandora’s Cluster. It lies 3.5 billion light-years away toward the constellation Sculptor. Using the galaxy cluster’s enormous mass as a gravitational lens to warp spacetime and magnify even more distant objects directly behind it, astronomers have found a background galaxy, UHZ1, at a remarkable redshift of Z=10.1. That puts UHZ1 far beyond Abell 2744, at a distance of 13.2 billion light-years, seen when our universe was about 3 percent of its current age. UHZ1 is identified in the insets of this composited image combining X-rays (purple hues) from the spacebased Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared light from the James Webb Space Telescope. The X-ray emission from UHZ1 detected in the Chandra data is the telltale signature of a growing supermassive black hole at the center of the ultra high redshift galaxy. That makes UHZ1’s growing black hole the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays, a result that now hints at how and when the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed.
more...Hubert Laws (born November 10, 1939) is an American flutist and saxophonist with a career spanning over 40 years in jazz, classical, and other music genres. Laws is one of the few classical artists who has also mastered jazz, pop, and rhythm-and-blues genres, moving effortlessly from one repertory to another. He has three Grammy nominations.
Hubert Laws, Jr. was born November 10, 1939, in the Studewood section of Houston, Texas, the second of eight children to Hubert Laws, Sr. and Miola Luverta Donahue. Many of his siblings also entered the music industry, including saxophonist Ronnie and vocalists Eloise, Debra, and Johnnie Laws. He began playing flute in high school after volunteering to substitute for the school orchestra’s regular flutist. He became adept at jazz improvisation by playing in the Houston-area jazz group the Swingsters, which eventually evolved into the Modern Jazz Sextet, the Night Hawks, and The Crusaders. At the age of 15, he was a member of the early Jazz Crusaders while in Texas (1954–60), and also played classical music during those years.
more...Andrew Charles Cyrille (born November 10, 1939) is an American avant-garde jazz drummer. Throughout his career, he has performed both as a leader and a sideman in the bands of Walt Dickerson and Cecil Taylor, among others. AllMusic biographer Chris Kelsey wrote: “Few free-jazz drummers play with a tenth of Cyrille’s grace and authority. His energy is unflagging, his power absolute, tempered only by an ever-present sense of propriety.”
Cyrille was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States, into a Haitian family. He began studying science at St. John’s University, but was already playing jazz in the evenings and switched his studies to the Juilliard School. His first drum teachers were fellow Brooklyn-based drummers Willie Jones and Lenny McBrowne; through them, Cyrille met Max Roach. Nonetheless, Cyrille became a disciple of Philly Joe Jones.
more...Paul Bley, CM (November 10, 1932 – January 3, 2016) was a Canadian jazz pianist known for his contributions to the free jazz movement of the 1960s as well as his innovations and influence on trio playing and his early live performance on the Moog and ARP synthesizers. His music has been described by Ben Ratliff of the New York Times as “deeply original and aesthetically aggressive”. Bley’s prolific output includes influential recordings from the 1950s through to his solo piano recordings of the 2000s.
Bley was born in Montreal, Quebec, on November 10, 1932. His adoptive parents were Betty Marcovitch, an immigrant from Romania, and Joseph Bley, owner of an embroidery factory, who named him Hyman Bley. However, in 1993 a relative from the New York branch of the Bley family walked into the Sweet Basil Jazz Club in New York City and informed Bley that his father was actually his biological parent.
more...The core of the Tangos is the letra, three or four octosyllabic lines. As with the Bulerías, the the first line is often repeated, and the repeated lines are balanced by a longer consequent phrase. Before a letra a Tangos may open with a guitar falseta or an estribillo, in which the singer sings a traditional melody with nonsense syllables (“le le le, ni, ni, etc.). The estribillo may return throughout the piece as a chorus after a letra.
Once the letra begins it can be broken up several times with remates performed by the dancer. This usually occurs between the first and second line of the letra, and often occurs more frequently, giving the dance a improvisatory air. Thus, the letras themselves can be further broken up with remates or escobillas from the dancer or with guitar falsetas. A dancer may also choose to perform a long footwork passage accompanied by compás patterns from the guitarist and palmista (an escobilla performed “a palo seco” or dry, without guitar accompaniment). As in Bulerías, Tangos can end with a cierre – a closing pattern – that is based on a different set of chords than the letras. The dancer can also perform a cue (llamada) that leads into a traveling exit – a salida. It’s also common to end certain forms in flamenco with a macho, a transition into a faster, related form. Tangos wiil often end with a brief Rumba Flamenca. Similarly, Tientos will often end with a brief Tangos.
more...The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier’s famous 18th century list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, debris from the death explosion of a massive star witnessed by astronomers in the year 1054. This sharp image from the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) explores the eerie glow and fragmented strands of the still expanding cloud of interstellar debris in infrared light. One of the most exotic objects known to modern astronomers, the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star spinning 30 times a second, is visible as a bright spot near the nebula’s center. Like a cosmic dynamo, this collapsed remnant of the stellar core powers the Crab’s emission across the electromagnetic spectrum. Spanning about 12 light-years, the Crab Nebula is a mere 6,500 light-years away in the head-strong constellation Taurus.
more...Mary Allin Travers (November 9, 1936 – September 16, 2009) was an American singer-songwriter who was known for being in the famous 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, along with Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey. Travers grew up amid the burgeoning folk scene in New York City‘s Greenwich Village, and she released five solo albums. She sang in the contralto range.
Mary Travers was born in 1936 in Louisville, Kentucky, to Robert Travers and Virginia Coigney, journalists and active organizers of The Newspaper Guild, a trade union. In 1938, the family moved to Greenwich Village in New York City.
more...
Jesse Davis (born September 11, 1965) is an American jazz saxophonist. He began as a student in Ellis Marsalis‘s New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. After graduating, Davis embarked on a productive jazz career, recording eight albums on the Concord Jazz label, alongside collaborations with such artists as Jack McDuff and Illinois Jacquet. Davis has studied music at Northeastern Illinois University,[1] and in 1989 he received a “Most Outstanding Musician award” from Down Beat magazine.
more...There’s a new space telescope in the sky: Euclid. Equipped with two large panoramic cameras, Euclid captures light from the visible to the near-infrared. It took five hours of observing for Euclid’s 1.2-meter diameter primary mirror to capture, through its sharp optics, the 1000+ galaxies in the Perseus cluster, which lies 250 million light years away. More than 100,000 galaxies are visible in the background, some as far away as 10 billion light years. The revolutionary nature of Euclid lies in the combination of its wide field of view (twice the area of the full moon), its high angular resolution (thanks to its 620 Megapixel camera), and its infrared vision, which captures both images and spectra. Euclid’s initial surveys, covering a third of the sky and recording over 2 billion galaxies, will enable a study of how dark matter and dark energy have shaped our universe.
more...More Posts
- Steve Lacy
- “Champion Jack” Dupree
- World Music Tinariwen
- Daily Roots Jacob Miller
- A Chorus Line by Theatre 55
- Cosmos Cygnus Wall
- George Clinton
- Al Di Meola
- Jimmy Bruno
- Don Patterson
- Junior Cook
- STOP THE WAR World Music Dakha Brakha
- Daily Roots Dennis Brown
- A Chorus Line by Theatre 55
- Rhythm Roots Workshop Residencies Ebenezer Assisted and Independent Care
- Cosmos NGC 4945
- Floyd McDaniel
- Cat Stevens
- Sonny Clark
- World Drumming Babatunde Olatunji