mick laBriola

Albert Gene Collins (October 1, 1932 – November 24, 1993 Leona, TX) was an American electric blues guitarist and singer with a distinctive guitar style. He was noted for his powerful playing and his use of altered tunings and a capo. His long association with the Fender Telecaster led to the title “The Master of the Telecaster”.

At 18, Collins started his own group, the Rhythm Rockers, in which he honed his craft. During this time he was employed for four years at a ranch in Normangee, Texas; he then worked as a truck driver for various companies for 12 years.

Collins played an Epiphone guitar during his first two years with the Rhythm Rockers, but in 1952, after seeing Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown playing a Fender Esquire, he decided to purchase a Fender. He wanted a Telecaster, but because of the cost he chose to buy an Esquire, which he took to the Parker Music Company in Houston to be fitted with a Telecaster neck pickup. This was his main guitar until he moved to California, and it was the guitar that he used on his earliest recordings, including his signature song, “Frosty”. For the rest of his career he played a “maple cap”–necked natural ash body Fender 1966 Custom Telecaster with a Gibson PAF humbucking pickup retrofitted into the neck position, which became the basis for a Fender Custom Artist signature model in 1990.

Franklin Joseph Lymon (September 30, 1942 – February 27, 1968) was an American rock and roll/rhythm and blues singer and songwriter, best known as the boy soprano lead singer of the New York City-based early rock and roll doo-wop group The Teenagers. The group was composed of five boys, all in their early to mid-teens. The original lineup of The Teenagers, an integrated group, included three African-American members, Lymon, Jimmy Merchant, and Sherman Garnes; and two Puerto Ricanmembers, Joe Negroni and Herman Santiago. The Teenagers’ first single, 1956’s “Why Do Fools Fall in Love“, was also their biggest hit. After Lymon went solo in mid-1957, both his career and that of The Teenagers fell into decline. In 1968, Lymon was found dead at the age of 25 on the floor of his grandmother’s bathroom from a heroinoverdose. Lymon was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 as a member of the Teenagers. His life was dramatized in the 1998 film Why Do Fools Fall in Love.

Patrice Louise Rushen (born September 30, 1954) is American jazz pianist, R&B singer, record producer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and music director.

At the 25th Annual Grammy Awards, her 1982 single, “Forget Me Nots“, received a nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, while her instrumental song, “Number One” was nominated Best R&B Instrumental; both songs were from her seventh studio album, Straight from the Heart (1982).

Since 2008, Rushen has served as an ambassador for artistry in education at the Berklee College of Music, and the chair of the popular music program at the USC Thornton School of Music since 2014.

Oscar Pettiford (September 30, 1922 – September 8, 1960) was an American jazzdouble bassist and composer. He was one of the earliest musicians to work in the bebop idiom.

Jazz bassist Christian McBride called Pettiford “probably the most important bass player of that bebop generation in terms of creating new language for the bass.” Jamela Pettiford, a singer in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a descendant of the Pettiford family, told Minnesota Public Radio in 2022 that the Pettiford family band traveled itinerantly for a time as road musicians before settling in north Minneapolis. Pettiford died in 1960 in Copenhagen, shortly before his 38th birthday, from a virus closely related to polio.

Bernard “Buddy” Rich (September 30, 1917 – April 2, 1987) was an American jazzdrummer, songwriter, conductor, and bandleader. He is considered one of the most influential drummers of all time.

Rich was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He discovered his affinity for jazz music at a young age and began drumming at the age of two. He began playing jazz in 1937, working with acts such as Bunny Berigan, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, and Harry James. From 1942 to 1944, Rich served in the U.S. Marines. From 1945 to 1948, he led the Buddy Rich Orchestra. In 1966, he recorded a big-band style arrangement of songs from West Side Story. He found lasting success in 1966 with the formation of the Buddy Rich Big Band, also billed as the Buddy Rich Band and The Big Band Machine.

Rich was known for his virtuoso technique, power, and speed. He was an advocate of the traditional grip, though he occasionally used matched grip when playing the toms. Despite his commercial success and musical talent, Rich never learned how to read sheet music, preferring to listen to the drum parts played in rehearsal by whomever was his drum roadie at the time and relying on his uncanny photographic memory. In early March 1987, he was touring in New York when he was hospitalized after suffering a paralysis on his left side that physicians believed had been caused by a stroke. He was transferred to California to UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles for tests, where doctors discovered and removed a brain tumor on March 16. He was discharged a week later, but continued to receive daily chemotherapy treatments at the hospital. On April 2, 1987, he died of unexpected respiratory and cardiac failure after a treatment related to the malignant brain tumor.

Artist Johannes Stoetter

September 29th 1941-May 15th 1995

Perry Lederman, who died May 15 at his home in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, after a long battle with cancer, was one of the little-known legends of the folk revival. Born in Brooklyn, NY, he was inspired to learn guitar after seeing Tom Paley playing in Washington Square Park and quickly became one of the foremost fingerstyle players in the city, exploring and reviving traditional styles in the company of friends like Danny Kalb and Roy Berkeley. He was also a peerless seeker-out of vintage ¾-size Martin guitars, which he continued to favor throughout his life.

Perry continued to play during a brief college stint in Ann Arbor, Michigan, then moved to Berkeley, California, where he became a leading folk performer in partnership with writer and poet Al Young. His playing, notable for its passion and imagination, and an astonishing, controlled vibrato, was a major influence on later West Coast players like John Fahey and frequent housemate and jamming partner Michael Bloomfield. It was during this period that he made his only issued recording, on a Bay Area sampler for the Arhoolie label. More interested in the music itself than in commercial success, Perry put the guitar aside just as his West Coast followers began to receive national attention, preferring to spend eight years studying sarod as a student and friend of Indian master Ali Akbar Khan.

Roy Sinclair Campbell Jr. (September 29, 1952 – January 9, 2014) was an American trumpeter frequently linked to free jazz, although he also performed rhythm and bluesand funk during his career.

Born in Los Angeles, California, in 1952, Campbell was raised in New York City. At the age of fifteen, he began learning to play trumpet and soon studied at the Jazz Mobile program along with Kenny Dorham, Lee Morgan and Joe Newman.Throughout the 1960s, still unacquainted with the avant-garde movement, Campbell performed in the big bands of the Manhattan Community College. From the 1970s onwards, he performed primarily within the context of free jazz, spending some of this period studying with Yusef Lateef. Campbell composed the film music for the documentary Survival in New York (1989) by Rosa von Praunheim.

In the early 1990s, Campbell moved to the Netherlands and performed regularly with Klaas Hekman and Don Cherry. In addition to leading his own groups, he performed with Yo La Tengo, William Parker, Peter Brötzmann, Matthew Shipp, and other improvisors. Upon returning to the United States he began leading his group Other Dimensions In Music and also formed the Pyramid Trio, a pianoless trio formed with William Parker.

He died in January 2014 of hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease at the age of 61.

Jean-Luc Ponty (born 29 September 1942) is a French jazz and jazz fusion violinist and composer. Ponty was born into a family of classical musicians in Avranches, France. His father taught violin, his mother taught piano. At sixteen, he was admitted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, graduating two years later with the institution’s highest honor, Premier Prix (first prize). He was hired by the Orchestre Lamoureux in which he played for three years.

While still a member of the orchestra in Paris, Ponty picked up a side job playing clarinet (which his father had taught him) for a college jazz band that regularly performed at local parties. It proved life-changing. A growing interest in Miles Davis and John Coltrane compelled him to take up tenor saxophone. One night after an orchestra concert, and still wearing his tuxedo, Ponty found himself at a local club with only his violin. Within four years, he was widely accepted as the leading figure in “jazz fiddle”.

At that time, Ponty was leading a dual musical life: rehearsing and performing with the orchestra while also playing jazz at clubs throughout Paris. The demands of this schedule eventually brought him to a crossroads. Critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt wrote that “Since Ponty, the jazz violin has been a different instrument”.