mick laBriola

Stephen Ray Vaughan (also known as SRV; October 3, 1954 – August 27, 1990) was an American musician, best known as the guitarist and frontman of the blues rock trio Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. Although his mainstream career spanned only seven years, he is regarded as one of the most influential musicians in the history of blues music, and one of the greatest guitarists of all time. He was the younger brother of guitarist Jimmie Vaughan.

Born and raised in Dallas, Vaughan began playing guitar at age seven, initially inspired by his elder brother, Jimmie Vaughan. In 1972, he dropped out of high school and moved to Austin, where he began to gain a following after playing gigs on the local club circuit. Vaughan joined forces with Tommy Shannon on bass and Chris Layton on drums as Double Trouble in 1978 and established it as part of the Austin music scene; it soon became one of the most popular acts in Texas. He performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1982, where David Bowie saw him play. Bowie contacted him for a studio gig that resulted in Vaughan playing blues guitar on the album Let’s Dance (1983), before being discovered by John Hammond who interested major label Epic Records in signing Vaughan and his band to a record deal. Within months, they achieved mainstream success for the critically acclaimed debut album Texas Flood. With a series of successful network television appearances and extensive concert tours, Vaughan became the leading figure in the blues revival of the 1980s. Playing his guitar behind his back or plucking the strings with his teeth as Jimi Hendrixdid, he earned fame in Europe, which later resulted in breakthroughs for guitar players like Robert Cray, Jeff Healey, Robben Ford, and Walter Trout, amongst others.

During the majority of his life, Vaughan struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction. He also struggled with the personal and professional pressures of fame and his marriage to Lenora “Lenny” Bailey. He successfully completed rehabilitation and began touring again with Double Trouble in November 1986. His fourth and final studio album In Step reached number 33 in the United States in 1989; it was one of Vaughan’s most critically and commercially successful releases and included his only number-one hit, “Crossfire”. He became one of the world’s most highly demanded blues performers, and he headlined Madison Square Garden in 1989 and the Beale Street Music Festival in 1990.

On August 27, 1990, Vaughan and four others were killed in a helicopter crash in East Troy, Wisconsin, after performing with Double Trouble at Alpine Valley Music Theatre. An investigation concluded that the cause of the accident was pilot error and Vaughan’s family later filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Omniflight Helicopters which was settled out of court. Vaughan’s music continued to achieve commercial success with several posthumous releases and has sold over 15 million albums in the United States alone. In 2003, David Fricke of Rolling Stone ranked him the seventh greatest guitarist of all time. Vaughan was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, along with Double Trouble bandmates Chris Layton, Tommy Shannon, and Reese Wynans.

There are two different types of nebulae brought to you in this Picture of the Week. Each appears with a distinct colour in the visible sky and are captured here using the wide-field camera OmegaCAM on the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean desert.

The large, bright emission nebula at the centre, IC1284, is a star-forming region composed primarily of hydrogen. Its rosy glow comes from electrons within the hydrogen atoms: they’re excited by the radiation from young stars, but then they lose energy and emit a specific colour or wavelength of light. One of the filters on OmegaCAM lets through this particular reddish colour, hence the nebula’s look. Meanwhile, another colour filter highlights the blue reflection nebulae NGC6589 and NGC6590 in the lower right corner. The dust in a reflection nebula preferentially scatters shorter, bluer wavelengths of light from nearby stars, which is what gives these nebulae their eerie glow. It’s the same reason why the sky is blue!

The frame of this image covers an area roughly equivalent in the sky to a full Moon. This image was captured as part of a large ESO public survey, the VST Photometric H alpha Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+), which observes nebulae and stars in visible light to help astronomers understand how stars are born, live and die.

Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner CBE (born 2 October 1951), known as Sting, is an English musician and actor. He was the frontman, songwriter and bassist for new wave band the Police from 1977 until their breakup in 1986. He launched a solo career in 1985 and has included elements of rock, jazz, reggae, classical, new-age, and worldbeat in his music.

As a solo musician and a member of the Police, Sting has received 17 Grammy Awards: he won Song of the Year for “Every Breath You Take“, three Brit Awards, including Best British Male Artist in 1994 and Outstanding Contribution in 2002, a Golden Globe, an Emmy, and four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. In 2019, he received a BMI Award for “Every Breath You Take” becoming the most-played song in radio history. In 2002, Sting received the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and was also inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Police in 2003. In 2000, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for recording. In 2003, Sting received a CBE from Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace for services to music. He was made a Kennedy Center Honoree at the White House in 2014 and was awarded the Polar Music Prize in 2017. In May 2023, he was made an Ivor Novello Fellow.

With the Police, Sting became one of the world’s best-selling music artists. Solo and with the Police combined, he has sold over 100 million records. In 2006, Paste ranked him 62nd of the 100 best living songwriters. He was 63rd of VH1‘s 100 greatest artists of rock, and 80th of Q‘s 100 greatest musical stars of the 20th century. He has collaborated with other musicians on songs such as “Money for Nothing” with Dire Straits, “Rise & Fall” with Craig David, “All for Love” with Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart, “You Will Be My Ain True Love” with Alison Krauss, and introduced the North African music genre raï to Western audiences through the hit song “Desert Rose” with Cheb Mami. In 2018, he released the album 44/876, a collaboration with Jamaican musician Shaggy, which won the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album in 2019.

NGC 6946, sometimes referred to as the Fireworks Galaxy, is a face-on intermediate spiral galaxywith a small bright nucleus, whose location in the sky straddles the boundary between the northernconstellations of Cepheus and Cygnus. Its distance from Earth is about 25.2 million light-years or 7.72 megaparsecs, similar to the distance of M101 (NGC 5457) in the constellation Ursa Major. Both were once considered to be part of the Local Group, but are now known to be among the dozen bright spiral galaxies near the Milky Way but beyond the confines of the Local Group. NGC 6946 lies within the Virgo Supercluster.

The galaxy was discovered by William Herschel on 9 September 1798. Based on an estimation by the Third Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies (RC3) in 1991, the galaxy has a D₂₅ B-band isophotal diameter of 26.77 kiloparsecs (87,300 light-years). It is heavily obscured by interstellar matter due to its location close to the galactic plane of the Milky Way. Due to its prodigious star formation it has been classified as an active starburst galaxy. NGC 6946 has also been classified as a double-barred spiral galaxy, with the inner, smaller bar presumably responsible for funneling gas into its center.

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

Pettiford was born in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, United States. His mother identified as being of Choctawdescent, and his father Harry “Doc” Pettiford identified as half Cherokee and half African American.

He grew up playing in the family band in which he sang and danced before switching to piano at the age of 12, then to double bass when he was 14. He is quoted as saying he did not like the way people were playing the bass, so he developed his own way of playing it. Despite being admired by the likes of Milt Hintonat the age of 14, he gave up in 1941 as he did not believe he could make a living. Five months later, he once again met Hinton, who persuaded him to return to music.

In 1942, he joined the Charlie Barnet band and in 1943 gained wider public attention after recording with Coleman Hawkins on his “The Man I Love“.^[1] Pettiford also recorded with Earl Hines and Ben Websteraround this time. After he moved to New York, he was one of the musicians (together with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke) who in the early 1940s jammed at Minton’s Playhouse, where the music style developed that later was called bebop. He and Dizzy Gillespie led a bop group in 1943.In  1945, Pettiford went with Hawkins to California, where he appeared in The Crimson Canary, a mystery movie known for its jazz soundtrack, which also featured Josh White. He then worked with Duke Ellington from 1945 to 1948 and for Woody Herman in 1949, before working mainly as a leader in the 1950s.

As a leader he inadvertently discovered Cannonball Adderley. After one of his musicians had tricked him into letting Adderley, an unknown music teacher, onto the stand, he had Adderley solo on a demanding piece, on which Adderley performed impressively.

Pettiford is considered the pioneer of the cello as a solo instrument in jazz music. He first played the cello as a practical joke on his band leader (Woody Herman), when he walked off stage during his solo spot and came back, unexpectedly with a cello and played on that. In 1949, after suffering a broken arm, Pettiford found it impossible to play his bass, so he experimented with a cello a friend had lent him. Tuning it in fourths, like a double bass, but one octave higher, Pettiford found it possible to perform during his rehabilitation (during which time his arm was in a sling) and made his first recordings with the instrument in 1950. The cello thus became his secondary instrument, and he continued to perform and record with it throughout the remainder of his career.

He recorded extensively during the 1950s for the Debut, Bethlehem and ABC Paramount labels among others. During the mid-1950s he played on the first three albums Thelonious Monk recorded for the Riverside label.

Between 1954 and 1958, Pettiford also led sextets, big bands and jazz orchestras which played dates in Manhattan venues like Birdland, where he continued to explore unusual instrumental voicing including French horns and harp. The reedist and composer Gigi Gryce collaborated with Pettiford on the novel arrangements for the orchestra’s hi-fi albums.

In 1958, Pettiford moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, and started recording for European companies. After his move to Europe he often performed with European musicians, like Attila Zoller, and also with other Americans who had settled in Europe, such as Bud Powell and Kenny Clarke.

He died in 1960 in Copenhagen shortly before his 38th birthday, from a virus closely related to polio.