mick laBriola

Rodney Jones (born August 30, 1956) is an American jazz guitarist who worked with Jaki Byard, Chico Hamilton, Dizzy Gillespie, and Lena Horne and as a bandleader. He is cited as a jazz guitarist who uses modern quartal harmony. Jones is a faculty member at Juilliard.

McKinley Howard “Kenny” Dorham (August 30, 1924 – December 5, 1972) was an American jazz trumpeter, singer, and composer. Dorham’s talent is frequently lauded by critics and other musicians, but he never received the kind of attention or public recognition from the jazz establishment that many of his peers did. For this reason, writer Gary Giddins said that Dorham’s name has become “virtually synonymous with underrated.” Dorham composed the jazz standard “Blue Bossa“, which first appeared on Joe Henderson‘s album Page One.

Dorham was one of the most active bebop trumpeters. He played in the big bands of Lionel Hampton, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, and Mercer Ellington and the quintet of Charlie Parker. He joined Parker’s band in December 1948. He was a charter member of the original cooperative Jazz Messengers. He also recorded as a sideman with Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins, and he replaced Clifford Brown in the Max Roach Quintet after Brown’s death in 1956. In addition to sideman work, Dorham led his own groups, including the Jazz Prophets (formed shortly after Art Blakey took over the Jazz Messengers name). The Jazz Prophets, featuring a young Bobby Timmons on piano, bassist Sam Jones, and tenorman J. R. Monterose, with guest Kenny Burrell on guitar, recorded a live album ‘Round About Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia in 1956 for Blue Note. During his final years Dorham suffered from kidney disease, from which he died on December 5, 1972, aged 48.

Usually, density waves of gas, dust, and newly formed stars circle a spiral galaxy‘s center and create a nearly symmetric galaxy. The differences between M66’s spiral arms and the apparent displacement of its nucleus are all likely caused by previous close interactions and the tidal gravitational pulls of nearby galaxy neighbors M65 and NGC 3628. The galaxy, featured here in infrared light taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, spans about 100,000 light years, lies about 35 million light years distant, and is the largest galaxy in a group known as the Leo Triplet. Like many spiral galaxies, the long and intricate dust lanes of M66 are seen intertwined with the bright stars and intergalactic dust that follow the spiral arms.

Doug Raney (August 29, 1956 – May 1, 2016) was an American jazz guitarist. He was the son of jazz guitarist Jimmy Raney.

Raney was born in New York City. He began to play the guitar when he was 14, beginning with rock and blues. He was given lessons by guitarist Barry Galbraith and became more interested in jazz. When he was 18, he played at a club in New York with pianist Al Haig. In 1977, he accompanied his father, jazz guitarist Jimmy Raney, in a duo. They toured Europe, and then Doug Raney moved to Copenhagen, Denmark. When he was 21, he recorded his first album as a leader, Introducing Doug Raney, for SteepleChase in 1977. Beginning in 1979, he recorded several albums with his father.

During his career, he worked with Chet Baker, George Cables, Joey DeFrancesco, Kenny Drew, Tal Farlow, Tomas Franck, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Billy Hart, Hank Jones, Clifford Jordan, Duke Jordan, Jesper Lundgaard, Red Mitchell, Adam Nussbaum, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Horace Parlan, Bernt Rosengren, and Jesper Thilo. Raney died of heart failure at the age of 59 on May 1, 2016.

Dinah Washington (born Ruth Lee Jones; August 29, 1924 – December 14, 1963) was an American singer and pianist, one of the most popular black female recording artists of the 1950s. Primarily a jazz vocalist, she performed and recorded in a wide variety of styles including blues, R&B, and traditional pop music, and gave herself the title of “Queen of the Blues”. She was a 1986 inductee of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

Ruth Lee Jones was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Alice and Ollie Jones, and moved to Chicago as a child. She became deeply involved in gospel music and played piano for the choir in St. Luke’s Baptist Church while still in elementary school. She sang gospel music in church and played piano, directing her church choir in her teens and was a member of the Sallie Martin Gospel Singers. When she joined the Sallie Martin group, she dropped out of Wendell Phillips High School. She sang lead with the first female gospel singers formed by Sallie Martin, who was co-founder of the Gospel Singers Convention. Her involvement with the gospel choir occurred after she won an amateur contest at Chicago’s Regal Theaterwhere she sang “I Can’t Face the Music”

Charles Parker Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955), nicknamed “Bird” or “Yardbird“, was an American jazz saxophonist, band leader and composer. Parker was a highly influential soloist and leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and advanced harmonies. He was a virtuoso and introduced revolutionary rhythmic and harmonic ideas into jazz, including rapid passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions. Primarily a player of the alto saxophone, Parker’s tone ranged from clean and penetrating to sweet and somber.

Parker acquired the nickname “Yardbird” early in his career on the road with Jay McShann. This, and the shortened form “Bird”, continued to be used for the rest of his life, inspiring the titles of a number of Parker compositions, such as “Yardbird Suite“, “Ornithology“, “Bird Gets the Worm”, and “Bird of Paradise”.

Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual rather than just an entertainer.

Charles Parker Jr. was born in Kansas City, Kansas, at 852 Freeman Avenue, and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, near Westport and later, in high school, near 15th and Olive St., to Charles Parker Sr. and Adelaide “Addie” Bailey, who was of mixed Choctaw and African-American background. He attended Lincoln High School in September 1934, but withdrew in December 1935, just before joining the local musicians’ union and choosing to pursue his musical career full-time.Parker’s life took a turn for the worse in March 1954 when his three-year-old daughter Pree died of cystic fibrosis and pneumonia. He attempted suicide twice in 1954, which once again landed him in a mental hospital. On March 12, 1955, while visiting his friend, the “jazz baroness” Nica de Koenigswarter, Charlie Parker died. The coroner cited pneumonia as the cause, and estimated Parker’s age at fifty-five or sixty. He was only thirty-four His childhood sweetheart and future wife, Rebecca Ruffin, graduated from Lincoln High School in June 1935.

Daniel Peter Seraphine (born August 28, 1948) is an American drummer, record producer, theatrical producer, and film producer. He is best known as the original drummer and a founding member of the rock band Chicago, a tenure which lasted from February 1967 to May 1990. Daniel Peter Seraphine was born in Chicago to John and Mary Seraphine. The family lived in the Dunningneighborhood on Chicago’s northwest side. He started playing drums at the age of nine while attending St. Priscilla Catholic grade school. When he was 15 years old, Seraphine withdrew from Steinmetz High School. Outside of school he joined a local gang called the JPs.

Dr. Bhekizizwe Joseph Shabalala (28 August 1940 – 11 February 2020) was a South African singer and musician who was the founder and musical director of the choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Dr. Bhekizizwe Joseph Shabalala was born in the town of Ladysmith (eMnambithi district) in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa. His parents, Jonathan Mluwane Shabalala and Nomandla Elina Shabalala, raised Joseph and his six siblings on a white-owned farm called Tugela. His father died in the late 1940s; Joseph, being the eldest, had to take care of the family. He left the farm, however, in 1958 to search for work in the nearby city of Durban.

During this time, he was spotted by a well-known group, the Durban Choir, after he delighted audiences with his smooth guitar playing and soprano voice. When he joined the choir, he attempted to teach them some of his new compositions, namely his first song “Nomathemba” (which was made into a play in 1995). They refused, and so he left them after only two years.

Kenneth Sidney “Kenny” Drew (August 28, 1928 – August 4, 1993) was an American-Danish jazzpianist.

Drew was born in New York City, United States, and received piano lessons from the age of five. He attended the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan. Drew’s first recording, in 1950, was with Howard McGhee, and over the next two years he worked in bands led by Buddy DeFranco, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, among others. After a brief period with his own trio in California, Drew returned to New York, playing with Dinah Washington, Johnny Griffin, Buddy Rich, and several others over the following few years. He led many recording sessions throughout the 1950s, and in 1957 appeared on John Coltrane‘s album, Blue Train.