mick laBriola

William John Evans (August 16, 1929 – September 15, 1980) was an American jazz pianist and composer who worked primarily as the leader of his trio. His use of impressionist harmony, interpretation of traditional jazz repertoire, block chords, and trademark rhythmically independent, “singing” melodic lines continues to influence jazz pianists today.

Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, United States, he was classically trained at Southeastern Louisiana Universityand the Mannes School of Music, in New York City, where he majored in composition and received the Artist Diploma. In 1955, he moved to New York City, where he worked with bandleader and theorist George Russell. In 1958, Evans joined Miles Davis‘s sextet, which in 1959, then immersed in modal jazz, recorded Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz album ever.

In late 1959, Evans left the Miles Davis band and began his career as a leader, with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, a group now regarded as a seminal modern jazz trio. In 1961, two albums were recorded at an engagement at New York’s Village Vanguard jazz club, Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby; a complete set of the Vanguard recordings on three CDs was issued decades later. However, ten days after this booking ended, LaFaro died in a car accident. After months of seclusion, Evans reemerged with a new trio, featuring bassist Chuck Israels. In 1963, Evans recorded Conversations with Myself, a solo album produced with overdubbing technology. In 1966, he met bassist Eddie Gómez, with whom he worked for the next 11 years. During the mid-1970s Bill Evans collaborated with the singer Tony Bennett on two critically acclaimed albums: The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album (1975) and Together Again(1977).

Many of Evans’s compositions, such as “Waltz for Debby” and “Time Remembered“, have become standards, played and recorded by many artists. Evans received 31 Grammy nominations and seven awards, and was inducted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame.

Evans grew up in North Plainfield, New Jersey, the son of Harry and Mary Evans (née Soroka). His father was of Welsh descent and ran a golf course; his mother was of Ukrainian ancestry and descended from a family of coal miners.

The Ring Nebula (also catalogued as Messier 57, M57 and NGC 6720) is a planetary nebula in the northern constellation of Lyra. Such a nebula is formed when a star, during the last stages of its evolution before becoming a white dwarf, expels a vast luminous envelope of ionized gas into the surrounding interstellar space. The new images of the famous Ring Nebula from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope are mesmerizing, with glowing rings of gas and wispy trails emanating from the core. We can see it in more clarity than ever, including thousands of clumps that make up its main ring.

The truly massive galaxy cluster 2MASX J05101744-4519179 basks in the centre of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This distant galaxy cluster is a cosmic leviathan that is highly luminous at X-ray wavelengths. Observing galaxy clusters like 2MASX J05101744-4519179 can advance our understanding of the evolution and interactions of dark and luminous matter in galaxy clusters, and also reveals powerful gravitational ‘telescopes’ that magnify distant objects through gravitational lensing. Knowing the location of these lenses can enable future observations with both Hubble and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The cluster 2MASX J05101744-4519179 is located in the constellation Pictor, around 2.6 billion light-years from Earth.

Two of Hubble’s instruments joined forces to create this image: Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. Both are third-generation instruments that offer superb image quality and high sensitivity to astronomers studying a range of scientific questions. Both instruments provide images of wide areas of the night sky, but view slightly different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. WFC3 spans the spectrum from the ultraviolet through to visible light and the near-infrared. In contrast to the wide panchromatic coverage of WFC3, ACS was optimised for visible-light observations.

Getting the best from Hubble requires instruments to use built-in corrective optics to account for the effects of the primary mirror’s aberration. During the construction of Hubble, a faulty instrument caused the primary mirror to be very precisely ground to slightly the wrong shape by only 0.0002 mm. A corrective instrument called COSTAR was developed to account for this tiny discrepancy, and later instruments like WFC3 and ACS were built with their own corrective optics.

[Image Description: A cluster of elliptical galaxies, visible as a crowd of oval shapes, each glowing around a bright core. The elliptical galaxy that appears largest by far is in the centre, with the other largest galaxies close to it. They are surrounded by a variety of more distant stars and galaxies, in many shapes and sizes but all much smaller, on a dark background.]

David Van Cortlandt Crosby (August 14, 1941 – January 18, 2023 LA, CA) was an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He first found fame as a member of the Byrds, with whom he helped pioneer the genres of folk rock and psychedelia in the mid-1960s, and later as part of the supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash, who helped popularize the “California sound” of the 1970s. In addition to his music, Crosby was known for his outspoken personality, politics, and personal troubles; he was sometimes depicted as emblematic of the counterculture of the 1960s.

After a short time performing in the folk music scene, Crosby co-founded the Byrds in 1964. They scored their first number-one hit in 1965 with a cover of Bob Dylan‘s “Mr. Tambourine Man“. Crosby appeared on the Byrds’ first five albums and the original lineup’s 1973 reunion album. In 1968, he formed Crosby, Stills & Nash (CSN) with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash. After the release of their debut album, CSN won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist of 1969. The group later occasionally included Neil Young. The core trio of CSN remained active from 1976 until 2016, and the duo of Crosby & Nash also recorded three gold albums in the 1970s. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) reunions were held in each decade from the 1970s through the 2000s.

Crosby released eight solo albums, albeit sporadically, over the course of his career. His solo debut was 1971’s If I Could Only Remember My Name. The last five of his solo albums, beginning with Croz (2014), came in the last decade of his life. Additionally, he formed a jazz-influenced trio with his son James Raymond and guitarist Jeff Pevar in CPR. He also appeared frequently on recordings by other artists, including Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, and David Gilmour.

Crosby’s combined work with the Byrds and CSNY has sold over 35 million albums. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice: once for his work in the Byrds and again for his work with CSN. Five albums to which he contributed are included in Rolling Stone‘s list of “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time“, three with the Byrds and two with CSN(Y).

He was also an occasional actor, appearing as a member of Captain Hook’s pirate crew in Hook (1991).

Edwin James Costa (August 14, 1930 – July 28, 1962) was an American jazz pianist, vibraphonist, composer and arranger. In 1957, he was chosen as DownBeat jazz critics’ new star on piano and vibes – the first time that one artist won two categories in the same year. He became known for his percussive, driving piano style that concentrated on the lower octaves of the keyboard.

Costa had an eight-year recording career, during which he appeared on more than 100 albums; five of these were under his own leadership. As a sideman, he appeared in orchestras led by Manny Albam, Gil Evans, Woody Herman and others; played in smaller groups led by musicians including Tal Farlow, Coleman Hawkins, Gunther Schuller, and Phil Woods; and accompanied vocalists including Tony Bennett and Chris Connor. Costa died, aged 31, in a car accident in New York City.

Eddie Costa was born in Atlas, Pennsylvania, near Mount Carmel, in Northumberland County. He was taught and influenced on piano by his older, musically trained brother, Bill, and a local piano teacher. Eddie took paid jobs as a pianist from the age of 15. In contrast to his piano training, he was self-taught on vibes. In 1949, Costa played and toured for a few months with violinist Joe Venuti. He then worked for his brother in New York until, in 1951, Costa was drafted into the army. During his time in the armed forces, Costa performed in Japan and Korea. Upon release after two years, Costa again worked around the New York area, including for bands led by Kai Winding, Johnny Smith, and Don Elliott.

Late at night on July 28, 1962, Costa was killed in a car crash, involving no other vehicles, on New York’s Westside Highway at 72nd Street. He was survived by his wife and four children. This loss to music was summarized years later in the liner notes to one of his recordings: “No pianist with his combination of strength, humor, and drive has developed in the sixties or seventies, and as the years go by it becomes more apparent that we lost a unique creative musician”