mick laBriola

Nesbert “Stix” Hooper (born August 15, 1938) is an American drummer and founding member of The Crusaders.

Hooper developed an interest in music, drums, and percussion at an early age. Starting in middle school with band director George Magruder, he began devoting much of his time to the study of music. While he was a student at Wheatley High School (Houston), he formed the band the Swingsters, then the Modern Jazz Sextet. At Texas Southern University, he received coaching from members of the Houston Symphony Orchestra and other local professional musicians. After moving to the west coast, he studied music at California State University, Los Angeles and with private instructors and mentors. During the 1950s the Jazz Crusaders were formed.

Oscar Emmanuel Peterson CC CQ OOnt (August 15, 1925 – December 23, 2007) was a Canadian jazzpianist and composer. Considered a virtuoso and one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, Peterson released more than 200 recordings, won eight Grammy Awards, as well as a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy, and received numerous other awards and honours. He played thousands of concerts worldwide in a career lasting more than 60 years. He was called the “Maharaja of the keyboard” by Duke Ellington, simply “O.P.” by his friends, and informally in the jazz community, “the King of inside swing”.

Peterson worked in duos with Sam Jones, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Joe Pass, Irving Ashby, Count Basie, and Herbie Hancock. He considered the trio with Ray Brown and Herb Ellis “the most stimulating” and productive setting for public performances and studio recordings. In the early 1950s, he began performing with Brown and drummer Charlie Smith as the Oscar Peterson Trio. Shortly afterward Smith was replaced by guitarist Irving Ashby, who had been a member of the Nat King Cole Trio. Ashby, who was a swing guitarist, was soon replaced by Kessel. Their last recording, On the Town with the Oscar Peterson Trio, recorded live at the Town Tavern in Toronto, captured a remarkable degree of emotional as well as musical understanding among three players.

Peterson won eight Grammy Awards during his lifetime between 1975 and 1997. He is considered among the best jazz pianists and jazz improvisers of the twentieth century.

Ben Hirsh Sidran (born August 14, 1943) is an American jazz and rock keyboardist, producer, label owner, and music writer. Early in his career he was a member of the Steve Miller Band and is the father of Grammy-nominated musician, composer and performer Leo Sidran.

He was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Sidran was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961, where he became a member of The Ardells with Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs. When Miller and Scaggs left Wisconsin for the West Coast, Sidran stayed behind to earn a degree in English literature. After graduating in 1966, he enrolled in the University of Sussex, England, to pursue a PhD. While in England, he was a session musician for Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, Peter Frampton, and Charlie Watts.

Hezekiah Leroy Gordon Smith (August 14, 1909 – September 25, 1967), better known as Stuff Smith, was an American jazz violinist. He is well known for the song “If You’re a Viper” (the original title was “You’se a Viper”).

Smith was, along with Stéphane Grappelli, Michel Warlop, Svend Asmussen, Ray Nance and Joe Venuti, one of jazz music’s preeminent violinists of the swing era.

He was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, United States in 1909, and studied violin with his father. Smith cited Louis Armstrong as his primary influence and inspiration to play jazz, and like Armstrong, was a vocalist as well as instrumentalist. In the 1920s, he played in Texas as a member of Alphonse Trent‘s band. After moving to New York City he performed regularly with his sextet at the Onyx Club starting in 1935, and also with Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and later, Sun Ra.

Sombrero Galaxy, one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The dark band ofdust that obscures the mid-section of the Sombrero Galaxy in optical light actually glows brightly in infrared light. The featured image, digitally sharpened, shows the infrared glow, recently recorded by the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, superposed in false-color on an existing image taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in visible light. The Sombrero Galaxy, also known as M104, spans about 50,000 light years across and lies 28 million light years away. M104 can be seen with a small telescope in the direction of the constellation Virgo.

Frank “Son” Seals (August 13, 1942 – December 20, 2004) was an American electric blues guitarist and singer.

In 2009, Seals was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.

Seals was born in Osceola, Arkansas, where his father, Jim “Son” Seals, owned a small juke joint, called the Dipsy Doodle Club. He began performing professionally by the age of 13, first as a drummer with Robert Nighthawk and later as a guitarist. At age 16, he began to play at the T-99, a local upper-echelon club,with his brother-in-law Walter “Little Walter” Jefferson. He played there with prominent blues musicians, including Albert King, Rufus Thomas, Bobby Bland, Junior Parker, and Rosco Gordon. Their varying styles contributed to the development of Seals’s own playing techniques. While playing at the T-99, he was also introduced to country–western music by Jimmy Grubbs, who occasionally asked Seals to play the drums or guitar with his group. At the age of 19, Seals formed his own band, Son Seals and the Upsetters, to fill in at the Rebel Club, in Osceola. The band members were Johnny Moore (“Old Man Horse”) on piano; Alvin Goodberry on drums, guitar, bass, or piano; Little Bob Robinson on vocals; and Walter Lee “Skinny Dynamo” Harris on piano. Shortly thereafter, a man from Little Rock, Arkansas, came to find “Little Walter” for a gig at his club, but when Walter turned it down the offer went to Seals.

Sir George Albert Shearing, OBE (13 August 1919 – 14 February 2011) was a British jazz pianist who for many years led a popular jazz group that recorded for Discovery Records, MGM Records and Capitol Records. Shearing was the composer of over 300 titles, including the jazz standards “Lullaby of Birdland” and “Conception“, and had multiple albums on the Billboard charts during the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s and 1990s. He died of heart failure in New York City, at the age of 91.

Anna Mae Winburn (née Darden; August 13, 1913 – September 30, 1999) was an influential Americanvocalist and jazz bandleader who flourished beginning in the mid-1930s. An African American, she is best known for having directed the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female big band that was perhaps one of the few – and one of the most – racially integrated dance-bands of the swing era.

Her first known publicized performance was singing with the studio band of Radio WOWO, Fort Wayne. She worked at various clubs in Indiana, including the Chateau Lido in Indianapolis (where she appeared under the pseudonym Anita Door)

“Big Chief” Russell Moore (August 13, 1912 – December 15, 1983) was an American jazz trombonist.Moore, a Pima tribe member, grew up on a Native American reservation before moving to Chicago and then Los Angeles where he learned to play various instruments, eventually settling on trombone. Throughout his career, Moore worked with an array of artists including Frank Sinatra, Lionel Hampton, Alberta Hunter and Pee Wee Russell as well as recording under his own name. He is best remembered for his work as a member of Louis Armstrong’s band.

Moore was born in Gila Crossing, Arizona inside the Gila River Indian Community reservation in 1912 and belonged to the Pima tribe. He was one of five children born to mother Amy Bending Moore and father José Newton Moore. Musical performances were important to community life on the reservation particularly due to the inaccessibility of record players and radios.

Percy Mayfield (August 12, 1920 – August 11, 1984) was an American rhythm and blues singer with a smooth vocal style. He was also a songwriter, known for the songs “Please Send Me Someone to Love” and “Hit the Road Jack“, the latter being a song first recorded by Ray Charles.

Mayfield was born in Minden, Louisiana, the seat of Webster Parish, in the northwestern part of the state. As a youth, he had a talent for poetry, which led him to songwriting and singing. He began his performing career in Texas and then moved to Los Angeles in 1942, but without success as a singer until 1947, when a small record label, Swing Time Records, signed him to record his song “Two Years of Torture,” with a band that included the saxophonist Maxwell Davis, the guitarist Chuck Norris, and the pianist Willard McDaniel. The record sold steadily over the next few years, prompting Art Rupe to sign Mayfield to his label, Specialty Records, in 1950.