mick laBriola

Just as Billy Elliot discovered his love of dance on the way to his boxing lesson, José Molina Quijada, born in Madrid on November 19, 1936, was enrolled in a boxing school which shared space with Spanish dancers. In 1945, the nine year old Molina saw Pilar López and José Greco perform and knew that dance was his future.

His father, Ramón Molina, a Republican who was imprisoned for three years during the Spanish Civil War and then worked in a fish market, was adamantly opposed, but his mother, Carmen Quijada, accepted his ambition on the condition that he pay for his classes by working mornings in the fish market. For six years José earned just enough to pay for classes with Pilar Monterde in neo-Classical Spanish dance, Escuela Bolera, Ballet and Flamenco. Soledad Miralles, dancing in Madrid at the Lope de Vega Theatre, gave Molina his first break. From age sixteen to nineteen, he toured nightclubs throughout Europe and the Middle East as a Flamenco and Classical Spanish dance soloist accompanied by piano and orchestra.

In 1956, he came to New York to audition, successfully, for The Tonight Show, to which he returned as a regular guest and performer, as well as appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Merv Griffin television shows. José Greco presented him as a soloist in his internationally touring company for five years before he formed his own company, José Molina Bailes Españoles, in 1961. Molina’s only sibling Ramón played guitar in his company in the early years.

For more than 30 years his company toured North America annually, performing in 49 states and over 400 cities, including engagements at NYC’s Carnegie Hall and with the Boston Pops. His fame led to featured roles in a commercial for Levi Jeans and a music video for Carly Simon.

Molina’s charisma on stage transferred to the classroom where he drew countless students in NYC as well as in residencies across the US, including Miami, FL and Portland, OR. His classes included many he groomed to be professional dancers as well as others for whom flamenco was simply a personal passion. He welcomed everyone, demanding discipline and technical precision while teaching with a unique warmth, charm, and sense of humor.

In 2012 he became a US citizen and maintained dual citizenship.

Henry “Hank” Medress (November 19, 1938 – June 18, 2007) was an American singer and record producer, best known for his taking part in the American band The Tokens.

Medress was born in Brooklyn, New York City, where he attended “Abraham Lincoln” High School. In 1955 he joined a doo-wop group called the Linc-Tones, from the surname of that President of the United States, which also included at first Neil Sedaka. After Sedaka’s departure, the group reformed with additional singers as The Tokens in 1958, after several changes of name. The Tokens achieved a #1 chart success in 1961 with their arrangement of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight“, a remake of the 1939 song “Mbube” by South African singer Solomon Linda. Medress and the Tokens also produced hits for The Chiffons, such as “He’s So Fine“.

Ofra Haza (Hebrew: עפרה חזה; 19 November 1957 – 23 February 2000) was an Israeli singer, songwriter, and actress, commonly known in the Western world as “the Madonna of the East“, or “the Israeli Madonna”. Her voice has been described as a “tender” mezzo-soprano. In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Haza at number 186 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.

Of Yemenite-Mizrahi descent, Haza performed music known as a mixture of traditional Middle Eastern and commercial singing styles, fusing elements of Eastern and Western instrumentation, orchestration and dance-beat, as well as lyrics from Mizrahi and Jewishfolk tales and poetry. By the late 1980s, Haza was an internationally successful artist, achieving large success in Europe and the Americas and appearing regularly on MTV.During her singing career, she earned many platinum and gold discs and her music proved highly popular in the club scene. By the 1990s, at the peak of her career,she was regularly featured in movie soundtracks, such as that of Dick Tracy (1990) and famously in The Prince of Egypt (1998), and her vocals were popularly sampled in hip hop. Her death in 2000 from an AIDS-related illness shocked Israeli society.

Haza was a highly influential cultural figure in Israel, and is considered one of the country’s biggest cultural icons, who helped popularize Mizrahi culture.

Kenny Werner (born November 19, 1951) is an American jazz pianist, composer, and author.

Werner started his own trio in 1981 with drummer Tom Rainey and bassist Ratzo Harris. The Kenny Werner Trio matured for fourteen years, touring in America and Europe and recording four albums along the way.

In the 1980s, he became the pianist for The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra (now known as the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra). Challenged by Lewis and Bob Brookmeyer to write for the band, he produced his first compositions and arrangements for jazz orchestra, consequently leading him to write for the bands in Europe including the Cologne, Danish, and Stockholm Jazz Orchestras, the Umo Jazz Orchestra of Finland and several times as the guest composer and soloist with the Metropole Orchestra of Holland. Since then Werner has had commissions to write for large ensembles such as jazz orchestras, full orchestras and most in 2007, wind ensemble, choir and string quartet as featured on his album No Beginning, No End (2009).

Today Tuesday November 19th 2024 marks 1,000 Days of War in Ukraine with Russia & Putin

Ignacy Jan Paderewski (Polish. 18 November [O.S. 6 November] 1860 – 29 June 1941) was a Polish pianist, composer and statesman who was a spokesman for Polish independence. In 1919, he was the nation’s prime ministerand foreign minister during which he signed the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I.

A favorite of concert audiences around the world, his musical fame opened access to diplomacy and the media, as possibly did his status as a freemason, and charitable work of his second wife, Helena Paderewska. During World War I, Paderewski advocated an independent Poland, including by touring the United States, where he met with President Woodrow Wilson, who came to support the creation of an independent Poland in his Fourteen Points at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, which led to the Treaty of Versailles.

Shortly after his resignation from office, Paderewski resumed his concert career to recoup his finances and rarely visited the politically chaotic Poland thereafter, the last time being in 1924.

Donald Eugene Cherry (November 18, 1936 – October 19, 1995 Oklahoma City, OK) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and multi-instrumentalist. Beginning in the late 1950s, he had a long tenure performing in the bands of saxophonist Ornette Coleman, including on the pioneering free jazz albums The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1961). Cherry also collaborated separately with musicians including John Coltrane, Charlie Haden, Sun Ra, Ed Blackwell, the New York Contemporary Five, and Albert Ayler.

Cherry released his debut album as bandleader, Complete Communion, in 1966. In the 1970s, he became a pioneer in world music, with his work drawing on African, Middle Eastern, and Hindustani music. He was a member of the ECM group Codona, along with percussionist Naná Vasconcelos and sitar and tabla player Collin Walcott. Chris Kelsey of AllMusic called Cherry “one of the most influential jazz musicians of the late 20th century. Cherry died of liver cancer in Málaga, Spain, on October 19, 1995, at the age of 58.

Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz Telles (18 November 1907 – 13 July 2003), known professionally as “Compay Segundo“, was a Cuban trova guitarist, singer and composer.

Compay (meaning compadre) Segundo, so called because he was always second voice in his musical partnerships, was born in Siboney, Cuba, and moved to Santiago de Cuba at the age of nine. His first engagement was in the Municipal Band of Santiago de Cuba, directed by his teacher, Enrique Bueno. In 1934, after a spell in a quintet, he moved to Havana, where he also played the clarinet in CI the Municipal Band. He also learned to play the guitar and the tres, which became his usual instruments. Compay Segundo also invented the armónico, a seven-stringed guitar-like instrument, to fill the harmonic jump between the Spanish guitar and the tres. In the 1950s he became well known as the second voice and tres player in Los Compadres, a duo he formed with Lorenzo Hierrezuelo in 1947.

Jack Owens (November 17, 1904 – February 9, 1997) was an American blues singerand guitarist, from Bentonia, Mississippi.

Harold Eugene Clark (November 17, 1944 – May 24, 1991) was an American singer-songwriter and founding member of the folk rock band the Byrds. He was the Byrds’ principal songwriter between 1964 and early 1966, writing most of the band’s best-known originals from this period, including “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better“, “She Don’t Care About Time“, “Eight Miles High” and “Set You Free This Time“. Although he did not achieve commercial success as a solo artist, Clark was in the vanguard of popular music during much of his career, prefiguring developments in such disparate subgenres as psychedelic rock, baroque pop, newgrass, country rock, and alternative country. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991 as a member of the Byrds.

Imrat Khan (17 November 1935 – 22 November 2018) was an Indian sitar and surbahar player and composer. He was the younger brother of sitar maestro Ustad Vilayat Khan. Imrat Khan was born in Calcutta on 17 November 1935 into a family of musicians tracing its roots back for several generations, to the court musicians of the Mughalrulers. The training in music traditionally has been passed down from father to son for nearly 400 years. He belonged to Etawah gharana also known as Imdadkhani gharana of classical musicians. Imrat Khan’s father was Enayat Khan (1895–1938), recognised as a leading sitar and surbahar player of his time, as had been his grandfather, Imdad Khan (1848–1920), before him. Imrat Khan’s father died when Imrat was a child, so he was raised by his mother, Bashiran Begum and her father, singer Bande Hassan Khan. In 1944, the family moved with Vilayat Khan, Imrat’s older brother, to Bombay where both the brothers learned sitar-playing extensively from their uncle Wahid Khan. In 1952, Vilayat and Imrat moved in together in Calcutta. They performed together for many years. The two brothers were part of the first cultural delegation to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1956.