mick laBriola

A great nebulous region near bright star omicron Persei offers this study in cosmic contrasts. Captured in the telescopic frame the colorful complex of dust, gas, and stars spans about 3 degrees on the sky along the edge of the Perseus molecular cloud some 1000 light-years away. Surrounded by a bluish halo of dust reflected starlight, omicron Persei itself is just left of center. Immediately below it lies the intriguing young star cluster IC 348 recently explored by the James Webb Space Telescope. In silhouette against the diffuse reddish glow of hydrogen gas, dark and obscuring interstellar dust cloud Barnard 3 is at upper right. Of course the cosmic dust also tends to hide newly formed stars and young stellar objects or protostars from prying optical telescopes. At the Perseus molecular cloud’s estimated distance, this field of view would span about 50 light-years.

Yiannis Chryssomallis (Greek: Γιάννης Χρυσομάλλης; born November 14, 1954), known professionally as Yanni , is a Greek composer, keyboardist, pianist, and music producer.

Yanni continues to use the musical shorthand that he developed as a child, blending jazz, classical, soft rock, and world music to create predominantly instrumental works. Although this genre of music was not well suited for commercial pop radio and music television, Yanni received international recognition by producing concerts at historic monuments and by producing videos that were broadcast on public television. His breakthrough concert, Live at the Acropolis, yielded the second best-selling music concert video of all time.Additional historic sites for Yanni’s concerts have included India’s Taj Mahal, China’s Forbidden City, the United Arab Emirates’ Burj Khalifa, Russia’s Kremlin,^[15] Puerto Rico’s El Morro castle, Lebanon’s ancient city of Byblos, Tunisia’s Roman Theatre of Carthage, India’s Laxmi Vilas Palace,^[19]the Egyptian pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza, and the Amman Citadel.

At least sixteen of Yanni’s albums have peaked at No. 1 in Billboard’s “Top New Age Album” category, and two albums (Dare to Dream and In My Time) received Grammy Award nominations. Yanni has performed in more than 30 countries on five continents, and through late 2015 had performed live in concert before more than 5 million people and had accumulated more than 40 platinum and gold albums globally, with sales totaling over 25 million copies. A longtime fundraiser for public television, Yanni’s compositions have been used on commercial television programs, especially for sporting events.He has written film scores and the music for an award-winning British Airways television commercial.

Yanni popularized the combination of electronic music synthesizers with a full symphony orchestra. He has employed musicians of various nationalities and has incorporated a variety of exotic instruments to create music that has been called an eclectic fusion of ethnic sounds. Influenced by his encounters with cultures around the world,Yanni has been called a “true global artist” and his music is said to reflect his “one world, one people” philosophy.

Aaron Copland (November 14, 1900 – December 2, 1990) was an American composer, critic, writer, teacher, pianist and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as the “Dean of American Composers”. The open, slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many people consider to be the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit. He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as “populist” and which the composer labeled his “vernacular” style. Works in this vein include the ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, his Fanfare for the Common Man and Third Symphony. In addition to his ballets and orchestral works, he produced music in many other genres, including chamber music, vocal works, opera and film scores.

After some initial studies with composer Rubin Goldmark, Copland traveled to Paris, where he first studied with Isidor Philipp and Paul Vidal, then with noted pedagogueNadia Boulanger. He studied three years with Boulanger, whose eclectic approach to music inspired his own broad taste. Determined upon his return to the U.S. to make his way as a full-time composer, Copland gave lecture-recitals, wrote works on commission and did some teaching and writing. However, he found that composing orchestral music in a modernist style, which he had adopted while studying abroad, was a financially contradictory approach, particularly in light of the Great Depression. He shifted in the mid-1930s to a more accessible musical style which mirrored the German idea of Gebrauchsmusik (“music for use”), music that could serve utilitarian and artistic purposes. During the Depression years, he traveled extensively to Europe, Africa, and Mexico, formed an important friendship with Mexican composer Carlos Chávez and began composing his signature works.

During the late 1940s, Copland became aware that Stravinsky and other fellow composers had begun to study Arnold Schoenberg‘s use of twelve-tone (serial) techniques. After he had been exposed to the works of French composer Pierre Boulez, he incorporated serial techniques into his Piano Quartet (1950), Piano Fantasy (1957), Connotations for orchestra (1961) and Inscape for orchestra (1967). Unlike Schoenberg, Copland used his tone rows in much the same fashion as his tonal material—as sources for melodies and harmonies, rather than as complete statements in their own right, except for crucial events from a structural point of view. From the 1960s onward, Copland’s activities turned more from composing to conducting. He became a frequent guest conductor of orchestras in the U.S. and the UK and made a series of recordings of his music, primarily for Columbia Records.

Roy Haynes, the pioneering jazz drummer who performed with legends like Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Sarah Vaughan, died Tuesday at the age of 99.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Leslie Haynes-Gilmore, to WRTI’s Nate Chinen.

To listen to any part of Roy Haynes’ drumming individually is to confront something important about jazz and what it can contain. The light and shifting ride-cymbal patterns, the uneven bass-drum accents, the crisply organized breaks or context-smashing disruptions on snare, the clarifying semaphore of the high-hat: each of these is worth following on its own.

But who does that? Better to hear all the parts functioning together as a complex, swinging organism. And Haynes played in such a way that all his startling musical details conjoined with human qualities: grace, humor, excitement, cool, confidence, vitality. He got up toward the front of the stage and tap-danced during his gigs, sometimes as an integral part of a drum solo. If you weren’t conditioned to pay close attention to the drummer in a group, he could be the one to make you start. No matter the group, he wasn’t just part of the rhythm section. He was — as per Sarah Vaughan’s introduction on her 1954 track “Shulie A Bop,” in alternation with his snare-drum hits — [crack!] Roy. [rat-tat-tat!] Haynes.

Haynes absorbed new styles in the jazz tradition. Yet it was often the older elements of his style, originating in the 1940s and ’50s — the strut and bounce and swing and dance in his beat — which kept him current, even in recent times. “I’m only happy when I’m moving forward,” as he explained it to the writer Burt Korall. “Some musicians play the same songs the same way every night. That’s impossible for me. My fundamental style may not really be different. But there have been so many things added.”

Born March 13, 1925, Haynes grew up within a remarkable family in the culturally integrated Boston neighborhood of Roxbury; he described his block as a mixture of French-Canadian, Jewish, Irish, and black families from the South. His parents, Gustavus and Edna Haynes, both came from Barbados, and his father worked for the Standard Oil company. (Both sang, and Gustavus played the organ in church.)

Roy studied violin for a year, knew percussion would be his focus. He became a voracious learner—although apart from an early lesson from a Roxbury drummer named Herbie Wright and a short stint at Boston Conservatory he mostly learned on his own by watching and practicing and performing, which he was doing so often by his middle teenage years that he dropped out of Roxbury Memorial High School. He gravitated toward the best: he learned much about playing the high-hat from the drummer who was perhaps his greatest hero, the Count Basie drummer Jo Jones, whom he first met as a teenager by talking his way backstage at a Basie gig at the RKO Boston Theatre, claiming to be Jones’s son.

The spiral galaxy appearing in this week’s Hubble Picture of the Week is named IC 3225. It looks remarkably as if it’s been launched from a cannon, speeding through space like a comet with a tail of gas streaming from its disc behind it. The scenes that galaxies appear in from Earth’s point of view are fascinating; many seem to hang calmlyin the emptiness of space as if hung from a string, while others star in much more dynamic situations!

Appearances can be deceiving with objects so far from Earth — IC 3225 itself is about 100 million light-years away — but the galaxy’s location suggests some causes for this active scene, because IC 3225 is one of over 1300 members of the Virgo galaxy cluster. The density of galaxies in the Virgo cluster creates a rich field of hot gas between them, the so-called ‘intracluster medium’, while the cluster’s extreme mass has its galaxies careening around its centre in some very fast orbits. Ramming through the thick intracluster medium, especially close to the cluster’s centre, places an enormous ‘ram pressure’ on the moving galaxies that strips gas out of them as they go.

IC 3225 is not so close to the cluster core right now, but astronomers have deduced that it has undergone this ram pressure stripping in the past. The galaxy looks as though it’s been impacted by this: it is compressed on one side and there has been noticeably more star formation on this leading edge, while the opposite end is stretched out of shape. Being in such a crowded field, a close call with another galaxy could also have tugged on IC 3225 and created this shape. The sight of this distorted galaxy is a reminder of the incredible forces at work on astronomical scales, which can move and reshape even entire galaxies!