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VdB 152 (also known as Cederblad 201) is a blue reflection nebula that glows atop of a dark Bok globule (1) called Barnard 175. This complex, also called Wolf’s Cave, spans about 7 light-years and is located about 1,400 light years-away from Earth in the northern constellation of Cepheus.
The “vdB” stands for “van den Bergh”; vdB 152 is reflection nebula number 152 in Sidney van den Bergh’s Catalog of Reflection Nebulae, created in 1966 and that contains 158 reflection nebulae. Barnard 175 was cataloged by E. E. Barnard in “A Photographic Atlas of Selected Areas of the Milky Way” from photographs made at Lick Observatory from 1889-1895, but not printed until 1913.
Described as a “dusty curtain” or “ghostly apparition”, vdB 152 is very faint. Near the edge of a large molecular cloud, interstellar dust in the region blocks most of the starlight behind it or scatter light from the embedded bright star (the 9.3 magnitude star B.D. +69° 1231) giving parts of the nebula a characteristic blue color. Ultraviolet light from the star is also thought to cause a dim reddish luminescence in the nebular dust.
Though stars do form in molecular clouds, this star seems to have only accidentally wandered into the area, as its measured velocity through space is very different from the cloud’s velocity.
Embedded in the top right side of the nebula is the Herbig Haro object (2) HH 450, a jet emitted from a newly forming star. The thin, red filaments of a huge supernova remnant, SNR 110.3+11.3, in the upper-right corner of the image, appear to be approaching vdB 152 and may or may not collide with it in the future.
more...Cassandra Wilson (born December 4, 1955) is an American jazz singer, songwriter, and producer from Jackson, Mississippi. She is one of the most successful female Jazz singers and has been described by critic Gary Giddins as “a singer blessed with an unmistakable timbre and attack[who has] expanded the playing field” by incorporating blues, country, and folk music into her work. She has won numerous awards, including two Grammys, and was named “America’s Best Singer” by Time magazine in 2001.
Cassandra Wilson is the third and youngest child of Herman Fowlkes, Jr., a guitarist, bassist, and music teacher; and Mary McDaniel, an elementary school teacher who earned her PhD in education. Her ancestry includes Fon, Yoruba, Irish and Welsh. Between her mother’s love for Motown and her father’s dedication to jazz, Wilson’s parents sparked her early interest in music.
more...Larry Davis (December 4, 1936 – April 19, 1994) was an American electric Texas blues and soul blues musician. He is best known for co-writing the song “Texas Flood“, later recorded to greater commercial success by Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Davis was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and was raised in England, Arkansas, and Little Rock, Arkansas. He swapped playing the drums to learn to play the bass guitar. In the mid-1950s, he had a working partnership with Fenton Robinson, and following the recommendation of Bobby Bland was given a recording contract by Duke Records. Davis had three singles released, which included “Texas Flood” and “Angels in Houston”. Thereafter, he had limited opportunity in the recording studio. He resided in St. Louis, Missouri, for a while, and played bass in Albert King‘s group. He also learned to play the guitar at this time; the guitar on Davis’s recording of “Texas Flood” was by played by Robinson.
Several single releases on the Virgo and Kent labels followed, but in 1972 a motorcycle accident temporarily paralyzed Davis’s left side. He returned a decade later with an album released by Rooster Blues, Funny Stuff, produced by Oliver Sain. He won four W. C. Handy Awards in 1982, but a decade later he was known only to blues specialists. His 1987 Pulsar LP, I Ain’t Beggin’ Nobody, was difficult even for blues enthusiasts to locate.
In 1992, Bullseye Blues issued another album, Sooner or Later, highlighting his booming vocals and guitar playing influenced by Albert King. Davis died of cancer in April 1994, at the age of 57.
more...James Stanley Hall (December 4, 1930 – December 10, 2013) was an American jazz guitarist, composer and arranger.
Born in Buffalo, New York, Hall moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio, during his childhood. Hall’s mother played the piano, his grandfather violin, and his uncle guitar. He began playing the guitar at the age of 10, when his mother gave him an instrument as a Christmas present. At 13 he heard Charlie Christian play on a Benny Goodman record, which he calls his “spiritual awakening”. As a teenager in Cleveland, he performed professionally, and also took up the double bass. Hall’s major influences since childhood were tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Paul Gonsalves, and Lucky Thompson. While he copied out solos by Charlie Christian, and later Barney Kessel, it was horn players from whom he took the lead. In 1955, Hall attended the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he majored in composition, studying piano and bass in addition to theory.
more...NGC 1097 (also known as Caldwell 67) is a barred spiral galaxy about 45 million light years away in the constellation Fornax. It was discovered by William Herschel on 9 October 1790. It is a severely interacting galaxy with obvious tidal debris and distortions caused by interaction with the companion galaxy NGC 1097A. Three supernovae (SN 1992bd, SN 1999eu, and SN 2003B) have been observed in NGC 1097 since 1992.
more...December 3rd 1954
Mark Boling is a jazz guitarist, teacher, composer, author and collaborator with drummer Keith Brown and bassist Rusty Holloway in the Boling, Brown, & Holloway trio. He has also performed and recorded with pianist Donald Brown, the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, and South African saxophonist Zim Ngqawana.
Evidence (MaBO Music 2000), Boling’s first recording as a leader, documents the Boling, Brown and Holloway (BBH) trio in a set of ten jazz standards and two original tunes. Evidence was featured as an outstanding recording by a southern artist on the syndicated Jazz South radio program in 2002. The BBH trio is augmented by Carlos Fernandez (percussion), Donald Brown (piano), and Zim Ngqawana (saxophone) on Tune Me (MaBO Music 2004).
Boling is author of Creative Comping Concepts for Jazz Guitar (Mel Bay), The Jazz Theory Workbook (Advance Music), Elements of the Jazz Language software (CPP/Belwin), and Curriculum for Aural Training software. He has been a Senior Artist-in-Residence at the Banff Center International Jazz Workshop, a visiting artist at the Brubeck Institute and has taught at the Berklee College of Music summer guitar program. He received a Bachelor of Music degree from the Berklee College of Music in Boston (1981) and a Masters in Music Theory from the University of Tennessee (1984). Mark Boling is an Associate Professor of Music and Coordinator of the University of Tennessee Jazz Program.
more...Joseph William Thomas, also known as Brother Cornbread (December 3, 1902 – February 18, 1981) was an American jazz clarinetist and singer, closely-associated with the New Orleans jazz scene.
Thomas’s first professional gig was in New Orleans with trombone player Joe Harris in 1923. Soon after that, he worked with Jack Carey, Chris Kelly, and Kid Rena. He recorded with Charles Derbigny in 1941, but the recordings were not publicly released until the 1960s, by which time Thomas had become a figure in the Dixieland revival movement. He led his own ensemble at New Orleans’s H&J Tavern for much of the 1940s, then, in 1951, became a sideman for Papa Celestin. He worked with this ensemble for years, including after Papa French and Eddie Pierson had taken over as leader. Other associations in the 1950s and 1960s included work with Freddie Kohlman, Punch Miller, the Olympia Brass Band, and on Swedish television with Sweet Emma Barrett in 1968. In the 1970s he worked with the Legends of Jazz, replacing Joe Darensbourg.
more...A merging galaxy pair cavort in this image captured by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. This pair of galaxies, known to astronomers as II ZW 96, is roughly 500 million light-years from Earth and lies in the constellation Delphinus, close to the celestial equator. As well as the wild swirl of the merging galaxies, a menagerie of background galaxies are dotted throughout the image.The two galaxies are in the process of merging and as a result have a chaotic, disturbed shape. The bright cores of the two galaxies are connected by bright tendrils of star-forming regions, and the spiral arms of the lower galaxy have been twisted out of shape by the gravitational perturbation of the galaxy merger. It is these star-forming regions that made II ZW 96 such a tempting target for Webb; the galaxy pair is particularly bright at infrared wavelengths thanks to the presence of the star formation. This observation is from a collection of Webb measurements delving into the details of galactic evolution, in particular in nearby Luminous Infrared Galaxies such as II ZW 96. These galaxies, as the name suggests, are particularly bright at infrared wavelengths, with luminosities more than 100 billion times that of the Sun. An international team of astronomers proposed a study of complex galactic ecosystems — including the merging galaxies in II ZW 96 — to put Webb through its paces soon after the telescope was commissioned. Their chosen targets have already been observed with ground-based telescopes and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which will provide astronomers with insights into Webb’s ability to unravel the details of complex galactic environments. Webb captured this merging galaxy pair with a pair of its cutting-edge instruments; NIRCam — the Near-InfraRed Camera — and MIRI, the Mid-InfraRed Instrument.
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Tal Wilkenfeld (born 2 December 1986) is an Australian singer, songwriter, bassist, and guitarist. She has performed with artists including Jeff Beck, Prince, Eric Clapton, Herbie Hancock, and Mick Jagger. In 2008, Wilkenfeld was voted “The Year’s Most Exciting New Player” by Bass Player magazine readers’ choice poll. In 2013, Wilkenfeld was awarded Bass Player Magazine’s “Young Gun Award” by Don Was, where she performed “Chelsea Hotel” by Leonard Cohen.
Wilkenfeld is a bandleader of her own eponymous bands, in which she sings, plays bass, and plays guitar. In her earlier work, she was backed by musicians such as Wayne Krantz and Vinnie Colaiuta. She opened for The Who on the North American part of The Who Hits 50! tour in 2016. In 2016, Wilkenfeld released a single entitled “Corner Painter” which features Blake Mills and Benmont Tench. Also in 2016, Rolling Stone stated that Wilkenfeld was “working on new music that sees her evolving from an instrumental prodigy into a formidable singer-songwriter.” On 15 March 2019, Wilkenfeld released her vocal debut album Love Remains,which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Heatseeker charts on the first week of its release. Love Remains has been highly praised by the press and featured in Rolling Stone, Relix, Paste, Billboard, and Forbes. Rolling Stone described Wilkenfeld’s vocal debut as “ten dense, riff-heavy tracks with brazen, introspective lyrics—prove her songwriting abilities.” Wilkenfeld has also been a guest on popular podcasts, including WTF with Marc Maron, and Bill Burr‘s Monday Morning Podcast .
Wilkenfeld has recorded on projects with Ringo Starr, Brian Wilson, Toto, Todd Rundgren, Macy Gray, Dr. John, Trevor Rabin, Jackson Browne, Joe Walsh, Rod Stewart, John Mayer, Sting, Ben Harper, David Gilmour, Pharrell, Buddy Guy, Billy Gibbons, Lee Ritenour, Hiram Bullock, Susan Tedeschi, and Hans Zimmer.
more...Ronald Mathews (December 2, 1935 in New York City – June 28, 2008 in Brooklyn) was an American jazz pianist who worked with Max Roach from 1963 to 1968 and Art Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers. He acted as lead in recording from 1963 and 1978–79. His most recent work was in 2008, as both a mentor and musician with Generations, a group of jazz musicians headed by veteran drummer Jimmy Cobb. He contributed two new compositions for the album that was released by San Francisco State University’s International Center for the Arts on September 15, 2008. Critics have compared him to pianists Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and McCoy Tyner.
In his twenties, Mathews toured internationally and recorded with Roach, Freddie Hubbard and Roy Haynes. He was also a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the late 1950s through the 1960s. By thirty, he began teaching jazz piano and led workshops, clinics and master classes at Long Island University in New York City. Besides Dexter Gordon and Clark Terry, he toured and recorded on two Louis Hayesprojects in the 70’s (i.e. the Louis Hayes-Woody Shaw Quintet and the Louis Hayes-Junior Cook Quintet).
more...Wynton Charles Kelly (December 2, 1931 – April 12, 1971) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He is known for his lively, blues-based playing and as one of the finest accompanists in jazz. He began playing professionally at the age of 12 and was pianist on a No. 1 R&B hit at the age of 16. His recording debut as a leader occurred three years later, around the time he started to become better known as an accompanist to singer Dinah Washington, and as a member of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie‘s band. This progress was interrupted by two years in the United States Army, after which Kelly worked again with Washington and Gillespie, and played with other leaders. Over the next few years, these included instrumentalists Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Hank Mobley, Wes Montgomery, and Sonny Rollins, and vocalists Betty Carter, Billie Holiday, and Abbey Lincoln.
Kelly attracted the most attention as part of Miles Davis‘ band from 1959, including an appearance on the trumpeter’s Kind of Blue, often mentioned as the best-selling jazz album ever. After leaving Davis in 1963, Kelly played with his own trio, which recorded for several labels and toured the United States and internationally. His career did not develop much further, and he had difficulty finding enough work late in his career. Kelly, who was known to have epilepsy, died in a hotel room in Canada following a seizure, aged 39.
The son of Jamaican immigrants, Kelly was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 2, 1931. He began playing the piano at the age of four, but did not receive much formal training in music. He attended the High School of Music & Art and the Metropolitan Vocational High School in New York, but “[t]hey wouldn’t give us piano, so I fooled around with the bass and studied theory.
more...The Soleá is a slow, solemn, and majestic flamenco form that likely comes from the Spanish word soledad, meaning solitude or loneliness. Tragedy, death, and desperation are the common subject matter for the Soleá cante (singers). Guitarists evoke these feelings in their playing as well. This tragic form is also known as the “Cante Jondo” category.
The Soleá is synonymous with the Soleares, known as the “Mother of Flamenco”. Flamenco guitarists usually begin their study with the Soleá since it has a relatively slow BPM (usually 50-110BPM). As a result, students have ample time to feel comfortable with the compás accents.
V V V V V
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Harmonic tension between the E major and F major chords is prevalent in the Soleá form, causing both harmonic and tension and resolve throughout a performance. A Soleá may include the escobilla section, where the beat shifts to a feeling of three (1,2,3, 4,5,6, 7,8,9, 10,11,12).
more...Christine McVie, the longtime co-lead vocalist, keyboardist, and songwriter for Fleetwood Mac, died Wednesday, Nov. 30, at the age of 79. A cause of death was not available, but McVie’s family saidshe died at a hospital “following a short illness.”
The band confirmed McVie’s death in a note shared on social media. “There are no words to describe our sadness at the passing of Christine McVie. She was truly one-of-a-kind, special and talented beyond measure. She was the best musician anyone could have in their band and the best friend anyone could have in their life. We were so lucky to have a life with her. Individually and together, we cherished Christine deeply and are thankful for the amazing memories we have. She will be so very missed.”
I saw Christine McVie with Fleetwood Mac and Peter Green in Boulder, Co (1970?) with Savoy Brown & Long John Baldry and she was a big part of the bands sound!
more...On flight day 13 (November 28) of the Artemis 1 mission the Orion spacecraft reached its maximum distance from Earth. In fact, over 430,000 kilometers from Earth its distant retrograde orbit also put Orion nearly 70,000 kilometers from the Moon. In the same field of view in this video frame from flight day 13, planet and large natural satellite even appear about the same apparent size from the uncrewed spacecraft’s perspective. Today (December 1) should see Orion depart its distant retrograde orbit. En route to planet Earth it will head toward a second powered fly by of the Moon. Splashdown on the home world is expected on December 11.
more...John Francis Anthony “Jaco” Pastorius III (/ˈdʒɑːkoʊ pæˈstɔːriəs/; December 1, 1951 – September 21, 1987) was an American jazz bassist, composer and producer. He recorded albums as a solo artist and band leader and was a member of Weather Report from 1976 to 1981. He also collaborated with other artists, most notably Pat Metheny and Joni Mitchell. His bass playing employed funk, lyrical solos, bass chords, and innovative harmonics. As of 2017 he was the only electric bassist of seven bassists inducted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame, and he has been lauded as the best electric bassists of all time.
Pastorius suffered from drug addiction and mental health issues and, despite his widespread acclaim, over the latter part of his life he had problems holding down jobs due to his unreliability. In frequent financial difficulties, he was often homeless in the mid-1980s. He died in 1987 as a result of injuries sustained in a beating outside a South Florida after-hours nightclub.
Since his death in 1987, his work has continued to be widely influential. He was elected to the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 1988 and was the subject of the 2014 documentary film Jaco.
John Francis Pastorius was born December 1, 1951, in Norristown, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the oldest of three boys born to Stephanie, his Finnish mother, and Jack Pastorius, a singer and jazz drummer who spent much of his time on the road. His family moved to Oakland Park near Fort Lauderdale when he was eight.Early American abolitionist Francis Daniel Pastorius is his ancestor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aztgDXq8–A
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