mick laBriola

David Nesta “Ziggy” Marley (born 17 October 1968) is a Jamaican reggae musician. He is the son of reggae icon Bob Marley and Rita Marley. He led the family band Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers until 2002, with whom he released eight studio albums. After the disbandment, Ziggy launched a successful solo career, releasing eight solo studio albums on his own label, Tuff Gong Worldwide. Ziggy continues his father’s practice of recording and self-releasing all of his music. Marley is an eight-time Grammy Awardwinner and a Daytime Emmy Award recipient.

David Nesta Marley was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on October 17, 1968. He grew up in Trenchtown, a poor neighborhood of Kingston, and in Wilmington, Delaware, where he attended elementary school for a few years. Ziggy grew up very active, playing soccer and running the mountains, a lifestyle passed on by his parents. As the oldest son of Bob and Rita Marley, Ziggy grew up surrounded by music. He has 5 half brothers, one brother, and two sisters. He received guitar and drum lessons from his father and began sitting in on Wailers recording sessions by the age of ten.

In the earliest known record of his musical career, Marley performed as part of a singing group called The Seven Do Bees, made up of him and his classmates, and wherein he was given the stage name “Freddie Dic”. The name never stuck, however, and instead, David went on to become known as “Ziggy”, a nickname often reported to have been given to him by his father Bob Marley, meaning “little spliff”. However, Ziggy stated the following to Melody Maker magazine in 1988: “Me name David but me big Bowiefan. So at the time of the Ziggy Stardust album, me call meself Ziggy and now everyone do.”

During the late 1970s, Ziggy could also be seen alongside his brother Stephen at some of their father’s larger concerts around Jamaica and abroad. In 1978, the duo appeared on stage at the One Love Peace Concert in Kingston, and the following year at Reggae Sunsplash II in Montego Bay.

Barney Kessel (October 17, 1923 – May 6, 2004) was an American jazz guitarist. Known in particular for his knowledge of chords and inversions and chord-based melodies, he was a member of many prominent jazz groups as well as a “first call” guitarist for studio, film, and television recording sessions. Kessel was a member of the group of session musicians informally known as the Wrecking Crew.

Kessel was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma in 1923 to a Jewish family. Kessel’s father was an immigrant from Hungary who owned and operated a shoe shop. A self-taught guitarist, his only formal musical study was three months of guitar lessons at the age of 12. He began his career as a teenager, touring with local swing bands. When he was 16, he started playing with the Oklahoma A&M band, Hal Price & the Varsitonians. The band members nicknamed him “Fruitcake” because he practiced in excess of 16 hours per day. Kessel gained recognition due in part to his youth, and in part to being the only white musician playing in all-African-American bands at black clubs.

In the early 1940s, he moved to Los Angeles, where for one year he was a member of the Chico Marx big band. Noticed by Norman Granz, he appeared in the 1944 film Jammin’ the Blues, which featured Lester Young. Soon after, he played in the bands of Charlie Barnet and Artie Shaw. During the day, he worked as a studio musician and at night played bop-oriented jazz in clubs. In 1947, he recorded with Charlie Parker. He worked in Jazz at the Philharmonic and for one year in the early 1950s he was a member of the Oscar Peterson trio. After leaving the trio, he recorded several solo albums for Contemporary. He recorded a series of albums with Ray Brown and Shelly Manne as The Poll Winnersbecause the three of them often won polls conducted by Metronome and DownBeat magazines. He was the guitarist on the album Julie Is Her Name (1955) by Julie London, which includes the standard “Cry Me a River“, selling a million copies and demonstrated Kessel’s chordal approach to guitar.

Jones-Emberson 1 (PK 164+31.1), also known as the Headphone Nebula, is a 14th magnitude planetary nebula in the constellation Lynx at a distance of 1600 light years. It is a larger planetary with low surface brightness. The 16.8-magnitude central star is a very blue white dwarf.

The striking spiral galaxy featured in this week’s Hubble Picture of the Week is Messier 90 (M90, also NGC 4569), located in the constellation Virgo. In 2019, an image of M90 was released using data from the older Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 — data taken in 1994 soon after the camera’s installation. That image has a distinctive stair-step pattern due to the layout of WFPC2’s sensors. WFPC2 was replaced in 2010 by the Wide Field Camera 3, and Hubble used WFC3 when it turned its aperture to Messier 90 again in 2019 and 2023. The resulting data was processed to create this stunning new image, providing a much fuller view of the galaxy’s dusty disc, its gaseous halo and its bright core.

The inner regions of M90’s disc are sites of star formation, which is highlighted here by red H-alpha light from nebulae, but this is absent in the rest of the galaxy. M90 sits among the galaxies of the relatively nearby Virgo Cluster, and the course of its orbit took it on a path near the cluster’s centre about three hundred million years ago. The density of gas in the inner cluster weighed on M90 like a strong headwind, stripping enormous quantities of gas from the galaxy and creating the diffuse halo that can be seen around it here. This gas is no longer available for M90 to form new stars with, and it will eventually fade as a spiral galaxy as a result.

M90 is located 55 million light-years from Earth, but it’s one of the very few galaxies getting closer to us. Its orbit through the Virgo cluster has accelerated it so much that it’s in the process of escaping the cluster entirely, and by happenstance it’s moving in our direction — other galaxies in the Virgo cluster have been measured at similar speeds, but in the opposite direction. Over the coming billions of years, we will be treated to a yet better view of M90 while it evolves into a lenticular galaxy.

[Image Description: A spiral galaxy. It has a bright core with light spilling out, and its disc is filled with thick clumps of dark reddish dust, which swirls around the galaxy following its rotation. Parts of the disc are speckled with blue, showing brighter and hotter stars. A halo of faintly-lit gas wraps around the galaxy, extending beyond the edges of the image.]

MacHouston “Mickey” Baker (October 15, 1925 – November 27, 2012) was an American musician, best known for his work as a studio musician and as part of the recording duo Mickey & Sylvia.

Baker was born in Louisville, Kentucky. His mother was black, and his father, whom he never met, was believed to be white.

By 1949, Baker had his own combo, and a few paying jobs. He decided to move west, but found that audiences there were not receptive to progressive jazz music. Baker was stranded without work in California when he saw a show by blues guitarist Pee Wee Crayton. Baker said of the encounter:

“I asked Pee Wee, ‘You mean you can make money playing that stuff on guitar?’ Here he was driving a big white Eldorado and had a huge bus for his band. So I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then.”

He found a few jobs in Richmond, California, and made enough money to return to New York.

After returning east, Baker began recording for Savoy, King and Atlantic Records. He did sessions with Doc Pomus, The Drifters, Ray Charles, Ivory Joe Hunter, Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, Coleman Hawkins, Dion and numerous other artists.

Inspired by the success of Les Paul & Mary Ford, he formed the pop duo Mickey & Sylvia (with Sylvia Robinson, one of his guitar students) in the mid-1950s. Together, they had a hit single with “Love Is Strange” in 1956. After the duo split up in the late 1958, Baker recorded with Kitty Noble as Mickey & Kitty. They released three records on Atlantic Records in 1959. In late 1959, Baker released his debut solo album, The Wildest Guitar, on Atlantic. Mickey & Sylvia reunited in 1960 and sporadically worked together on additional tracks until the mid-1960s.