mick laBriola

Elmore James (Brooks; January 27, 1918 – May 24, 1963) was an American blues guitarist, singer, songwriter, and bandleader. Noted for his use of loud amplification and his stirring voice, James was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. His slide guitar technique earned him the nickname “King of the Slide Guitar”.

Elmore James was born Elmore Brooks in Richland, Holmes County, Mississippi, the son of 15-year-old Leola Brooks, a field hand. His father was probably Joe Willie “Frost” James, who moved in with Leola, and Elmore took his surname. He began making music at the age of 12, using a simple one-string instrument (diddley bow, or jitterbug) strung on a shack wall. As a teen he performed at dances under the names Cleanhead and Joe Willie James.

Oran Thaddeus “Hot Lips” Page^[1] (January 27, 1908 – November 5, 1954) was an American jazztrumpeter, singer, and bandleader. He was known as a scorching soloist and powerful vocalist.

Page was a member of Walter Page‘s Blue Devils, Artie Shaw‘s Orchestra and Count Basie‘s Orchestra, and he worked with Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Ida Cox. He was one of the five musicians booked for the opening night at Birdland with Charlie Parker in 1949.

Oran Thadeus Page was born in Dallas, Texas, United States, to a schoolteacher and musician mother.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition resulted in more than 800 works of virtually every Western classical genre of his time. Many of these compositions are acknowledged as pinnacles of the symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral repertoire. Mozart is widely regarded as among the greatest composers in the history of Western music, with his music admired for its “melodic beauty, its formal elegance and its richness of harmony and texture”.

Born in Salzburg, then in the Holy Roman Empire and currently in Austria, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. His father took him on a grand tour of Europe and then three trips to Italy. At 17, he was a musician at the Salzburg court but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position.

While visiting Vienna in 1781, Mozart was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He stayed in Vienna, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years there, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas. His Requiem was largely unfinished by the time of his death at the age of 35, the circumstances of which are uncertain and much mythologised.

Anita Denise Baker (born January 26, 1958 Toledo, OH) is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for her soulful ballads, particularly from the height of the quiet storm period in the 1980s.

Starting her career in the late 1970s with the funk band Chapter 8, Baker released her first solo album, The Songstress, in 1983. In 1986, she rose to fame following the release of her Platinum-selling second album, Rapture, which included the Grammy-winning single “Sweet Love“. As of 2017, Baker has won eight Grammy Awards and has four Platinum albums, along with two Gold albums. Baker is a contralto with a wide range of octaves.

Huey Pierce “Piano” Smith (January 26, 1934 – February 13, 2023) was an American R&B pianist whose sound was influential in the development of rock and roll.

His piano playing incorporated the boogie-woogie styles of Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis, and Albert Ammons, the jazz style of Jelly Roll Morton and the R&B style of Fats Domino. Steve Huey of AllMusicnoted that “At the peak of his game, Smith epitomized New Orleans R&B at its most infectious and rollicking, as showcased on his classic signature tune, “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu“.

Smith was born in the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans. He was influenced by the innovative work of Professor Longhair. He became known for his shuffling right-handed break on the piano that influenced other Southern players.

Smith wrote his first song “Robertson Street Boogie”, named after the street where he lived, on the piano, when he was eight years old. He performed the tune with a friend Percy Anderson, with the two billing themselves as Slick and Doc. Smith attended Walter L. Cohen High School in New Orleans.

Clement Seymour “Coxsone” Dodd CD (26 January 1932 – 4 May 2004) was a Jamaican record producer who was influential in the development of ska and reggae in the 1950s, 1960s and beyond.

He was nicknamed “Coxsone” at school due to his talent as a cricketer (his friends compared him to Alec Coxon, a member of the 1940s Yorkshire County Cricket Club team).

The Kingston-born Dodd used to play records to the customers in his parents’ shop. During a spell in the American South he became familiar with the rhythm and blues music popular there at the time. In 1954, back in Jamaica, he set up the Downbeat Sound System, being the owner of an amplifier, a turntable, and some US records, which he would import from New Orleans and Miami.

With the success of his sound system, and in a competitive environment, Dodd would make trips through the US looking for new tunes to attract the Jamaican public. While he did, his mother Doris Darlingtonwould run the sound system and play the tunes. Dodd opened five different sound systems, each playing every night. To run his sound systems, Dodd appointed people such as Lee “Scratch” Perry, who was Dodd’s right-hand man during his early career, U-Roy and Prince Buster. Perry would later leave Dodd in 1966 due to Perry feeling disrespected by Dodd. This is documented in the 1966 song The Upsetter.

Stéphane Grappelli  26 January 1908 – 1 December 1997, born Stefano Grappelli) was a French jazz violinist. He is best known as a founder of the Quintette du Hot Club de France with guitarist Django Reinhardt in 1934. It was one of the first all-string jazz bands. He has been called “the grandfather of jazz violinists” and continued playing concerts around the world well into his eighties.

For the first three decades of his career, he was billed using a gallicised spelling of his last name, Grappelly, reverting to Grappelli in 1969. The latter, Italian spelling is now used almost universally when referring to the violinist, including reissues of his early work.

Grappelli was born at Hôpital Lariboisière in Paris, France, and christened with the name Stefano. His father, Italian marchese^{[citation needed]} Ernesto Grappelli, was born in Alatri, Lazio, while his French mother, Anna Emilie Hanoque, was from St-Omer. Ernesto was a scholar who taught Italian, sold translations, and wrote articles for local journals. Grappelli’s mother died when he was five, leaving his father to care for him. Although he was residing in France when World War I began, Ernesto was still an Italian citizen, and was consequently drafted into the Italian Army in 1914.

Soleares (soleá) are structured around a basic flamenco pattern, which includes guitar introduction, with these steps: “ayeo de salida” (introductory phrase), “cante de preparación” (preparation singing), “cante valiente” (brave singing), and “remate” (ending), with “falsetas” (guitar variations) intercalating between different verses.

It is difficult to distinguish the great variety of soleares that exist because the flamenco personality and character of the soleá permeate almost all flamenco, and the variations are numerous.

The Soleá de Cádiz is shorter, direct, and joyful. The Soleá de Jerez emphasizes melody more, and the Soleá de Triana is even more melodic. The differences between soleá styles are based on harmony, tonality, and rhythm.

All soleares share the common metric and the twelve-beat rhythm that governs the measure of this foundational style.

Benny Golson (born January 25, 1929) is an American bebop/hard bop jazz tenor saxophonist, composer, and arranger. He came to prominence with the big bands of Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie, more as a writer than a performer, before launching his solo career. Golson is known for co-founding and co-leading The Jazztet with trumpeter Art Farmer in 1959. From the late 1960s through the 1970s Golson was in demand as an arranger for film and television and thus was less active as a performer, but he and Farmer re-formed the Jazztet in 1982. Many of Golson’s compositions have become jazz standards including “I Remember Clifford“, “Blues March“, “Stablemates“, “Whisper Not“, “Along Came Betty”, and “Killer Joe”. He is regarded as “one of the most significant contributors” to the development of hard bop jazz, and was a recipient of a Grammy Trustees Award in 2021.