mick laBriola

Anthony Dominick Benedetto (born August 3, 1926), known professionally as Tony Bennett, is an American singer of traditional pop standards, big band, show tunes, and jazz. He is also a painter, having created works under his birth name that are on permanent public display in several institutions. He is the founder of the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Astoria, Queens, New York.

Bennett began singing at an early age. He fought in the final stages of World War II as a U.S. Army infantryman in the European Theater. Afterward, he developed his singing technique, signed with Columbia Records and had his first number-one popular song with “Because of You” in 1951. Several tracks such as “Rags to Riches” followed in early 1953. He then refined his approach to encompass jazz singing. He reached an artistic peak in the late 1950s with albums such as The Beat of My Heart and Basie Swings, Bennett Sings. In 1962, Bennett recorded his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco“. His career and personal life experienced an extended downturn during the height of the rock music era. Bennett staged a comeback in the late 1980s and 1990s, putting out gold record albums again and expanding his reach to the MTV generation while keeping his musical style intact.

Bennett continued to create popular and critically praised work into the 21st century. He attracted acclaim for his collaborations with Lady Gaga, which began with the album Cheek to Cheek (2014); the two performers toured together to promote the album throughout 2014 and 2015. With the release of the duo’s second album, Love for Sale (2021), Bennett broke the individual record for the longest span of top-10 albums on the Billboard 200 chart for any living artist; his first top-10 record was I Left My Heart in San Francisco in 1962. Bennett also broke the Guinness World Record for the oldest person to release an album of new material, at the age of 95 years and 60 days.

Bennett has amassed numerous accolades throughout his career, including 20 Grammy Awards (including a Lifetime Achievement Award presented in 2001) and two Primetime Emmy Awards. He was named an NEA Jazz Master and a Kennedy Center Honoree. Bennett has sold over 50 million records worldwide.

In February 2021, it was revealed that Bennett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016. Due to the slow progression of his illness, he continued to record, tour, and perform until his retirement from concert performances in August 2021 due to physical challenges. Anthony Dominick Benedetto was born on August 3, 1926, at St. John’s Hospital in Long Island City, Queens in New York City. He is a son of grocer John Benedetto and seamstress Anna (Suraci), and was the first member of his family to be born in a hospital. In 1906, John had emigrated from Podargoni, a rural eastern district of the southern Italian city of Reggio Calabria. Anna had been born in the U.S. shortly after her parents also emigrated from the Calabria region in 1899.  Other relatives came over as well as part of the mass migration of Italians to America. Tony grew up with an older sister, Mary, and an older brother, John Jr. With a father who was ailing and unable to work, the children grew up in poverty. John Sr. instilled in his son a love of art and literature, and a compassion for human suffering, but died when Tony was 10 years old. The experience of growing up in the Great Depression and a distaste for the effects of the presidency of Herbert Hoover would make the child a lifelong Democrat.

Sharpless 2-132 is a very faint emission type nebula on the Cepheus/Lacerta border.  It lies at a degree southeast of Epsilon Cep, and has a size of about 40 arc minutes.

It is estimated to be about 10,000 to 12,000 light years away… but this is no more than an estimate. It’s a well studied region as well, with lots going on as you can see in the annotated image.

There’s information about the planetary nebula G101.5-00.6, the open Galactic custer called Teutsch 127 as well as the Wolf-Raynet star 153ab.

This week, we feature an image of the spiral galaxy NGC 4303, also known as Messier 61, which is one of the largest galactic members of the Virgo Cluster. Being a so-called starburst galaxy, it has an unusually high amount of stars being born, and has been used by astronomers as a laboratory to better understand the fascinating phenomena of star formation. Stars form when clouds of cold gas collapse. The energetic radiation from newly born stars will heat and ionise the surrounding remaining gas. The ionised gas will shine, acting as a beacon of ongoing star formation. In this stunning and jewel-like image, this glowing gas can be seen as the whirlpool of gold: the direct traces of stars being born.  The golden glow is a result of combining observations taken at different wavelengths of light with the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Here gas clouds of ionised oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur are shown in blue, green and red, respectively. The observations are done as part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) project, aiming to reveal nearby galaxies across all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Are you curious about how one goes from observations to an image like this one? Check out this ESO blog post that goes into it in more detail of the process.

Jerome John Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995) was an American musician, best known for being a principal songwriter, the lead guitarist and a vocalist with the rock band Grateful Dead, of which he was a founding member and which came to prominence during the counterculture of the 1960s. Although he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader of the band. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 as a member of the Grateful Dead.

As one of its founders, Garcia performed with the Grateful Dead for their entire 30-year career (1965–1995). Garcia also founded and participated in a variety of side projects, including the Saunders–Garcia Band (with longtime friend Merl Saunders), the Jerry Garcia Band, Old & In the Way, the Garcia/Grisman and Garcia/Kahnacoustic duos, Legion of Mary, and New Riders of the Purple Sage (which he co-founded with John Dawson and David Nelson). He also released several solo albums, and contributed to a number of albums by other artists over the years as a session musician. He was well known for his distinctive guitar playing, and was ranked 13th in Rolling Stone‘s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” cover story in 2003. In the 2015 version of the list he was ranked at #46.

Garcia was also renowned for his musical and technical ability, particularly his ability to play a variety of instruments and sustain long improvisations with the Grateful Dead. Garcia believed that improvisation took stress away from his playing and allowed him to make spur of the moment decisions that he would not have made intentionally. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Garcia noted that “my own preferences are for improvisation, for making it up as I go along. The idea of picking, of eliminating possibilities by deciding, that’s difficult for me”. Originating from the days of the “acid tests”, these improvisations were a form of exploration rather than playing a song already written.

Later in life, Garcia struggled with diabetes and in 1986, went into a diabetic coma that nearly cost him his life. Although his overall health improved somewhat after that, he continued to struggle with obesity, smoking, and longstanding heroin and cocaine addictions. He was staying in a California drug rehabilitation facility when he died of a heart attack on August 9, 1995, at the age of 53.

Garcia’s ancestors on his father’s side were from Galicia in northwest Spain. His mother’s ancestors were Irish and Swedish. He was born in the Excelsior District of San Francisco, California, on August 1, 1942, to Jose Ramon “Joe” Garcia and Ruth Marie “Bobbie” (née Clifford) Garcia, who was herself born in San Francisco. His parents named him after composer Jerome Kern. Jerome John was their second child, preceded by Clifford Ramon “Tiff”, who was born in 1937. Shortly before Clifford’s birth, their father and a partner leased a building in downtown San Francisco and turned it into a bar, partly in response to Jose being blackballed from a musicians’ union for moonlighting.

Explanation: Why does this galaxy have a ring of bright blue stars? Beautiful island universe Messier 94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici). A popular target for Earth-based astronomers, the face-on spiral galaxy is about 30,000 light-years across, with spiral arms sweeping through the outskirts of its broad disk. But this Hubble Space Telescope field of viewspans about 7,000 light-years across M94‘s central region. The featured close-up highlights the galaxy’s compact, bright nucleus, prominent inner dust lanes, and the remarkable bluish ring of young massive stars. The ring stars are all likely less than 10 million years old, indicating that M94 is a starburst galaxy that is experiencing an epoch of rapid star formation from inspiraling gas. The circular ripple of blue stars is likely a wave propagating outward, having been triggered bythe gravity and rotation of a oval matter distributions. Because M94 is relatively nearby, astronomers can better explore details of its starburst ring. (more…)