mick laBriola

Annapurna Devi ( Annapūrṇā Devi; 1927 – 13 October 2018) was an Indian surbahar (bass sitar) player of Hindustani classical music. She was given the name ‘Annapurna’ by former Maharaja Brijnath Singh of the former Maihar Estate (M.P.), and it was by this name that she was popularly known. She was the daughter and disciple of Allauddin Khan, the founder of Maihar gharana, and Madina Bibi and the first wife of the sitar player Ravi Shankar. After her separation from Ravi Shankar, she moved to Bombay and never performed again in public. She remained a private person, yet continued to teach music for free. Her students include many notable disciples including Hariprasad Chaurasia, Nityanand Haldipur and Nikhil Banerjee.

Tientos, a slow cante jondo music and dance in a four-count rhythm, was first developed by the singer Enrique el Mellizo (1848 -1906) as an expressive variation of the Tangos. Poet Federico García Lorca considered the Tientos to be almost liturgical in its solemnity. Traditional Tientos lyrics – letras – set a dark mood, and have to do with loss, unrequited love, imprisionment, longing for freedom and other serious messages. Dancers strive to capture this mood in their solos. The most notable aspect of the slow Tientos tempo is the beat structure. Where the first beat in Tangos is subdued, it is strongly emphasized in the Tientos, as is the “and” of the second beat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI4O_gSd68E

Milton “Shorty” Rogers (born Milton Rajonsky; April 14, 1924 – November 7, 1994) was an American jazz musician, one of the principal creators of West Coast jazz. He played trumpet and flugelhorn and was in demand for his skills as an arranger.

Rogers was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, United States. He worked first as a professional musician with Will Bradley and Red Norvo.From 1947 to 1949, he worked extensively with Woody Herman and in 1950 and 1951 he played with Stan Kenton.

On June 7, 1953, Rogers and his orchestra, including Johnny “Guitar” Watson, performed for the famed ninth Cavalcade of Jazz concert at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, produced by Leon Hefflin, Sr. Also featured that day were Roy Brown and his Orchestra, Don Tosti and His Mexican Jazzmen, Earl Bostic, Nat “King” Cole, and Louis Armstrong and his All Stars with Velma Middleton

Eugene “Jug” Ammons (April 14, 1925 – August 6, 1974), also known as “The Boss”, was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. The son of boogie-woogie pianist Albert Ammons, Gene Ammons is remembered for his accessible music, steeped in soul and R&B.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Ammons studied music with instructor Walter Dyett at DuSable High School. Ammons began to gain recognition while still at high school when in 1943, at the age of 18, he went on the road with trumpeter King Kolax‘s band. In 1944, he joined the band of Billy Eckstine(who bestowed on him the nickname “Jug” when straw hats ordered for the band did not fit), playing alongside Charlie Parker and later Dexter Gordon. Performances from this period include “Blowin’ the Blues Away,” featuring a saxophone duel between Ammons and Gordon. After 1947, when Eckstine became a solo performer, Ammons then led a group, including Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt, that performed at Chicago’s Jumptown Club. In 1949, Ammons replaced Stan Getz as a member of Woody Herman‘s Second Herd, and then in 1950 formed a duet with Sonny Stitt.

The 1950s were a prolific period for Ammons and produced some acclaimed recordings such as The Happy Blues (1956). Musicians who played in his groups, apart from Stitt, included Donald Byrd, Jackie McLean, John Coltrane, Kenny Burrell, Mal Waldron, Art Farmer, and Duke Jordan.

Ali Akbar Khan (14 April 1922 – 18 June 2009) was an Indian Hindustani classical musician of the Maihar gharana, known for his virtuosity in playing the sarod. Trained as a classical musician and instrumentalist by his father, Allauddin Khan, he also composed numerous classical ragas and film scores. He established a music school in Calcutta in 1956, and the Ali Akbar College of Music in 1967, which moved with him to the United States and is now based in San Rafael, California, with a branch in Basel, Switzerland.

Khan was instrumental in popularizing Indian classical music in the West, both as a performer and as a teacher. He first came to America in 1955 on the invitation of violinist Yehudi Menuhin and later settled in California. He was a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Khan was accorded India’s second highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan, in 1989. Nominated five times for the Grammy Award, Khan was also a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts‘ National Heritage Fellowship.

John William “Jack” Casady (born April 13, 1944) is an American bass guitarist, best known as a member of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna. Jefferson Airplane became the first successful exponent of the San Francisco Sound. Singles including “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” charted in 1967 and 1968. Casady, along with the other members of Jefferson Airplane, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.

Casady was born in Washington D.C., the son of Mary Virginia (née Quimby) and William Robert Casady. His father was of half Irish Protestant and half Polish Jewish ancestry. His mother was a relative of aviator Harriet Quimby; some of her family had been in North America since the 1600s.

First playing as a lead guitarist with the Washington, D.C.-area rhythm and blues band The Triumphs, he switched to bass during his high school years, and while still underage (and with a forged I.D.) played the Washington D.C. club scene, backing artists such as Little Anthony and the Imperials.

Lawrence “Bud” Freeman (April 13, 1906 – March 15, 1991) was an American jazz musician, bandleader, and composer, known mainly for playing tenor saxophone but also able at the clarinet.

In 1922, Freeman and some friends from high school formed the Austin High School Gang. Freeman played the C melody saxophone with band members such as Jimmy McPartland and Frank Teschemacher. before switching to tenor saxophone two years later. The band was influenced by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and Louis Armstrong. While Armstrong was in King Oliver‘s Creole Jazz Band, Freeman attended performances at Lincoln Gardens with McPartland. They were nicknamed “Alligators”.

In 1927, he moved to New York City, where he worked as a session musician and band member with Red Nichols, Roger Wolfe Kahn, Ben Pollack, and Joe Venuti. One of his most notable performances was a solo on Eddie Condon‘s 1933 recording, The Eel, which became Freeman’s nickname for his long snake-like improvisations. Freeman played with Tommy Dorsey‘s Orchestra (1936–1938) and Benny Goodman‘s band in 1938, before forming the Summa Cum Laude Orchestra (1939–1940). Freeman joined the U.S. Army during World War II and headed a U.S. Army band in the Aleutian Islands.

Massive stars, abrasive winds, mountains of dust, and energetic light sculpt one of the largest and most picturesque regions of star formation in the Local Group of Galaxies. Known as N11, the region is visible on the upper right of many images of its home galaxy, the Milky Way neighbor known as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The featured image was taken for scientific purposes by the Hubble Space Telescope and reprocessed for artistry. Although the section imaged above is known as NGC 1763, the entire N11 emission nebula is second in LMC size only to the Tarantula Nebula. Compact globules of dark dust housing emerging young stars are also visible around the image. A recent study of variable stars in the LMC with Hubble has helped to recalibrate the distance scale of the observable universe, but resulted in a slightly different scale than found using the pervasive cosmic microwave background.