mick laBriola

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Airglow. Now air glows all of the time, but it is usually hard to see. A disturbance however — like an approaching storm — may cause noticeable rippling in the Earth’s atmosphere. These gravity waves are oscillations in air analogous to those created when a rock is thrown in calm water. Red airglow likely originates from OH molecules about 87-kilometers high, excited by ultraviolet light from the Sun, while orange and green airglow is likely caused by sodium and oxygen atoms slightly higher up. While driving near Keluke Lake in Qinghai Provence in China a few years ago, the photographer originally noticed mainly the impressive central band of the Milky Way Galaxy. Stopping to photograph it, surprisingly, the resulting sensitive camera image showed airglow bands to be quite prominent and span the entire sky. The featured image has been digitally enhanced to make the colors more vibrant.

Richard Allen “Blue“ Mitchell (March 13, 1930 – May 21, 1979) was an American jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, rock and funk trumpeter and composer, recording albums as leader and sideman for Riverside, Mainstream Records, and Blue Note.

Mitchell was born and raised in Miami, Florida, United States. He began playing trumpet in high school, with the nickname “Blue”. After high school, he played in the rhythm & blues ensembles of Paul Williams, Earl Bostic, and Chuck Willis. He returned to Miami and was heard by Cannonball Adderley, with whom he recorded for Riverside Records in New York in 1958. Mitchell performed with the Harold Land quintet until he died from cancer on May 21, 1979, in Los Angeles, aged 49.

Roy Owen Haynes (born March 13, 1925) is an American jazz drummer. He is among the most recorded drummers in jazz. In a career lasting over 80 years, he has played swing, bebop, jazz fusion, avant-garde jazz and is considered a pioneer of jazz drumming. “Snap Crackle” was a nickname given to him in the 1950s.

He has led bands such as the Hip Ensemble. His albums Fountain of Youth and Whereas were nominated for a Grammy Award. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1999. His son Graham Haynes is a cornetist; another son Craig Holiday Haynes and grandson Marcus Gilmore are both drummers.

Haynes was born in the Roxbury section of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. His younger brother, Michael E. Haynes, would become an important leader in the black community of Massachusetts, working with Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, representing Roxbury in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and for forty years serving as pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church, where King had been a member while he pursued his doctoral degree at Boston University

Otis Verries Hicks, known as Lightnin’ Slim (March 13, 1913 – July 27, 1974), was an American Louisiana blues musician, who recorded for Excello Records and played in a style similar to its other Louisiana artists. The blues critic ED Denson ranked him as one of the five great bluesmen of the 1950s, along with Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson.

According to most sources, Otis Hicks was born on a farm outside St. Louis, Missouri, but the researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc stated, on the basis of his draft card, that he was born in Good Pine, Louisiana. Prison records from Louisiana State Penitentiary discovered by researcher Gene Tomko also corroborate his birthplace as Good Pine, Louisiana. He moved to Baton Rouge at the age of thirteen. Taught guitar by his older brother Layfield, Slim was playing in bars in Baton Rouge by the late 1940s.

His first recording was “Bad Luck Blues” (“If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all”), released by J. D. “Jay” Miller‘s Feature Records in 1954. It was Miller, who had a penchant for picking colourful artists’ names, who christened him “Lightnin’ Slim”. Slim then recorded for Excello Records for twelve years, starting in the mid-1950s, often collaborating with his brother-in-law Slim Harpo and with the harmonica player Lazy Lester.

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Don Drummond (12 March 1932 – 6 May 1969) was a Jamaican ska trombonist and composer. He was one of the original members of The Skatalites, and composed many of their tunes. In 1966, Drummond was convicted of murdering his 23-year-old lover, Anita “Marguerita” Mahfood.

Drummond was born at the Jubilee Hospital in Kingston, Jamaica, to Doris Monroe and Uriah Drummond. He was educated at Kingston’s Alpha Boys School, where he later taught his younger schoolmate Rico Rodriguez to play the trombone.

His musical career began in 1950 with the Eric Dean’s All-Stars where he performed jazz. He continued into the 1960s with others, including Kenny Williams.

After performing jazz for a decade, Drummond began performing ska and in 1964 he joined The Skatalites. With Drummond’s politicized conversion to the Rastafari movement, other band members followed his lead. He became a household name in Jamaica, before suffering mental health problems. It has been said that pianist George Shearing rated him as being among the world’s top five trombone players. On 2 January 1965, Drummond’s live-in lover, Anita “Marguerita” Mahfood, was found dead with four stab wounds to the chest. Drummond reported to the police that Mahfood had stabbed herself, but, in 1966, he was found guilty of her murder. Drummond was ruled criminally insane and imprisoned at Bellevue Asylum, Kingston, where he remained until his death four years later. The official cause of death was “natural causes”, possibly heart failure caused by malnutrition or improper medication, but other theories were put forward; some of his colleagues believed it was a government plot against the Kingston musical scene, and some believed that he was killed by gangsters as revenge for the murder of Mahfood.

Wardell Joseph Quezergue  March 12, 1930 – September 6, 2011) was an American composer, arranger, record producer and bandleader, known among New Orleans musicians as the “Creole Beethoven”. Steeped in jazz, he was an influential musician whose work shaped the sound of New Orleans rhythm and blues, funk and pop music. His role as an arranger and producer kept him out of the spotlight and enabled him to enhance the careers of many. He was a staple of the New Orleans music scene and the recipient of an honorary doctorate in music.

Quezergue was born in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans into a musical family of creole descent. His father Sidney Quezergue Sr. played guitar and his mother Violetta Guimont played clarinet. His older brothers, Sidney Jr. and Leo, were jazz musicians. Sidney played the trumpet and Leo played the drums. The family played together on Sundays. Quezergue had no formal music training. He was influenced by Louis Armstrong, Harry James and Dizzy Gillespie. As a teenager he played the trumpet professionally and started to compose.

Performing for Shabbat for the Soul service. Mt Zion Temple. Friday 3-11-22 630pm

Harvey Mandel (born March 11, 1945, in Detroit, Michigan, United States) is an American guitarist best known as a member of Canned Heat. He also played with Charlie Musselwhite and John Mayall as well as maintaining a solo career.

Mandel was born in Detroit, Michigan, and grew up in Morton Grove, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His first recording was the album Stand Back! Here Comes Charley Musselwhite’s Southside Band in 1966 with Charlie Musselwhite. Described in Legends of Rock Guitar (1997) as a “legendary” album, it was influential in bridging the gap between blues and rock and roll, with Mandel’s “relentless fuzztone, feedback-edged solos, and unusual syncopated phrasing.” He relocated to the San Francisco Bay area, performing often at The Matrix, a club where local favorites like Jerry Garcia or Elvin Bishop would sit in and jam. He then met the pioneering San Francisco disc jockey and producer Abe “Voco” Kesh (Abe Keshishian), who signed Mandel to Philips Records and produced his first solo album, Cristo Redentor, in 1968. Mandel recorded with Barry Goldberg on a bootleg from Cherry Records and recorded with Graham Bond. He cut two more solo LPs for Philips, Righteous(1969) and Games Guitars Play (1970), followed by four more solo albums for the independent record label Janus in the early 1970s, which included Baby Batter.

Robert Keith McFerrin Jr. (born March 11, 1950) is an American folk-jazz vocalist. He is known for his vocal techniques, such as singing fluidly but with quick and considerable jumps in pitch—for example, sustaining a melody while also rapidly alternating with arpeggios and harmonies—as well as scat singing, polyphonic overtone singing, and improvisational vocal percussion. He is widely known for performing and recording regularly as an unaccompanied solo vocal artist. He has frequently collaborated with other artists from both the jazz and classical scenes.

McFerrin’s song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was a No. 1 U.S. pop hit in 1988 and won Song of the Year and Record of the Year honors at the 1989 Grammy Awards. McFerrin has also worked in collaboration with instrumentalists, including the pianists Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Joe Zawinul, the drummer Tony Williams, and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

McFerrin was born in Manhattan, New York City, United States, the son of operatic baritone Robert McFerrin and singer Sara Copper. He attended Cathedral High School in Los Angeles, Cerritos College, University of Illinois Springfield (then known as Sangamon State University) and California State University, Sacramento.

Astor Pantaleón Piazzolla March 11, 1921 – July 4, 1992) was an Argentine tangocomposer, bandoneon player, and arranger. His works revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style termed nuevo tango, incorporating elements from jazz and classical music. A virtuoso bandoneonist, he regularly performed his own compositions with a variety of ensembles. In 1992, American music critic Stephen Holden described Piazzolla as “the world’s foremost composer of Tango music”.

Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 1921, the only child of Italian immigrant parents, Vicente “Nonino” Piazzolla and Assunta Manetti. His paternal grandfather, a sailor and fisherman named Pantaleo (later Pantaleón) Piazzolla, had immigrated to Mar del Plata from Trani, a seaport in the southeastern Italian region of Apulia, at the end of the 19th century. His mother was the daughter of two Italian immigrants from Luccain the central region of Tuscany.

In 1925 Astor Piazzolla moved with his family to Greenwich Village in New York City, which in those days was a violent neighbourhood inhabited by a volatile mixture of gangsters and hard-working immigrants. His parents worked long hours and Piazzolla soon learned to take care of himself on the streets despite having a limp. At home he would listen to his father’s records of the tango orchestras of Carlos Gardel and Julio de Caro, and was exposed to jazz and classical music, including Bach, from an early age. He began to play the bandoneon after his father spotted one in a New York pawn shop in 1929.