mick laBriola

Gary Burton (born January 23, 1943) is an American jazz vibraphonist, composer, and educator. Burton developed a pianistic style of four-mallet technique as an alternative to the prevailing two-mallet technique. This approach caused him to be heralded as an innovator, and his sound and technique are widely imitated. He is also known for pioneering fusion jazz and popularizing the duet format in jazz, as well as being a major figure in music education from his 30 years at the Berklee College of Music.

Burton was born in Anderson, Indiana, United States. Beginning music at six years old, he mostly taught himself to play marimba and vibraphone.He began studying piano at age sixteen while finishing high school at Princeton Community High School in Princeton, Indiana (1956–60). He has cited jazz pianist Bill Evans as the inspiration for his approach to the vibraphone.

Burton attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1960–61 and the Stan Kenton Clinic at Indiana University in 1960. He studied with Herb Pomeroy and soon befriended composer and arranger Michael Gibbs. After establishing his career during the 1960s, he returned to join the staff of Berklee from 1971–2004, serving first as professor, then dean, and executive vice president, during his last decade at the college. In 1989, Burton received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee.

Early in his career, at the behest of Nashville saxophonist Boots Randolph, Burton moved to Nashville, Tennessee and recorded with several musicians from the area, including guitarist Hank Garland, pianist Floyd Cramer and guitarist Chet Atkins.

Curtis Counce (January 23, 1926 – July 31, 1963) was an American hard bop and West Coast jazz double bassist.

Counce was born in Kansas City, Missouri and moved to California in 1945. He began recording in 1946 with Lester Young, and in the 1950s in Los Angeles with musicians such as Shorty Rogers, Stan Kenton, Shelly Manne, Lyle Murphy, Teddy Charles, and Clifford Brown. Counce formed his quintet in 1956 featuring tenor saxophonist Harold Land, trumpeter Jack Sheldon, pianist Carl Perkins and drummer Frank Butler. Elmo Hope replaced Perkins after his death at age 29 in 1958. Gerald Wilson replaced Sheldon on some recordings. The four albums originally released on Contemporary Records were reissued in 2006 on a double CD by Gambit Spain. Counce died in Los Angeles, California, of a heart attack. He was survived by his wife, Mildred Counce and only child Celeste Counce. Curtis Counce is also survived by a son born in 1961.

Eberhard Weber (born 22 January 1940, in Stuttgart, Germany) is a German double bassist and composer. As a bass player, he is known for his highly distinctive tone and phrasing. Weber’s compositions blend chamber jazz, European classical music, minimalism and ambient music, and are regarded as characteristic examples of the ECM Records sound.

Weber began recording in the early 1960s, and released The Colours of Chloë (ECM 1042), his first record under his own name, in 1973. In addition to his career as a musician, he also worked for many years as a television and theater director. He has designed an electric-acoustic bass with an additional string tuned to C.

Weber’s music, often in a melancholic tone, frequently utilizes ostinatos, yet is highly organized in its colouring and attention to detail. He was an early proponent of the solid-body electric double bass, which he has played regularly since the early 1970s.

From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Weber’s closest musical association was with pianist Wolfgang Dauner. Their many mutual projects were diverse, from mainstream jazz to jazz-rock fusion to avant-garde sound experiments. During this period, Weber also played and recorded with pianists Hampton Hawes and Mal Waldron, guitarists Baden Powell de Aquino and Joe Pass, The Mike Gibbs Orchestra, violinist Stephane Grappelli, and many others.

J.J. Johnson (January 22, 1924 – February 4, 2001), born James Louis Johnson and also known as Jay Jay Johnson, was an American jazztrombonist, composer and arranger. Johnson was one of the earliest trombonists to embrace bebop.

After studying the piano beginning at age nine, Johnson decided to play trombone at the age of 14. In 1941, he began his professional career with Clarence Love, and then played with Snookum Russell in 1942. In Russell’s band, he met the trumpeter Fats Navarro, who influenced him to play in the style of the tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Johnson played in Benny Carter‘s orchestra between 1942 and 1945, and made his first recordings in 1943 under Carter’s leadership, recording his first solo (on “Love for Sale”) in October 1943. In 1944, he took part in the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert, presented in Los Angeles and organized by Norman Granz. In 1945, he joined the big band of Count Basie, touring and recording with him until 1946.

Héctor “Tito” Matos, a master of Puerto Rico’s indigenous music forms, bomba and plena, died on Jan. 18, at his home in the city of Santurce, Puerto Rico. He was 53.

His family confirmed his death to El Nuevo Dia, without providing a cause.

As cofounder of the band Viento De Agua, Matos helped modernize the bomba and plena traditions with the addition of trap drums and keyboards; elements of funk, rock and jazz harmony; and arranging techniques that have influenced every subsequent group in the styles today.

A virtuoso percussionist, vocalist, composer, and bandleader, Matos was also a committed educator who was passionate in his preservation and propagation of the island’s African-rooted music forms, especially plena. Whereas bomba is rooted in Bantú Congolese rhythms played on barrel drums covered with goat skin, accompanied by a large maraca and two sticks known as the cuá striking any wood surface, the plena is a separate art form with its own history and rhythmic language.

Born in the cities of Guayama and Ponce in the late 19th century, its acknowledged creator was a Black ox plow driver, Joselino “Bum Bum” Oppenheimer. The genre’s first acknowledged composer, he taught his new creations in tertulias (gatherings) held in bars. At its heart is its propulsive rhythm and a vocal tradition of commenting on the day’s events, society, local gossip, politics, love of country, news, or any other topic of importance. Thus it became known as the island’s musical newspaper.

“He was one of the most important innovators of plena, especially with his work with Viento de Agua, while cultivating in great detail the most traditional and popular roots of the genre.”

Richard Pierce Havens (January 21, 1941 – April 22, 2013) was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. His music encompassed elements of folk, soul, and rhythm and blues. He had an intense and rhythmic guitar style (often in open tunings), and played soulful covers of pop and folk songs. He was the opening act at Woodstock.

Born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, Havens was the oldest of nine children. He was of Native American (Blackfoot) descent on his father’s side and of the British West Indies on his mother’s. His grandfather was Blackfoot of the Montana/South Dakota area.

Havens’s grandfather and great-uncle joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, moved to New York City thereafter, and settled on the Shinnecock Reservation on Long Island. Havens’s grandfather married, then moved to Brooklyn.

As a youth, Havens began organizing his neighborhood friends into a street corner doo-wop group. At age 16, he was performing with the McCrea Gospel Singers.

Fird Eaglin Jr. (January 21, 1936 or 1937 – February 18, 2009), known as Snooks Eaglin, was an American guitarist and singer based in New Orleans. In his early years he was sometimes credited under other names, including Blind Snooks Eaglin, “Lil” Snook, Ford Eaglin, Blind Guitar Ferd.

His vocal style was reminiscent of that of Ray Charles; in the 1950s, when he was in his late teens, he sometimes billed himself as “Little Ray Charles”. He played a wide range of styles of music within the same concert, album, or even song: blues, rock and roll, jazz, country, and Latin. In his early years, he also played acoustic blues.

His ability to play a wide range of songs and make them his own earned him the nickname “The Human Jukebox.” Eaglin claimed in interviews that his musical repertoire included some 2,500 songs.

At live shows, he usually did not prepare set lists and was unpredictable, even to his bandmates. He played songs that came to him on stage, and he also took requests from the audience.

María Dolores “Lola” Flores Ruiz (21 January 1923 – 16 May 1995) was a Spanish singer, actress, bailaora and businesswoman. Born in Jerez de la Frontera, Flores became interested in the performing arts at a very young age. Known for her overwhelming personality onstage, she first debuted as a dancer at age sixteen at the stage production Luces de España, in her hometown. After being discovered by film director Fernando Mignoni, Flores moved to Madrid to pursue a professional career in music and film, with her first gig being the lead role in Mignoni’s Martingala (1940). Flores succeeded as a film and stage actress. In 1943 she obtained her breakthrough role in the musical stage production Zambra alongside Manolo Caracol, in which she sung original compositions by Rafael de León, Manuel López-Quiroga Miquel and Antonio Quintero, including “La Zarzamora” and “La Niña de Fuego”, mostly singing flamenco music, copla, rumba and ranchera. She then started to receive widespread media coverage.

In 1951, Flores signed a five-film contract with Suevia Films for a value of 6 million pesetas, which became the best paid contract for a performing artist in Spanish history. Under that contract she starred in major productions like La Niña de la Venta (1951), ¡Ay, Pena, Penita, Pena! (1953), La Danza de los Deseos (1954) and El Balcón de la Luna (1962), among many others, which spawned the signature songs “A Tu Vera” and “¡Ay, Pena, Penita, Pena!”. Since then, she was popularly dubbed as La Faraona. During her life, Flores performed in more than 35 films, pigeonholed, in many of them, in Andalusian folklore. As a bailaora, Flores enraged several generations of continents, although she distanced herself from flamenco canons. She also recorded over twenty albums, which she toured though Europe, Latin America and the United States.

Her strong personality, recognizable image, remarkable professional trajectory and her sometimes controversial personal life, have turned Flores into a Spanish pop culture icon. She is often cited as the “biggest exporter of Andalusian culture to date” as well as a “pioneer”, being tributed many times in recent television series and documentaries such as the biographical film Lola, la Película (2007). Lola became the matriarch of what would later be the Flores family, filled with popular singers and television personalities such as Lolita Flores, Rosario, Alba Flores and Elena Furiase. In 1995, Lola Flores died, aged 72, in Alcobendas due to health complications caused by a breast cancer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMZk67VCIs4&t=22s