mick laBriola

Wild Bill Davis (November 24, 1918 – August 17, 1995) was the stage name of American jazz pianist, organist, and arranger William Strethen Davis. He is best known for his pioneering jazz electronic organ recordings and for his tenure with the Tympany Five, the backing group for Louis Jordan. Prior to the emergence of Jimmy Smith in 1956, Davis (whom Smith had reportedly first seen playing organ in the 1930s) was the pacesetter among organists.

Davis was born in Glasgow, Missouri and grew up in Parsons, Kansas. He first learned music from his father who was a professional singer. He received further musical training at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama, and at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. In his early career he took inspiration from Fats Waller and Art Tatum.

Davis moved to Chicago, where he originally played guitar and wrote arrangements for Milt Larkin‘s big band from 1939 through 1942; a band which included Arnett Cobb, Illinois Jacquet, and Tom Archia on horns. In 1943 he played guitar and wrote arrangements for Earl Hines. Davis first worked as a pianist in Chicago with Louis Jordan and his band Tympany Five, whom he played with regularly from 1945 through 1949. He played a crucial role as the pianist-arranger for that ensemble at the height of their success in the years 1945 through 1947.He also played piano in a recording with Buster Bennett in 1945.

Theodore Shaw Wilson (November 24, 1912 – July 31, 1986) was an American jazz pianist. Described by critic Scott Yanow as “the definitive swing pianist”, Wilson had a sophisticated, elegant style. His work was featured on the records of many of the biggest names in jazz, including Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald. With Goodman, he was one of the first black musicians to appear prominently with white musicians. In addition to his extensive work as a sideman, Wilson also led his own groups and recording sessions from the late 1920s to the 1980s.

Wilson was born in Austin, Texas, United States. He studied piano and violin at Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. After working in Speed Webb‘s band, with Louis Armstrong, and also understudying Earl Hines in Hines’s Grand Terrace Cafe Orchestra, Wilson joined Benny Carter‘s Chocolate Dandies in 1933. In 1935, he joined the Benny Goodman Trio (which consisted of Goodman, Wilson and drummer Gene Krupa, later expanded to the Benny Goodman Quartet with the addition of Lionel Hampton). The trio performed during the big band‘s intermissions. By joining the trio, Wilson became one of the first black musicians to perform prominently in a racially integrated group.

Sunspots themselves are a bit cooler than the surrounding solar surface because the magnetic fields that create them reduce convective heating. It is therefore unusual that regions overhead — even much higher up in the Sun’s corona — can be hundreds of times hotter. To help find the cause, NASA directed the Earth-orbiting Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) satellite to point its very sensitive X-ray telescope at the Sun. Featured here is the Sun in ultraviolet light, shown in a red hue as taken by the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Superimposed in false-colored green and blue is emission above sunspots detected by NuSTAR in different bands of high-energy X-rays, highlighting regions of extremely high temperature. Clues about the Sun’s atmospheric heating mechanisms come from NuSTAR images like this and shed light on solar nanoflares and microflares as brief bursts of energy that may drive the unusual heating.

John Alfred Mandel (November 23, 1925 – June 29, 2020) was an American composer and arranger of popular songs, film music and jazz. The musicians he worked with include Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Anita O’Day, Barbra Streisand, Tony Bennett, Diane Schuur and Shirley Horn. He won 5 Grammy Awards – from 17 nominations; his first nomination was for his debut film score for the multi-nominated 1958 film I Want to Live!.

Mandel was born in Manhattan on November 23, 1925. His father, Alfred, was a garment manufacturer who ran Mandel & Cash; his mother, Hannah (Hart-Rubin), had aimed to be an opera singer and discovered her son had perfect pitch at the age of five. His family was Jewish. They moved to Los Angeles in 1934, after his father’s business collapsed during the Great Depression. Mandel was given piano lessons, but switched to the trumpet and later the trombone.

Ray Drummond (born November 23, 1946 in Brookline, Massachusetts) is a jazz bassist and teacher. He also has an MBA from Stanford University, hence his linkage to the Stanford Jazz Workshop. He can be heard on hundreds of albums and co-leads The Drummonds with Renee Rosnes and (not related) Billy Drummond.

Drummond has been a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey, since 1980 with his wife, Susan, and his daughter, Maya.

He is the elder brother of David Drummond, senior vice president, corporate development and chief legal officer of Google Inc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKbk1LcsuUM

R. L. Burnside (November 23, 1926 – September 1, 2005) was an American blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. He played music for much of his life but received little recognition before the early 1990s. In the latter half of that decade, Burnside recorded and toured with Jon Spencer, garnering crossover appeal and introducing his music to a new fan base in the punk and garage rock scenes.

Burnside was born in 1926 to Earnest Burnside and Josie Malone, in either Harmontown, College Hill, or Blackwater Creek, all of which are in the rural part of Lafayette County, Mississippi, near the area that would be covered by Sardis Lake a few years later. His first name is given variously as R. L., Rural, Robert Lee, Rule, or Ruel. His father left the family early on, and R. L. grew up with his mother, grandparents, and several siblings.

Aston Francis Barrett (born 22 November 1946), often called “Family Man” or “Fams” for short, is a retired Jamaican musician and Rastafarian.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Aston “Family Man” Barrett was one of the Barrett brothers (the other being the younger brother on drums Carlton “Carly” Barrett) who played with Bob Marley & The Wailers, The Hippy Boys and Lee Perry‘s The Upsetters. He was the bandleader of Marley’s backing band, as well as co-producer of the albums, and the man in charge of the overall song arrangements.

Max Romeo (born Maxwell Livingston Smith, 22 November 1944) is a Jamaican reggae and roots reggae recording musician who has achieved chart success in his home country and in the United Kingdom. He had several hits with the vocal group the Emotions. His song “Wet Dream” (1968) included overtly sexual lyrics and launched a new style of reggae.

Born in St. D’Acre, St. Ann, Jamaica, Romeo left home at the age of 14 and worked on a sugar plantation outside Clarendon, before winning a local talent competition when he was 18. This prompted a move to the capital, Kingston, in order to embark on a musical career.

In 1965, Romeo joined up with Kenneth Knight and Lloyd Shakespeare in The Emotions, whilst also working in sales for the Caltone label. The group were unsuccessful in auditions for other producers, but Ken Lack offered them an audition after overhearing Smith singing to himself while working. In 1966, the group had their first hit, with the Lack-produced “(Buy You) A Rainbow”.The Emotions went on to release several hit singles. and by 1968, the singer, by that point known as Max Romeo began his solo career in 1968, but did not have any great successes on the charts. Romeo returned to The Emotions, now recording for Phil Pratt, and founded a new band, The Hippy Boys.

Perry Miller (born November 22, 1941), known professionally as Jesse Colin Young, is an American singer and songwriter. He was a founding member and lead singer of the 1960s group the Youngbloods. After their dissolution in 1972, Young embarked on a solo career, releasing a series of successful albums through Warner Bros. Records, including Song for Juli (1973), Light Shine (1974), Songbird (1975) and the live album On the Road(1976). Young continued to release music in the 1980s with Elektra Records and Cypress Records, before deciding to release music through his personal label, Ridgetop Music, in 1993. After the Mount Vision Fire in 1995, Young relocated with his family to a coffee plantation in Hawaii, periodically releasing music. Young received a diagnosis of “chronic Lyme disease” in 2012, and decided to retire from music. He began performing again in 2016 with his son Tristan, releasing a new album Dreamers in 2019 through BMG.

Young’s song “Sunlight” was covered by Three Dog Night on their album Naturally (1970), and “Darkness, Darkness” by Robert Plant in 2002, which received a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88JHOYWmpcg

James Minter Knepper (November 22, 1927 – June 14, 2003) was an American jazz trombonist. In addition to his own recordings as leader, Knepper performed and recorded with Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman, Claude Thornhill, Stan Kenton, Benny Goodman, Gil Evans, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, Toshiko Akiyoshi and Lew Tabackin, and, most famously, Charles Mingus in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Knepper died in 2003 of complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Knepper was born in Los Angeles, California, United States, the second son of a nurse and a police officer. His parents divorced shortly after his birth, and his mother had to take her abusive husband to court in order to get child support. He and his older brother, Robert, were sent to several boarding and military schools, Page Military Academy and St. John’s Military Academy, while their mother worked. He picked up his first instrument, an alto horn, at the age of six while he was a pupil there. His first teacher persuaded him to put aside the alto and pick up the trombone because, as he said, he had a “trombone mouth”. He played his first professional gigs in Los Angeles, and traveled to Spokane, Washington, at the age of 15. He graduated high school, and later attended classes at Los Angeles Community College.

Hoagland Howard Carmichael (November 22, 1899 – December 27, 1981) was an American songwriter, musician, actor, singer, and attorney. American composer and author Alec Wilder described Carmichael as the “most talented, inventive, sophisticated and jazz-oriented of all the great craftsmen” of pop songs in the first half of the 20th century. Carmichael was one of the most successful Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the 1930s, and was among the first singer-songwriters in the age of mass media to utilize new communication technologies such as television, electronic microphones, and sound recordings.

Carmichael composed several hundred songs, including 50 that achieved hit record status. He is best known for composing the music for “Stardust“, “Georgia on My Mind” (lyrics by Stuart Gorrell), “The Nearness of You“, and “Heart and Soul” (in collaboration with lyricist Frank Loesser), four of the most-recorded American songs of all time. He also collaborated with lyricist Johnny Mercer on “Lazybones” and “Skylark“. Carmichael’s “Ole Buttermilk Sky” was an Academy Award nominee in 1946, from Canyon Passage, in which he co-starred as a musician riding a mule. “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening“, with lyrics by Mercer, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1951. Carmichael also appeared as a character actor and musical performer in 14 films, hosted three musical-variety radio programs, performed on television, and wrote two autobiographies.

Comet C/2021 A1 (Leonard) was discovered as a faint smudge in January 2021 when it was out past Mars — but its orbit will take the giant shedding ice-ball into the inner Solar System, passing near both Earth and Venus in December before it swoops around the Sun in early January 2022. Although comets are notoriously hard to predict, some estimations have Comet Leonard brightening to become visible to the unaided eye in December. Comet Leonard was captured just over a week ago already sporting a green-tinged coma and an extended dust tail. The featured picture was composed from 62 images taken through a moderate-sized telescope — one set of exposures tracking the comet, while another set tracking the background stars. The exposures were taken from the dark skies above the Eastern Sierras (Mountains), near June Lake in California, USA. Soon after passing near the Earth in mid-December, the comet will shift from northern to southern skies.