mick laBriola

Grace Slick (born Grace Barnett Wing, October 30, 1939) is an American artist, painter and retired singer-songwriter. Slick was a key figure in San Francisco’s early psychedelic music scene in the mid-1960s. With a music career spanning four decades, she first performed with The Great Society, but is best known for her work with Jefferson Airplane and the subsequent successor bands Jefferson Starship and Starship. Slick and Jefferson Airplane first achieved fame with their 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow, which included the top-ten Billboard hits “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love“. She provided the lead vocals on both tracks. With Starship, she sang co-lead for two number one hits, “We Built This City” and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now“. She would also release four solo albums. Slick retired from music in 1990, but continues to be active in the visual arts field.

Grace Barnett Wing was born October 30, 1939, in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois to Ivan Wilford Wing (1907–1987), of Norwegian and Swedish descent, and Virginia Wing (née Barnett; 1909–1983). Her parents met while they were both students at the University of Washington,and later married. In 1949, her brother Chris was born. Her father, working in the investment banking sector for Weeden and Company, was transferred several times when she was a child, and in addition to the Chicago metropolitan area, she lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California, before her family finally settled in Palo Alto, California in the early 1950s.

Clifford Benjamin Brown (October 30, 1930 – June 26, 1956) was an American jazz trumpeter. He died at the age of 25 in a car accident, leaving behind four years’ worth of recordings. His compositions “Sandu”, “Joy Spring”, and “Daahoud” have become jazz standards. Brown won the DownBeat magazine Critics’ Poll for New Star of the Year in 1954; he was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 1972.

Brown was born into a musical family in Wilmington, Delaware. His father organized his four sons, including Clifford, into a vocal quartet. Around age ten, Brown started playing trumpet at school after becoming fascinated with the shiny trumpet his father owned. At age thirteen, his father bought him a trumpet and provided him with private lessons. In high school, Brown received lessons from Robert Boysie Lowery and played in “a jazz group that Lowery organized”, making trips to Philadelphia.

Brown briefly attended Delaware State University as a math major before he switched to Maryland State College. His trips to Philadelphia grew in frequency after he graduated from high school and entered Delaware State University. He played in the fourteen-piece, jazz-oriented Maryland State Band. In June 1950, he was injured in a car accident after a performance. While in the hospital, he was visited by Dizzy Gillespie, who encouraged him to pursue a career in music. For a time, injuries restricted him to playing the piano. In June 1956, Brown and Richie Powell embarked on a drive to Chicago for their next appearance. Powell’s wife Nancy was at the wheel so that Clifford and Richie could sleep. While driving at night in the rain on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, west of Bedford, she is presumed to have lost control of the car, which went off the road, killing all three in the resulting crash. Brown is buried in Mt. Zion Cemetery, in Wilmington, Delaware.

Peter Allen Greenbaum (29 October 1946 – 25 July 2020), known professionally as Peter Green, was an English blues rock singer-songwriter and guitarist.^[3] As the founder of Fleetwood Mac, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. Green’s songs, such as “Albatross“, “Black Magic Woman“, “Oh Well“, “The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)” and “Man of the World“, appeared on singles charts, and several have been adapted by a variety of musicians.

Green was a major figure in the “second great epoch” of the British blues movement. Eric Clapton praised his guitar playing, and B.B. Kingcommented, “He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.” His trademark sound included string bending, vibrato, and economy of style.

In June 1996, Green was voted the third-best guitarist of all time in Mojo magazine. In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked him at number 58 in its list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”. Green’s tone on the instrumental “The Super-Natural” was rated as one of the 50 greatest of all time by Guitar Player in 2004.

Willem Bernard “Pim” Jacobs (29 October 1934 – 3 July 1996) was a Dutch jazz pianist, composer and television presenter.

Jacobs was born on 29 October 1934 in Hilversum, the Netherlands. His parents were artistic. He started playing the piano at the age of six. His brother, Ruud, was born in 1938 and became a jazz bassist.

Pim and Ruud formed a trio with drummer Wessel Ilcken in 1954. The band grew with the addition of guitarist Wim Overgaauw and Ilcken’s wife, Rita Reys. The trio recorded with Herbie Mann in 1956. Following Ilcken’s death in 1957, Pim Jacobs and Reys performed as a duo or trio with Overgaauw, and married in 1960. They often recorded and played jazz festivals in Europe and New Orleans, “their typical program featuring arrangements of vocal music standards as well as bebop material”. He also composed film music.

John Haley “Zoot” Sims (October 29, 1925 – March 23, 1985) was an American jazz saxophonist, playing mainly tenor but also alto (and, later, soprano) saxophone. He first gained attention in the “Four Brothers” sax section of Woody Herman‘s big band, afterward enjoying a long solo career, often in partnership with fellow saxmen Gerry Mulligan and Al Cohn.

Sims was born in 1925 in Inglewood, California, United States, to vaudeville performers Kate Haley and John Sims. His father was a vaudeville hoofer, and Sims prided himself on remembering many of the steps his father taught him. Growing up in a performing family, he learned to play drums and clarinet at an early age. His brother was the trombonist Ray Sims.

Sims began on tenor saxophone at age 13. He initially modelled his playing on the work of Lester Young, Ben Webster, and Don Byas. By his late teens, having dropped out of high school, he was playing in big bands, starting with those of Kenny Baker and Bobby Sherwood. He joined Benny Goodman‘s band for the first time in 1943 (he was to rejoin in 1946, and continued to perform with Goodman on occasion through the early 1970s). Sims replaced Ben Webster in Sid Catlett‘s Quartet of 1944. In May of 1944, Sims made his recording debut for Commodore Records in a sextet led by pianist Joe Bushkin, who two months earlier had recorded for the same label as part of Lester Young’s Kansas City Six.

Richard Bona (born 28 October 1967) is a Cameroon-born American musician, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist.

Bona Penda Nya Yuma Elolo was born in Minta, Cameroon, into a family of musicians, which enabled him to start learning music from a young age. His grandfather was a griot – a West African singer of praise and storyteller – and percussionist, as his mother was a singer. When he was four years old, Bona started to play the balafon. At the age of five, he began performing at his village church. Not being wealthy, Bona made many of his own instruments: including flutes and guitars (with cords strung over an old motorcycle tank).

His talent was quickly noticed, and he was often invited to perform at festivals and ceremonies. Bona began learning to play the guitar at the age of 11, and in 1980, aged just 13, he assembled his first ensemble for a French jazz club in Douala. The owner befriended him and helped him discover jazz music, in particular that of Jaco Pastorius, which inspired Bona to switch his focus to the electric bass.

October 28th 1952 After 20 years of making music together as husband-and-wife jazz duo Tuck & Patti, Tuck Andress’s guitar and Patti Cathcart’s vocals blend smoothly into a honed sound all their own. They perform both their own compositions, such as “High Heel Blues,” and standards like “One Hand, One Heart” from West Side Story and Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish.” Each concert ends with their signature closer, “You Take My Breath Away.”

Andress was raised in Oklahoma. He studied piano and took up guitar as a young teenager, when he was eager to play in a neighborhood garage band. He studied for a few months with Tommy Crook, but was primarily a self-taught artist who learned by playing with other musicians, listening to records, and experimenting. He enrolled in Stanford University in 1970, but dropped out after the first quarter to join members of his high school band in Los Angeles. Andress found a session gig on his first day in town, and was later offered work on the popular Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. Soon, however, he found Los Angeles too commercial, and he went back to Stanford, where he majored in music, studying classical guitar and playing with the Gap Band, Chaka Kahn, and Leon Russell.

Meanwhile, Cathcart, who was born and raised in San Francisco, spent eleven years studying the violin. She also sang in and directed choirs, but learned about phrasing and scatting by listening to Sammy Davis, Jr. She studied opera in college, then began singing with rock ‘n’ rollers in her twenties, including Bob Weir’s Kingfish band, Shaky Ground, and Occam’s Razor.

Glen Moore (born October 28, 1941) is an American jazz bassist, who occasionally performs on piano, flute and violin.

Moore was born in Portland, Oregon, United States. His performing career began at age 14 with the Young Oregonians in Portland, where he met and played with Native American saxophonist, Jim Pepper. He graduated with a degree in History and Literature from the University of Oregon. His formal bass instruction started after college with Jerome Magil in Portland, James Harnett in Seattle, Gary Karr in New York, Plough Christenson in Copenhagen, Ludwig Streicher in Vienna and Francois Rabbath in Hawaii. His main instrument is an upright bass which was made by Klotz in Tyrol around 1715. He mostly plays it in a personal unique tuning, using a low and a high C string.

Moore is a founding member of Oregon, but worked also regularly with Rabih Abou-Khalil, Vasant Rai, Nancy King and Larry Karush.