mick laBriola

John Cipollina (August 24, 1943 – May 29, 1989) was a guitarist best known for his role as a founder and the lead guitarist of the prominent San Francisco rock band Quicksilver Messenger Service. After leaving Quicksilver he formed the band Copperhead, was a member of the San Francisco All Stars and later played with numerous other bands.

John and his twin sister Manuela were born in Berkeley, California on August 24, 1943. Cipollina attended Tamalpais High School, in Mill Valley, California (as did his brother, Mario, born 1954) and sister, Antonia (born 1952). Their father, Gino, was of italian ancestry (Genovese and Piemontese origins). He was a realtor, and their mother, Evelyn, and godfather José Iturbi, were concert pianists.

John showed great promise as a classical pianist in his youth, but his father gave him a guitar when he was 12 and this quickly became his primary instrument. Cipollina died on 29 May 1989 at the age of 45 after a career in music that spanned twenty five years. His cause of death was alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, which he suffered from most of his life, and which is exacerbated by smoking.

Oteil Burbridge is an American multi-instrumentalist, specializing on the bass guitar, trained in playing jazz and classical music from an early age. He has achieved fame primarily on bass guitar during the resurgence of the Allman Brothers Band from 1997 through 2014, and as a founding member of the band Dead & Company. Burbridge was also a founding member of The Aquarium Rescue Unit and Tedeschi Trucks Band, with whom his brother Kofi Burbridge was the keyboardist and flautist. He has worked with other musicians including Bruce Hampton, Trey Anastasio, Page McConnell, Bill Kreutzmann and Derek Trucks.

Burbridge has been recognized for his ability to incorporate scat-singing into his improvised bass solos. Burbridge endorses Fodera, Modulus, Sukop and Dunlop guitars and effects.

Henry Franklin “Buster“ Smith (August 24, 1904 – August 10, 1991), also known as Professor Smith, was an American jazz alto saxophonist and mentor to Charlie Parker. Smith was instrumental in instituting the Texas Sax Sound with Count Basie and Lester Young in the 1930s.

Smith played saxophone for a number of prominent band leaders including Duke Ellington and Earl Hines as well as vocalist Ella Fitzgerald. He recorded his only album as leader in 1959 and despite intending to record a follow-up, he was injured in an accident and nothing else was released.

Smith was born and raised in Alsdorf, Texas, a small township near Telico in the outskirts of Dallas, where he attended school as a child. Smith earned the name “Buster” from his parents as a baby, as he was born as an overweight child. Buster was the third of five boys and had no sisters, though both of his older brothers died in childhood of measles.

Arthur William “Big Boy” Crudup (August 24, 1905 – March 28, 1974) was an American Delta blues singer, songwriter and guitarist. He is best known, outside blues circles, for his songs “That’s All Right” (1946), “My Baby Left Me” and “So Glad You’re Mine”, later recorded by Elvis Presleyand other artists.

Crudup was born in Union Grove, Forest, Mississippi, to a family of migrant workers traveling through the South and Midwest. The family returned to Mississippi in 1926, where he sang gospel music. He had lessons with a local bluesman, whose name was Papa Harvey, and later he was able to play in dance halls and cafes around Forest. Around 1940 he went to Chicago.

He began his career as a blues singer around Clarksdale, Mississippi. As a member of the Harmonizing Four, he visited Chicago in 1939. He stayed in Chicago to work as a solo musician but barely made a living as a street singer. The record producer Lester Melrose allegedly found him while Crudup was living in a packing crate, introduced him to Hudson Whittaker, better known as Tampa Red, and signed him to a recording contract with RCA Victor‘s Bluebird label.

Toward the right of the featured Hubble image of the massive galaxy cluster Abell 3827 is what appears to be a most unusual galaxy — curved and with three centers. A detailed analysis, however, finds that these are three images of the same background galaxy — and that there are at least four more images. Light we see from the single background blue galaxy takes multiple paths through the complex gravity of the cluster, just like a single distant light can take multiple paths through the stem of a wine glass. Studying how clusters like Abell 3827 and their component galaxies deflect distant light gives information about how mass and dark matter are distributed. Abell 3827 is so distant, having a redshift of 0.1, that the light we see from it left about 1.3 billion years ago — before dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Therefore, the cluster’s central galaxies have now surely all coalesced — in a feast of galactic cannibalism — into one huge galaxy near the cluster’s center.

Terje Rypdal (born 23 August 1947) is a Norwegian guitarist and composer. He has been an important member in the Norwegian jazz community, and has also given show concerts with guitarists Ronni Le Tekrø and Mads Eriksen as “N3”.

Rypdal was born in Oslo, Norway, the son of a composer and orchestra leader. He studied classical piano and trumpet as a child, and then taught himself to play guitar as he entered his teens. Starting out as a Hank Marvin-influenced rock guitarist with The Vanguards, Rypdal turned towards jazz in 1968 and joined Jan Garbarek‘s group and later George Russell‘s sextet and orchestra. An important step towards international attention was his participation in the free jazz festival in Baden-Baden, Germany, in 1969, where he was part of a band led by Lester Bowie. During his musical studies at Oslo university and conservatory, he led the orchestra of the Norwegian version of the musical Hair. He has often been recorded on the ECM record label, both jazz-oriented material and classical compositions (some of which do not feature Rypdal’s guitar).

Gilbert Lloyd “Gil” Coggins (August 23, 1924 – February 15, 2004) was an American jazz pianist.

Coggins was born to parents of West Indian heritage. His mother was a pianist and had her son start on piano from an early age. He attended school in New York City and Barbados. In Harlem, New York City, he attended The High School of Music & Art.

In 1946, Coggins met Miles Davis while stationed at Jefferson Barracks in Missouri. After his discharge he began playing piano professionally, working with Davis on several of his Blue Note and Prestige releases. Coggins also recorded with John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Art Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers, Ray Draper, and Jackie McLean.

Coggins gave up playing jazz professionally in 1954 and took up a career in real estate, playing music only occasionally. He did not record as a leader until 1990, when Interplay Records released Gil’s Mood. He continued performing through the 1990s and 2000s until 2004, when he died from complications sustained in a car crash eight months earlier in Forest Hills, New York. Better Late Than Never, his second album recorded as a leader, was released posthumously.

Wynona Carr (August 23, 1923 – May 11, 1976) was an American gospel, R&B and rock and roll singer-songwriter, who recorded as Sister Wynona Carr when performing gospel material.

Wynona Merceris Carr was born in Cleveland, Ohio, where she started out as a gospel singer, forming her own five-piece group The Carr Singers around 1945 and touring the Cleveland/Detroit area. Being tipped by the Pilgrim Travelers, who shared a bill with Carr in the late 1940s, Art Rupesigned her to his Specialty label, giving Carr her new stage name “Sister” Wynona Carr (modelled after pioneering gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe) and cutting some twenty sides with her from 1949 to 1954, including a couple of duets with Specialty’s biggest gospel star at the time, Brother Joe May.

Donna Jean Thatcher Godchaux-MacKay (born August 22, 1947) is an American singer, best known for having been a member of the Grateful Dead from 1972 until 1979.

Donna Jean Thatcher was born in Florence, Alabama. Prior to 1970, she had worked as a session singer in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, eventually singing with a group called Southern Comfort and appearing as a backup singer on at least two #1 hit songs: “When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge in 1966 and “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis Presley in 1969. Her vocals were featured on other classic recordings by Boz Scaggs and Duane Allman, Cher, Joe Tex, Neil Diamond and many others. She then moved to California and met future fellow Grateful Dead member Keith Godchaux, whom she married in 1970.

Delmar Allen “Dale” Hawkins (August 22, 1936 – February 13, 2010) was a pioneer American rock singer, songwriter, and rhythm guitarist who was often called the architect of swamp rock boogie. Ronnie Hawkins is his cousin.

He began recording in 1956. In 1957, Hawkins was playing at Shreveport, Louisiana clubs, and although his music was influenced by the new rock and roll style of Elvis Presley and the guitar sounds of Scotty Moore, Hawkins blended that with the uniquely heavy blues sound of black Louisiana artists for his recording of his swamp-rock classic, “Susie Q.” Fellow Louisiana guitarist and future Rock and Roll Hall of Famer James Burton provided the signature riff and solo.