mick laBriola

Severino Dias de Oliveira (May 26, 1930 – December 14, 2006), known professionally as Sivuca, was a Brazilian accordionist, guitarist and singer. In addition to his home state of Paraíba, Brazil, and cities Recife and Rio de Janeiro, he worked and lived in Paris, Lisbon, and New York Cityintermittently.

He worked with Scandinavian jazz musicians in the 1980s. His most famous songs are “João e Maria” with lyrics by Chico Buarque and “Feira de Mangaio”, named after the artisan markets of northeast Brazil. He used makeshift instruments alongside conventional ones and combined traditional regional styles such as forró and choro with jazz, bossa nova, and classical music. Sivuca and Hermeto Pascoal, both versatile multi-instrumentalists with albinism, worked together and are sometimes confused with each other.

His professional career began in Pernambuco where he went at the age of 15, and continued in his first album with Humberto Teixeira (1950), leading to work in radio and television in Rio de Janeiro from 1955. With “Os Brasileiros” he toured Europe (1958).

Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991 Alton, IL) was an American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musical directions in a five-decade career that kept him at the forefront of many major stylistic developments in jazz.

Born in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis, Davis left to study at Juilliard in New York City, before dropping out and making his professional debut as a member of saxophonist Charlie Parker‘s bebop quintet from 1945 to 1948. Shortly after, he recorded the Birth of the Cool sessions for Capitol Records, which were instrumental to the development of cool jazz. In the early 1950s, Miles Davis recorded some of the earliest hard bopmusic while on Prestige Records but did so haphazardly due to a heroin addiction. After a widely acclaimed comeback performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955, he signed a long-term contract with Columbia Records and recorded the 1957 album ‘Round About Midnight. It was his first work with saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers, key members of the sextet he led into the early 1960s. During this period, he alternated between orchestral jazz collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, such as the Spanish music-influenced Sketches of Spain (1960), and band recordings, such as Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959). The latter recording remains one of the most popular jazz albums of all time,having sold over five million copies in the U.S.

Davis made several lineup changes while recording Someday My Prince Will Come (1961), his 1961 Blackhawk concerts, and Seven Steps to Heaven (1963), another mainstream success that introduced bassist Ron Carter, pianist Herbie Hancock, and drummer Tony Williams.^[3] After adding saxophonist Wayne Shorter to his new quintet in 1964, Davis led them on a series of more abstract recordings often composed by the band members, helping pioneer the post-bop genre with albums such as E.S.P (1965) and Miles Smiles (1967), before transitioning into his electric period. During the 1970s, he experimented with rock, funk, African rhythms, emerging electronic music technology, and an ever-changing line-up of musicians, including keyboardist Joe Zawinul, drummer Al Foster, and guitarist John McLaughlin. This period, beginning with Davis’ 1969 studio album In a Silent Way and concluding with the 1975 concert recording Agharta, was the most controversial in his career, alienating and challenging many in jazz. His million-selling 1970 record Bitches Brew helped spark a resurgence in the genre’s commercial popularity with jazz fusion as the decade progressed.

After a five-year retirement due to poor health, Davis resumed his career in the 1980s, employing younger musicians and pop sounds on albums such as The Man with the Horn (1981) and Tutu (1986). Critics were often unreceptive but the decade garnered Davis his highest level of commercial recognition. He performed sold-out concerts worldwide, while branching out into visual arts, film, and television work, before his death in 1991 from the combined effects of a stroke, pneumonia and respiratory failure. In 2006, Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which recognized him as “one of the key figures in the history of jazz”. Rolling Stone described him as “the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century,” while Gerald Early called him inarguably one of the most influential and innovative musicians of that period.

Rubén González Fontanills (26 May 1919 – 8 December 2003) was a Cuban pianist. Together with Lilí Martínez and Peruchín he is said to have “forged the style of modern Cuban piano playing in the 1940s”.

Between the 1940s and his retirement in the 1980s, he played with Cuba’s most successful acts, including Paulina Álvarez, Arsenio Rodríguez, Orquesta América del 55, Orquesta Riverside and Enrique Jorrín. In the 1990s, he came out of retirement to play in the revival ensembles Afro-Cuban All Stars and Buena Vista Social Club, also recording solo material and performing live until 2002.

González was born in Santa Clara, Cuba, on 26 May 1919. His family moved to the small village of Encrucijada when he was 6 years old. He took up the piano at age seven and graduated from the Cienfuegos Conservatory at age 15.

This image shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5037, which is found in the constellation of Virgo and was first documented by William Herschel in 1785. It lies about 150 million light-years away from Earth, and yet it is possible to see the delicate structures of gas and dust within the galaxy in extraordinary detail. This was made possible by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which was used to collect the exposures that were combined to create this image.  WFC3 is a very versatile camera, as it can collect ultraviolet, visible and infrared light, thereby providing a wealth of information about the objects that it observes. WFC3 was installed on Hubble by astronauts in 2009, during servicing mission 4, which was Hubble’s fifth and final servicing mission. Servicing mission 4 was intended to prolong Hubble’s life for another five years. 12 years later, both Hubble and WFC3 remain in active use!

Wallace Roney (May 25, 1960 – March 31, 2020) was an American jazz (hard bop and post-bop) trumpeter. Roney took lessons from Clark Terry and Dizzy Gillespie and studied with Miles Davis from 1985 until the latter’s death in 1991. Wallace credited Davis as having helped to challenge and shape his creative approach to life as well as being his music instructor, mentor, and friend; he was the only trumpet player Davis personally mentored.

Roney was born in Philadelphia. He attended Howard University and Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, after graduating from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts of the D. C. Public Schools, where he studied trumpet with Langston Fitzgerald of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Found to have perfect pitch at the age of four, Wallace began his musical and trumpet studies at Philadelphia’s Settlement School of Music.

He studied with trumpeter Sigmund Hering of the Philadelphia Orchestra for three years. Hering regularly presented Wallace at recitals at the Settlement School, and with the Philadelphia Brass Ensemble, during his studies in Philadelphia. Wallace Roney died at the age of 59 on March 31, 2020, at St. Joseph’s University Medical Center in Paterson, New Jersey. The cause was complications arising from COVID-19.

Marshall Belford Allen (born May 25, 1924) is an American free jazz and avant-garde jazz alto saxophone player. He also performs on flute, oboe, piccolo, and EVI (an electronic valve instrument made by Steiner, Crumar company).

Allen is best known for his work with Sun Ra, having recorded and performed mostly in this context since the late 1950s, and having led Sun Ra’s Arkestra since 1993. Critic Jason Ankeny describes Marshall as “one of the most distinctive and original saxophonists of the postwar era.”

Marshall Allen was born in Louisville, Kentucky. During the Second World War he enlisted in the 92nd Infantry Division and was stationed in France. Allen studied alto saxophone in Paris and played in Europe with Art Simmons and James Moody.

He is best known for his mastery of pyrotechnic effects on the alto – he has said that he “wanted to play on a broader sound basis rather than on chords” (1971 interview with Tam Fiofori)). The opportunity came through his long association with Sun Ra, with whom he performed almost exclusively from 1958 to Ra’s death in 1993, although he did record outside the Arkestra, with Paul Bley‘s group in 1964 and Olatunji‘s group during the mid-1960s. Critic Scott Yanow has described Allen’s playing as “Johnny Hodges from another dimension”.

Since Sun Ra and John Gilmore died, Allen has led the Arkestra, and has recorded two albums as their bandleader. In May 2004, Allen celebrated his 80th birthday on stage with the Arkestra, as part of their performance at the Ninth Vision Festival in New York City. Allen gave other performances on his birthday in 2008 at Sullivan Hall and at Iridium Jazz Club in 2018, both in New York City.

Bill Robinson, nicknamed Bojangles (born Luther Robinson; May 25, 1878 – November 25, 1949 Richmond, VA) was an American tap dancer, actor, and singer, the best known and the most highly paid Black American entertainer in America during the first half of the 20th century. His long career mirrored changes in American entertainment tastes and technology. His career began in the age of minstrel shows and moved to vaudeville, Broadway theatre, the recording industry, Hollywood films, radio, and television.

According to dance critic Marshall Stearns, “Robinson’s contribution to tap dance is exact and specific. He brought it up on its toes, dancing upright and swinging”, adding a “hitherto-unknown lightness and presence”. His signature routine was the Stair Dance, in which he would tap up and down a set of stairs in a rhythmically complex sequence of steps, a routine that he unsuccessfully attempted to patent. He is also credited with having popularized the word copacetic through his repeated use of it in vaudeville and radio appearances.

He is best known today for his dancing with Shirley Temple in a series of films during the 1930s, and for starring in the musical Stormy Weather(1943), loosely based on his own life and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. He used his popularity to challenge and overcome numerous racial barriers, including becoming:

• one of the first minstrel and vaudeville performers to appear as Black without the use of blackface makeup
• one of the earliest Black performers to perform solo, overcoming vaudeville’s two-colored rule
• an early Black headliner in Broadway shows
• the first Black performer to appear in a Hollywood film in an interracial dance team (with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel, 1935)
• the first Black performer to headline a mixed-race Broadway production

Robinson came under heavy criticism for his apparent tacit acceptance of racial stereotypes of the era, with some critics calling him an Uncle Tom. He strongly resented this, and his biographers suggested that critics were underestimating the difficulties faced by Black performers engaging with mainstream white culture at the time, and ignoring his many efforts to overcome racial prejudice. In his public life, Robinson led efforts to:

• persuade the Dallas Police Department to hire its first Black policeman
• lobby President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II for more equitable treatment of Black soldiers
• stage the first integrated public event in Miami, a fundraiser which was attended by both Black and white city residents

Robinson was a popular figure in both the Black and white entertainment worlds of his era, and is remembered for the support that he gave to fellow performers, including Fred Astaire, Lena Horne, Jesse Owens and the Nicholas Brothers. Sammy Davis Jr. and Ann Miller credited him as a teacher and mentor, Miller saying that he “changed the course of my life”. Gregory Hines produced and starred in a biographical movie about Robinson for which he won the NAACP Best Actor Award.

Thunderstorms almost spoiled this view of the spectacular 2011 June 15 total lunar eclipse. Instead, storm clouds parted for 10 minutes during the total eclipse phase and lightning bolts contributed to the dramatic sky. Captured with a 30-second exposure the scene also inspired one of the more memorable titles (thanks to the astrophotographer) in APOD’s now 25-year history. Of course, the lightning reference clearly makes sense, and the shadow play of the dark lunar eclipse was widely viewed across planet Earth in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. The picture itself, however, was shot from the Greek island of Ikaria at Pezi. That area is known as “the planet of the goats” because of the rough terrain and strange looking rocks. The next total lunar eclipse will occur on Wednesday. Details: Total Lunar Eclipse on 2021 May 26

Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman; May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, author and visual artist. Often regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture during a career spanning nearly 60 years. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963) and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1964) became anthems for the civil rights and anti-war movements. His lyrics during this period incorporated a range of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, defying pop music conventions and appealing to the burgeoning counterculture.

Following his self-titled debut album in 1962, which mainly comprised traditional folk songs, Dylan made his breakthrough as a songwriter with the release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan the following year. The album features “Blowin’ in the Wind” and the thematically complex “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall“. For many of these songs, he adapted the tunes and phraseology of older folk songs. He went on to release the politically charged The Times They Are a-Changin’ and the more lyrically abstract and introspective Another Side of Bob Dylan in 1964. In 1965 and 1966, Dylan drew controversy when he adopted electrically amplified rock instrumentation, and in the space of 15 months recorded three of the most important and influential rock albums of the 1960s: Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966). Commenting on the six-minute single “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965), Rolling Stone wrote: “No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time”.

In July 1966, Dylan withdrew from touring after a motorcycle accident. During this period, he recorded a large body of songs with members of the Band, who had previously backed him on tour. These recordings were released as the collaborative album The Basement Tapes in 1975. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dylan explored country music and rural themes in John Wesley Harding (1967), Nashville Skyline (1969), and New Morning(1970). In 1975, he released Blood on the Tracks, which many saw as a return to form. In the late 1970s, he became a born-again Christian and released a series of albums of contemporary gospel music before returning to his more familiar rock-based idiom in the early 1980s. Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out of Mind marked the beginning of a renaissance for his career. He has released five critically acclaimed albums of original material since then, the most recent being Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). He also recorded a series of three albums in the 2010s comprising versions of traditional American standards, especially songs recorded by Frank Sinatra. Backed by a changing lineup of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the Never Ending Tour.

Cecil Bustamente Campbell OD (24 May 1938 – 8 September 2016), known professionally as Prince Buster, was a Jamaican singer-songwriter and producer. The records he released in the 1960s influenced and shaped the course of Jamaican contemporary music and created a legacy of work that would be drawn upon later by reggae and ska artists.

Cecil Bustamente Campbell was born in Orange Street in Kingston, Jamaica, on 24 May 1938. His middle name was given to him by his family in honour of the Labour activist and first post-Independence Prime Minister William Alexander Clarke Bustamante. In the early 1940s Campbell was sent to live with his grandmother in rural Jamaica where his family’s commitment to the Christian faith gave him his earliest musical experiences in the form of church singing as well as private family prayer and hymn meetings. Returning to live at Orange Street while still a young boy, Campbell attended the Central Branch School and St. Anne’s School.

While at school Campbell performed three or four times a week at the Glass Bucket Club, as part of Frankie Lymon‘s Sing and Dance Troupe; rock ‘n’ roll-themed shows were popular during the 1950s, with the Glass Bucket Club establishing a reputation as the premier music venue and social club for Jamaican teenagers at that time. Upon leaving school he found himself drawn to the ranks of followers sound system of Tom the Great Sebastian. Jamaican sound systems at that time were playing American rhythm ‘n’ blues and Campbell credits Tom the Great Sebastian with his first introduction to the songs and artists that would later influence his own music: The Clovers‘ “Middle of the Night”, Fats Domino‘s “Mardi Gras in New Orleans”, the Griffin Brothers featuring Margie Day, and Shirley & Lee.

Archie Shepp (born May 24, 1937) is an American jazz saxophonist, educator and playwright who since the 1960s has played a central part in the development of avant-garde jazz. Shepp was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano, clarinet, and alto saxophone before focusing on tenor saxophone. He occasionally plays soprano saxophone and piano. He studied drama at Goddard College from 1955 to 1959. He played in a Latin jazz band for a short time before joining the band of avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor. Shepp’s first recording under his own name, Archie Shepp – Bill Dixon Quartet, was released on Savoy Records in 1962 and featured a composition by Ornette Coleman. Along with John Tchicaiand Don Cherry, he was a member of the New York Contemporary Five. John Coltrane‘s admiration led to recordings for Impulse! Records, the first of which was Four for Trane in 1964, an album of mainly Coltrane compositions on which he was joined by alto player John Tchicai, trombonist Roswell Rudd, flugelhorn player Alan Shorter, bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Charles Moffett.

VdB 123 is a reflection nebula in the constellation Serpens (Serpens Cauda). It is illuminated by the 9.75 mag. star HD 170634, from spectral class B7V. The nebula is embedded in a dark molecular cloud known as Serpens Cloud. This super dust cloud overlies a rich star field of the Milky Way and has an appearence like a fine blue mist with defined borders and thickenings in the middle. The lasts appear as dark nebulae and are catalogued in the Dobashi catalogue (Dobashi et al. 2005). Many other objects also can be seen on this image (see mouseover). Among them are some Herbig – Haro objects.

Nathaniel “Nat” Adderley Jr. (born May 23, 1955) is an American pop and rhythm and blues music arranger and pianist who spent much of his music career arranging as music director for Luther Vandross tours and contributed as co-songwriter on most of Vandross’s albums. His father Nat Adderley(1931–2000) was a composer and jazz cornet and trumpet player, while his uncle Cannonball Adderley (1928–1975) was a jazz alto saxophonist. Nat Adderley Jr. was born in Quincy, Florida on May 23, 1955. The scion of a famed jazz family, he grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, moving to that suburban New York City community with his family when he was five years old. He started playing piano as a child and had his first song, “I’m on My Way”, recorded by his uncle Cannonball on the 1967 album Why Am I Treated So Bad! by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet when the young Nat Adderley was only 11 years old. While at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York City, Adderley first met Luther Vandross, who attended Taft High School in the Bronx. Adderley would end up spending much of his musical career with Vandross. He attended Yale University, graduating with a degree in African American studies.

While living in Houston, Texas, he was the music arranger for the 1981 album Never Too Much which became Vandross’s first hit with the title track, which reached number 33 on the Billboard Hot 100 and fourth on the dance charts. He continued working with Vandross, whom he called “a hilarious guy, a great employer, a great friend, and an incredible musician”, until the singer’s stroke in February 2003 that effectively ended his career.

Adderley has returned to his jazz roots, performing his own works, as well as tributes to both his father and uncle. He cites his influences as Chick Corea, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. In a 2009 interview with the Star-Ledger he said pianists “who are killing me” include Kenny Barron, Herbie Hancock, Cedar Walton and Joe Zawinul. As of 2009, Nat Adderley Jr is a resident of West Orange, New Jersey

Donald Moye, Jr. (born May 23, 1946), known as Famoudou Don Moye, is an American jazz percussionist and drummer. He is most known for his involvement with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and is noted for his mastery of African and Caribbean percussion instruments and rhythmic techniques.

Moye was born in Rochester, New York and performed in various drum and bugle corps (including the Rochester Crusaders) during his youth, as well as church choir. Moye has commented that he really “didn’t have an affinity for the bugle … and just kind of gravitated towards drums.” He also took violin lessons during this time. Moye was exposed to jazz at an early age since his mother worked for a local social club that had a jazz club next door that hosted musicians such as Kenny Burrell and Jimmy McGriff. His family was also musically inclined; his uncles played saxophones and his father played drums. Also, his mother used to take him to various performances as a child, such as “opera under the stars” and to see Mahalia Jackson.