mick laBriola

William Keith Relf (22 March 1943 – 12 May 1976) was an English musician, best known as the lead vocalist and harmonica player for the Yardbirds.

Relf started playing in bands around the summer of 1956 as a singer, guitarist, and harmonica player. His blues harp and vocals were as key to the Yardbirds’ sound and success as were the group’s three superstar lead guitarists Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page.

Relf co-wrote many of the original Yardbirds songs (“Shapes of Things“, “I Ain’t Done Wrong”, “Over Under Sideways Down“, “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago“), later showing a leaning towards acoustic/folk music as the sixties unfolded (“Only the Black Rose”). He also sang an early version of “Dazed and Confused” in live Yardbirds concerts, after hearing musician Jake Holmes perform the song, which was later recorded by the band’s successor group Led Zeppelin. Relf died in the basement of his home in 1976 at age 33 from electrocution while playing an electric guitar. Relf had several health problems throughout his life, including emphysema and asthma. He may have been taking the medications commonly used to treat those diseases at the time, and these may have contributed to his inability to survive the electric shock.

George Washington Benson (born March 22, 1943) is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He began his professional career at the age of 19 as a jazz guitarist.

A former child prodigy, Benson first came to prominence in the 1960s, playing soul jazz with Jack McDuff and others. He then launched a successful solo career, alternating between jazz, pop, R&B singing, and scat singing. His album Breezin’ was certified triple-platinum, hitting no. 1 on the Billboardalbum chart in 1976. His concerts were well attended through the 1980s, and he still has a large following. Benson has been honored with a staron the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Benson was born and raised in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At the age of seven, he first played the ukulele in a corner drug store, for which he was paid a few dollars. At the age of eight, he played guitar in an unlicensed nightclub on Friday and Saturday nights, but the police soon closed the club down. At the age of 9, he started to record. Out of the four sides he cut, two were released: “She Makes Me Mad” backed with “It Should Have Been Me”, with RCA Victor in New York; although one source indicates this record was released under the name “Little Georgie”, the 45rpm label is printed with the name George Benson. The single was produced by Leroy Kirkland for RCA’s rhythm and blues label, Groove Records. As he has stated in an interview, Benson’s introduction to showbusiness had an effect on his schooling. When this was discovered (tied with the failure of his single) his guitar was impounded. Luckily, after he spent time in a juvenile detention centre his stepfather made him a new guitar.

Weldon H. Philip Bonner, better known as Juke Boy Bonner (March 22, 1932 – June 29, 1978) was an American blues singer, harmonica player, and guitarist. He was influenced by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, and Slim Harpo. He accompanied himself on guitar, harmonica, and drums in songs such as “Going Back to the Country”, “Life Is a Nightmare”, and “Struggle Here in Houston”.

Born in Bellville, Texas, Bonner was one of nine children; his parents died when he was very young. Raised by a neighbor’s family, he moved in with his older sister in 1945. At the age of twelve he taught himself to play the guitar. He gained the nickname “Juke Boy” as a youth, because he frequently sang in local juke joints. Starting a musical career as teenager, he won the first prize at local disc jockey Trummie Cain’s weekly talent show at the Lincoln Theater in Houston, Texas in 1948. Through this he secured a 15-minute radio slot on a show operated by the record retailer Henry Atlas. After having three children with his wife, she left him to look after the children by himself.

Fred Anderson (March 22, 1929 – June 24, 2010) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist who was based in Chicago, Illinois. Anderson’s playing was rooted in the swing music and hard bop idioms, but he also incorporated innovations from free jazz. Anderson was also noted for having mentored numerous young musicians. Critic Ben Ratliff called him “a father figure of experimental jazz in Chicago”. Writer John Corbett referred to him as “scene caretaker, underground booster, indefatigable cultural worker, quiet force for good.” In 2001, author John Litweiler called Anderson “the finest tenor saxophonist in free jazz/underground jazz/outside jazz today.”

Anderson was born in Monroe, Louisiana. When he was ten, his parents separated, and he moved to Evanston, Illinois, where he initially lived with his mother and aunt in a one-room apartment. When Anderson was a teenager, a friend introduced him to the music of Charlie Parker, and he soon decided he wanted to play saxophone, purchasing his first instrument for $45. He listened to Lester Young, Johnny Hodges, Dexter Gordon, Gene Ammons, and Illinois Jacquet, all of whom would influence his playing. He also heard Young and Parker in concert on multiple occasions.^[12]Unlike many musicians at the time, Anderson did not play with dance bands or school ensembles, and instead focused on practicing, taking private lessons, and studying music theory at the Roy Knapp Conservatory in Chicago, all the while supporting his family by working as a waiter.

The Eagle Nebula (catalogued as Messier 16 or M16, and as NGC 6611, and also known as the Star Queen Nebula and The Spire) is a young open cluster of stars in the constellation Serpens, discovered by Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux in 1745–46. Both the “Eagle” and the “Star Queen” refer to visual impressions of the dark silhouette near the center of the nebula, an area made famous as the “Pillars of Creation” imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. The nebula contains several active star-forming gas and dust regions, including the aforementioned Pillars of Creation.

David Perry Lindley (born March 21, 1944) is an American musician who founded the band El Rayo-X, and who has worked with many other performers including Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, Curtis Mayfield and Dolly Parton. He has mastered such a wide variety of instruments that Acoustic Guitar magazine referred to Lindley not as a multi-instrumentalist, but instead as a “maxi-instrumentalist.”

The majority of the instruments that Lindley plays are string instruments, including the acoustic and electric guitar, upright and electric bass, banjo, lap steel guitar, mandolin, hardingfele, bouzouki, cittern, bağlama, gumbus, charango, cümbüş, oud, and zither.

Lindley was a founding member of the 1960s band Kaleidoscope, and has worked as musical director for several touring artists. In addition, he has occasionally scored and composed music for film.

When Lindley was growing up in Los Angeles, his father had an extensive collection of 78 rpm records that included Korean folk and Indian sitar music. Lindley took up the violin at age 3, but broke the bridge. He then moved on to the baritone ukelele in his early teens. Then Lindley took to playing the banjo and the fiddle. By his late teens, he was acknowledged as an award-winning player, having won the Topanga Banjo•Fiddle Contest five times.

Solomon Vincent McDonald Burke (born James Solomon McDonald, March 21, 1936 or 1940 – October 10, 2010 Philadelphia, PA) was an American preacher and singer who shaped the sound of rhythm and blues as one of the founding fathers of soul music in the 1960s. He has been called “a key transitional figure bridging R&B and soul”, and was known for his “prodigious output”.He had a string of hits including “Cry to Me“, “If You Need Me“, “Got to Get You Off My Mind“, “Down in the Valley“, and “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love“. Burke was referred to honorifically as “King Solomon”, the “King of Rock ‘n’ Soul”, “Bishop of Soul”, and the “Muhammad Ali of soul”. Due to his minimal chart success in comparison to other soul music greats such as James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and Otis Redding, Burke has been described as the genre’s “most unfairly overlooked singer” of its golden age. Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler referred to Burke as “the greatest male soul singer of all time”.

Burke’s most famous recordings, which spanned five years in the early 1960s, bridged the gap between mainstream R&B and grittier R&B.Burke was “a singer whose smooth, powerful articulation and mingling of sacred and profane themes helped define soul music in the early 1960s.” He drew from his roots—gospel, jazz, country, and blues—as well as developing his own style at a time when R&B, and rock were both still in their infancy.^[14] Described as both “Rabelaisian“ and also as a “spiritual enigma,” “perhaps more than any other artist, the ample figure of Solomon Burke symbolized the ways that spirituality and commerce, ecstasy and entertainment, sex and salvation, individualism and brotherhood, could blend in the world of 1960s soul music.”

During the 55 years that he performed professionally, Burke released 38 studio albums on at least 17 record labels and had 35 singles that charted in the US, including 26 singles that made the Billboard R&B charts. In 2001, Burke was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fameas a performer. His album Don’t Give Up on Me won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album at the 45th Annual Grammy Awards in 2003. By 2005 Burke was credited with selling 17 million albums. Rolling Stone ranked Burke as No. 89 on its 2008 list of “100 Greatest Singers of All Time”.

Otis Spann (March 21, 1924 or 1930 – April 24, 1970) was an American blues musician, whom many consider to be the leading postwar Chicago blues pianist. Sources differ over Spann’s early years. Some state that he was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1930, but the researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc concluded, on the basis of census records and other official information, that he was born in 1924 in Belzoni, Mississippi.

Spann’s father was, according to some sources, a pianist called Friday Ford. His mother, Josephine Erby, was a guitarist who had worked with Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith, and his stepfather, Frank Houston Spann, was a preacher and musician. One of five children, Spann began playing the piano at the age of seven, with some instruction from Friday Ford, Frank Spann, and Little Brother Montgomery.

By the age of 14, he was playing in bands in the Jackson area. He moved to Chicago in 1946, where he was mentored by Big Maceo Merriweather. Spann performed as a solo act and with the guitarist Morris Pejoe, working a regular spot at the Tic Toc Lounge. Spann became known for his distinctive piano style. He replaced Merriweather as Muddy Waters’s piano player in late 1952 and participated in his first recording session with the band on September 24, 1953. He continued to record as a solo artist and session player with other musicians, including Bo Diddley and Howlin’ Wolf, during his tenure with the group. He stayed with Muddy Waters until 1968.

Manolis Chiotis (Greek: Μανώλης Χιώτης; March 21, 1921, Thessaloniki – March 20, 1970, Athens) was a Greek rebetiko and laiko composer, singer, and bouzouki player. He is considered one of the greatest bouzouki soloists of all time. He popularised the four-course bouzouki (tetrachordo) and introduced the guitar-like tuning, who found it better suited to the kind of virtuoso playing he was famous for.

Chiotis had other successes. In the summer of 1961, he played for Aristotle Onassis and Maria Callas, Prince Rainier III of Monaco and Grace Kelly. Journalist Dimitris Liberopoulos, Onassis’ biographer, writes in his book that when the two couples joined one of Chiotis’ shows in Athens, they asked to meet him in person to congratulate him.

Callas told Chiotis that she had been translating the lyrics of his songs to Princess Grace all night long and the American actress loved them because “she is a woman in love.” At that moment, Kelly asked Chiotis what the difference between a bouzouki and an electric guitar is.

Chiotis’ answer was rather unexpected; “Mrs. Callas, please explain to Princess Grace that the strings of an electric guitar vibrate due to electricity, while the strings of a bouzouki vibrate through the heart.”

Edward James “Son” House Jr. (March 21, 1902 – October 19, 1988 Lyon, MS) was an American delta blues singer and guitarist, noted for his highly emotional style of singing and slide guitar playing.

After years of hostility to secular music, as a preacher and for a few years also working as a church pastor, he turned to blues performance at the age of 25. He quickly developed a unique style by applying the rhythmic drive, vocal power and emotional intensity of his preaching to the newly learned idiom. In a short career interrupted by a spell in Parchman Farm penitentiary, he developed his musicianship to the point that Charley Patton, the foremost blues artist of the Mississippi Delta region, invited him to share engagements and to accompany him to a 1930 recording session for Paramount Records.

Issued at the start of the Great Depression, the records did not sell and did not lead to national recognition. Locally, House remained popular, and in the 1930s, together with Patton’s associate Willie Brown, he was the leading musician of Coahoma County. There he was a formative influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. In 1941 and 1942, House and the members of his band were recorded by Alan Lomax and John W. Work for the Library of Congress and Fisk University. The following year, he left the Delta for Rochester, New York, and gave up music.

In 1964, a group of young record collectors discovered House, whom they knew of from his records issued by Paramount and by the Library of Congress. With their encouragement, he relearned his repertoire and established a career as an entertainer, performing for young, mostly white audiences in coffeehouses, at folk festivals and on concert tours during the American folk music revival, billed as a “folk blues” singer. He recorded several albums, and some informally taped concerts have also been issued as albums. House died in 1988. In 2017, his single “Preachin’ the Blues” was inducted in to the Blues Hall of Fame.

This popular group leaps into the early evening sky around the March equinox and the northern hemisphere spring. Famous as the Leo Triplet, the three magnificent galaxies found in the prominentconstellation Leo gather here in one astronomical field of view. Crowd pleasers when imaged with even modest telescopes, they can be introduced individually as NGC 3628 (right), M66 (upper left), and M65 (bottom). All three are large spiral galaxies but tend to look dissimilar, because their galactic disks are tilted at different angles to our line of sight. NGC 3628, also known as the Hamburger Galaxy, is temptingly seen edge-on, with obscuring dust lanes cutting across its puffy galactic plane. The disks of M66 and M65 are both inclined enough to show off their spiral structure. Gravitational interactions between galaxies in the group have left telltale signs, including the tidal tails and warped, inflated disk of NGC 3628 and the drawn out spiral arms of M66. This gorgeous view of the region spans over 1 degree (two full moons) on the sky in a frame that covers over half a million light-years at the trio’s estimated distance of 30 million light-years. Of course the spiky foreground stars lie well within our own Milky Way.

Mathis James Reed (September 6, 1925 – August 29, 1976) was an American blues musician and songwriter. His particular style of electric blues^[1]was popular with blues as well as non-blues audiences. Reed’s songs such as “Honest I Do” (1957), “Baby What You Want Me to Do” (1960), “Big Boss Man” (1961), and “Bright Lights, Big City” (1961) appeared on both Billboard magazine’s rhythm and blues and Hot 100 singles charts.

Reed influenced other musicians, such as Elvis Presley, Hank Williams Jr., and the Rolling Stones, who recorded his songs. Music critic Cub Kodadescribes him as “perhaps the most influential bluesman of all,” due to his easily accessible style.

Reed was born in Dunleith, Mississippi, on September 6, 1925. He learned the harmonica and guitar from his friend Eddie Taylor. After several years of busking and performing there, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1943. He was then drafted into the U.S. Navy and served in World War II. He was discharged in 1945 and returned briefly to Mississippi, marrying his girlfriend, Mary (henceforth known as Mama Reed). He then moved to Gary, Indiana, to work at an Armour meat-packing plant. Mama Reed was an uncredited background singer on many of his recordings, notably the hits “Baby What You Want Me to Do“, “Big Boss Man” and “Bright Lights, Big City

Harold Mabern Jr. (March 20, 1936 – September 17, 2019) was an American jazz pianist and composer, principally in the hard bop, post-bop, and soul jazz fields. He is described in The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings as “one of the great post-bop pianists”.

Mabern was born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 20, 1936. He initially started learning drums before switching to learning piano. He had access to a piano from his teens, after his father, who worked in a lumber yard, saved to buy him one.Mabern learned by watching and emulating pianists Charles Thomas and Phineas Newborn Jr. Mabern attended Douglass High School, before transferring to Manassas High School; he played with saxophonists Frank Strozier, George Coleman and trumpeter Booker Little at this time, but was most influenced by Newborn, Jr. In 1954, after graduating, Mabern moved to Chicago, intending to attend the American Conservatory of Music. He was unable to afford to attend music college because of a change in his parents’ financial circumstances, but had private lessons there for six months and developed his reading ability by playing with trombonist Morris Ellis’ big band. He also developed by listening to Ahmad Jamal and others in clubs, and “playing and practicing 12 hours a day” for the next five years,  but he remained self-taught as a pianist. Mabern went on to play with Walter Perkins‘ MJT + 3 and others in Chicago.

Mabern learned orchestration techniques from bassist Bill Lee, and comping and chord voicing from pianists Chris Anderson and Billy Wallace.

Margaret Marian McPartland, OBE (née Turner; 20 March 1918 – 20 August 2013), was an English-American jazz pianist, composer and writer. She was the host of Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz on National Public Radio from 1978 to 2011.

After her marriage to trumpeter Jimmy McPartland in February 1945, she resided in the United States when not travelling throughout the world to perform. In 1969 she founded Halcyon Records, a recording company that produced albums for 10 years. In 2000 she was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. In 2004 she was given a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement. In 2007 she was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame. Although known mostly for jazz, she composed other types of music as well, performing her own symphonic work A Portrait of Rachel Carson with the University of South Carolina Symphony Orchestra in 2007. In 2010 she was named a member of the Order of the British Empire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zP6PwGkGXA

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (March 20, 1915 – October 9, 1973) was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and recording artist. She attained popularity in the 1930s and 1940s with her gospel recordings, characterized by a unique mixture of spiritual lyrics and rhythmic accompaniment that was extremely important to the origins of rock and roll. She was the first great recording star of gospel music and among the first gospel musicians to appeal to rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll audiences, later being referred to as “the original soul sister” and “the Godmother of rock and roll”. She influenced early rock-and-roll musicians, including Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Tharpe was a pioneer in her guitar technique; she was among the first popular recording artists to use heavy distortion on her electric guitar, presaging the rise of electric blues. Her guitar playing technique had a profound influence on the development of British blues in the 1960s; in particular a European tour with Muddy Waters in 1964 with a stop in Manchester on 7 May is cited by prominent British guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Keith Richards.

Willing to cross the line between sacred and secular by performing her music of “light” in the “darkness” of nightclubs and concert halls with big bandsbehind her, Tharpe pushed spiritual music into the mainstream and helped pioneer the rise of pop-gospel, beginning in 1938 with the recording “Rock Me” and with her 1939 hit “This Train“. Her unique music left a lasting mark on more conventional gospel artists such as Ira Tucker, Sr., of the Dixie Hummingbirds. While she offended some conservative churchgoers with her forays into the pop world, she never left gospel music.

Tharpe’s 1944 release “Down by the Riverside” was selected for the National Recording Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress in 2004, which noted that it “captures her spirited guitar playing and unique vocal style, demonstrating clearly her influence on early rhythm-and-blues performers” and cited her influence on “many gospel, jazz, and rock artists”. (“Down by the Riverside” was recorded by Tharpe on December 2, 1948, in New York City, and issued as Decca single 48106.) Her 1945 hit “Strange Things Happening Every Day“, recorded in late 1944, featured Tharpe’s vocals and electric guitar, with Sammy Price (piano), bass and drums. It was the first gospel record to cross over, hitting no. 2 on the Billboard “race records” chart, the term then used for what later became the R&B chart, in April 1945. The recording has been cited as a precursor of rock and roll, and alternatively has been called the first rock and roll record. In May 2018, Tharpe was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an Early Influence.