mick laBriola

The Pinwheel Galaxy (also known as Messier 101 or NGC 5457) is a face-on spiral galaxy distanced 25 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.M101 is a relatively large galaxy compared to the Milky Way. With a diameter of 170,000 light-years it is nearly twice the size of the Milky Way. It has a disk mass on the order of 100 billion solar masses, along with a small bulge of about 3 billion solar masses.Another remarkable property of this galaxy is its huge and extremely bright H II regions, of which a total of about 3,000 can be seen on photographs.[citation needed] H II regions usually accompany the enormous clouds of high density molecular hydrogen gas contracting under their own gravitational force where stars form. H II regions are ionized by large numbers of extremely bright and hot young stars.M101 can be seen to be asymmetrical on one side. It is thought that in the recent past (speaking in galactic terms) M101 underwent a near collision with another galaxy and the associated gravitational tidal forces caused the asymmetry. In addition, this encounter also amplified the density waves in the spiral arms of M101. The amplification of these waves leads to the compression of the interstellar hydrogen gas, which then triggers strong star formation activity.

John Mayall, OBE (born 29 November 1933) is an English blues singer, guitarist, organist and songwriter, whose musical career spans over sixty years. In the 1960s, he was the founder of John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, a band which has counted among its members some of the most famous blues and blues rock musicians. Born in Macclesfield, Cheshire in 1933, Mayall was the son of Murray Mayall, a guitarist and jazz music enthusiast. From an early age, John was drawn to the sounds of American blues players such as Lead Belly, Albert Ammons, Pinetop Smith and Eddie Lang, and taught himself to play the piano, guitars, and harmonica.

Mayall spent three years in Korea for national service and, during a period of leave, he bought his first electric guitar. Back in England, he enrolled at Manchester College of Art (now part of Manchester Metropolitan University) and started playing with semi-professional bands. After graduation, he obtained a job as an art designer but continued to play with local musicians. In 1963, he opted for a full-time musical career and moved to London. His previous craft would be put to good use in the designing of covers for many of his coming albums.

Since the end of the 1960s Mayall has lived in the US. A brush fire destroyed his house in Laurel Canyon in 1979, seriously damaging his musical collections and archives.

Billy Hart (born November 29, 1940) is an American jazz drummer and educator.

Hart was born in Washington, D.C., where early on in his career he performed with soul artists such as Otis Redding and Sam and Dave, and then later with Buck Hill and Shirley Horn, and was a sideman with the Montgomery Brothers (1961), Jimmy Smith (1964–1966), and Wes Montgomery(1966–68). Following Montgomery’s death in 1968, Hart moved to New York, where he recorded with McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter, and Joe Zawinul, and played with Eddie Harris, Pharoah Sanders, and Marian McPartland.

Hart was a member of Herbie Hancock‘s sextet (1969–73), and played with McCoy Tyner (1973–74), Stan Getz (1974–77), and Quest (1980s), in addition to extensive freelance playing (including recording with Miles Davis on 1972’s On the Corner).

John Lamb (born November 29, 1933) is an American jazz double bassist who was a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

Born in Vero Beach, Florida, Lamb grew up as a child who loved playing music, specializing in the tuba. He left high school to join the United States Air Force as a musician for their military band. He was stationed in Texas and then Montana, where the long winters left him ample time to practice. When the band’s usual string bass player was unavailable for a gig in 1951, the bandmaster asked Lamb if he could play the bass; Lamb immediately said yes, and before long became the band’s new string bassist. He credited his tuba experience for giving him the “feel” to pick up string bass quickly without any prior experience.

Lamb joined Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1964, and toured with them for three years. Lamb was more of a fan of Miles Davis and Red Garland when he was with Ellington, later saying, “I was very young and very cocky. I thought I knew more than Duke at that time…I have more time today to reflect on the things that were accomplished back then, and the places we traveled to and all the wonderful people that we met. So one has to be careful what one does in his young years, because if they’re fortunate to live long, it all comes back.” In 1966 Lamb performed with Ellington and Sam Woodyard for artist Joan Miró at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.

Lamb later moved to St. Petersburg, Florida and taught music in public schools as well as St. Petersburg College. Alphonso Johnson was one of Lamb’s students. Lamb was awarded the Jazz Club of Sarasota’s “Satchmo Award” for service to jazz.

William Thomas Strayhorn (November 29, 1915 – May 31, 1967) was an American jazz composer, pianist, lyricist, and arranger, best remembered for his long-time collaboration with bandleader and composer Duke Ellington that lasted nearly three decades. His compositions include “Take the ‘A’ Train“, “Chelsea Bridge“, “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing”, and “Lush Life“.

Strayhorn was born in Dayton, Ohio. His family soon moved to the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. However, his mother’s family was from Hillsborough, North Carolina, and she sent him there to protect him from his father’s drunken sprees.

Grand spiral galaxies often seem to get all the glory, flaunting their young, bright, blue star clusters in beautiful, symmetric spiral arms. But small galaxies form stars too, like nearby NGC 6822, also known as Barnard’s Galaxy. Beyond the rich starfields in the constellation Sagittarius, NGC 6822 is a mere 1.5 million light-years away, a member of our Local Group of galaxies. A dwarf irregular galaxy similar to the Small Magellanic Cloud, NGC 6822 is about 7,000 light-years across. Brighter foreground stars in our Milky Way have a spiky appearance. Behind them, Barnard’s Galaxy is seen to be filled with young blue stars and mottled with the telltale pinkish hydrogen glow of star forming regions in this deep color composite image.

November 28th 1977

A world-class musician, composer, arranger and educator, Diego Rivera has entertained audiences for over 20 years. Rivera is known for his muscular tone and unique blend of straight-ahead mainstream jazz fused with music inspired by his Latino background and heritage. He is a tenured Associate Professor of Jazz Saxophone at Michigan State University where he also serves as Associate Director of Jazz Studies.

Rivera was born in Ann Arbor, MI and raised ‘just up the road’ in East Lansing, MI. Born into a Mexican-American family, his Chicano heritage has always been important to him and shaped his creative endeavors. His parents named him after the famed muralist, Diego Rivera. A trip to the Detroit Institute of Arts at a young age inspired him to make his own mark with the Saxophone rather than the brush. He attended Michigan State University where he studied with Andrew Speight, Branford Marsalis, Ron Blake and Rodney Whitaker.

In 1999, he began his professional and touring career with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra on their Big Band ‘99 tour. Since that maiden voyage, he has performed concerts at the most prestigious venues and festivals across the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. He currently leads his own group, The Diego Rivera Quartet. Rivera has also toured extensively with JUNO-Award winning Canadian Jazz Vocalist, Sophie Milman and The Rodney Whitaker Quintet. He is a member of the The Ulysses Owens New Century Big Band (New York, NY), the Jazz @ Dr. Phillips Center Orchestra (Orlando, FL) and the Gathering Orchestra (Detroit, MI). He has also performed with artists: Ellis Marsalis, Kurt Elling, Christian McBride, Wycliffe Gordon, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, the Gerald Wilson Big Band and the Lincoln Center Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra.

Rivera has several credits to his name as a recording artist, composer and arranger. His latest project Connections was released on Posi-Tone Records and was the “Highest Debut” on the Jazz Radio Charts. Rivera’s first recording, Hercules was released in 2006 on his record label, Rivera Records. His sophomore release, The Contender (D- Clef Records 2013) received national critical acclaim reaching the Top 10 on the JazzWeek Radio Charts. He has also appeared on several recordings as a sideman on the Posi-Tone, Mack Avenue and Detroit Music Factory Record Labels.

Randall Stuart Newman (born November 28, 1943 LA,CA) is an American singer-songwriter, arranger and composer known for his Southern-affectedsinging style, early Americana-influenced songs (often with mordant or satirical lyrics), and various film scores. His best-known songs as a recording artist are “Short People” (1977), “I Love L.A.” (1983), and “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” (1995), while other artists have enjoyed more success with cover versions of his “Mama Told Me Not to Come” (1966), “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” (1968) and “You Can Leave Your Hat On” (1972).

Born in Los Angeles to an extended family of Hollywood film composers, Newman began his songwriting career at the age of 17, penning hits for acts such as the Fleetwoods, Cilla Black, Gene Pitney, and the Alan Price Set. In 1968, he made his formal debut as a solo artist with the album Randy Newman, produced by Lenny Waronker and Van Dyke Parks. Four of Newman’s non-soundtrack albums have charted in the US top 40: Sail Away(1972), Good Old Boys (1974), Little Criminals (1977), and Harps and Angels (2008).

Since the 1980s, Newman has worked mostly as a film composer. He has scored nine Disney–Pixar animated films, including all four Toy Story films (1995–2019), A Bug’s Life (1998), both Monsters, Inc. films (2001–2013), and the first and third Cars films (2006, 2017), as well as Disney’s James and the Giant Peach (1996) and The Princess and the Frog (2009). His other film scores include Ragtime (1981), The Natural (1984), Awakenings(1990), Pleasantville (1998), Meet the Parents (2000), Seabiscuit (2003), and Marriage Story (2019).

Newman has received twenty-two Academy Award nominations in the Best Original Score and Best Original Song categories and has won twice in the latter category, contributing to the Newmans being the most nominated Academy Award extended family, with a collective 92 nominations in various music categories. He has also won three Emmys, seven Grammy Awards and the Governor’s Award from the Recording Academy. In 2007, he was recognized by the Walt Disney Company as a Disney Legend. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2002 and to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G55cJrUs9VM

Leandro “Gato” Barbieri (28 November 1932 – 2 April 2016) was an Argentine jazz tenor saxophonist who rose to fame during the free jazzmovement in the 1960s and is known for his Latin jazz recordings of the 1970s. His nickname, Gato, is Spanish for “cat”.

Born to a family of musicians, Barbieri began playing music after hearing Charlie Parker‘s “Now’s the Time”. He played the clarinet and later the alto saxophone while performing with the Argentinean pianist Lalo Schifrin in the late 1950s. By the early 1960s, while playing in Rome, he also worked with the trumpeter Don Cherry. By now influenced by John Coltrane‘s late recordings, as well as those from other free jazz saxophonists such as Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, he began to develop the warm and gritty tone with which he is associated. In the late 1960s, he was fusing music from South America into his playing and contributed to multi-artist projects like Charlie Haden‘s Liberation Music Orchestra and Carla Bley‘s Escalator Over The Hill. His score for Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1972 film Last Tango in Paris earned him a Grammy Award and led to a record deal with Impulse! Records.

By the mid-1970s, he was recording for A&M Records and moved his music towards soul-jazz and jazz-pop. Caliente! (1976) included his best known song, a rendition of Carlos Santana‘s “Europa“. That and the follow-up album, Ruby Ruby (1977) were both produced by fellow musician and label co-founder, Herb Alpert.

Gigi Gryce (born George General Grice Jr.; November 28, 1925 – March 14, 1983 Pensacola, FL), later Basheer Qusim, was an American jazz saxophonist, flautist, clarinetist, composer, arranger, and educator.

While his performing career was relatively short, much of his work as a player, composer, and arranger was quite influential and well-recognized during his time. However, Gryce abruptly ended his jazz career in the 1960s. This, in addition to his nature as a very private person, has resulted in very little knowledge of Gryce today. Several of his compositions have been covered extensively (“Minority“, “Social Call”, “Nica’s Tempo”) and have become minor jazz standards. Gryce’s compositional bent includes harmonic choices similar to those of contemporaries Benny Golson, Tadd Dameron and Horace Silver. Gryce’s playing, arranging, and composing are most associated with the classic hard bop era (roughly 1953–1965). He was a well-educated composer and musician, and wrote some classical works as a student at the Boston Conservatory. As a jazz musician and composer he was very much influenced by the work of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.

November 28, 1929 June 3, 2018

With Fountain at the helm, the Blind Boys rose from humble beginnings to the pinnacles of musical achievement – winning multiple Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and an NEA National Heritage Fellowship, as well as being inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame and performing at the White House.

Born in Tyler, Alabama on November 28, 1929, Clarence Fountain grew up in a churchgoing and musical family in Selma. At age eight he was enrolled at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind in Talladega. There he joined a large boys choir. Inspired by weekly radio broadcasts of the Golden Gate Quartet, he and five friends decided to start their own singing group. Calling themselves the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, they snuck off the school campus to perform a cappella for soldiers at a nearby military training camp. Buoyed by the praise (and money) they received, the group left the school in 1944 while still in their teens.

Early on, the Blind Boys emulated the jubilee harmony style of gospel singing, but eventually became forerunners of the ‘hard’ gospel sound. This style featured a shouting and preaching lead singer (usually Fountain), accompanied by fuller instrumentation. The band became known as “house-wreckers,” a term that referred to their ability to rouse a church audience into states of spiritual ecstasy. Fountain said, “You have to feel the spirit deep in your gut, and you have to know how to make someone else feel it.”

By the late 1940s the Blind Boys were touring full-time, performing for segregated audiences in churches and schools. Under Fountain’s direction, the Blind Boys had their first hit recording in 1948 on the Vee-Jay label with the song “I Can See Everybody’s Mother But Mine.” At a concert in Newark, New Jersey that year the band, still known as the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, performed on the same bill as another group of blind singers, the Jackson Harmoneers. Clever promotion billed the event as a battle between the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. As Fountain told it, “The crowd loved us, the name stuck, and things took off for us.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms4LbE18P3U

Arp 54 is a little-known interacting pair at a distance of ~570 million light-years. It shows up in infrared surveys, as a radio source as well as an x-ray source, so it apparently is experiencing very vigorous star formation or perhaps has an obscured active galactic nucleus (AGN) — both signs of an interaction. Arp placed it in his classification of “Spiral galaxies with high surface brightness companion on arm”, though it doesn’t appear that the arm from the larger galaxy reaches the smaller galaxy. The edge-on to the south is not related to Arp 54.

Using 375x the larger galaxy (PGC 9113) appeared fairly faint, elongated 3:2 E-W, 30″x20″, fairly low surface brightness, weak concentration. Its interacting companion PGC 9107 is just 0.9′ WSW. It was a very small faint glow, only 12″ diameter. Although it easily popped into view with averted I couldn’t hold continuously. A mag 14.4 star is 0.5’ SW.

Lyle David Mays (November 27, 1953 – February 10, 2020 Wausaukee, Wisconsin) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and member of the Pat Metheny Group. Metheny and Mays composed and arranged nearly all of the group’s music, for which Mays won eleven Grammy Awards.

While growing up, Mays had four main interests: chess, mathematics, architecture, and music. His mother Doris played piano and organ and his father Cecil, a truck driver, taught himself to play guitar. His teacher allowed him to practice improvisation after the structured elements of the lesson were completed. At age nine he played organ at a family member’s wedding, and at age fourteen he began to play in church. In summer camp he was introduced to jazz pianist Marian McPartland.