mick laBriola

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.

Randal Edward Brecker (born November 27, 1945) is an American trumpeter, flugelhornist, and composer. His versatility has made him a popular studio musician who has recorded with acts in jazz, rock, and R&B.

Brecker was born on November 27, 1945 in the Philadelphia suburb of Cheltenham to a musical family. His father Bob (Bobby) was a lawyer who played jazz piano and his mother Sylvia was a portrait artist. Randy described his father as “a semipro jazz pianist and trumpet fanatic. In school when I was eight, they only offered trumpet or clarinet. I chose trumpet from hearing Diz, Miles, Clifford, and Chet Baker at home. My brother (Michael Brecker) didn’t want to play the same instrument as I did, so three years later he chose the clarinet!” Randy’s father, Bob, was also a songwriter and singer who loved to listen to recordings of the great jazz trumpet players such as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown. He took Randy and his younger brother Michael Brecker to see Davis, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and many other jazz icons. Brecker attended Cheltenham High School from 1959 to 1963 and then Indiana University from 1963 to 1966 studying with Bill Adam, David Baker and Jerry Coker and later moved to New York and performed with Clark Terry‘s Big Bad Band, the Duke Pearson and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra.

Edward Otha South (November 27, 1904 – April 25, 1962) was an American jazz violinist. South studied classical music in Budapest, Paris, and Chicago. In the 1920s he was a member of jazz orchestras led by Charlie Elgar, Erskine Tate, and Jimmy Wade. He led a band in the early 1930s that included Milt Hinton and Everett Barksdale. In 1937 he recorded in Paris with Stephane Grappelli, Django Reinhardt, and Michel Warlop. In 1945 he worked for the studio band at WMGM in New York City. During the 1950s, he was a guest on television with Fran Allison and Dave Garroway and on WGN in Chicago.

On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Eddie South among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire. On September 2, 2020, The New York Times consulted violinist Mazz Swift, who selected Eddie South’s performance of “Black Gypsy” for a feature on “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Violin.

James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix; November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970) was an American musician, singer, and songwriter. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as “arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music”.

Born in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix began playing guitar at the age of 15. In 1961, he enlisted in the US Army, but was discharged the following year. Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, and began playing gigs on the Chitlin’ Circuit, earning a place in the Isley Brothers‘ backing band and later with Little Richard, with whom he continued to work through mid-1965. He then played with Curtis Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals became his manager. Within months, Hendrix had earned three UK top ten hits with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: “Hey Joe“, “Purple Haze“, and “The Wind Cries Mary“. He achieved fame in the US after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and in 1968 his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, reached number one in the US. The double LP was Hendrix’s most commercially successful release and his first and only number one album. The world’s highest-paid performer, he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 before his accidental death in London from barbiturate-related asphyxia on September 18, 1970.

Hendrix was inspired by American rock and roll and electric blues. He favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain, and was instrumental in popularizing the previously undesirable sounds caused by guitar amplifier feedback. He was also one of the first guitarists to make extensive use of tone-altering effects units in mainstream rock, such as fuzz distortion, Octavia, wah-wah, and Uni-Vibe. He was the first musician to use stereophonic phasing effects in recordings. Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone commented: “Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began.”

Hendrix was the recipient of several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year and in 1968, Billboard named him the Artist of the Year and Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year. Disc and Music Echo honored him with the World Top Musician of 1969 and in 1970, Guitar Player named him the Rock Guitarist of the Year. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Rolling Stone ranked the band’s three studio albums, Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland, among the 100 greatest albums of all time, and they ranked Hendrix as the greatest guitarist and the sixth greatest artist of all time.

Wilber Morris (November 27, 1937 – August 8, 2002) was an American jazz double bass player and bandleader. He was the brother of the cornetist, composer, and conductor Butch Morris.

Wilber Morris recorded widely, and performed with such musicians as Pharoah Sanders, Sonny Simmons, Alan Silva, Joe McPhee, Horace Tapscott, Butch Morris, Arthur Blythe, Charles Gayle, William Parker, and Billy Bang, Charles Tyler, Dennis Charles, Roy Campbell, Avram Fefer, Alfred 23 Harth, Borah Bergman and Rashied Ali.