mick laBriola

Blind Willie Johnson (January 25, 1897 – September 18, 1945) was an American gospel blues singer, guitarist and evangelist. His landmark recordings completed between 1927 and 1930—thirty songs in total—display a combination of powerful “chest voice” singing, slide guitar skills, and originality that has influenced generations of musicians. Even though Johnson’s records sold well, as a street performer and preacher, he had little wealth in his lifetime. His life was poorly documented, but over time, music historians such as Samuel Charters have uncovered more about Johnson and his five recording sessions.

A revival of interest in Johnson’s music began in the 1960s, following his inclusion on Harry Smith‘s Anthology of American Folk Music, and by the efforts of the blues guitarist Reverend Gary Davis. Johnson’s work has become more accessible through compilation albums such as American Epic: The Best of Blind Willie Johnson and the Charters compilations. As a result, Johnson is credited as one of the most influential practitioners of the blues, and his slide guitar playing, particularly on his hymn “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground“, is highly acclaimed. Other recordings by Johnson include “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed“, “It’s Nobody’s Fault but Mine“, and “John the Revelator“.

Johnson was born on January 25, 1897, in Pendleton, Texas, a small town near Temple, Texas, to sharecropper George Johnson (also identified as Willie Johnson Sr.) and his wife, Mary Fields, who died in 1901. His family, which according to the blues historian Steven Calt included at least one younger brother named Carl, moved to the agriculturally rich community of Marlin, where Johnson spent most of his childhood.

The alboreá or albolá is a flamenco palo which is sung only in Gypsy marriage rites, and many Gypsies refuse to sing it outside this context or in the presence of non-Gypsies. It is linked to the Gypsy romance, and derives many lyrics from it.

The rhythm and guitar accompaniment is identical with the soleá. The lyrics are usually formed stanzas with four 6-syllable lines.

Interstellar dust clouds and glowing nebulae abound in the fertile constellation of Orion. One of the brightest, M78, is centered in this colorful, wide field view, covering an area north of Orion’s belt. At a distance of about 1,500 light-years, the bluish reflection nebula is around 5 light-years across. Its tint is due to dust preferentially reflecting the blue light of hot, young stars. Reflection nebula NGC 2071 is just to the left of M78. Flecks of emission from Herbig-Haro objects, energetic jets from stars in the process of formation, stand out against the dark dust lanes. The exposure also brings out the region’s fainter, pervasive reddish glow of atomic hydrogen gas.

Steven Dirk Gilmore (born January 21, 1943, Trenton, New Jersey) is an American jazz double-bassist.

Gilmore picked up bass when he was twelve years old and played locally in Philadelphia as a teenager. At age 17 he enrolled at the Advanced School of Contemporary Music, run by Oscar Peterson, and later in the 1960s played with Ira Sullivan and the Baker’s Dozen Big Band. He joined Flip Phillips‘s group in 1967 and remained with Phillips until 1971, after which he worked with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, Mose Allison, The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, Phil Woods, Richie Cole, and the National Jazz Ensemble. In the 1980s he played with John Coates, Meredith D’Ambrosio, Dave Frishberg, Hal Galper, Tom Harrell, and Toshiko Akiyoshi, as well as with Woods; he and Woods would remain collaborators into the 1990s. In 1988 he began working with Dave Liebman, with whom he would work intermittently through the late 1990s. Other associations in the 1990s included Carol Sloane, Susannah McCorkle, Bill Charlap, and Jim Hall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYM17JZidKk&t=629s

Richard Pierce Havens (January 21, 1941 – April 22, 2013) was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. His music encompassed elements of folk, soul, and rhythm and blues. He had an intense and rhythmic guitar style (often in open tunings), and played soulful covers of pop and folk songs. He was the opening act at Woodstock.

Born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, Havens was the oldest of nine children. He was of Native American (Blackfoot) descent on his father’s side and of the British West Indies on his mother’s. His grandfather was Blackfoot of the Montana/South Dakota area.

Havens’s grandfather and great-uncle joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, moved to New York City thereafter, and settled on the Shinnecock Reservation on Long Island. Havens’s grandfather married, then moved to Brooklyn.

Fird Eaglin Jr. (January 21, 1936 or 1937 – February 18, 2009), known as Snooks Eaglin, was an American guitarist and singer based in New Orleans. In his early years he was sometimes credited under other names, including Blind Snooks Eaglin, “Lil” Snook, Ford Eaglin, Blind Guitar Ferd.

His vocal style was reminiscent of that of Ray Charles; in the 1950s, when he was in his late teens, he sometimes billed himself as “Little Ray Charles”. He played a wide range of styles of music within the same concert, album, or even song: blues, rock and roll, jazz, country, and Latin. In his early years, he also played acoustic blues.

His ability to play a wide range of songs and make them his own earned him the nickname “The Human Jukebox.” Eaglin claimed in interviews that his musical repertoire included some 2,500 songs.

At live shows, he usually did not prepare set lists and was unpredictable, even to his bandmates. He played songs that came to him on stage, and he also took requests from the audience.

Robert “Juice” Wilson (January 21, 1904 – May 22, 1993) was an American jazz violinist.

Wilson grew up an orphan and was raised by his uncle from age three in Chicago. He began playing drums in the Chicago Militia Boys Band, then switched to violin at age eight. By the age of twelve he was already playing with Jimmy Wade, and at 14 he performed with Freddie Keppard. He worked on steamboats on the Great Lakes and did extended residencies with Jimmy Harrison in Ohio. Early in the 1920s he worked in Erie, Pennsylvania with Hersal Brassfield, then moved to Buffalo, New York to play with Eugene Primus as well as the Buffalo Junior Symphony Orchestra.

In 1928, Wilson moved to New York City and played with Lloyd Scott at the Savoy Ballroom. At the end of the decade he toured Europe with Noble Sissle, and decided to remain there. He worked first in the Netherlands with Ed Swayzee, Leon Abbey, the Utica Jubilee Singers, the Louis Douglass Revue, Little Mike McKendrick’s International Band, and Tom Chase. He made trips to Spainand North Africa before settling in Malta, where he became a local star. He worked there through much of the 1940s and 1950s as a multi-instrumentalist, and made further tours around the Mediterranean before coming back to the United States in the 1960s. He died peacefully in 1993.

January 20th 1960.

Jeff “Tain” Watts is one of the most in demand jazz drummers in the world today. Jeff Watts majored in classical percussion at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University, where he was primarily a timpanist, followed by enrollment at the Berklee School of Music, where he pursued jazz studies alongside such talented players as Branford Marsalis, Kevin Eubanks, Greg Osby, Aimee Mann, Steve Vai and Marvin “Smitty” Smith.

Jeff joined the Wynton Marsalis Quartet in 1981 and proceeded to win three Grammy Awards with the ensemble. Watts left Wynton Marsalis in 1988. After working with George Benson, Harry Connick. Jr. and McCoy Tyner, he joined the Branford Marsalis Quartet in 1989.

Jeff has worked in the film and television industry as both a musician on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and as an actor, Rhythm Jones in Spike Lee’s “Mo Better Blues”. Jeff joined Kenny Garrett’s band after returning to New York in 1995 after three years in LA on the Tonight Show. Watts also continued to record and tour with Branford Marsalis as well as Danilo Perez, Michael Brecker, Betty Carter, Kenny Kirkland, Courtney Pine, Geri Allen, Alice Coltrane, Greg Osby, Steve Coleman, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, and Ravi Coltrane.

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

Wilbur James Cobb (January 20, 1929 – May 24, 2020) was an American jazz drummer. He was part of Miles Davis‘s First Great Sextet. At the time of his death, he had been the band’s last surviving member for nearly thirty years. He was awarded an NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship in 2009.

Cobb was born in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 1929. Before he began his music career, he listened to jazz albums and stayed awake into the late hours of the night in order to listen to Symphony Sid performing in New York City. Cobb started his touring career in 1950 with the saxophonist Earl Bostic. He subsequently performed with vocalist Dinah Washington, pianist Wynton Kelly, saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, bassist Keter Betts, Frank Wess, Leo Parker, and Charlie Rouse. His website also recounts his gigs with Billie Holiday, Pearl Bailey, and Dizzy Gillespie that took place before 1957.

Huddie William Ledbetter (/ˈhjuːdi/; January 23, 1888 – December 6, 1949), better known by the stage name Lead Belly, was an American folkand blues singer, musician and songwriter notable for his strong vocals, virtuosity on the twelve-string guitar, and the folk standards he introduced, including his renditions of “Goodnight, Irene“, “Midnight Special“, “Cotton Fields“, and “Boll Weevil“.

Lead Belly usually played a twelve-string guitar, but he also played the piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin, and windjammer. In some of his recordings, he sang while clapping his hands or stomping his foot.

Lead Belly’s songs covered a wide range of genres and topics including gospel music; blues about women, liquor, prison life, and racism; and folk songs about cowboys, prison, work, sailors, cattle herding, and dancing. He also wrote songs about people in the news, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Jean Harlow, Jack Johnson, the Scottsboro Boys and Howard Hughes. Lead Belly was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2008.

Though many releases credit him as “Leadbelly”, he himself wrote it as “Lead Belly”, which is also the spelling on his tombstone and the spelling used by the Lead Belly Foundation.