mick laBriola

The year of 2015 has been declared the International Year of Light (IYL) by the United Nations. Organizations, institutions, and individuals involved in the science and applications of light will be joining together for this yearlong celebration to help spread the word about the wonders of light.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory explores the universe in X-rays, a high-energy form of light.  By studying X-ray data and comparing them with observations in other types of light, scientists can develop a better understanding of objects likes stars and galaxies that generate temperatures of millions of degrees and produce X-rays.

To recognize the start of IYL, the Chandra X-ray Center is releasing a set of images that combine data from telescopes tuned to different wavelengths of light. From a distant galaxy to the relatively nearby debris field of an exploded star, these images demonstrate the myriad ways that information about the universe is communicated to us through light.

In this image, an expanding shell of debris called SNR 0519-69.0 is left behind after a massive star exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way. Multimillion degree gas is seen in X-rays from Chandra, in blue. The outer edge of the explosion (red) and stars in the field of view are seen in visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Delroy George Wilson CD (5 October 1948 – 6 March 1995) was a Jamaican ska, rocksteady and reggae singer. Wilson is often regarded as Jamaica’s first child star, having first found success as a teenager. His youngest son, Karl “Konan” Wilson, has found success as part of British duo Krept and Konan (founded 2009).

Delroy Wilson began his recording career at the age of thirteen, while still a pupil at Boys Town Primary School. Wilson released his first single “Emy Lou”in 1962 for record producer, Clement “Coxsone” Dodd. His early years with Coxsone yielded a number of ska hits, the biggest of which, the Lee Perry-written “Joe Liges” was an attack on rival producer and former Dodd employee Prince Buster. This was followed by another Perry-written attack on Buster, “Spit in the Sky”. Further singles followed, including “One Two Three”, “I Shall Not Remove”, “Look Who Is Back Again” (a duet with Slim Smith), and another anti-Buster song, “Prince Pharaoh”, notably the only record featuring the voice of Dodd himself. He is regarded as Jamaica’s first child star. Delroy Wilson died at the age of 46 on 6 March 1995 at Kingston‘s UWI hospital, of complications from cirrhosis of the liver.

Steven Haworth Miller (born October 5, 1943) is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter, known as leader of the Steve Miller Band. He began his career in blues and blues rock and evolved to a more pop-oriented sound during the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, releasing popular singles and albums. Miller was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2016.

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Miller received his first exposure to music from his mother, Bertha, whom he described as a remarkable jazz-influenced singer, and his physician father, George, known as “Sonny” who, in addition to his profession as a pathologist, was a jazz enthusiast and an accomplished amateur recording engineer. Guitar virtuoso Les Paul and his musical partner Mary Ford were regular visitors at the Miller house. The Millers were best man and matron of honor at the December 1949 Paul/Ford wedding. Paul became Steve’s godfather. Les Paul heard Steve, who was six, on a wire recording made by Dr. Miller, as the youngster was “banging away” on a guitar given to him by his uncle, Dr. K. Dale Atterbury.Paul encouraged Miller to continue with his interest in the guitar… and “perhaps he will be something one day.”

In 1950, the family relocated to Dallas, Texas. Many distinguished musicians came to the house to record, and Steve absorbed much from “greats” such as T-Bone Walker, Charles Mingus, and Tal Farlow. Walker taught Steve how to play his guitar behind his back and also with his teeth in 1952. In 1955, Steven began attending Dallas‘ St. Mark’s School, a non-denominational preparatory day school for boys where he formed his first band, The Marksmen. He taught his older brother Buddy to play the bass guitar and also instructed his classmate, future musical star Boz Scaggs, guitar chords so that he could join the band.

Ismael Rivera a.k.a. “Maelo” (October 5, 1931 – May 13, 1987), was a Puerto Rican composer and salsa singer.

Rivera was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, a sector of San Juan, Puerto Rico. He was the first of five children born to Luis and Margarita Rivera. His father, Luis, was a carpenter and his mother a housewife. As a child, Rivera was always singing and banging on cans with sticks. He received his primary education at the Pedro G. Goyco Elementary School and then went on to learn carpentry at a vocational school. He also shined shoes to help his family financially and when he was 16 years old, he worked as a carpenter. During his free time he would hang around the corner with his best friend Rafael Cortijo and sing songs. In 1948, Rivera and Cortijo joined El Conjunto Monterrey, where Rivera played the conga and Cortijo the bongos. Rivera was unable to work full-time as a musician because of his work as a carpenter.

William Robert “Bill” Dixon (October 5, 1925 – June 16, 2010) was an American composer, improviser, visual artist, activist, and educator. Dixon was one of the seminal figures in free jazz and late twentieth-century contemporary music. His was also a prominent voice arguing for artist’s rights and insisting, through words and deeds, on the cultural and aesthetic richness of the African American music tradition. He played the trumpet, flugelhorn, and piano, often using electronic delay and reverb.

Dixon hailed from Nantucket, Massachusetts. His family moved to Harlem, in New York City, in 1934. He enlisted in the Army in 1944; his unit served in Germany before he was discharged in 1946. His studies in music came relatively late in life, at the Hartnette Conservatory of Music (1946–1951), which he attended on the GI Bill. He studied painting at Boston University and the WPA Arts School and the Art Students League. From 1956 to 1962, he worked at the United Nations, where he founded the UN Jazz Society.

James Blanton (October 5, 1918 – July 30, 1942) was an American jazz double bassist. Blanton is credited with being the originator of more complex pizzicato and arco bass solos in a jazz context than previous bassists. Nicknamed “Jimmie,” Blanton’s nickname is usually misspelled as “Jimmy,” including by Duke Ellington.

Blanton was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He originally learned to play the violin, but took up the bass while at Tennessee State University, performing with the Tennessee State Collegians from 1936 to 1937, and during the vacations with Fate Marable.

Blanton left university in 1938 to play full-time in St Louis with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra. Blanton joined Duke Ellington‘s band in 1939. On November 22 of that year, Blanton and Ellington recorded two tracks – “Blues” and “Plucked Again” – which were the first commercially recorded piano–bass duets. In 1941, Blanton was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Blanton died on July 30, 1942, at a sanatorium in Duarte, California, aged 23.

Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula‘s glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud. Many of the filamentary structures visible in the featured image are actually shock waves – fronts where fast moving material encounters slow moving gas. The Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located about 1500 light years away in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. The image shows the nebula in three colors specifically emitted by hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur gas. The whole Orion Nebula cloud complex, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, will slowly disperse over the next 100,000 years.

María de los Ángeles de las Heras Ortiz (4 October 1944 – 25 March 2006), better known professionally as Rocío Dúrcal (Spanish pronunciation: [roˈθi.o ˈðuɾkal]), was a Spanish singer and actress.

In 2005 Dúrcal received a Latin Grammy Award for musical excellence, a prize that is awarded by the Governing Board of the Recording Latin Academy to artists who have made creative contributions of outstanding artistic significance during their careers. Dúrcal began her artistic career by participating in various radio song festivals and competitions, secretly supported by her paternal grandfather, who always believed in her talent and became her first fan. In 1959, with the approval of her parents, she participated in the television program Primer Aplauso, broadcast by Televisión Española. The theme that she chose for the contest was the traditional song “La sombra vendo”. Luis Sanz, a Madrid manager who watched the show, was impressed by her talent and personality. Sanz contacted the program for the name and the address of the young contestant.

Edgar Gómez (born October 4, 1944) is a jazz double bassist born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, known for his work with the Bill Evans Trio from 1966 to 1977.

Gómez moved with his family from Puerto Rico at a young age to New York, where he was raised. He started on double bass in the New York City school system at the age of eleven and at age thirteen went to the New York City High School of Music & Art. He played in the Newport Festival Youth Band (led by Marshall Brown) from 1959 to 1961, and graduated from Juilliard in 1963.

He played with musicians such as Gerry Mulligan, Marian McPartland, Paul Bley, Steps Ahead, and Chick Corea.^[1] He spent a total of eleven years with the Bill Evans Trio, which included performances in the United States, Europe and Asia, as well as dozens of recordings.

His career mainly consists of working as an accompanist, a position suited for his quick reflexes and flexibility. In addition to working as a studio musician for many famous jazz musicians, he has recorded as a leader for Columbia Records, Projazz and Stretch. Many of his recent recordings as a leader are co-led by the jazz pianist Mark Kramer.

In May 2013, Gómez was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music in Valencia, Spain. This was the first honorary doctorate granted at the college’s new international campus in Spain.

Steve Swallow (born October 4, 1940) is a jazz bassist and composer noted for his collaborations with Jimmy Giuffre, Gary Burton, and Carla Bley.He was one of the first jazz double bassists to switch entirely to electric bass guitar.

Born in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, Swallow studied piano and trumpet, as a child, before turning to the double bass at age 14. While attending a prep school, he began trying his hand in jazz improvisation. In 1960, he left Yale, where he was studying composition, and settled in New York City, playing at the time in Jimmy Giuffre‘s trio along with Paul Bley. After joining Art Farmer‘s quartet in 1963, Swallow began to write. It is in the 1960s that his long-term association with Gary Burton‘s various bands began.

In the early 1970s, Swallow switched exclusively to electric bass guitar, of which he prefers the five-string variety. Along with Monk Montgomery and Bob Cranshaw, Swallow was among the first jazz bassists to do so (with much encouragement from Roy Haynes, one of Swallow’s favorite drummers). He plays with a pick (made of copper by Hotlicks), and his style involves intricate solos in the upper register; he was one of the early adopters of the high C string on a bass guitar.

In 1974–1976, Swallow taught at the Berklee College of Music. He contributed several of his compositions to the Berklee students who assembled the first edition of The Real Book. He later recorded an album, Real Book, with the picture of a well-worn, coffee-stained book on the cover. In 1978 Swallow became a member of Carla Bley‘s band. He has been Bley’s romantic partner since the 1980s. He toured extensively with John Scofield in the early 1980s, and has returned to this collaboration several times over the years. Swallow has consistently won the electric bass category in Down Beat yearly polls, both Critics’ and Readers’, since the mid-80s. His compositions have been covered by, among others, Jim Hall (who recorded his very first tune, “Eiderdown”), Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Stan Getz and Gary Burton.

Amos Leon Thomas Jr. (October 4, 1937 – May 8, 1999), known professionally as Leon Thomas, was an American jazz and blues vocalist, born in East St. Louis, Illinois, and known for his bellowing glottal-stop style of free jazz singing in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Leon Thomas was born Amos Thomas, Jr. on October 4, 1937, in East St. Louis, Illinois. He studied music at Tennessee State University. At the time of his studies, he had begun a singing career as a guest vocalist for the jazz bands of percussionist Armando Peraza, saxophonist Jimmy Forest, and guitarist Grant Green. His musical development at this time was shaped in part by seeing saxophonist John Coltrane perform in trumpeter Miles Davis‘s sextet during the late 1950s. Thomas moved to New York City in 1959, singing at the Apollo Theater as a vocalist for acts such as jazz ensemble The Jazz Messengers and singer Dakota Staton. In 1961, he joined the Count Basie Orchestra but soon left after being conscripted into the army.^[3]

Thomas was discharged from the army in the late 1960s and resumed his music career, first working with avant-garde jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders.^[3] In 1969, he released his first solo album for Bob Thiele‘s Flying Dutchman label. Thomas became best known for his work with Sanders, particularly the 1969 song “The Creator Has a Master Plan” from Sanders’ Karma album. Thomas’s most distinctive device was that he often broke out into yodeling in the middle of a vocal. This style has influenced singers James Moody, Tim Buckley and Bobby McFerrin. He said in an interview that he developed this style after he fell and broke his teeth before an important show. Some of the vocal style is classified as ‘jive singing’. (Ref: Leon Thomas Blues Band album).^{[citation needed]} Thomas saw music as a means of social commentary during this period, saying, “You just have to be more than an entertainer. How the blazes can you ignore what is happening?”

Although the two galaxies in NGC 3256 appear merged when viewed in visible light, a second, bright nucleus is found hiding among the tangle of dust lanes in the central region. By using a range of telescopes on the ground and in space, the GOALS (Great Observatories All-sky LIRG Survey) research team has been analyzing galaxies like NGC 3256 from X-ray through radio wavelengths. NGC 3256 has a buried active nucleus, large-scale shocks from two powerful outflows, and a huge number of compact, bright star clusters. Upcoming research with the James Webb Space Telescope will help researchers learn more about the outflows, which will allow them to better model the hot and cold gas, and determine what implications that has for how and where stars form in rapidly evolving galaxies.

Kevin Roosevelt Moore (born October 3, 1951), known as Keb’ Mo’, is an American blues musician and five-time Grammy Award winner. He is a singer, guitarist, and songwriter, living in Nashville, Tennessee. He has been described as “a living link to the seminal Delta blues that travelled up the Mississippi River and across the expanse of America”. His post-modern blues style is influenced by many eras and genres, including folk, rock, jazz, pop and country. The moniker “Keb Mo” was coined by his original drummer, Quentin Dennard, and picked up by his record label as a “street talk” abbreviation of his given name.

From early on, Keb’ Mo’s parents, who were from Louisiana and Texas, instilled him with a great appreciation for the blues and gospel music. By adolescence, he was an accomplished guitarist.

Keb’ Mo’ started his musical career playing the steel drums in a calypso band. He moved on to play in a variety of blues and backup bands throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He first started recording in the early 1970s with Jefferson Airplane violinist Papa John Creach through an R&B group. Creach hired him when Moore was 21 years old; Moore appeared on four of Creach’s albums: Filthy!, Playing My Fiddle for You, I’m the Fiddle Man and Rock Father. Keb’ Mo’s first gold record was received for a song, “Git Fiddler”, which he co-wrote with Creach on Jefferson Starship‘s Red Octopus. Red Octopus hit number one on the Billboard 200in 1975.