mick laBriola

William Alexander “Sonny” Greer (December 13, c. 1895 – March 23, 1982) was an American jazz drummer and vocalist, best known for his work with Duke Ellington. Greer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and played with Elmer Snowden‘s band and the Howard Theatre‘s orchestra in Washington, D.C., before joining Duke Ellington, whom he met in 1919. He was Ellington’s first drummer, playing with his quintet, the Washingtonians, and moved with Ellington into the Cotton Club. As a result of his job as a designer with the Leedy Drum Company of Indiana, Greer was able to build up a huge drum kit worth over a then-considerable $3,000, including chimes, a gong, timpani, and vibes.^[1]

Greer was a heavy drinker, as well as a pool-hall hustler (when he needed to retrieve his drums from the pawnbroker), and in 1950, Ellington responded to his drinking and occasional unreliability by taking a second drummer, Butch Ballard, with them on a tour of Scandinavia. This enraged Greer, and the consequent argument led to their permanent estrangement.

Greer continued to play, mainly as a freelance drummer, working with musicians such as Johnny Hodges, Red Allen, J. C. Higginbotham, Tyree Glenn, and Brooks Kerr, as well as appearing in films, and briefly leading his own band. Greer featured in the iconic 1958 black-and-white photograph by Art Kane known as “A Great Day in Harlem“. He was part of a tribute to Ellington in 1974, which achieved great success throughout the United States. Greer died in 1982 and is interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City.

Carlos García Montoya (13 December 1903 – 3 March 1993) in Madrid, Spain, was a prominent flamenco guitarist and a founder of the modern-day popular flamenco style of music.

He was the nephew of renowned flamenco guitarist Ramón Montoya. He first learned from his mother, “la Tula”, and then from a neighboring barber, Pepe el Barbero, i.e. Pepe the Barber. After one year Montoya had completed what Pepe was able to teach him. Carlos left to gain what he could from other flamenco guitarists of the time. At fourteen he was playing in the “cafes cantantes,” in the heyday of flamenco singing and dancing, for such artists as Antonio de Bilbao, Juan el Estampío, La Macarrona and La Camisona in Madrid, Spain.

In the 1920s and 1930s he performed extensively in Europe, North America, and Asia with the likes of La Teresina. The outbreak of World War II brought him to the United States where he began his most successful days as a musician, bringing his fiery style to concert halls and universities. He also accompanied orchestras. During this period he made a few recordings for several major and independent labels including RCA Victor, Everest and Folkways, performing traditional flamenco music such as Farruca., Malaga and Hokie.

Bassam Saba, a renowned Lebanese ud and ney player, and composer of Arabic music, died in Beirut on December 4, 2020 of COVID-19 complications. Bassam Saba (* 1959 – December 4, 2020 ) was a Lebanese composer , conductor and multi-instrumentalist . In addition to Arabic instruments such as the nay , the oud , the saz and the buzuq , he also played classical flute and violin. Saba studied nay, oud and violin at the Lebanese National Conservatory in Beirut . From 1976 he studied classical western music and flute at the Conservatoire Municipal des Gobelins in Paris. From 1979 to 1985 he obtained his master’s degree in flute and music education at the Moscow Gnessin Institute .

Marie Dionne Warwick (/ˈdiːɒn/ DEE-on; née Warrick; born December 12, 1940) is an American singer, actress, television host, and former Goodwill Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization.

The smokey black silhouette in this new image is part of a large, sparse cloud of partially ionised hydrogen — an HII region — known as Gum 15. In wide-field images this nebula appears as a striking reddish purple clump dotted with stars and slashed by opaque, weaving dust lanes. This image homes in on one of these dust lanes, showing the central region of the nebula.

These dark chunks of sky have seemingly few stars because lanes of dusty material are obscuring the bright, glowing regions of gas beyond. The occasional stars that do show up in these patches are actually between us and Gum 15, but create the illusion that we are peering through a window out onto the more distant sky.

Gum 15 is shaped by the aggressive winds flowing from the stars within and around it. The cloud is located near to several large associations of stars including the star cluster ESO 313-13. The brightest member of this cluster, named HD 74804, is thought to have ionised Gum 15’s hydrogen cloud. This ionised hydrogen content is the cause of the red hue permeating the frame.

This image was taken as part of the ESO Cosmic Gems programme using the FORS instrument on the Very Large Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. This project has actually produced multiple images of this target — back in July 2014, ESO released a stunning wide-field image of Gum 15 with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory that showed the nebula’s sculpted clouds, murky dust, and brightly shining stars in extraordinary detail. The portion of Gum 15 shown in the new and more detailed VLT image can be seen within the wider frame towards the top left quarter of the 2.2-metre image.

Anthony Tillmon Williams (December 12, 1945 – February 23, 1997) was an American jazz drummer.

Williams first gained fame in the band of trumpeter Miles Davis and pioneered jazz fusion. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1986. Williams was born in Chicago and grew up in Boston. He was of African, Portuguese, and Chinese descent. He studied with drummer Alan Dawsonat an early age, and began playing professionally at the age of 13 with saxophonist Sam Rivers. Saxophonist Jackie McLean hired Williams when he was 16.

At 17 Williams gained attention by joining Miles Davis in what was later dubbed Davis’s Second Great Quintet. Williams was a vital element of the group, called by Davis in his autobiography “the center that the group’s sound revolved around.” His playing helped redefine the role of the jazz rhythm section through the use of polyrhythms and metric modulation. Meanwhile, he recorded his first two albums as leader for Blue Note label, Life Time (1964) and Spring (1965). He also recorded as a sideman for the label including, in 1964, Out to Lunch! with Eric Dolphy and Point of Departurewith Andrew Hill.

In 1969, he formed a trio, the Tony Williams Lifetime, with John McLaughlin on guitar and Larry Young on organ. Lifetime was a pioneering band of the fusion movement.

Grover Washington Jr. (December 12, 1943 – December 17, 1999) was an American jazz-funk / soul-jazz saxophonist. Along with George Benson, John Klemmer, David Sanborn, Bob James, Chuck Mangione, Dave Grusin, Herb Alpert, and Spyro Gyra, he is considered by many to be one of the founders of the smooth jazz genre. He wrote some of his material and later became an arranger and producer.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Washington made some of the genre’s most memorable hits, including “Mister Magic”, “Reed Seed”, “Black Frost”, “Winelight”, “Inner City Blues” and “The Best is Yet to Come”. In addition, he performed very frequently with other artists, including Bill Withers on “Just the Two of Us“, Patti LaBelle on “The Best Is Yet to Come” and Phyllis Hyman on “A Sacred Kind of Love”. He is also remembered for his take on the Dave Brubeck classic “Take Five“, and for his 1996 version of “Soulful Strut“.

Washington had a preference for black nickel-plated saxophones made by Julius Keilwerth. These included an SX90R alto and SX90R tenor. He also played Selmer Mark VI alto in the early years. His main soprano was a black nickel-plated H. Couf Superba II (also built by Keilwerth for Herbert Couf) and a Keilwerth SX90 in the last years of his life.

Washington was born in Buffalo, New York, United States, on December 12, 1943. His mother was a church chorister, and his father was a collector of old jazz gramophone records and a saxophonist as well, so music was everywhere in the home. He grew up listening to the great jazzmen and big band leaders like Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, and others like them. At the age of 8, Grover Sr. gave Jr. a saxophone. He practiced and would sneak into clubs to see famous Buffalo blues musicians. His younger brother, drummer Daryl Washington, would soon follow in his footsteps, he also had another younger brother named Michael Washington, who was an accomplished Gospel Music organist who mastered the Hammond B3 organ.

Forrest Richard Betts (born December 12, 1943), known as Dickey Betts, is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter, and composer best known as a founding member of The Allman Brothers Band.

Early in his career he partnered with Duane Allman, introducing melodic twin guitar harmony and counterpoint which “rewrote the rules for how two rock guitarists can work together, completely scrapping the traditional rhythm/lead roles to stand toe to toe”. Following Allman’s death in 1971, Betts assumed sole lead guitar duties during the peak of the group’s commercial success in the mid-1970s.

Betts was the writer and singer on the Allmans’ only hit single, “Ramblin’ Man“. He also gained renown for composing instrumentals, with one appearing on most of the group’s albums, the most notable of these being “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and “Jessica” (the latter widely known as the theme to Top Gear).

He was inducted with the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and also won a best rock performance Grammy Award with the band for “Jessica” in 1996. Betts was ranked No. 58 on Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time list in 2003, and #61 on the list published in 2011. Betts departed the Allman Brothers Band in 2000 under acrimonious circumstances and continued with a solo career that had begun in the 1970s.

Emmanuel N’Djoké “Manu” Dibango (12 December 1933 – 24 March 2020) was a Cameroonian musician and songwriter who played saxophoneand vibraphone. He developed a musical style fusing jazz, funk, and traditional Cameroonian music. His father was a member of the Yabassi ethnic group, while his mother was a Duala. He was best known for his 1972 single “Soul Makossa“. He died from COVID-19 on 24 March 2020.

Emmanuel “Manu” Dibango was born in Douala, Cameroon in 1933. His father, Michel Manfred N’Djoké Dibango, was a civil servant. Son of a farmer, he met his wife travelling by pirogue to her residence, Douala. Emmanuel’s mother was a fashion designer, running her own small business. Both her ethnic group, the Douala, and his, the Yabassi, viewed this union of different ethnic groups with some disdain. Dibango had only a stepbrother from his father’s previous marriage, who was four years older than him. In Cameroon, one’s ethnicity is dictated by one’s father, though Dibango wrote in his autobiography, Three Kilos of Coffee, that he had “never been able to identify completely with either of [his] parents”.

Dibango’s uncle was the leader of his extended family. Upon his death, Dibango’s father refused to take over, as he never fully initiated his son into the Yabassi’s customs. Throughout his childhood, Dibango slowly forgot the Yabassi language in favour of the Douala. However, his family did live in the Yabassi encampment on the Yabassi plateau, close to the Wouri River in central Douala. While a child, Dibango attended Protestant church every night for religious education, or nkouaida. He enjoyed studying music there, and reportedly was a fast learner. In 1941, after being educated at his village school, Dibango was accepted into a colonial school, near his home, where he learned French. He admired the teacher, whom he described as “an extraordinary draftsman and painter”. In 1944, French president Charles de Gaulle chose this school to perform the welcoming ceremonies upon his arrival in Cameroon. In 1949, at age 15, Dibango was sent to college in Saint-Calais, France. After that he attended the lycée de Chartres where he learned the piano.

Toshiko Akiyoshi (秋吉 敏子 or 穐吉 敏子, Akiyoshi Toshiko, born 12 December 1929) is a Japanese-American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader.

She has received fourteen Grammy Award nominations and was the first woman to win Best Arranger and Composer awards in Down Beatmagazine’s annual Readers’ Poll. In 1984, she was the subject of the documentary Jazz Is My Native Language. In 1996, she published her autobiography, Life with Jazz, and in 2007 she was named an NEA Jazz Master by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts.

Akiyoshi was born in Liaoyang, Manchuria to Japanese emigrants. She was the youngest of four sisters. In 1945, after World War II, Akiyoshi’s family lost their home and returned to Japan, settling in Beppu. A local record collector introduced her to jazz by playing a record of Teddy Wilsonplaying “Sweet Lorraine“. She immediately loved the sound and began to study jazz. In 1952, during a tour of Japan, pianist Oscar Petersondiscovered her playing in a club on the Ginza. Peterson was impressed and convinced record producer Norman Granz to record her. In 1953, under Granz’s direction, she recorded her first album with Peterson’s rhythm section: Herb Ellis on guitar, Ray Brown on double bass, and J. C. Heard on drums. The album was released with the title Toshiko’s Piano in the U.S. and Amazing Toshiko Akiyoshi in Japan.

This image shows the bright centre and swirling arms of the spiral galaxy NGC 6300. NGC 6300 is located in a starry patch of sky in the southern constellation of Ara (The Altar) which contains a variety of intriguing deep-sky objects. NGC 6300 has beautiful pinwheeling arms connected by a straight bar that cuts through the middle of the galaxy. While it may look like a standard spiral galaxy in visible-light images like this one, it is actually a Seyfert II galaxy. Such galaxies have unusually luminous centres that emit very energetic radiation, meaning that they are often intensely bright in part of the spectrum either side of the visible. NGC 6300 is thought to contain a massive black hole at its heart some 300 000 times more massive than the Sun. This black hole is emitting high energy X-rays as it is fed by the material that is pulled into it. This image of NGC 6300 was taken by the ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera (EFOSC2) on the 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT). The NTT is based at ESO’s La Silla observing site, on the outskirts of the Atacama Desert in Chile, and was inaugurated in 1989. A black and white image of NGC 6300 was released at the time of the telescope’s inauguration — one of 31 images that were the first to be released from the NTT.

Alfred McCoy Tyner (December 11, 1938 – March 6, 2020) was an American jazz pianist known for his work with the John Coltrane Quartet and a long solo career. He was an NEA Jazz Master and a five-time Grammy winner. Not a player of electric keyboards and synthesizers, he was committed to acoustic instrumentation. Tyner, who was widely imitated, was one of the most recognizable and most influential pianists in jazz history.

Tyner was born in Philadelphia, as the oldest of three children of Jarvis and Beatrice (Stevenson) Tyner. He was encouraged to study piano by his mother. He began studying the piano at age 13 and within two years music had become the focal point in his life. He studied at West Philadelphia Music School and later at the Granoff School of Music. During his teens he led his own group, the Houserockers.

When he was 17, he converted to Islam through the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and changed his name to Sulieman Saud. Tyner played professionally in Philadelphia becoming part of its modern jazz scene. His neighbors in the city included musicians Richie Powell and Bud Powell. In 1960, Tyner joined The Jazztet led by Benny Golson and Art Farmer. Six months later, he joined the quartet of John Coltrane that included Elvin Jones and Steve Davis (later replaced by Art Davis, Reggie Workman, and, finally, Jimmy Garrison). He worked with the band during its extended run at the Jazz Gallery, replacing Steve Kuhn. Coltrane had known Tyner for a while growing up in Philadelphia. He recorded the pianist’s composition “The Believer” on January 10, 1958; it became the title track of Prestige’s 1964 album The Believer issued as a John Coltrane record. He played on Coltrane’s My Favorite Things (1961) for Atlantic. The band toured almost non-stop between 1961 and 1965, recording the albums Coltrane “Live” at the Village Vanguard (1962), Ballads (1963), John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman (1963), Live at Birdland (1964), Crescent (1964), A Love Supreme (1964), and The John Coltrane Quartet Plays (1965), all for Impulse! Records.

Willie Mae Thornton (December 11, 1926 – July 25, 1984), better known as Big Mama Thornton, was an American rhythm-and-blues singer and songwriter. She was the first to record Leiber and Stoller’s “Hound Dog“, in 1952, which became her biggest hit, staying seven weeks at number one on the Billboard R&B chart in 1953 and selling almost two million copies. Thornton’s other recordings included the original version of “Ball and Chain“, which she wrote.

Thornton’s birth certificate states that she was born in Ariton, Alabama, but in an interview with Chris Strachwitz she claimed Montgomery, Alabamaas her birthplace, probably because Montgomery was better known than Ariton. She was introduced to music in a Baptist church, where her father was a minister and her mother a singer. She and her six siblings began to sing at early ages. Her mother died young, and Willie Mae left school and got a job washing and cleaning spittoons in a local tavern. In 1940 she left home and, with the help of Diamond Teeth Mary, joined Sammy Green’s Hot Harlem Revue and was soon billed as the “New Bessie Smith“. Her musical education started in the church but continued through her observation of the rhythm-and-blues singers Bessie Smith and Memphis Minnie, whom she deeply admired.

Dámaso Pérez Prado (December 11, 1916 – September 14, 1989) was a Cuban bandleader, pianist, composer and arranger who popularized the mambo in the 1950s. His big band adaptation of the danzón-mambo proved to be a worldwide success with hits such as “Mambo No. 5“, earning him the nickname “King of the Mambo”. In 1955, Prado and his orchestra topped the charts in the US and UK with a mambo cover of Louiguy‘s “Cherry Pink (and Apple Blossom White)“. He frequently made brief appearances in films, primarily of the rumberas genre, and his music was featured in films such as La Dolce Vita.

Pérez Prado began his career as pianist and arranger for the Sonora Matancera, an internationally successful dance music ensemble from his hometown of Matanzas. He later established his own group and made several recordings in Havana in 1946, including “Trompetiana”, a self-penned mambo and one of the first examples arranged for big band. He then moved to Mexico where the developed this particular genre in multiple forms, including bolero-mambo (with María Luisa Landín), guaracha-mambo (with Benny Moré) and two forms of instrumental mambo he created: mambo batiri and mambo kaen. The success of his 1949 recordings landed him a contract with RCA Victor in the US, which led to a prolific career in the 1950s. His number 1 hit “Cherry Pink” was followed by other charting singles, such as a cover of “Guaglione” and his own “Patricia“, both released in 1958. In the 1960s, Pérez Prado’s popularity waned with the advent of other Latin dance rhythms such as pachanga and, later, boogaloo. Despite several innovative albums and a new form of mambo he called “dengue”, Pérez Prado moved back to Mexico in the 1970s, where became a naturalized citizen in 1980. He died there in 1989. His son, Pérez Jr., continues to direct the Pérez Prado Orchestra in Mexico City to this day.

Carlos Gardel (born Charles Romuald Gardès; 11 December 1890 – 24 June 1935) was a French Argentinesinger, songwriter, composer and actor, and the most prominent figure in the history of tango. He was one of the most influential interpreters of world popular music in the first half of the 20th century. He was notable for his baritone voice and the dramatic phrasing of his lyrics. Together with lyricist and long-time collaborator Alfredo Le Pera, Gardel wrote several classic tangos.

Gardel died in an airplane crash at the height of his career, becoming an archetypal tragic hero mourned throughout Latin America. For many, Gardel embodies the soul of the tango style. He is commonly referred to as “Carlitos”, “El Zorzal” (“The Song thrush“), “The King of Tango”, “El Mago” (The Wizard), “El Morocho del Abasto” (The Brunette boy from Abasto), and ironically “El Mudo” (The Mute).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uauAL0q26sI

In flamenco a tango (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈtaŋɡo]) is one of the flamenco palos closely related in form and feeling to the rumba flamenca. It is often performed as a finale to a flamenco tiento. Its compás and llamada are the same as that of the farruca and share the farruca’s lively nature. However, the tango is normally performed in the A Phrygian mode. In some English sources the flamenco tango is written with an -s; “the tangos is…”

The flamenco tango is distinct from the flamenco rumba primarily through the guitar playing. In Rumba the guitar flows more freely, whereas in Tangos the accents on beats 2, 3 & 4 are marked clearly with heavy strumming.

Tangos is only vaguely related to Argentine tango, and objectively they only share compás binario or double stroke rhythm. The fact that Argentine tango is one of the first couple dances in America has led historians to believe that both could be based in a minuet-style European dance, therefore sharing a common ancestor, while those who compare the present day forms do not see them as related.