mick laBriola

Secondo “Conte” Candoli (July 12, 1927 – December 14, 2001) was an American jazz trumpeter based on the West Coast. He played in the big bands of Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, Benny Goodman, and Dizzy Gillespie, and in Doc Severinsen‘s NBC Orchestra on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. He played with Gerry Mulligan, and on Frank Sinatra‘s TV specials. He also recorded with Supersax, a Charlie Parker tribute band that consisted of a saxophone quintet, the rhythm section, and either a trumpet or trombone.

Conte was the younger brother of trumpeter Pete Candoli. He was born in Mishawaka, Indiana, on July 12, 1927. During the summer of 1943, while at Mishawaka High School, Secondo “Conte” Candoli sat in with Woody Herman‘s First Herd. After graduating in 1945, he joined the band full-time, where he sat side by side with his brother Pete in the trumpet section. Conte immediately went on the road, where he stayed for the next ten years, with Herman, Stan Kenton, Benny Goodman, and Dizzy Gillespie.

In 1954, after leaving Stan Kenton, Candoli formed his own group with sidemen Chubby Jackson, Frank Rosolino, and Lou Levy. He soon moved to Los Angeles to join the Lighthouse All-Stars with Shorty Rogers, Bud Shank, and Bob Cooper, and was with them for four years.

Candoli’s long relationship with The Tonight Show began in 1967 and he became a permanent fixture in the orchestra’s trumpet section when Johnny Carson moved the show to Burbank, California in 1972. For many years he preferred to stay in California where he could do The Tonight Show, take all the studio work he wanted, and do occasional concerts and clinics. He ventured to Kansas in 1986 as a WJF All-Star with Jerome Richardson, Barney Kessel and Monty Alexander at the 1986 Wichita Jazz Festival. After Carson’s retirement in 1992, he traveled occasionally with Doc Severinsen, but still enjoyed his solo playing.

Paul Gonsalves (July 12, 1920 – May 15, 1974) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist  best known for his association with Duke Ellington. At the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, Gonsalves played a 27-chorus solo in the middle of Ellington’s “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” a performance credited with revitalizing Ellington’s waning career in the 1950s.

Born in Brockton, Massachusetts, to Cape Verdean parents, Gonsalves’ first instrument was the guitar, and as a child he was regularly asked to play Cape Verdean folk songs for his family. He grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and played as a member of the Sabby Lewis Orchestra. His first professional engagement in Boston was with the same group on tenor saxophone, in which he played before and after his military service during World War II. Before joining Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1950, he also played in big bands led by Count Basie (1947–1949) and Dizzy Gillespie(1949–1950).

At the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, Gonsalves’ solo in Ellington’s song “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” went through 27 choruses; the publicity from this performance is credited with reviving Ellington’s career. The performance is captured on the album Ellington at Newport. Gonsalves was a featured soloist in numerous Ellingtonian settings. He received the nickname “The Strolling Violins” from Ellington for playing solos while walking through the crowd.

Comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) is now sweeping through northern skies. Its developing tails stretch some six degrees across this telescopic field of view, recorded from Brno, Czech Republic before daybreak on July 10. Pushed out by the pressure of sunlight itself, the comet’s broad, yellowish dust tail is easiest to see. But the image also captures a fainter, more bluish tail too, separate from the reflective comet dust. The fainter tail is an ion tail, formed as ions from the cometary coma are dragged outward by magnetic fields in the solar wind and fluoresce in the sunlight. In this sharp portrait of our new visitor from the outer Solar System, the tails of comet NEOWISE are reminiscent of the even brighter tails of Hale Bopp, the Great Comet of 1997.

Michael Rose (born 11 July 1957) is a Grammy award-winning reggae singer from Jamaica. Possessing a wide-ranged voice, Rose would regularly meet in Kingston with singers, musicians, writers, and producers such as Dennis Brown, Big Youth, The Wailers, Gregory Isaacs, Sly and Robbie, and others.

Rose started his recording career as a solo artist for record producers Yabby You and Niney the Observer. He joined Black Uhuru in 1977 after the departure of Don Carlos and Garth Dennis. He led them to international success in the early 1980s, having written most of their popular material. They won the first-ever Grammy Award for reggae in 1985 for the album Anthem, with the hallmark voice of Rose in the forefront.

After the release of Anthem, Rose left Black Uhuru and retired to the Blue Mountains in Jamaica to start a coffee farm. He released a string of singles in Jamaica, but nothing much was heard of him outside the island until 1989, when he was signed to RCA and released the strongly pop influenced album Proud in Europe and Japan. The deal with RCA was short-lived however, and Rose returned to Jamaica to record a new string of Sly and Robbie produced singles. He also recorded for other producers but the only albums during this period were the Japan only releases Bonanza (1991) and King Of General (1992). The Sly and Robbie produced singles were eventually released on the vinyl only Sly And Robbie presents: Mykall Rose – The Taxi Sessions in 1995 also saw his American debut as a solo artist with the album Michael Rose on Heartbeat Records. The single “Short Temper” reached No. 2 on the Gavin reggae chart.

In the period 1995–2004 Heartbeat Records released a total of nine albums including Party in Session: Live and a compilation entitled Happiness: The Best Of Michael Rose. Next to these albums, a great amount of different recordings appeared on dozens of Jamaican vinyl singles and several albums, including “Last Chance” which was No. 1 on the UK reggae charts for several weeks. He also recorded “Michael Rows the Boat Ashore” in 2001.

Oscar Emilio León Somoza (born July 11, 1943), known as Oscar D’León, and affectionately called The Pharaoh of Salsa, The Lion of Salsa, The Devil of Salsa, and the Son singer of the World, is a Venezuelan musician best known for his work with salsa music. He is the author of “Llorarás”, which he recorded in 1975 with his group La Dimensión Latina. He is also ambassador for Operation Smile. Oscar D’León was a long-time resident of the Parroquia Antímano section of Caracas (his father was a laborer at the neighborhood cemetery). He had a strong interest in percussion ever since he was a child, improvising bass parts with his throat while playing Latin rhythms with his hands on any available surface. He got in trouble in school early on for doing this constantly. He then took interest in the upright bass (he learned the instrument on his own), and would eventually alternate in jobs as an auto mechanic, assembly line worker or taxi driver (during the day) and bass player (at night) for local conjuntos [literally means an “assembly”, but represents a small musical band popularized in Cuba, whereby musicians on bass, guitar, and percussion would all sing local folk songs]. As he acquired a reputation for being a solid bass player, clever improviser (he would improvise entire songs on the spot), humorous entertainer and dynamic singer (he used to dance with a double bass onstage while singing, a not-so-subtle physical feat), he founded orchestras such as La Golden Star and music groups such as Los Psicodélicos. Together with percussionist José Rodríguez and trombone players César Monge and José Antonio Rojas, he formed La Dimensión Latina in 1972.

Four years later, D’León quit the group and created La Salsa Mayor. With La Salsa Mayor he recorded the merengue standard “Juanita Morell”, a version that became a radio hit in Puerto Rico. He later founded La Crítica in 1978 in memory of the legends of Cuban Rumba, such as Miguelito Valdés. For a while, D’León would alternate singing with both orchestras, giving him enough flexibility to stay working constantly.

Ronald Augustus “Ronnie” Mack (July 11, 1940 – circa late 1963) was an American songwriter, singer and talent manager who wrote “He’s So Fine“, a number one chart hit in 1963 for the Chiffons and the apparent inspiration for George Harrison‘s “My Sweet Lord“. Mack’s early death reportedly inspired Holland, Dozier and Holland to write the song “Jimmy Mack“.

Ronnie Mack (known to his friends as Rocco) grew up in Harlem, New York City, and loved music from childhood, teaching himself to play piano. By the mid-1950s he started writing songs, and also performed in a doo-wop vocal group, the Marquis, which unusually for the time featured a female lead singer, June Bateman (who later married musician Noble “Thin Man” Watts). In 1956, the group recorded a song co-written by Mack, “Bohemian Daddy”, for the Onyx record label. After the Marquis split up, Mack formed a new group, the Highlights, who included singer Joyce Peterson, but they never recorded.

Mack moved to the Bronx but kept in touch with his Harlem friends and continued writing songs. He started writing for, and managing, another vocal group, the Young Lads, featuring lead singer Jimmy Rivers, and suggested that they add a female singer, Joyce Peterson’s younger sister Sylvia. The group then became Four Bees and a Gee (for four boys and a girl), and auditioned with several of Mack’s songs for Richard Barrett at Gone Records. Barrett renamed the group the Tops, and recorded them on one of Mack’s up-tempo songs, “Puppy Love” (not the song of the same name written by Paul Anka). The song was first issued in late 1958 on the V-Tone label, and then on several other labels credited to Little Jimmy Rivers and the Tops. In late 1961, it was re-promoted and reissued more successfully in Philadelphia, and Rivers appeared as a solo act performing it on American Bandstand, but it failed to make the national charts.

In the Bronx, Mack heard a trio of students from James Monroe High School singing, and suggested that Sylvia Peterson join them. Mack rewrote one of the songs he had written for the Tops, “She’s So Fine”, originally written about Peterson, and changed the lyrics for the girl group to sing as “He’s So Fine”. The group, which Mack renamed the Chiffons, made a demo of several of Mack’s songs, which he took to Hank Medress at Bright Tunes, a music publishing company set up by members of the Tokens. Jay Siegel of the Tokens later said of Mack’s songs: “They had the most incredible lyrics; not intellectual lyrics, but just the things that people speak of in everyday language. Most people don’t have the talent to write them down as music, but he did…. [Had he lived] he…would have been one of the most successful songwriters of the ’60s.”

The Chiffons re-recorded “He’s So Fine” with members of the Tokens and with Carole King on piano, and it was released by Laurie Records in late 1962, reaching number one on both the BillboardHot 100 and the R&B chart in March 1963. As a follow-up, the Chiffons also recorded another of Mack’s songs, “Lucky Me”, but it was unsuccessful.

By the time “He’s So Fine” had started to become a chart hit, Mack was already terminally ill with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He died, aged 23, in 1963, by which time the royalties received for the song had begun to raise his family out of poverty.

July 11th 1938

Terry Garthwaite is an internationally known singer, songwriter, composer, producer, and teacher. Her recording career dates back to the late 1960s when she and Toni Brown formed the rock group Joy of Cooking. She recorded several albums with the band, and then a dozen others by herself or in collaboration with other jazz and blues musicians.
Terry has also produced recordings by other artists including Jasmine, Rosalie Sorrels, Rhiannon, Nicholas, Glover &Wray, Hunter Davis, Robin Flower, and Ferron, whose Garthwaite-produced Shadows on a Dime was awarded four stars by Rolling Stone.

In performance she has shared the stage with such artists as BB King, Janis Joplin, Bonnie Raitt, The Band, Allen Ginsberg, Santana, Rosalie Sorrels and writer Bobbie Hawkins at venues that include Carnegie Hall, the Joseph Papp Theater, the Hollywood Bowl, and Canadian Folk Festivals.

Terry’s recent recordings and writing reflect an awareness of the healing nature of music. In 1992 she recorded her critically acclaimed Affirhythms – rhythmic affirmation chantsongs, and followed it in 2000 with Sacred Circles, songs of hope and heart.

In 2006, Terry began collaborating again with Toni Brown to put together a Joy of Cooking compilation. They pored through old tapes of live performances and studio forays–from their earliest beginnings in 1968–to find the best material with the best performances. The result is the double CD “Back to Your Heart”, one disc of studio takes of never-released songs, and the other a live Berkeley concert from the early ’70s.

Captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, this image shows NGC 7513, a barred spiral galaxy. Located approximately 60 million light-years away, NGC 7513 lies within the Sculptor constellation in the southern hemisphere.

This galaxy is moving at the astounding speed of 1564 kilometres per second, and it is heading away from us. For context, the Earth orbits the Sun at about 30 kilometres per second. Though NGC 7513’s apparent movement away from the Milky Way might seem strange, it is not that unusual.

While some galaxies, like the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, are caught in each other’s gravitational pull and will eventually merge together, the vast majority of  galaxies in our Universe appear to be moving away from each other. This phenomenon is due to the expansion of the Universe, and it is the space between galaxies that is stretching, rather than the galaxies themselves moving.

Béla Anton Leoš Fleck (born July 10, 1958) is an American banjo player. An innovative and technically proficient banjo player, he is best known for his work with the bands New Grass Revival and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones.

A native of New York City, Fleck was named after Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, Austrian composer Anton Webern, and Czech composer Leoš Janáček. He was drawn to the banjo at a young age when he heard Earl Scruggs play the theme song for the television show Beverly Hillbillies and when he heard “Dueling Banjos” by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell on the radio. At age of 15, he received his first banjo from his grandfather. During the train ride home, a man volunteered to tune the banjo and suggested he learn from the book How to Play the Five String Banjo by Pete Seeger. He attended the High School of Music & Art in New York City, playing French horn until he flunked and was transferred to the choir, though he spent most of his time on the banjo. He studied the book Bluegrass Banjo by Pete Wernick and took lessons from Erik Darling, Marc Horowitz, and Tony Trischka.

After graduating from high school, he moved to Boston and became a member of the group Tasty Licks, with whom he recorded two albums. He released his debut solo album, Crossing the Tracks (1979), and it was chosen Best Overall Album by the readers of Frets magazine.

Fleck played on the streets of Boston with bassist Mark Schatz. Along with guitarist Glen Lawson and mandolinist Jimmy Gaudreau, they formed Spectrum in 1981. That same year, Sam Bush asked Fleck to join New Grass Revival. Fleck performed with New Grass Revival for nine years. During this time, in 1987 Fleck recorded another solo album, Drive, which was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1988 for Best Bluegrass Album. During the 1980s Fleck and Bush also performed live with Doc Watson and Merle Watson in bluegrass festivals, most notably the annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Bela also played with Jerry Garcia at the Hearst Greek Theatre on August 5, 1990.

Arlo Davy Guthrie (born July 10, 1947) is an American folk singer-songwriter. He is known for singing songs of protest against social injustice, and storytelling while performing songs, following the tradition of his father Woody Guthrie. Guthrie’s best-known work is his debut piece, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree“, a satirical talking blues song about 18 minutes in length that has since become a Thanksgiving anthem. His only top-40 hit was a cover of Steve Goodman‘s “City of New Orleans“. His song “Massachusetts” was named the official folk song of the state in which he has lived most of his adult life. Guthrie has also made several acting appearances. He is the father of four children, who have also had careers as musicians.

Guthrie was born in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, the son of the folk singer and composer Woody Guthrie and dancer Marjorie Mazia Guthrie. His sister is the record producer Nora Guthrie. His mother was a professional dancer with the Martha Graham Company and founder of the Committee to Combat Huntington’s disease (later Huntington’s Disease Society of America), the illness from which Woody Guthrie died in 1967. Arlo’s father was from a Protestant family and his mother was Jewish. His maternal grandmother was the renowned Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt.

Henry “Hank” Mobley (July 7, 1930 – May 30, 1986) was an American hard bop and soul jazz tenor saxophonist and composer. Mobley was described by Leonard Feather as the “middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone”, a metaphor used to describe his tone, that was neither as aggressive as John Coltrane nor as mellow as Stan Getz, and his style that was laid-back, subtle and melodic, especially in contrast with players like Sonny Rollins and Coltrane. The critic Stacia Proefrock claimed he is “one of the most underrated musicians of the bop era.”

Mobley was born in Eastman, Georgia, but was raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, near Newark. When he was 16, an illness kept him in the house for several months. His grandmother thought of buying a saxophone to help him occupy his time, and it was then that Mobley began to play. He tried to enter a music school in Newark, but could not, since he was not a resident, so he instead studied music through books at home.

At 19, he started to play with local bands and, months later, worked for the first time with musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach. He took part in one of the earliest hard bop sessions, alongside Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Doug Watkins and trumpeter Kenny Dorham. The results of these sessions were released as Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers. When The Jazz Messengers split in 1956, Mobley continued on with pianist Silver for a short time, although he did work again with Blakey some years later, when the drummer appeared on Mobley’s albums in the early 1960s.

In 1956, Mobley recorded the album Mobley’s Message with Jackie McLean and Donald Byrd. AllMusic gave the album 4 stars out of 5, and users gave the album 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Blind Boy Fuller (born Fulton Allen, July 10, 1904 or 1907 – February 13, 1941) was an American blues guitarist and singer. Fuller was one of the most popular of the recorded Piedmont blues artists with rural African Americans along with Blind Blake, Josh White, and Buddy Moss.

Allen was born in Wadesboro, North Carolina, United States, one of ten children of Calvin Allen and Mary Jane Walker. Most sources date his birth to 1907, but the researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc indicate 1904. After the death of his mother, he moved with his father to Rockingham, North Carolina. As a boy he learned to play the guitar and also learned from older singers the field hollers, country rags, traditional songs and bluespopular in poor rural areas.

He married young, to Cora Allen, and worked as a laborer. He began to lose his eyesight when he was in his mid-teens. According to the researcher Bruce Bastin, “While he was living in Rockingham he began to have trouble with his eyes. He went to see a doctor in Charlotte who allegedly told him that he had ulcers behind his eyes, the original damage having been caused by some form of snow-blindness.” Only the first part of this diagnosis was correct. A 1937 eye examination attributed his vision loss to the long-term effects of untreated neonatal conjunctivitis.

By 1928 he was completely blind. He turned to whatever employment he could find as a singer and entertainer, often playing in the streets. By studying the records of country blues players like Blind Blake and live performances by Gary Davis, Allen became a formidable guitarist, playing on street corners and at house parties in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Danville, Virginia; and then Durham, North Carolina. In Durham, playing around the tobacco warehouses, he developed a local following, which included the guitarists Floyd Council and Richard Trice, the harmonica player Saunders Terrell (better known as Sonny Terry), and the washboard player and guitarist George Washington.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FShhBW-NBPQ

Fandango is a lively couples dance originating from Portugal and Spain, usually in triple metre, traditionally accompanied by guitars, castanets, or hand-clapping (“palmas” in Spanish). Fandango can both be sung and danced. Sung fandango is usually bipartite: it has an instrumental introduction followed by “variaciones”. Sung fandango usually follows the structure of “cante” that consist of four or five octosyllabic verses (coplas) or musical phrases (tercios). Occasionally, the first copla is repeated.

Fandango rhythm. The meter of fandango is similar to that of the bolero and seguidilla.