mick laBriola

Oscar Emmanuel Peterson CC CQ OOnt (August 15, 1925 – December 23, 2007 Montreal) was a Canadian jazzpianist and composer. Considered a virtuoso and one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, Peterson released more than 200 recordings, won eight Grammy Awards, as well as a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy, and received numerous other awards and honours. He played thousands of concerts worldwide in a career lasting more than 60 years. He was called the “Maharaja of the keyboard” by Duke Ellington, simply “O.P.” by his friends, and informally in the jazz community, “the King of inside swing”.

Peterson worked in duos with Sam Jones, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Joe Pass, Irving Ashby, Count Basie, and Herbie Hancock. He considered the trio with Ray Brown and Herb Ellis “the most stimulating” and productive setting for public performances and studio recordings. In the early 1950s, he began performing with Brown and drummer Charlie Smith as the Oscar Peterson Trio. Shortly afterward Smith was replaced by guitarist Irving Ashby, who had been a member of the Nat King Cole Trio. Ashby, who was a swing guitarist, was soon replaced by Kessel. Their last recording, On the Town with the Oscar Peterson Trio, recorded live at the Town Tavern in Toronto, captured a remarkable degree of emotional as well as musical understanding among three players.

Peterson won eight Grammy Awards during his lifetime between 1975 and 1997. He is considered among the best jazz pianists and jazz improvisers of the twentieth century.

Ben Hirsh Sidran (born August 14, 1943) is an American jazz and rock keyboardist, producer, label owner, and music writer. Early in his career he was a member of the Steve Miller Band and is the father of Grammy-nominated musician, composer and performer Leo Sidran.

He was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Sidran was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961, where he became a member of The Ardells with Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs. When Miller and Scaggs left Wisconsin for the West Coast, Sidran stayed behind to earn a degree in English literature. After graduating in 1966, he enrolled in the University of Sussex, England, to pursue a PhD. While in England, he was a session musician for Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, Peter Frampton, and Charlie Watts.

Edwin James Costa (August 14, 1930 – July 28, 1962 Atlas, PA) was an American jazz pianist, vibraphonist, composer and arranger. In 1957, he was chosen as DownBeat jazz critics’ new star on piano and vibes – the first time that one artist won two categories in the same year. He became known for his percussive, driving piano style that concentrated on the lower octaves of the keyboard.

Costa had an eight-year recording career, during which he appeared on more than 100 albums; five of these were under his own leadership. As a sideman, he appeared in orchestras led by Manny Albam, Gil Evans, Woody Herman and others; played in smaller groups led by musicians including Tal Farlow, Coleman Hawkins, Gunther Schuller, and Phil Woods; and accompanied vocalists including Tony Bennett and Chris Connor. Costa died, aged 31, in a car accident in New York City.

Hezekiah Leroy Gordon Smith (August 14, 1909 – September 25, 1967), better known as Stuff Smith, was an American jazz violinist. He is well known for the song “If You’re a Viper” (the original title was “You’se a Viper”).

Smith was, along with Stéphane Grappelli, Michel Warlop, Svend Asmussen, Ray Nance and Joe Venuti, one of jazz music’s preeminent violinists of the swing era. He was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, United States in 1909, and studied violin with his father.

Daniel Grayling Fogelberg (August 13, 1951 – December 16, 2007) was an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. He is primarily known for his 1980s soft rock hits, including “Longer” (1980), “Same Old Lang Syne” (1981), and “Leader of the Band” (1982). Dan Fogelberg was born in Peoria, Illinois. In May 2004, Fogelberg was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. After undergoing therapy, his cancer went into partial remission. In August 2005, Fogelberg announced the success of his cancer treatments. However, his cancer returned and on December 16, 2007, Fogelberg died at home in Deer Isle, Maine, at the age of 56.

Joe Puma (August 13, 1927 – May 31, 2000) was an American jazz guitarist.

Puma was born in the Bronx, New York. His first professional experience came with Joe Roland in 1949–50. He played in the band led by Cy Coleman. He acted as a session musician for many jazz musicians during the 1950s, including Louie Bellson, Artie Shaw‘s Gramercy Five, Eddie Bert, Herbie Mann, Mat Mathews, Chris Connor, and Paul Quinichette, Lee Konitz, and Dick Hyman; he also recorded extensively as a leader at this time. In the 1960s, he worked with Morgana King, Bobby Hackett, Gary Burton, and Carmen McRae, and between 1972 and 1977 he and Chuck Wayne led an ensemble. He continued to perform and teach into the late 1990s.

Frank “Son” Seals (August 13, 1942 – December 20, 2004) was an American electric blues guitarist and singer. In 2009, Seals was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.

Seals was born in Osceola, Arkansas, where his father, Jim “Son” Seals, owned a small juke joint, called the Dipsy Doodle Club. He began performing professionally by the age of 13, first as a drummer with Robert Nighthawk and later as a guitarist. At age 16, he began to play at the T-99, a local upper-echelon club, with his brother-in-law Walter “Little Walter” Jefferson. He played there with prominent blues musicians, including Albert King, Rufus Thomas, Bobby Bland, Junior Parker, and Rosco Gordon.

Sir George Albert Shearing OBE (13 August 1919 – 14 February 2011) was a British jazz pianist who for many years led a popular jazz group that recorded for Discovery Records, MGM Records and Capitol Records. Shearing was the composer of over 300 songs, including the jazz standards “Lullaby of Birdland” and “Conception“, and had multiple albums on the Billboard charts during the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s and 1990s.

Robert Henry “Baby Boy” Warren (August 13, 1919 – July 1, 1977), was an American blues singer and guitarist who was a leading figure on the Detroit bluesscene in the 1950s.

Warren was born in Lake Providence, Louisiana, in 1919, and at the age of three months moved with his parents to Memphis, Tennessee. He was interested in music from an early age and was working occasionally as a musician from around 1931, when he dropped out of school, having learned to play guitar from two of his older brothers.

Anna Mae Winburn (née Darden; August 13, 1913 – September 30, 1999) was an American vocalist and jazzbandleader who flourished beginning in the mid-1930s. An African-American, she is best known for having directed the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female big band that was perhaps one of the few – and one of the most – racially integrated dance-bands of the swing era. In 1944, the band was named as the country’s favorite all-female orchestra in a DownBeatmagazine poll.

Anna Mae Darden was born in Port Royal, Tennessee, to Andrew Jackson Darden (1881–1956) and Lula Carnell (maiden; 1882–1929), a musical family.