mick laBriola

Clifford Everett “Bud” Shank, Jr. (May 27, 1926 – April 2, 2009) was an American alto saxophonist and flautist. He rose to prominence in the early 1950s playing lead alto and flute in Stan Kenton‘s Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra and throughout the decade worked in various small jazz combos. He spent the 1960s as a first-call studio musician in Hollywood. In the 1970s and 1980s, he performed regularly with the L. A. Four. Shank ultimately abandoned the flute to focus exclusively on playing jazz on the alto saxophone. He also recorded on tenor and baritone sax. His most famous recording is probably the version of Harlem Nocturne used as the theme song in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. He is also well known for the alto flute solo on the song “California Dreamin’” recorded by The Mamas & the Papas in 1965.

Bud Shank was born in Dayton, Ohio. He began with clarinet in Vandalia, Ohio, but had switched to saxophone before attending the University of North Carolina. While at UNC, Shank was initiated into the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. In 1946 he worked with Charlie Barnet before moving on to Kenton and the West coast jazz scene. He also had a strong interest in what might now be termed world music, playing Brazilian-influenced jazz with Laurindo Almeida in 1953–54. In 1958 he is the first American jazz musician to record in Italy with an Italian jazz orchestra conducted by Ezio Leoni(aka Len Mercer), paving the way for Chet Baker and others who would follow Shank’s tracks recording in Milan with Maestro Leoni. His world music collaborations continued in 1962, fusing jazz with Indian traditions in collaboration with Indian composer and sitar player Ravi Shankar.

In 1974, Shank joined with Ray Brown, Shelly Manne (replaced by Jeff Hamilton after 1977), and Laurindo Almeida to form the group the L.A. Four, who recorded and toured extensively through 1982. Shank helped to popularize both Latin-flavored and chamber jazz music, and as a musician’s musician also performed with orchestras as diverse as the Royal Philharmonic, the New American Orchestra, the Gerald Wilson Big Band, Stan Kenton‘s Neophonic Orchestra, and Duke Ellington.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRsde9y6c8I

Messier 99 or M99, also known as NGC 4254, is a grand design spiral galaxy in the northern constellation Coma Berenices approximately 15 megaparsecs (49 megalight-years) in distance from the Milky Way. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain on March 17, 1781. The discovery was then reported to Charles Messier, who included the object in the Messier Catalogue of comet-like objects. Messier 99 was one of the first galaxies in which a spiral pattern was seen. This pattern was first identified by Lord Rosse in the spring of 1846.

This galaxy has a morphological classification of SA(s)c, indicating a pure spiral shape with loosely wound arms. It has a peculiar shape with one normal looking arm and an extended arm that is less tightly wound. The galaxy is inclined by 42° to the line-of-sight with a major axis position angle of 68°. Four supernovae have been observed in this galaxy: SN 1967H (type II), 1972Q, 1986I (type II), and 2014L (type Ic).

A bridge of neutral hydrogen gas links NGC 4254 with VIRGOHI21, an HI region and a possible dark galaxy. The gravity from the latter may have distorted M99 and drawn out the gas bridge, as the two galaxy-sized objects may have had a close encounter before they went their separate ways. However, VIRGOHI21 may instead be tidal debris from an interaction with the lenticular galaxy NGC 4262 some 280 million years ago. It is expected that the drawn out arm will relax to match the normal arm once the encounter is over.

While not classified as a starburst galaxy, M99 has a star formation activity three times larger than other galaxies of similar Hubble type that may have been triggered by the encounter. M99 is likely entering the Virgo Cluster for the first time and is located at the periphery of the cluster at a projected separation of 3.7°, or around one megaparsec, from the cluster center at Messier 87. The galaxy is undergoing ram-pressure stripping as it moves through the intracluster medium

Severino Dias de Oliveira (26 May 1930 – 14 December 2006 in , known professionally as Sivuca, was a Brazilian accordionist and guitarist. In addition to his home state of Paraíba, and cities Recife and Rio de Janeiro, he worked and lived in Paris, Lisbon, and New York City intermittently. He was an albino.

He worked with Scandinavian jazz musicians in the 1980s. His most famous songs are João e Maria with lyrics by Chico Buarque and “Feira de Mangaio”, named after the artisan markets of northeast Brazil. He used makeshift instruments alongside conventional ones and combined traditional regional styles such as forró and choro with jazz, bossa nova, and classical music. Sivuca and Hermeto Pascoal, both versatile multi-instrumentalists with albinism, worked together and are sometimes confused with each other.

Mark Lavon “Levon” Helm (May 26, 1940 – April 19, 2012) was an American musician and actor who achieved fame as the drummer and one of the vocalists for The Band. Helm was known for his deeply soulful, country-accented voice, multi-instrumental ability, and creative drumming style, highlighted on many of The Band’s recordings, such as “The Weight“, “Up on Cripple Creek“, and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down“.

Helm also had a successful career as a film actor, appearing as Loretta Lynn‘s father in Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), as Chuck Yeager‘s friend and colleague Captain Jack Ridley in The Right Stuff (1983), and as a Tennessee firearms expert in Shooter (2007).

In 1998, Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer, which caused him to lose his singing voice. After treatment, his cancer eventually went into remission, and he gradually regained the use of his voice. His 2007 comeback album Dirt Farmer earned the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album in February 2008, and in November of that year, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him No. 91 in its list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. In 2010, Electric Dirt, his 2009 follow-up to Dirt Farmer, won the first Grammy Award for Best Americana Album, a category inaugurated in 2010. In 2011, his live album Ramble at the Ryman won the Grammy in the same category. On April 17, 2012, his wife and daughter announced on Helm’s website that he was “in the final stages of his battle with cancer” and thanked fans while requesting prayers. Two days later, Helm died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991 Alton, Ill) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musical directions in a five-decade career that kept him at the forefront of many major stylistic developments in jazz.

Born in Alton, Illinois, and raised in East St. Louis, Davis left to study at the Juilliard School in New York City, before dropping out and making his professional debut as a member of saxophonist Charlie Parker‘s bebop quintet from 1944 to 1948. Shortly after, he recorded the Birth of the Coolsessions for Capitol Records, which were instrumental to the development of cool jazz. In the early 1950s, Miles Davis recorded some of the earliest hard bop music while on Prestige Records but did so haphazardly due to a heroin addiction. After a widely acclaimed comeback performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955, he signed a long-term contract with Columbia Records and recorded the 1957 album ‘Round About Midnight. It was his first work with saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers, key members of the sextet he led into the early 1960s. During this period, he alternated between orchestral jazz collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, such as the Spanish-influenced Sketches of Spain (1960), and band recordings, such as Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959). The latter recording remains one of the most popular jazz albums of all time, having sold over five million copies in the U.S.

Davis made several lineup changes while recording Someday My Prince Will Come (1961), his 1961 Blackhawk concerts, and Seven Steps to Heaven(1963), another mainstream success that introduced bassist Ron Carter, pianist Herbie Hancock, and drummer Tony Williams. After adding saxophonist Wayne Shorter to his new quintet in 1964, Davis led them on a series of more abstract recordings often composed by the band members, helping pioneer the post-bop genre with albums such as E.S.P (1965) and Miles Smiles (1967), before transitioning into his electric period. During the 1970s, he experimented with rock, funk, African rhythms, emerging electronic music technology, and an ever-changing line-up of musicians, including keyboardist Joe Zawinul, drummer Al Foster, and guitarist John McLaughlin. This period, beginning with Davis’ 1969 studio album In a Silent Way and concluding with the 1975 concert recording Agharta, was the most controversial in his career, alienating and challenging many in jazz. His million-selling 1970 record Bitches Brew helped spark a resurgence in the genre’s commercial popularity with jazz fusion as the decade progressed.

After a five-year retirement due to poor health, Davis resumed his career in the 1980s, employing younger musicians and pop sounds on albums such as The Man with the Horn (1981) and Tutu (1986). Critics were generally unreceptive but the decade garnered the trumpeter his highest level of commercial recognition. He performed sold-out concerts worldwide, while branching out into visual arts, film, and television work, before his death in 1991 from the combined effects of a stroke, pneumonia and respiratory failure. In 2006, Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,which recognized him as “one of the key figures in the history of jazz.” Rolling Stone described him as “the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century,” while Gerald Early called him inarguably one of the most influential and innovative musicians of that period.

Rubén González Fontanills (May 26, 1919 – December 8, 2003) was a Cuban pianist. Together with Lilí Martínez and Peruchín he is said to have “forged the style of modern Cuban piano playing in the 1940s”.

Between the 1940s and his retirement in the 1980s, he played with Cuba’s most successful acts, including Paulina Álvarez, Arsenio Rodríguez, Orquesta América del 55, Orquesta Riverside and Enrique Jorrín. In the 1990s, he came out of retirement to play in the revival ensembles Afro-Cuban All Stars and Buena Vista Social Club, also recording solo material and performing live until 2002. González was born in Santa Clara, Cuba on May 26, 1919. His family moved to the small village of Encrucijada when he was 6 years old. He took up the piano at age 7 and graduated from the Cienfuegos Conservatory at age 15.

To date over 345,000 people have perished from COVID-19. Let us honor all of the victims and fight to survive in our Universal Struggle.

Honoring my dad Mike Labriola who served in the US Army during WWII and suffered greatly as he served in Italy his birthplace.

Mystic Mountain is a photograph and a term for a region in the Carina Nebula imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. The view was captured by the then-new Wide Field Camera 3, though the region was also viewed by the previous generation instrument. The new view celebrated the telescope’s 20th anniversary of being in space in 2010. Mystic Mountain contains multiple Herbig-Haro objects where nascent stars are firing off jets of gas which interact with surrounding clouds of gas and dust.

This region is about 7,500 light-years (2,300 pc) away from Earth. The pillar measures around three light-years in height (190,000 astronomical units).

Wallace Roney (May 25, 1960 – March 31, 2020) was an American jazz (hard bop and post-bop) trumpeter.

Roney took lessons from Clark Terry and Dizzy Gillespie and studied with Miles Davis from 1985 until the latter’s death in 1991. Wallace credited Davis as having helped to challenge and shape his creative approach to life as well as being his music instructor, mentor, and friend; he was the only trumpet player Davis personally mentored.

Roney was born in Philadelphia. He attended Howard University and Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, after graduating from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts of the D. C. Public Schools, where he studied trumpet with Langston Fitzgerald of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Found to have perfect pitch at the age of four, Wallace began his musical and trumpet studies at Philadelphia’s Settlement School of Music.

He studied with trumpeter Sigmund Hering of the Philadelphia Orchestra for three years. Hering regularly presented Wallace at recitals at the Settlement School, and with the Philadelphia Brass Ensemble, during his studies in Philadelphia.

Norman Gary Foster (born May 25, 1936) is an American musician who plays saxophone, clarinet, and flute. He is considered a crossover artist, performing jazz, pop, and classical music. He has been prominent in the film, television, and music industries for five decades, having performed on over 500 movie scores and with over 200 orchestras.

He has recorded on numerous Grammy, Academy Award, Emmy, and Golden Globe winning media and soundtracks for artists and composers such as Carol Burnett, Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Mel Torme, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Frank Sinatra, Pat Williams, John Williams, Natalie Cole, Jerry Fielding, Cal Tjader, Marty Paich, and Michael Bublé.

Foster received the Most Valuable Player Award for woodwind doubling from The Recording Academy.

Gary Foster was born in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1936. He started on the clarinet at age thirteen. His first musical inspiration was Olin Parker, a school music director and teacher who introduced him to the music of Count Basie, Woody Herman, and many other types of music. He listened closely to the Woody Herman Orchestra’s recording of “Four Brothers”, which featured saxophonists Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, and Serge Chaloff. For Foster, Getz stood out on the tenor saxophone because of his tone. Foster also acknowledged the influence of Lester Young and Charlie Parker.

Jazz critic Zan Stewart compared Foster’s style to that of Lee Konitz, Paul Desmond, and Art Pepper (West Coast Jazz style). The music of Lennie Tristano and the concepts taught to him by Warne Marsh have been of great inspiration and influence over the years.

Marshall Belford Allen (born May 25, 1924) is an American free jazz and avant-garde jazz alto saxophone player. He also performs on flute, oboe, piccolo, and EVI (an electronic valve instrument made by Steiner, Crumar company).

Allen is best known for his work with Sun Ra, having recorded and performed mostly in this context since the late 1950s, and having led Sun Ra’s Arkestra since 1993. Critic Jason Ankeny describes Marshall as “one of the most distinctive and original saxophonists of the postwar era.” Marshall Allen was born in Louisville, Kentucky.

During the Second World War he enlisted in the 92nd Infantry Division and was stationed in France.^[3] Allen studied alto saxophone in Paris and played in Europe with Art Simmons and James Moody.

He is best known for his mastery of pyrotechnic effects on the alto – he has said that he “wanted to play on a broader sound basis rather than on chords” (1971 interview with Tam Fiofori)). The opportunity came through his long association with Sun Ra, with whom he performed almost exclusively from 1958 to Ra’s death in 1993, although he did record outside the Arkestra, with Paul Bley‘s group in 1964 and Olatunji‘s group during the mid-1960s. Critic Scott Yanow has described Allen’s playing as “Johnny Hodges from another dimension”.

Jimmy Hamilton (May 25, 1917 – September 20, 1994) was an American jazz clarinetist, tenor saxophonist, arranger, composer, and music educator, best known for his twenty-five years with Duke Ellington.

Hamilton was born in Dillon, South Carolina, and grew up in Philadelphia. Having originally learned to play piano and brass instruments, in the 1930s he started playing the latter in local bands, before switching to clarinet and saxophone. During this time he studied with renowned clarinet teacher Leon Russianoff. In 1939 he played with Lucky Millinder, Jimmy Mundy, and Bill Doggett, going on to join the Teddy Wilson sextet in 1940. After two years with Wilson, he played with Eddie Heywood and Yank Porter.

In 1943, he replaced Barney Bigard in the Duke Ellington orchestra, and stayed with Ellington until 1968. His style was very different on his two instruments: on tenor saxophone he had an R&B sound, while on clarinet he was much more precise and technical. He wrote some of his own material in his time with Ellington.

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (May 25, 1878 – November 25, 1949) was an American tap dancer, actor, and singer, the best known and the most highly paid black American entertainer in America during the first half of the twentieth century. His long career mirrored changes in American entertainment tastes and technology. His began in the age of minstrel shows and moved to vaudeville, Broadway theatre, the recording industry, Hollywood films, radio and television. According to dance critic Marshall Stearns, “Robinson’s contribution to tap dance is exact and specific. He brought it up on its toes, dancing upright and swinging”, giving tap dancing a “hitherto-unknown lightness and presence. His signature routine was the Stair Dance, in which he would tap up and down a set of stairs in a rhythmically complex sequence of steps, a routine that he unsuccessfully attempted to patent. He is also credited with having coined the word copacetic in popular culture via his repeated use of it in vaudeville and radio appearances.

Robinson was a popular figure in both the black and white entertainment worlds of his era. He is best known today for his dancing with Shirley Templein a series of films during the 1930s, and for starring in the musical Stormy Weather (1943), loosely based on his own life and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. He used his popularity to challenge and overcome numerous racial barriers, including becoming:

• one of the first minstrel and vaudeville performers to appear without the use of blackface makeup
• one of the earliest black performers to go solo, overcoming vaudeville’s two-colored rule^[4]
• a headliner in Broadway shows
• the first black performer to appear in a Hollywood film in an interracial dance team (with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel, 1935)
• the first black performer to headline a mixed-race Broadway production

Robinson came under heavy criticism for his tacit acceptance of racial stereotypes of the era, with critics calling him an Uncle Tom. He resented such criticism, and his biographers suggested that critics were at best incomplete in making such a characterization, especially given his efforts to overcome racial prejudice. In his public life, Robinson led efforts to:

• persuade the Dallas Police Department to hire its first black policeman
• lobby President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II for more equitable treatment of black soldiers
• stage the first integrated public event in Miami, a fundraiser which was attended by both black and white city residents