mick laBriola

John Symon Asher Bruce (14 May 1943 – 25 October 2014), known professionally as Jack Bruce, was a Scottish singer-songwriter, musician and composer. He gained popularity as the lead vocalist and bass guitarist of British rock band Cream. After the group disbanded in 1968, he pursued a solo career and also played with several bands.

In the early 1960s Bruce joined the Graham Bond Organisation, where he met his future bandmate Ginger Baker. After leaving the Graham Bond Organisation, he joined with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, where he met Eric Clapton, who also was his future bandmate. His time with the band was brief. In 1966, he formed Cream with lead guitarist Clapton and drummer Baker; he co-wrote some of their hits (including “Sunshine of Your Love“, “White Room” and “I Feel Free“) with songwriter Pete Brown. After the group disbanded Bruce formed his own blues-rock band West, Bruce and Laing in 1972, with guitarist Leslie West and drummer Corky Laing. In the late 1960s he began recording solo albums. His first solo album, Songs for a Tailor, released in 1969, was a worldwide hit. His solo career spanned several decades. From the 1970s to the 1990s he played with several groups as a touring member. He reunited with Cream in 2005 for concerts at the Royal Albert Hall and at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Bruce is considered to be one of the most important and influential bass guitarists of all time. Rolling Stone magazine readers ranked him number eight on their list of “10 Greatest Bass Guitarist Of All Time”. He was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, and was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, both as a member of Cream.

His first marriage was with Janet Godfrey in 1964, with whom he had two sons, Jonas and Malcolm. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1981. His second marriage was with Margret Seyfer in 1982, with whom he had two daughters Natascha, Kyla and a son named Corin. He died of liver disease on 25 October 2014 in England, aged 71. At the time of his death he had a net worth of 20 million dollars.

Warren Smith (born May 14, 1934) is an American jazz drummer and percussionist, known as a contributor to Max Roach‘s M’boom ensemble and leader of the Composer’s Workshop Ensemble (Strata-East).

Smith was born May 14, 1934, in Chicago, Illinois, to a musical family. His father played saxophone and clarinet with Noble Sissle and Jimmie Noone, and his mother was a harpist and pianist. At the age of four Smith studied clarinet with his father. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1957, then received a master’s degree in percussion from the Manhattan School of Music in 1958.

One of his earliest major recording dates was with Miles Davis as a vibraphonist in 1957. He found work in Broadway pit bands in 1958, and also played with Gil Evans that year. In 1961 he co-founded the Composers Workshop Ensemble. In the 1960s Smith accompanied Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Lloyd Price, and Nat King Cole; he worked with Sam Rivers from 1964–76 and with Gil Evans again from 1968 to 1976. In 1969 he played with Janis Joplin and in 1971 with King Curtis and Tony Williams. He was also a founding member of Max Roach‘s percussion ensemble, M’Boom, in 1970.

In the 1970s and 1980s Smith had a loft called Studio Wis that acted as a performing and recording space for many young New York jazz musicians, such as Wadada Leo Smith and Oliver Lake. Through the 1970s Smith played with Andrew White, Julius Hemphill, Muhal Richard Abrams, Nancy Wilson, Quincy Jones, Count Basie, and Carmen McRae. Other credits include extensive work with rock and pop musicians and time spent with Anthony Braxton, Charles Mingus, Henry Threadgill, Van Morrison, and Joe Zawinul. He continued to work on Broadway into the 1990s, and has performed with a number of classical ensembles.

Arthur James “Zutty” Singleton (May 14, 1898 – July 14, 1975) was an American jazz drummer.

Singleton was born in Bunkie, Louisiana, and raised in New Orleans. According to his Jazz Profiles biography:

His unusual nickname, acquired in infancy, is the Creole word for “cute.”

He was working professionally with Steve Lewis by 1915. He served with the United States Navy in World War I. After returning to New Orleans he worked with such bands as those of Papa Celestin, Big Eye Louis Nelson, John Robichaux, and Fate Marable. He left for St. Louis, Missouri, to play in Charlie Creath‘s band, then moved to Chicago.

In Chicago, Singleton played with Doc Cook, Dave Peyton, Jimmie Noone, and theater bands, then joined Louis Armstrong‘s band with Earl Hines. In 1928 and 1929, he performed on landmark recordings with Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. In 1929 he moved with Armstrong to New York City.

In addition to Armstrong, in New York Singleton played with Bubber Miley, Tommy Ladnier, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton and Otto Hardwick. He also played in the band backing Bill Robinson. In 1934, Singleton returned to Chicago. He returned to New York in 1937, working with Mezz Mezzrow and Sidney Bechet.

The British thriller writer, Eric Ambler, author of A Coffin for Dimitrios, and other novels, saw Singleton perform in New York in 1939 and became an instant fan. In his autobiography, Here Lies, Ambler mentions getting an autographed photo of the drummer, which he prized.

In 1943, he moved to Los Angeles, where he led his own band, played for motion pictures, and was featured on Orson Welles‘s CBS Radio series, The Orson Welles Almanac (1944). Later he worked with such jazz musicians as Slim Gaillard, Wingy Manone,Eddie Condon, Nappy Lamare, Art Hodes, Oran “Hot Lips” Page, and Max Kaminsky.

This spectacular color panorama of the center the Orion nebula is one of the largest pictures ever assembled from individual images taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The picture, seamlessly composited from a mosaic of 15 separate fields, covers an area of sky about five percent the area covered by the full Moon.

The seemingly infinite tapestry of rich detail revealed by Hubble shows a churning turbulent star factory set within a maelstrom of flowing, luminescent gas. Though this 2.5 light-years wide view is still a small portion of the entire nebula, it includes almost all of the light from the bright glowing clouds of gas and a star cluster associated with the nebula. Hubble reveals details as small as 4.1 billion miles across.

Hubble Space Telescope observing time was devoted to making this panorama because the nebula is a vast laboratory for studying the processes which gave birth to our own Sun and solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Many of the nebula’s details can’t be captured in a single picture – any more than one snapshot of the Grand Canyon yields clues to its formation and history. Like the Grand Canyon, the Orion nebula has a dramatic surface topography – of glowing gasses instead of rock – with peaks, valleys and walls. They are illuminated and heated by a torrent of energetic ultraviolet light from its four hottest and most massive stars, called the Trapezium, which lie near the center of the image.

In addition to the Trapezium, this stellar cavern contains 700 hundred other young stars at various stages of formation. High-speed jets of hot gas spewed by some of the infant stars send supersonic shock waves tearing into the nebula at 100,000 miles per hour. These shock waves appear as thin curved loops, sometimes with bright knots on their end (the brightest examples are near the bright star at the lower left).

Stevland Hardaway Morris (né Judkins; born May 13, 1950), known professionally as Stevie Wonder, is an American singer, songwriter, musician and record producer. A prominent figure in popular music, he is one of the most successful songwriters and musicians in the history of music.Through his heavy use of electronic instruments and innovative sounds, Wonder became a pioneer and influence to musicians of various genres including pop, rhythm and blues, soul, funk and rock.

Blind since shortly after his birth, Wonder was a child prodigy known as Little Stevie Wonder, leading him to sign with Motown‘s Tamla label at the age of 11. In 1963, the single “Fingertips” was a number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 when Wonder was aged 13, making him the youngest artist ever to top the chart. Wonder’s critical success was at its peak in the 1970s when he started his “classic period” in 1972 with the releases of Music of My Mind and Talking Book, with the latter featuring the number-one hit “Superstition“. “Superstition” is one of the most distinctive and famous examples of the sound of the Hohner Clavinet keyboard. With Innervisions (1973), Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974) and Songs in the Key of Life(1976) all winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, Wonder became the tied record holder, with Frank Sinatra, for the most Album of the Year wins with three. Wonder is also the only artist to have won the award with three consecutive album releases.

Wonder’s “classic period”, which is widely considered to have ended in 1977, was noted for his funky keyboard style, personal control of production, and series of songs integrated with one another to make a concept album. In 1979, Wonder made use of the early music sampler Computer Music Melodian through his composition of the soundtrack album Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants”. It was also his first digital recording, and one of the earliest popular albums to use the technology, which Wonder used for all subsequent recordings. Wonder’s 1970s albums are regarded as very influential; the Rolling Stone Record Guide (1983) wrote they “pioneered stylistic approaches that helped to determine the shape of pop music for the next decade”.

Wonder has sold over 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. He has won 25 Grammy Awards, making him one of the most awarded artists of all time. He was the first Motown artist and second African-American musician to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song, for the 1984 film The Woman in Red. Wonder has been inducted into the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame, Rock and Rock Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame, and has received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Wonder is also noted for his work as an activist for political causes, including his 1980 campaign to make Martin Luther King Jr.‘s birthday a holiday in the United States. In 2009, he was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace.

Wonder was born Stevland Hardaway Judkins in Saginaw, Michigan, on May 13, 1950, the third of six children born to Calvin Judkins and songwriter Lula Mae Hardaway. He was born six weeks premature which, along with the oxygen-rich atmosphere in the hospital incubator, resulted in retinopathy of prematurity, a condition in which the growth of the eyes is aborted and causes the retinas to detach, so he became blind.

When Wonder was four, his mother divorced his father and moved with her children to Detroit, Michigan, where Wonder sang as a child in a choir at the Whitestone Baptist Church. She changed her name back to Lula Hardaway and later changed her son’s surname to Morris, partly because of relatives. Wonder has retained Morris as his legal surname. He began playing instruments at an early age, including piano, harmonica, and drums. He formed a singing partnership with a friend; calling themselves Stevie and John, they played on street corners and occasionally at parties and dances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPFB-z2ezXk

William McKinley “Red” Garland, Jr. (May 13, 1923 – April 23, 1984) was an American modern jazz pianist. Known for his work as a bandleader and during the 1950s with Miles Davis, Garland helped popularize the block chord style of piano playing.

William “Red” Garland was born in 1923 in Dallas, Texas. He began his musical studies on the clarinet and alto saxophone but, in 1941, switched to the piano. Less than five years later, Garland joined the trumpet player Hot Lips Page, well-known in the southwest, playing with him until a tour ended in New York in March 1946. With Garland having decided to stay in New York to find work, Art Blakey came across Garland playing at a small club, only to return the next night with Blakey’s boss, Billy Eckstine.

Garland also had a short-lived career as a welterweight boxer in the 1940s. He fought more than 35 fights, one being an exhibition bout with Sugar Ray Robinson.

Garland became famous in 1954 when he joined the Miles Davis Quintet, featuring John Coltrane, Philly Joe Jones, and Paul Chambers. Davis was a fan of boxing and was impressed that Garland had boxed earlier in his life. Together, the group recorded their famous Prestige albums, Miles: The New Miles Davis Quintet (1954), Workin, Steamin’, Cookin’, and Relaxin’. Garland’s style is prominent in these seminal recordings—evident in his distinctive chord voicings, his sophisticated accompaniment, and his musical references to Ahmad Jamal‘s style. Some observers dismissed Garland as a “cocktail” pianist, but Miles was pleased with his style, having urged Garland to absorb some of Jamal’s lightness of touch and harmonics within his own approach.

Ian Ernest Gilmore Evans (born Green; May 13, 1912 – March 20, 1988) was a Canadian-American jazz pianist, arranger, composer and bandleader. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest orchestrators in jazz, playing an important role in the development of cool jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, and jazz fusion. He is best known for his acclaimed collaborations with Miles Davis.

Gil Evans was born to Ian Ernest Green and Margaret Julia McConnachy on May 13, 1912. Originally named Ian Ernest Gilmore Green, he would eventually change his name from Green to Evans, taking the name of his step-father, John Evans. His father was a doctor and his mother was a homemaker and he had two siblings, Jean and Montgomery.

From a young age, Evans moved many times; from his birthplace in Toronto to western Canada, then to Washington State before finally settling in Stockton, California. He graduated from Stockton High School and Modesto Junior College. Evans remained a Canadian citizen until he entered the US Army during the second World War. After 1946, he lived and worked primarily in New York City, living for many years at Westbeth Artists Community.

Between 1941 and 1948, Evans worked as an arranger for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra. Even then, early in his career, his arrangements were such a challenge to musicians that bassist Bill Crow recalled that bandleader Thornhill would bring out Evans’s arrangements “when he wanted to punish the band.” Evans’ modest basement apartment behind a New York City Chinese laundry soon became a meeting place for musicians looking to develop new musical styles outside of the dominant bebop style of the day. Those present included the leading bebop performer, Charlie Parker, as well as Gerry Mulligan and John Carisi. In 1948, Evans, with Miles Davis, Mulligan, and others, collaborated on a band book for a nonet. These ensembles, larger than the trio-to-quintet “combos”, but smaller than the “big bands” which were on the brink of economic unviability, allowed arrangers to have a larger palette of colors by using French horns and tuba. Claude Thornhill had employed hornist John Graas in 1942, and composer-arranger Bob Graettinger had scored for horns and tubas with the Stan Kenton orchestra, but the “Kenton sound” was in the context of a dense orchestral wall of sound that Evans avoided.

Rho Ophiuchi (ρ Ophiuchi) is a multiple star system in the constellation Ophiuchus. The central system has an apparent magnitude of 4.63. Based on the central system’s parallax of 9.03 mas,it is located about 360 light-years (110 parsecs) away. The other stars in the system are slightly farther away.

Rho Ophiuchi is the namesake of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. It is a nebula of gas and dust, which the Rho Ophiuchi system is embedded in. It is one of the easiest star forming regions to observe, as it is one of the nearest, and it is visible from both hemispheres.

The interstellar extinction (A_V) of Rho Ophiuchi is measured to be 1.45 magnitudes, meaning the dust and gas in front of Rho Ophiuchi absorbs light from the system, making it appear 1.45 magnitudes dimmer than it should be. Additionally, gas and dust also scatters more higher-frequency light, leaving the light appearing more reddish. The interstellar reddening (E_B−V) of Rho Ophiuchi has been measured to be 0.47 magnitudes.

Stephen Lawrence Winwood (born 12 May 1948) is an English singer, songwriter and musician whose genres include progressive rock, blue-eyed soul, rhythm and blues, blues rock, pop rock, and jazz. Though primarily a vocalist and keyboard player, Winwood also plays a wide variety of other instruments; on several of his solo albums he has played all instrumentation, including drums, mandolin, guitars, bass and saxophone.

Winwood was a key member of The Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, Blind Faith and Go. He also had a successful solo career with hits including “While You See a Chance“, “Valerie“, “Back in the High Life Again” and two US Billboard Hot 100 number ones, “Higher Love” and “Roll with It” charting 20 years after the start of his recording career. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Traffic in 2004.

In 2005 Winwood was honoured as a BMI Icon at the annual BMI London Awards for his “enduring influence on generations of music makers”. In 2008, Rolling Stone ranked Winwood No. 33 in its 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. Winwood has won two Grammy Awards. He was nominated twice for a Brit Award for Best British Male Artist: 1988 and 1989. In 2011 he received the Ivor Novello Award from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors for Outstanding Song Collection.

Gary Peacock is a seminal part of jazz history. Born May 12th 1935 in Burley, Idaho, he grew up in Yakima, Washington, studied piano at the Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles and played piano in the army until the group’s bassist quit and Peacock took over the chair.

Back in the US, Peacock worked on the West Coast with Bud Shank, Art Pepper, Barney Kessel, Paul Bley and Ornette Coleman and on the East Coast with Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Jimmy Giuffre, Albert Ayler, Paul Motian, Roland Kirk and Don Cherry. In 1964 Peacock left the music scene to study Eastern medicine in Japan, then came back to America to study biology. Gradually he started playing again and in the early ’80s he started working with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, a collaboration that continues to this day.

Peacock makes his home in upstate New York, where among other activities he helps run a meditation group in a prison.

Gerald Foster Wiggins, Sr. (May 12, 1922 – July 13, 2008) was a jazz pianist and organist.Wiggins was born in New York City on May 12, 1922. He studied classical music, but switched to jazz in his teens.

Wiggins began as a professional playing accompaniment to comedian Stepin Fetchit. Wiggins worked with Louis Armstrong and Benny Carter. He was in the military from 1944 to 1946. In the 1940s he moved to Los Angeles, where he played music for television and film. He also worked with singers like Lena Horne (1950–51), Kay Starr, and Eartha Kitt. In 1960 his best recording as an organist appeared, Wiggin’ Out, known for the quality of its music and fresh, clear sound. He recorded another LP at the organ with saxophonist Teddy Edwards. “In the 1960s he worked as a music director and vocal coach in film studios,”including “a lengthy stint as vocal coach for Marilyn Monroe.