mick laBriola

The graceful, winding arms of the majestic spiral galaxy NGC 3147 appear like a grand spiral staircase sweeping through space in this Hubble Space Telescope image. They are actually long lanes of young blue stars, pinkish nebulas, and dust in silhouette.

The beauty of the galaxy belies the fact that at its very center is a malnourished black hole surrounded by a thin, compact disk of stars, gas, and dust that have been caught up in a gravitational maelstrom. The black hole’s gravity is so intense that anything that ventures near it gets swept up in the disk.

The disk is so deeply embedded in the black hole’s intense gravitational field that the light from the gas disk is modified, according to Einstein’s theories of relativity, giving astronomers a unique peek at the dynamic processes close to a black hole.

NGC 3147 is located 130 million light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Draco the Dragon.

Richard Berry, Jr. (April 11, 1935 – January 23, 1997) was an American singer, songwriter and musician, who performed with many Los Angeles doo-wop and close harmony groups in the 1950s, including The Flairs and The Robins.

He is best known as the composer and original performer of the rock standard “Louie Louie“. The song became a hit for The Kingsmen, and it is one of the most recorded songs of all time; however, Berry received little financial benefit for writing it until the 1980s, having signed away his rights to the song in 1959. In the same year, he wrote and released “Have Love, Will Travel“, which has been played by many other artists.

Berry was born in Extension, south of Monroe, Louisiana, and moved with his family to Los Angeles as a baby. As a child, he suffered a hip injury and had to walk on crutches until he was six. His first instrument was the ukulele, which he learned when attending a summer camp for crippled children.

Luther Johnson (born April 11, 1939, Itta Bena, Mississippi) is a Chicago blues singer and guitarist, who performs under the name Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson. He is not to be confused with Luther “Snake Boy” Johnson, Luther “Houserocker” Johnson, or Lonnie “Guitar Junior” Brooks.

Johnson moved to Chicago with his family in 1955. During the 1960s, he performed with Magic Sam. He performed in Muddy Waters‘ band from 1972 to 1980. In 1980, four of his songs were included in an anthology released by Alligator Records. That same year he appeared as a member of the Legendary Blues Band, backing John Lee Hooker in the movie The Blues Brothers.

Johnson moved to the East Coast and began fronting his own band, the Magic Rockers. His “Walkin’ the Dog” was recorded live at the Montreux Festival‘s Blues Night. He won a Grammy Award in 1985 for Best Traditional Blues Album for his part in Blues Explosion. He recorded three albums released by Telarc Records: Slammin’ on the West Side (1996), Got to Find a Way (1998), and Talkin’ About Soul (2001). He also performed on three albums by the Nighthawks.

He lived in Antrim, New Hampshire for many years but moved to Florida in 2017.

John Levy (April 11, 1912 – January 20, 2012) was an American jazz double-bassist and businessman. Levy was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1944, he left his family home in Chicago, Illinois, and moved to New York City where he played bass for such renowned jazz musicians as Ben Webster, Erroll Garner, Milt Jackson, and Billie Holiday. In 1949, he became the bassist in the original George Shearing Quintet, where he also acted as Shearing’s road manager. In 1951, Levy opened John Levy Enterprises, Inc., becoming the first African-American personal manager in the pop or jazz music field. By the 1960s, Levy’s client roster included Shearing, Nancy Wilson, Cannonball Adderley, Joe Williams, Shirley Horn, Soul singer Jimmie Raye, and Ramsey Lewis.

In 1997, Levy was inducted into the International Jazz Hall of Fame, and in 2006 he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts .  He died, aged 99, in Altadena, California.

Arp 299 is a system located about 140 million light years from Earth. It contains two galaxies that are merging, creating a partially blended mix of stars from each galaxy in the process. However, this stellar mix is not the only ingredient. New data from Chandra reveals 25 bright X-ray sources sprinkled throughout the Arp 299 concoction. Fourteen of these sources are such strong emitters of X-rays that astronomers categorize them as “ultra-luminous X-ray sources,” or ULXs.

Arp 299 (parts of it are also known as IC 694 and NGC 3690) is a pair of colliding galaxies approximately 134 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. Both of the galaxies involved in the collision are barred irregular galaxies. It is not completely clear which object is historically called IC 694. According to some sources, the small appendage more than an arcminute northwest of the main pair is actually IC 694, not the primary (eastern) companion.

The interaction of the two galaxies in Arp 299 produced young powerful starburst regions similar to those seen in II Zw 96. Eight supernovaehave been detected in Arp 299: SN 1992bu, SN 1993G, SN 1998T, SN 1999D were observed in NGC 3690 while SN 1990al, SN 2005U, SN2010O and SN2010P were observed in IC 694.

Joey DeFrancesco (born April 10, 1971) is an American jazz organist, trumpeter, and vocalist. He has released more than 30 albums, including recordings with Miles Davis and Jimmy Smith. DeFrancesco signed his first record deal at the age of 16 and has played internationally with musicians that include David Sanborn, Arturo Sandoval, Larry Coryell, Frank Wess, John McLaughlin, Benny Golson, James Moody, Steve Gadd, Danny Gatton, Elvin Jones, Jimmy Cobb, George Benson, Pat Martino, John Scofield, Joe Lovano, and recorded with musicians that included Ray Charles, Bette Midler and Van Morrison.

DeFrancesco was born in 1971 in Springfield, Pennsylvania.He was born into a musical family that included three generations of jazz musicians. He was named after his grandfather, Joseph DeFrancesco, a jazz musician who played the saxophone and clarinet. His father, “Papa” John DeFrancesco, was an organist who played nationally and received the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame‘s Living Legend Award in 2013. DeFrancesco began playing the organ at the age of 4 and was playing songs by Jimmy Smith verbatim by the time he was 5. His father John began taking him to gigs from the age of 5, letting him sit in on sets. At the age of 10, DeFrancesco joined a band in Philadelphia that included jazz musicians Hank Mobley and Philly Joe Jones. He was considered a fixture at local jazz clubs, opening shows for Wynton Marsalis and B.B. King. 

Omar Sosa (born April 10, 1965) is a musician from Cuba.

A native of Camagüey, Cuba, Sosa studied percussion at the Escuela Nacional de Musica and Instituto Superior de Arte. In the 1980s he started the band Tributo, recording albums and touring with the band. He worked with Cuban vocalist Xiomara Laugart and several Latin jazz bands. In the 1990s he moved to San Francisco, and his first solo album was released. Sosa received Latin Grammy Award nominations for his albums Sentirand Eggun.In January 2011, he won the 10th Annual Independent Music Awards in the Jazz Album category for Ceremony. He has worked with Paolo Fresu, Seckou Keita, Adam Rudolph, and the NDR Big Band.

Neville O’Riley Livingston, OM (born 10 April 1947), best known as Bunny Wailer, is a Jamaican singer songwriter and percussionist and was an original member of reggae group The Wailers along with Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. A three-time Grammy award winner, he is considered one of the longtime standard-bearers of reggae music. He is also known as Bunny Livingston and affectionately Jah B.

The young Neville Livingston spent his earliest years in the village of Nine Mile in St. Ann Parish. It was there that he first met Bob Marley, and the two toddlers befriended each other quickly. The boys both came from single-parent families; Livingston was brought up by his father, Marley by his mother. Later, Bunny’s father Thaddeus “Toddy” Livingston lived with Bob Marley‘s mother Cedella Booker and had a daughter with her named Pearl Livingston. Peter Tosh had a son, Andrew Tosh, with another of Bunny’s sisters, Shirley, making Andrew his nephew.

Bunny had originally gone to audition for Leslie Kong at Beverley’s Records in 1962, around the same time Bob Marley was cutting “Judge Not”. Bunny had intended to sing his first composition, “Pass It On”, which at the time was more ska-oriented. However, Bunny was late getting out of school, missed his audition, and was told he wasn’t needed. A few months later, in 1963; he formed “The Wailing Wailers” with his step-brother Bob Marley and friend Peter Tosh, and the short-lived members Junior Braithwaite and Beverley Kelso. As he was by some way the least forceful of the group, he tended to sing lead vocals less often than Marley and Tosh in the early years, but when Bob Marley left Jamaica in 1966 for Delaware, replacing Bunny with Constantine “Vision” Walker, he began to record and sing lead vocals on some of his own compositions, such as “Who Feels It Knows It”, “I Stand Predominant” and “Sunday Morning”. His music was very influenced by gospel and the soul of Curtis Mayfield. In 1967, he recorded “This Train”, based on a gospel standard, for the first time, at Studio One.

Gaansaraswati Kishori Ravindra Amonkar (10 April 1932 – 3 April 2017) ,was a leading Indian classical vocalist, belonging to the Jaipur gharana, or a community of musicians sharing a distinctive musical style.

She was a performer of the classical genre khyal and the light classical genres thumri and bhajan. Amonkar trained under her mother, classical singer Mogubai Kurdikar also from the Jaipur gharana, but she experimented with a variety of vocal styles in her career.

Kishori’s initial training in music was by her mother, the classical vocalist Mogubai Kurdikar. She has stated in an interview that her mother was an exacting teacher, initially teaching her by singing phrases and making Kishori repeat them. In the early stages of her career, she travelled with her mother to performances, accompanying her on the tanpura while Kurdikar sang.

Rosco N. Gordon III (April 10, 1928 – July 11, 2002) was an American blues singer, pianist, and songwriter. He is best known for his hit songs “Booted,” (1952), “No More Doggin'” (1952), and “Just a Little Bit” (1960). Gordon was a pioneer of the Memphis blues style. He played piano in a style known as the “Rosco rhythm,” with the emphasis on the off-beat. This rhythm was an influence on the Jamaican pianist Theophilus Beckfordand hence on reggae music as a whole.

Gordon was born in Memphis, Tennessee on April 10, 1928, the youngest of eight children. He learned to play piano from his sister who took lessons. Gordon became associated with Johnny Ace, Bobby Bland and B.B. King, sometimes referred to as the “Beale Streeters.” In 1946, Gordon moved to Chicago “after getting in trouble in Memphis.” He returned to Memphis in 1949, and won first place at an amateur show at the Palace Theatre on Beale Street in 1950. Emcee of the show Rufus Thomas invited Gordon to play on his radio show at WDIA. Soon after, Gordon had his own show as well.

In 1951, WDIA manager, David Mattis, introduced Gordon to producer Sam Phillips. Around this time, Gordon was scouted by Ike Turner, talent scout for the Bihari brothers, to record for Modern Records. His first hit single, “Saddled the Cow (and Milk the Horse),” released on RPM Records(subsidiary of Modern) reached #9 on the Billboard R&B chart.

Gordon’s next single “Booted” was recorded at Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service. Phillips licensed the record to the Chess brothers at Chess Records, which was released as a single in December 1951.

Fandango is a lively couples dance originating from 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. It was originally notated in ^6/8.

Not all galaxies have the luxury of possessing a simple moniker or quirky nickname.

This impressive galaxy imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is one of the unlucky ones, and goes by a name that looks more like a password for a computer: 2XMM J143450.5+033843.

Such a name may seem like a random jumble of numbers and letters, but like all galactic epithets it has a distinct meaning. This galaxy, for example, was detected and observed as part of the second X-ray sky survey performed by ESA’s XMM-Newton Observatory. Its celestial coordinates form the rest of the bulky name, following the “J”: a right ascension value of 14h (hours) 34m (minutes) 50.5s (seconds). This can be likened to terrestrial longitude. It also has a declination of +03d (degrees) 38m (minutes) 43s (seconds). Declination can be likened to terrestrial latitude. The other fuzzy object in the frame was named in the same way — it is a bright galaxy named 2XMM J143448.3+033749.

2XMM J143450.5+033843 lies nearly 400 million light-years away from Earth. It is a Seyfert galaxy that is dominated by something known as an Active Galactic Nucleus — its core is thought to contain a supermassive black hole that is emitting huge amounts of radiation, pouring energetic X-rays out into the Universe.

Stephen Kendall Gadd (born April 9, 1945) is an American drummer, percussionist, and session musician. Gadd is one of the most well-known and highly regarded session and studio drummers in the industry, recognized by his induction into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1984. Gadd’s performances on Paul Simon‘s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover“, “Late in the Evening“, and Steely Dan‘s “Aja” are examples of his style. He has worked with popular musicians from many genres including Simon & Garfunkel, Steely Dan, James Taylor, Harry Chapin, Eric Clapton, Kate Bush, Joe Cocker, Grover Washington Jr., Chick Corea, Lee Ritenour, Paul Desmond, Chet Baker, Al Di Meola, Kenny Logginsand Michel Petrucciani.

Gadd grew up in Irondequoit, New York and graduated from Eastridge High School, then the Eastman School of Music in 1968. In a Modern Drummer interview Gadd mentioned that some of his influences at a young age and later on included Buddy Rich, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, and the “less is more” style of Rick Marotta.