mick laBriola

Nathan Tate Davis (February 15, 1937 – April 8, 2018) was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist who played the tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, and flute. He is known for his work with Eric Dolphy, Kenny Clarke, Ray Charles, Slide Hampton and Art Blakey.

Davis traveled extensively around Europe after World War II and moved to Paris in 1962. He held a Ph.D in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University and was a professor of music and director of jazz studies at the University of Pittsburgh from 1969, an academic program that he helped initiate. He was also founder and director of the University of Pittsburgh Annual Jazz Seminar and Concert, the first academic jazz event of its kind in the United States. He also helped to found the university’s William Robinson Recording Studio as well as establish the International Academy of Jazz Hall of Fame located in the school’s William Pitt Union and the University of Pittsburgh-Sonny Rollins International Jazz Archives. Davis retired as director of the Jazz Studies Program at Pitt in 2013. Davis also served as the editor of the International Jazz Archives Journal.

One of Davis’ best known musical associations was heading the Paris Reunion Band (1985-1989), which at different times included Nat Adderley, Kenny Drew, Johnny Griffin, Slide Hampton, Joe Henderson, Idris Muhammad, Dizzy Reece, Woody Shaw, and Jimmy Woode. Davis also toured and recorded with the post-bop ensemble leading Roots which he formed in 1991. Davis composed various pieces, including a 2004 opera entitled Just Above My Head. Davis died in Palm Beach, Florida, at the age of 81.

Kirkland “Kirk” Lightsey (born February 15, 1937, Detroit, Michigan) is an American jazz pianist.

Lightsey had piano instruction from the age of five and studied piano and clarinet through high school. After service in the Army, Lightsey worked in Detroit and California in the 1960s as an accompanist to singers. He also worked with jazz musicians such as Yusef Lateef, Betty Carter, Pharoah Sanders, Bobby Hutcherson, Sonny Stitt, Chet Baker, and Kenny Burrell. From 1979 to 1983 he toured with Dexter Gordon and was a member of The Leaders in the late 1980s. During the 1980s he led several sessions of his own, including duets with pianist Harold Danko. In the 1980s and since he has worked with Jimmy Raney, Clifford Jordan, Woody Shaw, David Murray, Joe Lee Wilson, the late, great, Irish guitarist Louis Stewart, Adam Taubitz, Harold Land and Gregory Porter.

He is also an accomplished flautist and occasionally doubles on flute in live performances. He has been living in Paris since 2000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEoYz1bhhug

James “Kokomo“ Arnold (February 15, 1896 or 1901 – November 8, 1968) was an American blues musician. A left-handed slide guitarist, his intense style of playing and rapid-fire vocal delivery set him apart from his contemporaries. He got his nickname in 1934 after releasing “Old Original Kokomo Blues” for Decca Records, a cover version of Scrapper Blackwell‘s blues song about the city of Kokomo, Indiana.

Arnold was born in Lovejoy’s Station, Georgia. Most sources give the date his birth as 1901, but the researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc give the date as 1896, on the basis of information in the 1900 census. He learned the basics of playing the guitar from his cousin, John Wiggs.

Arnold began playing in the early 1920s as a sideline, when he was working as a farmhand in Buffalo, New York, and as a steelworker in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1929 he moved to Chicago and ran a bootlegging business, an activity he continued until the end of Prohibition. In 1930 he moved south briefly and made his first recordings, “Rainy Night Blues” and “Paddlin’ Madeline Blues”, under the name Gitfiddle Jim, for the Victor label in Memphis. He soon moved back to Chicago, where he was forced to make a living as a musician after Prohibition ended in 1933. Kansas Joe McCoy heard him and introduced him to Mayo Williams, a producer for Decca Records.

From his first recording for Decca, on September 10, 1934, until his last, on May 12, 1938, Arnold made 88 sides, seven of which have been lost.

Arnold, Peetie Wheatstraw and Bumble Bee Slim were well-known musicians in Chicago blues circles at that time. Wheatstraw and Arnold, in particular, were also major influences on their contemporary, the Delta blues artist Robert Johnson. Johnson turned “Old Original Kokomo Blues” into “Sweet Home Chicago” and “Milk Cow Blues” into “Milkcow’s Calf Blues“. Another Arnold song, “Sagefield Woman Blues”, introduced the phrase “dust my broom“, which Johnson used as a song title.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4Rva6F_hro

The Heart Nebula, IC 1805, Sharpless 2-190, lies some 7500 light years away from Earth and is located in the Perseus Arm of the Galaxy in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was discovered by William Herschel on 3 November 1787. It is an emission nebula showing glowing ionized hydrogen gas and darker dust lanes.

The brightest part of the nebula (a knot at its western edge) is separately classified as NGC 896, because it was the first part of the nebula to be discovered. The nebula’s intense red output and its morphology are driven by the radiation emanating from a small group of stars near the nebula’s center. This open cluster of stars, known as Melotte 15, contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, and many more dim stars that are only a fraction of our Sun’s mass.

Merl Saunders (February 14, 1934 – October 24, 2008) was an American multi-genre musician who played piano and keyboards, favoring the Hammond B-3 console organ.

Born in San Mateo, California, Saunders attended Polytechnic High School in San Francisco. In his first band in high school was singer Johnny Mathis. He served in the Air Force from 1953 to 1957. He worked as musical director of the Billy Williams Revue and served in a similar capacity in Oscar Brown Jr.‘s off-Broadway show, Big Time Buck White.

He gained notice in the 1970s when he began collaborating with Jerry Garcia, with whom he had begun playing in 1971 at a small Fillmore Street nightclub called The Matrix. He sat in with the Grateful Dead, and co-founded the Saunders/Garcia Band which produced three albums, and which became the Legion of Mary with the addition of Martin Fierro (sax) in 1974. It disbanded the following year, but he and Garcia continued to collaborate in the band Reconstruction during 1979, collaborating with Ed Neumeister (trombone), Gaylord Birch (drums) and John Kahn (bass).

He led his own band as Merl Saunders and Friends, playing live dates with Garcia, as well as Mike Bloomfield, David Grisman, Michael Hinton, Tom Fogerty, Vassar Clements, Kenneth Nash, John Kahn and Sheila E.. He also collaborated with Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart in the band High Noon.

Samuel Gene Maghett (February 14, 1937 – December 1, 1969), known as Magic Sam, was an American Chicago blues musician. He was born in Grenada County, Mississippi, and learned to play the blues from listening to records by Muddy Waters and Little Walter. After moving to Chicago at the age of 19, he was signed by Cobra Records and became well known as a bluesman after the release of his first record, “All Your Love”, in 1957. He was known for his distinctive tremolo guitar playing.

The stage name Magic Sam was devised by Sam’s bass player and childhood friend Mack Thompson at Sam’s first recording session for Cobra, as an approximation of “Maghett Sam”. The name Sam was using at the time, Good Rocking Sam, was already being used by another artist.

Maghett moved to Chicago in 1956, where his guitar playing earned him bookings at blues clubs on the West Side. He recorded singles for Cobra Records from 1957 to 1959, including “All Your Love” and “Easy Baby”. They did not reach the record charts but had a profound influence, far beyond Chicago’s guitarists and singers. Together with recordings by Otis Rush and Buddy Guy (also Cobra artists), the Westside Sound was a manifesto for a new kind of blues.

Dwike Mitchell (born Ivory Mitchell Jr.; February 14, 1930 – April 7, 2013) was an American piano player and teacher. He began his career as pianist for the Lionel Hampton Orchestra before joining Willie Ruff to form The Mitchell-Ruff Duo jazz group.

Mitchell was born and raised in Dunedin, Florida. He began playing piano around the age of three after his father, who had a job driving a garbage truck, brought home an old piano discarded by its owner. With the help of his mother, who made him play exercises and scales, and a cousin, who had been taking piano lessons herself, Mitchell soon displayed an exceptional aptitude for the instrument.

After graduating from the Academy, Mitchell joined the orchestra of the jazz musician Lionel Hampton. Hampton had heard Mitchell play at Lockbourne five years earlier and told him at the time that he wanted him as his pianist. Mitchell had abandoned his given name, Ivory, because of its popular association with piano keys. His new professional name, Dwike, was his mother’s suggestion, based on several family names.

In 1954 Mitchell was reunited with French horn player Willie Ruff, whom Mitchell had befriended when both were stationed at Lockbourne. Ruff had just received a master’s degree in music from Yale and was considering offers from two symphony orchestras. On television, he had seen Lionel Hampton’s orchestra perform on The Ed Sullivan Show and recognized Mitchell when the camera panned to the pianist. Ruff immediately phoned the television station, and in the ensuing conversation Mitchell convinced Ruff to abandon his symphony plans and instead join the Hampton orchestra.

In 1955 the two men left the orchestra to form the Mitchell-Ruff jazz duo. The duo placed an emphasis on introducing American jazz music in parts of the world unfamiliar with the idiom. Among these, were visits to the Soviet Union in 1959 and to China in 1981. On the former trip they made a pretext of performing with the Yale Russian Chorus, jazz being prohibited at the time by the Soviet government. In fact, they held two jazz concerts at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. In appreciation for the duo’s performances, Mitchell and Ruff were invited to attend the Bolshoi Theater to see the final performance of the Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova. The 1981 trip to China marked the first time Americans had played and conducted workshops on jazz in that country after the Cultural Revolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opF3LeDLZvg

The Trifid Nebula, also known as Messier 20, is easy to find with a small telescope. About 30 light-years across and 5,500 light-years distant it’s a popular stop for cosmic tourists in the nebula richconstellation Sagittarius. As its name suggests, visible light pictures show the nebula divided into three parts by dark, obscuring dust lanes. But this penetrating infrared image reveals the Trifid’s filaments of glowing dust clouds and newborn stars. The spectacular false-color view is courtesy of the Spitzer Space Telescope. Astronomers have used the infrared image data to count newborn and embryonic stars which otherwise can lie hidden in the natal dust and gas clouds of this intriguing stellar nursery. Launched in 2003, Spitzer explored the infrared Universe from an Earth-trailing solar orbit until its science operations were brought to a close earlier this year, on January 30.

1.2 “/pixel, 22.7×35.5 arcmin
North is 2¡ CCW from up
RA = 18h02m25.61s Dec = -23d01m26.9s

Peter Brian Gabriel (born 13 February 1950) is an English singer, songwriter, record producer and activist who rose to fame as the original lead singer and frontman of the progressive rock band Genesis. After leaving Genesis in 1975, Gabriel launched a successful solo career with “Solsbury Hill” as his first single. His 1986 album, So, is his best-selling release and is certified triple platinum in the UK and five times platinum in the US. The album’s most successful single, “Sledgehammer“, won a record nine MTV Awards at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards and, according to a report in 2011, it was MTV‘s most played music video of all time.

Gabriel has been a champion of world music for much of his career. He co-founded the WOMAD festival in 1982. He has continued to focus on producing and promoting world music through his Real World Records label. He has also pioneered digital distribution methods for music, co-founding OD2, one of the first online music download services. Gabriel has also been involved in numerous humanitarian efforts. In 1980, he released the anti-apartheid single “Biko“. He has participated in several human rights benefit concerts, including Amnesty International‘s Human Rights Now! tour in 1988, and co-founded the Witness human rights organisation in 1992. Gabriel developed The Elders with Richard Branson, which was launched by Nelson Mandela in 2007.

Gabriel has won three Brit Awards—winning Best British Male in 1987, six Grammy Awards, thirteen MTV Video Music Awards, the first Pioneer Award at the BT Digital Music Awards, the Q magazine Lifetime Achievement, the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Polar Music Prize. He was made a BMI Icon at the 57th annual BMI London Awards for his “influence on generations of music makers”. In recognition of his many years of human rights activism, he received the Man of Peace award from the Nobel Peace Prize laureates in 2006, and Timemagazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2008. AllMusic has described Gabriel as “one of rock’s most ambitious, innovative musicians, as well as one of its most political”. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Genesis in 2010, followed by his induction as a solo artist in 2014. In March 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of South Australia in recognition of his achievements in music.

Wardell Gray (February 13, 1921 – May 25, 1955) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist who straddled the swing and bebop periods.

Wardell Gray was born in Oklahoma City, the youngest of four children. His early childhood years were spent in Oklahoma, before moving with his family to Detroit  in 1929.

In early 1935, Gray began attending Northeastern High School, and then transferred to Cass Technical High School, which is noted for having Donald Byrd, Lucky Thompson and Al McKibbon as alumni. He left in 1936, before graduating. Advised by his brother-in-law Junior Warren, as a teenager he started on the clarinet, but after hearing Lester Young on record with Count Basie, he was inspired to switch to the tenor saxophone.

Gray’s first musical job was in Isaac Goodwin‘s small band, a part-time outfit that played local dances. When auditioning for another job, he was heard by Dorothy Patton, a young pianist who was forming a band in the Fraternal Club in Flint, Michigan, and she hired him. After a very happy year there, he moved to Jimmy Raschel‘s band (Raschel had recorded a few sides earlier in the 1930s but did not do so again) and then on to the Benny Carew band in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was at around this time that he met Jeanne Goings; together they had a daughter, Anita, who was born in January 1941.

King Floyd (February 13, 1945 – March 6, 2006) was a New Orleans soul singer and songwriter, best known for his Top 10 hit from 1970, “Groove Me“.

King Floyd III was born in New Orleans in 1945. His musical career started as a singer at the Sho-Bar on Bourbon Street. Following a stint in the army, Floyd went to California, where he joined up with record producer Harold Battiste. His debut album, A Man In Love, featuring songs co-written with Dr. John, failed to make an impact on the charts. Floyd returned to New Orleans in 1969 and worked for the Post Office.

In 1970, Wardell Quezergue, an arranger of R&B scores, persuaded Floyd to record “Groove Me” with Malaco Records in Jackson, Mississippi. Jean Knight recorded her hit, “Mr. Big Stuff,” in the same sessions.

At first, “Groove Me” was a B-side to another Floyd song, “What Our Love Needs.” New Orleans radio DJs started playing “Groove Me” and the song became a local hit. Atlantic Records picked up national distribution of “Groove Me,” which topped the United States R&B chart and reached #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and went to #41 in Britain. This disc sold over one million copies, and received a gold disc awarded by the R.I.A.A. in December 1970. Floyd quit his job at the post office to perform a U.S. tour. His follow-up single, “Baby Let Me Kiss You” climbed up to number 29 on the Billboard Top 40 charts in 1971.

However, differences with Quezergue soon emerged and his 1973 follow-up album, Think About It, failed to make a commercial impact. However, Atlantic released a song from the album, “Woman Don’t Go Astray,” as a single. His 1975 album, Well Done, was released through TK Records with Atlantic distributing. “I Feel Like Dynamite” from the album, written by Larry Hamilton, was released as its single. Reviewing the album in Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies(1981), Robert Christgau said, “Floyd’s quiet, chocolatey voice—cf. Lee Dorsey, Aaron Neville—is prized by seekers after the New Orleans dispensation, but he’s never grooved me without skipping like a cheap bootleg. So I’m pleased to report that side one of his fourth LP, climaxing with the neglected regional hit ‘I Feel Like Dynamite,’ provides songs as winsome as the straight-ahead Caribbeanisms (even some reggae) of the New Orleans r&b behind. Location of studio: Jackson, Mississippi.

A dying star is throwing a cosmic tantrum in this combined image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), which NASA has lent to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In death, the star’s dusty outer layers are unraveling into space, glowing from the intense ultraviolet radiation being pumped out by the hot stellar core.

This object, called the Helix nebula, lies 650 light-years away, in the constellation of Aquarius. Also known by the catalog number NGC 7293, it is a typical example of a class of objects called planetary nebulae. Discovered in the 18th century, these cosmic works of art were erroneously named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets.

Planetary nebulae are actually the remains of stars that once looked a lot like our sun. These stars spend most of their lives turning hydrogen into helium in massive runaway nuclear fusion reactions in their cores. In fact, this process of fusion provides all the light and heat that we get from our sun. Our sun will blossom into a planetary nebula when it dies in about five billion years.

When the hydrogen fuel for the fusion reaction runs out, the star turns to helium for a fuel source, burning it into an even heavier mix of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Eventually, the helium will also be exhausted, and the star dies, puffing off its outer gaseous layers and leaving behind the tiny, hot, dense core, called a white dwarf. The white dwarf is about the size of Earth, but has a mass very close to that of the original star; in fact, a teaspoon of a white dwarf would weigh as much as a few elephants!

The glow from planetary nebulae is particularly intriguing as it appears surprisingly similar across a broad swath of the spectrum, from ultraviolet to infrared. The Helix remains recognizable at any of these wavelengths, but the combination shown here highlights some subtle differences.

The intense ultraviolet radiation from the white dwarf heats up the expelled layers of gas, which shine brightly in the infrared. GALEX has picked out the ultraviolet light pouring out of this system, shown throughout the nebula in blue, while Spitzer has snagged the detailed infrared signature of the dust and gas in yellow A portion of the extended field beyond the nebula, which was not observed by Spitzer, is from NASA’s all-sky Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The white dwarf star itself is a tiny white pinprick right at the center of the nebula.

The brighter purple circle in the very center is the combined ultraviolet and infrared glow of a dusty disk circling the white dwarf (the disk itself is too small to be resolved). This dust was most likely kicked up by comets that survived the death of their star.