mick laBriola

This peculiar galaxy, beautifully streaked with tendrils of reddish dust, is captured here in wonderful detail by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxy is known as NGC 1022, and is officially classified as a barred spiral galaxy. You can just about make out the bar of stars in the center of the galaxy in this image, with swirling arms emerging from its ends. This bar is much less prominent than in some of the galaxy’s barred cousins and gives the galaxy a rather squat appearance; but the lanes of dust that swirl throughout its disc ensure it is no less beautiful.

NGC 1022 is a barred spiral galaxy located at approximately 66 million light years away in the constellation of Cetus. It was discovered on September 10, 1785 by William Herschel.

John Adam Belushi (January 24, 1949 – March 5, 1982) was an American comedian, actor, singer, and one of the seven original cast members of the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL). Throughout his career, Belushi had a close personal and artistic partnership with his fellow SNL star Dan Aykroyd, whom he met while they were both working at Chicago‘s The Second City comedy club.

Born in Chicago to Albanian American parents, Belushi started his own successful comedy troupe with Tino Insana and Steve Beshekas, called “The West Compass Trio”. Belushi performed with The Second City after Bernard Sahlins discovered him. He met Brian Doyle-Murray and Harold Ramisthere and also met Aykroyd, who would later become one of his close associates.

In 1975, Belushi was recommended to SNL creator and showrunner Lorne Michaels by Chevy Chase and Michael O’Donoghue, who accepted Belushi as a new cast member of the show after an audition. He developed a series of characters on the show that reached high success, including his performances as Henry Kissinger and Ludwig van Beethoven. After his breakout film role as John “Bluto” Blutarsky in National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), Belushi later appeared in films such as 1941, The Blues Brothers, and Neighbors. He also pursued interests in music, creating with Aykroyd, Lou Marini, Tom Malone, Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, and Paul Shaffer, the Blues Brothers, from which the film received its name.

In his personal life, Belushi struggled with heavy drug use that affected his comedy career; he was dismissed and rehired by Michaels on several occasions due to his behavior. In 1982, Belushi died from combined drug intoxication caused by Cathy Smith who injected him with a mixture of heroinand cocaine known as a speedball. He was posthumously honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004.

Belushi’s mother, Agnes Demetri (Samaras), was the daughter of Albanian immigrants, and his father, Adam Anastos Belushi, was an Albanian emigrant from Qytezë. Born in Humboldt Park, a neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, Illinois.

Aaron Joseph Neville (born January 24, 1941) is an American R&B and soul vocalist and musician. He has had four platinum albums and four Top 10 hits in the United States, including three that went to #1 on Billboard‘s Adult Contemporary chart. His debut single, from 1966, was #1 on the Soul chart for five weeks.

He has also recorded with his brothers Art, Charles and Cyril as The Neville Brothers and is the father of singer/keyboards player Ivan Neville. Neville is of mixed African-American, Caucasian, and Native American (Choctaw) heritage.

The first of his singles that was given airplay outside of New Orleans was “Over You” (Minit, 1960). Neville’s first major hit single was “Tell It Like It Is“, released on a small New Orleans label, Par-Lo, co-owned by local musician/arranger George Davis, a friend from school, and band-leader Lee Diamond. The song topped Billboard‘s R&B chart for five weeks in 1967 and also reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 (behind “I’m a Believer by the Monkees). It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. It was not the label’s only release, as some sources claim. At least five other Par-Lo singles, three of them by Neville himself, are known to exist.

In 1989, Neville teamed up with Linda Ronstadt on the album Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind. Among the duets recorded for the disc were the #1 Grammy-winning hits “Don’t Know Much” and “All My Life“. “Don’t Know Much” reached #2 on the Hot 100, and was certified Gold for selling a million copies, while the album was certified Triple Platinum for US sales of more than 3 million.

His other hits have included “Everybody Plays the Fool“, his 1991 cover of the 1972 Main Ingredient song, that reached #8 on the Hot 100; “Don’t Take Away My Heaven”, “Hercules” and “Can’t Stop My Heart From Loving You (The Rain Song).” Neville’s biggest solo successes have been on the Adult Contemporary chart, where “Don’t Know Much,” “All My Life,” and “Everybody Plays the Fool” all reached Number One.

Isidore “Tuts” Washington (January 24, 1907 – August 5, 1984) was an American blues pianist from New Orleans, Louisiana.

He taught himself to play the piano at age 10 and studied with the New Orleans jazz pianist Joseph Louis “Red” Cayou. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was a leading player for dance bands and Dixieland bands in New Orleans. His style blended elements of ragtime, jazz, blues, and boogie-woogie.

After World War II, Washington joined Smiley Lewis in a trio with drummer Herman Seals. They released several popular songs for Imperial, including “Tee-Nah-Nah”, “The Bells Are Ringing”, and “Dirty People”. Washington moved to St. Louis to play with Tab Smith. He returned to New Orleans in the 1960s, performing in restaurants in the French Quarter in clubs such as Tipitina’s and at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. For years he had a regular engagement playing piano at a bar in the Pontchartrain Hotel. He avoided recording for most of his career, but he released the solo piano album New Orleans Piano Professor for Rounder in 1983. A live recording by Washington, Live at Tipitina’s ’78, was released by Night Train International Records in 1998. Washington died on August 5, 1984, after having a heart attack while performing at the World’s Fair in New Orleans.

James Robert Forrest Jr. (January 24, 1920 – August 26, 1980) was an American jazz musician, who played tenor saxophone throughout his career.

Forrest is known for his first solo recording of “Night Train“. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart in March 1952, and stayed at the top for seven weeks. “Hey Mrs. Jones” (No. 3 R&B) and “Bolo Blues” were his other hits. All were made for United Records, which recorded Forrest between 1951 and 1953. He recorded frequently as both a sideman and a bandleader.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, Forrest played alongside Fate Marable as a young man. He was with Jay McShann in 1940-42 and with Andy Kirk from 1942 until 1948 when he joined Duke Ellington. During the early 1950s, Forrest led his own combos. He also played with Miles Davis, in early 1952 at The Barrel Club. After his solo career, he played in small combos with Harry “Sweets” Edison and Al Grey, as well as appearing with Count Basie.

Late in life Forrest married Betty Tardy, and settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he died in August 1980, aged 60, from heart failure.

Some 13,000 light-years away toward the southern constellation Pavo, the globular star cluster NGC 6752 roams the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Over 10 billion years old, NGC 6752 follows clustersOmega Centauri and 47 Tucanae as the third brightest globular in planet Earth’s night sky. It holds over 100 thousand stars in a sphere about 100 light-years in diameter. Telescopic explorations of the NGC 6752 have found that a remarkable fraction of the stars near the cluster’s core, are multiple star systems. They also reveal the presence of blue straggle stars, stars which appear to be too young and massive to exist in a cluster whose stars are all expected to be at least twice as old as the Sun. The blue stragglers are thought to be formed by star mergers and collisions in the dense stellar environment at the cluster’s core. This sharp color composite also features the cluster’s ancient red giant stars in yellowish hues. (Note: The bright, spiky blue star at 11 o’clock from the cluster center is a foreground star along the line-of-sight to NGC 6752).

Gary Burton (born January 23, 1943) is an American jazz vibraphonist, composer, and educator. Burton developed a pianistic style of four-mallet technique as an alternative to the prevailing two-mallet technique. This approach caused him to be heralded as an innovator, and his sound and technique are widely imitated. He is also known for pioneering fusion jazz and popularizing the duet format in jazz, as well as being a major figure in music education from his 30 years at the Berklee College of Music.

Burton was born in Anderson, Indiana in 1943. Beginning music at six years old, he mostly taught himself to play marimba and vibraphone. He began studying piano at age sixteen while finishing high school at Princeton Community High School in Princeton, Indiana (1956–60). He has cited jazz pianist Bill Evans as the inspiration for his approach to the vibraphone.

Curtis Counce (January 23, 1926 – July 31, 1963) was an American hard bop and West Coast jazz double bassist.

Counce was born in Kansas City, Missouri and moved to California in 1945. He began recording in 1946 with Lester Young, and in the 1950s in Los Angeles with musicians such as Shorty Rogers, Stan Kenton, Shelly Manne, Lyle Murphy, Teddy Charles, and Clifford Brown. Counce formed his quintet in 1956 featuring tenor saxophonist Harold Land, trumpeter Jack Sheldon, pianist Carl Perkins and drummer Frank Butler. Elmo Hope replaced Perkins after his death at age 29 in 1958. Gerald Wilson replaced Sheldon on some recordings. The four albums originally released on Contemporary Records were reissued in 2006 on a double CD by Gambit Spain. Counce died in Los Angeles, California, of a heart attack. He was survived by his wife, Mildred Counce and only child Celeste Counce.

Jean Reinhardt (23 January 1910 – 16 May 1953), known by his stage name Django Reinhardt (French: [dʒãŋɡo ʁɛjnaʁt] or [dʒɑ̃ɡo ʁenɑʁt]), was a Belgian-born Romani-French jazz guitarist and composer, regarded as one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century. He was the first jazz talent to emerge from Europe and remains the most significant.

With violinist Stéphane Grappelli, Reinhardt formed the Paris-based Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934. The group was among the first to play jazz that featured the guitar as a lead instrument. Reinhardt recorded in France with many visiting American musicians, including Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter, and briefly toured the United States with Duke Ellington‘s orchestra in 1946. He died suddenly of a stroke at the age of 43.

Reinhardt’s most popular compositions have become standards within gypsy jazz, including “Minor Swing“, “Daphne”, “Belleville”, “Djangology”, “Swing ’42”, and “Nuages“. Jazz guitarist Frank Vignola claims that nearly every major popular-music guitarist in the world has been influenced by Reinhardt. Over the last few decades, annual Django festivals have been held throughout Europe and the U.S., and a biography has been written about his life. In February 2017, the Berlin International Film Festival held the world premiere of the French film Django.

At the age of 17 Reinhardt married Florine “Bella” Mayer, a girl from the same Romani settlement, according to Romani custom (although not an official marriage under French law). The following year he recorded for the first time. On these recordings, made in 1928, Reinhardt plays the “banjo” (actually the banjo-guitar) accompanying the accordionists Maurice Alexander, Jean Vaissade and Victor Marceau, and the singer Maurice Chaumel. His name was now drawing international attention, such as from British bandleader Jack Hylton, who came to France just to hear him play. Hylton offered him a job on the spot, and Reinhardt accepted.

Before he had a chance to start with the band, however, Reinhardt nearly died. On the night of 2 November 1928, Reinhardt was going to bed in the wagon that he and his wife shared in the caravan. Apparently, he knocked over a candle, which ignited the extremely flammable celluloid that his wife used to make artificial flowers. The wagon was quickly engulfed in flames. The couple escaped, but Reinhardt suffered extensive burns over half his body During his 18 month hospitalization, doctors apparently recommended amputation for his badly damaged right leg. Reinhardt refused the surgery and was eventually able to walk with the aid of a cane.

More crucial to his music, the third finger (ring finger) and fourth finger (pinky) of Reinhardt’s left hand were badly burned. Doctors believed that he would never play guitar again Reinhardt applied himself intensely to relearning his craft, however, making use of a new guitar bought for him by his brother, Joseph Reinhardt, who was also an accomplished guitarist. While he never regained the use of those two fingers, Reinhardt regained his musical mastery by focusing on his left index and middle fingers, using the two injured fingers only for chord work.

Within a year of the fire, in 1929, Bella Mayer gave birth to their son, Henri “Lousson” Reinhardt. Soon thereafter, the couple split up. The son eventually took the surname of his mother’s new husband. As Lousson Baumgartner, the son himself became an accomplished musician who would go on to record with his biological father.

It is the closest cluster of stars to the Sun. The Hyades open cluster is bright enough to have been remarked on even thousands of years ago, yet is not as bright or compact as the nearby Pleiades (M45) star cluster. Pictured here is a particularly deep image of the Hyades which has brings out vivid star colors and faint coincidental nebulas. The brightest star in the field is yellow Aldebaran, the eye of the bull toward the constellation of Taurus. Aldebaran, at 65 light-years away, is now known to be unrelated to the Hyades cluster, which lies about 150 light-years away. The central Hyades stars are spread out over about 15 light-years. Formed about 625 million years ago, the Hyades likely shares a common origin with the Beehive cluster (M44), a naked-eye open star cluster toward the constellation of Cancer, based on M44‘s motion through space and remarkably similar age.

Samuel Cook (January 22, 1931 – December 11, 1964), known professionally as Sam Cooke, was an American singer, songwriter, civil-rights activist and entrepreneur.

Influential as both a singer and composer, he is commonly known as the King of Soul for his distinctive vocals and importance within popular music. He began singing as a child and joined the Soul Stirrers before moving to a solo career where he scored a string of hit songs like “You Send Me“, “A Change Is Gonna Come“, “Wonderful World“, “Chain Gang“, “Twistin’ the Night Away“, and “Bring It On Home to Me“.

His pioneering contributions to soul music contributed to the rise of Aretha Franklin, Bobby Womack, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Billy Preston, and popularized the likes of Otis Redding and James Brown. AllMusic biographer Bruce Eder wrote that Cooke was “the inventor of soul music”, and possessed “an incredible natural singing voice and a smooth, effortless delivery that has never been surpassed”.

On December 11, 1964, at the age of 33, Cooke was shot and killed by Bertha Franklin, the manager of the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles, California. After an inquest, the courts ruled Cooke’s death to be a justifiable homicide. Since that time, the circumstances of his death have been called into question by Cooke’s family.

Cooke was born Samuel Cook in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1931 (he added the “e” to his last name in 1957 to signify a new start to his life). He was the fifth of eight children of the Rev. Charles Cook, a minister in the Church of Christ (Holiness), and his wife, Annie Mae. One of his younger brothers, L.C. (1932–2017), later became a member of the doo-wop band Johnny Keyes and the Magnificents.

The family moved to Chicago in 1933. Cook attended Doolittle Elementary and Wendell Phillips Academy High School in Chicago, the same school that Nat “King” Cole had attended a few years earlier. Sam Cooke began his career with his siblings in a group called the Singing Children when he was six years old. He first became known as lead singer with the Highway QC’s when he was a teenager, having joined the group at the age of 14. During this time, Cooke befriended fellow gospel singer and neighbor Lou Rawls, who sang in a rival gospel group. Cooke died at the age of 33 on December 11, 1964, at the Hacienda Motel, in Los Angeles, California. Answering separate reports of a shooting and of a kidnapping at the motel, police found Cooke’s body, clad only in a sports jacket and shoes but no shirt, pants or underwear. He had sustained a gunshot wound to the chest, which was later determined to have pierced his heart. The motel’s manager, Bertha Franklin, said she had shot Cooke in self-defense after he broke into her office residence and attacked her. Her account was immediately disputed by Cooke’s acquaintances.

James Louis Johnson (January 22, 1924 – February 4, 2001) was an American jazz trombonist, composer and arranger. Johnson was one of the earliest trombonists to embrace bebop.

After studying the piano beginning at age 9, Johnson decided to play trombone at the age of 14. In 1941, he began his professional career with Clarence Love, and then played with Snookum Russell in 1942. In Russell’s band he met the trumpeter Fats Navarro, who influenced him to play in the style of the tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Johnson played in Benny Carter‘s orchestra between 1942 and 1945, and made his first recordings in 1942 under Carter’s leadership, recording his first solo (on Love for Sale) in October 1943. In 1944, he took part in the first Jazz at the Philharmonicconcert, presented in Los Angeles and organized by Norman Granz. In 1945 he joined the big band of Count Basie, touring and recording with him until 1946.

While the trombone was featured prominently in dixieland and swing music, it fell out of favor among bebop musicians, largely because instruments with valves and keys (trumpet, saxophone) were believed to be more suited to bebop’s often rapid tempos and demand for technical mastery. In 1946, bebop co-inventor Dizzy Gillespie encouraged the young trombonist’s development with the comment, “I’ve always known that the trombone could be played different, that somebody’d catch on one of these days. Man, you’re elected.” After leaving Basie in 1946 to play in small bebop bands in New York clubs, Johnson toured in 1947 with Illinois Jacquet. During this period he also began recording as a leader of small groups featuring Max Roach, Sonny Stitt and Bud Powell. He performed with Charlie Parker at the 17 December 1947 Dial Records session following Parker’s release from Camarillo State Mental Hospital.

Blind Willie Johnson (January 25, 1897 – September 18, 1945) was an American gospel blues singer, guitarist and evangelist. His landmark recordings completed between 1927 and 1930—thirty songs in total—display a combination of powerful “chest voice” singing, slide guitar skills, and originality that has influenced later generations of musicians. Even though Johnson’s records sold well, as a street performer and preacher he had little wealth in his lifetime. His life was poorly documented, but over time music historians such as Samuel Charters have uncovered more about Johnson and his five recording sessions.

A revival of interest in Johnson’s music began in the 1960s, following his inclusion on Harry Smith‘s Anthology of American Folk Music, and by the efforts of the blues guitarist Reverend Gary Davis. Johnson’s work has become more accessible through compilation albums such as American Epic: The Best of Blind Willie Johnson and the Charters compilations. As a result, Johnson is credited as one of the most influential practitioners of the blues, and his slide guitar playing, particularly on his hymn “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground“, is highly acclaimed. Other recordings by Johnson include “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed“, “It’s Nobody’s Fault but Mine“, and “John the Revelator“.

Johnson was born on January 25, 1897, in Pendleton, Texas, a small town near Waco, to sharecropper George Johnson (also identified as Willie Johnson Sr.) and his wife, Mary Fields, who died in 1901.