mick laBriola

Frédéric François Chopin (UK: /ˈʃɒpæ̃/, US: /ʃoʊˈpæn/, French: [ʃɔpɛ̃], Polish: [ˈʂɔpɛn]; 1 March 1810 – 17 October 1849) was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era who wrote primarily for solo piano. He has maintained worldwide renown as a leading musician of his era, one whose “poetic genius was based on a professional technique that was without equal in his generation.”

Chopin was born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin in the Duchy of Warsaw and grew up in Warsaw, which in 1815 became part of Congress Poland. A child prodigy, he completed his musical education and composed his earlier works in Warsaw before leaving Poland at the age of 20, less than a month before the outbreak of the November 1830 Uprising. At 21, he settled in Paris. Thereafter—in the last 18 years of his life—he gave only 30 public performances, preferring the more intimate atmosphere of the salon. He supported himself by selling his compositions and by giving piano lessons, for which he was in high demand. Chopin formed a friendship with Franz Liszt and was admired by many of his other musical contemporaries (including Robert Schumann).

After a failed engagement to Maria Wodzińska from 1836 to 1837, he maintained an often troubled relationship with the French writer Amantine Dupin (known by her pen name, George Sand). A brief and unhappy visit to Majorca with Sand in 1838–39 would prove one of his most productive periods of composition. In his final years, he was supported financially by his admirer Jane Stirling, who also arranged for him to visit Scotland in 1848. For most of his life, Chopin was in poor health. He died in Paris in 1849 at the age of 39, probably of pericarditis aggravated by tuberculosis.

All of Chopin’s compositions include the piano. Most are for solo piano, though he also wrote two piano concertos, a few chamber pieces, and some 19 songs set to Polish lyrics. His piano writing was technically demanding and expanded the limits of the instrument: his own performances were noted for their nuance and sensitivity. Chopin invented the concept of the instrumental ballade. His major piano works also include mazurkas, waltzes, nocturnes, polonaises, études, impromptus, scherzos, preludes and sonatas, some published only posthumously. Among the influences on his style of composition were Polish folk music, the classical tradition of J. S. Bach, Mozart, and Schubert, and the atmosphere of the Paris salons of which he was a frequent guest. His innovations in style, harmony, and musical form, and his association of music with nationalism, were influential throughout and after the late Romanticperiod.

Urinetown the Musical by Theater 55 at the Illusion Theater.  2pm matinee and 730pm evening show. Music by Music by Music by Neal McIntosh, Jamie Carter, Chad Green, Paul Fontara and mick laBriola.

The intricate detail visible in this Picture of the Week would likely be extraordinary to Herschel. Hubble was able to capture an impressive level of structure within NGC 691’s layers of stars and spiraling arms — all courtesy of the telescope’s high-resolution Wide Field Camera 3.

Khaled Hadj Ibrahim (Arabic: خالد حاج إبراهيم‎, born 28 February 1960), better known by his mononym Khaled (Arabic: خالد‎; Arabic pronunciation: [ˈxaːled]), is an Algerian musician, singer and songwriter born in Oran, Algeria. He began recording in his early teens under the name Cheb Khaled (الشاب خالد, Arabic for “Young” Khaled, as opposed to the traditionalist Sheikh elders). He was crowned “King of Raï” in the first rai festival in Oran and has since become the world’s best-known Arab singer. His most famous songs are “Didi“, “Aïcha” and “C’est la vie” as well as “Alech Taadi”, which was prominently featured in the film The Fifth Element. Khaled Hadj Brahim was born in 1960 in Oran‘s Eckmühl neighborhood, Algeria. On 12 January 1995, Khaled married Samira Diabi, 27, with whom he has four daughters and one son.

Richie Cole (born February 29, 1948) is an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and arranger. Cole was born in Trenton, New Jersey. He started playing alto saxophone when he was ten years old, encouraged by his father, who owned a jazz club in New Jersey. He is a graduate of Ewing High School, in Ewing Township, New Jersey. Cole won a scholarship from Down Beat magazine to the Berklee School of Music in Boston.

In 1969 he joined drummer Buddy Rich‘s Big Band. After working with Lionel Hampton‘s Big Band and Doc Severinsen‘s Big Band, he formed his own quintet and toured worldwide, doing a great deal to popularize bebop and his own “alto madness” style in the 1970s and early ’80s. He formed the Alto Madness Orchestra in the 1990s.

Cole has performed and recorded with Eddie Jefferson, Nancy Wilson, Tom Waits, The Manhattan Transfer, Hank Crawford, Freddie Hubbard, Eric Kloss, Bobby Enriquez, Phil Woods, Sonny Stitt, Art Pepper, and Boots Randolph. He has recorded over fifty albums, including his top hit album Hollywood Madness (Muse, 1979) and his tribute album to Leonard Bernstein, Richie Cole Plays West Side Story (Music Masters, 1997).

James Francis Dorsey (February 29, 1904 – June 12, 1957), professionally known as Jimmy Dorsey, was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, composer and big band leader. He recorded and composed the jazz and pop standards “I’m Glad There Is You (In This World of Ordinary People)” and “It’s The Dreamer In Me“. His other major recordings were “Tailspin“, “John Silver“, “So Many Times“, “Amapola“, “Brazil (Aquarela do Brasil)”, “Pennies from Heaven” with Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, and Frances Langford, “Grand Central Getaway”, and “So Rare“. He played clarinet on the seminal jazz standards “Singin’ the Blues” in 1927 and the original 1930 recording of “Georgia on My Mind“, which were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Jimmy Dorsey was born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, United States, the first son of Theresa Langton Dorsey and Thomas Francis Dorsey. His father, Thomas, was initially a coal miner, but would later become a music teacher and marching-band director. Both Jimmy and his younger brother,Tommy Dorsey, were musically active during their childhoods and by the age of seven, Jimmy was already playing with his father’s band. He made his first public appearance at the age of 9 while playing trumpet with J. Carson McGee’s King Trumpeters in New York in 1913. He switched to alto saxophone in 1915, and then learned clarinet. Jimmy Dorsey played on a clarinet outfitted with the Albert system of fingering, as opposed to the more common Boehm system used by most of his contemporaries including Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw.

Urintown by Theater 55 (https://theatre55.org) opening night at the Illusion Theater (http://www.illusiontheater.org) running from Friday February 28th thru Sunday March 15th. Music by Music by Neal McIntosh, Jamie Carter, Chad Green, Paul Fontara and mick laBriola. The plot of Urinetown is fairly straightforward. The scene is a city in a parallel universe in the mid 1900’s in which the majority of the citizens’ dreary low-class existence is compounded by a water shortage, which has lead to the institution of pay-per-use public bathrooms and the jailing of unsanitary offenders.

Substitute teaching this week at Friends School, teaching Percussion & Guitar classes. Mounting material for upcoming performance. (For a complete listing of Daily Music go to Blog pages at micklabriola.com)

Astronomers have discovered the biggest explosion we have ever seen. They spotted the remnants of this blast in a distant galaxy, using some of the most powerful telescopes we have, including NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Murchison Widefield Array in Australia. The observations revealed a strange void at the centre of a huge galaxy about 390 million light years away in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. The space inside that void is seething with radio waves, which come from electrons accelerated almost to the speed of light. The researchers concluded that those electrons were accelerated by a huge explosion from just near a black hole, which smashed away all the gas in the area to leave behind just a void filled with electrons and radiation. The explosion released five times more energy than the previous record holder. “You could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas,” Simona Giacintucci at the US Naval Research Laboratory, who was part of the team that found the explosion, said in a press release.

Lewis Brian Hopkins Jones (28 February 1942 – 3 July 1969) was an English musician, best known as the founder and original leader of the Rolling Stones. Initially a slide guitarist, Jones would go on to play a wide variety of instruments on Rolling Stones recordings and in concerts, such as rhythm and lead guitar, sitar, dulcimer, various keyboard instruments such as piano and mellotron, marimba, wind instruments such as harmonica, recorder, saxophone, as well as drums, vocals and numerous others.

Jones and fellow guitarist Keith Richards developed a unique style of guitar play that Richards refers to as the “ancient art of weaving” where both players would play rhythm and lead parts together; Richards would carry the style on with later Stones guitarists and the sound would become a Rolling Stones trademark.

After he founded the Rolling Stones as a British blues outfit in 1962, and gave the band its name, Jones’ fellow band members Richards and Mick Jagger began to take over the band’s musical direction, especially after they became a successful songwriting team. Jones also did not get along with the band’s manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who pushed the band into a musical direction at odds with Jones’ blues background. At the same time, Jones developed alcohol and drug problems, and his performance in the studio became increasingly unreliable, leading to a diminished role within the band he had founded. In June 1969, the Rolling Stones asked Jones to leave; guitarist Mick Taylor took his place in the group. Jones died less than a month later, drowning in the swimming pool at his home at the age of 27.

Long-time Rolling Stones bass guitarist Bill Wyman said of Jones, “He formed the band. He chose the members. He named the band. He chose the music we played. He got us gigs. … he was very influential, very important, and then slowly lost it – highly intelligent – and just kind of wasted it and blew it all away.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr91kyjkdLM

John Aloysius Fahey (/ˈfeɪhi/ FAY-hee; February 28, 1939 – February 22, 2001) was an American fingerstyle guitarist and composer who played the steel-string acoustic guitar as a solo instrument. His style has been enormously influential and has been described as the foundation of American Primitive Guitar, a term borrowed from painting and referring mainly to the self-taught nature of the music and its minimalist style. Fahey borrowed from the folk and blues traditions in American roots music, having compiled many forgotten early recordings in these genres. He would later incorporate 20th-century classical, Portuguese, Brazilian, and Indian influences into his work.

Fahey spent many of his later years in poverty and poor health, but enjoyed a minor career resurgence in the late 1990s, with a turn towards the avant-garde. He also created a series of abstract paintings in his final years. Fahey died in 2001 from complications from heart surgery. In 2003, he was ranked 35th on Rolling Stone magazine’s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” list.

Fahey was born into a musical household in Washington, D.C. in 1939. Both his father, Aloysius John Fahey, and his mother, Jane (née Cooper), played the piano. In 1945, the family moved to the Washington suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland, where his father lived until his death in 1994. On weekends, the family attended performances of the top country and bluegrass acts of the day, but it was hearing Bill Monroe‘s version of Jimmie Rodgers‘ “Blue Yodel No. 7” on the radio that ignited the young Fahey’s passion for music.

Charles Gayle (born February 28, 1939) is an American free jazz musician. Initially known as a saxophonist who came to prominence in the 1990s after decades of obscurity, Gayle also performs as pianist, bass clarinetist, bassist, and percussionist.

Charles Gayle was born in Buffalo, New York. Some of his history has been unclear due to his reluctance to talk about his life in interviews. He briefly taught music at the University at Buffalo before relocating to New York City during the early 1970s.

Willie Bobo was the stage name of William Correa (February 28, 1934 – September 15, 1983), a Latin and jazz percussionist of Puerto Rican ancestry.

William Correa grew up in Spanish Harlem, New York City. He made his name in Latin Jazz, specifically Afro-Cuban jazz, in the 1960s and 1970s, with the timbales becoming his favoured instrument. He met Mongo Santamaría shortly after his arrival in New York and studied with him while acting as his translator, and later at the age of 19 joined Tito Puente for four years.

The nickname Bobo is said to have been bestowed by the jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams in the early 1950s.

In flamenco a tango (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈtaŋɡo]) is one of the flamenco palos closely related in form and feeling to the rumba flamenca. It is often performed as a finale to a flamenco tiento. Its compás and llamada are the same as that of the farruca and share the farruca’s lively nature. However, the tango is normally performed in the A Phrygian mode. In some English sources the flamenco tango is written with an -s; “the tangos is…”

The flamenco tango is distinct from the flamenco rumba primarily through the guitar playing. In Rumba the guitar flows more freely, whereas in Tangos the accents on beats 2, 3 & 4 are marked clearly with heavy strumming.

Tangos is only vaguely related to Argentine tango, and objectively they only share compás binario or double stroke rhythm. The fact that Argentine tango is one of the first couple dances in America has led historians to believe that both could be based in a minuet-style European dance, therefore sharing a common ancestor, while those who compare the present day forms do not see them as related.

February 26, 2020
Substitute teaching this week at Friends School, teaching Percussion & Guitar classes. Mounting material for upcoming performance.
(For a complete listing of Daily Music go to Blog pages at micklabriola.com)