mick laBriola

The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier’s famous 18th century list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, debris from the death explosion of a massive star witnessed by astronomers in the year 1054. This sharp image from the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) explores the eerie glow and fragmented strands of the still expanding cloud of interstellar debris in infrared light. One of the most exotic objects known to modern astronomers, the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star spinning 30 times a second, is visible as a bright spot near the nebula’s center. Like a cosmic dynamo, this collapsed remnant of the stellar core powers the Crab’s emission across the electromagnetic spectrum. Spanning about 12 light-years, the Crab Nebula is a mere 6,500 light-years away in the head-strong constellation Taurus.

Bonnie Lynn Raitt ( born November 8, 1949) is an American songwriter, blues singer and guitarist. In 1971, Raitt released her self-titled debut album. Following this, she released a series of critically acclaimed roots-influenced albums that incorporated elements of blues, rock, folk, and country. She was also a frequent session player and collaborator with other artists, including Warren Zevon, Little Feat, Jackson Browne, the Pointer Sisters, John Prine, and Leon Russell.

In 1989, after several years of limited commercial success, she had a major hit with her tenth studio album Nick of Time, which included the song of the same name. The album reached number one on the Billboard200 chart, and won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. It has since been selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry. Her following two albums, Luck of the Draw (1991) and Longing in Their Hearts (1994), were multimillion sellers, generating several hit singles, including “Something to Talk About“, “Love Sneakin’ Up On You“, and the ballad “I Can’t Make You Love Me” (with Bruce Hornsby on piano). Her 2022 single “Just Like That” won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year.

As of 2023, Raitt has received 13 competitive Grammy Awards, from 30 nominations, as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She ranked No. 50 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time“, and ranked No. 89 on the magazine’s list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”. Australian country music artist Graeme Connors has said “Bonnie Raitt does something with a lyric no one else can do; she bends it and twists it right into your heart.” In 2000, Raitt was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She has also received the Icon Award from the Billboard Women in Music Awards, and the MusiCares Person of the Year from The Recording Academy.

Messier 74 (also known as NGC 628 and Phantom Galaxy) is a large spiral galaxy in the equatorialconstellation Pisces. It is about 32 million light-years away from Earth. The galaxy contains two clearly defined spiral arms and is therefore used as an archetypal example of a grand design spiral galaxy. The galaxy’s low surface brightness makes it the most difficult Messier object for amateur astronomers to observe. Its relatively large angular (that is, apparent) size and the galaxy’s face-on orientation make it an ideal object for professional astronomers who want to study spiral armstructure and spiral density waves. It is estimated that M74 hosts about 100 billion stars

Roberta Joan “Joni” Mitchell CC (née Anderson; born November 7, 1943) is a Canadian-American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and painter. As one of the most influential singer-songwriters to emerge from the 1960s folk music circuit, Mitchell became known for her starkly personal lyrics and unconventional compositions which grew to incorporate pop and jazz elements.She has received many accolades, including ten Grammy Awards and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. Rolling Stonecalled her “one of the greatest songwriters ever”, and AllMusic has stated, “When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century”.

Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in Saskatoon and throughout western Canada, before moving on to the nightclubs of Toronto. She moved to the United States and began touring in 1965. Some of her original songs (“Urge for Going”, “Chelsea Morning“, “Both Sides, Now“, “The Circle Game“) were recorded by other folk singers, allowing her to sign with Reprise Records and record her debut album, Song to a Seagull, in 1968. Settling in Southern California, Mitchell helped define an era and a generation with popular songs like “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Woodstock“. Her 1971 album Blue is often cited as one of the best albums of all time; it was rated the 30th best album ever made in Rolling Stone‘s 2003 list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time“, rising to number 3 in the 2020 edition. In 2000, The New York Times chose Blue as one of the 25 albums that represented “turning points and pinnacles in 20th-century popular music”. NPR ranked Bluenumber 1 on a 2017 list of Greatest Albums Made By Women.

Mitchell began exploring more jazz-influenced ideas on 1974’s Court and Spark, which featured the radio hits “Help Me” and “Free Man in Paris“ and became her best-selling album. Mitchell’s vocal range began to shift from mezzo-soprano to that of a wide-ranging contralto around 1975. Her distinctive piano and open-tuned guitar compositions also grew more harmonically and rhythmically complex as she melded jazz with rock and roll, R&B, classical music and non-Western beats. Starting in the mid-1970s, she began working with noted jazz musicians including Jaco Pastorius, Tom Scott, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Pat Metheny as well as Charles Mingus, who asked her to collaborate on his final recordings. She later turned to pop and electronic music and engaged in political protest. She was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 44th Annual Grammy Awards in 2002.

Mitchell produced or co-produced most of her albums and designed most of her own album covers, describing herself as a “painter derailed by circumstance”. A critic of the music industry, she quit touring and released her 17th and last album of original songs in 2007. She would give occasional interviews and make appearances to speak on various causes over the next two decades, though the rupture of a brain aneurysm in 2015 led to a long period of recovery and therapy. A series of retrospective compilations were released over the time period, culminating in the Joni Mitchell Archives, a project to publish much of Joni’s unreleased material from her long career. She returned to public appearances in 2021, accepting several awards in person, including a Kennedy Center Honor in 2021. She performed live for the first time in 9 years, with an unannounced appearance at the June 2022 Newport Folk Festival, and performed a headlining show in June 2023 at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington State.

November 7th 1907 Chepín [Electo Rosell], Cuban violinist, bandleader, and composer (Orquesta Chepín-Chovén), born in Santiago, Cuba (d. 1984)