mick laBriola

A telescopic view toward the constellation Cassiopeia, the colorful skyscape features swept-back, comet-shaped clouds IC 59 (left) and IC 63. About 600 light-years distant, the clouds aren’t actually ghosts. They are slowly disappearing though, under the influence of energetic radiation from hot,luminous star gamma Cas. Gamma Cas is physically located only 3 to 4 light-years from the nebulae, the bright star just above and left in the frame. Slightly closer to gamma Cas, IC 63 is dominated by red H-alpha light emitted as hydrogen atoms ionized by the star’s ultraviolet radiation recombine with electrons. Farther from the star, IC 59 shows proportionally less H-alpha emission but more of the characteristic blue tint of dust reflected star light. The field of view spans over 1 degree or 10 light-years at the estimated distance of gamma Cas and friends.

James Edward Heath (born October 25, 1926), nicknamed Little Bird, is an American jazz saxophonist, composer, arranger and big band leader. He is the brother of bassist Percy Heath and drummer Albert Heath.

Heath originally played alto saxophone, but, after the influence of Charlie Parker on his work for Howard McGhee and Dizzy Gillespie in the late 1940s, he earned the nickname “Little Bird” (Parker’s nickname was “Bird”) and he switched to tenor saxophone.

During World War II, Heath was rejected for the draft for being under the weight limit. From late 1945 through most of 1946 he performed with the Nat Towles band. In 1946 he formed his own band, which was a fixture on the Philly jazz scene until 1949. John Coltrane was one of four saxophonists in this band, which played gigs with Charlie Parker and also at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Although Heath recalls that the band recorded a few demos on acetate, it never released any recordings, and its arrangements were lost at a Chicago train station. The band dissolved in 1949 so that Heath could join Dizzy Gillespie’s band.^[2]

One of Heath’s earliest big bands (1947-1948) in Philadelphia included John Coltrane, Benny Golson, Specs Wright, Cal Massey, Johnny Coles, Ray Bryant, and Nelson Boyd. Charlie Parker and Max Roach sat in on one occasion.

Heath was arrested and convicted twice for the sale of heroin; he was an acknowledged addict. The first time, in the spring of 1954, he was sent to the federal Prison Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, where many musicians and celebrities (and other people) were given treatment. After release, In early 1955, still an addict, he was arrested again, and served most of a six-year prison sentence in Lewisburg. He went cold turkey, and was able to spend a lot of his time engaged in music. While in prison he actually composed most of the 1956 Chet Baker and Art Pepper album Playboys. He was released early, on May 21, 1959, and has been clean ever since; conditions of probation made it difficult, but he managed to start rebuilding his career. At a coming-home party the night after his release, he met his eventual wife, Mona Brown, whom he married in 1960; they have two children, Roslyn and Jeffrey. He briefly joined Miles Davis‘s group in 1959, replacing Coltrane, and also worked with Kenny Dorham and Gil Evans. Heath recorded extensively as leader and sideman. During the 1960s, he frequently worked with Milt Jackson and Art Farmer.

In 1975, he and his brothers formed the Heath Brothers, also featuring pianist Stanley Cowell.

Earl Cyril Palmer (October 25, 1924 – September 19, 2008) was an American rock and roll and rhythm-and-blues drummer. He is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Palmer played on many recordings, including Little Richard‘s first few albums and many other well-known rock and roll records. According to one obituary, “his list of credits read like a Who’s Who of American popular music of the last 60 years.”Born into a show-business family in New Orleans and raised in the Tremé district, Palmer started his career at five as a tap dancer, joining his mother and aunt on the black vaudeville circuit in its twilight and touring the country extensively with Ida Cox‘s Darktown Scandals Review. His father is thought to have been the local pianist and bandleader Walter “Fats” Pichon.

Eddie Lang (born Salvatore Massaro, October 25, 1902 – March 26, 1933) is known as the father of jazz guitar. During the 1920s, he gave the guitar a prominence it previously lacked as a solo instrument, as part of a band or orchestra, and as accompaniment for vocalists. He recorded duets with guitarists Lonnie Johnson and Carl Kress and jazz violinist Joe Venuti, and played rhythm guitar in the big bands of Paul Whiteman and Bing Crosby. Eddie Lang Pennsylvania Historical Marker and mural by Jared Bader at 7th and Fitzwater Streets in South Philadelphia (October 19, 2016)

The son of an Italian-American instrument maker, Lang was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up with violinist Joe Venuti. His first instrument was violin when he was seven. He performed on violin in 1917 and became a member of a trio. In 1920, he dropped the violin for banjo and worked with Charlie Kerr, then Bert Estlow, Vic D’Ippolito, and Billy Lustig‘s Scranton Siren Orchestra. A few years later, he dropped the banjo for guitar when he became a member of the Mound City Blue Blowers led by Red McKenzie. He recorded one of the first solos in 1924 on “Deep 2nd Street Blues”. His performances with McKenzie’s band drew attention, and he found many jobs as a freelance guitarist. Before Lang, the guitar hadn’t been a prominent instrument in jazz bands and dance orchestras.

Lang and Joe Venuti recorded with Roger Wolfe Kahn and Jean Goldkette and performed with the Adrian Rollini Orchestra. Lang recorded with blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson under the name Blind Willie Dunn to hide his race and as a tribute to blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson. He also worked with Frankie Trumbauer, Hoagy Carmichael, Annette Hanshaw, Red Nichols, Jack Pettis, Bessie Smith, and Clarence Williams.

Georges Bizet (UK: /ˈbiːzeɪ/ BEE-zay, US: /biːˈzeɪ/ bee-ZAY, French: [ʒɔʁʒ bizɛ]; 25 October 1838 – 3 June 1875), registered at birth as Alexandre César Léopold Bizet, was a French composer of the Romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, which has become one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertoire.

During a brilliant student career at the Conservatoire de Paris, Bizet won many prizes, including the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1857. He was recognised as an outstanding pianist, though he chose not to capitalise on this skill and rarely performed in public. Returning to Paris after almost three years in Italy, he found that the main Parisian opera theatres preferred the established classical repertoire to the works of newcomers. His keyboard and orchestral compositions were likewise largely ignored; as a result, his career stalled, and he earned his living mainly by arranging and transcribing the music of others. Restless for success, he began many theatrical projects during the 1860s, most of which were abandoned. Neither of his two operas that reached the stage in this time—Les pêcheurs de perles and La jolie fille de Perth—were immediately successful.

After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, during which Bizet served in the National Guard, he had little success with his one-act opera Djamileh, though an orchestral suite derived from his incidental music to Alphonse Daudet‘s play L’Arlésienne was instantly popular. The production of Bizet’s final opera, Carmen, was delayed because of fears that its themes of betrayal and murder would offend audiences. After its premiere on 3 March 1875, Bizet was convinced that the work was a failure; he died of a heart attack three months later, unaware that it would prove a spectacular and enduring success.

Bizet’s marriage to Geneviève Halévy was intermittently happy and produced one son. After his death, his work, apart from Carmen, was generally neglected. Manuscripts were given away or lost, and published versions of his works were frequently revised and adapted by other hands. He founded no school and had no obvious disciples or successors. After years of neglect, his works began to be performed more frequently in the 20th century. Later commentators have acclaimed him as a composer of brilliance and originality whose premature death was a significant loss to French musical theatre.

Light-years across, this suggestive shape known as the Seahorse Nebula appears in silhouette against a rich, luminous background of stars. Seen toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus, the dusty, obscuring clouds are part of a Milky Way molecular cloud some 1,200 light-years distant. It is also listed as Barnard 150 (B150), one of 182 dark markings of the sky cataloged in the early 20th century by astronomer E. E. Barnard. Packs of low mass stars are forming within from collapsing cores only visible at long infrared wavelengths. Still, colorful stars in Cepheus add to the pretty, galactic skyscape.

Odean Pope (born October 24, 1938) is an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Pope was raised in Philadelphia, where he learned from Ray Bryant while young. Early in his career, at Philadelphia’s Uptown Theater, Pope played behind a number of noted rhythm and blues artists including James Brown, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder.

He played briefly in the 1960s with Jimmy McGriff, and late in the 1960s he began working with Max Roach, including on tours of Europe in 1967-68. He was a member of Philadelphia group Catalyst in the early and mid-1970s, and assembled the Saxophone Choir, which consists of nine saxophones and a rhythm section (piano, bass and drums), in 1977. He became a regular member of Roach’s quartet in 1979 and recorded extensively with him, in addition to numerous releases as a leader.

James Henry “Jimmy” Dawkins (October 24, 1936 – April 10, 2013) was an American Chicago blues and electric blues guitarist and singer. He is generally considered to have been a practitioner of the “West Side sound” of Chicago blues.

Dawkins was born in Tchula, Mississippi. He moved to Chicago in 1955, where he worked in a box factory, started to play in local blues clubs, and gained a reputation as a session musician.

In 1969, thanks to the efforts of his friend Magic Sam, his first album, Fast Fingers, was released by Delmark Records. It won the Grand Prix du Disque from the Hot Club de France. In 1971, Delmark released his second album, All for Business, with the singer Andrew Odom and the guitarist Otis Rush.

Dawkins toured in the late 1970s, backed up by James Solberg (of Luther Allison and the Nighthawks) on guitar and Jon Preizler (the Lamont Cranston Band, Luther Allison, and Albert King), a Seattle-based Hammond B-3 organ player known for his soulful jazz-influenced style. Other musicians that toured with Dawkins in the late 1970s were Jimi Schutte (drums), Sylvester Boines (bass), Rich Kirch and Billy Flynn (guitars). Dawkins toured in Europe with this group of musicians. He also toured in Japan and recorded more albums in the United States and Europe. He contributed a column to the blues magazine Living Blues.

Willie James Mabon (October 24, 1925 – April 19, 1985) was an American R&B singer, songwriter and pianist, who had two number one hits on the Billboard R&B chart: “I Don’t Know” in 1952 and “I’m Mad” in 1953. Mabon was born and brought up in the Hollywood district of Memphis, Tennessee. He moved to Chicago in 1942, by which time he had become known as a singer and pianist. He formed a group, the Blues Rockers, and in 1949 began recording for Aristocrat Records and then Chess Records.

His biggest success came in 1952 when his debut solo release, “I Don’t Know“, written by Cripple Clarence Lofton (who received no royalties),topped the Billboard R&B chart for eight weeks. It was one of the most popular releases of its era and was Chess’s biggest hit before the successes of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. It was also one of the first R&B hit records to be covered by a leading white artist, Tennessee Ernie Ford. Mabon’s original was played on Alan Freed‘s early radio shows and also sold well to white audiences, crossing over markets at the start of the rock-and-roll era.

Mabon returned to the top R&B slot in 1953 with “I’m Mad” and had another hit in 1954 with the Mel London song “Poison Ivy”. However, his career failed to maintain its momentum, and record releases in the late 1950s on various labels were largely unsuccessful. Releases in the 1960s included “I’m the Fixer” and “Got to Have Some”.

Saunders Teddell, or Saunders Terrell (or other variants, sources differ) (October 24, 1911 – March 11, 1986), known as Sonny Terry, was an American Piedmont blues and folk musician, who was known for his energetic blues harmonica style, which frequently included vocal whoops and hollers and occasionally imitations of trains and fox hunts. Terry was born in Greensboro, Georgia. His father, a farmer, taught him to play basic blues harp as a youth. He sustained injuries to his eyes and went blind by the time he was 16, which prevented him from doing farm work, and was forced to play music in order to earn a living. Terry played Campdown Races to the plow horses which improved the efficiency of farming in the area. He began playing blues in Shelby, North Carolina. After his father died, he began playing in the trio of Piedmont blues–style guitarist Blind Boy Fuller. When Fuller died in 1941, Terry established a long-standing musical relationship with Brownie McGhee, and they recorded numerous songs together. The duo became well known among white audiences during the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. This included collaborations with Styve Homnick, Woody Guthrie and Moses Asch, producing classic recordings for Folkways Records (now Smithsonian/Folkways).

In 1938 Terry was invited to play at Carnegie Hall for the first From Spirituals to Swing concert,^[4] and later that year he recorded for the Library of Congress. He recorded his first commercial sides In 1940. Some of his most famous works include “Old Jabo”, a song about a man bitten by a snake, and “Lost John”, which demonstrates his amazing breath control.

Despite their fame as “pure” folk artists, in the 1940s Terry and McGhee fronted a jump blues combo with honking saxophone and rolling piano, which was variously billed as Brownie McGhee and his Jook House Rockers or Sonny Terry and his Buckshot Five.

RCW 49 (Gum 29) is a H II region nebula located 13,700 light years away. It is a dusty stellar nursery that contains more than 2,200 stars and is about 350 light years across.

The nebula RCW49, shown in infrared light in this image from the Spitzer Space Telescope, is a nursery for newborn stars. Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have found in RCW49 more than 300 newborn or ‘protostars,’ all with circumstellar disks of dust and gas. The discovery reveals that galaxies make new stars at a much more prolific rate than previously imagined. The stellar disks of dust and gas not only feed material onto the growing new stars, but can be the raw material for new planetary systems.

Gary Robert McFarland (October 23, 1933 – November 3, 1971) was a composer, arranger, vibraphonist and vocalist, prominent on Verve and Impulse! Records during the 1960s, when he made “one of the more significant contributors to orchestral jazz”. McFarland was born in Los Angeles, on October 23, 1933, but grew up in Grants Pass, Oregon.

He attained a small following after working with Bill Evans, Gerry Mulligan, Johnny Hodges, John Lewis, Stan Getz, Bob Brookmeyer, and Anita O’Day.

As well as his own albums and arrangements for other musicians he composed the scores to the films Eye of the Devil (1966) and Who Killed Mary What’s ‘Er Name? (1971). By the end of the 1960s, he was moving away from jazz towards an often wistful or melancholy style of instrumental pop, as well as producing the recordings of other artists on his Skye Records label (run in partnership with Gábor Szabó and Cal Tjader until its bankruptcy in 1970).

Frank Hewitt (October 23, 1935 – September 5, 2002) was an American hard bop jazz pianist. Born in Queens, New York, Hewitt lived most of his life in Harlem. His mother was a church pianist, and he initially studied classical and gospel music, but switched to jazz after hearing a Charlie Parker record. He took the bop pianists Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Elmo Hope as his role models. In the 1950s and 1960s he worked with Howard McGhee, Cecil Payne, John Coltrane, Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday, among others; in 1961 he also participated in the Living Theater‘s production of Jack Gelber‘s The Connection. He became a regular figure in the circle of the pianist Barry Harris. In the 1990s Hewitt became a central figure at New York’s Smalls Jazz Club; aside from playing there several nights a week, he sometimes also ended up using the walk-in refrigerator as a place to bunk when times were rough.

During his lifetime only one track of Hewitt’s playing was released, a version of the Kenny Dorham tune “Prince Albert” on the compilation Jazz Underground: Live at Smalls (Impulse, 1998). After Hewitt’s death, however, recordings made by Luke Kaven began to surface on Kaven’s Smalls Records label: the trio discs We Loved You, Not Afraid to Live, Fresh from the Cooler, and Out of the Clear Black Sky, and the quintet date Four Hundred Saturdays. His reputation as a neglected jazz master has steadily grown among fans of bebop piano.