mick laBriola

Raymond Matthews Brown (October 13, 1926 – July 2, 2002) was an American jazz double bassist known for extensive work with Oscar Petersonand Ella Fitzgerald.

Ray Brown was born October 13, 1926 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and took piano lessons from the age of eight. After noticing how many pianists attended his high school, he thought of taking up the trombone but was unable to afford one. With a vacancy in the high school jazz orchestra, he took up the upright bass. A major early influence on Brown’s bass playing was Jimmy Blanton, the bassist in the Duke Ellington band. As a young man Brown became increasingly well known in the Pittsburgh jazz scene, with his first experiences playing in bands with the Jimmy Hinsley Sextet^[a] and the Snookum Russell band. After graduating high school, having heard stories about the burgeoning jazz scene on 52nd Street in New York City, he bought a one-way ticket to New York. He arrived in New York at the age of 20, met up with Hank Jones, with whom he had previously worked, and was introduced to Dizzy Gillespie, who was looking for a bass player. Gillespie hired Brown on the spot, and he soon played with such established musicians as Art Tatum and Charlie Parker. In 1948, Brown left Dizzy’s band to start a trio with Hank Jones and Charlie Smith.

Arthur Tatum Jr. (/ˈteɪtəm/, October 13, 1909 – November 5, 1956) was an American jazz pianist.

Tatum grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where he began playing professionally and had his own radio program, rebroadcast nationwide, while still in his teens. He left Toledo in 1932 and had residencies as a solo pianist at clubs in major urban centers including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Throughout his career, Tatum also played for long periods at night in after-hours venues – at which he was often more spontaneous and creative than in his paid-for performances – and drank enormous quantities of alcohol. Although drinking did not negatively affect his playing, it did damage his health. In the 1940s, Tatum led a commercially successful trio for a short time and began playing in more formal jazz concert settings, including at Norman Granz-produced Jazz at the Philharmonic events. Granz recorded Tatum extensively in solo and small group formats in the mid-1950s, with the last session occurring only two months before the pianist’s death from uremia at the age of 47.

Tatum is widely regarded as one of the greatest jazz pianists. His playing encompassed everything that had come before, added great harmonic and rhythmic imagination and complexity, and was often at very high speed. He extended what was considered possible in jazz piano and established new ground in jazz more broadly through innovative use of reharmonization, voicing, and bitonality. Tatum’s mother, Mildred Hoskins, was born in Martinsville, Virginia, around 1890, and was a domestic worker. His father, Arthur Tatum Sr., was born in Statesville, North Carolina, and had steady employment as a mechanic. In 1909, they made their way from North Carolina to begin a new life in Toledo, Ohio. The couple had four children; Art was the oldest to survive, and was born in Toledo on October 13, 1909. He was followed by Arline nine years later and by Karl after another two years. Karl went to college and became a social worker. The Tatum family was regarded as conventional and church-going.

The Boomerang Nebula is a protoplanetary nebula located 5,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It is also known as the Bow Tie Nebula and catalogued as LEDA 3074547. The nebula’s temperature is measured at 1 K (−272.15 °C; −457.87 °F) making it the coolest natural place currently known in the Universe.

The Boomerang Nebula is believed to be a star system evolving toward the planetary nebula phase. It continues to form and develop due to the outflow of gas from its core where a star in its late stage life sheds mass and emits starlight illuminating dust in the nebula. Millimeter scale dust grains mask portions of the nebula’s center so most escaping visible light is in two opposing lobes forming a distinctive hourglass shape as viewed from Earth. The outflowing gas is moving outwards at a speed of about 164 km/s and expanding rapidly as it moves out into space; this gas expansion results in the nebula’s unusually low temperature.

Keith Taylor and Mike Scarrott called it the “Boomerang Nebula” in 1980 after observing it with the Anglo-Australian telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory. Unable to view it with great clarity, the astronomers saw merely a slight asymmetry in the nebula’s lobes suggesting a curved shape like a boomerang. The nebula was photographed in detail by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1998 revealing a more symmetric hourglass shape.

In 1995, using the 15-metre Swedish-ESO Submillimetre Telescope in Chile, astronomers revealed that it is the coldest place in the Universe found so far, besides laboratory-created temperatures. With a temperature of −272 °C, it is only 1 °C warmer than absolute zero (the lowest limit for all temperatures). Even the −270 °C background glow from the Big Bang is warmer than the nebula. Aside from the CMB cold spot, it is the only object found so far that has a temperature lower than the background radiation.

Melvin Rhyne (October 12, 1936 – March 5, 2013, Indianapolis, Indiana), was a jazz organist best known for his work with Wes Montgomery. Melvin Rhyne was born in Indianapolis in 1936 and started playing the piano shortly after. At 19 years old, Rhyne started playing piano with then-unknown tenor saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk but quickly switched over to the instrument that would make him famous: the Hammond B3 organ. Rhyne’s piano skills translated to the organ fluently and before long he was backing famous blues players like B.B. King and T-Bone Walker. In 1959 he was asked to join fellow Indianapolis musician Wes Montgomery‘s newly formed trio.

Rhyne then moved to Wisconsin and largely kept to himself for the next two decades. In 1991, however, he played on Herb Ellis‘s album Roll Call, Brian Lynch‘s At the Main Event, and his own album, The Legend. He continued to be prolific in the years to come, releasing eight more solo albums on the Criss Cross Jazz label. Rhyne also recorded with The Mark Ladley Trio for the 1992 release, Strictly Business and the 1994 release, Evidence. Both landed in the Jazz Charts at CMJ New Music Report and The Gavin Report. The group also appeared on a Jazziz Magazine sampler disc during that time. Altenburgh Records posthumously released, Final Call in 2013 by the same group.

Robert Lewis Jones (October 12, 1925 – April 2, 1996), known as both Guitar Gabriel and Nyles Jones, was an American blues musician. Gabriel’s unique style of guitar playing, which he referred to as “Toot Blues”, combined Piedmont, Chicago, and Texas blues, as well as gospel, and was influenced by artists such as Blind Boy Fuller and Reverend Gary Davis. After hearing of Guitar Gabriel from the late Greensboro, North Carolinablues guitarist and pianist, James “Guitar Slim” Stephens, musician and folklorist Tim Duffy located and befriended Gabriel, who was the inspiration for the creation of the Music Maker Relief Foundation. Gabriel wore a trademark white sheepskin hat, which he acquired while traveling and performing with Medicine Shows during his late 20s. Gabriel was born in Decatur, Georgia, moving to Winston-Salem, North Carolina at age five. His father, Sonny Jones (also known as Jack Jones, James Johnson, and as Razorblade for an act in which he ate razor blades, mason jars, and light bulbs) recorded for Vocalion Records in 1939 in Memphis, accompanied by Sonny Terry and Oh Red (George Washington). Sonny Jones also recorded a single for the Orchid label in Baltimore in 1950 (as Sunny Jones). His family, who grew up sharecropping, shared a talent for music. His great-grandmother, an ex-slave, called set dances and played the banjo; his grandfather played banjo and his grandmother the pump organ; his father and uncle were blues guitarists and singers and his sisters sang blues and gospel

In 1935, Gabriel’s family moved to Durham, North Carolina, where he began playing guitar on the streets. Between the ages of 15 and 25, Gabriel traveled the country playing the guitar in medicine shows. During his travels, he performed with artists such as Bo Diddley, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Louis Jordan, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, T-Bone Walker and Jimmy Reed. In 1970, Gabriel went to Pittsburgh and recorded a single, “Welfare Blues,” as well as an album, My South, My Blues, with the Gemini label under the name “Nyles” Jones. The 45 became a hit in Pittsburgh and Cleveland and though the album sold well, Gabriel never saw any royalties. Disillusioned and embittered by the music business, Gabriel returned home to Winston-Salem where he continued playing music, but expressly for his community, at churches, homes, clubs, “drink houses,” and even at bus stops when children were returning home from school. The album, My South, My Blues was reissued in 1988, on the French label, Jambalaya, as Nyles Jones, the Welfare Blues.

Alfred “Tubby” Hall (October 12, 1895 – May 13, 1945) was a jazz drummer.Hall was born in Sellers, Louisiana; his family moved to New Orleans in his childhood. His younger brother Minor “Ram” Hall also became a professional drummer. He played in many marching bands in New Orleans, including with Buddie Petit. In March 1917 Tubby Hall moved to Chicago, where he played with Sugar Johnny Smith. After two years in the United States Army, he returned to playing in Chicago mostly with New Orleans bands, joining Carroll Dickerson‘s Orchestra (recording with it in 1927) and later with the groups of King Oliver, Jimmie Noone, Tiny Parham, Johnny Dodds. Noted swing and big-band drummer Gene Krupa said that Hall and Zutty Singleton “were great! They knew every trick and just how to phrase the parts of the choruses behind the horns, how to lead a man in, what to do at the turn-arounds, when to use sticks and when to use brushes, when to go for the rims or the woodblocks, what cymbals are for.” He is seen in Armstrong’s movies of the early 1930s, including the live action and Betty Boop cartoon I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You (1932) and A Rhapsody in Black and Blue(1932), made by Paramount. Only Armstrong and Hall got closeups in the two films, and both get their faces transposed with those of racially stereotyped “jungle natives” in the cartoon. Hall morphs from a jazz drummer to a cannibal stirring a cooking pot with two wooden sticks. His drumming style was forceful and sober, generally maintaining constant tempo on the snare. Jazz critic Hugues Panassié considered him one of the three greatest jazz drummers of his generation, along with Zutty Singleton and Warren “Baby” Dodds.

Tubby Hall died in Chicago

NGC 4567 and NGC 4568 (nicknamed the Siamese Twins or the Butterfly Galaxies) are a set of unbarred spiral galaxies about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. They were both discovered by William Herschel in 1784. They are part of the Virgo cluster of galaxies. Only one supernova (SN 2004cc) has been observed in the Siamese Twins. Distance 59.4 Mly. These galaxies are in the process of colliding and merging with each other, as studies of their distributions of neutral and molecular hydrogen show, with the highest star formation activity in the part where they overlap. However the system is still in an early phase of interaction. They were named “Siamese Twins” because they appear to be connected.

Lester Bowie (October 11, 1941 – November 8, 1999) was an American jazz trumpet player and composer. He was a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and co-founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Born in the historic village of Bartonsville in Frederick County, Maryland, Bowie grew up in St Louis, Missouri. At the age of five he started studying the trumpet with his father, a professional musician. He played with blues musicians such as Little Milton and Albert King, and rhythm and blues stars such as Solomon Burke, Joe Tex, and Rufus Thomas. In 1965, he became Fontella Bass‘s musical director and husband. He was a co-founder of Black Artists Group (BAG) in St Louis.In 1966, he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a studio musician, and met Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell and became a member of the AACM. In 1968, he founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago with Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, and Malachi Favors. He remained a member of this group for the rest of his life, and was also a member of Jack DeJohnette‘s New Directions quartet. He lived and worked in Jamaica and Africa, and played and recorded with Fela Kuti. Bowie’s onstage appearance, in a white lab coat, with his goatee waxed into two points, was an important part of the Art Ensemble’s stage show.In 1984, he formed Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, a brass nonet in which Bowie demonstrated jazz’s links to other forms of popular music, a decidedly more populist approach than that of the Art Ensemble. With this group he recorded songs previously associated with  Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, and Marilyn Manson, along with other material. His New York Organ Ensemble featured James Carter and Amina Claudine Myers. In the mid 1980s he was also part of the jazz supergroup The Leaders. Featuring tenor saxophonist Chico Freeman, alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe, drummer Famoudou Don Moye, pianist Kirk Lightsey, and bassist Cecil McBee. At this time, he was also playing the opening theme music for The Cosby Show.

Billy Higgins (October 11, 1936 – May 3, 2001) was an American jazz drummer. He played mainly free jazz and hard bop. Higgins was born in Los Angeles. Higgins played on Ornette Coleman‘s first records, beginning in 1958. He then freelanced extensively with hard bop and other post-bop players, including Donald Byrd, Dexter Gordon, Grant Green, Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, Paul Horn, Milt Jackson, Jackie McLean, Pat Metheny, Hank Mobley, Thelonious Monk, Lee Morgan, David Murray, Art Pepper, Sonny Rollins, Mal Waldron, and Cedar Walton. He was one of the house drummers for Blue Note Records and played on dozens of Blue Note albums of the 1960s In his career, he played on over 700 recordings, including recordings of rock and funk. He appeared as a jazz drummer in the 2001 movie Southlander. In 1989, Higgins cofounded a cultural center, The World Stage, in Los Angeles to encourage and promote younger jazz musicians. The center provides workshops in performance and writing, as well as concerts and recordings. Higgins also taught in the jazz studies program at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was divorced from wife Mauricina Altier Higgins and had three sons, William, Joseph, and David, as well as a stepson Jody. His youngest son Benjamin resides in Los Angeles. He also had two daughters, Rickie Wade and Heidi. Billy Higgins died of kidney and liver failure on May 3, 2001 at a hospital in Inglewood, California.

Arthur Blakey (October 11, 1919 – October 16, 1990) was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. He was briefly known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina after he became a Muslim in the late 1940s.

Blakey made a name for himself in the 1940s in the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. He worked with bebop musicians Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. In the mid-1950s Horace Silver and Blakey formed the Jazz Messengers, a group that the drummer was associated with for the next 35 years. The group was formed as a collective of contemporaries, but over the years the band became known as an incubator for young talent, including Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, and Wynton Marsalis. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz calls the Jazz Messengers “the archetypal hard bop group of the late 50s”.^[2]

Blakey was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame (in 1981),^[3] the Grammy Hall of Fame (in 1998 and 2001), and was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1991. Blakey was born on October 11, 1919, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, probably to a single mother who died shortly after his birth, and her name is often cited as Marie Roddicker (or Roddericker) although Blakey’s own 1937 marriage license shows her maiden name to have been Jackson. His biological father was Bertram Thomas Blakey, originally of Ozark, Alabama, whose family migrated northward to Pittsburgh sometime between 1900 and 1910. Blakey’s uncle, Rubi Blakey, was a popular Pittsburgh singer, choral leader, and teacher who attended Fisk University.

Flamenco Fridays & Fandangos
Fandango is a lively couples dance from Spain, usually in triple metre, traditionally accompanied by guitars, castanets, or hand-clapping (“palmas” in Spanish). Fandango can both be sung and danced. Sung fandango is usually bipartite: it has an instrumental introduction followed by “variaciones”. Sung fandango usually follows the structure of “cante” that consist of four or five octosyllabic verses (coplas) or musical phrases (tercios). Occasionally, the first copla is repeated.

What day is it today Animal? It’s Hug a Drummer Day!

NGC 2074 is a magnitude ~8 emission nebula in the Tarantula Nebula located in the constellation Dorado. It was discovered on 3 August 1826 by James Dunlop and around 1835 by John Herschel. It is described as being “pretty bright, pretty large, much extended, [and having] 5 stars involved”. Some of the objects catalogued by Herschel before 1847 do not have a discovery date listed, and NGC 2074 is one of them. Though its inclusion in the catalog of objects observed in the Large Magellanic Cloud which involves observations carried out between 2 November 1836 and 26 March 1837 shows it must not have been discovered later than that. The observation of NGC 2074 by Dunlop was not identified as this object until recently. NGC 2074 is located around 170,000 light-years (1.1×10¹⁰ AU) away. The area has a lot of raw stellar creation, possibly triggered by a nearby supernova explosion and is on the edge of a dark molecular cloud which is an incubator for the birth of new stars.

Cyril Garrett Neville (born October 10, 1948) is an American percussionist and vocalist who first came to prominence as a member of his brother Art Neville‘s funky New Orleans-based band, The Meters. He joined Art in the Neville Brothers band upon the dissolution of the Meters.

He has appeared on recordings by Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson, Edie Brickell, Willie Nelson, Dr. John and The New Orleans Social Club among others.

Neville wrote an article for the December 16, 2005 edition of CounterPunch, titled “Why I’m Not Going Back To New Orleans” and was featured in the 2006 documentary film New Orleans Music in Exile. After Hurricane Katrina he moved to Austin, Texas but currently lives in Slidell, Louisiana.

Soul Rebels Brass Band featured Neville as a special guest on their Rounder Records debut record, Unlock Your Mind, released on January 31, 2012. The Soul Rebels’ name was conceived by Neville at the New Orleans venue Tipitina’s, where the band was opening.

In 2005, Neville joined up with Tab Benoit for the Voice of the Wetlands Allstars to bring awareness to Louisiana’s rapid loss of wetlands along the Gulf Coast. The band also features Waylon Thibodeaux, Johnny Sansone, Anders Osborne, Monk Boudreaux, George Porter, Jr., Johnny Vidacovich, and Dr. John. The band has become a main feature at the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.