mick laBriola

PSR B1509−58 is a pulsar approximately 17,000 light-years away in the constellation of Circinus discovered by the Einstein X-Ray Observatory in 1982. It appears approximately 1,700 years old, and it sits in a nebula that spans about 150 light years. NASA described the star as “a rapidly spinning neutron star which is spewing energy out into the space around it to create complex and intriguing structures, including one that resembles a large cosmic hand.” Which is also known by name “Hand of God”. The spin rate is “almost 7 times per second”.

Dorothy Masuka (3 September 1935, Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) – 23 February 2019, Johannesburg, South Africa) was a Zimbabwe-born South African jazz singer. She was born in Bulawayo, the fourth of seven children, and her mother was Zulu while her father was a Zambian hotel chef. Still, she attended a Catholic school deemed good by the standards of education allowed blacks. Her family moved to South Africa when she was 12 due to her health. By the time she was 19 she was touring in South Africa with singers she had admired as a girl. Masuka’s music was popular in South Africa throughout the 1950s, but when her songs became more serious, the government began questioning her. Her song “Dr. Malan,” mentioning difficult laws, was banned and in 1961 she sang a song for Patrice Lumumba, which led to her exile. This exile lasted 31 years in total during which she lived in Zambia and worked as a flight attendant. She returned to Zimbabwe in 1980 after independence. Many of her songs are in the Ndebele language or Sindebele languages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV3n4rt26LA

Freddie King (September 3, 1934 – December 28, 1976) was an American blues guitarist and singer. He recorded several hits for Federal Records in the early 1960s. His soulful and powerful voice and distinctive guitar style inspired many musicians, particularly guitarists. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.

King based his guitar style on Texas blues and Chicago blues influences. His best-known recordings include the early instrumentals “Hide Away” (1961), “San-Ho-Zay,” (1961) and “The Stumble” (1962). The album Freddy King Sings showcased his singing talents and included the record chart hits “You’ve Got to Love Her with a Feeling” and “I’m Tore Down”. He later became involved with more rhythm and blues– and rock-oriented producers and was one of the first bluesmen to have a multiracial backing band at live performances. According to his birth certificate he was named Fred King, and his parents were Ella Mae King and J. T. Christian. When Freddie was six years old, his mother and his uncle began teaching him to play the guitar. In autumn 1949, he and his family moved from Dallas to the South Side of Chicago.

Shoista Mullojonova (Tajik: Шоиста Муллоҷонова, Persian: شایسته ملاجان‌آوا‎, Russian: Шоиста Рубиновна Муллоджанова; September 3, 1925 – June 26, 2010), born Shushana Rubinovna Mullodzhanova, was a renowned Tajik-born Bukharian Jewish Shashmakom singer. She was born in Dushanbe, Tajik ASSR to a religious Bukharian Jewish family. Her mother, Sivyo Davydova, was from Samarkand and her father, Rubin Mullodzhanov, originally came from Bukhara. Her family traces its ancestry to an artistocratic Levite tribe that has been into performing and entertaining since the time of the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem. At some point as an adult, she changed her surname from Mullodzhanova to Mullojonova in Soviet Tajikistan.

Memphis Slim (September 3, 1915 – February 24, 1988) was an American blues pianist, singer, and composer. He led a series of bands that, reflecting the popular appeal of jump blues, included saxophones, bass, drums, and piano. A song he first cut in 1947, “Every Day I Have the Blues“, has become a blues standard, recorded by many other artists. He made over 500 recordings.

Memphis Slim was born John Len Chatman, in Memphis, Tennessee. For his first recordings, for Okeh Records in 1940, he used the name of his father, Peter Chatman (who sang, played piano and guitar, and operated juke joints); it is commonly believed that he did so to honor his father. He started performing under the name “Memphis Slim” later that year but continued to publish songs under the name Peter Chatman.

He spent most of the 1930s performing in honky-tonks, dance halls, and gambling joints in West Memphis, Arkansas, and southeast Missouri. He settled in Chicago in 1939 and began teaming with the guitarist and singer Big Bill Broonzy in clubs soon afterwards. In 1940 and 1941 he recorded two songs for Bluebird Records that became part of his repertoire for decades, “Beer Drinking Woman” and “Grinder Man Blues”. These were released under the name “Memphis Slim,” given to him by Bluebird’s producer, Lester Melrose. Slim became a regular session musician for Bluebird, and his piano talents supported established stars such as John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, Washboard Sam, and Jazz Gillum. Many of Slim’s recordings and performances until the mid-1940s were with Broonzy, who had recruited Slim to be his piano player after the death of his accompanist Joshua Altheimer in 1940.

The Necklace Nebula (PN G054.2-03.4) is a 19-trillion-kilometre-wide (2.0 light-year-wide) planetary nebula located about 15,000 light-years away in the northern constellation Sagitta. It was discovered in 2005 from the Isaac Newton Telescope Photometric H-alpha Survey (IPHAS), a ground-based H-alphaplanetary nebula study of the North Galactic Plane.

The Necklace Nebula is the exploded aftermath of a giant star that came too close to its Sun-like binary companion. The two stars that produced the Necklace Nebula are in a relatively small orbit about each other. They have a period of 1.2 days and a separation on the order of 5 times the radius of the Sun.

About 10,000 years ago one of the aging stars ballooned to the point where it engulfed its companion star. The smaller star continued orbiting inside its larger companion, increasing the giant’s rotation rate.

The bloated companion star spun so fast that a large part of its gaseous envelope expanded into space. Due to centrifugal force, most of the gas escaped along the star’s equator, producing a ring. The embedded bright knots are dense gas clumps in the ring.

Clifford Laconia Jordan (September 2, 1931 – March 27, 1993) was an American jazz tenor saxophone player. While in Chicago, he performed with Max Roach, Sonny Stitt, and some rhythm and blues groups. He moved to New York City in 1957, after which he recorded three albums for Blue Note. He recorded with Horace Silver, J.J. Johnson, and Kenny Dorham, among others. He was part of the Charles Mingus Sextet, with Eric Dolphy, during its 1964 European tour.

Jordan toured Africa with Randy Weston, and performed in Paris while living in Belgium. In later years, he led his own groups, performed with Cedar Walton‘s quartet Eastern Rebellion, and led a big band.

Jordan was married to Shirley Jordan, a designer and former owner of Clothing Manufacturing Corporation in New York. He later married Sandy Jordan (née Williams), a graphic artist and Honorary Founders Board member of the Jazz Foundation of America.

Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver (September 2, 1928 – June 18, 2014 Norwalk, CT) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, particularly in the hard bop style that he helped pioneer in the 1950s.

After playing tenor saxophone and piano at school in Connecticut, Silver got his break on piano when his trio was recruited by Stan Getz in 1950. Silver soon moved to New York City, where he developed a reputation as a composer and for his bluesy playing. Frequent sideman recordings in the mid-1950s helped further, but it was his work with the Jazz Messengers, co-led by Art Blakey, that brought both his writing and playing most attention. Their Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers album contained Silver’s first hit, “The Preacher“. After leaving Blakey in 1956, Silver formed his own quintet, with what became the standard small group line-up of tenor saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass, and drums. Their public performances and frequent recordings for Blue Note Records increased Silver’s popularity, even through changes of personnel. His most successful album was Song for My Father, made with two iterations of the quintet in 1963 and 1964.

Several changes occurred in the early 1970s: Silver disbanded his group to spend more time with his wife and to concentrate on composing; he included lyrics in his recordings; and his interest in spiritualism developed. The last two of these were often combined, resulting in commercially unsuccessful releases such as The United States of Mind series. Silver left Blue Note after 28 years, founded his own record label, and scaled back his touring in the 1980s, relying in part on royalties from his compositions for income. In 1993, he returned to major record labels, releasing five albums before gradually withdrawing from public view because of health problems.

As a player, Silver transitioned from bebop to hard bop by stressing melody rather than complex harmony, and combined clean and often humorous right-hand lines with darker notes and chords in a near-perpetual left-hand rumble. His compositions similarly emphasized catchy melodies, but often also contained dissonant harmonies. Many of his varied repertoire of songs, including “Doodlin’“, “Peace“, and “Sister Sadie“, became jazz standardsthat are still widely played. His considerable legacy encompasses his influence on other pianists and composers, and the development of young jazz talents who appeared in his bands over the course of four decades.

Lawrence (Booker T.) Laury (September 2, 1914 – September 23, 1995) was an American boogie-woogie, blues, gospel and jazz pianist and singer. Laury worked with Memphis Slim and Mose Vinson but did not record his debut album until he was almost eighty years of age. He appeared in two films.

Laury was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up with his lifelong friend Memphis Slim. At the age of six, after helping his mother play the family’s pump organ, Laury learned to play the keyboards. His barrelhouse playing style, which he developed alongside Slim, was based on the influence of the Memphis performers Roosevelt Sykes, Sunnyland Slim, and Speckled Red. In the early 1930s, and in the company of the younger Mose Vinson, Slim and Laury began playing in local clubs.

In 1935, Sykes suggested to Laury and Slim that they relocate to Chicago, with a view to obtaining a recording contract. Slim took the advice, but Laury decided to remain in Memphis, where he played in gambling houses and clubs for decades. Laury had a large hand width, which enabled him to span ten keys. His playing dexterity was such that, after losing one finger on his left hand following an accident with a circular saw in the 1950s, he was still able to play well. Based around Beale Street, in Memphis, as that area started to degenerate, Laury traveled around Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri. Despite differing fortunes, his friendship with Slim did not diminish over the years, up to Slim’s death in 1988.

Laury recorded his debut album in his late seventies. A concert with a full band was recorded in 1980. A 1980 Paris concert was released by Indigo Records in France.

The 1989 Dennis Quaid film Great Balls of Fire! portrayed the young Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart looking into a juke joint to see Laury playing “Big Legged Woman”. The attention helped to give Laury an opportunity to record later in his life.

In 1994, Bullseye Blues Records issued Nothin’ but the Blues, an album of Laury’s voice and piano, performing ten of his own compositions. The same year, the Austrian label Wolf Records released a live album, containing concert recordings made in 1987.

Laury died of cancer in September 1995, at the age of 81, in Memphis. He has a brass note on Beale Street’s Walk of Fame.

The bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. With a long exposure from a dark location, though, the dust cloud surrounding the Pleiades star cluster becomes very evident. The featured exposure took over 12 hours and covers a sky area several times the size of the full moon. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades lies about 400 light years away toward the constellation of the Bull (Taurus). A common legend with a modern twist is that one of the brighter stars faded since the cluster was named, leaving only six stars visible to the unaided eye. The actual number of Pleiades stars visible, however, may be more or less than seven, depending on the darkness of the surrounding sky and the clarity of the observer’s eyesight.

Gene Harris (born Eugene Haire, September 1, 1933 – January 16, 2000) was an American jazz pianist known for his warm sound and blues and gospel infused style that is known as soul jazz.

From 1956 to 1970, he played in The Three Sounds trio with bassist Andy Simpkins and drummer Bill Dowdy. During this time, The Three Sounds recorded regularly for Blue Note and Verve.

He mostly retired to Boise, starting in the late 1970s, although he performed regularly at the Idanha Hotel there. Ray Brown convinced him to go back on tour in the early 1980s. He played with the Ray Brown Trio and then led his own groups, recording mostly on Concord Records, until his death from kidney failure in 2000. Gene Harris is survived by his 3 daughters, Tracy Haire, Beth Haire- Lewis and Gina Haire (Niki Haris), and a son Eugene Haire. One of his most popular numbers was his “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a live version of which is on his Live at Otter Crest album, published by Concord.

Arthur Edward Pepper Jr. (September 1, 1925 – June 15, 1982) was an American alto saxophonist and very occasional tenor saxophonist and clarinetist. A longtime figure in West Coast jazz, Pepper came to prominence in Stan Kenton‘s big band. He was known for his emotionally charged performances and several stylistic shifts throughout his career, and was described by critic Scott Yanow as “the world’s great altoist” at the time of his death.

Art Pepper was born in Gardena, California, on September 1, 1925. His mother was a 14-year-old runaway; his father, a merchant seaman. Both were violent alcoholics, and when Art was still quite young he was sent to live with his paternal grandmother. He expressed early musical interest and talent, and he was given lessons. He began playing clarinet at nine, switched to alto saxophone at 13 and immediately began jamming on Central Avenue, the black nightclub district of Los Angeles.

At the age of 17 he began playing professionally with Benny Carter and then became part of the Stan Kenton orchestra, touring with that band until he was drafted in 1943. After the war he returned to Los Angeles and joined the Kenton Innovations Orchestra. By the 1950s Pepper was recognized as one of the leading alto saxophonists in jazz, finishing second only to Charlie Parker as Best Alto Saxophonist in the DownBeat magazine Readers Poll of 1952. Along with Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and Shelly Manne, and perhaps due more to geography than playing style, Pepper is often associated with the musical movement known as West Coast jazz, as contrasted with the East Coast (or “hot”) jazz of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Some of Pepper’s most famous albums from the 1950s are Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, Art Pepper + Eleven – Modern Jazz Classics, Gettin’ Together, and Smack Up. Representative music from this time appears on The Aladdin Recordings (three volumes), The Early Show, The Late Show, The Complete Surf Ride, and The Way It Was!, which features a session recorded with Warne Marsh.

Near Orion’s belt is a fuzzy area known as the Great Nebula of Orion or M42. In this nebula is a bright star cluster known as the Trapezium, shown above. New stellar systems are forming there in gigantic globs of gas and dust known as Proplyds. Looking closely at the above picture also reveals that gas and dust surrounding some of the dimmer stars appears to form structures that point away from the brighter stars. The above false color image was made by combining several exposures from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.

The Trapezium or Orion Trapezium Cluster, also known by its Bayer designation of Theta¹ Orionis, is a tight open cluster of stars in the heart of the Orion Nebula, in the constellation of Orion. It was discovered by Galileo Galilei. On February 4, 1617 he sketched three of the stars (A, C, D), but missed the surrounding nebulosity The fourth component (B) was identified by several observers in 1673, and several more components were discovered later, for a total of eight by 1888. Subsequently, several of the stars were determined to be binaries. Telescopes of amateur astronomers from about 5 inch aperture can resolve six stars under good seeing conditions.

The Trapezium is a relatively young cluster that has formed directly out of the parent nebula. The five brightest stars are on the order of 15-30 solar masses in size. They are within a diameter of 1.5 light-years of each other and are responsible for much of the illumination of the surrounding nebula. The Trapezium may be a sub-component of the larger Orion Nebula Cluster, a grouping of about 2,000 stars within a diameter of 20 light-years.

Sir George Ivan “Van” Morrison OBE (born 31 August 1945) is a Northern Irish singer-songwriter, instrumentalist and record producer. His professional career began as a teenager in the late 1950s playing a variety of instruments including guitar, harmonica, keyboards and saxophone for various Irish showbands, covering the popular hits of that time. Van Morrison rose to prominence in the mid-1960s as the lead singer of the Northern Irish R&B band Them, with whom he recorded the garage band classic “Gloria“. His solo career began under the pop-hit oriented guidance of Bert Berns with the release of the hit single “Brown Eyed Girl” in 1967. After Berns’s death, Warner Bros. Records bought out his contract and allowed him three sessions to record Astral Weeks (1968). Though this album gradually garnered high praise, it was initially a poor seller.

Moondance (1970) established Morrison as a major artist, and he built on his reputation throughout the 1970s with a series of acclaimed albums and live performances. He continues to record and tour, producing albums and live performances that sell well and are generally warmly received, sometimes collaborating with other artists, such as Georgie Fame and The Chieftains.

Much of Morrison’s music is structured around the conventions of soul music and R&B, such as the popular singles “Brown Eyed Girl“, “Jackie Wilson Said (I’m in Heaven When You Smile)“, “Domino” and “Wild Night“. An equal part of his catalogue consists of lengthy, loosely connected, spiritually inspired musical journeys that show the influence of Celtic tradition, jazz and stream-of-consciousness narrative, such as the album Astral Weeks and the lesser known Veedon Fleece and Common One. The two strains together are sometimes referred to as “Celtic soul”. He has received two Grammy Awards, the 1994 Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, the 2017 Americana Music Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting and has been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2016, he was knighted for services to the music industry and to tourism in Northern Ireland.