mick laBriola

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.

John Prine (born October 10, 1946) is an American country folk singer-songwriter. He has been active as a composer, recording artist, and live performer since the early 1970s, and is known for an often humorous style of country music that has elements of protest and social commentary.

Born and raised in Maywood, Illinois, Prine learned to play the guitar at the age of 14. He attended classes at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music.^[1] After serving in West Germany with the U.S. armed forces, he moved to Chicago in the late 1960s, where he worked as a mailman, writing and singing songs as a hobby.

A member of Chicago’s folk revival, he was discovered by Kris Kristofferson, resulting in the production of Prine’s self-titled debut album with Atlantic Records in 1971. After receiving critical acclaim, Prine focused on his musical career, recording three more albums for Atlantic. He then signed to Asylum Records, where he recorded an additional three albums. In 1984 he co-founded Oh Boy Records, an independent record label with which he would release most of his subsequent albums. After his battle with squamous cell cancer in 1998, Prine’s vocals deepened into a gravelly voice.

Widely cited as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation, Prine is known for humorous lyrics about love, life, and current events, as well as serious songs with social commentary, or which recollect melancholy tales from his life. Prine is the son of William Prine and Verna Hamm. He started playing guitar at age 14, taught by his brother, David. He attended classes at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. Prine attended Proviso East High School in Maywood, Illinois. He was a mailman for five years and served in the Army during the Vietnam War era, serving in Germany, before beginning his musical career in Chicago.

In the late-1960s, while Prine was delivering mail, he began to sing at open mic evenings at the Fifth Peg on Armitage Avenue in Chicago. Prine was initially a spectator, reluctant to perform, but eventually did so in response to a “You think you can do better?” comment made to him by another performer. Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert heard him there and wrote the first review Prine ever received, calling him a great songwriter. He became a central figure in the Chicago folk revival, which also included such singer-songwriters as Steve Goodman, Michael Peter Smith, Bonnie Koloc, Jim Post, Tom Dundee, Anne Hills and Fred Holstein. Joined by such established musicians as Jethro Burns and Bob Gibson, Prine performed frequently at a variety of Chicago clubs—including the Earl of Old Town, the Quiet Knight, Dangling Conversation, Somebody Else’s Troubles, The Fifth Peg, and the Bulls.

Edward Joseph Blackwell (October 10, 1929 – October 7, 1992) was an American jazz drummer born in New Orleans, Louisiana, known for his extensive, influential work with Ornette Coleman.

Blackwell’s early career began in New Orleans in the 1950s. He played in a bebop quintet that included pianist Ellis Marsalis and clarinetist Alvin Batiste. There was also a brief stint touring with Ray Charles. The second line parade music of New Orleans greatly influenced Blackwell’s drumming style and could be heard in his playing throughout his career.

Blackwell first came to national attention as the drummer with Ornette Coleman‘s quartet around 1960, when he took over for Billy Higgins in the quartet’s stand at the Five Spot in New York City. He is known as one of the great innovators of the free jazz of the 1960s, fusing New Orleans and African rhythms with bebop. In the 1970s and 1980s Blackwell toured and recorded extensively with fellow Ornette Quartet veterans Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Dewey Redman in the quartet Old and New Dreams.

Thelonious Sphere Monk (/θəˈloʊniəs/, October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including “‘Round Midnight“, “Blue Monk“, “Straight, No Chaser“, “Ruby, My Dear“, “In Walked Bud“, and “Well, You Needn’t“. Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is particularly remarkable as Ellington composed more than a thousand pieces, whereas Monk wrote about 70.

Monk’s compositions and improvisations feature dissonances and angular melodic twists and are consistent with his unorthodox approach to the piano, which combined a highly percussive attack with abrupt, dramatic use of switched key releases, silences, and hesitations. His style was not universally appreciated; the poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin dismissed him as “the elephant on the keyboard”.

Monk was renowned for a distinct look which included suits, hats, and sunglasses. He was also noted for an idiosyncratic habit during performances: while other musicians continued playing, Monk stopped, stood up, and danced for a few moments before returning to the piano.

Monk is one of five jazz musicians to have been featured on the cover of Time magazine (the others being Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and Wynton Marsalis). Thelonious Sphere Monk was born two years after his sister Marion on October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and was the son of Thelonious and Barbara Monk. His poorly written birth certificate misspelled his first name as “Thelious” or “Thelius”. It also did not list his middle name, taken from his maternal grandfather, Sphere Batts.

“Monk’s usual piano touch was harsh and percussive, even in ballads. He often attacked the keyboard anew for each note, rather than striving for any semblance of legato. Often seemingly unintentional seconds embellish his melodic lines, giving the effect of someone playing while wearing work gloves. […] He hit the keys with fingers held flat rather than in a natural curve, and held his free fingers high above the keys. […] Sometimes he hit a single key with more than one finger, and divided single-line melodies between the two hands.” In contrast with this unorthodox approach to playing, he could play runs and arpeggios with great speed and accuracy. He also had good finger independence, allowing him to play a melodic line and a trill simultaneously in his right hand.

Monk often used parts of whole tone scales, played either ascending or descending, and covering several octaves. He also had extended improvisations that featured parallel sixths (he also used these in the themes of some of his compositions). His solos also feature space and long notes. Unusually for a bebop-based pianist, as an accompanist and on solo performances he often employed a left-hand stride pattern. A further characteristic of his work as an accompanist was his tendency to stop playing, leaving a soloist with just bass and drums for support.

Monk had a particular proclivity for the key of B flat. All of his many blues compositions, including “Blue Monk,” “Misterioso,” “Blues Five Spot,” and “Functional,” were composed in B flat; in addition, his signature theme, “Thelonious,” largely consists of an insistently repeated B-flat tone.