mick laBriola

Gemini Legacy image of the complex planetary nebula Sh2-71 as imaged by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph on Gemini North on Mauna Kea in Hawai‘i. The long-assumed central star is the brightest star near the center, but some astronomers wonder if the much dimmer and bluer star (just to the right and down a bit) might be the parent of this beautiful object. The image is composed of three narrow-band images, and each is assigned a color as follows: H-alpha (orange), HeII (blue) and [OIII] (cyan). Each image is 15 minutes in duration, the field-of-view is 5.3 x 3.6 arcminutes, and the image is rotated 110 degrees clockwise from north up, east left.

Sh2-71 (Sharpless 71) is an unusual and complex planetary nebula located about 3,260 light-years away from Earth in the northern constellation of Aquila (the Eagle). It is embroiled in a bit of controversy over its “birth parents”.

Sh2-71 is the 71st object in a catalogue of nebulae originally assembled by the U.S. astronomer Stewart Sharpless of the US Naval Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. It is from his second catalogue, of 313 nebulae, published in 1959. (In fact there are more than 313 objects as subsequent research has shown that some of the Sharpless nebulae consist of more than one object.)

Planetary nebulae represent the final brief stage in the life of a medium-sized star like our Sun. While consuming the last of the fuel in its core, the dying star expels a large portion of its outer envelope. This material then becomes heated by the radiation from the stellar remnant and radiates, producing glowing clouds of gas. They are called “planetary” nebulae because early observers thought they looked like planets; but they don’t have anything to do with planets at all.

Astronomers long assumed that Sh2-71 formed from the death throes of the brightest star (a binary system) which lies very close to the center of the nebula’s gas shell. But new observations have shown that the nature of a dimmer, bluer star – just to the right, and a bit lower than the bright central star – might provide a better fit for the nebula’s “birth parent.”

The uncertainty arises from the fact that the brighter central star doesn’t appear to radiate enough high-energy (ultraviolet) light to cause the surrounding gas to glow as intensely as it does, whereas the dimmer, bluer star likely does. On the other hand, the brighter star’s binary nature would help explain the nebula’s asymmetrical structure. Astronomers do not yet known if the dimmer, bluer star also has a companion.

Another unresolved issue is whether the brighter star’s unseen companion might be hot enough to excite the gas to glow. If so, this pair might be able to hold on to its parental connection to the nebula.

However, at the assumed distance to the nebula, the faint star has about the right brightness to be the fading remnant of the nebula’s progenitor star. Then again, the brighter binary star is an uncommon one that shows strong and broad hydrogen-alpha emission, which are seen in some planetary nebulae.

Carly Elisabeth Simon (born June 25, 1945) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and children’s author. She first rose to fame in the 1970s with a string of hit records; her 13 Top 40 U.S. hits include “Anticipation” (No. 13), “You Belong To Me” (No. 6), “Coming Around Again” (No. 18), and her four Gold certified singles “Jesse” (No. 11), “Mockingbird” (No. 5, a duet with James Taylor), “You’re So Vain” (No. 1), and “Nobody Does It Better” (No. 2) from the 1977 James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me.

After a brief stint with her sister Lucy Simon as duo group the Simon Sisters, she found great success as a solo artist with her 1971 self-titled debut album Carly Simon, which won her the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, and spawned her first Top 10 single “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be“. She achieved international fame with her third album No Secrets which sat firmly at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for five weeks and spawned the worldwide hit “You’re So Vain”, for which she received three Grammy nominations, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. With her 1988 hit “Let the River Run“, from the film Working Girl, she became the first artist to win a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award for a song composed and written, as well as performed, entirely by a single artist.

Over the course of her career, Simon has amassed 24 Billboard Hot 100 charting singles, 28 Billboard Adult Contemporary charting singles, and won 2 Grammy Awards, from 14 nominations. AllMusic called her “one of the quintessential singer-songwriters of the ’70s”. She has a contralto vocal range, and has cited Odetta as a significant influence. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994. In 1995 and 1998, respectively, she received the Boston Music Awards Lifetime Achievement and a Berklee College of Music Honorary Doctor of Music Degree. She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for “You’re So Vain” in 2004 and awarded the ASCAP Founders Award in 2012.

Simon was formerly married to singer-songwriter James Taylor. They have two children together, Sally Taylor and Ben Taylor, who are also musicians.

Johnny Henry Smith II (June 25, 1922 – June 11, 2013) was an American cool jazz and mainstream jazz guitarist. He wrote “Walk, Don’t Run” in 1954. In 1984, Smith was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.

Smith taught himself to play guitar in pawnshops, which let him play in exchange for keeping the guitars in tune. At thirteen years of age he was teaching others to play the guitar. One of Smith’s students bought a new guitar and gave him his old guitar, which became the first guitar Smith owned.

Smith joined Uncle Lem and the Mountain Boys, a local hillbilly band that travelled around Maine, performing at dances, fairs, and similar venues. Smith earned four dollars a night. He dropped out of high school to accommodate this enterprise.

Having become increasingly interested in the jazz bands that he heard on the radio, Smith gradually moved away from country music towards playing more jazz. He left The Mountain Boys when he was eighteen years old to join a variety trio called the Airport Boys.

An extremely diverse musician, Johnny Smith was equally at home playing in the famous Birdland jazz club or sight-reading scores in the orchestral pit of the New York Philharmonic. From Schoenberg to Gershwin to originals, Smith was one of the most versatile guitarists of the 1950s.

As a staff studio guitarist and arranger for NBC from 1946 to 1951, and on a freelance basis thereafter until 1958, he played in a variety of settings from solo to full orchestra and had his own trio, The Playboys, with Mort Lindsey and Arlo Hults.

Smith’s playing is characterized by closed-position chord voicings and rapidly ascending lines (reminiscent of Django Reinhardt, but more diatonic than chromatically-based). From those famous 1952 sides and into the 1960s he recorded for the Roost label, on whose releases his reputation mainly rests. Mosaic Records has issued the majority of them in an 8-CD set.

His most critically acclaimed record was Moonlight in Vermont (one of Down Beat magazine’s top two jazz records for 1952, featuring saxophonist Stan Getz).Initially released as a track on the 10-inch Lp “Jazz at NBC” (Roost 410), “Moonlight in Vermont” was later made the title track of a 1956 12-inch Lp.

His most famous musical composition is the tune “Walk Don’t Run“, written for a 1954 recording session as counter-melody to the chord changes of “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise”. Guitarist Chet Atkins covered the tune, recording a neo-classical rendition of the song on the electric guitar for his Hi Fi in Focus album which preceded the Ventures’ hit by three years. He played his arrangement fingerstyle, including the bass notes A, G, F, and E which later became the basis for the Ventures’ arrangement. The musicians who became The Ventures heard the Atkins version, simplified it, sped it up, and recorded it in 1960. The Ventures’ version went to No. 2 on the Billboard Top 100 for a week in September 1960.

In 1957, Smith’s wife died in childbirth, along with his second child. He sent his young daughter to Colorado Springs, Colorado to be cared for temporarily by his mother, and the following year he left his busy performing career in New York City to join his daughter in Colorado. There, Smith ran a musical instruments store, taught music, and raised his daughter while continuing to record albums for the Royal Roost and Verve labels into the 1960s.

NGC 4647 is a spiral galaxy estimated to be around 63 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo. It was discovered by astronomer William Herschel on March 15, 1784. NGC 4647 is listed along with Messier 60 as being part of a pair of galaxies called Arp 116; their designation in Halton Arp‘s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. The galaxy is located on the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster

The gas in NGC 4647 has been mildly disturbed. The galaxy’s location in the Virgo Cluster suggests that might it suffered an effect known as ram-pressure stripping caused by the intracluster medium. Another explanation may be hot gas in the halo of Messier 60. The hot gas in Messier 60 may have increased the pressure of gas on the eastern side of NGC 4647 through either ram-pressure striping or a bow-shock between the two galaxies causing the observed asymmetry of gas in the galaxy. The difficulty is that the galaxies would have to be so close that tidal forces from Messier 60 would cause the disk of NGC 4647 to get ripped apart.

Derrick “Duckie” Simpson , born June 24, 1950 in Kingston , Jamaica , is a Jamaican reggae singer . He was one of the founders of the reggae band Black Uhuru , who received reggae history’s first grammy in 1985. Duckie Simpson has almost always been in some of the Black Uhurus’s different constellations over the years, but has remained in the background and been the band’s “anchor” while others have taken the places as a lead singer.

Black Uhuru was founded by vocalists Simpson, Ervin “Don Carlos” Spencer and Rudolph “Garth” Dennis in the late 1960s. Everyone was raised in the slum district of Waterhouse in Kingston’s inner city. At the end of the 1970s, Don Carlos and Garth Dennis had been replaced by the talented Michael Rose (First Vocalist), also from the Waterhouse, and the American Sandra “Puma” Jones . The drummer Sly Dunbar and the bassist Robbie Shakespeare responded to production and new, creative grips, and the band lifted and became the world’s leading reggae band in the years 1983-85. The album Anthem was released in an original version in 1983, blended for an American and European audience in 1984, and it was this remixed version that received the Grammy Award for this year’s best reggae album.

In 1985, Michael Rose left Black Uhuru for a solo career and was replaced by Junior Reid , and Puma Jones died of breast cancer in 1989. In 1990, Simpson took in the two original members Spencer and Dennis for a new constellation.

Geoffrey Arnold Beck (born 24 June 1944) is an English rock guitarist. He is one of the three noted guitarists to have played with the Yardbirds (the other two being Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page). Beck also formed the Jeff Beck Group and with Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, he formed Beck, Bogert & Appice.

Much of Beck’s recorded output has been instrumental, with a focus on innovative sound, and his releases have spanned genres ranging from blues rock, hard rock, and an additional blend of guitar-rock and electronica. Although he recorded two hit albums (in 1975 and 1976) as a solo act, Beck has not established or maintained the sustained commercial success of many of his contemporaries and bandmates. Beck appears on albums by Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, Morrissey, Donovan, Diana Ross, Jon Bon Jovi, Malcolm McLaren, Kate Bush, Roger Waters, Stevie Wonder, Les Paul, Zucchero, Cyndi Lauper, Brian May, Roger Taylor, Stanley Clarke, Screaming Lord Sutch, ZZ Top, and Toots and the Maytals.

He was ranked fifth in Rolling Stone‘s list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” and the magazine, upon whose cover Beck has appeared three times, has described him as “one of the most influential lead guitarists in rock”. He is often called a “guitarist’s guitarist”. Beck has earned wide critical praise and received the Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance six times and Best Pop Instrumental Performance once. In 2014 he received the British Academy’s Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. Beck has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice: as a member of The Yardbirds (1992) and as a solo artist (2009).

Frank Lowe (June 24, 1943 – September 19, 2003) was an American avant-garde jazz saxophonist and composer.

Messier 58 (also known as M58 and NGC 4579) is an intermediate barred spiral galaxy with a weak inner ring structure located within the constellation Virgo, approximately 68 million light-years away from Earth. It was discovered by Charles Messier on April 15, 1779 and is one of four barred spiral galaxies that appear in Messier’s catalogue. M58 is one of the brightest galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. From 1779 it was arguably (though unknown at that time) the farthest known astronomical object until the release of the New General Catalogue in the 1880s and even more so the publishing of redshift values in the 1920s.

Sahib Shihab (born Edmund Gregory; June 23, 1925, Savannah, Georgia – October 24, 1989, Nashville, Tennessee) was an American jazz and hard bop saxophonist (baritone, alto, and soprano) and flautist. He variously worked with Luther Henderson, Thelonious Monk, Fletcher Henderson, Tadd Dameron, and Dizzy Gillespie amongst others. Edmund Gregory first played alto saxophone professionally for Luther Henderson at age 13 and went on to study at the Boston Conservatory and to play with trumpeter Roy Eldridge. He played lead alto with Fletcher Henderson in the mid 1940s.

He was one of the first jazz musicians to convert to Islam and changed his name in 1947. During the late 1940s, Shihab played with Thelonious Monkand on July 23, 1951 he recorded with Monk for the Lp Genius of Modern Music: Volume 2. During this period, he also appeared on recordings by Art Blakey, Kenny Dorham and Benny Golson. The invitation to play with Dizzy Gillespie‘s big band in the early 1950s was of particular significance as it marked Shihab’s switch to baritone.

On August 12, 1958, Shihab was one of the musicians photographed by Art Kane in his famous photograph known as “A Great Day in Harlem“. In 1959, he toured Europe with Quincy Jones after getting disillusioned with racial politics in United States and ultimately settled in Scandinavia. He worked for Copenhagen Polytechnic and wrote scores for television, cinema and theatre.

In 1961, he joined the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band and remained a member of the band for the 12 years it existed. He married a Danish woman and raised a family in Europe, although he remained a conscious African-American still sensitive to racial issues.

George Allen Russell (June 23, 1923 – July 27, 2009) was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger and theorist. He is considered one of the first jazz musicians to contribute to general music theory with a theory of harmony based on jazz rather than European music, in his book Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (1953). Russell was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to a white father and a black mother, later the adopted only child of a nurse and a chef on the B & O Railroad, Bessie and Joseph Russell. Young Russell sang in the choir of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and listened to the Kentucky Riverboat music of Fate Marable. He made his stage debut at age seven, singing “Moon Over Miami” with Fats Waller.

Surrounded by the music of the black church and the big bands which played on the Ohio Riverboats, and with a father who was a music educator at Oberlin College, he started playing drums with the Boy Scouts and Bugle Corps, receiving a scholarship to Wilberforce University, where he joined the Collegians, a band noted as a breeding ground for great jazz musicians including Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Charles Freeman Lee, Frank Foster, and Benny Carter. Russell served in that band at the same time as another noted jazz composer, Ernie Wilkins. When called up for the draft at the beginning of World War II, he was quickly hospitalized with tuberculosis, where he was taught the fundamentals of music theory by a fellow patient.

Milton John Hinton (June 23, 1910 – December 19, 2000) was an American double bassist and photographer.

Regarded as the Dean of American jazz bass players, his nicknames included “Sporty” from his years in Chicago, “Fump” from his time on the road with Cab Calloway, and “The Judge” from the 1950s and beyond.Hinton’s recording career lasted over 60 years, mostly in jazz but also with a variety of other genres as a prolific session musician.

He was also a photographer of note, praised for documenting American jazz during the 20th Century.

Hinton was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the only child of Hilda Gertrude Robinson, whom he referred to as “Titter,” and Milton Dixon Hinton. He was three-months-old when his father left the family. He grew up in a home with his mother, his maternal grandmother (whom he referred to as “Mama”), and two of his mother’s sisters.

His childhood in Vicksburg was characterized by extreme poverty and extreme racism. Lynching was a common practice at the time. Hinton said that one of the clearest memories of his childhood was when he accidentally came upon a lynching.