mick laBriola

Dotted across the sky in the constellation of Pictor (The Painter’s Easel) is the galaxy cluster highlighted here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope: SPT-CL J0615-5746, or SPT0615 for short. First discovered by the South Pole Telescope less than a decade ago, SPT0615 is exceptional among the myriad clusters so far catalogued in our map of the Universe — it is the highest-redshift cluster for which a full, strong lens model is published.

SPT0615 is a massive cluster of galaxies, one of the farthest observed to cause gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when light from a background object is deflected around mass between the object and the observer. Among the identified background objects, there is SPT0615-JD, a galaxy that is thought to have emerged just 500 million years after the Big Bang. This puts it among the very earliest structures to form in the Universe. It is also the farthest galaxy ever imaged by means of gravitational lensing.

Just as ancient paintings can tell us about the period of history in which they were painted, so too can ancient galaxies tell us about the era of the Universe in which they existed. To learn about cosmological history, astronomers explore the most distant reaches of the Universe, probing ever further out into the cosmos. The light from distant objects travels to us from so far away that it takes an immensely long time to reach us, meaning that it carries information from the past — information about the time at which it was emitted.

By studying such distant objects, astronomers are continuing to fill the gaps in our picture of what the very early Universe looked like, and uncover more about how it evolved into its current state.

Anthony Wilson (born May 9, 1968) is a jazz guitarist, arranger and composer. He is the son of bandleader Gerald Wilson. Born in Los Angeles on May 9, 1968, Wilson received his degree in music composition from Bennington College. His first major breakthrough was as lead guitarist of the group, Storm in 1980. He counts Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Wes Montgomery, Ry Cooder, and T-Bone Walker among his influences. His first album Anthony Wilson was nominated for a Grammy Award and his second album, Goat Hill Junket (1998) also received praise. Albums with his nine-piece band include Adult Themes (MAMA, 1999) and Power of Nine (Groove Note, 2006). Diana Krall and mandolinist Eva Scow appear on the latter.

He has also recorded two trio albums with Hammond organist Joe Bagg and drummer Mark Ferber, Our Gang in 2001 and Savivity in 2005 (both on Groove Note). In 2009 he recorded more organ trio music with Jack of Hearts (again for Groove Note) featuring Larry Goldings on Hammond organ, and alternating drummers Jim Keltner and Jeff Hamilton.

As a composer, he has received commissions from the International Association for Jazz Education, the Henry Mancini Institute, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and luthier John Monteleone. His guitar quartet song cycle “Seasons” was composed as a vehicle for Monteleone’s quartet of guitars called “The Four Seasons” which were included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2011 exhibition “Guitar Heroes.” “Seasons” was released as an audio CD and live performance film DVD set on Wilson’s label Goat Hill Recordings in November 2011. Another 2011 album, recorded in Brazil, was “Campo Belo” (Goat Hill Recordings), featuring rising Brazilian music stars André Mehmari (piano and accordion), Edu Ribeiro (drums), and Guto Wirtti (bass).

Dennis Milton Chambers (born May 9, 1959) is an American drummer. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2001. Chambers was born on May 9, 1959. He began drumming at the age of four years, and was gigging in Baltimore-area nightclubs by the age of six. He was recruited in 1981 by the Sugar Hill Label to be their “house drummer.” Chambers played on many Sugar Hill releases — sounds like Keith LeBlanc [not Chambers], who was the Original Sugar Hill Rhythm Section drummer [“White Lines,” “The Message,” “8th Wonder,” and so on], with Skip McDonald (guitar) and Doug Wimbish (bass)]. Contrary to popular belief he did not play on “Rapper’s Delight” which was revealed in a recent interview on Drumeo.com on 6/8/2017.

In an interview by Bonedo in 2011, Chambers was asked who some of his influences and favorite drummers were and he mentioned Clyde Stubblefield, Al Jackson Jr., Steve Gadd, Vinnie Colaiuta, Gary Husband, Jack Dejohnette, Billy Cobham, Buddy Rich, Elvin Jones, Roy Haynes, and Tony Williams.

In 1978 (at 18 years old) he joined Parliament/Funkadelic, and stayed with them until 1985. In 1986 he joined the John Scofield band. Since then he has played with most of the major figures in jazz fusion music.

He has recorded and performed with Tommy Coster, John Scofield, George Duke, Victor Wooten, Brecker Brothers, Santana, Parliament/Funkadelic, John McLaughlin, Niacin, Mike Stern, CAB, Greg Howe, and many others.

He has toured extensively with Carlos Santana and makes appearances with his band Niacin.

Aaron Corthen, better known as A.C. Reed (May 9, 1926 – February 24, 2004) was an American blues saxophonist, closely associated with the Chicago blues scene from the 1940s into the 2000s. Reed was born in Wardell, Missouri, and grew up in southern Illinois. He took his stage name from his friend Jimmy Reed. He moved to Chicago during World War II, playing with Earl Hooker and Willie Mabon in the 1940s. He toured with Dennis “Long Man” Binder in 1956 and worked extensively as a sideman for Mel London‘s blues record labels Chief/Profile/Age in the 1960s, with Lillian Offitt and Ricky Allen, among others. He had a regionally popular single in 1961, “This Little Voice” (Age 29101), and cut several more singles over the course of the decade.

He became a member of Buddy Guy‘s band in 1967, playing with him on his tour of Africa in 1969 and, with Junior Wells, opening for the Rolling Stones in 1970. He remained with Guy until 1977. He then played with Son Seals and Albert Collins in the late 1970s and 1980s. He began recording solo material for Alligator Records in the 1980s. His 1987 album, I’m in the Wrong Business, includes cameo appearances by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Bonnie Raitt.

The delicate nebula NGC 1788, located in a dark and often neglected corner of the Orion constellation, is revealed in this finely nuanced image. Although this ghostly cloud is rather isolated from Orion’s bright stars, their powerful winds and light have a strong impact on the nebula, forging its shape and making it a home to a multitude of infant suns.

This image has been obtained using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. It combines images taken through blue, green and red filters, as well as a special filter designed to let through the light of glowing hydrogen. The field is about 30 arcminutes across; North is up, and East to the left.

Keith Jarrett (born May 8, 1945) is an American jazz and classical music pianist and composer.

Jarrett started his career with Art Blakey, moving on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s he has enjoyed a great deal of success as a group leader and a solo performer in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music. His improvisations draw from the traditions of jazz and other genres, especially Western classical music, gospel, blues, and ethnic folk music.

In 2003, Jarrett received the Polar Music Prize, the first recipient of both the contemporary and classical musician prizes, and in 2004 he received the Léonie Sonning Music Prize. His album The Köln Concert (1975) became the best-selling piano recording in history.

In 2008, he was inducted into the Down Beat Hall of Fame in the magazine’s 73rd Annual Readers’ Poll.

Keith Jarrett was born on May 8, 1945, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to a mother of Hungarian descent and a father of either French or Scots-Irish descent. He grew up in suburban Allentown with significant early exposure to music. Jarrett possesses absolute pitch, and he displayed prodigious musical talents as a young child. He began piano lessons before his third birthday, and at age five he appeared on a TV talent program hosted by the swing bandleader Paul Whiteman. He gave his first formal piano recital at the age of seven, playing works by composers such as Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Saint-Saëns, and ending with two of his own compositions. Encouraged by his mother, he took classical piano lessons with a series of teachers, including Eleanor Sokoloff of the Curtis Institute.

Mahmoud Ahmed (Amharic: ማሀሙድ አህመድ; born May 18, 1941) is an Ethiopian singer of Gurage ancestry. He gained great popularity in Ethiopia in the 1970s and among the Ethiopian diaspora in the 1980s, before rising to international fame with African music fans in Europe and the Americas. Born in Addis Ababa, Mercato district, Mahmoud was enthralled with the music he heard on Ethiopian radio from an early age. Having poorly learned in school, he worked shoeshinerbefore becoming a handyman at the Arizona Club, which was the after hours hangout of Emperor Haile Selassie I‘s Imperial Body Guard Band. One night in 1962 when the band’s singer didn’t show up, Mahmoud asked to sing a few songs. He soon became part of the band’s regular lineup, where he remained until 1974.

After cutting his first single with Venus Band “Nafqot New Yegodagn” and “Yasdestal” in 1971, Mahmoud continued to record with several bands for the Amha and Kaifa record labels throughout the 1970s. The overthrow of Emperor Selassie and the suspension of musical nightlife under the military government created shifts in the Ethiopian music industry—the Imperial Body Guard Band were no more, and Mahmoud continued to make hit records and cassettes with many musicians who remained in the country, including the Dahlak Band, and the Ibex Band. He also began to release solo cassettes, accompanying himself on the krar, guitar or mandolin.

By 1978, censorship laws prevented Mahmoud from releasing his music on vinyl and so he switched to releasing cassettes. In the 1980s, Mahmoud operated his own music store in Addis Ababa’s Piazza district while continuing his singing career. With many Ethiopian refugees living abroad, Mahmoud became one of the first modern Ethiopian music makers to perform in the United States on a 1980-1981 tour with the Walias Band, Getatchew Kassa, and Webeshet Fisseha. Mahmoud soon began releasing records with the Roha Band and became popular in diaspora communities.

Robert Leroy Johnson (May 8, 1911 – August 16, 1938 Hazlehurst, MS) was an American blues singer, songwriter and musician. His landmark recordings in 1936 and 1937 display a combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that has influenced later generations of musicians. Johnson’s poorly documented life and death have given rise to much legend. The one most closely associated with his life is that he sold his soul to the devil at a local crossroads to achieve musical success. He is now recognized as a master of the blues, particularly as a progenitor of the Delta blues style.

As an itinerant performer who played mostly on street corners, in juke joints, and at Saturday night dances, Johnson had little commercial success or public recognition in his lifetime. He only participated in two recording sessions, one in San Antonio in 1936, and one in Dallas in 1937, that produced recordings of 29 distinct songs (with some alternate takes). These songs, recorded at low fidelity in improvised studios, were the totality of his recorded output. About half of these were released as 10-inch, 78 rpm singles from 1937–1939, many after his death at the age of 27. Other than these recordings, very little was known of him during his life outside of the small musical circuit in the Mississippi Delta where he spent most of his life; much of his story has been reconstructed after his death by researchers.

His music had only a small, but influential, following during his life and in the years after his death. As early as 1938, his music was being sought by influential producers such as John Hammond, who tried to recruit him to record and tour without even knowing of his death. Brunswick Records, which owned the original recordings, was eventually bought by Hammond’s Columbia Records, which would later release the recordings to a wider audience. Musicologist Alan Lomax went to Mississippi in 1941 to record Johnson, also not knowing of his death. A compilation album, titled King of the Delta Blues Singers, was released by Columbia in 1961, which finally brought his work to a wider audience. The album would become an influential record, especially on the nascent British blues movement which was just getting started at the time; Eric Clapton has called Johnson “the most important blues singer that ever lived.”Musicians as diverse as Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, and Robert Plant have cited both Johnson’s lyricism and musicianship has key influences on their own work. Many of Johnson’s songs have been covered over the years, becoming hits for other artists, and his guitar licks and lyrics have been borrowed and repurposed by a many later musicians.

Renewed interest in Johnson’s work and life led to a burst of scholarship starting in the 1960s. Much of what we know about him today was reconstructed by researchers such as Gayle Dean Wardlow. The 1991 documentary The Search for Robert Johnson by John Hammond, Jr. was another attempt to document his life, and demonstrated the difficulties arising from the scant historical record and conflicting oral accounts.

Mary Lou Williams (born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs; May 8, 1910 – May 28, 1981) was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements and recorded more than one hundred records (in 78, 45, and LP versions). Williams wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.

The second of eleven children, Williams was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A young musical prodigy, at the age of three, she taught herself to play the piano.

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

Stars are forming, dying, and leaving an impressive tapestry of dark dusty filaments. The entire Carina Nebula, cataloged as NGC 3372, spans over 300 light years and lies about 8,500 light-years away in the constellation of Carina. The nebula is composed predominantly of hydrogen gas, which emits the pervasive red glow seen in this highly detailed featured image. The blue glow in the center is created by a trace amount of glowing oxygen. Young and massive stars located in the nebula’s center expel dust when they explode in supernovae. Eta Carinae, the most energetic star in the nebula’s center, was one of the brightest stars in the sky in the 1830s, but then faded dramatically.

Joe Ford (born May 7, 1947, Buffalo, New York) is an American jazz saxophonist.

Ford studied saxophone under Makanda Ken McIntyre, Jackie McLean, and Frank Foster, and percussion under Joe Chambers. He took his Bachelor’s in music education in 1968 from Central State University, then taught in Buffalo public schools from 1968 to 1972. While working at the Buffalo Public Library in 1974-75, Ford played in the Birthright ensemble, then played with McCoy Tyner in 1976. Since the early 1980s he has worked extensively as a sideman, playing with Sam Jones, Lester Bowie, Jimmy Owens, Idris Muhammad, Abdullah Ibrahim, Chico O’Farrill, Saheb Sarbib (1984), Avery Sharpe (1988), Jerry Gonzalez (from 1988), Larry Willis (1989), Michael Logan (1990), Malachi Thompson (1991), John Blake (1992), Ronnie Burrage (1993), Hannibal Marvin Peterson (1993), Freddie Cole (1993), Steve Berrios (1995), and Nova Bossa Nova (1997).

In the late 1990s he led two ensembles, the Black Art Sax Quartet and a big band called The Thing. He has released one album as a leader, 1993’s Today’s Night on Blue Moon Records. It features Charles Fambrough, Kenny Kirklandand Jeff “Tain” Watts.

Admiral Amos Easton (May 7, 1905 – June 8, 1968), better known by the stage name Bumble Bee Slim, was an American Piedmont blues singer and guitarist.

Easton was born in Brunswick, Georgia. Around 1920 he joined the Ringling Brothers circus. He then returned to Georgia and was briefly married before heading north on a freight train to Indianapolis, where he settled in 1928. There he met and was influenced by the pianist Leroy Carr and the guitarist Scrapper Blackwell.

By 1931 he had moved to Chicago, where he made his first recordings, as Bumble Bee Slim, for Paramount Records. The following year his song “B&O Blues” was a hit for Vocalion Records, inspiring a number of other railroad blues and eventually becoming a popular folk song. In the next five years he recorded over 150 songs for Decca Records, Bluebird Records and Vocalion, often accompanied by other musicians, including Big Bill Broonzy, Peetie Wheatstraw, Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, and Washboard Sam.

In 1937, he returned to Georgia. He relocated to Los Angeles, California, in the early 1940s, apparently hoping to break into motion pictures as a songwriter and comedian. During the 1950s he recorded several albums, but they had little impact.^[2] His last album was released by in 1962 by Pacific Jazz Records.

He continued to perform in clubs around Los Angeles until his death in 1968.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_VrvODcPiQ

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (English: /tʃaɪˈkɒfski/ chy-KOF-skee; Russian: Пётр Ильич Чайковский, tr. Pyótr Ilʹyích Chaykóvskiy, IPA: [pʲɵtr ɪlʲˈjitɕ tɕɪjˈkofskʲɪj] ; 7 May 1840 [O.S. 25 April] – 6 November [O.S. 25 October] 1893), was a Russian composer of the romantic period, whose works are among the most popular music in the classical repertoire. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally, bolstered by his appearances as a guest conductor in Europe and the United States. He was honored in 1884 by Emperor Alexander III, and awarded a lifetime pension.

Although musically precocious, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant. There was scant opportunity for a musical career in Russia at that time and no system of public music education. When an opportunity for such an education arose, he entered the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1865. The formal Western-oriented teaching he received there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five, with whom his professional relationship was mixed. Tchaikovsky’s training set him on a path to reconcile what he had learned with the native musical practices to which he had been exposed from childhood. From this reconciliation he forged a personal but unmistakably Russian style—a task that did not prove easy. The principles that governed melody, harmony and other fundamentals of Russian music ran completely counter to those that governed Western European music; this seemed to defeat the potential for using Russian music in large-scale Western composition or for forming a composite style, and it caused personal antipathies that dented Tchaikovsky’s self-confidence. Russian culture exhibited a split personality, with its native and adopted elements having drifted apart increasingly since the time of Peter the Great. This resulted in uncertainty among the intelligentsia about the country’s national identity—an ambiguity mirrored in Tchaikovsky’s career.

Despite his many popular successes, Tchaikovsky’s life was punctuated by personal crises and depression. Contributory factors included his early separation from his mother for boarding schoolfollowed by his mother’s early death, the death of his close friend and colleague Nikolai Rubinstein, and the collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, which was his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck who was his patron even though they never actually met each other. His homosexuality, which he kept private, has traditionally also been considered a major factor, though some musicologists now downplay its importance. Tchaikovsky’s sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera; there is an ongoing debate as to whether cholera was indeed the cause of death, and whether his death was accidental or self-inflicted.

While his music has remained popular among audiences, critical opinions were initially mixed. Some Russians did not feel it was sufficiently representative of native musical values and expressed suspicion that Europeans accepted the music for its Western elements. In an apparent reinforcement of the latter claim, some Europeans lauded Tchaikovsky for offering music more substantive than base exoticism and said he transcended stereotypes of Russian classical music. Others dismissed Tchaikovsky’s music as “lacking in elevated thought,” according to longtime New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg, and derided its formal workings as deficient because they did not stringently follow Western principles.