mick laBriola

Sir Richard Starkey (born 7 July 1940), known professionally as Ringo Starr, is an English musician, singer, songwriter and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for the Beatles. He occasionally sang lead vocals with the group, usually for one song on each album, including “With a Little Help from My Friends“, “Yellow Submarine“, “Good Night“, and their cover of “Act Naturally“. He also wrote and sang the Beatles’ songs “Don’t Pass Me By” and “Octopus’s Garden“, and is credited as a co-writer of others, including “What Goes On” and “Flying“.

Starr was afflicted by life-threatening illnesses during childhood, and he fell behind in school as a result of prolonged hospitalisations. He briefly held a position with British Rail before securing an apprenticeship at a Liverpool equipment manufacturer. Soon afterwards, he became interested in the UK skiffle craze and developed a fervent admiration for the genre. In 1957, he co-founded his first band, the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, which earned several prestigious local bookings before the fad succumbed to American rock and roll by early 1958. When the Beatles formed in 1960, Starr was a member of another Liverpool group, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. After achieving moderate success in the UK and Hamburg, he quit the Hurricanes and joined the Beatles in August 1962, replacing Pete Best.

Starr played key roles in the Beatles’ films and appeared in numerous others. After the band’s break-up in 1970, he released several successful singles including the US number-four hit “It Don’t Come Easy“, and number ones “Photograph” and “You’re Sixteen“. In 1972, he released his most successful UK single, “Back Off Boogaloo“, which peaked at number two. He achieved commercial and critical success with his 1973 album Ringo, which was a top-ten release in both the UK and the US. He has featured in a number of documentaries and hosted television shows. He also narrated the first two series of the children’s television programme Thomas & Friends and portrayed “Mr Conductor” during the first season of the PBSchildren’s television series Shining Time Station. Since 1989, he has toured with thirteen variations of Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band.

Josef Erich Zawinul (7 July 1932 – 11 September 2007) was an Austrian jazz keyboardist and composer. First coming to prominence with saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, Zawinul went on to play with Miles Davis and to become one of the creators of jazz fusion, a musical genre that combined jazz with rock. He co-founded the groups Weather Report and The Zawinul Syndicate. He pioneered the use of electric piano and synthesizer, and was named “Best Electric Keyboardist” twenty-eight times by the readers of Down Beat magazine.

Zawinul grew up in Vienna, Austria. Accordion was his first instrument. When he was six or seven, he studied clarinet, violin, and piano at the Vienna Conservatory (Konservatorium Wien). During the 1950s he was a staff pianist for Polydor. He worked as a jazz musician with Hans Koller, Friedrich Gulda, Karl Drewo, and Fatty George. In 1959 he moved to the U.S. to attend Berklee College of Music, but a week later he received a job offer from Maynard Ferguson, so he left school and went on tour. He then accompanied Dinah Washington. He spent most of the 1960s with Cannonball Adderley. During this time he wrote “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” and “Walk Tall”, and “Country Preacher” and played electric piano. At the end of the decade he recorded with Miles Davis on In a Silent Way as Davis was establishing the genre of jazz fusion, combining jazz with rock.

Henry “Hank” Mobley (July 7, 1930 – May 30, 1986) was an American hard bop and soul jazz tenor saxophonist and composer. Mobley was described by Leonard Feather as the “middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone”, a metaphor used to describe his tone, that was neither as aggressive as John Coltrane nor as mellow as Stan Getz, and his style that was laid-back, subtle and melodic, especially in contrast with players like Sonny Rollins and Coltrane. The critic Stacia Proefrock claimed he is “one of the most underrated musicians of the bop era.” Mobley was born in Eastman, Georgia, but was raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, near Newark. When he was 16, an illness kept him in the house for several months. His grandmother thought of buying a saxophone to help him occupy his time, and it was then that Mobley began to play. He tried to enter a music school in Newark, but could not, since he was not a resident, so he instead studied music through books at home.

At 19, he started to play with local bands and, months later, worked for the first time with musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach. He took part in one of the earliest hard bop sessions, alongside Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Doug Watkins and trumpeter Kenny Dorham. The results of these sessions were released as Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers. They contrasted with the classical inclinations of cool jazz, with Mobley’s rich lyricism being bluesier, alongside the funky approach of Silver. When The Jazz Messengers split in 1956, Mobley continued on with pianist Silver for a short time, although he did work again with Blakey some years later, when the drummer appeared on Mobley’s albums in the early 1960s.

Lloyd “Tiny” Grimes (July 7, 1916 – March 4, 1989) was an American jazz and R&B guitarist. He was a member of the Art Tatum Trio from 1943 to 1944, was a backing musician on recording sessions, and later led his own bands, including a recording session with Charlie Parker. He is notable for playing the tenor guitar, a four-stringed electric instrument. Grimes was born in Newport News, Virginia, United States, and began his musical career playing drums and one-fingered piano. In 1938 he took up the electric four-string tenor guitar. In 1940 he joined the Cats and the Fiddle as guitarist and singer. In 1943 he joined the Art Tatum Trio as guitarist and made a number of recordings with Tatum.

After leaving Tatum, Grimes recorded with his own groups in New York and with a long list of leading musicians, including vocalist Billie Holiday. He made four recordings with his own group, augmented with Charlie Parker: “Tiny’s Tempo”, “Red Cross”, “Romance Without Finance”, and “I’ll Always Love You Just the Same”, the latter two featuring Grimes’ singing.

In the late 1940s, he had a hit on a jazzed-up version of “Loch Lomond“, with the band billed as Tiny “Mac” Grimes and the Rocking Highlandersand appearing in kilts. This groups included tenor saxman Red Prysock and singer Screaming Jay Hawkins. Grimes continued to lead his own groups into the later 1970s and he recorded on Prestige Records in a series of strong blues-based performances with Coleman Hawkins, Illinois Jacquet, Pepper Adams, Roy Eldridge and other noted players including, in 1977, Earl Hines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8B900gBv9Q

NGC 520 is a pair of colliding spiral galaxies about 78 million light-years away in the constellationPisces and were discovered by astronomer William Herschel on 13 December 1784. The object has an H II nucleus.

NGC 520 is the product of a collision between two disk galaxies that started 300 million years ago. It exemplifies the middle stages of the merging process: the disks of the parent galaxies have merged together, but the nuclei have not yet coalesced. It features an odd-looking tail of stars and a prominent dust lane that runs diagonally across the center of the image and obscures the galaxy. NGC 520 is one of the brightest galaxy pairs on the sky, and can be observed with a small telescope toward the constellation of Pisces, the Fish, having the appearance of a comet. It is about 100 million light-years away and about 100,000 light-years across. The galaxy pair is included in Arp’s catalog of peculiar galaxies as Arp 157. This image is part of a large collection of 59 images of merging galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released on the occasion of its 18th anniversary on 24th April 2008. About the object Object name NGC 520, Arp 157, VV 231, KPG 031 Object description Interacting Galaxies Position (J2000) 01 24 35.42 +03 47 55.0 Constellation Pisces Distance 100 million light-years (50 million parsecs).

Michael Shrieve (born July 6, 1949) is an American drummer, percussionist, and composer. He is best known as the drummer of the rock band Santana. He played on its albums from 1969 to 1974. Shrieve was one of the youngest musicians to perform at Woodstock in 1969, being aged 20. His drum solo during “Soul Sacrifice” in the Woodstock film has been described as “electrifying”. Shrieve’s first full-time band was called Glass Menagerie, followed by experience in the house band of an R&B club, backing touring musicians including B.B. King and Etta James. At 16, Shrieve played in a jam session at the Fillmore Auditorium, where he attracted the attention of Santana‘s manager, Stan Marcum. When he was 19, Shrieve jammed with Santana at a recording studio and was invited to join that day.

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

Gene Chandler (born Eugene Drake Dixon and nicknamed “The Duke of Earl” or simply “The Duke”; July 6, 1937) is an American singer, songwriter, music producer and record label executive. He is known best for his most successful songs “Duke of Earl” and “Groovy Situation” and his association with The Dukays, the Impressions and Curtis Mayfield.

Chandler is a Grammy Hall Of Fame inductee and a winner of both the National Association of Television and Radio Announcers’ (NATRA) “Producer of the Year” Award and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation‘s Pioneer Award. He is also one of a just a few singers to achieve chart successes spanning the doo-wop, rhythm and blues, soul, and disco musical eras, with some Top 40 pop and R&B chart hits between 1961 and 1986. Chandler was inducted as a performer into the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame on August 24, 2014. In 2016, he became a “Double Inductee” into the R&B Hall of Fame, having received a Special Induction as an R&B Music Pioneer.

Gene Chandler was born Eugene Drake Dixon in Chicago, Illinois, on July 6, 1937. He attended Englewood High School on Chicago’s south side. He began performing during the early 1950s with the band The Gaytones. In 1957, he joined The Dukays, with James Lowe, Shirley Jones, Earl Edwards and Ben Broyles, soon becoming their lead singer. After his draft into the U.S. Army he returned to Chicago in 1960 and rejoined the Dukays.

Luigi Paulino Alfredo Francesco Antonio Balassoni (July 6, 1924 – February 14, 2009), known by the stage name Louie Bellson (his own preferred spelling, although he is often seen in sources as Louis Bellson), was an American jazz drummer. He was a composer, arranger, bandleader, and jazz educator, and is credited with pioneering the use of two bass drums.

Bellson was an internationally acclaimed artist who performed in most of the major capitals around the world. Bellson and his wife, actress and singer Pearl Bailey (married from 1952 until Bailey’s death in 1990), had the second highest number of appearances at the White House (only Bob Hopehad more).

Bellson was a vice president at Remo, a drum company. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1985. Bellson was born in Rock Falls, Illinois in 1924, where his father owned a music store. He started playing drums at three years of age. While still a young child, Bellson’s father moved the family and music store to Moline, Illinois . At 15, he pioneered using two bass drums at the same time, a technique he invented in his high school art class. At age 17, he triumphed over 40,000 drummers to win the Slingerland National Gene Krupa contest.

After graduating from Moline High School in 1942, he worked with big bands throughout the 1940s, with Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, and Duke Ellington. In 1952, he married jazz singer Pearl Bailey. During the 1950s, he played with the Dorsey Brothers, Jazz at the Philharmonic, acted as Bailey’s music director, and recorded as a leader for Norgran Records and Verve Records.

Over the years, his sidemen included Ray Brown, Pete and Conte Candoli, Chuck Findley, John Heard, Roger Ingram, Don Menza, Blue Mitchell, Larry Novak, Nat Pierce, Frank Rosolino, Bobby Shew, Clark Terry, and Snooky Young.

ESO 495-21 is located approximately 30 million light-years away in the constellation of Pyxis.

Also known as Henize 2-10 or LEDA 24171, it is a dwarf starburst galaxy — this means that it is small in size, but ablaze with rapid bursts of star formation.

Starburst galaxies form stars at exceptionally high rates, creating stellar newborns of up to 1,000 times faster than our own Milky Way Galaxy.

ESO 495-21 is only 3% the size of the Milky Way, and yet there are indicationsthat the black hole at its core is over a million times as massive as the Sun — an extremely unusual scenario.

This black hole may offer clues as to how black holes and galaxies evolved in the early Universe.

The origin of the central supermassive black holes in galaxies is still a matter of debate.

Do the galaxies form first and then crush material at their centers into black holes, or do pre-existing black holes gather galaxies around them?

Do they evolve together — or could the answer be something else entirely?

With its small size, indistinct shape, and rapid starburst activity, astronomers think ESO 495-21 may be an analogue for some of the Universe’s first galaxies.

Finding a black hole at ESO 495-21’s heart is therefore a strong indication that black holes may have formed first, with galaxies later developing and evolving around them.

Jaime Royal “Robbie” Robertson, OC (born July 5, 1943), is a Canadian musician, songwriter, film composer, producer, actor, and author. Robertson is best known for his work as lead guitarist and primary songwriter for The Band, and for his career as a solo recording artist.

Robertson’s work with the Band was instrumental in creating the Americana music genre. Robertson has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame as a member of the Band, and has been inducted to Canada’s Walk of Fame, both with the Band and on his own. He is ranked 59th in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 greatest guitarists. As a songwriter, Robertson is credited for writing “The Weight“, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down“, “Up on Cripple Creek“, “Broken Arrow“, “Somewhere Down the Crazy River“, and many others. He has been inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Songwriters.

As a film soundtrack producer and composer, Robertson is known for his collaborations with director Martin Scorsese, which began with the rockumentary film The Last Waltz (1978), and continued through a number of dramatic films, including Raging Bull (1980) and Casino (1995). He has worked on many other soundtracks for film and television.

Arthur Murray Blythe (July 5, 1940 – March 27, 2017) was an American jazz alto saxophonist and composer. He was described by critic Chris Kelsey as displaying “one of the most easily recognizable alto sax sounds in jazz, big and round, with a fast, wide vibrato and an aggressive, precise manner of phrasing” and furthermore as straddling the avant garde and traditionalist jazz, often with bands featuring unusual instrumentation. Born in Los Angeles, Blythe lived in San Diego, returning to Los Angeles when he was 19 years old. He took up the alto saxophone at the age of nine, playing R&B until his mid-teens when he discovered jazz. In the mid-1960s, Blythe was part of The Underground Musicians and Artists Association (UGMAA), founded by Horace Tapscott, on whose 1969 The Giant Is Awakened he made his recording debut.

After moving to New York in the mid-70s, Blythe worked as a security guard before being offered a place as sideman for Chico Hamilton (1975–77). He subsequently played with Gil Evans‘ Orchestra (1976–78), Lester Bowie (1978), Jack DeJohnette (1979) and McCoy Tyner (also 1979). Blythe’s group – John Hicks, Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall (drummer) – played Carnegie Hall and the Village Vanguard in 1979.

In 1977, Blythe appeared on the LP Rhythmatism, a recording led by drummer Steve Reid. Reviewing in Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), Robert Christgau highlighted Blythe’s “forceful” alto-saxophone playing and said, “like so many of the new players Blythe isn’t limited to modern methods by his modernism—he favors fluent, straight-ahead Coltrane modalities, but also demonstrates why he belongs on a tune for Cannonball.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do7exf7oo4c

Overton Amos Lemons (July 5, 1913 – October 7, 1966), known as Smiley Lewis, was an American New Orleans rhythm and blues singer and guitarist. The music journalist Tony Russell wrote that “Lewis was the unluckiest man in New Orleans. He hit on a formula for slow-rocking, small-band numbers like ‘The Bells Are Ringing’ and ‘I Hear You Knocking‘ only to have Fats Domino come up behind him with similar music with a more ingratiating delivery. Lewis was practically drowned in Domino’s backwash.”

Lemons was born in DeQuincy, Louisiana, a rural hamlet near Lake Charles, to Jeffrey and Lillie Mae Lemons. He was the second of three sons. His mother died while he was a child, and later he named a song and several automobiles after her. In his mid-teens, he hopped a slow-moving freight train with some friends, who jumped off when the train began to speed up. Lewis alone remained on the train, getting off when it reached its stop in New Orleans. He found boarding with a Caucasian family in the Irish Channel neighborhood and eventually adopted their surname, Lewis.

He began playing clubs in the French Quarter and “tan bars” in the Seventh Ward, at times billed as Smiling Lewis, a variation of the nicknameearned by his lack of front teeth. He was often accompanied by the pianist Isidore “Tuts” Washington, with whom he played in Thomas Jefferson’s Dixieland band in the mid-1930s. When the band dissolved, Lewis began playing in clubs, earning only tips.

Lewis married Leona Robinson in 1938. The couple lived with her mother until they began having children, when they moved to South Tonti Street, while Lewis worked at manual labor during the day and performed at night. During World War II, he joined Washington again, this time with Kid Ernest Molière’s band, entertaining soldiers stationed at Fort Polk, outside Bunkie, Louisiana, and serving as the house band at the Boogie Woogie Club. The two formed a trio with the drummer Herman Seals after the war ended and again began playing in clubs in the French Quarter and along Bourbon Street.

The trio was invited by David Braun to record a session for his DeLuxe Records in 1947, which produced Lewis’s debut record, “Here Comes Smiley” (Papa John Joseph replaced Seals and played bass at this session). The single “Turn On Your Volume” was a local jukebox hit, but DeLuxe requested no more material and left two other recorded sides unreleased. An invitation from Dave Bartholomew, who grew up in the same neighborhood as Lewis and was then beginning a career as a producer with Imperial Records, led to a recording session for the trio in March 1950, at which they recorded the song “Tee Nah Nah”. Lewis had his first national hit song with “The Bells Are Ringing” in 1952. He was the first to record Bartholomew’s song “Blue Monday“, in 1954; Fats Domino‘s recording of the song was a hit two years later.^[8][5] In 1955 he achieved his biggest sales with “I Hear You Knocking“, the first recording of the song (written by Bartholomew and Pearl King), with Huey Smith playing the piano.

Flamenco Fridays with Bulerias.

“Bulería” is the most characteristic flamenco style of Jerez de la Frontera. It is generally composed of three or four eight-syllable verses. This is one of the most complex dancing and guitar styles: bustling, happy and cheerful.

It is characterised by a fast rhythm and a redoubled beat. It is more suitable than other flamenco styles to be sung accompanied by flamenco clapping, “jaleo” and other shouts and expresive voices. “Bulerías” constitute an usually dance to finish all flamencos parties (composing a semicircle, people dance in the middle of it a part of the song).

“Loco Mateo” was the first performer of this style, finishing  his “soleares or soleás” with “bulerías”. Hence “bulería” results from “solea”. It was originated in the late 19th century. In “Sinfonía Virtual” magazine Guillermo Castro documented that the term “bulería” was used for the first time in the 17th century, but it didn’t acquire its flamenco meaning until the early 20th century. It was earlier believed that the first appearance of this style came up with the painting of José García Ramos “Baile por bulerías” (1884), preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville. Currently, it’s widely known that this paiting had other titles previously such as “Tango“, “Bailarina” or “El Baile”. It was not until second half of the XX century that it adopted the name “Baile por Bulerías”.

NGC 6946 also known as the Fireworks Galaxy is a face-on intermediate spiral galaxy with a small bright nucleus, whose location in the sky straddles the boundary between the northern constellations of Cepheus and Cygnus. Its distance from Earth is about 25.2 million light-years or 7.72 megaparsecs, similar to the distance of M101 (NGC 5457) in the constellation Ursa Major. Both were once considered to be part of the Local Group. but are now known to be among the dozen bright spiral galaxies near the Milky Way but beyond the confines of the Local Group. NGC 6946 lies within the Virgo Supercluster.

Discovered by William Herschel on 9 September 1798, this well-studied galaxy has a diameter of approximately 40,000 light-years , about one-third of the Milky Way’s size, and it contains roughly half the number of stars as the Milky Way. The galaxy is heavily obscured by interstellar matter as it lies quite close to the galactic plane of the Milky Way. Due to its prodigious star formation it has been classified as an active starburst galaxy.

Various unusual celestial objects have been observed within NGC 6964. This includes the so-called ‘Red Ellipse’ along one of the northern arms that looks like a super-bubble or very large supernova remnant, and which may have been formed by an open cluster containing massive stars. There are also two regions of unusual dark lanes of nebulosity, while within the spiral arms several regions appear devoid of stars and gaseous hydrogen, some spanning up to two kiloparsecs across. A third peculiar object, discovered in 1967, is now known as “Hodge’s Complex”. This was once thought to be a young supergiant cluster, but in 2017 it was conjectured to be an interacting dwarf galaxy superimposed on NGC 6964.

Fred Wesley (born July 4, 1943) is an American jazz and funk trombonist, best known for his work with James Brown in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Parliament-Funkadelic in the second half of the 1970s. In 2015, Wesley was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame. Wesley was born the son of a high school teacher and big band leader in Columbus, Georgia, and raised in Mobile, Alabama. As a child he took piano and later trumpet lessons. He played baritone horn and trombone in school, and at around age 12 his father brought a trombone home, whereupon he switched (eventually permanently) to trombone.

During the 1960s and 1970s he was a pivotal member of James Brown‘s bands, playing on many hit recordings including “Say it Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud,” “Mother Popcorn” and co-writing tunes such as “Hot Pants.” His slippery riffs and pungent, precise solos, complementing those of saxophonist Maceo Parker, gave Brown’s R&B, soul, and funk tunes their instrumental punch. In the 1970s he also served as band leader and musical director of Brown’s band the J.B.’s and did much of the composing and arranging for the group. His name was credited on ‘Fred Wesley & the J.B.’s’ recording of “Doing It to Death,” which sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc by the R.I.A.A. in July 1973. He left Brown’s band in 1975 and spent several years playing with George Clinton‘s various Parliament-Funkadelic projects, even recording a couple of albums as the leader of a spin-off group, The Horny Horns.

Wesley became a force in jazz in 1978 when he joined the Count Basie Orchestra. He released his first jazz album as a leader, To Someone in 1988. It was followed by New Friends in 1990, Comme Ci Comme Ca in 1991, the live album Swing and Be Funky, and Amalgamation in 1994.