mick laBriola

Drifting through the Orion Arm of the spiral Milky Way Galaxy, this cosmic cloud by chance echoes the outline of California on the west coast of the United States. Our own Sun also lies within the Milky Way’s Orion Arm, only about 1,500 light-years from the California Nebula. Also known as NGC 1499, the classic emission nebula is around 100 light-years long. On the featured image, the most prominent glow of the California Nebula is the red light characteristic of hydrogen atoms recombining with long lost electrons, stripped away (ionized) by energetic starlight. The star most likely providing the energetic starlight that ionizes much of the nebular gas is the bright, hot, bluish Xi Persei just to the right of the nebula. A regular target for astrophotographers, the California Nebula can be spotted with a wide-field telescope under a dark sky toward the constellation of Perseus, not far from the Pleiades.

Aurora “Rory” Block (born November 6, 1949, Princeton, New Jersey, United States) is an American blues guitarist and singer, a notable exponent of the country blues style.

Aurora Block was born in Princeton and grew up in Manhattan. Her father, Allan Block, ran a sandal shop in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, and the influence of the Greenwich Village folk music scene, such as Peter Rowan, Maria Muldaur, and John Sebastian,^[1] tempted Block to study classical guitar. At the age of 14, she met guitarist Stefan Grossman, who introduced her to the music of Mississippi Delta blues guitarists. Block began listening to old albums, transcribing them, and learning to play the songs. At age 15, she left home to seek out the remaining blues giants, such as Mississippi John Hurt, Reverend Gary Davis, and Son House, and hone her craft in the traditional manner of blues musicians;^[1] then she traveled to Berkeley, California, where she played in clubs and coffeehouses.

Arturo Sandoval (born November 6, 1949) is a Cuban American jazz trumpeter, pianist and composer.

Sandoval, while living in his native Cuba, was influenced by jazz musicians Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, and Dizzy Gillespie, finally meeting Gillespie later in 1977. Gillespie became a mentor and colleague, playing with Sandoval in concerts in Europe and Cuba and later featuring him in the United Nations Orchestra. Sandoval defected while touring with Gillespie in 1990, and he became a naturalized citizen in 1998.

His life was the subject of the film For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story (2000), starring Andy García. Sandoval has won ten Grammy Awards and been nominated nineteen times; he has also received six Billboard Awards and one Emmy Award. Additionally, Sandoval has performed in a Super Bowl Halftime Show (1995), in an Orange Bowl (2009) at the White House, and at the University of Notre Dame.

On August 8, 2013, former President Barack Obama announced that Sandoval would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

As a twelve-year-old boy in Cuba, Sandoval played trumpet with street musicians. He helped establish the Orquesta Cubana de Musica Moderna, which became the band Irakere in 1973. He toured worldwide with his own group in 1981. The following year he toured with Dizzy Gillespie, who became his friend and mentor. In 1989, Gillespie invited Sandoval to be part of the United Nations Orchestra. During a tour with this group, Sandoval visited the American Embassy in Rome to defect from Cuba. He became an American citizen on December 7, 1998.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImU2TjosRW4

IC 4592 (also known as the Blue Horsehead Nebula) is a reflection nebula in the Scorpius constellation that is lit by Nu Scorpii. 40 ly distance

What you are seeing is not the famous Horsehead nebula toward Orion but rather a fainter nebula that only takes on a familiar form with deeper imaging. The main part of the here imaged molecular cloud complex is a reflection nebula cataloged as IC 4592. Reflection nebulas are actually made up of very fine dust that normally appears dark but can look quite blue when reflecting the light of energetic nearby stars. In this case, the source of much of the reflected light is a star at the eye of the horse. That star is part of Nu Scorpii, one of the brighter star systems toward the constellation of the Scorpion (Scorpius). A second reflection nebula dubbed IC 4601 is visible surrounding two stars to the right of the image center.

Neil Cowley (born 5 November 1972) is a contemporary jazz pianist whose previous incarnations include Fragile State, the Green Nuns of the Revolution, and the Neil Cowley Trio, which appeared on Later… with Jools Holland in April 2008 and won the 2007 BBC Jazz Award for best album for Displaced.

Cowley was born in London. He began as a classical pianist and performed a Shostakovich piano concerto at the age of 10 at Queen Elizabeth Hall. In his late teens Cowley moved into being a keyboardist for soul and funk acts Mission Impossible, the Brand New Heavies, Gabrielle and Zero 7. He also appeared as a co-composer and session musician with the jazz-rock group Samuel Purdey. An early album was “Foxbury Rules”, released under the pseudonym Diamond Wookie.

Arthur Ira Garfunkel (born November 5, 1941) is an American singer, poet, math teacher and actor. He is best known for his partnership with Paul Simon in the folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel.

Highlights of his solo music career include a top 10 hit, three top 20 hits, six top 40 hits, 14 Adult Contemporary top 30 singles, five Adult Contemporary number ones, two UK number ones and a People’s Choice Award. Through his solo and collaborative work, Garfunkel has earned eight Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1990, he and Simon were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Garfunkel was born in Forest Hills, Queens, New York City, the son of Rose (née Pearlman) and Jacob “Jack” Garfunkel, a traveling salesman. Art is a middle child with two brothers, the older named Jules and the younger named Jerome. Jacob’s parents had originally emigrated to the United States at the turn of the century, and settled in Manhattan. Before his career in sales, Jacob worked as an actor in Dayton, Ohio. Garfunkel is Jewish; his paternal grandparents immigrated from Iași in Romania. His maternal cousin was Lou Pearlman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucT-2YJslt8

In the northern constellation of Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair) lies the impressive Coma Cluster — a structure of over a thousand galaxies bound together by gravity. Many of these galaxies are elliptical types, as is the brighter of the two galaxies dominating this image: NGC 4860 (centre). However, the outskirts of the cluster also host younger spiral galaxies that proudly display their swirling arms. Again, this image shows a wonderful example of such a galaxy in the shape of the beautiful NGC 4858, which can be seen to the left of its bright neighbour and which stands out on account of its unusual, tangled, fiery appearance. NGC 4858 is special. Rather than being a simple spiral, it is something called a “galaxy aggregate”, which is, just as the name suggests, a central galaxy surrounded by a handful of luminous knots of material that seem to stem from it, extending and tearing away and adding to or altering its overall structure. It is also experiencing an extremely high rate of star formation, possibly triggered by an earlier interaction with another galaxy. As we see it, NGC 4858 is forming stars so frantically that it will use up all of its gas long before it reaches the end of its life. The colour of its bright knots indicates that they are formed of hydrogen, which glows in various shades of bright red as it is energised by the many young, hot stars lurking within. This scene was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), a powerful camera designed to explore the evolution of stars and galaxies in the early Universe.

NGC 4860 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices. The galaxy was discovered on 21 April 1865 by Heinrich Louis d’Arrest.

With its distance from earth being approximately 110 million parsecs, NGC 4860 belongs to the Coma Cluster, which consists of over 1,000 identified galaxies

Jeffrey H. Lorber (born November 4, 1952) is an American keyboardist, composer, and record producer. After six previous nominations, Lorber won his first Grammy Award on Jan. 28, 2018 for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album for Prototype by his band The Jeff Lorber Fusion.

Many of his songs have appeared on The Weather Channel‘s Local on the 8s segments and on the channel’s compilation albums, The Weather Channel Presents: The Best of Smooth Jazz and The Weather Channel Presents: Smooth Jazz II. He was nominated for a Grammy Award for his album He Had a Hat (Blue Note, 2007)

Lorber was born to a Jewish family in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, the same suburb as Michael and Randy Brecker, with whom he would later play.He started to play the piano when he was four years old. After playing in a number of R&B bands as a teen, he attended Berklee College of Music, where he developed his love for jazz.

Carlos Valdés (November 4, 1926 – December 4, 2007), better known as Patato, was a Cuban-born American conga player.^[1] In 1954 he emigrated from La Habana to New York City where he continued his prolific career as a sideman for several jazz and Latin music ensembles, and occasionally as a bandleader. He invented and patented the tunable conga drum which revolutionized the use of the instrument in the US. Tito Puente once called him “the greatest conguero alive today”.

Like most Cuban musicians, Carlos Valdés had several nicknames throughout his artistic career. Early on he was known as “El Toro” (The Bull) as a young dancer and boxer. In school he was known as “Patato” (Potato) due to his short stature; more despectively he was known as “Remache” and “Tampón de bañera” around his neighbourhood. While playing alongside Armando Perazain Havana’s Zombie Club, he was known as “El Zombie”, “Zombito” or “Pequeño Zombie” (Little Zombie). Due to his dancing style he was known as “Pingüino” (Penguin). Nonetheless, “Patato” was the name that stuck and he carried this pseudonym to the US, where he was often miscredited as “Potato Valdez”.

Powerful gushers of energy from seething stars can sculpt eerie-looking figures with long, flowing veils of gas and dust. One striking example is “the Ghost of Cassiopeia,” officially known as IC 63, located 550 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia the Queen.

The nebula’s ethereal glow might remind people of apparitions such as those reported by paranormal investigators. In reality, it’s simply hydrogen that is being bombarded with ultraviolet radiation from the nearby, blue-giant star Gamma Cassiopeiae (not seen here), causing it to glow in red light. The blue color is from light reflected off of the nebula’s dust.

The IC 63 nebula is not the only object under the influence of the blinding star, which unleashes as much energy as 34,000 suns. The Ghost Nebula is part of a much larger nebulous region surrounding Gamma Cassiopeiae that measures approximately two degrees on the sky — roughly four times as wide as the full Moon.

The constellation Cassiopeia is visible every clear night from mid-northern and higher latitudes. Its distinctive “W” asterism, which forms the queen’s throne, is best seen high in the sky on autumn and winter evenings. Gamma Cassiopeiae, the middle star in the W, is visible to the unaided eye, but a large telescope is needed to see IC 63.

Azar Lawrence (born November 3, 1952) is an American jazz saxophonist, known for his contributions as sideman to McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, and Woody Shaw. Lawrence was the tenor saxophonist Tyner used following John Coltrane‘s death.

Lawrence released Summer Solstice on Prestige Records in 1975, produced by Orrin Keepnews. It featured Raul de Souza, Gerald Hayes, Amaury Tristão, Dom Salvador, Ron Carter, Guilherme Franco on the songs “Novo Ano” and “Highway” which were composed by Amaury Tristão, and Lawrence, Souza, Albert Dailey, Carter and Billy Hart on all other selections.

Bridge Into The New Age featured Jean Carn, Woody Shaw, Ray Straughter, Woody Murray, Clint Houston, Billy Hart, Guillerme Franco, Julian Priester, Hadley Caliman, Black Arthur, Joe Bonner, John Heard, Leon “Ndugu” Chancler, Mtume and Kenneth Nash.