mick laBriola

NGC 772 (also known as Arp 78) is an unbarred spiral galaxy approximately 130 million light-years away in the constellation Aries.

Around 200,000 light years in diameter, NGC 772 is twice the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, and is surrounded by several satellite galaxies – including the dwarf elliptical, NGC 770 – whose tidal forces on the larger galaxy have likely caused the emergence of a single elongated outer spiral arm that is much more developed than the others arms. Halton Arp includes NGC 772 in his Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 78, where it is described as a “Spiral galaxy with a small high-surface brightness companion”.

Two supernovae (SN 2003 hl & SN 2003 iq) have been observed in NGC 772.

NGC 772 probably has a H II nucleus, but it may be a transitional object

Joe Watkins (October 24, 1900, New Orleans – September 13, 1969, New Orleans) was an American jazz drummer.

Watkins learned piano in his youth and began teaching himself to play drums late in his teens. Early in his career he worked with Kid Howard, Punch Miller, Herb Morand, and Isaiah Morgan. Starting in 1946 he worked with George Lewis, with whom he would play into the 1960s, including on recordings and international tours. Later, he recorded with Howard again and with Emmanuel Sayles, though poor health forced him essentially into retirement in the mid-1960s.

James Henry “Jimmy” Dawkins (October 24, 1936 – April 10, 2013) was an American Chicago blues and electric blues guitarist and singer. He is generally considered to have been a practitioner of the “West Side sound” of Chicago blues.

Dawkins was born in Tchula, Mississippi. He moved to Chicago in 1955, where he worked in a box factory, started to play in local blues clubs, and gained a reputation as a session musician.

In 1969, thanks to the efforts of his friend Magic Sam, his first album, Fast Fingers, was released by Delmark Records. It won the Grand Prix du Disque from the Hot Club de France. In 1971, Delmark released his second album, All for Business, with the singer Andrew Odom and the guitarist Otis Rush.

Saunders Teddell, or Saunders Terrell (or other variants, sources differ) (October 24, 1911 – March 11, 1986), known as Sonny Terry, was an American Piedmont blues and folk musician, who was known for his energetic blues harmonica style, which frequently included vocal whoops and hollers and occasionally imitations of trains and fox hunts.

Terry was born in Greensboro, Georgia. His father, a farmer, taught him to play basic blues harp as a youth. He sustained injuries to his eyes and went blind by the time he was 16, which prevented him from doing farm work, and was forced to play music in order to earn a living. Terry played Campdown Races to the plow horses which improved the efficiency of farming in the area. He began playing blues in Shelby, North Carolina. After his father died, he began playing in the trio of Piedmont blues–style guitarist Blind Boy Fuller. When Fuller died in 1941, Terry established a long-standing musical relationship with Brownie McGhee, and they recorded numerous songs together. The duo became well known among white audiences during the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. This included collaborations with Styve Homnick, Woody Guthrie and Moses Asch, producing classic recordings for Folkways Records (now Smithsonian/Folkways).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwa93R1BIqM

NGC 4676, or the Mice Galaxies, are two spiral galaxies in the constellation Coma Berenices. About 290 million light-years away, they began the process of colliding and merging. Their name refers to the long tails produced by tidal action—the relative difference between gravitational pulls on the near and far parts of each galaxy—known here as a galactic tide. It is a possibility that both galaxies, which are members of the Coma cluster, have experienced collision, and will continue colliding until they coalesce.

The colors of the galaxy are peculiar. In NGC 4676A a core with some dark markings is surrounded by a bluish white remnant of spiral arms. The tail is unusual, starting out blue and terminating in a more yellowish color, despite the fact that the beginning of each arm in virtually every spiral galaxy starts yellow and terminates in a bluish color. NGC 4676B has a yellowish core and two arcs; arm remnants underneath are bluish as well.

Gary Robert McFarland (October 23, 1933 – November 3, 1971) was a composer, arranger, vibraphonist and vocalist, prominent on Verve and Impulse! Records during the 1960s, when he made “one of the more significant contributors to orchestral jazz”.

McFarland was born in Los Angeles, on October 23, 1933, but grew up in Grants Pass, Oregon.

He attained a small following after working with Bill Evans, Gerry Mulligan, Johnny Hodges, John Lewis, Stan Getz, Bob Brookmeyer, and Anita O’Day.

As well as his own albums and arrangements for other musicians he composed the scores to the films Eye of the Devil (1966) and Who Killed Mary What’s ‘Er Name? (1971). By the end of the 1960s, he was moving away from jazz towards an often wistful or melancholy style of instrumental pop, as well as producing the recordings of other artists on his Skye Records label (run in partnership with Gábor Szabó and Cal Tjader until its bankruptcy in 1970).

Frank Hewitt (October 23, 1935 – September 5, 2002) was an American hard bop jazz pianist.

Born in Queens, New York, Hewitt lived most of his life in Harlem. His mother was a church pianist, and he initially studied classical and gospel music, but switched to jazz after hearing a Charlie Parker record. He took the bop pianists Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Elmo Hope as his role models. In the 1950s and 1960s he worked with Howard McGhee, Cecil Payne, John Coltrane, Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday, among others; in 1961 he also participated in the Living Theater‘s production of Jack Gelber‘s The Connection. He became a regular figure in the circle of the pianist Barry Harris. In the 1990s Hewitt became a central figure at New York’s Smalls Jazz Club; aside from playing there several nights a week, he sometimes also ended up using the walk-in refrigerator as a place to bunk when times were rough.

William “Sonny” Criss (23 October 1927 – 19 November 1977) was an American jazz musician.

An alto saxophonist of prominence during the bebop era of jazz, he was one of many players influenced by Charlie Parker.

William Criss was born in Memphis, Tennessee and moved to Los Angeles at the age of 15. He then went on to play in various bands including Howard McGhee‘s, which also featured Charlie Parker.

Criss had developed his own, concise, bluesy tone by this point, and though his basic style did not vary much, his ability on the instrument continued to develop. Nevertheless, he continued to drift from band to band, and played on some records with Johnny Otis and Billy Eckstine.

His first major break came in 1947, on a number of jam sessions arranged by jazz impresario Norman Granz. In 1956 he signed to Imperial Records, based in New York, and recorded a series albums including Jazz U.S.A , Go Man! and Sonny Criss Plays Cole Porter featuring pianist Sonny Clark. Capitol, which owned the master recordings, reissued them as a 2-CD set on their Blue Note imprint in 2000. Criss also recorded At the Crossroadswith pianist Wynton Kelly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaGtbdJZkaM&index=3&list=PLKAZion_8BHIihbxDS8QGZQkYheoOARhw

The galaxy lies 13 million light-years away in the southern constellation Circinus. This galaxy is designated a type 2 Seyfert, a class of mostly spiral galaxies that have compact centers and are believed to contain massive black holes. Seyfert galaxies are themselves part of a larger class of objects called Active Galactic Nuclei or AGN. AGN have the ability to remove gas from the centers of their galaxies by blowing it out into space at phenomenal speeds. Astronomers studying the Circinus galaxy are seeing evidence of a powerful AGN at the center of this galaxy as well. Much of the gas in the disk of the Circinus spiral is concentrated in two specific rings — a larger one of diameter 1,300 light-years, which has already been observed by ground-based telescopes, and a previously unseen ring of diameter 260 light-years. In the Hubble image, the smaller inner ring is located on the inside of the green disk. The larger outer ring extends off the image and is in the plane of the galaxy’s disk. Both rings are home to large amounts of gas and dust as well as areas of major “starburst” activity, where new stars are rapidly forming on timescales of 40 – 150 million years, much shorter than the age of the entire galaxy. At the center of the starburst rings is the Seyfert nucleus, the believed signature of a supermassive black hole that is accreting surrounding gas and dust. The black hole and its accretion disk are expelling gas out of the galaxy’s disk and into its halo (the region above and below the disk). The detailed structure of this gas is seen as magenta-colored streamers extending towards the top of the image. In the center of the galaxy and within the inner starburst ring is a V-shaped structure of gas. The structure appears whitish-pink in this composite image, made up of four filters. Two filters capture the narrow lines from atomic transitions in oxygen and hydrogen; two wider filters detect green and near-infrared light. In the narrow-band filters, the V-shaped structure is very pronounced. This region, which is the projection of a three-dimensional cone extending from the nucleus to the galaxy’s halo, contains gas that has been heated by radiation emitted by the accreting black hole. A “counter-cone,” believed to be present, is obscured from view by dust in the galaxy’s disk. Ultraviolet radiation emerging from the central source excites nearby gas causing it to glow. The excited gas is beamed into the oppositely directed cones like two giant searchlights. Located near the plane of our own Milky Way Galaxy, the Circinus galaxy is partially hidden by intervening dust along our line of sight. As a result, the galaxy went unnoticed until about 25 years ago. This Hubble image was taken on April 10, 1999 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The research team, led by Andrew S. Wilson of the University of Maryland, is using these visible light images along with near-infrared data to further understand the dynamics of this powerful galaxy.

Jan Gunnar Hoff (born 22 October 1958 in Bodø) is a Norwegian jazz pianist, composer, arranger and professor, living in Bodø, known from cooperations with jazz musicians like Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, Lars Danielsson, John Surman, Karin Krog, Maria Joao, Marilyn Mazur, Anders Jormin, Arve Henriksen, Per Jørgensen, Alex Acuna, Mike Stern, Ernst-Wiggo Sandbakk, Per Mathisen, Arild Andersen, Nils Petter Molvær, Ståle Storløkken, Audun Kleive and Mathias Eick.

Cyril “Midnight” Blake (22 October 1900 – 3 December 1951) was a Trinidadian jazz trumpeter.

Blake moved to England about 1918, where he played in a British group called the Southern Syncopated Orchestra. He worked in Paris and London as a musician throughout the 1920s, and in the 1930s played in the bands of Leon Abbey, Happy Blake, Rudolph Dunbar, Leslie Thompson, Joe Appleton, and Lauderic Caton. In 1938 he formed his own band, which was centred on Jig’s Club in London; he recorded several times with this ensemble. In the 1940s Blake led his band behind Lord Kitchener for recordings on Parlophone Records, playing in a calypso style. Late in his life he returned to Trinidad, where he continued to lead bands. He died of an illness in 1951.