mick laBriola

The nearby dwarf galaxy NGC 1569 is a hotbed of vigorous star birth activity which blows huge bubbles that riddle the main body of the galaxy. The galaxy’s “star factories” are also manufacturing brilliant blue star clusters. This galaxy had a sudden onset of star birth about 25 million years ago, which subsided about the time the very earliest human ancestors appeared on Earth.

In this new image, taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the bubble structure is sculpted by the galactic super-winds and outflows caused by a colossal input of energy from collective supernova explosions that are linked with a massive episode of star birth.

One of the still unresolved mysteries in astronomy is how and when galaxies formed and how they evolved. Most of today’s galaxies seem to have been already fully formed very early on in the history of the universe (now corresponding to a large distance away from us), their formation involving one or more galaxy collisions and/or episodes of strongly enhanced star formation activity (so-called starbursts).

While any galaxies that are actually forming are too far away for detailed studies of their stellar populations even with Hubble, their local counterparts, nearby starburst and colliding galaxies, are far easier targets.

NGC 1569 is a particularly suitable example, being one of the closest starburst galaxies. It harbors two very prominent young, massive clusters plus a large number of smaller star clusters. The two young massive clusters match the globular star clusters we find in our own Milky Way galaxy, while the smaller ones are comparable with the less massive open clusters around us.

NGC 1569 was recently investigated in great detail by a group of European astronomers who published their results in the January 1, 2004 issue of the British journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The group used several of Hubble’s high-resolution instruments, with deep observations spanning a wide wavelength range, to determine the parameters of the clusters more precisely than is currently possible from the ground.

The team found that the majority of clusters in NGC 1569 seem to have been produced in an energetic starburst that started around 25 million years ago and lasted for about 20 million years. First author Peter Anders from the Gottingen University Galaxy Evolution Group, Germany says “We are looking straight into the very creation processes of the stars and star clusters in this galaxy. The clusters themselves present us with a fossil record of NGC 1569’s intense star formation history.”

The bubble-like structures seen in this image are made of hydrogen gas that glows when hit by the fierce winds and radiation from hot young stars and is racked by supernovae shocks. The first supernovae blew up when the most massive stars reached the end of their lifetimes roughly 20-25 million years ago. The environment in NGC 1569 is still turbulent and the supernovae may not only deliver the gaseous raw material needed for the formation of further stars and star clusters, but also actually trigger their birth in the tortured swirls of gas.

The color image is composed of 4 different exposures with Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 through the following filters: a wide ultraviolet filter (shown in blue), a green filter (shown in green), a wide red filter (shown in red), and a Hydrogen alpha filter (also shown in red).

Charles McPherson (born July 24, 1939) is an American jazz alto saxophonist born in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in Detroit, Michigan, who worked intermittently with Charles Mingus from 1960 to 1974, and as a performer leading his own groups.

McPherson also was commissioned to help record ensemble renditions of pieces from Charlie Parker on the 1988 soundtrack for the film Bird.

William Taylor (July 24, 1921 – December 28, 2010) was an American jazz pianist, composer, broadcaster and educator. He was the Robert L. Jones Distinguished Professor of Music at East Carolina University in Greenville, and from 1994 was the artistic director for jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

A jazz activist, Taylor sat on the Honorary Founders Board of The Jazz Foundation of America, an organisation he started in 1989, with Ann Ruckert, Herb Storfer and Phoebe Jacobs, to save the homes and the lives of America’s elderly jazz and blues musicians, later including musicians who survived Hurricane Katrina.

Taylor was also a jazz educator, who lectured in colleges, served on panels and travelled worldwide as a jazz ambassador. Critic Leonard Feather once said, “It is almost indisputable that Dr. Billy Taylor is the world’s foremost spokesman for jazz.”

Taylor was born in Greenville, North Carolina, but moved to Washington, D.C., when he was five years old. He grew up in a musical family and learned to play different instruments as a child, including guitar, drums and saxophone. He was most successful at the piano, and had classical piano lessons with Henry Grant, who had educated Duke Ellington a generation earlier. Taylor made his first professional appearance playing keyboard at the age of 13 and was paid one dollar.

This image of NGC 3359 was obtained with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawai‘i. The circular pinwheel shape with the easily recognized spiral arm structure makes it straightforward to classify this object as a spiral galaxy, however, it is the presence of the straight ‘bar’ in the center of the galaxy that distinguishes NGC 3359 from many other spirals. Recent research has shown that the central bar in this galaxy is relatively young; it is only 500 million years old (as compared to the several billion year age of the galaxy). Astronomers are still trying to understand how large features like the bar form and how long they last as a galaxy like NGC 3359 evolves. In addition to its central bar NGC 3359 is known for its many regions of star formation (so-called [H II] regions) that are visible across its disk. In this image the [H II] regions are seen as the light red patches visible throughout the image. There are approximately 100 [H II] regions in NGC 3359 which makes it an example of intense star formation. An example of an [H II] region in our own galaxy, where many tens of young stars have recently been born, is the famous Orion Nebula. The color-composite image is actually made of four individual images taken in the g (blue), r (green), i (orange) and h-alpha (red) filters. NGC 3359 is a moderately large object in the sky. The angular size of this image is 4.3 x 5.3 arcminutes. It is a relatively close example of a spiral galaxy at a distance of roughly 49 million light-years. NGC 3359 is located in the constellation Ursa Major and has an apparent magnitude of 10.5. It is easily visible in amateur-sized portable telescopes.

Pandit Dr. Lakshminarayana Subramaniam (born 23 July 1947) is an acclaimed Indian violinist, composer and conductor, trained in the classical Carnatic music tradition and Western classical music, and renowned for his virtuoso playing techniques and compositions in orchestral fusion.

Since 1973, Subramaniam has amassed over 200 recordings to his credit, releasing several solo albums, recording collaborations with musicians Yehudi Menuhin, Stéphane Grappelli, Ruggiero Ricci and Jean-Pierre Rampal, further to making albums and performing with Ruggiero Ricci, Herbie Hancock, Joe Sample, Jean-Luc Ponty, Stanley Clarke John Handy, George Harrison and several others.

He has accompanied highly regarded vocalists in Carnatic music on stage including Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavatar, K. V. Narayaswamy, Dr. Sripada Pinakapani, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, M. Balamuralikrishna and M. D. Ramanathan. He has also performed many concerts with the venerable Palghat Mani Iyer on the Mridangam, in addition to collaborating with musicians of North Indian Hindustani music and artists of other music systems.

Subramaniam has written works for orchestras, ballets and Hollywood film scores, and written books on music – such as Euphony – in addition to composing symphonies and Carnatic pieces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya7E85zw-o4

Steve Lacy (July 23, 1934 – June 4, 2004), born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York City, was a jazz saxophonist and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone. Coming to prominence in the 1950s as a progressive dixieland musician, Lacy went on to a long and prolific career. He worked extensively in experimental jazz and to a lesser extent in free improvisation, but Lacy’s music was typically melodic and tightly-structured. Lacy also became a highly distinctive composer, with compositions often built out of little more than a single questioning phrase, repeated several times.

The music of Thelonious Monk became a permanent part of Lacy’s repertoire after a stint in the pianist’s band, with Monk’s songs appearing on virtually every Lacy album and concert program; Lacy often partnered with trombonist Roswell Rudd in exploring Monk’s work. Beyond Monk, Lacy performed the work of jazz composers such as Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington and Herbie Nichols; unlike many jazz musicians he rarely played standard popular or show tunes.

This half century-old Bolivian ensemble is the equivalent of a superlative, studied European Reformation Revivalist band. Except that they’ve spent more time with homemade instruments. And with their (South American griot) grandfathers and grandmothers. And with childhood bedtime stories of the Golden Man. And border wars, in living memory, with headhunters, ritual cannibals and slavers from the Amazon basin on the other side of the Andes.

Berkeley 59 (also OCl 286.0 ) – a young open cluster found in the constellation of Cepheus , about 3,300 light-years away from Earth .

The stars of Berkeley 59 have recently left the gas envelopes that surround them. They are only a few million years old, so they are extremely young on the stellar scale. Young stars warm up the warm dust surrounding them, illuminating it. The Berkeley Cluster 59 is immersed in the NGC 7822nebula. In the interior of the nebula, a second generation of stars is already being formed, perhaps due to the warming and compression of gas by young stars.

Al Laurence Di Meola (born July 22, 1954) is an American jazz, jazz fusion, and world music guitarist. Albums such as Friday Night in San Franciscohave earned him both critical and commercial success with fans throughout the world.

Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, into an Italian family with roots in Cerreto Sannita, a small town northeast of Naples, Di Meola grew up in Bergenfield, where he attended Bergenfield High School. He has been a resident of Old Tappan, New Jersey.

When he was eight years old, he was inspired by Elvis Presley and the Ventures to start playing guitar. His teacher directed him toward jazz standards. He cites as influences jazz guitarists George Benson and Kenny Burrell and bluegrass and country guitarists Clarence White and Doc Watson.

Di Meola with Return to Forever at Onondaga Community College, Syracuse, New York, 1974

He attended Berklee College of Music in the early 1970s. At nineteen, he was hired by Chick Corea to replace Bill Connors in the pioneering jazz fusion band Return to Forever with Stanley Clarke and Lenny White. He recorded three albums with Return to Forever, helping the quartet earn its greatest commercial success as all three albums cracked the Top 40 on the U.S. Billboard pop albums chart. He could play so fast that he was sometimes criticized for playing too many notes.

Herman “Junior” Cook (July 22, 1934 – February 3, 1992) was a hard bop tenor saxophone player.

Cook was born in Pensacola, Florida. After playing with Dizzy Gillespie in 1958, Cook gained some fame for his longtime membership in the Horace Silver Quintet (1958–1964); when he and Blue Mitchell left that band, Cook played in Mitchell’s quintet (1964–1969). Later associations included Freddie Hubbard, Elvin Jones, George Coleman, Louis Hayes (1975–1976), Bill Hardman (1979–1989), and the McCoy Tyner big band.

At a young age, Deepak Ram’s reputation grew rapidly. Among his many laurels is the award for Best Instrumental Album, South African Music Awards 2000. Ram has collaborated with renowned musicians in a variety of genres from jazz pianist Darius Brubeck to Tunisian ud player Dhafer Yousseff. He has performed throughout the world, including South Africa?s Millennium Concert on Robben Island before such illustrious audience members as presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. In addition to masterful composition, arranging and performance, Ram is also an accomplished teacher, most recently holding a post with the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Performing on congas and percussion Saturday July 21st 2018 9pm-1am

with Soul Tight Committee

at Bunkers Bar Minneapolis

Although it looks like the pattern of a shell on the beach, this intriguing spiral is in fact astronomical in nature. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) captured this remarkable image of a binary star system, where two stars — LL Pegasi and its companion — are locked in a stellar waltz, orbiting around their common centre of gravity. The old star LL Pegasi is continuously losing gaseous material as it evolves into a planetary nebula, and the distinct spiral shape is the imprint made by the stars orbiting in this gas.

The spiral spans light-years and winds around with extraordinary regularity. Based on the expansion rate of the spiralling gas, astronomers estimate that a new “layer” appears every 800 years — approximately the same time it takes for the two stars to complete one orbit around each other.

LL Pegasi was first highlighted about 10 years ago when the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope obtained a picture of the almost-perfect spiral structure. This was the first time a spiral pattern had been found in material surrounding an old star. Now, ALMA’s observations, of which this image only shows one “cross-section”, have added an extra dimension to reveal the exquisitely-ordered 3D geometry of the spiral pattern. A full view of the 3D video can be seen in this video.

An additional image shows a composition of the ALMA and Hubble data.

4,240 ly distance

Yusuf Islam (born Steven Demetre Georgiou; 21 July 1948), commonly known by his former stage name Cat Stevens, is a British singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. His 1967 debut album reached the top 10 in the UK, and the album’s title song “Matthew and Son” charted at number 2 on the UK Singles Chart. Stevens’ albums Tea for the Tillerman (1970) and Teaser and the Firecat (1971) were both certified triple platinum in the US by the RIAA. His musical style consists of folk, pop, rock, and Islamic music.

His 1972 album Catch Bull at Four spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, and fifteen weeks at number one in the Australian ARIA Charts. He earned two ASCAP songwriting awards in 2005 and 2006 for “The First Cut Is the Deepest“, and the song has been a hit for four artists. His other hit songs include “Father and Son“, “Wild World“, “Peace Train“, “Moonshadow“, and “Morning Has Broken“. In 2007 he received the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song Collection from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.

In December 1977, Stevens converted to Islam, and he adopted the name Yusuf Islam the following year. In 1979, he auctioned all of his guitars for charity and left his musical career in order to devote himself to educational and philanthropic causes in the Muslim community. He was embroiled in a long-running controversy regarding comments which he made in 1989 about the death fatwa on author Salman Rushdie. He has received two honorary doctorates and awards for promoting peace from two organisations founded by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Conrad Yeatis “Sonny” Clark (July 21, 1931 – January 13, 1963) was an American jazz pianist who mainly worked in the hard bop idiom.

Clark was born and raised in Herminie, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town east of Pittsburgh. His parents were originally from Stone Mountain, Georgia. His miner father, Emery Clark, died of a lung disease two weeks after Sonny was born. Sonny was the youngest of eight children. At age 12, he moved to Pittsburgh.

When visiting an aunt in California at age 20, Clark decided to stay and began working with saxophonist Wardell Gray. Clark went to San Franciscowith Oscar Pettiford and after a couple months, was working with clarinetist Buddy DeFranco in 1953. Clark toured the United States and Europe with DeFranco until January 1956, when he joined The Lighthouse All-Stars, led by bassist Howard Rumsey.

Wishing to return to the east coast, Clark served as accompanist for singer Dinah Washington in February 1957 in order to relocate to New York City. In New York, Clark was often requested as a sideman by many musicians, partly because of his rhythmic comping. He frequently recorded for Blue Note Records, playing as a sideman with many hard bop players, including Kenny Burrell, Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer, Curtis Fuller, Grant Green, Philly Joe Jones, Clifford Jordan, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Art Taylor, and Wilbur Ware. He also recorded sessions with Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Billie Holiday, Stanley Turrentine, and Lee Morgan.

Zani Diabaté, who died in 2011, was one of the great Malian guitar heroes who never quite made it in the west, despite his adventurous fusion of traditional styles and rock energy; he was compared to Hendrix when the exuberant album Zani Diabaté & The Super Djata Band was released here in 1988. But now his music and style are being resurrected, thanks to percussionist Bamba Dembélé, who played with him in Super Djata before joining the legendary Super Rail Band De Bamako, alongside drummer Maguett Diop and guitarist Moussa Diabaté – who now reappear alongside Dembélé in Bamba Wassoulou Groove. This is a band dominated by three guitarists, with Moussa taking the lead on new songs and old Super Djata favourites. On Farima he switches from a cool, drifting introduction to a driving solo, while Bina is a mellow workout featuring inter-twining guitars.