mick laBriola

Beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is nearly 175,000 light-years across, larger than our own Milky Way. It lies some 30 million light-years distant in the southern constellation Pavo, its galactic disk tilted towards our line of sight. This Hubble close-up of the nearby island universe spans about 24,000 light-years across NGC 6744’s central region in a detailed portrait that combines visible light and ultraviolet image data. The giant galaxy’s yellowish core is dominated by the visible light from old, cool stars. Beyond the core are pinkish star forming regions and young star clusters scattered along the inner spiral arms. The young star clusters are bright at ultraviolet wavelengths, shown in blue and magenta hues.

Louis Hayes (born May 31, 1937) is an American jazz drummer.

His father played drums and piano and his mother played the piano. He refers to the early influence of hearing jazz, especially hearing big bands on the radio. His main influence was Philly Joe Jones and he was mentored by Jo Jones. His three main associations were with Horace Silver‘s Quintet (1956–1959), the Cannonball Adderley Quintet (1959–1965), and the Oscar Peterson Trio (1965–1967). Hayes often joined Sam Jones, both with Adderley and Peterson, and in freelance settings.

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

Albert “Tootie” Heath (born May 31, 1935) is an American jazz hard bop drummer, the brother of tenor saxophonist Jimmy Heath and the double-bassist Percy Heath.

He first recorded in 1957 with John Coltrane. From 1958 to 1974 he worked with, among others, J. J. Johnson, Wes Montgomery, Art Farmer and Benny Golson‘s Jazztet, Cedar Walton, Bobby Timmons, Kenny Drew, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Herbie Hancock, Friedrich Gulda, Nina Simone, and Yusef Lateef. In 1975, he, Jimmy and Percy formed the Heath Brothers. He remained with the group until 1978, then left to freelance. He has recorded extensively throughout his career.

Among his many workshop and classroom teaching assignments, Tootie Heath is a regular instructor at the Stanford Jazz Workshop.

Tootie Heath is now the producer and leader of The Whole Drum Truth, a jazz drum ensemble featuring Ben Riley, Ed Thigpen, Jackie Williams, Billy Hart, Charlie Persip, Leroy Williams and Louis Hayes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw4I30YsWUs

James Wesley “Red” Holloway (May 31, 1927 – February 25, 2012) was an American jazz saxophonist.

Born in Helena, Arkansas, Holloway started playing banjo and harmonica, switching to tenor saxophone when he was 12 years old. He graduated from DuSable High School,^[3] where he had played in the school big band with Johnny Griffin and Eugene Wright, and attended the Conservatory of Music, Chicago. He joined the Army when he was 19 and became bandmaster for the U.S. Fifth Army Band, and after completing his military service returned to Chicago and played with Yusef Lateef and Dexter Gordon, among others. In 1948 he joined blues vocalist Roosevelt Sykes, and later played with other rhythm & blues musicians such as Willie Dixon, Junior Parker, and Lloyd Price.

In the 1950s he played in the Chicago area with Billie Holiday, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Ben Webster, Jimmy Rushing, Arthur Prysock, Dakota Staton, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Wardell Gray, Sonny Rollins, Red Rodney, Lester Young, Joe Williams, Redd Foxx, B.B. King, Bobby Bland, and Aretha Franklin. During this period, he also toured with Sonny Stitt, Memphis Slim and Lionel Hampton. He became a member of the house band for Chance Records in 1952. He subsequently appeared on many recording sessions for the Chicago-based independents Parrot, United and States, and Vee-Jay.

from Haiti

In this image, two spiral galaxies, similar in looks to the Milky Way, are participating in a cosmic ballet, which, in a few billion years, will end up in a complete galactic merger — the two galaxies will become a single, bigger one.

Located about 150 million light-years away in the constellation of Canis Major (the Great Dog), NGC 2207 — the larger of the two — and its companion, IC 2163, form a magnificent pair. English astronomer John Herschel discovered them in 1835.

The fatal gravitational attraction of NGC 2207 is already wreaking havoc throughout its smaller partner, distorting IC 2163’s shape and flinging out stars and gas into long streamers that extend over 100,000 light-years. The space between the individual stars in a galaxy is so vast, however, that when these galaxies collide, virtually none of the stars in them will actually physically smash into each other.

This image was captured with the ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera (EFOSC2) through three wide band filters (B, V, R). EFOSC2 has a 4.1 x 4.1 arcminute field of view and is attached to the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

born May 30th 1962

Darrell Grant, performer, composer and Portland State University professor, has built an international reputation as a stellar pianist and versatile musician. A gifted artist whose four previous recordings have topped jazz charts, Darrell explores the lyricism and soul of songs with beauty, joy and passion. He has appeared on major concert stages from the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall to the Monterey, Telluride and San Francisco Jazz Festivals. He has been a guest on Marian McPartland’s “Piano Jazz” on NPR and toured internationally with many jazz legends.

Born in 1962 in Philadelphia, Grant moved to Denver, CO, as a young child. Starting piano lessons before his teens, Grant was enough of a prodigy that he joined the Boulder, CO-based Pearl Street Jazz Band, a young but internationally renowned traditional New Orleans-style combo, at the age of 15, touring worldwide with the group for two years. Grant won a scholarship to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, at the age of 17; while at Eastman, Grant focused on performance studies over theory, which he covered in his graduate studies in jazz theory and composition at the University of Miami.

Dave McKenna (May 30, 1930 – 18 October 18, 2008) was an American jazz pianist known primarily as a solo pianist and for his “three-handed” swing style. He was a significant figure in the evolution of jazz piano.

At age 15, McKenna worked in big bands with Charlie Ventura (1949) and Woody Herman’s Orchestra (1950–’51). He then spent two years in the military before returning to Ventura (1953–’54). During his career he worked in swing and dixieland settings with Al Cohn, Eddie Condon Stan Getz, Gene Krupa, Zoot Sims, Joe Venuti^[1], and often with Bob Wilber and Bobby Hackett. McKenna released his first solo album in 1955. During the 1980s, he worked as a pianist at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston.

Benjamin David “Benny” Goodman (May 30, 1909 – June 13, 1986) was an American jazz clarinetist and bandleader known as the “King of Swing”.

In the mid-1930s, Goodman led one of the most popular musical groups in the United States. His concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City on January 16, 1938 is described by critic Bruce Eder as “the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history: jazz’s ‘coming out’ party to the world of ‘respectable’ music.”

Goodman’s bands launched the careers of many major jazz artists. During an era of racial segregation, he led one of the first well-known integrated jazz groups. Goodman performed nearly to the end of his life while exploring an interest in classical music.

Goodman was born in Chicago, the ninth of twelve children of poor Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire. His father, David Goodman (1873–1926), came to America in 1892 from Warsaw in partitioned Poland, and became a tailor. His mother, Dora (née Grisinsky, 1873–1964), came from Kovno, partitioned Poland. His parents met in Baltimore, Maryland, and moved to Chicago before Benny was born. With little income and a large family, they moved to the low-rent Maxwell Street neighborhood, an overcrowded slum near the railroad yards and surrounding factories, populated mostly by Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants.

Gjallarhorn rejuvenated traditional music rooted in the Swedish folk music of Finland. Their music was a modern echo of the ancient Nordic folk tradition with mythical medieval ballads, whirling minuets, prayers in runo-metric chanting and ancient Icelandic rÍmur (sung poetry) epics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cnON5E8NuU

The pair of galaxies NGC 1531/2, engaged in a spirited waltz, is located about 70 million light-years away towards the southern constellation Eridanus (The River). The deformed foreground spiral galaxy laced with dust lanes NGC 1532 is so close to its companion — the background galaxy with a bright core just above the centre of NGC 1532 — that it gets distorted: one of its spiral arms is warped and plumes of dust and gas are visible above its disc. The cosmic dance leads to another dramatic effect: a whole new generation of massive stars were born in NGC 1532 because of the interaction. They are visible as the purple objects in the spiral arms.

This exquisite image was made using the 1.5-metre Danish telescope at the ESO La Silla Observatory, Chile. It is based on data obtained through three different filters: B, V and R. The field of view is 12 x 12 arcmin.

Wycliffe A. Gordon (born May 29, 1967) is an American jazz trombonist, arranger, composer, band leader, and music educator at the collegiate-conservatory level. Gordon also sings and plays didgeridoo, trumpet, tuba, and piano. His nickname is “Pinecone”.

Gordon was born in Waynesboro, Georgia into a religious and musical background that influenced the early direction of his music. His father, Lucius Gordon (1936–1997), was a church organist at several churches in Burke County, Georgia and a classical pianist and teacher. Gordon took an interest in jazz in 1980 when he was thirteen, while listening to jazz records inherited from his great-aunt. The collection included a five-LP anthology produced by Sony-Columbia. In particular, he was drawn to musicians like Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens.

born 5-29-1952

Wayne Wallace is professor of practice in jazz studies and jazz trombone at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

A seven-time Grammy nominee, he is one of the most respected exponents of African American-Latin music in the world today.

Wallace is known for the use of traditional forms and styles in combination with contemporary music and has earned wide critical acclaim, including placement in both the trombone and producer categories of the DownBeat Critics Poll.

He is an accomplished arranger, educator, and composer with compositions for film and television. He has received grants from the Creative Work Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace Foundation, and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Wallace has performed, recorded, and studied with many acknowledged masters of the Afro-Latin and jazz idioms, such as Aretha Franklin, Bobby Hutcherson, Earth Wind and Fire, Pete Escovedo, Santana, Julian Priester, Conjunto Libre, Whitney Houston, Tito Puente, Steve Turre, John Lee Hooker, Con Funk Shun, Francisco Aguabella, Manny Oquendo and Libre, Max Roach, the Count Basie Orchestra, and Orestes Vilató. This experience has provided a solid foundation for Wallace’s current explorations of the intersections of a wealth of cultural styles and rhythmic concepts.

Born and raised in San Francisco, Calif., Wallace was exposed to blues, country and western, R&B, jazz, and Afro-Caribbean music at an early age. The fertile musical environment of the San Francisco Bay Area shaped his career in a unique way. His studies of Afro-Latin music and jazz have included several trips to Cuba, New York City, and Puerto Rico.

Widely respected as a teacher and historian, Wallace has taught at San Jose State University, Stanford University, and the Jazzschool in Berkeley. He has conducted lectures, workshops and clinics in the Americas and Europe since 1983.

Freddie Redd (born May 29, 1928) is an American hard-bop pianist and composer. He is probably best known for writing music to accompany The Connection (1959), a play by Jack Gelber.

Redd was born and grew up in New York City; after losing his father at the age of one, he was raised by his mother, who moved around Harlem, Brooklyn and other neighborhoods. An autodidact, he began playing the piano at a young age and took to studying jazz seriously upon hearing Charlie Parker during his military service in Korea in the mid-1940s.

Upon discharge from the Army in 1949, he worked with drummer Johnny Mills, and then in New York played with Tiny Grimes, Cootie Williams, Oscar Pettiford and the Jive Bombers. In 1954, he was playing with Art Blakey.^[3] Redd toured Sweden in 1956 with Ernestine Anderson and Rolf Ericson.

Hamza Namira is an Egyptian singer-songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist.

Is this really the famous Pleaides star cluster? Known for its iconic blue stars, the Pleaides is shown here in infrared light where the surrounding dust outshines the stars. Here three infrared colors have been mapped into visual colors (R=24, G=12, B=4.6 microns). The base images were taken by NASA’s orbiting Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft. Cataloged as M45 and nicknamed the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades star cluster is by chance situated in a passing dust cloud. The light and winds from the massive Pleiades stars preferentially repels smaller dust particles, causing the dust to become stratified into filaments, as seen. The featured image spans about 20 light years at the distance of the Pleiades, which lies about 450 light years distant toward the constellation of the Bull (Taurus).

Leland Bruce Sklar (born May 28, 1947) is an American musician. A prominent electric bass guitarist, Sklar has contributed to over 2,000 albums as a session musician. He has collaborated with a number of well-known performers and recorded soundtracks to films and television shows.

Sklar studied at California State University, Northridge. It was during that time he met James Taylor, who invited him to play bass at some venues. They both thought that the work would be short-term, but soon Taylor’s career took off with his first hit records, and Sklar came into the limelight. He was soon asked to record with others, and his long career began. In the 1970s, Sklar worked so frequently with drummer Russ Kunkel, guitaristDanny Kortchmar, and keyboardist Craig Doerge that they eventually became known as “The Section” and recorded three albums under that name between 1972 and 1977.