mick laBriola

ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile has captured the most detailed image ever taken of the Medusa Nebula (also known Abell 21 and Sharpless 2-274). As the star at the heart of this nebula made its final transition into retirement, it shed its outer layers into space, forming this colourful cloud. The image foreshadows the final fate of the Sun, which will eventually also become an object of this kind.

The Medusa Nebula is a large planetary nebula in the constellation of Gemini on the Canis Minor border. It also known as Abell 21 and Sharpless 2-274. It was originally discovered in 1955 by UCLA astronomer George O. Abell, who classified it as an old planetary nebula. The braided serpentine filaments of glowing gas suggests the serpent hair of Medusa found in ancient Greek mythology.

Until the early 1970s, the Medusa was thought to be a supernova remnant. With the computation of expansion velocities and the thermal character of the radio emission, Soviet astronomers in 1971 concluded that it was most likely a planetary nebula.

As the nebula is so big, its surface brightness is very low, with surface magnitudes of between +15.99 and +25 reported. Because of this most websites recommend at least an 8-inch (200 mm) telescope with an [O III] filter to find this object although probably possible to image with smaller apertures.

Stanley Cowell (born May 5, 1941 Toledo, OH) is an American jazz pianist and co-founder of the Strata-East Records label. He played with Roland Kirk while studying at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and later with Marion Brown, Max Roach, Bobby Hutcherson, Clifford Jordan, Harold Land, Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz. Cowell played with trumpeter Charles Moore and others in the Detroit Artist’s Workshop Jazz Ensemble in 1965-66. During the late 1980s Cowell was part of a regular quartet led by J.J. Johnson. Cowell teaches in the Music Department of the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Blind Willie McTell (born William Samuel McTier; May 5, 1898 – August 19, 1959) was a Piedmont blues and ragtime singer and guitarist. He played with a fluid, syncopated fingerstyle guitar technique, common among many exponents of Piedmont blues. Unlike his contemporaries, he came to use twelve-string guitars exclusively. McTell was also an adept slide guitarist, unusual among ragtime bluesmen. His vocal style, a smooth and often laid-back tenor, differed greatly from many of the harsher voices of Delta bluesmen such as Charley Patton. McTell performed in various musical styles, including blues, ragtime, religious music and hokum.

McTell was born in Thomson, Georgia. He learned to play the guitar in his early teens. He soon became a street performer in several Georgia cities, including Atlanta and Augusta, and first recorded in 1927 for Victor Records. He never produced a major hit record, but he had a prolific recording career with different labels and under different names in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1940, he was recorded by the folklorist John A. Lomax and Ruby Terrill Lomax for the folk song archive of the Library of Congress. He was active in the 1940s and 1950s, playing on the streets of Atlanta, often with his longtime associate Curley Weaver. Twice more he recorded professionally. His last recordings originated during an impromptu session recorded by an Atlanta record store owner in 1956. McTell died three years later, having suffered for years from diabetes and alcoholism. Despite his lack of commercial success, he was one of the few blues musicians of his generation who continued to actively play and record during the 1940s and 1950s. He did not live to see the American folk music revival, in which many other bluesmen were “rediscovered.

‘La noche de los Griots’

Small Axe

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is one of the last entries in Charles Messier’s famous catalog, but definitely not one of the least. About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy. M101 was also one of the original spiral nebulae observed by Lord Rosse’s large 19th century telescope, the Leviathan of Parsontown. M101 shares this modern telescopic field of view with spiky foreground stars within the Milky Way and a companion dwarf galaxy NGC 5474 (lower right). The colors of the Milky Way stars can also be found in the starlight from the large island universe. Its core is dominated by light from cool yellowish stars. Along its grand design spiral arms are the blue colors of hotter, young stars mixed with obscuring dust lanes and pinkish star forming regions. Also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101 lies within the boundaries of the northern constellation Ursa Major, about 23 million light-years away. NGC 5474 has likely been distorted by its past gravitational interactions with the dominant M101.

Dick Dale (born Richard Anthony Mansour on May 4, 1937) is an American surf rock guitarist, known as The King of the Surf Guitar. He pioneered the surf music style, drawing on Middle-Eastern music scales and experimenting with reverberation. He worked closely with Fender to produce custom made amplifiers, including the first-ever 100-watt guitar amplifier.He pushed the limits of electric amplification technology, helping to develop new equipment that was capable of producing distorted, “thick, clearly defined tones” at “previously undreamed-of volumes.” The “breakneck speed of his single-note staccato picking technique” and showmanship with the guitar is considered a precursor to heavy metal music, influencing guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen.

Dale was born Richard Anthony Mansour in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 4, 1937. He is of Lebanese descent from his father and Polish–Belarusiandescent from his mother.His parents farmed in Whitman, Massachusetts. Dale’s family moved to Quincy, Massachusetts, which had a significant Arab immigrant community, when Dale was very young. He learned to play music, starting with piano when he was nine. Dale admired Hank Williams—he wanted to be a cowboy singer—so he bought a plastic ukulele for $6 and taught himself to play by reading an instruction book. The first song he played on the ukulele was “Tennessee Waltz“.

Ronald Levin “Ron” Carter (born May 4, 1937) is an American jazz double bassist. His appearances on 2,221 recording sessions make him the most-recorded jazz bassist in history. Carter is also a cellist who has recorded numerous times on that instrument.

Some of his studio albums as a leader include: Blues Farm (1973); All Blues (1973); Spanish Blue (1974); Anything Goes (1975); Yellow & Green(1976); Pastels (1976); Piccolo (1977); Third Plane (1977); Peg Leg (1978); and A Song for You (1978).

He was a member of the Miles Davis Quintet in the early 1960s, which also included Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and drummer Tony Williams. Carter joined Davis’s group in 1963, appearing on the album Seven Steps to Heaven and the follow-up E.S.P.. Carter also performed on some of Hancock, Williams and Shorter’s recordings during the sixties for Blue Note Records. He was a sideman on many Blue Note recordings of the era, playing with Sam Rivers, Freddie Hubbard, Duke Pearson, Lee Morgan, McCoy Tyner, Andrew Hill, Horace Silver and many others. He was elected to the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame in 2012. In 1993, he won a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Group and another Grammy in 1998 for “an instrumental composition for the film” Round Midnight. In 2010 he was honored with France’s premier cultural award, the medallion and title of Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Carter was born in Ferndale, Michigan. He started to play cello at the age of 10, but when his family moved to Detroit, he ran into difficulties performing on cello due to the racial stereotyping of classical musicians, the vast majority of whom were white at that time. Carter switched to playing double bass. He attended Cass Technical High School in Detroit, and, later, the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he played in its Philharmonic Orchestra. He finished his bachelor’s degree at Eastman in 1959, and in 1961 a master’s degree in double bass performance from the Manhattan School of Music in New York City.

Sonny Payne (May 4, 1926 – January 29, 1979) was an American jazz drummer, best known for his work with Count Basie and Harry James.

Payne’s father was Wild Bill Davis‘s drummer Chris Columbus. After early study with Vic Berton, in 1944 Payne started playing professionally around New York with the Dud and Paul Bascomb band, Hot Lips Page, Earl Bostic (1945–1947), Tiny Grimes (between 1947 and 1950), and Lucille Dixon(1948).

From 1950 to 1953, Payne played with Erskine Hawkins‘ big band, and led his own band for two years, but in late December, 1954, he made his most significant move, joining Basie’s band for more than ten years of constant touring and recording. He was originally asked only to temporarily fill in for Basie’s ailing regular drummer, but Payne’s flashy style was such a hit that he was immediately hired to be Basie’s permanent drummer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcYGz627GFk

World Music on Flamenco Fridays

With Spanish singer Diego El Cigala and Argentinian guitarist Juanjo Dominguez

Five Man Army

NGC 1792 is a barred spiral galaxy, located about 43 million light-years away from Earth in the south-western corner of the small southern constellation of Columba (the Dove), while it is moving away from us at 1211 – 1222 kilometers per second.

Colour composite image of the starburst spiral galaxy NGC 1792 obtained with the FORS1 and FORS2 multi-mode instruments (at VLT MELIPAL and YEPUN, respectively). Its optical appearance of NGC 1792 is quite chaotic, due to the patchy distribution of dust throughout the disc of this galaxy. It is very rich in neutral hydrogen gas – fuel for the formation of new stars – and is indeed rapidly forming such stars. The galaxy is characterized by unusually luminous far-infrared radiation ; this is due to dust heated by young stars. Note the numerous background galaxies in this sky field. North is up and East is to the left.

James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006 Barnwell, SC) was an American singer, songwriter, dancer, musician, record producer and bandleader. A progenitor of funk music and a major figure of 20th century popular music and dance, he is often referred to as the “Godfather of Soul“. In a career that lasted 50 years, he influenced the development of several music genres.

Brown began his career as a gospel singer in Toccoa, Georgia. He joined an R&B vocal group, the Gospel Starlighters (which later evolved into the Flames) founded by Bobby Byrd, in which he was the lead singer. First coming to national public attention in the late 1950s as a member of the singing group The Famous Flames with the hit ballads “Please, Please, Please” and “Try Me“, Brown built a reputation as a tireless live performer with the Famous Flames and his backing band, sometimes known as the James Brown Band or the James Brown Orchestra. His success peaked in the 1960s with the live album Live at the Apollo and hit singles such as “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag“, “I Got You (I Feel Good)” and “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World“. During the late 1960s he moved from a continuum of blues and gospel-based forms and styles to a profoundly “Africanized” approach to music-making that influenced the development of funk music. By the early 1970s, Brown had fully established the funk sound after the formation of the J.B.s with records such as “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” and “The Payback“. He also became noted for songs of social commentary, including the 1968 hit “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud“. Brown continued to perform and record until his death from pneumonia in 2006.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMqM4lZGiK0

John Aaron Lewis (May 3, 1920 – March 29, 2001) was an American jazz pianist, composer and arranger, best known as the founder and musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet.

John Lewis was born in La Grange, Illinois, and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and began learning classical music and piano at the age of seven. His family was musical and had a family band that allowed him to play frequently and he also played in a Boy Scout music group. Even though he learned piano by playing the classics, he was exposed to jazz from an early age because his aunt loved to dance and he would listen to the music she played. He attended the University of New Mexico, where he led a small dance band that he formed and double majored in Anthropology and Music. Eventually, he decided not to pursue Anthropology because he was advised that careers from degrees in Anthropology did not pay well. In 1942, Lewis entered the army and played piano alongside Kenny Clarke, who influenced him to move to New York once their service was over. Lewis moved to New York in 1945 to pursue his musical studies at the Manhattan School of Music and eventually graduated with a master’s degree in music in 1953. Although his move to New York turned his musical attention more towards jazz, he still frequently played and listened to classical works and composers such as Chopin, Bach and Beethoven.

Peter Seeger (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014 Manhattan NY) was an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead Belly‘s “Goodnight, Irene“, which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, Seeger re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, counterculture, and environmental causes.

A prolific songwriter, his best-known songs include “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (with Joe Hickerson), “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)” (with Lee Hays of the Weavers), and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (lyrics adapted from Ecclesiastes), which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are sung throughout the world. “Flowers” was a hit recording for the Kingston Trio (1962); Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962); and Johnny Rivers (1965). “If I Had a Hammer” was a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963) while the Byrds had a number one hit with “Turn! Turn! Turn!” in 1965.

Seeger was one of the folk singers responsible for popularizing the spiritual “We Shall Overcome” (also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists) that became the acknowledged anthem of the Civil Rights Movement, soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. In the PBS American Masters episode “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song“, Seeger stated it was he who changed the lyric from the traditional “We will overcome” to the more singable “We shall overcome”.

Two exceptional musician representing distinct traditions and harps celebrate the magnificent osprey bird on their album titled Soar.Welsh musician Catrin Finch plays the Welsh harp and contributes the Celtic and western classical traditions. Senegalese kora player contributes the musical influences of West Africa and his world music collaborations. The result is a superb set of musical pieces where the two forms of harps engage in a beautiful genre-defying dialog.

Sounds of Thunder

This striking image, taken with the FORS2 instrument on the Very Large Telescope, shows a beautiful yet peculiar pair of galaxies, NGC 4438 and NGC 4435, nicknamed The Eyes. The larger of these, at the top of the picture, NGC 4438, is thought to have once been a spiral galaxy that was strongly deformed by collisions in the relatively recent past. The two galaxies belong to the Virgo Cluster and are about 50 million light-years away.

The Eyes Galaxies (NGC 4435-NGC 4438, also known as Arp 120) are a pair of galaxies about 52 million light-years away in the constellationVirgo. The pair are members of the string of galaxies known as Markarian’s Chain.

NGC 4435 is a barred lenticular galaxy currently interacting with NGC 4438. Studies of the galaxy by the Spitzer Space Telescope revealed a relatively young (190 million years) stellar population within the galaxy’s nucleus, which may have originated through the interaction with NGC 4438 compressing gas and dust in that region, triggering a starburst. It also has a long tidal tail possibly caused by the interaction with the mentioned galaxy; however, other studies suggest that tail is actually a galactic cirrus in the Milky Way totally unrelated to NGC 4435.

NGC 4438 is the most curious interacting galaxy in the Virgo Cluster, due to the uncertainty surrounding the energy mechanism that heats the nuclear source; this energy mechanism may be a starburst region, or a black hole-powered active galactic nucleus (AGN). Both hypotheses are currently under investigation by astronomers.

This galaxy shows a highly distorted disk, including long tidal tails due to the gravitational interactions with other galaxies in the cluster and its companion. The aforementioned features explain why sources differ to classify it as a lenticular or spiral galaxy. NGC 4438 also shows signs of a past, extended, – but modest – starburst, a considerable deficience of neutral hydrogen, as well as a displacement of the components of its interstellar medium – atomic hydrogen, molecular hydrogen, interstellar dust, and hot gas – in the direction of NGC 4435. This observation suggests both a tidal interaction with NGC 4435 and the effects of ram-pressure stripping as NGC 4438 moves at high speed through Virgo’s intracluster medium, increased by the encounter between both galaxies.

The keyboardist Eddie Green established a permanent connection with several aspects of the Philadelphia music scene, including both Philly soul and Philly jazz. Green had come up in the ’50s studying with Richie Powell, brother of famed pianist Bud Powell (no slouch himself). He became a member of a widely admired, cutting-edge jazz fusion outfit and fit comfortably into the sophisticated soul happening between steak and cheese sandwiches at recording studios. Despite his talent and potential, it became something of a cliché that nobody would have heard or seen this shade of Green or anything he was involved in unless they resided in Philadelphia or someplace nearby.

While he played on some R&B sessions in the years prior, Green doesn’t start showing up in jazz discographies until the late ’60s. At that point, he’s in hot and heavy company including the fine guitarist Pat Martino, with whom Green kept up a regular collaboration, as well as alto saxophone master Sonny Criss. The ensemble Catalyst became an important part of Green‘s résumé, an intense grouping that also included saxophonist and bandleader Odean Pope. The group made a series of albums on the Muse label in the first half of the ’70s that wisely blended avant-garde, hard bop, Philly soul and even touches of classical. There was a buzz about this band with hipsters, and the group’s reputation has only been strengthened by historic appraisal. Nonetheless nobody involved with the group gained much in terms of immediate fame and fortune. Green also performed and recorded much less diverse music with the Three Degrees. His activities in Philadelphia included teaching music. Green put out an album under his own name, This One’s for You after about a half a century in the music business.

Richard Arnold “Groove” Holmes real name: Richard Arnold Jackson (May 2, 1931 in Camden, New Jersey – June 29, 1991 in St. Louis, Missouri) was an American jazz organist who performed in the hard bop and soul jazz genre. He is best known for his 1965 recording of “Misty“, and is considered a precursor of acid jazz.

Holmes’ first album, on Pacific Jazz with guest Ben Webster, was recorded in March 1961.

He recorded many albums for Pacific Jazz, Prestige Records, Groove Merchant and Muse Records, many of which featured Houston Person.

Holmes died after a long struggle with prostate cancer, having performed his last concerts in a wheelchair. One of his last gigs was at the 1991 Chicago Blues Festival with his longtime friend, singer Jimmy Witherspoon. A year after his death, the Beastie Boys honoured Holmes by adding an organ-based instrumental track, “Groove Holmes”, to their album Check Your Head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ihr49x0FIj4