mick laBriola

NGC 660 is classified as a “polar ring galaxy“, meaning that it has a belt of gas and stars around its centre that it ripped from a near neighbour during a clash about one billion years ago. The first polar ring galaxy was observed in 1978 and only around a dozen more have been discovered since then, making them something of a cosmic rarity.

Unfortunately, NGC 660’s polar ring cannot be seen in this image, but has plenty of other features that make it of interest to astronomers – its central bulge is strangely off-kilter and, perhaps more intriguingly, it is thought to harbour exceptionally large amounts of dark matter. In addition, in late 2012 astronomers observed a massive outburst emanating from NGC 660 that was around ten times as bright as a supernova explosion. This burst was thought to be caused by a massive jet shooting out of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy.

Peter Beets (born 12 June 1971) is a Dutch jazz pianist. He has shared the stage with musicians including Chick Corea, Wynton Marsalis, Dee Dee Bridgewater, George Coleman, Johnny Griffin, Chris Potter, Kurt Rosenwinkel and John Clayton. Beets recorded with Jeff Hamilton and Curtis Fullerand in 2001 he released his New York Trio, which was the start of his international career.

Beets was born in The Hague on 12 June 1971. His mother is a music teacher and his father a jazz-playing gynaecologist with a love of Oscar Peterson and Art Blakey. This musical family, which includes two elder brothers, Marius and Alexander, moved in 1972 to Groenlo.

Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea (born June 12, 1941) is an American jazz pianist/electric keyboardist and composer. His compositions “Spain“, “500 Miles High“, “La Fiesta” and “Windows“, are considered jazz standards. As a member of Miles Davis‘s band in the late 1960s, he participated in the birth of jazz fusion. In the 1970s he formed the fusion band Return to Forever. With Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, and Keith Jarrett, he has been described as one of the major jazz piano voices to emerge in the post-John Coltrane era.

Corea continued to pursue other collaborations and to explore musical styles throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He is also known for promoting and fundraising for a number of social issues.

Armando Corea was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He is of southern Italian and Spanish descent. His father, a jazz trumpeter who led a Dixieland band in Boston in the 1930s and 1940s, introduced him to the piano at the age of four. Surrounded by jazz, he was influenced at an early age by bebop and Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Horace Silver, and Lester Young. At eight he took up drums, which would influence his use of the piano as a percussion instrument.

Jacky Molard is one of the key musicians in the rebirth of Breton music. He plays various instruments, including fiddle, guitar and bass. He is also a reputable composer and producer.

Jacky Molard was behind some of the most groups in recent Breton history, such as Den, Archetype, Triptique, Bal Tribal. He was also a member of now legendary bands: Gwerz and Pennou Skoulm, as well as Procession Celtique, the Alain Genty Band and Erik Marchand’s band. From France.

In the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius, some 5,500 light-years away in the southern Milky Way, is a chaotic caldron of stellar birth known as GGD 27. While such stellar nurseries are sprinkled liberally throughout our Milky Way Galaxy, GGD 27 presents an especially compelling snapshot of stellar birth.

At first glance it looks like chaos. However, this seemingly random cloud of gas and dust is home to several nascent stars interacting in complex, but predictable ways. Millions of years from now the prenatal cloud of gas and dust will disperse and a cluster of stars will emerge much like a butterfly from its chrysalis. Until then this beautiful cloud will slowly (by human standards) evolve and allow astronomers to explore the complex process of star birth.

The new infrared Gemini image peers deep into GGD 27 where a massive developing star (called a protostar) dominates the central region of the nebula. Identified as GGD 27-ILL this future star already glows several thousand times brighter than our Sun and powers a bipolar outflow where gas streams away at supersonic speeds propelled by intense magnetic fields. Other forming stars in the area complicate the scene while adding to its beauty.

Hazel Dorothy Scott (June 11, 1920 – October 2, 1981) was a Trinidadian-born jazz and classical pianist and singer; she also performed as herself in several films.

Born in Port of Spain, Hazel was taken at the age of four by her mother to New York City. Recognized early as a musical prodigy, Scott was given scholarships from the age of eight to study at the Juilliard School. She began performing in a jazz band in her teens and was performing on radio at age 16.

She was prominent as a jazz singer throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In 1950, she became the first black person to have a TV show, The Hazel Scott Show,^[1] featuring a variety of entertainment. Her career in America faltered after she testified before the House Un-American Activities Committeeduring the McCarthy era. Scott subsequently moved to Paris in the late 1950s and performed in France, not returning to the United States until 1967.

Bernard Lee “Pretty” Purdie (born June 11, 1939) is an American drummer, considered an influential and innovative funk musician. He is known for his precise musical time keeping and his signature use of triplets against a half-time backbeat: the “Purdie Shuffle.” He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2013.

Purdie recorded Soul Drums (1968) as a band leader and although he went on to record Alexander’s Ragtime Band, the album remained unreleased until Soul Drums was reissued on CD in 2009 with the Alexander’s Ragtime Band sessions. Other solo albums include Purdie Good (1971), Soul Is … Pretty Purdie (1972) and the soundtrack for the blaxploitation film Lialeh (1973).

In the mid-1990s he was a member of The 3B’s, with Bross Townsend and Bob Cunningham.

Purdie was born on June 11, 1939 in Elkton, Maryland, US, the eleventh of fifteen children. At an early age he began hitting cans with sticks and learned the elements of drumming techniques from overhearing lessons being given by Leonard Heywood. He later took lessons from Heywood and played in Heywood’s big band. Purdie’s other influences at that time were Papa Jo Jones, Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, Joe Marshall, Art Blakey, as well as Cozy Cole, Sticks Evans, Panama Francis, Louis Bellson, and Herbie Lovelle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESpGlYrVlb4

Sheldon “Shelly” Manne (June 11, 1920 – September 26, 1984), was an American jazz drummer. Most frequently associated with West Coast jazz, he was known for his versatility and also played in a number of other styles, including Dixieland, swing, bebop, avant-garde jazz and fusion, as well as contributing to the musical background of hundreds of Hollywood films and television programs.

Manne’s father and uncles were drummers. In his youth he admired many of the leading swing drummers of the day, especially Jo Jones and Dave Tough. Billy Gladstone, a colleague of Manne’s father and the most admired percussionist on the New York theatrical scene, offered the teenage Shelly tips and encouragement. From that time, Manne rapidly developed his style in the clubs of 52nd Street in New York in the late 1930s and 1940s. His first professional job with a known big band was with the Bobby Byrne Orchestra in 1940.In those years, as he became known, he recorded with jazz stars like Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Shavers, and Don Byas. He also worked with a number of musicians mainly associated with Duke Ellington, like Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Lawrence Brown, and Rex Stewart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYi9P5H8nzg

Orchestre National de Barbés is a piece of North Africa stranded in the heart of Paris. In English, the name means The National Barbés Orchestra, implying that Barbés is a nation unto itself. It is a sentiment that few who visit the neighborhood would dispute.

The band’s story started in Belcourt, a working class section of Algiers, Algeria at the peak of the 1980 baby boom. Youcef Boukella’s older brothers listened to rock and bossa nova, people watched Cairo film classics on TV and tuned to Kabyl folk music on the radio. Outside the Belcourt alleyways, there were street peddlers, muezzins, Gnawa street performers, shaabi concerts, and ghetto blasters playing reggae, funk and raï.

The alluring Cat’s Eye nebula, however, lies three thousand light-years from Earth across interstellar space. A classic planetary nebula, the Cat’s Eye (NGC 6543) represents a final, brief yet glorious phase in the life of a sun-like star. This nebula‘s dying central star may have produced the simple, outer pattern of dusty concentric shells by shrugging off outer layers in a series of regular convulsions. But the formation of the beautiful, more complex inner structures is not well understood. Seen so clearly in this digitally sharpened Hubble Space Telescope image, the truly cosmic eye is over half a light-year across. Of course, gazing into this Cat’s Eye, astronomers may well be seeing the fate of our sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of evolution … in about 5 billion years.

The full beauty of the Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is revealed in this new, detailed view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The image from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) shows a bull’s eye pattern of eleven or even more concentric rings, or shells, around the Cat’s Eye. Each ‘ring’ is actually the edge of a spherical bubble seen projected onto the sky – that’s why it appears bright along its outer edge.

Observations suggest the star ejected its mass in a series of pulses at 1,500-year intervals. These convulsions created dust shells, each of which contain as much mass as all of the planets in our solar system combined (still only one percent of the Sun’s mass). These concentric shells make a layered, onion-skin structure around the dying star. The view from Hubble is like seeing an onion cut in half, where each skin layer is discernible.

The bull’s-eye patterns seen around planetary nebulae come as a surprise to astronomers because they had no expectation that episodes of mass loss at the end of stellar lives would repeat every 1,500 years. Several explanations have been proposed, including cycles of magnetic activity somewhat similar to our own Sun’s sunspot cycle, the action of companion stars orbiting around the dying star, and stellar pulsations. Another school of thought is that the material is ejected smoothly from the star, and the rings are created later on due to formation of waves in the outflowing material.

Gary Thomas (born June 10, 1961, Baltimore, Maryland) is an American jazz saxophonist and flautist from Baltimore, Maryland. He was a member of Jack DeJohnette‘s Special Edition band and has worked with John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, John Scofield, Jim Hall, Dave Holland, Greg Osby, Wayne Shorter, Ravi Coltrane, Cassandra Wilson, Wallace Roney, Steve Coleman, and Miles Davis.

Thomas was the Director and Chair of Jazz Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

João Gilberto Prado Pereira de Oliveira, known as João Gilberto (Portuguese: [ˈʒoɐ̃w ʒiwˈbɛʁtu]; June 10, 1931), is a Brazilian singer, songwriter, and guitarist. João created the musical genre of bossa nova in the late 1950s.

João Gilberto was born in Juazeiro, Bahia, Brazil. From an early age, music was a part of Gilberto’s life. His grandfather bought him his first guitar at the age of 14. During high school, Gilberto teamed up with some of his classmates to form a small band. Gilberto, who led the band, was influenced by Brazilian popular songs, American jazz, and even some opera, among other genres. After trying his luck as a radio singer in Salvador, the young Gilberto was recruited in 1950 as lead singer of the vocal quintet Garotos da Lua (Moon Boys) and moved to Rio de Janeiro. A year and a half later, he was dismissed from the group for his lack of discipline (he would often show up late to rehearsals or not at all).

João Gilberto’s first recordings were released in Brazil as two-song 78-rpm singles between 1951 and 1959. In the 1960s, Brazilian singles evolved to the “double compact” format, and João would release some EPs in this new format, which carried 4 songs on a 45-rpm record.

Chester Arthur Burnett (June 10, 1910 – January 10, 1976), known as Howlin’ Wolf, was a Chicago blues singer, guitarist, and harmonica player, originally from Mississippi. With a booming voice and imposing physical presence, he is one of the best-known Chicago blues artists. The musician and critic Cub Koda noted, “no one could match Howlin’ Wolf for the singular ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits.” Producer Sam Phillips recalled, “When I heard Howlin’ Wolf, I said, ‘This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.'” Several of his songs, including “Smokestack Lightnin’“, “Killing Floor” and “Spoonful“, have become blues and blues rock standards. In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 54 on its list of the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time“.

Burnett was born on June 10, 1910, in White Station, Mississippi, near West Point. He was given the name Chester Arthur, after Chester A. Arthur, the 21st President of the United States. His physique garnered him the nicknames “Big Foot Chester” and “Bull Cow” as a young man: he was 6 feet 3 inches (191 cm) tall and often weighed close to 300 pounds (136 kg). He explained the origin of the name Howlin’ Wolf: “I got that from my grandfather”, who would tell him stories about wolves in that part of the country and warn him that if he misbehaved the “howling wolves” would get him. The blues historian Paul Oliver wrote that Burnett once claimed to have been given his nickname by his idol Jimmie Rodgers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hwMb6JTvBE

Martin Abraham, better known as Chink Martin (June 10, 1886, New Orleans – January 7, 1981, New Orleans) was an American jazz tubist.

Martin (second from right) on bass horn with Jack Laine’s band in 1910

Martin played guitar in his youth before settling on tuba as his main instrument. He played with Papa Jack Laine‘s Reliance Brass Band around 1910, and worked in various other brass bands in the city in the 1910s. In 1923, he traveled to Chicago and played with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings with whom he made his first records. He also recorded guitar duets with Leon Roppolo, but these unfortunately were never issued. He returned to New Orleans with the Rhythm Kings in 1925, and made further recordings with them. He also played with the Halfway House Orchestra (with which he recorded on both tuba and string bass), the New Orleans Harmony Kings, and the New Orleans Swing Kings. In the 1930s, Martin worked as a staff musician at WSMB radio. He continued to play tuba for his entire career, though he also played and recorded on the double-bass (like many New Orleans tubists) from at least the 1920s onward. He played with dozens of noted New Orleans jazz musicians, appearing on record with Sharkey Bonano, Santo Pecora, Pete Fountain, Al Hirt, and others, and released one album under his own name on Southland Records in 1963.

Malian guitarist and vocalist Samba Touré. It’s a delight for guitar fans and lovers of what has been called desert blues, the music of northern Mali, Niger, Mauritania and the Western Sahara.

What sets Touré’s music a part is his use of traditional instruments such as the tama, the talking drum that plays a leading role throughout the album. Touré dedicated a love song to his wife in the title cut and also celebrates the late Zoumana Tereta, the musician that participated in many of his recordings playing the soku, a Wasulu fiddle. Zouman appears in the form of some samples of his performances.

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the rich galaxy cluster Abell 3827. The strange blue structures surrounding the central galaxies are gravitationally lensed views of a much more distant galaxy behind the cluster. Observations of the central four merging galaxies have provided hints that the dark matter around one of the galaxies is not moving with the galaxy itself, possibly implying dark matter-dark matter interactions of an unknown nature are occuring.

The central supermassive galaxy (ESO 146-IG 005) is clearly visible among its cluster companions as well as the remains of at least four nuclei that are being “digested” by the large galaxy. The central galaxy is thought to be the most massive galaxy in our local universe (out to about 1.5 billion light years).