mick laBriola

Carmen Mercedes McRae (April 8, 1922 – November 10, 1994) was an American jazz singer. She is considered one of the most influential jazz vocalists of the 20th century and is remembered for her behind-the-beat phrasing and ironic interpretation of lyrics. McRae was inspired by Billie Holiday, but she established her own voice. She recorded over sixty albums and performed worldwide.

McRae was born in Harlem. Her father, Osmond, was originally from Costa Rica, and her mother, Evadne McRae, an immigrant from Jamaica. She began studying piano when she was eight, and the music of jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington filled her home. When she was just 17 years old she met singer Billie Holiday. As a teenager McRae came to the attention of Teddy Wilson and his wife, the composer Irene Kitchings Wilson. One of McRae’s early songs, “Dream of Life”, was, through their influence, recorded in 1939 by Wilson’s long-time collaborator Billie Holiday. McRae considered Holiday to be her primary influence. She was a lifelong active Democrat

Matato’a is a Chilean music and dance group from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the Pacific. The name of the group means The Warriors. It performs a combination of rock music with Rapa Nui, Polynesian and Latino styles.

Know the Right

4-8-18

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCne0ScYGLA&list=PLEB3LPVcGcWZ0hsQ5_jgSMhawAnDzy1io&index=16

This composite picture created from images from several space- and ground-based telescopes tells the story of the hunt for an elusive missing object hidden amid a complex tangle of gaseous filaments in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy approximately 200,000 light-years from us outside the Milky Way Galaxy. The reddish background image comes from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and reveals the wisps of gas forming the supernova remnant 1E 0102.2-7219 in green. The red ring with a dark center is from the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the blue and purple images are from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The blue spot at the center of the red ring is an isolated neutron star with a weak magnetic field, the first identified outside the Milky Way.

Frederick Dewayne Hubbard (April 7, 1938 – December 29, 2008) was an American jazz trumpeter. He was known primarily for playing in the bebop, hard bop, and post-bop styles from the early 1960s onwards. His unmistakable and influential tone contributed to new perspectives for modern jazz and bebop.

Ramón “Mongo” Santamaría Rodríguez (April 7, 1917 – February 1, 2003) was a rumba quinto master and an Afro-Cuban Latin jazz percussionist. He is most famous for being the composer of the jazz standard “Afro Blue“, recorded by John Coltrane among others. In 1950 he moved to New York City where he played with Perez Prado, Tito Puente, Cal Tjader, Fania All Stars, etc. He was an integral figure in the fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms with R&B and soul, paving the way for the boogaloo era of the late 1960s. His 1963 hit rendition of Herbie Hancock‘s “Watermelon Man” (recorded on December 17, 1962) was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998.

Mongo Santamaría was one of a handful of Cuban congueros (“conga players”) who came to the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Other notable congueros who came to the U.S. during that time include Armando Peraza, Chano Pozo, Francisco Aguabella, Julito Collazo, Carlos Vidal Bolado and Modesto Durán. Many^[who?] consider Santamaría to have been the greatest conga drummer of the twentieth century.

Santamaría learned rumba as a kid in the streets of Havana’s Jesús María barrio. He reminisced: “In the neighborhood where I came from we had all kinds of music, mostly from Africa. We did not leave it alone; we changed it our way. The music we made dealt with religion and conversation. The drum was our tool and we used it for everything”. Gerard points out: “Santamaría, like other drummers of his generation, learned music in the streets by observing different drummers. When he started playing professionally, he learned on the job. His approach was utilitarian, not theoretical”.Santamaría was mentored on bongos and rumba quinto by Clemente “Chicho” Piquero, who played in Beny Moré’s band. He recalled: “I would go with Chicho and play the tumbadora and also the [quinto]. I would play everything because I learned a lot from Chicho—because he could play everything”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egDLqG6dtMQ&list=PLamqGIGc1bfLZFgusjTc1JVHWodOxn7Qn&index=21

Eleanora Fagan (April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959), better known as Billie Holiday, was an American jazz musician and singer-songwriter with a career spanning nearly thirty years. Nicknamed “Lady Day” by her friend and music partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills, which made up for her limited range and lack of formal music education.

After a turbulent childhood, Holiday began singing in nightclubs in Harlem, where she was heard by the producer John Hammond, who commended her voice. She signed a recording contract with Brunswick Records in 1935. Collaborations with Teddy Wilson yielded the hit “What a Little Moonlight Can Do“, which became a jazz standard. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Holiday had mainstream success on labels such as Columbia Recordsand Decca Records. By the late 1940s, however, she was beset with legal troubles and drug abuse. After a short prison sentence, she performed at a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall, but her reputation deteriorated because of her drug and alcohol problems.

Though she was a successful concert performer throughout the 1950s with two further sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall, Holiday’s bad health, coupled with a string of abusive relationships and ongoing drug and alcohol abuse, caused her voice to wither. Her final recordings were met with mixed reaction to her damaged voice but were mild commercial successes. Her final album, Lady in Satin, was released in 1958. Holiday died of cirrhosis on July 17, 1959. A posthumous album, Last Recording, was released following her death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7VNrRS3Sv0

The Song of the Butterfly

Channel One Studio

4-7-18

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLkZgugz5is&list=PLEB3LPVcGcWZ0hsQ5_jgSMhawAnDzy1io&index=20″ /]

This bright cosmic cloud was sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from the hot young stars of open cluster NGC 3324. With dust clouds in silhouette against its glowing atomic gas, the pocket-shaped star-forming region actually spans about 35 light-years. It lies some 7,500 light-years away toward the nebula rich southern constellation Carina. A composite of narrowband image data, the telescopic view captures the characteristic emission from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms mapped to red, green, and blue hues in the popular Hubble Palette. For some, the celestial landscape of bright ridges of emission bordered by cool, obscuring dust along the right side create a recognizable face in profile. The region’s popular name is the Gabriela Mistral Nebula for the Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet.

John Paul Pizzarelli Jr. (born April 6, 1960) is an American jazz guitarist and vocalist. He has recorded over twenty solo albums and has appeared on more than forty albums by other recording artists, including Paul McCartney, James Taylor, Rosemary Clooney; his father, jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli; and his wife, singer Jessica Molaskey.

The son of swing guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, John Pizzarelli was born in Paterson, New Jersey. He started on guitar when he was six and played trumpet through his college years. He attended Don Bosco Preparatory High School, an all-boys Catholic school. In his teens, he performed with Benny Goodman, Les Paul, Zoot Sims, Slam Stewart, and Clark Terry.

He attended the University of Tampa and William Patterson College, though he has said that his most important teacher was his father from 1980–1990. During the 1980s, he established himself as a jazz guitarist and a vocalist. He released his debut solo album, I’m Hip (Please Don’t Tell My Father), in 1983.

Charlie Rouse (April 6, 1924 – November 30, 1988) was an American hard bop tenor saxophonist and flautist. His career is marked by his collaboration with Thelonious Monk, which lasted for more than ten years.

Rouse was born in Washington, DC in 1924. At first he worked with the clarinet, before turning to the saxophone.

Rouse began his career with the Billy Eckstine Orchestra in 1944, followed by the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band in 1945, the Duke Ellington Orchestra from 1949 to 1950, the Count Basie Octet in 1950, Bull Moose Jackson And His Buffalo Bearcats in 1953, and the Oscar Pettiford Sextet in 1955. He made his recording debut with Tadd Dameron in 1947, and in 1957 made a notable album with Paul Quinichette.

He was a member of Thelonious Monk‘s quartet from 1959 to 1970. In the 1980s he was a founding member of the group Sphere, which began as a tribute to Monk.

Arthur S. Taylor, Jr. (April 6, 1929 – February 6, 1995) was an American jazz drummer who “helped define the sound of modern jazz drumming”.

As a teenager, Taylor joined a local Harlem band that featured Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean and Kenny Drew. After playing in the bands of Howard McGhee (1948), Coleman Hawkins (1950–51), Buddy DeFranco (1952), Bud Powell (1953), George Wallington and Art Farmer (1954), Powell and Wallington again (1954–55), Gigi Gryce and Donald Byrd (1956), he formed his own group, Taylor’s Wailers. Between 1957 and 1963 he toured with Donald Byrd, recorded with Miles Davis, Gene Ammons and John Coltrane, and performed with Thelonious Monk; he also was a member of the original Kenny Dorham Quartet of 1957.

In 1963 he moved to Europe, where he lived mainly in France and Belgium for 20 years, playing with local groups and jazz musicians such as Johnny Griffin, John Bodwin and with travelling American musicians such as Woody Shaw during the latter’s tenure in Paris.

Randy Weston (born April 6, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American jazz pianist and composer of Jamaican parentage.He was described by Marian McPartland as “one of the world’s great visionary pianists and composers”.

Weston’s piano style owes much to Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk (he has paid direct tribute to both on his “Portraits” albums), but it is highly distinctive in its qualities: percussive, highly rhythmic, capable of producing a wide variety of moods.

Also been characterized as a “griot of jazz and its African roots”, Weston has said: “It’s so important to teach the history of our music and the origins of our music, which comes directly from the African continent…. Musicians have to be historians, too.” Described as “America’s African Musical Ambassador”, he has said: “What I do I do because it’s about teaching and informing everyone about our most natural cultural phenomenon. It’s really about Africa and her music.”

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

Walter Horton, better known as Big Walter (Horton) or Walter “Shakey” Horton (April 6, 1921 – December 8, 1981) was an American bluesharmonica player. A quiet, unassuming, shy man, he is remembered as one of the premier harmonica players in the history of blues. Willie Dixononce called Horton “the best harmonica player I ever heard.”

Horton was born in Horn Lake, Mississippi. He was playing the harmonica by the time he was five years old. In his early teens, he lived in Memphis, Tennessee. He claimed that his earliest recordings were done there in the late 1920s with the Memphis Jug Band,^[3] but there is no documentation of them, and some blues researchers have stated that this story was likely to have been fabricated by Horton. (He also claimed to have taught some harmonica techniques to Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson I, but these claims are unsubstantiated and, in the case of Williamson, who was older than Horton, dubious.)^{[citation needed]}

Like many of his peers, he lived on a meager income during much of his career and endured racial discrimination in the racially segregated United States. In the 1930s he played with numerous blues performers in the Mississippi Delta region. It is generally accepted that he was first recorded in Memphis, backing the guitarist Little Buddy Doyle on Doyle’s recordings for Okeh Records and Vocalion Records in 1939. These recordings were acoustic duets, in a style popularized by Sleepy John Estes and his harmonicist Hammie Nixon, among others.

World Music on Flamenco Fridays with Diego El Cigala featuring the Rondeña.

A Rondeña is a palo or musical form of flamenco originating in the town of Ronda in the province of Málaga in Spain.

In common with other palos originating in Málaga, the rondeña antedated flamenco proper and became incorporated into it during the 19th century.

According to the experts, the name does not derive from “nocturnal rounds”, as some have suggested, but is based solely on the name of the town Ronda.

The rondeña spread enormously throughout Andalusia in the 19th century, to such an extent that numerous foreign observers, touring the region at the time, referred to it later in their writings.

The rondeña has evolved in recent times, with a decrease in melismatic ornamentation, and generally the tempo is somewhat slower than was previously the case. It is a composition with an ad libtime signature
( compás ), and the lyrics are frequently about rustic life. A verse consists of four octosyllabic lines which sometimes become five through repetition of the second line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud10s_BmNHk

Guidance

4-6-18

About 70 million light-years distant, gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 289 is larger than our own Milky Way. Seen nearly face-on, its bright core and colorful central disk give way to remarkably faint, bluish spiral arms. The extensive arms sweep well over 100 thousand light-years from the galaxy’s center. At the lower right in this sharp, telescopic galaxy portrait the main spiral arm seems to encounter a small, fuzzy elliptical companion galaxy interacting with enormous NGC 289. Of course the spiky stars are in the foreground of the scene. They lie within the Milky Way toward the southern constellation Sculptor.

Stanley William Turrentine (April 5, 1934 – September 12, 2000) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. He began his career playing soul jazz for Blue Note Records, touched on jazz fusion during a stint on CTI Records in the 1970s, and was described by critic Steve Huey as “renowned for his distinctively thick, rippling tone [and] earthy grounding in the blues.” Turrentine was married to organist Shirley Scott in the 1960s, with whom he frequently recorded, and was the younger brother of trumpeter Tommy Turrentine.

Turrentine was born in Pittsburgh‘s Hill District into a musical family. His father, Thomas Turrentine, Sr., was a saxophonist with Al Cooper’s Savoy Sultans, his mother played stride piano, and his older brother Tommy Turrentine became a professional trumpet player.

He began his prolific career with blues and rhythm and blues bands, and was at first greatly influenced by Illinois Jacquet. In the 1950s, he went on to play with the groups of Lowell Fulson and Earl Bostic.

Turrentine received his only formal musical training during his military stint in the mid-’50s. In 1959, he left the military and went straight into the band of the drummer Max Roach.

Billy Bland (born 5 April 1932, Wilmington, North Carolina, died 22 March 2017, New York City^{[citation needed]}) was an American R&B singer and songwriter.

Bland, the youngest of 19 children, first sang professionally in 1947 in New York, and sang with a group called The Bees in the 1950s on New Orleans‘s Imperial Records. In 1954, “Toy Bell” by the group caused some unrest by veering into the dirty blues genre. Dave Bartholomew brought them to New Orleans, where they recorded a song he had written and recorded twice before: firstly in 1952 for King Records as “My Ding-a-Ling,” and later that year for Imperial as “Little Girl Sing Ting-A-Ling.” Bland later pursued a solo career.

In 1960, Bland heard Titus Turner recording the song “Let the Little Girl Dance” in the studio, and demonstrated for Turner how to sing it (along with guitarist Mickey Baker and other session musicians).