mick laBriola

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974 Washington DC) was an American composer, pianist, and bandleader of a jazz orchestra, which he led from 1923 until his death in a career spanning over fifty years.

Born in Washington, D.C., Ellington was based in New York City from the mid-1920s onward, and gained a national profile through his orchestra’s appearances at the Cotton Club in Harlem. In the 1930s, his orchestra toured in Europe. Though widely considered to have been a pivotal figure in the history of jazz, Ellington embraced the phrase “beyond category” as a liberating principle, and referred to his music as part of the more general category of American Music, rather than to a musical genre such as jazz.

Some of the musicians who were members of Ellington’s orchestra, such as saxophonist Johnny Hodges, are considered to be among the best players in jazz. Ellington melded them into the best-known orchestral unit in the history of jazz. Some members stayed with the orchestra for several decades. A master at writing miniatures for the three-minute 78 rpm recording format, Ellington wrote more than one thousand compositions; his extensive body of work is the largest recorded personal jazz legacy, with many of his works having become standards. Ellington also recorded songs written by his bandsmen, for example Juan Tizol‘s “Caravan“, and “Perdido“, which brought a Spanish tinge to big band jazz. After 1941, Ellington collaborated with composer-arranger-pianist Billy Strayhorn, whom he called his writing and arranging companion.^[3] With Strayhorn, he composed many extended compositions, or suites, as well as additional short pieces. Following an appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, in July 1956, Ellington and his orchestra enjoyed a major career revival and embarked on world tours. Ellington recorded for most American record companies of his era, performed in several films, scoring several, and composed stage musicals.

Persian ney (flute) virtuoso and vocalist Hossein Omoumi

Ras Portraits

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), or Nubecula Minor, is a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way. It is classified as a dwarf irregular galaxy. It has a diameter of about 7,000 light-years, contains several hundred million stars, and has a total mass of approximately 7 billion times the mass of the Sun. The SMC contains a central bar structure and it is speculated that it was once a barred spiral galaxy that was disrupted by the Milky Way to become somewhat irregular. At a distance of about 200,000 light-years, it is one of the Milky Way‘s nearest intergalactic neighbors. It is also one of the most distant objects that can be seen with the naked eye.

The SMC is mostly visible from the Southern Hemisphere though it can be fully glimpsed from near the southern horizon from equatorial latitudes south of about 15° N. It is located across both the constellations of Tucana and part of Hydrus, appearing as a hazy light patch resembling a detached piece of the Milky Way. It covers an average diameter of about 4.2° across (8 times the Moon’s diameter) or 51.7 sq. degrees (about 60 times the apparent area of the Moon.) Since it has a very low surface brightness, the SMC is best seen from a dark site away from city lights. It forms a pair with the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), which lies a further 20° to the east, and like the LMC, is a member of the Local Group and highly probably is a satellite of the Milky Way.

Mickey Tucker (born April 28, 1941, Durham, North Carolina) is an American jazz pianist and organist.

When he was six, he started on piano, eventually playing in church. He performed in the 1960s with Little Anthony and the Imperials and Damita Jo, and also accompanied comedian Timmy Rogers. He entered the jazz world in 1969, working for the next several years with Eric Kloss, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, James Moody, the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, Eddie Jefferson, and George Benson. He was music director for Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. During the 1980s, he appeared on albums by Phil Woods, Art Farmer, Richie Cole, and Benny Golson.

John Martin Tchicai (April 28, 1936 – October 8, 2012) was a Danish free jazz saxophonist and composer.

After moving to New York City in 1963, Tchicai joined Archie Shepp‘s New York Contemporary Five and the New York Art Quartet. He played on John Coltrane‘s Ascension, and Albert Ayler’s New York Eye and Ear Control, both influential free jazz recordings.

Tchicai was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, to a Danish mother and a Congolese father. The family moved to Aarhus, where he studied violin in his youth, and in his mid-teens began playing clarinet and alto saxophone, focusing on the latter. By the late 1950s he was travelling around northern Europe, playing with many musicians.

Mario Bauzá (April 28, 1911 – July 11, 1993) was an Afro-Cuban jazz musician. He was one of the first to introduce Cuban music to the United States by bringing Cuban musical styles to the New York City jazz scene. While Cuban bands had popular jazz tunes in their repertoire for years, Bauzá’s composition “Tangá” was the first piece to blend jazz with clave, and is considered the first true Afro-Cuban jazz or Latin jazz tune.

Trained as a classical musician, he was a clarinetist in the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra by the age of nine, where he would stay for three years. Bauzá traveled to New York in 1925 to record with Maestro Antonio María Romeu‘s band, a charanga, shortly after his fourteenth birthday.

Bauzá had been hired as lead trumpeter and musical director for Chick Webb‘s Orchestra by 1933, and it was during his time with Webb that Bauzá both met fellow trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and discovered and brought into the band singer Ella Fitzgerald. Importantly, Bauzá introduced the young Havana virtuoso Chano Pozo to Dizzy, when the latter wanted to add a Cuban percussionist to his band; though Pozo was killed in a Harlem bar fight just a year later, he left an indelible and long-lasting mark on Dizzy’s playing and compositions, co-writing several legendary compositions such as “Manteca” and “Tin Tin Deo”.

Ethiopian Music by Mahmoud Ahmed – Yager Betua Aynama

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQzJe6dAf5Q

Jezebel

Performing at MLK park in Minneapolis for Arbor Day 2018

with Steve Sandberg, Jim McCreary, Hilary Johnson, Tom Wells, Ralph Campbell, mick laBriola and many more.

https://www.minneapolisparks.org/activities__events/events/arbor_day/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-7W4-DLFEA

NGC 6946 is a face-on intermediate spiral galaxy with a small bright nucleus, whose location in the sky straddles the boundary between the northern constellations of Cepheus and Cygnus. Its distance from Earth is about 22.5 million light-years or 6.8 megaparsecs, similar to the distance of M101 (NGC 5457) in the constellation Ursa Major. Both were once considered to be part of the Local Group. but are now known to be among the dozen bright spiral galaxies near the Milky Way but beyond the confines of the Local Group.

Discovered by William Herschel on 9 September 1798, this well-studied galaxy has a diameter of approximately 40,000 light-years, about one-third of the Milky Way’s size, and it contains roughly half the number of stars as the Milky Way. The galaxy is heavily obscured by interstellar matter as it lies quite close to the galactic plane of the Milky Way. Due to its prodigious star formation it has been classified as an active starburst galaxy.

Frederick “Freddie” Douglas Waits (April 27, 1943 – November 18, 1989) was a hard bop and post-bop drummer.

Waits never officially recorded as leader, however he was a prominent member and composer in Max Roach‘s M’Boom percussion ensemble.

He worked as sideman with a number of influential pianists, including McCoy Tyner, Kenny Barron, Andrew Hill, Gene Harris, Billy Taylor and Joe Zawinul.

In the late 1970s, Waits formed Colloquium III with fellow drummers Horace Arnold and Billy Hart. In the 1980s he became a music faculty member of Rutgers University. He died of pneumonia and kidney failure in New York in 1989.

His son is the drummer Nasheet Waits.

Conrad Henry Kirnon (April 27, 1927 – November 30, 1994) known professionally as Connie Kay, was an American jazz and R&B drummer who was a member of the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Self-taught on drums, he began performing in Los Angeles in the mid-1940s. His drumming is recorded in The Hunt, the recording of a famous Los Angeles jam session featuring the dueling tenors of Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray on July 6, 1947. He recorded with Lester Young‘s quintet from 1949 to 1955 and with Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis.

Kay did R&B sessions for Atlantic Records in the early to mid-1950s, and he was featured on hit records such as Shake, Rattle and Roll by Big Joe Turner.

Kay joined the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1955, replacing original drummer Kenny Clarke. He remained through the group’s dissolution in 1974 and occasional reunions into the 1990s. In addition to his MJQ compatriots, he had an enduring partnership with cool jazz altoist Paul Desmond through the first half of the 1960s. He played drums on several of Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison‘s albums: Astral Weeks, one song on Saint Dominic’s Preview, and four songs on Tupelo Honey.^[2]

Kay was known for incorporating percussion instruments alongside his drum kit, such as timpani, small cymbals, triangle, bell tree, and darbukas, the latter referred to as “exotic-looking” drums in a 2006 article.^[3][4]

Kay died of cardiac arrest in Manhattan in 1994 at the age of 67.

Let Us All

The Lagoon Nebula (catalogued as Messier 8 or M8, NGC 6523, Sharpless 25, RCW 146, and Gum 72) is a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius. It is classified as an emission nebula and as an H II region.

The Lagoon Nebula was discovered by Giovanni Hodierna before 1654 and is one of only two star-forming nebulae faintly visible to the eye from mid-northern latitudes. Seen with binoculars, it appears as a distinct oval cloudlike patch with a definite core. In the foreground is the open cluster NGC 6530.

The Lagoon Nebula is estimated to be between 4,000-6,000 light-years from the Earth. In the sky of Earth, it spans 90′ by 40′, which translates to an actual dimension of 110 by 50 light years. Like many nebulas, it appears pink in time-exposure color photos but is gray to the eye peering through binoculars or a telescope, human vision having poor color sensitivity at low light levels. The nebula contains a number of Bok globules(dark, collapsing clouds of protostellar material), the most prominent of which have been catalogued by E. E. Barnard as B88, B89 and B296. It also includes a funnel-like or tornado-like structure caused by a hot O-type star that emanates ultraviolet light, heating and ionizing gases on the surface of the nebula. The Lagoon Nebula also contains at its centre a structure known as the Hourglass Nebula (so named by John Herschel), which should not be confused with the better known Hourglass Nebula in the constellation of Musca. In 2006 the first four Herbig–Haro objects were detected within the Hourglass, also including HH 870. This provides the first direct evidence of active star formation by accretion within it.

To celebrate its 28th anniversary in space the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope took this amazing and colourful image of the Lagoon Nebula. Using its infrared capabilities, the telescope was able to peer through the thick clouds of dust and gas. The most obvious difference between Hubble’s infrared and visible images of this region is the abundance of stars that fill the field of view in the infrared. Most of them are more distant, background stars located behind the nebula. However, some of them are young stars within the Lagoon Nebula itself.

Lakshminarayana Shankar (born 26 April 1950), also known as L. Shankar and Shenkar, is an Indian-born American violinist, singer and composer. He has worked extensively in both traditional music from India, and in jazz, free improvisation and popular music, notably with singer Peter Gabriel in the latter.

Shankar was born in Madras, Tamil Nadu. Growing up in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, where his father V. Lakshminarayana Iyer was a professor at the Jaffna College of Music, Shankar was exposed to Carnatic music and other styles from an early age. His father was a violinist, his mother L. Seethalakshmi played the veena and all his five older siblings were also proficient in music.^{[citation needed]} His brothers include the violinist L. Subramaniam and L. Vaidyanathan, a music composer for Indian films.^[2] Shankar cites his family and Tyāgarāja as early inspirations.

Theodore Marcus Edwards (April 26, 1924 – April 20, 2003) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist on the west coast of the U.S.

Edwards was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He learned to play at a very early age, first on alto saxophone and then clarinet.

His uncle sent for him to come to Detroit to live because he felt opportunities were better. Due to illness in the family, he went back to Jackson and ventured to Alexandria, Louisiana. He was persuaded by Ernie Fields to join his band after going to Tampa, Florida. Teddy had planned to go to New York City, but Ernie Fields convinced him he could get there by way of Washington, DC, if he worked with his band. Teddy ended up at the “Club Alabam” on Central Avenue in Los Angeles, which later became his city of residence.

Teddy Edwards played with many jazz notables, including his personal friend Charlie Parker, Roy Milton, Wynonie Harris, Vince Guaraldi, Joe Castroand Ernie Andrews. A classic 1947 recording with Dexter Gordon, The Duel, helped set him up as a legend, a status he liked to maintain by challenging other worthy sax players to similar duels whenever possible, including a recording with Houston Person. One such “memorable” duel took place in the 1980s at London’s 100 Club with British tenor Dick Morrissey.

John Ned “Johnny” Shines (April 26, 1915 – April 20, 1992) was an American blues singer and guitarist.

Shines was born in the community of Frayser, in Memphis, Tennessee. He was taught to play the guitar by his mother and spent most of his childhood in Memphis, playing slide guitar at an early age in juke joints and on the street. He moved to Hughes, Arkansas, in 1932 and worked on farms for three years, putting aside his music career.A chance meeting with Robert Johnson, his greatest influence, gave him the inspiration to return to music. In 1935, Shines began traveling with Johnson, touring in the United States and Canada. They parted in 1937, one year before Johnson’s death.

Gladys “Bobi” Céspedes was born in Cuba and emigrated to the States in 1959. In 1967 she was initiated as a Yoruba-Lucumi priestess. She now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she maintains a rigorous schedule of concerts, religious rituals, and travels lecturing at the university level.