mick laBriola

Noble “Thin Man” Watts (February 17, 1926 – August 24, 2004) was an American blues, jump blues and rhythm and blues saxophonist. He primarily played tenor saxophone. The AllMusicjournalist, Bill Dahl, considered Watts “one of the most incendiary […] fire-breathing tenor sax honkers” of the 1950s.

Born in DeLand, Florida, Watts studied violin and trumpet in his youth, later switching to sax. He gained musical training at Florida A&M, where he played in the school’s marching band with future saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. Hired to play with The Griffin Brothers after college, Watts began his professional career. During the 1950s, he would work with Lionel Hampton, Dinah Washington, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, and others.^[3] He also appeared on American Bandstand with Johnny Mathis in 1957, and performed in the house band at a Harlem club owned by boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.

World Music with Brenda Fassie from South Africa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayd0G5-XVIg

Daily Roots with Rod Taylor

2-17-18

The comet PanSTARRS, also known as the blue comet (C/2016 R2), really is near the lower left edge of this stunning, wide field view recorded on January 13. Spanning nearly 20 degrees on the sky, the cosmic landscape is explored by well-exposed and processed frames from a sensitive digital camera. It consists of colorful clouds and dusty dark nebulae otherwise too faint for your eye to see, though. At top right, theCalifornia Nebula (aka NGC 1499) does have a familiar shape. Its coastline is over 60 light-years long and lies some 1,500 light-years away. The nebula’s pronounced reddish glow is from hydrogen atoms ionized by luminous blue star Xi Persei just below it. Near bottom center, the famous Pleiades star cluster is some 400 light-years distant and around 15 light-years across. Its spectacular blue color is due to the reflection of starlight by interstellar dust. In between are hot stars of the Perseus OB2 association and dusty, dark nebulae along the edge of the nearby, massive Taurus and Perseus molecular clouds. Emission from unusually abundant ionized carbon monoxide (CO+) molecules fluorescing in sunlight is largely responsible for the telltale blue tint of the remarkable comet’s tail. The comet was about 17 light minutes from Earth.

Otis Blackwell (February 16, 1931 – May 6, 2002) was an African-American songwriter, singer, and pianist, whose work significantly influenced rock and roll. His compositions include “Fever“, recorded by Little Willie John; “Great Balls of Fire” and “Breathless“, recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis; “Don’t Be Cruel“, “All Shook Up” and “Return to Sender” (with Winfield Scott), recorded by Elvis Presley; and “Handy Man“, recorded by Jimmy Jones. He is not to be confused with the songwriter and record producer Robert “Bumps” Blackwell.

Blackwell was born in Brooklyn, New York. He learned to play the piano as a child and grew up listening to both R&B and country music.

William Ballard Doggett (February 16, 1916 – November 13, 1996) was an American jazz and rhythm and blues pianist and organist. He is best known for his compositions “Honky Tonk” and “Hippy Dippy”, and variously working with the Ink Spots, Johnny Otis, Wynonie Harris, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Jordan.

Doggett was born in Philadelphia.His mother, a church pianist, introduced him to music when he was nine years old. By the time he was fifteen, he had joined a Philadelphia area combo, playing local theaters and clubs while attending high school.

World Music with Javier Conde on Flamenco Fridays performing Grannies.

Granaína (pronunciación española: [ɡɾanaina]) es un estilo flamenco de canto y guitarra de Granada. Es una variante de los fandangos de Granada. Originalmente era bailable, pero ahora ha perdido su ritmo, es mucho más lento, y normalmente solo se canta o se toca como solo de guitarra, lo que refleja su herencia árabe-morisca con más fuerza que otros fandangos.

El famoso cantante Don Antonio Chacón (1869-1929) se atribuye a liberar la granaína de sus ataduras rítmicas y hacerla popular. Los cantantes usualmente terminan su interpretación de la granaína con una media granaína, una canción similar pero que aumenta a un tono más alto. Manuel Vallejo (1891-1960) fue un famoso exponente de este último cante.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EvcL4hc4Jc

Daily Roots with Big Youth

2-16-18

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHGqPe2QzcQ

RHYTHM ROOTS WORKSHOP

Tuesday February 13th noon-2pm Partnership Resources Inc St Louis Park

Thursday February 15th noon-2pm Partnership Resources Inc Minneapolis

Celebrating Mardi Gras songs and rhythms with the Developmentally Disabled

community putting on the Hey Pocky Way

NGC 521, also occasionally referred to as PGC 5190 or UGC 962, is a spiral galaxy located approximately 224 million light-years from the Solar System in the constellation Cetus. It was discovered on 8 October 1785 by astronomer William Herschel.

Herschel described his discovery as “faint, pretty large, irregular round, brighter middle”. Further observations were made by both his son, John Herschel, who simply noted “big” on his first and “very faint” on his second observation, as well as R. J. Mitchell, who noted “pretty big, spiral galaxy, disc enveloped in faint outlying neby and looks like an unresolved cluster.” NGC 521 was later catalogued by John Louis Emil Dreyer in the New General Catalogue, where the galaxy was described as “faint, pretty large, round, gradually brighter middle”.

A total of three supernovae have been assigned to NGC 521, with SN 1966G being the first to be observed in 1966, followed by SN 1982O in 1982 and the most recent being SN 2006G in 2006.

Melissa Manchester (born February 15, 1951) is an American singer-songwriter and actress. Since the 1970s, her songs have been carried by adult contemporary radio stations. She has also appeared on television, in films, and on stage.

Manchester was born in the Bronx, a borough of New York City, to a musical family. Her father was a bassoonist for the New York Metropolitan Opera. Her mother was one of the first women to design and found her own clothing firm, Ruth Manchester Ltd. Manchester hails from a Jewish background. Manchester started a singing career at an early age. She learned the piano and harpsichord at the Manhattan School of Music, began singing commercial jingles at age 15, and became a staff writer for Chappell Music while attending Manhattan’s High School of Performing Arts. 

Henry Threadgill (born February 15, 1944) is an American composer, saxophonist, and flautist, who came to prominence in the 1970s leading jazz ensembles with unusual instrumentation and often incorporating genres other than jazz. He has performed and recorded with several ensembles: Air, Aggregation Orb, Make a Move, the seven-piece Henry Threadgill Sextett, the twenty-piece Society Situation Dance Band, Very Very Circus, X-75, and Zooid.

He was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his album In for a Penny, In for a Pound,^[2] which premiered at Roulette Intermedium on December 4, 201

Threadgill performed as a percussionist in his high-school marching band before taking up baritone saxophone, alto saxophone, and flute. He studied at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, majoring in piano, flute, and composition. He studied piano with Gail Quillman and composition with Stella Roberts. He was an original member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in his hometown of Chicago and worked under the guidance of Muhal Richard Abrams before leaving to tour with a gospel band.

Harold Arlen (born Hyman Arluck; February 15, 1905 – April 23, 1986) was an American composer of popular music who composed over five-hundred songs, a number of which have become known worldwide. In addition to composing the songs for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz (lyrics by E.Y. Harburg), including the classic “Over the Rainbow“, Arlen is a highly regarded contributor to the Great American Songbook. “Over the Rainbow” was voted the twentieth century’s No. 1 song by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Arlen was born in Buffalo, New York, United States, the child of a cantor. His twin brother died the next day. He learned to play the piano as a youth, and formed a band as a young man. He achieved some local success as a pianist and singer before moving to New York City in his early twenties, where he worked as an accompanist in vaudeville and changed his name to Harold Arlen. Between 1926 and about 1934, Arlen appeared occasionally as a band vocalist on records by The Buffalodians, Red Nichols, Joe Venuti, Leo Reisman, and Eddie Duchin, usually singing his own compositions.

World Music with Chinese Pipa player Wu Man

Daily Roots with the Paragons & Roslyn Sweat

2-15-18

What’s that inside the Heart Nebula? First, the large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart. It’s shape perhaps fitting of the Valentine’s Day, this heart glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element: hydrogen. The red glow and the larger shape are all created by a small group of stars near the nebula’s center. In the heart of the Heart Nebula are young stars from the open star cluster Melotte 15 that are eroding away several picturesque dust pillars with their energetic light and winds. The open cluster of stars contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, many dim stars only a fraction of the mass of our Sun, and an absent microquasar that was expelled millions of years ago. The Heart Nebula is located about 7,500 light years away toward the constellation of the mythological Queen of Aethiopia (Cassiopeia).

Thomas W. “Tommy” Campbell (born February 14, 1957, Norristown, Pennsylvania) is an American jazz drummer.

Campbell’s uncle is Jimmy Smith; Campbell played with him as a teenager and subsequently. He was a student at Berklee College of Music from 1975 to 1979, where he played with Tiger Okoshiand Marlena Shaw, and led a band which included Kevin Eubanks. After graduating he became a member of Dizzy Gillespie‘s big band, where he worked until 1982; he then joined John McLaughlin‘s group until 1984. He recorded with Eubanks throughout the 1980s and played with Sonny Rollins, Tania Maria, Gary Burton, Igor Butman, and Makoto Ozone in the decade. After relocating to New York City in 1988, he worked with his own group alongside Charnett Moffett, Aydin Esen, and Eubanks. He also worked in a trio setting with David Kikoski and Alex Blake. As a sideman, he worked in the 1990s with Stanley Jordan, the Manhattan Transfer, the Great Saxophone Quartet, David Murray, Ray Anderson, and Mingus Big Band. In early 1998 he moved to Japan and has split his time between the two countries since then.

Samuel Gene Maghett (February 14, 1937 – December 1, 1969), known as Magic Sam, was an American Chicago blues musician. He was born in Grenada County, Mississippi, United States, and learned to play the blues from listening to records by Muddy Waters and Little Walter. After moving to Chicago at the age of 19, he was signed by Cobra Records and became well known as a bluesman after the release of his first record, “All Your Love”, in 1957. He was known for his distinctive tremolo guitar playing.

Maghett moved to Chicago in 1956, where his guitar playing earned him bookings at blues clubs on the West Side. He recorded singles for Cobra Records from 1957 to 1959, including “All Your Love” and “Easy Baby”. They did not reach the record charts but had a profound influence, far beyond Chicago’s guitarists and singers. Together with recordings by Otis Rush and Buddy Guy (also Cobra artists), they were a manifesto for a new kind of blues. Around this time Magic Sam worked briefly with Homesick James Williamson.

Merl Saunders (February 14, 1934 – October 24, 2008) was an American multi-genre musician who played piano and keyboards, favoring the Hammond B-3 console organ.

Born in San Mateo, California, Saunders attended Polytechnic High School in San Francisco. In his first band in high school was singer Johnny Mathis. He served in the Air Force from 1953 to 1957. He worked as musical director of the Billy Williams Revue and served in a similar capacity in Oscar Brown Jr.‘s off-Broadway show, Big Time Buck White.

World Music with the Saltwater Band

from Elcho Island off the coast of North East Arnhem Land, Australia.