Tommy Bruce (16 July 1937 – 10 July 2006) was an English rock and roll singer who had most of his success in the early 1960s. His cover version of "Ain't Misbehavin'" was a Top Ten hit in the UK Singles Chart in 1960.

Life and career

He was born Thomas Charles Bruce, in Stepney, London. Both his parents died when he was a child and he grew up in an orphanage, later working as a van driver in Covent Garden Market before undertaking National Service in Belgium.

Returning to London in 1959, and working again as a market porter, he became a friend of his neighbour, songwriter Barry Mason. Mason suggested he record a version of the song "Ain't Misbehavin'", written by Fats Waller, in a style similar to "Chantilly Lace", a recent hit single by the Big Bopper. Produced by Norrie Paramor and released on Columbia Records, Bruce's recording rose to number 3 in the UK Singles Chart in 1960. He had no musical training, and described his own "sandpaper and gravel" singing voice with a strong London accent as "diabolical".

The Mission Snipers are a professional roller hockey team based out of New York who competes in Pro tournaments across North America.

2015: The summer started in Detroit, MI at Torhs Nationals. The Snipers added another Championship to their resume with a win over the Alkali Assault in the Championship. The team went undefeated during the tournament and Shane Fox really showed the roller hockey world why he is one of the top players in the sport. Fox and Sigmund played lights out all tournament and Troy Redmann proved once again to be the best goaltender the US has to offer. The Snipers were also $12,000 richer!

After TORHS was over a lot of the players went over to Finland for the IIHF Inline World Championships in Tampere. PJ Kavaya, Shane Fox, David Makowski, Nathan Sigmund, Greg Thompson, Pat Cannone, and Troy Redmann all represented the United States.

However, the tournament of the year was State Wars 11. State Wars Hockey had the best Pro Division the sport has seen in a long long time. The Pama Pro Invitational was very unique and only allowed teams who were invited to play at the tournament. The Snipers had a tough round robin but squeaked into the playoffs as a 6th seed, taking down every team that go in their way! First the Bauer Bordercats, then the Pama Cyclones. In the finals the Snipers took down Alkali RPD and were awarded $20,000 and the right to call themselves the best team in the US.

Ain't Misbehavin' is a 1929 stride jazz/early swing composition with 32 bars in AABA measure with a slow-to-moderate pace. With lyrics by Andy Razaf and score by Thomas "Fats" Waller and Harry Brooks, the number was created specifically as a theme song for the Razaf/Waller/Brooks off-Broadway musical comedy Connie's Hot Chocolates. In a 1941 interview with Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Fats claimed the song was written while "lodging" in alimony prison, and that is why he was not "misbehaving".

The song was first performed at the premiere of Connie's Hot Chocolates at Connie's Inn in Harlem as an opening number by Margaret Simms and Paul Bass, and repeated later in the musical by Russell Wooding's Hallelujah Singers. Connie's Hot Chocolates transferred to the Hudson Theatre on Broadway in June 1929, where it was renamed to Hot Chocolates and where Louis Armstrong took over as orchestra director. The script also required Armstrong to play Ain't Misbehavin' in a trumpet solo, and although this was initially slated to only be a reprise of the opening song, Armstrong's performance was so well received that the trumpeter was asked to climb out of the orchestra pit and play the piece on stage.

Ain't Misbehavin' is a 1955 musical film released by Universal-International and starring Rory Calhoun, Piper Laurie, Jack Carson and Mamie Van Doren.

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Ain't Misbehavin' is a musical revue with a book by Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby, Jr., and music by various composers and lyricists as arranged and orchestrated by Luther Henderson. It is named after the song by Fats Waller (with Harry Brooks and Andy Razaf), "Ain't Misbehavin'".

The musical is a tribute to the black musicians of the 1920s and '30s who were part of the Harlem Renaissance, an era of growing creativity, cultural awareness, and ethnic pride, and takes its title from the 1929 Waller song "Ain't Misbehavin'". It was a time when Manhattan nightclubs like the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom were the playgrounds of high society and Lenox Avenue dives were filled with piano players banging out the new beat known as swing. Five performers present an evening of rowdy, raunchy, and humorous songs that encapsulate the various moods of the era and reflect Waller's view of life as a journey meant for pleasure and play.

Productions

Ain't Misbehavin' opened in the Manhattan Theatre Club's East 73rd Street cabaret on February 8, 1978. The cast included Irene Cara, Nell Carter, André DeShields, Armelia McQueen, and Ken Page and was staged by Maltby. The New York Times reviewer wrote: "The show moves with the zing and sparkle of a Waller recording-filled with bright melodies and asides." Its reception was such that it was decided to develop it into a full-scale production.

Ayin or Ayn is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʿAyin , Hebrew ʿAyin ע, Aramaic ʿĒ , Syriac ʿĒ ܥ, and Arabic ʿAyn ع (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only). ﻉ comes twenty‐first in the New Persian alphabet and eighteenth in Arabic hijaʾi order.

The ʿayin glyph in these various languages represents, or has represented, a voiced pharyngeal fricative (/ʕ/), or a similarly articulated consonant, which has no equivalent or approximate substitute in the sound‐system of English. There are many possible transliterations.

Origins

The letter name is derived from Proto-Semitic *ʿayn- "eye", and the Phoenician letter had an eye-shape, ultimately derived from the ı͗r hieroglyph

To this day, ʿayin in Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, and Maltese means "eye" and "spring" (ʿayno in Neo-Aramaic).

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Ο, Latin O, and Cyrillic О, all representing vowels.

The sound represented by ayin is common to much of the Afrasiatic language family, such as the Egyptian, Cushitic, and Semitic languages. Some scholars believe that the sound in Proto-Indo-European transcribed h₃ was similar, though this is debatable. (See Laryngeal theory.)

An ain is a spring in North Africa, which reaches the surface as a result of an artesian basin and is of particular importance in arid regions. It can produce a flow of water directly or result in evaporitic saline crusts. Known examples are found in the oases of the Tunisian region of Bled el Djerid and in the entire area around the depressions of Chott el Djerid and Chott el Gharsa. Here, there are water-bearing strata, usually of sand or sandstone, that act as aquifers in their function.