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Zeki Müren  6 December 1931 – 24 September 1996) was a Turkish singer, composer, songwriter, actor and poet. Known by the nicknames “The Sun of Art” and “Pasha“, he was one of the prominent figures of Turkish classical music. Due to his contributions to the art industry, he was named a “State Artist” in 1991. He was the first singer to receive a gold certification in Turkey and throughout his career recorded and released hundreds of songs on cassettes and phonograph records.

Miroslav Ladislav Vitouš (born 6 December 1947) is a Czech jazz bassist.

Born in Prague, Vitouš began the violin at age six, switching to piano after about three years, and then to bass at age fourteen. As a young man in Europe, Vitouš was a competitive swimmer. One of his early music groups was the Junior Trio with his brother Alan on drums and Jan Hammer on keyboards. He studied music at the Prague Conservatory under František Pošta, and won a music contest in Vienna in 1966 that gave him a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, which he attended one year before going to Chicago to play with a group co-led by the classically inclined trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and flugelhorn pioneer Clark Terry.

Miles Davis saw Vitouš playing in Chicago with Brookmeyer and Terry in 1967 and invited him to join his own group playing at the Village Gate in New York City. It was with Davis that Vitouš first encountered saxophonist Wayne Shorter, keyboardist Herbie Hancock and the Davis-centric scene that was transforming mainstream jazz from late hard bop into what would be known as jazz fusion.

Joseph Francis Lamb (December 6, 1887 – September 3, 1960) was an American composer of ragtime music. Lamb, of Irish descent, was the only non-African American of the “Big Three” composers of classical ragtime, the other two being Scott Joplin and James Scott. The ragtime of Joseph Lamb ranges from standard popular fare to complex and highly engaging. His use of long phrases was influenced by classical works he had learned from his sister and others while growing up, but his sense of structure was potentially derived from his study of Joplin’s piano rags. By the time he added some polish to his later works in the 1950s, Lamb had mastered the classic rag genre in a way that almost no other composer was able to approach at that time, and continued to play it passably as well, as evidenced by at least two separate recordings done in his home, as well as a few recorded interviews.

Lamb was born in Montclair, New Jersey. The youngest of four children, he taught himself to play the piano and admired the early ragtime publications of Scott Joplin. His first known works were “Meet Me at the Chutes,” and “Idle Dreams”, at the age of 13 in 1900, but they are unpublished and assumed lost.

José Monje Cruz (5 December 1950 – 2 July 1992), better known by his stage name Camarón de la Isla(Spanish: Shrimp from the Island), was a Spanish Romani flamenco singer. Considered one of the all-time greatest flamenco singers, he was noted for his collaborations with Paco de Lucía and Tomatito, and the three of them were of major importance to the revival of flamenco in the second half of the 20th century.

He was born in San Fernando, Cádiz, Spain, into a Spanish Romani family, the seventh of eight children. His mother was Juana Cruz Castro, a “Canastera”, literally a basket weaver, and meaning from a wandering Roma family, and whose gift of singing was a strong early influence.

His father, Juan Luis Monje, was also a singer as well as a blacksmith, and had a forge where Camarón worked as a boy. His uncle José nicknamed him Camarón (Spanish for “Shrimp”) because he was blonde and fair skinned.

When his father died of asthma, while still very young, the family went through financial hardship. At the age of eight he began to sing at inns and bus stops with Rancapino to earn money. At sixteen, he won first prize at the Festival del Cante Jondo in Mairena del Alcor. Camarón then went to Madrid with Miguel de los Reyes and in 1968 became a resident artist at the Tablao Torres Bermejas, where he remained for twelve years.

Egberto Amin Gismonti (born 5 December 1947) is a Brazilian composer, guitarist and pianist. Gismonti was born in the small city of Carmo, state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, into a musical family. His mother was from Sicily and his father was from Beirut, Lebanon. At the age of six, he started studying the piano at the Brazilian Conservatory of Music. After studying the classical repertoire in Brazil for 15 years, he went to Paris, France, to delve into modern music. He studied with Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979), after acceptance as a student by the composer Jean Barraqué, a student of Anton Webern and Schoenberg. Boulanger encouraged Gismonti to write the collective Brazilian experience into his music.

Gismonti is a self-taught guitarist. After returning to Brazil, he designed guitars with more than six strings, expanding the possibilities of the instrument. Approaching the fretboard as if it were a keyboard, Gismonti gives the impression that there is more than a single guitar player. Gismonti’s sojourn in the Xingu region of the Amazon basin made a lasting impression. This is documented musically in tunes such as “Yualapeti” and “Sapain” (Yualapeti shaman, Sapain) and in the recordings Dança das Cabeças (“Dance of the Heads”, 1977), Sol do Meio-Dia (“Noon Sun”, 1978), which he dedicated to the Xingu, and Duas Vozes (“Two Voices”, 1984).

The musical career of Gismonti spans five decades. The major phases are distinguished by record company, the ensemble format, and the musical collaborators. The most important ensembles are his Brazilian group Academia de Danças, including Mauro Senise (saxophone and flutes), Zeca Assumpção (bass) and Nenê (Realcino Lima Filho, drums and percussion), the duo with Naná Vasconcelos (percussion), and the trio with Charlie Haden (bass) and Jan Garbarek (saxophone). Dança das Cabecas, the first ECM record, was nominated “Album of the Year” by Stereo Review and received the 1977 Großer Deutscher Schallplattenpreis.

Christopher Hillman (born December 4, 1944 LA, CA) is an American musician. He was the original bassist of the Byrds.

With frequent collaborator Gram Parsons, Hillman was a key figure in the development of country rock, defining the genre through his work with the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Manassas and the country-rock group the Desert Rose Band. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991 as a member of the Byrds.

Dennis Carl Wilson (December 4, 1944 – December 28, 1983) was an American musician who co-founded the Beach Boys. He is best remembered as their drummer and as the middle brother of bandmates Brian and Carl Wilson. Dennis was the only true surfer in the Beach Boys, and his personal life exemplified the “California Myth” that the band’s early songs often celebrated. He was also known for his association with the Manson Family and for co-starring in the 1971 film Two-Lane Blacktop.

Wilson served mainly on drums and baritone backing vocals for the Beach Boys. His playing can be heard on many of the group’s hits, belying the popular misconception that he was always replaced on record by studio musicians. He originally had few lead vocals on the band’s songs due to his limited baritone range, but his prominence as a singer-songwriter increased following their 1968 album Friends. His music is characterized for reflecting his “edginess” and “little of his happy charm”. His original songs for the group included “Little Bird” (1968), “Forever” (1970) and “Cuddle Up” (1972). Friends and biographers have asserted that he was an uncredited writer on “You Are So Beautiful“, a 1974 hit for Joe Cocker frequently performed by Wilson in concert.

During his final years, Wilson struggled with alcoholism and the use of other drugs (including cocaine and heroin), exacerbating longstanding tensions with some of his bandmates. His solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue(1977), was released to warm reviews and moderate sales comparable to those of contemporaneous Beach Boys albums. Sessions for a follow-up, Bambu, disintegrated before his death. In 1983, Wilson drowned at age 39. In 1988, he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Beach Boys.

Terence Woods (born 4 December 1947) is an Irish folk musician, songwriter/singer and multi-instrumentalist.

He is known for his membership in such folk and folk-rock groups as The Pogues, Steeleye Span, Sweeney’s Men, The Bucks, Dr. Strangely Strange and the short-lived Orphanage, with Phil Lynott. Woods also played with his wife Gay, billed initially as The Woods Band and later as Gay and Terry Woods.

Woods is most associated with the mandolin and cittern, but also plays acoustic and electric guitars, mandola, five-string banjo and concertina.

James Stanley Hall (December 4, 1930 – December 10, 2013) was an American jazz guitarist, composer and arranger.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Hall moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio, during his childhood. Hall’s mother played the piano, his grandfathers violin, and his uncles guitar. He began playing the guitar at the age of 10, when his mother gave him an instrument as a Christmas present. At 13 he heard Charlie Christian play on a Benny Goodman record, which he calls his “spiritual awakening”. As a teenager in Cleveland, he performed professionally, and also took up the double bass. Hall’s major influences since childhood were tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Paul Gonsalves, and Lucky Thompson. While he copied out solos by Charlie Christian, and later Barney Kessel, it was horn players from whom he took the lead. In 1955, Hall attended the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he majored in composition, studying piano and bass in addition to theory.