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Dorothy Jacqueline Keely (March 9, 1928 – December 16, 2017), professionally known as Keely Smith, was an American jazz and popular music singer, who performed and recorded extensively in the 1950s with then-husband Louis Prima, and throughout the 1960s as a solo artist.

Smith married Prima in 1953. The couple were stars throughout the entertainment business, including stage, television, motion pictures, hit records, and cabaret acts. They won a Grammy in 1959, its inaugural year, for their smash hit, “That Old Black Magic”, which remained on the charts for 18 weeks.

Smith was born in Norfolk, Virginia; her ancestry was Irish and Cherokee. Jesse Smith, her stepfather, was a carpenter, and her mother took in laundry to earn money to buy gowns for Smith to wear when she performed.

Gábor István Szabó (March 8, 1936 – February 26, 1982) was a Hungarian American guitarist whose style incorporated jazz, pop, rock, and Hungarian music.

Szabó was born in Budapest, Hungary. He began playing guitar at the age of 14. In the aftermath of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, he moved to California and later attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston between 1958 and 1960.

In 1961, Szabó became member of a quintet that was led by Chico Hamilton and included Charles Lloyd, playing what has been described as chamber jazz, with “a moderate avant-gardism.

George Edward Coleman (born March 8, 1935) is an American jazz saxophonist known for his work with Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock in the 1960s. In 2015, he was named an NEA Jazz Master.

Coleman was born in Memphis, Tennessee. He was taught how to play the alto saxophone in his teens by his older brother Lucian Adams, inspired (like many jazz musicians of his generation) by Charlie Parker. Among his schoolmates were Harold Mabern, Booker Little, Frank Strozier, Hank Crawford, and Charles Lloyd. After working with Ray Charles, Coleman started working with B.B. King in 1953, at which point he switched to tenor saxophone. In 1956 Coleman moved to Chicago, along with Booker Little, where he worked with Gene Ammons and Johnny Griffin before joining Max Roach‘s quintet (1958–1959). Coleman recorded with organist Jimmy Smith on his album House Party (1957), along with Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller, Kenny Burrell, and Donald Bailey. Moving to New York City with Max Roach in that year, he went on to play with Slide Hampton (1959–1962).

Richard George Fariña (March 8, 1937 – April 30, 1966) was an American folksinger, songwriter, poet and novelist.

Fariña was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States, the son of an Irish mother, Theresa Crozier, and a Cuban father of Galician origin, also named Richard Fariña. He grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn Technical High School. He earned an academic scholarship to Cornell University, starting as an engineering major, but later switching to English. While at Cornell he published short stories for local literary magazines and for national periodicals, including Transatlantic Review and Mademoiselle. Fariña became good friends with Thomas Pynchon, David Shetzline, and Peter Yarrowwhile at Cornell. He was suspended for alleged participation in a student demonstration against campus regulations, and although he later resumed his status as a student, he dropped out in 1959, just before graduation.

On returning to Manhattan, Fariña became a regular patron of the White Horse Tavern, the well-known Greenwich Village tavern frequented by poets, artists, and folksingers, where he befriended Tommy Makem. It was there that he met Carolyn Hester, a successful folk singer. They married 18 days later. Fariña appointed himself Hester’s agent; they toured worldwide while Fariña worked on his novel and Carolyn performed gigs. April 30th 1966 Fariña saw a guest with a motorcycle, who later gave Fariña a ride up Carmel Valley Road, heading east toward the rural Cachagua area of Carmel Valley.At an S-turn the driver lost control. The motorcycle tipped over on the right side of the road, came back to the other side, and tore through a barbed wire fence into a field where a small vineyard now exists. The driver survived, but Fariña was killed instantly.

Christopher Taylor White (born 7 March 1943) is an English musician.

White’s music career spans more than 50 years. He came to prominence in the mid-1960s as the bass guitarist and occasional lead vocalist of the English rock band The Zombies. White is one of the main composers of the Zombies’ music, and made major lyrical contributions to the band’s songs. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019 as a member of the Zombies.

Louis Albert Cottrell Jr. (March 7, 1911 – March 21, 1978) was a Louisiana Creole jazz clarinetist and tenor saxophonist. He was the son of the influential drummer Louis Cottrell, Sr., and grandfather of New Orleans jazz drummer Louis Cottrell III. As leader of the Heritage Hall Jazz Band, he performed at Carnegie Hall in 1974.

Cottrell was born into an upper-class Creole musical family in New Orleans. His father, Louis “Old Man” Cottrell, Sr., was a famed drummer, and cornetist Manny Perez was his godfather. The young Cottrell grew up around such great musicians as Barney Bigard, John Robichaux, and A.J. Piron. Cottrell studied clarinet under Lorenzo Tio Jr. and Bigard. He began his career in the 1920s with the Golden Rule Orchestra, and then in 1925 played with Paul “Polo” Barnes.

Alcide Louis “Slow Drag” Pavageau (March 7, 1888 – January 19, 1969) was an American jazz guitarist and double-bassist.

Pavageau was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He started his career as a dancer, mastering a dance called the Slow Drag which resulted in his nickname. He learned the guitar as a young man from his cousin Ulysses Picou, a singer in New Orleans. Pavageau came from a musical family and was related to families like the Tios, Picous and Pirons who formed some of the earliest jazz bands. He played Buddy Petit, Bunk Johnson, and Herb Morand. Johnson bragged that he taught Louis Armstrong how to play cornet by ear. He started playing bass in 1927 when he was 39 years old and joined George Lewis‘s band from 1943 and also played in Bunk Johnson‘s band in New York City in 1945. He toured with Lewis through the end of the 1950s. In 1961, while playing with the Louis Cottrell Trio, he recorded New Orleans: The Living Legends for Riverside. He worked at Preservation Hall in the 1960s and recorded one album as a leader in 1965 in addition to frequent recording with Lewis.

Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France’s greatest living composer.

Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France’s premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other composers’ piano music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky‘s Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known.

A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies or church music. Many of his works exist in two versions: first, a piano score and later an orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), is exceptionally difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé (1912) require skilful balance in performance.

Ravel was among the first composers to recognise the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public. From the 1920s, despite limited technique as a pianist or conductor, he took part in recordings of several of his works; others were made under his supervision.