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Forrest Richard Betts (born December 12, 1943 West Palm Beach, FL) is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter, and composer best known as a founding member of The Allman Brothers Band.

Early in his career, he collaborated with Duane Allman, introducing melodic twin guitar harmony and counterpoint which “rewrote the rules for how two rock guitarists can work together, completely scrapping the traditional rhythm/lead roles to stand toe to toe”. Following Allman’s death in 1971, Betts assumed sole lead guitar duties during the peak of the group’s commercial success in the mid-1970s. Betts was the writer and singer on the Allmans’ hit single “Ramblin’ Man“. He also gained renown for composing instrumentals, with one appearing on most of the group’s albums, including “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and “Jessica” (which was later used as the theme to Top Gear).

The band went through a hiatus in the late 1970s, during which time Betts, like many of the other band members, pursued a solo career and side projects under such names as Great Southern and The Dickey Betts Band. The Allman Brothers reformed in 1979, with Dan Toler taking the second guitar role alongside Betts. In 1982, they broke up a second time, during which time Betts formed the group Betts, Hall, Leavell and Trucks, which lasted until 1984. A third reformation occurred in 1989, with Warren Haynes now joining Betts on guitar. Betts would be ousted from the band in 2000 over a conflict regarding Betts’s continued drug and alcohol use; he would never play with them again and has not since appeared with any former band members for reunions or side projects. He remains (alongside Jaimoe) one of only two living founders of the Allman Brothers Band.

He was inducted with the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and also won a best rock performance Grammy Award with the band for “Jessica” in 1996. Betts was ranked No. 58 on Rolling Stone‘s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time list in 2003, and No. 61 on the list published in 2011.

Grover Washington Jr. (December 12, 1943 – December 17, 1999) was an American jazz-funk and soul-jazz saxophonist. Along with Wes Montgomery and George Benson, he is considered by many to be one of the founders of the smooth jazz genre. He wrote some of his material and later became an arranger and producer.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Washington made some of the genre’s most memorable hits, including “Mister Magic”, “Reed Seed”, “Black Frost”, “Winelight”, “Inner City Blues”, “Let it Flow (For ‘Dr. J’)” and “The Best is Yet to Come”. In addition, he performed very frequently with other artists, including Bill Withers on “Just the Two of Us“, Patti LaBelle on “The Best Is Yet to Come” and Phyllis Hyman on “A Sacred Kind of Love”. He is also remembered for his take on the Dave Brubeckclassic “Take Five“, and for his 1996 version of “Soulful Strut“.

Washington was born in Buffalo, New York, United States, on December 12, 1943. His mother was a church chorister, and his father was a collector of old jazzgramophone records and a saxophonist as well, so music was everywhere in the home. He grew up listening to the great jazzmen and big band leaders like Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, and others like them. At the age of 8, Grover Sr. gave Jr. a saxophone. He practiced and would sneak into clubs to see famous Buffalo blues musicians. His younger brother, drummer Daryl Washington, would follow in his footsteps, he also had another younger brother named Michael Washington, who was an accomplished Gospel Music organist who mastered the Hammond B3 organ. He was part of a vocal ensemble, The Teen Kings, which included Lonnie Smith.

Michael “Dodo” Marmarosa (December 12, 1925 – September 17, 2002) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger.

Originating in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Marmarosa became a professional musician in his mid-teens, and toured with several major big bands, including those led by Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, and Artie Shaw into the mid-1940s. He moved to Los Angeles in 1945, where he became increasingly interested and involved in the emerging bebop scene. During his time on the West Coast, he recorded in small groups with leading bebop and swing musicians, including Howard McGhee, Charlie Parker, and Lester Young, as well as leading his own bands.

Marmarosa returned to Pittsburgh due to health reasons in 1948. He began performing much less frequently, and had a presence only locally for around a decade. Friends and fellow musicians had commented from an early stage that Marmarosa was an unusual character. His mental stability was probably affected by being beaten into a coma when in his teens, by a short-lived marriage followed by permanent separation from his children, and by a traumatic period in the army. He made comeback recordings in the early 1960s, but soon retreated to Pittsburgh, where he played occasionally into the early 1970s. From then until his death three decades later, he lived with family and in veterans’ hospitals.

Alfred McCoy Tyner (December 11, 1938 – March 6, 2020) was an American jazz pianist and composer known for his work with the John Coltrane Quartet (from 1960 to 1965) and his long solo career afterwards.

He was an NEA Jazz Master and five-time Grammy award winner. Unlike many of the jazz keyboardists of his generation, Tyner very rarely incorporated electric keyboards or synthesizers into his work. Tyner has been widely imitated, and is one of the most recognizable and influential pianists in jazz history.

Willie Mae Thornton (December 11, 1926 – July 25, 1984), better known as Big Mama Thornton, was an American singer and songwriter of the blues and R&B genres. She was the first to record Leiber and Stoller‘s “Hound Dog“, in 1952, which became her biggest hit, staying seven weeks at number one on the Billboard R&B chart in 1953 and selling almost two million copies. Thornton’s other recordings included the original version of “Ball and Chain“, which she wrote.

Dámaso Pérez Prado (December 11, 1916 – September 14, 1989)^{[nb 1]}was a Cuban bandleader, pianist, composer and arranger who popularized the mambo in the 1950s.^[2] His big band adaptation of the danzón-mambo proved to be a worldwide success with hits such as “Mambo No. 5“, earning him the nickname “King of the Mambo”. In 1955, Prado and his orchestra topped the charts in the US and UK with a mambo cover of Louiguy‘s “Cherry Pink (and Apple Blossom White)“. He frequently made brief appearances in films, primarily of the rumberas genre, and his music was featured in films such as La Dolce Vita.

https://youtu.be/CiXztRrljPQ

Melbourne Robert Cranshaw (December 3, 1932 – November 2, 2016) was an American jazz bassist. His career spanned the heyday of Blue Note Records to his recent involvement with the Musicians Union. He is perhaps best known for his long association with Sonny Rollins. Cranshaw performed in Rollins’s working band on and off for over five decades, starting with a live appearance at the 1959 Playboy jazz festival in Chicago and on record with the 1962 album The Bridge.

Cranshaw died at the age of 83 on November 2, 2016, in Manhattan, New York, from Stage IV cancer.

Pops Mohamed (born Ismail Mohamed  12-10-1949) is a South African multi-instrumentalist, jazz musician and producer.

Born in Benoni, Gauteng, Pops Mohamed had a career in music that was the logical outcome of an early exposure at Dorkay House to the likes of Abdullah Ibrahim and Kippie Moeketsi. Mohamed’s father was a Muslim of Portuguese and Indian heritage and his mother was of Xhosa people and Khoisan heritage. He grew up in the Indian community of Johannesburg. He started his first band The Valiants, at the age of 14. Known by fans as the “Minister of Music”, he plays a wide variety of instruments: African mouth bow, bird whistle, berimbau, didgeridoo, guitar, keyboard, kora, and the thumb piano. He is also known for his wide range of musical styles which include kwela, pop, and soul. He produced Finding One’s Self, the late Moses Taiwa Molelekwa‘s award-winning album.

Pops has also performed regularly with and sits on the board of the Johannesburg Youth Orchestra Company

Ray Willis Nance (December 10, 1913 – January 28, 1976) was an American jazz trumpeter, violinist and singer. He is best remembered for his long association with Duke Ellington and his orchestra.

Nance was the leader of his own band in Chicago from 1932 to 1937. Then, he worked with Earl Hines from 1937 to 1939; and from 1939 to 1940 he worked with Horace Henderson.

Ellington hired Nance to replace trumpeter Cootie Williams, who had joined Benny Goodman, in 1940. Nance’s first recorded performance with Ellington was at the Fargo, North Dakota ballroom dance. Shortly after joining the band, Nance was given the trumpet solo on the earliest recorded version of “Take the “A” Train“, which became the Ellington theme. Nance’s “A Train” solo is one of the most copied and admired trumpet solos in jazz history. Indeed, when Cootie Williams returned to the band more than twenty years later, he would play Nance’s solo on “A Train” almost exactly as the original.