Carlos Wesley “Don” Byas (October 21, 1912 – August 24, 1972)^[1] was an American jazz tenor saxophonist, associated with Swing and bebop. He played with Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Art Blakey, and Dizzy Gillespie, among others, and also led his own band. He lived in Europe for the last 26 years of his life.

Byas was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, United States. Both of Byas’ parents were musicians. His mother played the piano, and his father, the clarinet. Byas began his musical education in the European classical tradition, learning to play violin, clarinet and alto saxophone, which he played until the end of the 1920s.

Benny Carter, who played many instruments, was his idol at this time. Byas started to perform in local orchestras at the age of 17, with Bennie Moten, Terrence Holder and Walter Page. He founded and led his own college band, Don Carlos and His Collegiate Ramblers, during 1931–1932, at Langston College, Oklahoma.

Alegria is structurally one of the strictest forms of flamenco. A traditional dance in alegria must contain each of the following sections, in order:

• salida (entrance)
• paseo (walkaround)
• silencio (similar to an adagio in ballet – it is the singer who is “silent”)
• castellana (upbeat section)
• escobilla (literally “brush” as with a broom, which describes dancers’ footwork in this section)
• bulerias

This structure is often not strictly followed when alegria is played as a standalone song with no dancing. You will, however, frequently hear parts of this structure in solo guitar playing. In this way an artist can pay homage to the entirety of the art form, even when a dancer is not present.

Thomas Earl Petty (October 20, 1950 – October 2, 2017 Gainesville, FL) was an American musician who was the lead vocalist and guitarist of the rock band Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, formed in 1976. He previously led the band Mudcrutch, was a member of the late 1980s supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, and had success as a solo artist.

Petty had many hit records. Hit singles with the Heartbreakers include “Don’t Do Me Like That” (1979), “Refugee” (1980), “The Waiting” (1981), “Don’t Come Around Here No More” (1985) and “Learning to Fly” (1991). Petty’s solo hits include “I Won’t Back Down” (1989), “Free Fallin’” (1989), and “You Don’t Know How It Feels” (1994). Solo or with the Heartbreakers, he had hit albums from the 1970s through the 2010s and sold more than 80 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. Petty and the Heartbreakers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. Petty was honored as MusiCares Person of the Year in February 2017 for his contributions to music and for his philanthropy. He also had a minor acting career, most notably starring in a recurring role as the voice of Elroy “Lucky” Kleinschmidt in the animated comedy series King of the Hill from 2004 to the show’s end in 2009.

In 2017, Petty died of a cardiac arrest, at the age of 66, one week after the end of the Heartbreakers’ 40th Anniversary Tour.

Eddie Harris (October 20, 1934 – November 5, 1996) was an American jazz musician, best known for playing tenor saxophone and for introducing the electrically amplified saxophone. He was also fluent on the electric piano and organ. His best-known compositions are “Freedom Jazz Dance”, popularized by Miles Davis in 1966, and “Listen Here”.

Harris was born and grew up in Chicago, Illinois, United States. His father was from Cuba and his mother from Mississippi. He studied music under Walter Dyett at DuSable High School, as had many other successful Chicago musicians (such as Nat King Cole, Clifford Jordan, Johnny Griffin, Gene Ammons, Julian Priester, and others). He later studied music at Roosevelt University, by which time he was proficient on piano, vibraphone, and tenor saxophone. While in college, he performed professionally with Gene Ammons.

After college, Harris was drafted into the United States Army and while serving in Europe, he was accepted into the 7th Army Band, which also included Don Ellis, Leo Wright, and Cedar Walton.

RGB (Red, Green, Blue) filters like the cone cells in our eyes, except collecting light for 19 hours, not a fraction of a second. The featured image was captured over six nights, using a 24-inch diameter telescope in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in California, USA. The bright spiral galaxy at the center (NGC 7497) looks like it is being grasped by an eerie tendril of a space ghost, and therein lies the trick. The galaxy is actually 59 million light yearsaway, while the nebulosity is MBM 54, less than one thousand light years away, making it one of the nearest cool clouds of gas and dust — galactic cirrus — within our own Milky Way Galaxy. Both are in the constellation of Pegasus, which can be seen high overhead from northern latitudes in the autumn.

Paul Blake (19 October 1965 – 18 May 2017), better known as Frankie Paul, was a Jamaican dancehall reggae artist. Born blind, he has been dubbed by some ‘The Jamaican Stevie Wonder’.

Born in Jamaica in 1965, Blake was born blind but as a child had his sight partially restored by an operation on a hospital ship. He sang for, and impressed Stevie Wonder when Wonder visited the school that Blake attended, prompting him to pursue a singing career. Adopting the stage name Frankie Paul, he first found fame in the early 1980s, and he recorded prolifically throughout the decade. He recorded for virtually every producer/studio in Jamaica at some time, and was known to release several albums a year.

Notable works of Frankie Paul include the popular “Sara” and “Worries in the Dance”. Paul resided in The Gambia from 1994. In January 2016 he underwent surgery to amputate a foot and part of his leg.

Frankie Paul died on 18 May 2017 from complications with his liver at the University Hospital of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.

Willie Lee Perryman (October 19, 1911 – July 25, 1985), usually known professionally as Piano Red and later in life as Dr. Feelgood, was an American bluesmusician, the first to hit the pop music charts. He was a self-taught pianist who played in the barrelhouse blues style (a loud percussive type of blues piano suitable for noisy bars or taverns). His performing and recording careers emerged during the period of transition from completely segregated “race music” to rhythm and blues, which was marketed to both white and black audiences. Some music historians credit Perryman’s 1950 recording “Rocking With Red” for the popularization of the term rock and roll in Atlanta. His simple, hard-pounding left hand and his percussive right hand, coupled with his cheerful shout, brought him considerable success over three decades.

Perryman was born on a farm near Hampton, Georgia, United States, where his parents, Ada and Henry Perryman, were sharecroppers. He was part of a large family, though sources differ on exactly how many brothers and sisters he had. Perryman was an albino African American, as was his older brother Rufus, who also had a blues piano career as “Speckled Red“.

Farid al-Atrash (Arabic: فريد الأطرش; October 19, 1916 – December 26, 1974), also written Farid El-Atrache, was a Syrian-Egyptian composer, singer, virtuoso oud player, and actor. Having immigrated to Egypt at the age of only nine years old with his mother and siblings, he studied there under numerous respected musicians. Al-Atrash embarked on a highly successful career spanning more than four decades—recording 500 songs and starring in 31 movies. Sometimes referred to as “King of the Oud”, he is one of the most important figures of 20th- century Arab music.

Al-Atrash was born in Al-Qurayya, in southern Syria to the Druze princely al-Atrash family who fought the French colonial army. His father was Syrian and his mother was Lebanese.

On the left, the central plane of our home galaxy extends from the horizon past the middle of the sky. On the right, an auroral oval also extends from the sky’s center — but is dominated by bright green-glowing oxygen. The two are not physically connected, because the aurora is relatively nearby, with the higher red parts occurring in Earth’s atmosphere only about 1000 kilometers high. In contrast, an average distance to the stars and nebulas we see in the Milky Way more like 1000 light-years away – 10 trillion times further. The featured image composite was taken in early October across a small lake in Abisko, northern Sweden. As our Sun’s magnetic field evolves into the active part of its 11-year cycle, auroras near both of Earth’s poles are sure to become more frequent.

Anita Belle Colton (October 18, 1919 – November 23, 2006), known professionally as Anita O’Day, was an American jazz singer and self proclaimed “song stylist” widely admired for her sense of rhythm and dynamics, and her early big band appearances that shattered the traditional image of the “girl singer”. Refusing to pander to any female stereotype, O’Day presented herself as a “hip” jazz musician, wearing a band jacket and skirt as opposed to an evening gown. She changed her surname from Colton to O’Day, pig Latin for “dough”, slang for money.

Anita Belle Colton (who later took the surname “O’Day”) was born to Irish parents, James and Gladys M. (née Gill) Colton in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Chicago, Illinois, during the Great Depression. Colton took the first chance to leave her unhappy home when, at age 14, she became a contestant in the popular Walk-a-thons as a dancer. She toured with the Walk-a-thons circuits for two years, occasionally being called upon to sing. In 1934, she began touring the Midwest as a marathon dance contestant.