Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz Telles (18 November 1907 – 13 July 2003), known professionally as “Compay Segundo“, was a Cuban trovaguitarist, singer and composer.

Compay (meaning compadre) Segundo, so called because he was always second voice in his musical partnerships, was born in Siboney, Cuba, and moved to Santiago de Cuba at the age of nine. His first engagement was in the Municipal Band of Santiago de Cuba, directed by his teacher, Enrique Bueno. In 1934, after a spell in a quintet, he moved to Havana, where he also played the clarinet in the Municipal Band. He also learned to play the guitar and the tres, which became his usual instruments. Compay Segundo also invented the armónico, a seven-stringed guitar-like instrument, to fill the harmonic jump between the Spanish guitar and the tres. In the 1950s he became well known as the second voice and tres player in Los Compadres, a duo he formed with Lorenzo Hierrezuelo in 1947.

Los Compadres were one of the most successful Cuban duos of their time. Greater international fame came later, in 1997, with the release of the Buena Vista Social Club album, a hugely successful recording which won several Grammy awards. Compay Segundo appeared in the Wim Wenders film of the same title

Ignacy Jan Paderewski (Polish: [iɡˈnatsɨ ˈjan padɛˈrɛfskʲi]; 18 November [O.S. 6 November] 1860 – 29 June 1941) was a Polish pianist and composerwho became a spokesman for Polish independence. In 1919, he was the new nation’s Prime Minister and foreign minister during which he signed the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I.

A favorite of concert audiences around the world, his musical fame opened access to diplomacy and the media, as possibly did his status as a freemason, and charitable work of his second wife, Helena Paderewska. During World War I, Paderewski advocated an independent Poland, including by touring the United States, where he met with President Woodrow Wilson, who came to support the creation of an independent Poland in his Fourteen Points at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, which led to the Treaty of Versailles.

Shortly after his resignations from office, Paderewski resumed his concert career to recoup his finances and rarely visited the politically chaotic Poland thereafter, the last time being in 1924.

Imrat Khan (17 November 1935 – 22 November 2018) was an Indian sitar and surbahar player and composer. He was the younger brother of sitar maestro Ustad Vilayat Khan.

Imrat Khan was born in Calcutta on 17 November 1935 into a family of musicians tracing its roots back for several generations, to the court musicians of the Mughal rulers. The training in music traditionally has been passed down from father to son for nearly 400 years. He belonged to Etawah gharana also known as Imdadkhani gharana of classical musicians. Imrat Khan’s father was Enayat Khan (1895–1938), recognised as a leading sitar and surbahar player of his time, as had been his grandfather, Imdad Khan (1848–1920), before him. Imrat Khan’s father died when Imrat was a child, so he was raised by his mother, Bashiran Begum and her father, singer Bande Hassan Khan. In 1944, the family moved with Vilayat Khan, Imrat’s older brother, to Bombay where both the brothers learned sitar-playing extensively from their uncle Wahid Khan. In 1952, Vilayat and Imrat moved in together in Calcutta. They performed together for many years. The two brothers were part of the first cultural delegation to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1956.

David Werner Amram III (born November 17, 1930) is an American composer, arranger, and conductor of orchestral, chamber, and choral works, many with jazz flavorings. He plays piano, French horn, Spanish guitar, and pennywhistle, and sings.

Amram studied at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1948–1949, and earned a bachelor’s degree in European history from George Washington University in 1952. In 1955 he enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied under Dimitri Mitropoulos, Vittorio Giannini, and Gunther Schuller. Under Schuller he studied French horn.

Amram is a strong advocate for music education of the young. For over a quarter-century he served as music director for youth and family concert programs for the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Amram has pointed out: “It is tremendously important for professional people to work with the young. That is the way a true music culture is created — not through merchandising, but through love.”

Jack Owens became one of Mississippi’s most venerated blues artists in the 1980s and ‘90s after spending most of his life as a farmer in Yazoo County. Born November 17, 1904, or 1906 according to some sources, Owens did not perform outside the state of Mississippi until 1988. During his final years he and his harmonica player, Bud Spires, traveled together to many festivals and performed on Owens’s front porch for hundreds of visitors. Owens died on February 9, 1997.

Owens belonged to the pioneering generation of Bentonia bluesmen, which included Nehemiah “Skip” James (1902-1969) and Henry Stuckey (1897-1966). Stuckey is often regarded as the seminal local blues figure, but researchers have yet to discover any recordings or photographs of him. James ranks as Bentonia’s most internationally renowned musician, known for the striking quality of the music on his 1931 recordings for the Paramount label and for a briefly rejuvenated career during the blues revival of the 1960s. Just as James’s recording career was nearing its end, Owens was beginning his, in 1966; his first album, produced by musicologist Dr. David Evans, was not released until 1971. But during the following decades Owens became Bentonia’s resident celebrity. Local citizens grew accustomed to the sight of tour buses, vans, and cars with out-of-state license plates, sometimes loaded with cameras and recording equipment, heading for Owens’s house just north of this site off Rose Hill Road.

The music of Owens and James, as Evans wrote, was distinguished by “haunting, brooding lyrics dealing with such themes as loneliness, death and the supernatural . . . Altogether it is one of the eeriest, loneliest and deepest blues sounds ever recorded.” Neither Owens’s music nor his lifestyle in Bentonia changed much over the years. He clung to old ways and superstitions, including burying money in the ground and hanging bottles from his trees, and was reputed to be the last farmer in the area to plow with a mule. He once made moonshine and ran juke joints in or near his house. Even in his nineties he kept a pistol or shotgun at hand but claimed he had not shot anyone in several years. Documentary filmmakers were duly fascinated, and Owens appeared in Alan Lomax’s Land Where the Blues Began and Robert Mugge’s Deep Blues, as well as a commercial for Levi’s 501 Blues. After making a few festival appearances in Mississippi, he accepted offers to perform in Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Europe, and elsewhere, and took his first plane flight in 1992. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a National Heritage Fellowship in 1993.

Diana Jean Krall OC OBC (born November 16, 1964) is a Canadian jazz pianist and singer. She has sold more than 15 million albums worldwide, including over 6 million in the US. On December 11, 2009, Billboard magazine named her the second greatest jazz artist of the decade (2000–2009), establishing her as one of the best-selling artists of her time.

Krall is the only jazz singer to have had eight albums debuting at the top of the Billboard Jazz Albums. To date, she has won three Grammy Awardsand eight Juno Awards. She has also earned nine gold, three platinum, and seven multi-platinum albums.

Krall was born on November 16, 1964, in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, the daughter of Adella A. (née Wende), an elementary school teacher, and Stephen James “Jim” Krall, an accountant. Krall’s only sibling, Michelle, is a former member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Krall’s father played piano at home and her mother sang in a community choir. Krall began studying piano herself at the age of four, and took exams through The Royal Conservatory of Music. In high school, she was a member of a student jazz group; at 15, she began playing professionally in local restaurants. Krall won a scholarship to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied from 1981 to 1983,before spending time in Los Angeles to play jazz. She returned to Canada to record her first album in 1992.

Hubert Charles Sumlin (November 16, 1931 – December 4, 2011) was a Chicago blues guitarist and singer, best known for his “wrenched, shattering bursts of notes, sudden cliff-hanger silences and daring rhythmic suspensions” as a member of Howlin’ Wolf‘s band. He was ranked number 43 in Rolling Stone‘s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”.

Sumlin was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and raised in Hughes, Arkansas. He got his first guitar when he was eight years old.^[5] As a boy, he met Howlin’ Wolf by sneaking into a performance.

Wolf relocated from Memphis to Chicago in 1953, but his longtime guitarist Willie Johnson chose not to join him. In Chicago, Wolf hired the guitarist Jody Williams, but in 1954 he invited Sumlin to move to Chicago to play second guitar in his band. Williams left the band in 1955, leaving Sumlin as the primary guitarist, a position he held almost continuously (except for a brief spell playing with Muddy Waters around 1956) for the remainder of Wolf’s career. According to Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf sent him to a classical guitar instructor at the Chicago Conservatory of Music to learn keyboards and scales. Sumlin played on the album Howlin’ Wolf (called the “rocking chair album”, with reference to its cover illustration), which was named the third greatest guitar album of all time by Mojo magazine in 2004.

Paul Hindemith (/ˈpaʊlˈhɪndəmɪt/; 16 November 1895 – 28 December 1963) was a prolific German composer, violist, violinist, teacher and conductor. He founded the Amar Quartet in 1921, touring extensively in Europe. As a composer, he became a major advocate of the Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) style of music in the 1920s, with compositions such as Kammermusik, including works with viola and viola d’amore as solo instruments in a neo-Bachian spirit. Other notable compositions include his song cycle Das Marienleben (1923), Der Schwanendreher for viola and orchestra (1935), the opera Mathis der Maler (1938), the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943), and the oratorio When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, a requiem based on Walt Whitman’s poem (1946).

Albert Edwin “Eddie” Condon (November 16, 1905 – August 4, 1973) was an American jazz banjoist, guitarist, and bandleader. A leading figure in Chicago jazz, he also played piano and sang.

Condon was born in Goodland, Indiana, the son of John and Margaret (née McGraw) Condon. He grew up in Momence, Illinois, and Chicago Heights, Illinois, where he attended St. Agnes and Bloom High School. After playing ukulele, he switched to banjo and was a professional musician by 1921.

When he was 15 years old, he received his first union card in Waterloo, Iowa.