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Ahmad Jovdat Ismayil oglu Hajiyev (June 18, 1917 – January 18, 2002) was one of the major Azerbaijani composers of the Soviet period. He is remembered for his monumental orchestral works, having been the first Azerbaijani to compose a symphony (1936). He studied under Azerbaijan’s Founder of Composed Music, Uzeyir Hajibeyov and under Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Hajiyev was born in Shaki (then Nukha), a town in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains in northwestern Azerbaijan. From an early age, he was deeply influenced by the traditional music of folk songs, ashug music (folk minstrel) and mugham (modal music).

In 1924, his family moved to Baku. In 1935, he enrolled in the theoretical composition faculty at Baku Conservatory, studying under Uzeyir Hajibeyovand the Latvian-born Leopold Rudolf, a student of Sergei Taneyev. The following year, Hajiyev composed his single movement “Symphony No. 1”, the first symphonic piece ever written by an Azerbaijani composer. This work enabled him to enter Moscow Conservatory in 1938. In Moscow, World War II interrupted his studies and he had to return to Baku.

Ray McKinley (June 18, 1910 – May 7, 1995) was an American jazz drummer, singer, and bandleader.

McKinley got his start at age 9 working with local bands in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. He left home when he was 15 and played with Milt Shaw’s Detroiters and the Smith Ballew and Duncan-Marin bands. His first substantial professional engagement came in 1934 with the Dorsey Brothers’ Orchestra. It was with the Smith Ballew band in 1929 that McKinley met Glenn Miller. The two formed a friendship that lasted from 1929 until Miller’s death in 1944. McKinley and Miller joined the Dorsey Brothers in 1934. Miller left for Ray Noble in December 1934, while McKinley remained.

The Dorsey brothers split in 1935, with McKinley remaining with Jimmy Dorsey until 1939, when he joined Will Bradley, becoming co-leader. McKinley’s biggest hit with Bradley, as a singer, was “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar“, which he recorded early in the year 1940 (and for which he got partial songwriting credit under his wife’s maiden name Eleanore Sheehy). McKinley is referred to as “Eight Beat Mack” in the lyrics to the song “Down the Road a Piece,” which he recorded as a trio with Will Bradley and Freddie Slack in 1940. This was the earliest recording of the song, which was written specifically for Bradley’s band by Don Raye.

Dobet Gnahoré (born June 17, 1982) is a singer from Côte d’Ivoire. The daughter of percussionist Boni Gnahoré, she plays with the group Na Afriki, consisting mainly of French and Tunisian musicians, who accompany her with the guitar, sanza, the balafon, the calebasse and bongos. Due to the civil war, she moved to France in 1999. In 2004, Gnahoré released her debut album Ano Neko. In 2006. She was a nominee at the World music (Awards) for Newcomer and shared an award for Best Urban/Alternative Performance with India.Arie at the 52nd Grammy Awards.

A self-taught musician, who incorporates elements of song, dance, percussion and theatre into her repertoire, she is the daughter of percussionist Boni Gnahoré, who performs with her and the sister of kiff no beat band member Black k. She settled in Marseille in 1999 due to the civil war.

Charles Walter Rainey III (born June 17, 1940 in Cleveland, Ohio, United States) is an American bass guitarist who has performed and recorded with many well-known acts, including Aretha Franklin, Steely Dan, and Quincy Jones.

By the 1970s he had played with Jerome Richardson, Grady Tate, Mose Allison, Gato Barbieri, and Gene Ammons, as well as with Eddie Vinson at the 1971 Montreux Festival.

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ComSE (/strəˈvɪnski/; Russian: Игорь Фёдорович Стравинский, IPA: [ˈiɡərʲ ˈfʲɵdərəvʲɪtɕ strɐˈvʲinskʲɪj] (listen); 17 June [O.S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.

Stravinsky’s compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Serge Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The latter transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky’s enduring reputation as a revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His “Russian phase”, which continued with works such as Renard, L’Histoire du soldat, and Les noces, was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassicism. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue, and symphony) and drew from earlier styles, especially those of the 18th century. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells, and clarity of form and instrumentation.

Tony Scott (born Anthony Joseph Sciacca June 17, 1921 – March 28, 2007) was an American jazz clarinetist and arranger with an interest in folk music around the world. For most of his career he was held in high esteem in new-age music circles because of his involvement in music linked to Asian cultures and to meditation.

Born in Morristown, New Jersey, Scott attended Juilliard School from 1940 to 1942. In the 1950s he worked with Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday. He also had a young Bill Evans and Paul Motian as side-men on several albums released between 1957 and 1959. In the late 1950s he won on four occasions the Down Beat critics poll for clarinetist in 1955, 1957, 1958 and 1959. He was known for a more “cool” style on the instrument than his peer Buddy DeFranco who often played a more aggressive bebop style.

Despite this he remained relatively little-known as the clarinet had been in eclipse in jazz since the emergence of bebop. In 1959 he left New York City, where he had been based, and abandoned the United States for a time. In the 1960s he toured South, East, and Southeast Asia. This led to his playing in a Hindu temple, spending time in Japan, and releasing Music for Zen Meditation in 1964 for Verve Records. In 1960 a Down Beat poll for Japan saw readers there name him best clarinetist while the United States preferred Buddy DeFranco. More recently he did a Japanese special on Buddhism and Jazz, although he continued to work with American jazz musicians and played at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1965. In the years following that he worked in Germany, Africa, and at times in South America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSKQHDrmutw&list=PL-91EjxL7mjGB08zVPyqv1UR2yC9QOM4A

If Scorpius looked this good to the unaided eye, humans might remember it better. Scorpius more typically appears as a few bright stars in a well-known but rarely pointed out zodiacal constellation. To get a spectacular image like this, though, one needs a good camera, a dark sky, and some sophisticated image processing. The resulting digitally-enhanced image shows many breathtaking features. Diagonal across the image right is part of the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. Visible there are vast clouds of bright stars and long filaments of dark and intricate dust. Rising vertically on the image left are dark dust bands known as the Dark River. Several of the bright stars on the left are part of Scorpius’ head and claws, and include the bright star Antares. Numerous red emission nebulas, blue reflection nebulas, and dark filaments became visible as the deep 17-hour expo image developed. Scorpius appears prominently in southern skies after sunset during the middle of the year.

Edward Willis Levert (born June 16, 1942) is an American singer–songwriter and actor. Levert is best known as the lead vocalist of The O’Jays. He is the father of Gerald Levert (1966-2006).

Levert was born in Bessemer, Alabama, but was raised in Canton, Ohio, where he moved at the age of 6. He attended church regularly and eventually joined the church choir. As Levert continued singing into his teenage years, he became a recognized voice in the church choir, sang in school plays and performed regularly on a gospel radio show.

Whilst at high school he teamed up with classmates Walter Williams, William Powell, Bobby Massey and Bill Isles to form a group called the Triumphs. The Triumphs played locally in Canton opening for different acts, playing ‘sock hops’. They traveled to Cincinnati to canvas King Records whose President Sid Nathan changed their name to The Mascots and signed them to his label. The Mascots’ popularity grew as their music was broadcast on Cleveland radio stations.

Eli “Lucky” Thompson (June 16, 1924 – July 30, 2005) was an American jazz tenor and soprano saxophonist whose playing combined elements of swing and bebop. Although John Coltrane usually receives the most credit for bringing the soprano saxophone out of obsolescence in the early 1960s, Thompson (along with Steve Lacy) embraced the instrument earlier than Coltrane.

Thompson was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and moved to Detroit, Michigan, during his childhood. Thompson had to raise his siblings after his mother died, and he practiced saxophone fingerings on a broom handle before acquiring his first instrument. He joined Erskine Hawkins‘ band in 1942 upon graduating from high school.

After playing with the swing orchestras of Lionel Hampton, Don Redman, Billy Eckstine (alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker), Lucky Millinder, and Count Basie, he worked in rhythm and blues and then established a career in bebop and hard bop, working with Kenny Clarke, Miles Davis, Gillespie and Milt Jackson.

Clarence Eugene Shaw, sometimes credited as Gene Shaw (June 16, 1926 – August 17, 1973) was an American jazz trumpeter.

Shaw was born in Detroit on June 16, 1926. He played the piano and trombone as a child. He began playing trumpet around 1946 after hearing Dizzy Gillespie‘s Hot House while recovering from injuries sustained in the army. He attended the Detroit Institute of Music, and studied with pianist Barry Harris.

In Detroit, he played with Lester Young, Wardell Gray, and Lucky Thompson. He moved to New York in 1956 and began playing with Charles Mingus‘s Jazz Workshop in 1957. Among his credits with Mingus is Tijuana Moods. On East Coasting, Shaw used a Harmon mute, although he was initially wary of using it, given its association with the sound of Miles Davis. Later in 1957 he destroyed his instrument and quit music over a fight with Mingus. He did not return to playing until 1962, after which time he formed his own ensemble. He retired again in 1964 and returned to music once more in 1968. He died in Los Angeles on August 17, 1973.

The star cluster is very bright and was discovered in the mid-eighteenth century. The nebula, however, is much more elusive and it took almost a further two decades for it to be first noted by Charles Messier in 1764. Although it is commonly known as the Eagle Nebula, its official designation is Messier 16 and the cluster is also named NGC 6611. One spectacular area of the nebula (outside the field of view) has been nicknamed “The Pillars of Creation” ever since the Hubble Space Telescope captured an iconic image of dramatic pillars of star-forming gas and dust. The cluster and nebula are fascinating targets for small and medium-sized telescopes, particularly from a dark site free from light pollution. Messier 16 can be found within the constellation of Serpens Cauda (the Tail of the Serpent), which is sandwiched between Aquila, Sagittarius, and Ophiuchus in the heart of one of the brightest parts of the Milky Way. Small telescopes with low power are useful for observing large, but faint, swathes of the nebula, whereas 30 cm telescopes and larger may reveal the dark pillars under good conditions. But a space telescope in orbit around the Earth, like Hubble — which boasts a 2.4-metre diameter mirror and state-of-the-art instruments — is required for an image as spectacular as this one. This picture was created from images taken with the Wide Field Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Images through a near-infrared filter (F775W) are coloured red and images through a blue filter (F475W) are blue. The exposures times were one hour and 54 minutes respectively and the field of view is about 3.3 arcminutes across.

Harry Edward Nilsson III (June 15, 1941 – January 15, 1994), known professionally as Nilsson, was an American singer-songwriter who achieved the peak of his commercial success in the early 1970s. His work is characterized by pioneering vocal overdub experiments, returns to the Great American Songbook, and fusions of Caribbean sounds. A tenor with a 3+1⁄2 octave range, Nilsson was one of the few major pop-rock recording artists to achieve significant commercial success without ever performing major public concerts or undertaking regular tours. The craft of his songs and the defiant attitude he projected remain touchstones for later generations of indie rock musicians.

Born in Brooklyn, Nilsson moved to Los Angeles as a teenager to escape his family’s poor financial situation. While working as a computer programmer at a bank, he grew interested in musical composition and close-harmony singing, and was successful in having some of his songs recorded by various artists such as the Monkees. In 1967, he debuted on RCA Victor with the LP Pandemonium Shadow Show, followed by a variety of releases that include a collaboration with Randy Newman (Nilsson Sings Newman, 1970) and the original children’s story The Point! (1971). His most commercially successful album, Nilsson Schmilsson (1971), produced the international top 10 singles “Without You” and “Coconut“. His other top 10 hit, “Everybody’s Talkin’” (1968), was featured prominently in the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy. A version of Nilsson’s “One“, released by Three Dog Night in 1969, also reached the U.S. top 10.

During a 1968 press conference, the Beatles were asked what their favorite American group was and answered “Nilsson”. Sometimes called “the American Beatle“, he soon formed close friendships with John Lennon and Ringo Starr. In the 1970s, Nilsson, Lennon and Starr were members of the Hollywood Vampires drinking club, embroiling themselves in a number of widely publicized, alcohol-fueled incidents. They produced one collaborative album, Pussy Cats (1974). After 1977, Nilsson left RCA, and his record output diminished. In response to Lennon’s 1980 murder, he took a hiatus from the music industry to campaign for gun control. With this, he heavily advocated for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and spent most of his time and effort trying to make a change in the handgun industry. At this time his only occupation was a Spokesperson for Handgun Violence, and would even hold many social gatherings to spread the word on the topic.

Nilsson created the first remix album (Aerial Pandemonium Ballet, 1971) and recorded the first mashup song (“You Can’t Do That“, 1967). He was voted No. 62 in Rolling Stone‘s 2015 list of the “100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time“, where he was described as “a pioneer of the Los Angeles studio sound, a crucial bridge between the baroque psychedelic pop of the late Sixties and the more personal singer-songwriter era of the Seventies”. The RIAA certified Nilsson Schmilsson and Son of Schmilsson (1972) as gold records, indicating over 500,000 units sold each. He earned Grammy Awards for two of his recordings; Best Contemporary Vocal Performance, Male in 1970 for “Everybody’s Talkin'” and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male in 1973 for “Without You”.