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Gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 3521 is a mere 35 million light-years away, toward the constellation Leo. Relatively bright in planet Earth’s sky, NGC 3521 is easily visible in small telescopes but often overlooked by amateur imagers in favor of other Leo spiral galaxies, like M66 and M65. It’s hard to overlook in this colorful cosmic portrait, though. Spanning some 50,000 light-years the galaxy sports characteristicpatchy, irregular spiral arms laced with dust, pink star forming regions, and clusters of young, blue stars. Remarkably, this deep image also finds NGC 3521 embedded in gigantic bubble-like shells. The shells are likely tidal debris, streams of stars torn from satellite galaxies that have undergone mergers with NGC 3521 in the distant past.

Larry Eugene Carlton (born March 2, 1948) is an American guitarist who built his career as a studio musician in the 1970s and ’80s for acts such as Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell. He has participated in thousands of recording sessions, recorded on hundreds of albums in many genres, for television and movies, and on more than 100 gold records. He has been a member of the jazz fusion group the Crusaders, the smooth jazz band Fourplay, and has maintained a long solo career.

Carlton was born in Torrance, California in 1948 and at the age of six began guitar lessons. His interest in jazz came from hearing guitarist Joe Passon the radio. From Pass he moved on to jazz guitarists Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery and blues guitarist B.B. King. He went to junior college and Long Beach State College while playing professionally at clubs in Los Angeles.

Leon Russell (born Claude Russell Bridges; April 2, 1942 – November 13, 2016 Lawton, OK) was an American musician and songwriter who was involved with numerous bestselling pop music records during his 60-year career. His genres included pop, country, rock, folk, gospel, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, folk rock, blues rock, surf, standards, and Tulsa Sound.

His collaborations rank as some of the most successful in music history, and as a touring musician he performed with hundreds of notable artists. He recorded 33 albums and at least 430 songs. He wrote “Delta Lady” recorded by Joe Cocker, and organized and performed with Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour in 1970. His “A Song for You” which was named to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2018, has been recorded by more than 200 artists, and his song “This Masquerade” by more than 75.

As a pianist, he played in his early years on albums by The Beach Boys, Dick Dale, and Jan and Dean. On his first album, Leon Russell, in 1970, the musicians included Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison. One of his biggest early fans, Elton John said that Russell was a “mentor” and an “inspiration”. They recorded their album The Union in 2010 earning them a Grammy nomination.

Russell produced and played in recording sessions for Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Ike & Tina Turner, The Rolling Stones, and many other artists. He wrote and recorded the hits “Tight Rope” and “Lady Blue“. He performed at The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, along with Harrison, Dylan, and Clapton for which he earned a Grammy Award.

His recordings earned six gold records. He received two Grammy Awards from seven nominations. In 2011, he was inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Marvin Gaye (born Marvin Pentz Gay Jr.; April 2, 1939 – April 1, 1984 Washington DC) was an American singer, songwriter, and record producer. He helped to shape the sound of Motown in the 1960s, first as an in-house session player and later as a solo artist with a string of hits, earning him the nicknames “Prince of Motown” and “Prince of Soul”.

Gaye’s Motown hits include “Ain’t That Peculiar“, “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)“, and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine“. Gaye also recorded duets with Mary Wells, Kim Weston, Tammi Terrell, and Diana Ross. During the 1970s, Gaye recorded the albums What’s Going On and Let’s Get It On and became one of the first artists in Motown to break away from the reins of a production company. His later recordings influenced several contemporary R&B subgenres, such as quiet storm and neo soul. He was a tax exile in Europe in the early 1980s; he released “Sexual Healing” the 1982 hit which won his first two Grammy Awards on the album Midnight Love. Gaye’s last televised appearances were at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game, where he sang “The Star-Spangled Banner“; Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever; and Soul Train.

On April 1, 1984, the day before his 45th birthday, Gaye was shot dead by his father, Marvin Gay Sr. at their house in West Adams, Los Angeles, after an argument. Many institutions have posthumously bestowed Gaye with awards and other honors including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and inductions into the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Gaye intervened in a fight between his parents on the afternoon of April 1, 1984, in the family house in the West Adams district of Los Angeles, and he became involved in a physical altercation with his father, Marvin Gay Sr. who shot Gaye twice, once in the chest, piercing his heart, and then into Gaye’s shoulder. The shooting took place in Gaye’s bedroom at 12:38 p.m. The first shot proved fatal. Gaye was pronounced dead at 1:01 p.m. after his body arrived at California Hospital Medical Center, one day short of his 45th birthday.

Booker Little Jr. (April 2, 1938 – October 5, 1961) was an American jazz trumpeter and composer. He appeared on many recordings in his short career, both as a sideman and as a leader. Little performed with Max Roach, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy and was strongly influenced by Sonny Rollins and Clifford Brown. He died at age 23.

Booker Little Jr. was born in Memphis, Tennessee to Booker, a Pullman porter who was a trombonist, and his wife Ophelia Little, who was a church organist. He also was the brother of Helena, Vivian, and Vera Little (Vera later sung with the London Opera Company). From a musically inclined family, Little naturally gravitated towards music. Like his father, he attempted to learn the trombone but instead choose clarinet at the age of 12. At 14, he finally settled on trumpet as his band director urged him play trumpet. In 1952, Little attended Manassas High School where he would begin his development on trumpet and later on graduate. Being in a city like Memphis, Little was able to grow his talent with other young musicians during that time such as Phineas Newborn Jr., George Coleman, Frank Strozier, and his cousin Louis Smith. After graduating, he moved to Chicago, Illinoisto continue his studies at the Chicago Conservatory in 1954. At the conservatory, he continued studying trumpet but also incorporated studies in composition, theory, and orchestration with a minor in piano. He would later on graduate with a bachelors degree in trumpet. As a sophomore, Little met Sonny Rollins. For about nine months, they both stayed at the YMCA where Rollins would influence Little greatly by encouraging him to find his own sound versus mimicking other musicians.

Tangos Gitanos is one of a variety of musical styles found in the Spanish-speaking world called “tango.” Like the Tango Argentino, Tangos Gitanos roots lie in the way African and Caribbean music blended with Spanish music in 18th and 19th century Latin America. Similar to it’s South American cousin, Tango Gitano consists of a simple, easily varied harmonic and melodic structure over a four-count rhythm. Unlike other four-count patterns, the first beat is weak while the other three beats are strong. As Tangos became a part of flamenco in the 19th century, certain aspects of older flamenco forms were folded into it, including 12-count soleares letras re-shaped to fit the four count rhythmic pattern. Tangos of Granada shows traces of Moorish Zambras, while the Tango de Cádiz, Tanguillos, is a compound rhythm of triplets and duplets. As one might expect with such a maleable form, there is a wide range of Tangos associated with different artists and regions in Andalucía.

UFO sighting early this morning just west of the Twin Cities. mick was in Wright County picking up a Mesa Boogie when aliens contacted him telepathically and asked him to tell people of Earth that Trump is a escaped alien renegade and will soon be recaptured and returned to his planet COVID.

This object was featured in a previous Hubble photo release, but now new processing techniques have been applied, bringing out fine details of the nebula’s delicate threads and filaments of ionised gas. To create this colourful image, observations taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument through 5 different filters were used. The new post-processing methods have further enhanced details of emissions from doubly ionised oxygen (seen here in blues), ionised hydrogen and ionised nitrogen (seen here in reds). The Veil Nebula lies around 2100 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus (The Swan), making it a relatively close neighbour in astronomical terms. Only a small portion of the nebula was captured in this image. The Veil Nebula is the visible portion of the nearby Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant formed roughly 10 000 years ago by the death of a massive star. The Veil Nebula’s progenitor star — which was 20 times the mass of the Sun — lived fast and died young, ending its life in a cataclysmic release of energy. Despite this stellar violence, the shockwaves and debris from the supernova sculpted the Veil Nebula’s delicate tracery of ionised gas — creating a scene of surprising astronomical beauty.

James Chambers OM (born 1 April 1948), known professionally as Jimmy Cliff, is a Jamaican ska, rocksteady, reggae and soul musician, multi-instrumentalist, singer, and actor. He is the only living musician to hold the Order of Merit, the highest honour that can be granted by the Jamaican government for achievements in the arts and sciences.

Cliff is best known among mainstream audiences for songs such as “Wonderful World, Beautiful People”, “Many Rivers to Cross“, “You Can Get It If You Really Want“, “The Harder They Come“, “Reggae Night“, and “Hakuna Matata“, and his covers of Cat Stevens‘s “Wild World” and Johnny Nash‘s “I Can See Clearly Now” from the film Cool Runnings. He starred in the film The Harder They Come, which helped popularize reggae across the world, and Club Paradise. Cliff was one of five performers inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.

Jimmy Cliff was born James Chambers on 1 April 1948 in Saint James, Colony of Jamaica. He began writing songs while still at primary school in St. James, listening to a neighbour’s sound system. When Chambers was 14, his father took him to Kingston, where he would take up the stage name Jimmy Cliff.

Gilbert Scott-Heron (April 1, 1949 – May 27, 2011 Chicago) was an American soul and jazz poet, musician, and author, known primarily for his work as a spoken-word performer in the 1970s and 1980s. His collaborative efforts with musician Brian Jackson featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues, and soul, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron. His own term for himself was “bluesologist”, which he defined as “a scientist who is concerned with the origin of the blues.” He is considered by many to be the first rapper ever.

His music, most notably on the albums Pieces of a Man and Winter in America in the early 1970s, influenced and foreshadowed later African-American music genres such as hip hop and neo soul. His recording work received much critical acclaim, especially for “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised“. AllMusic‘s John Bush called him “one of the most important progenitors of rap music,” stating that “his aggressive, no-nonsense street poetry inspired a legion of intelligent rappers while his engaging songwriting skills placed him square in the R&B charts later in his career.”

Scott-Heron remained active until his death, and in 2010 released his first new album in 16 years, entitled I’m New Here. A memoir he had been working on for years up to the time of his death, The Last Holiday, was published posthumously in January 2012. Scott-Heron received a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. He also is included in the exhibits at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) that officially opened on September 24, 2016, on the National Mall, and in an NMAAHC publication, Dream a World Anew.

Jorge López Ruiz ( La Plata , April 1, 1935- Buenos Aires , December 11, 2018) was an Argentine musician , composer and double bass performer, performer and arranger of various genres of popular music, especially jazz. .His work includes El grito (1967) and Bronca Buenos Aires (1970), banned by the military dictatorship . In popular music he has been arranger and composer of themes for Sandro , Leonardo Favio and Piero , among others.

He was a regular participant in a series of meetings of improvisation and casual folk experimentation house Eduardo Lagos , named humorously by Hugo Diaz as folkloréishons , which in the manner of the jam sessions of the jazz , used to gather Lagos, Astor Piazzolla and Diaz, with other musicians such as López Ruiz himself, Oscar Cardozo Ocampo , Domingo Cura and Oscar López Ruiz , among others. With his quartet he was awarded by the Konex Foundation as one of the 5 best jazz groups of the decade in Argentina.

Irving Sidney “Duke” Jordan (April 1, 1922 – August 8, 2006) was an American jazz pianist.

Jordan was born in New York and raised in Brooklyn where he attended Boys High School. An imaginative and gifted pianist, Jordan was a regular member of Charlie Parker‘s quintet during 1947–48, which also featured Miles Davis. He participated in Parker’s Dial sessions in late 1947 that produced “Dewey Square”, “Bongo Bop”, “Bird of Paradise”, and the ballad “Embraceable You“. These performances are featured on Charlie Parker on Dial.

Lucille Bogan (April 1, 1897 – August 10, 1948) was an American classic female blues singer and songwriter, among the first to be recorded. She also recorded under the pseudonym Bessie Jackson. Music critic Ernest Borneman noted that Bogan was one of “the big three of the blues”, along with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Many of Bogan’s songs have been recorded by later blues and jazz musicians. Many of her songs were sexually explicit, and she was generally considered to have been a dirty bluesmusician.

She was born Lucille Anderson in Amory, Mississippi, and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1914, she married Nazareth Lee Bogan, a railwayman, and gave birth to a son, Nazareth Jr., in either 1915 or 1916. She later divorced Bogan and married James Spencer, who was 22 years younger than her.

Frederick William Green (March 31, 1911 – March 1, 1987) was an American swing jazz guitarist who played rhythm guitar with the Count Basie Orchestra for almost fifty years.

Green was born in Charleston, South Carolina on March 31, 1911. He was exposed to music from an early age, and learned the banjo before picking up the guitar in his early teenage years. A friend of his father by the name of Sam Walker taught a young Freddie to read music, and keenly encouraged him to keep up his guitar playing. Walker gave Freddie what was perhaps his first gig, playing with a local community group of which Walker was an organizer. Another member of the group was William “Cat” Anderson, who went on to become an established trumpeter, working with notable figures such as Duke Ellington.

Red Norvo (born Kenneth Norville, March 31, 1908 – April 6, 1999) was an American musician, one of jazz‘s early vibraphonists, known as “Mr. Swing”. He helped establish the xylophone, marimba, and vibraphone as jazz instruments. His recordings included “Dance of the Octopus”, “Bughouse”, “Knockin’ on Wood”, “Congo Blues”, and “Hole in the Wall”.

Red Norvo was born in Beardstown, Illinois, United States. His career began in Chicago with a band called “The Collegians” in 1925. He played with many other bands, including an all-marimba band on the vaudeville circuit, and the bands of Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, and Woody Herman. He recorded with Mildred Bailey (his wife), Billie Holiday, Dinah Shore and Frank Sinatra. Norvo and his wife were known as “Mr. and Mrs. Swing.” He appeared as himself in the film Screaming Mimi (1958) and in Ocean’s 11, accompanying Dean Martin while he sang “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?“.

Major Merriweather (March 31, 1905 – February 23, 1953), better known as Big Maceo Merriweather, was an American pianist and blues singer. He was mainly active in Chicago through the 1940s.

Born in Newnan, Georgia, he was a self-taught pianist. In the 1920s, he moved to Detroit, Michigan, to begin his music career. He moved to Chicago in 1941, where he made the acquaintance of Tampa Red. Red introduced him to Lester Melrose of RCA Victor and its subsidiary label Bluebird Records, who signed Merriweather to a recording contract.

His first record was “Worried Life Blues” (1941), which became a blues hit and remained his signature piece. The song had elements derived from Sleepy John Estes‘ “Someday, Baby”. Other classic piano blues recordings followed, such as “Chicago Breakdown”, “Texas Stomp”, and “Detroit Jump“. His piano style was developed from players like Leroy Carr and Roosevelt Sykes and from the boogie-woogie style of Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons. He in turn influenced other musicians, such as Little Johnny Jones and Henry Gray, the latter of whom credited Merriweather with helping him launch his career as a blues pianist.

Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March [O.S. 21 March] 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Brandenburg Concertos and the Goldberg Variations, and for vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival, he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time.

The Bach family already counted several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician in Eisenach. After being orphaned at age 10, he lived for five years with his eldest brother Johann Christoph, after which he continued his musical formation in Lüneburg. From 1703 he was back in Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant churches in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen and, for longer stretches of time, at courts in Weimar, where he expanded his organ repertory, and Köthen, where he was mostly engaged with chamber music. From 1723 he was employed as Thomaskantor (cantor at St. Thomas) in Leipzig. He composed music for the principal Lutheran churches of the city, and for its university’s student ensemble Collegium Musicum. From 1726 he published some of his keyboard and organ music. In Leipzig, as had happened during some of his earlier positions, he had difficult relations with his employer, a situation that was little remedied when he was granted the title of court composer by his sovereign, Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, in 1736. In the last decades of his life he reworked and extended many of his earlier compositions. He died of complications after eye surgery in 1750 at the age of 65.

Bach enriched established German styles through his mastery of counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organisation, and his adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France. Bach’s compositions include hundreds of cantatas, both sacred and secular. He composed Latin church music, Passions, oratorios, and motets. He often adopted Lutheran hymns, not only in his larger vocal works, but for instance also in his four-part chorales and his sacred songs. He wrote extensively for organ and for other keyboard instruments. He composed concertos, for instance for violin and for harpsichord, and suites, as chamber music as well as for orchestra. Many of his works employ the genres of canon and fugue.

Throughout the 18th century Bach was primarily valued as an organist, while his keyboard music, such as The Well-Tempered Clavier, was appreciated for its didactic qualities. The 19th century saw the publication of some major Bach biographies, and by the end of that century all of his known music had been printed. Dissemination of scholarship on the composer continued through periodicals (and later also websites) exclusively devoted to him, and other publications such as the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV, a numbered catalogue of his works) and new critical editions of his compositions. His music was further popularised through a multitude of arrangements, including, for instance, the Air on the G String, and of recordings, such as three different box sets with complete performances of the composer’s oeuvre marking the 250th anniversary of his death.