This cloud-strewn new image of RCW 36 (or Gum 20) was captured by ESO’s Focal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph (FORS). It shows one of the sites of massive-star formation closest to our Solar System, about 2300 light-years away. Located in the constellation of Vela (The Sails), the RCW 36 emission nebula is only part of an even larger star formation complex, known as the Vela Molecular Ridge. Some areas in the clouds of RCW 36 are dense enough to block out background light, creating patches and wisps of inky black. Despite the dark appearance of these clouds, they are the only places in the Universe in which star formation occurs; clumps of molecular hydrogen and cosmic dust collapse and come together to form stars encircled by small families of planets, as in our own Solar System. FORS is mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, one of the world’s most advanced astronomical observatories. This image was selected as part of the ESO Cosmic Gems programme, an initiative that produces images of scientifically interesting and visually attractive objects using ESO telescopes for the purposes of education and public outreach. The programme makes use of telescope time that cannot be used for science observations. All data collected may also be suitable for scientific purposes, and are made available to astronomers through ESO’s science archive.

José Monje Cruz (5 December 1950 – 2 July 1992), better known by his stage name Camarón de la Isla (Spanish: Shrimp of the Island), was a Spanish Romani flamenco singer. Considered one of the all-time greatest flamenco singers, he was noted for his collaborations with Paco de Lucíaand Tomatito, and the three of them were of major importance to the revival of flamenco in the second half of the 20th century.

He was born in San Fernando, Cádiz, Spain, into a Romani family, the seventh of eight children. His mother was Juana Cruz Castro, a “Canastera”, literally a basket weaver, and meaning from a wandering roma family, and whose gift of singing was a strong early influence.

His father, Juan Luis Monje, was also a singer as well as a blacksmith, and had a forge where Camarón worked as a boy. His uncle José nicknamed him Camarón (Spanish for “Shrimp”) because he was blonde and fair skinned.

When his father died of asthma, while still very young, the family went through financial hardship. At the age of eight he began to sing at inns and bus stops with Rancapino to earn money. At sixteen, he won first prize at the Festival del Cante Jondo in Mairena de Alcor. Camarón then went to Madrid with Miguel de los Reyes and in 1968 became a resident artist at the Tablao Torres Bermejas where he remained for twelve years.

During his time at Tablao Torres Bermejas, he met Paco de Lucía, with whom he recorded nine albums between 1969 and 1977. The two toured extensively together during this period. As Paco de Lucía became more occupied with solo concert commitments, Camarón worked with the flamenco guitarist Tomatito.

John Weldon “J. J.” Cale (December 5, 1938 – July 26, 2013) was an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. Though he avoided the limelight, his influence as a musical artist has been widely acknowledged by figures such as Mark Knopfler, Neil Young and Eric Clapton, who described him as “one of the most important artists in the history of rock”. He is considered to be one of the originators of the Tulsa Sound, a loose genre drawing on blues, rockabilly, country, and jazz.

In 2008, Cale and Clapton received a Grammy Award for their album The Road to Escondido.

John Cale was born on December 5, 1938, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and graduated from Tulsa Central High School in 1956. As well as learning to play the guitar he began studying the principles of sound engineering while still living with his parents in Tulsa, where he built himself a recording studio. After graduation he was drafted into military service, studying at the Air Force Air Training Command in Rantoul, Illinois. Cale recalled, “I didn’t really want to carry a gun and do all that stuff so I joined the Air Force and what I did is I took technical training and that’s kind of where I learned a little bit about electronics.

Art Davis (December 5, 1934 – July 29, 2007) was a double-bassist, known for his work with Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, McCoy Tyner and Max Roach.

Davis was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he began studying the piano at the age of five, switched to tuba, and finally to bass while attending high school. He studied at Juilliard and Manhattan School of Music but graduated from Hunter College.

As a New York session musician, he recorded with many jazz and pop musicians and also in symphony orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic. He recorded with Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and John Coltrane among other jazz musicians. Art Davis was a professor at Orange Coast College.

Davis is also known for starting a legal case that led to blind auditions for orchestras.

Davis earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from New York University in 1982. He moved in 1986 to southern California, where he balanced his teaching and practicing of psychology with jazz performances.

Davis died on July 29, 2007 following a heart attack. He was survived by two sons and a daughter.

Richard Wayne Penniman (December 5, 1932 – May 9, 2020 Macon, GA), known as Little Richard, was an American musician, singer, and songwriter. He was an influential figure in popular music and culture for seven decades. Nicknamed “The Innovator, The Originator, and The Architect of Rock and Roll“, Richard’s most celebrated work dates from the mid-1950s, when his charismatic showmanship and dynamic music, characterized by frenetic piano playing, pounding back beat and raspy shouted vocals, laid the foundation for rock and roll. Richard’s innovative emotive vocalizations and uptempo rhythmic music also played a key role in the formation of other popular music genres, including soul and funk. He influenced numerous singers and musicians across musical genres from rock to hip hop; his music helped shape rhythm and blues for generations.

“Tutti Frutti” (1955), one of Richard’s signature songs, became an instant hit, crossing over to the pop charts in both the United States and overseas in the United Kingdom. His next hit single, “Long Tall Sally” (1956), hit No. 1 on the Billboard Rhythm and Blues Best-Sellers chart, followed by a rapid succession of fifteen more in less than three years. His performances during this period resulted in integration between White Americans and African Americans in his audience. In 1962, during a five-year period in which Richard abandoned rock and roll music for born again Christianity, concert promoter Don Arden persuaded him to tour Europe. During this time, Arden had the Beatles open for Richard on some tour dates, capitalizing on his popularity. Richard advised the Beatles on how to perform his songs and taught the band’s member Paul McCartney his distinctive vocalizations.

Richard is cited as one of the first crossover black artists, reaching audiences of all races. His music and concerts broke the color line, drawing blacks and whites together despite attempts to sustain segregation. Many of his contemporaries, including Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, recorded covers of his works. Taken by his music and style, and personally covering four of Richard’s songs on his own two breakthrough albums in 1956, Presley told Richard in 1969 that his music was an inspiration to him and that he was “the greatest”.

Richard was honored by many institutions. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of its first group of inductees in 1986. He was also inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation. In 2015, Richard received a Rhapsody & Rhythm Award from the National Museum of African American Music for his key role in the formation of popular music genres and helping to bring an end to the racial divide on the music charts and in concert in the mid-1950s changing American culture significantly. “Tutti Frutti” was included in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2010, which stated that his “unique vocalizing over the irresistible beat announced a new era in music”.

Alex or Aleck Miller (né Ford, possibly December 5, 1912 – May 24, 1965), known later in his career as Sonny Boy Williamson, was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter. He was an early and influential blues harp stylist who recorded successfully in the 1950s and 1960s. Miller used various names, including Rice Miller and Little Boy Blue, before calling himself Sonny Boy Williamson, which was also the name of a popular Chicago blues singer and harmonica player. To distinguish the two, Miller has been referred to as Sonny Boy Williamson II.

He first recorded with Elmore James on “Dust My Broom“. Some of his popular songs include “Don’t Start Me Talkin’“, “Help Me“, “Checkin’ Up on My Baby“, and “Bring It On Home“. He toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival and recorded with English rock musicians, including the Yardbirds, the Animals, and Jimmy Page. “Help Me” became a blues standard, and many blues and rock artists have recorded his songs.

Miller’s date of birth is disputed. In a spoken word performance called “The Story of Sonny Boy Williamson” that was later included in several compilations, Miller states that he was born in Glendora, Mississippi in 1897. A counter claim is made that he was born Alex Ford (pronounced “Aleck”) on the Sara Jones Plantation in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. Another claim is that he was born on December 5, 1899. David Evans, professor of music and an ethnomusicologist at the University of Memphis, claims to have found census records that Miller was born around 1912, being seven years old on February 2, 1920, the day of the census. However, it has been argued that a census record claim of age without a birth certificate is not a reliable proof, as census clerks often made mistakes, especially in rural towns where few people could read or write. Miller’s gravestone in or near Tutwiler, Mississippi, set up by record company owner Lillian McMurry twelve years after his death, gives his date of birth as March 11, 1908.

mick is performing his Bob Dylan medley and a Steel Pulse favorite.

A bright spiral galaxy of the northern sky, Messier 63 is nearby, about 30 million light-years distant toward the loyal constellation Canes Venatici. Also cataloged as NGC 5055, the majestic island universe is nearly 100,000 light-years across, about the size of our own Milky Way. Its bright core and majestic spiral arms lend the galaxy its popular name, The Sunflower Galaxy, while this exceptionally deep exposure also follows faint, arcing star streams far into the galaxy’s halo. Extending nearly 180,000 light-years from the galactic center the star streams are likely remnants of tidally disrupted satellites of M63. Other satellite galaxies of M63 can be spotted in this remarkable wide-field image, made with a small telescope, including five newly identified faint dwarf galaxies, which could contribute to M63’s star streams in the next few billion years.

Cassandra Wilson (born December 4, 1955) is an American jazz singer, songwriter, and producer from Jackson, Mississippi. She has been described by critic Gary Giddins as “a singer blessed with an unmistakable timbre and attack [who has] expanded the playing field” by incorporating blues, country, and folk music into her work.

Cassandra Wilson is the third and youngest child of Herman Fowlkes, Jr., a guitarist, bassist, and music teacher; and Mary McDaniel, an elementary school teacher who earned her PhD in education. Her ancestry includes Fon, Yoruba, Irish and Welsh. Between her mother’s love for Motown and her father’s dedication to jazz, Wilson’s parents sparked her early interest in music.

Wilson’s earliest formal musical education consisted of classical lessons; she studied piano from the age of six to thirteen and played clarinet in the middle school concert and marching bands. When she was tired of this training, she asked her father to teach her the guitar. Instead, he gave her a lesson in self-reliance, suggesting she study Mel Bay method books. Wilson explored guitar on her own, developing what she has described as an “intuitive” approach. During this time she began writing her own songs, adopting a folk style. She also appeared in the musical theater productions, including The Wizard of Oz as Dorothy, crossing racial lines in a recently desegregated school system.

Wilson attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University. She graduated with a degree in mass communications. Outside of the classroom, she spent her nights working with R&B, funk, and pop cover bands, also singing in local coffeehouses. The Black Arts Music Society, founded by John Reese and Alvin Fielder, provided her with her first opportunities to perform bebop. In 2007, Wilson received her PhD in Arts from Millsaps College.

In 1981, she moved to New Orleans for a position as assistant public affairs director for the local television station, WDSU. She did not stay long. Working with mentors who included elder statesmen Earl Turbinton, Alvin Batiste, and Ellis Marsalis, Wilson found encouragement to seriously pursue jazz performance and moved to New York City the following year.

Terence Woods (born 4 December 1947 in Dublin, Ireland) is an Irish folk musician, noted for playing the mandolin and cittern, but also plays acoustic and electric guitar, mandola, five-string banjo and concertina. He is also a singer and songwriter. He is known for his membership in such folk and folk-rock groups as The Pogues, Steeleye Span, Sweeney’s Men, The Bucks and, briefly, Dr. Strangely Strange and Dublin rock band Orphanage, with Phil Lynott, as well as in a duo/band with his then wife, Gay, billed initially as The Woods Band and later as Gay and Terry Woods. Woods has toured with The Pogues on their reunion concerts.

James Stanley Hall (December 4, 1930 – December 10, 2013) was an American jazz guitarist, composer and arranger.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Hall moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio during his childhood. Hall’s mother played the piano, his grandfather violin, and his uncle guitar. He began playing the guitar at the age of 10, when his mother gave him an instrument as a Christmas present. At 13 he heard Charlie Christian play on a Benny Goodman record, which he calls his “spiritual awakening”. As a teenager in Cleveland, he performed professionally, and also took up the double bass. Hall’s major influences since childhood were tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Paul Gonsalves, and Lucky Thompson. While he copied out solos by Charlie Christian, and later Barney Kessel, it was horn players from whom he took the lead. In 1955, Hall attended the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he majored in composition, studying piano and bass in addition to theory.

Edward Heywood Jr. (December 4, 1915 – January 3, 1989) was an American jazz pianist, popular in the 1940s and 1950s. Heywood was born in Atlanta, Georgia. His father, Eddie Heywood Sr., was also a jazz musician from the 1920s and provided him with training from the age of 12 as an accompanist playing in the pit band in a vaudeville theater in Atlanta, occasionally accompanying singers such as Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters. Heywood moved, first to New Orleans and then to Kansas City, when vaudeville began to be replaced by sound pictures.Heywood played with several popular jazz musicians such as Wayman Carver in 1932, Clarence Love from 1934 to 1937 and Benny Carter, who heard him in Kansas City playing with Clarence Love, from 1939 to 1940 after moving to New York City in 1938.

After starting his band, Heywood would occasionally do back-up for Billie Holiday in 1941. In 1943, Heywood took several classic solos on a Coleman Hawkins quartet date (including “The Man I Love“) and put together a sextet, including Doc Cheatham (tpt), Vic Dickenson (tb), Lem Davis (as), Al Lucas (b), and Jack Parker (d). After their version of “Begin the Beguine” became a hit in 1944, they had three successful years.“Begin the Beguine” sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc by the RIAA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSdmknZM9LY