Eddie Henderson (born October 26, 1940) is an American jazz trumpet and flugelhorn player. He came to prominence in the early 1970s as a member of pianist Herbie Hancock‘s Mwandishi band, going on to lead his own electric/fusion groups through the decade. Henderson earned his medical degree and worked a parallel career as a psychiatrist and musician, turning back to acoustic jazz by the 1990s.

Henderson was born in New York City on October 26, 1940. At the age of nine he was given an informal lesson by Louis Armstrong, and he continued to study the instrument as a teenager in San Francisco, where he grew up, after his family moved there in 1954, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Charles Daly Barnet (October 26, 1913 – September 4, 1991) was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and bandleader.

His major recordings were “Skyliner”, “Cherokee“, “The Wrong Idea”, “Scotch and Soda”, “In a Mizz”, and “Southland Shuffle”.

Barnet was born in New York City, the son of Charline (Daly) and Willard Barnet. His parents divorced when he was two, and he was raised by his mother and her grandparents. His grandfather was Charles Frederick Daly, a vice-president for the New York Central Railroad, banker, and businessman.

Barnet attended boarding schools, both in the New York and Chicago areas. He learned to play piano and saxophone as a child. He often left school to listen to music and to try to gain work as a musician. Although his family wanted him to become a lawyer, he chose to be a musician instead.

Bassam Saba (26 October 1958 – 4 December 2020) was a Lebanese musician and a promoter of Arabic music in the west. He was a co-founder of the New York Arabic Orchestra and the director of Lebanon’s national conservatory of music. He died of complications from COVID-19 in Beirut, Lebanon on December 4, 2020.

Saba was born on 26 October 1958, in Tripoli, Lebanon. His father, Antoine Saba, worked for an oil company. His mother, Delena Saba, was a homemaker. His family was musical, and his older siblings taught him to play the nay. At the outset of the Lebanese Civil War in 1976 he went to Paris to study music at the Conservatoire Municipal des Gobelins in Paris, where he earned his BA in Western Classical Music and Flute Performance, and the Gnessin School in Moscow, where he received a master’s degree in Western Flute Performance and Music Education. He then moved to the United States and settled in Northport, New York.

Earl Cyril Palmer (October 25, 1924 – September 19, 2008) was an American drummer. Considered one of the inventors of rock and roll, he is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Palmer was one of the most prolific studio musicians of all time and played on thousands of recordings, including nearly all of Little Richard‘s hits, all of Fats Domino‘s hits, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” by the Righteous Brothers, and a long list of classic TV and film soundtracks. According to one obituary, “his list of credits read like a Who’s Who of American popular music of the last 60 years”.

Georges Bizet Alexandre César Léopold Bizet; 25 October 1838 – 3 June 1875) was a French composer of the Romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, which has become one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertoire.

During a brilliant student career at the Conservatoire de Paris, Bizet won many prizes, including the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1857. He was recognised as an outstanding pianist, though he chose not to capitalise on this skill and rarely performed in public. Returning to Paris after almost three years in Italy, he found that the main Parisian opera theatres preferred the established classical repertoire to the works of newcomers. His keyboard and orchestral compositions were likewise largely ignored; as a result, his career stalled, and he earned his living mainly by arranging and transcribing the music of others. Restless for success, he began many theatrical projects during the 1860s, most of which were abandoned. Neither of his two operas that reached the stage in this time—Les pêcheurs de perles and La jolie fille de Perth—were immediately successful.

After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, during which Bizet served in the National Guard, he had little success with his one-act opera Djamileh, though an orchestral suite derived from his incidental music to Alphonse Daudet‘s play L’Arlésienne was instantly popular. The production of his final opera, Carmen, was delayed because of fears that its themes of betrayal and murder would offend audiences. After its premiere on 3 March 1875, Bizet was convinced that the work was a failure; he died of a heart attack three months later, unaware that it would prove a spectacular and enduring success.

Bizet’s marriage to Geneviève Halévy was intermittently happy and produced one son. After his death, his work, apart from Carmen, was generally neglected. Manuscripts were given away or lost, and published versions of his works were frequently revised and adapted by other hands. He founded no school and had no obvious disciples or successors. After years of neglect, his works began to be performed more frequently in the 20th century. Later commentators have acclaimed him as a composer of brilliance and originality whose premature death was a significant loss to French musical theatre.

James Edward Heath (October 25, 1926 – January 19, 2020), nicknamed Little Bird, was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, arranger, and big band leader. He was the brother of bassist Percy Heath and drummer Albert Heath.

Heath was born in Philadelphia on October 25, 1926. His father, an auto mechanic, played the clarinet, performing on the weekends. His mother sang in a church choir. The family frequently played recordings of big band jazz groups around the house. Heath’s sister was a pianist, while his brothers were bassist Percy Heath (older) and drummer Albert Heath (his youngest sibling).

During World War II, Heath was rejected for the draft for being below the minimum weight.

Heath originally played alto saxophone. He earned the nickname “Little Bird” after his work for Howard McGhee and Dizzy Gillespie in the late 1940s, during which his playing displayed influences from Charlie Parker (Parker’s nickname was “Bird”). He then switched to tenor saxophone.

From late 1945 through most of 1946, he performed with the Nat Towles band. In 1946, he formed his own band, which was a fixture on the Philadelphia jazz scene until 1949. The band included John Coltrane, Benny Golson, Specs Wright, Cal Massey, Johnny Coles, Ray Bryant, and Nelson Boyd. Charlie Parker and Max Roach sat in on one occasion. The band performed at venues such as the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Although Heath recalls that the band recorded a few demos on acetate, it never released any recordings, and its arrangements were lost at a Chicago train station. The band dissolved in 1949 so that Heath could join Dizzy Gillespie’s band.

ddie Lang (born Salvatore Massaro, October 25, 1902 – March 26, 1933) was an American musician who is credited as the father of jazz guitar.During the 1920s, he gave the guitar a prominence it previously lacked as a solo instrument, as part of a band or orchestra, and as accompaniment for vocalists. He recorded duets with guitarists Lonnie Johnson and Carl Kress and jazz violinist Joe Venuti, and played rhythm guitar in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and was the favoured accompanist of Bing Crosby.

The son of an Italian-American instrument maker, Lang was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up with violinist Joe Venuti. His first instrument was violin when he was seven. He performed on violin in 1917 and became a member of a trio. In 1920, he dropped the violin for banjo and worked with Charlie Kerr, then Bert Estlow, Vic D’Ippolito, and Billy Lustig‘s Scranton Siren Orchestra. A few years later, he dropped the banjo for guitar when he became a member of the Mound City Blue Blowers led by Red McKenzie. He recorded one of the first solos in 1924 on “Deep 2nd Street Blues”. His performances with McKenzie’s band drew attention, and he found many jobs as a freelance guitarist. Before Lang, the guitar hadn’t been a prominent instrument in jazz bands and dance orchestras. Lang suffered from occasional laryngitis, chronic sore throat, and digestion problems. After a doctor recommended a tonsillectomy, Crosby urged Lang to have the operation. Assured that the operation was routine, Lang entered Park West Hospital in Manhattan, but he never awoke from the surgery. He died at the age of thirty in 1933. The cause of his death is uncertain.

Odean Pope (born October 24, 1938) is an American jazz tenor saxophonist

Pope was raised in Philadelphia, where he learned from Ray Bryant while young. Early in his career, at Philadelphia’s Uptown Theater, Pope played behind a number of noted rhythm and blues artists including James Brown, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder.

He played briefly in the 1960s with Jimmy McGriff, and late in the 1960s he began working with Max Roach, including on tours of Europe in 1967-68. He was a member of Philadelphia group Catalyst in the early and mid-1970s, and assembled the Saxophone Choir, which consists of nine saxophones and a rhythm section (piano, bass and drums), in 1977. He became a regular member of Roach’s quartet in 1979 and recorded extensively with him, in addition to numerous releases as a leader.

Willie James Mabon (October 24, 1925 – April 19, 1985) was an American R&B singer, songwriter and pianist, who had two number one hits on the BillboardR&B chart: “I Don’t Know” in 1952 and “I’m Mad” in 1953.

Mabon was born and brought up in the Hollywood district of Memphis, Tennessee. He moved to Chicago in 1942, by which time he had become known as a singer and pianist. He formed a group, the Blues Rockers, and in 1949 began recording for Aristocrat Records and then Chess Records.

His biggest success came in 1952 when his debut solo release, “I Don’t Know“, written by Cripple Clarence Lofton (who received no royalties), topped the BillboardR&B chart for eight weeks. It was one of the most popular releases of its era and was Chess’s biggest hit before the successes of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. It was also one of the first R&B hit records to be covered by a leading white artist, Tennessee Ernie Ford. Mabon’s original was played on Alan Freed‘s early radio shows and also sold well to white audiences, crossing over markets at the start of the rock-and-roll era.

Saunders Terrell (October 24, 1911 – March 11, 1986 Greensboro, GA), known as Sonny Terry, was an American Piedmont blues and folk musician, who was known for his energetic blues harmonica style, which frequently included vocal whoops and hollers and occasionally imitations of trains and fox hunts. Terry was born in Greensboro, Georgia. His father, a farmer, taught him to play basic blues harp as a youth. He sustained injuries to his eyes and went blind by the time he was 16, which prevented him from doing farm work, and was forced to play music in order to earn a living. Terry played “Campdown Races” to the plow horses which improved the efficiency of farming in the area. He began playing blues in Shelby, North Carolina. After his father died, he began playing with Piedmont blues–style guitarist Blind Boy Fuller. When Fuller died in 1941, Terry established a long-standing musical relationship with Brownie McGhee, and they recorded numerous songs together. The duo became well known among white audiences during the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s,  including for collaborations with Styve Homnick, Woody Guthrie and Moses Asch, producing classic recordings for Folkways Records (now Smithsonian/Folkways)

Gary Robert McFarland (October 23, 1933 – November 3, 1971 LA, CA)

was an American composer, arranger, vibraphonist and vocalist. He recorded for the jazz imprints Verveand Impulse! Records during the 1960s. Down Beat magazine said he made “one of the more significant contributors to orchestral jazz”. A 2015 review of a McFarland DVD documentary called him “one of the busiest New York jazz arrangers of the 1960s”. The review further stated that McFarland’s “ascendance coincided with the rise of bossa nova, and McFarland was adept at translating the mercurial song form into orchestrations. He wrote some beautiful orchestral settings for great soloists, yet wasn’t immune to commercial forces.”