Clouds of stardust drift through this deep skyscape, across the Perseus molecular cloud some 850 light-years away. Dusty nebulae reflecting light from embedded young stars stand out in the nearly 2 degree wide telescopic field of view. With a characteristic bluish color reflection nebula NGC 1333 is at center, vdB 13 at top right, with rare yellowish reflection nebula vdB 12 near the top of the frame. Stars are forming in the molecular cloud, though most are obscured at visible wavelengths by the pervasive dust. Still, hints of contrasting red emission from Herbig-Haro objects, the jets and shocked glowing gas emanating from recently formed stars, are evident in NGC 1333. The chaotic environment may be similar to one in which our own Sun formed over 4.5 billion years ago. At the estimated distance of the Perseus molecular cloud, this cosmic scene would span about 40 light-years.

Andy Narell (born March 18, 1954) is an American jazz steel pannist.

Narell took up the steelpan at a young age in Queens, New York. His father, who was a social worker, had started a program of steelpan playing for at-risk youth at the Jewish philanthropic Education Alliance in Lower East Side Manhattan using two sets of pans made by Rupert Sterling, a native of Antigua. Beginning in 1962, Andy, his brother Jeff, and three others boys played on a third set of Sterling-made pans in the basement of the Narell house in the Whitestone neighborhood of Queens, calling themselves the Steel Bandits. The band was a novelty steelpan act that played concerts and appeared on television shows, including I’ve Got a Secret in 1963.

The band played Carnegie Hall and at the National Music Festival of Trinidad. Murray Narell invited Ellie Mannette in 1964 to expand steelpan activities in New York City and convinced him to come in 1967. Mannette taught the Narell boys more technique, and they played on improved pans tuned by Mannette.

Narell studied music at the University of California, Berkeley and played piano with the University of California Jazz Ensembles under the direction of David W. Tucker. He graduated in 1973.

He started the record label Hip Pocket and released his first solo album, Hidden Treasures, in 1979. With an interest in Caribbean music, Latin jazz, and rhythm and blues, he joined the Caribbean Jazz Project in 1995 with Dave Samuels and Paquito D’Rivera.

He has performed with Montreux, Sakésho, Calypsociation, and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. He composed and arranged music for Trinidad‘s national steelband competition, Panorama. Narell performed in South Africa in 1999 in front of a crowd of 80,000 people.

William Richard Frisell (born March 18, 1951) is an American guitarist, composer and arranger. One of the leading guitarists in jazz since the late 1980s, Frisell came to prominence as a stalwart for ECM Records. He went on to work in a variety of contexts, notably as a member of the New York City Downtown Scene where he formed a long partnership with John Zorn. He was also a longtime member of Paul Motian‘s groups from the early 1980s until Motian’s death in 2011. Since 2000, Frisell’s eclectic output as a bandleader has emphasized folk, country music, and Americana.

Frisell was born in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, but spent most of his youth in the Denver, Colorado, area. He studied clarinet with Richard Joiner of the Denver Symphony Orchestra as a youth, but by his teens was more interested in guitar. He graduated from Denver East High School, and went to the University of Northern Colorado to study music. There he studied with guitarist Johnny Smith, though Frisell later reported the class effectively became private lessons from Smith because “it was too much for everyone else–they didn’t want to be learning scales and inversions.”

His original guitar teacher in the Denver-Aurora metropolitan area was Dale Bruning, with whom Frisell released the 2000 duo album Reunion. After graduating from Northern Colorado, Frisell went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied with Jon Damian and Jim Hall.

Wilson Pickett (March 18, 1941 – January 19, 2006) was an American singer and songwriter. A major figure in the development of American soul music, Pickett recorded over 50 songs which made the US R&B charts, many of which crossed over to the Billboard Hot 100. Among his best-known hits are “In the Midnight Hour” (which he co-wrote), “Land of 1,000 Dances“, “Mustang Sally“, and “Funky Broadway“. Pickett was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, in recognition of his impact on songwriting and recording. Pickett was born March 18, 1941 in Prattville, Alabama, and sang in Baptist church choirs. He was the fourth of 11 children and called his mother “the baddest woman in my book,” telling historian Gerri Hirshey: “I get scared of her now. She used to hit me with anything, skillets, stove wood … [one time I ran away and] cried for a week. Stayed in the woods, me and my little dog.” Pickett eventually left to live with his father in Detroit in 1955. Pickett died on January 19, 2006, two months short of his 65th birthday. He had been suffering from health problems for the last year of his life and had spent considerable time in the hospital. He died at a hospital near his home in Reston, Virginia after suffering a heart attack.

Lester J. Kinsey Jr., (March 18, 1927 – April 3, 2001) known as Big Daddy Kinsey, was an American Chicago blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player. He was born near Pleasant Grove, Mississippi. He grew up playing gospel music; his father was a pastor in the Church of God in Christ and disapproved of blues music. However, Kinsey started playing guitar at parties in Mississippi, before moving in 1944 to Gary, Indiana, where he worked in a steel mill. He married and served in the military before returning to work in Gary and raising a family.

In the late 1950s, he started a family band, Big Daddy Kinsey and His Fabulous Sons, with his children, but it dissolved in the early 1970s, and Lester Kinsey began playing harmonica with a local band, the Soul Brothers. His second son, guitarist Donald Kinsey, played in Albert King‘s band in the 1970s, and later joined Bob Marley and the Wailers, but in 1984 rejoined his father and brothers Ralph and Kenneth to form The Kinsey Report. The band featured Lester “Big Daddy” Kinsey as slide guitarist and harmonica player. They signed for the Rooster Blues label, and in 1985 with Alligator Records, becoming “one of the hottest attractions in contemporary blues”. In the early 1990s Kinsey recorded the album I Am the Blues, featuring such musicians as Buddy Guy, James Cotton, and Pinetop Perkins.

The California Nebula (NGC 1499) is an emission nebula located in the constellation Perseus. It is so named because it appears to resemble the outline of the US State of California on long exposure photographs. It is almost 2.5° long on the sky and, because of its very low surface brightness, it is extremely difficult to observe visually. It can be observed with a Hα filter (isolates the Hα line at 656 nm) or Hβ filter (isolates the Hβ line at 486 nm) in a rich-field telescope under dark skies. It lies at a distance of about 1,000 light years from Earth.

John Benson Sebastian (born March 17, 1944) is an American singer/songwriter, guitarist, harmonicist, and autoharpist. He is best known as a founder of The Lovin’ Spoonful, as well as his impromptu appearance at the Woodstock festival in 1969 and a US No. 1 hit in 1976, “Welcome Back.” The Lovin’ Spoonful was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. olk-rock and pop with elements of blues, country, and jug band music, became part of the American response to the British Invasion, and was noted for such hits as “Do You Believe in Magic“, “Summer in the City“, “Daydream“, “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?“, “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice“, “Darling Be Home Soon“, “Jug Band Music”, “Rain on the Roof”, “Nashville Cats”, and “Six O’Clock”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rts7Qdew3HE

Paul Horn (March 17, 1930 – June 29, 2014) was an American flautist, saxophonist, composer and producer. He became a pioneer of world and new age music with his 1969 album Inside.

Horn was born on March 17, 1930 in New York City and has Jewish roots through his father. The family moved to Washington, D.C. when Horn was four. He took up the piano at age four, followed by the clarinet at 12. While in Washington, D.C., Horn attended Theodore Roosevelt High Schooland the Washington College of Music. In the summer of 1942, Horn worked as an usher at the Earl Theatre to buy a clarinet. He studied the clarinet and flute at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, earning a bachelor’s degree. In June 1953, Horn gained a master’s from the Manhattan School of Music.

Moving to Los Angeles he played with Chico Hamilton‘s quintet from 1956 to 1958 and became an established West Coast session player. He played on the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s Suite Thursday and worked with Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett and others. He scored the 1959 animated television series Clutch Cargo.

In 1960 Horn recorded for Fantasy Records with Latin Jazz vibraphonist Cal Tjader (with drummers Willie Bobo and Mongo Santamaria) for the album Latino! (originally released in 1962 and later re-released with the same title in 1992). He appears playing with his band in the opening scene at the jazz club in Curtis Harrington‘s film Night Tide.

Horn’s Quintet produced jazz albums for Columbia and RCA Victor up until 1966. During this period, he was the subject of a David Wolper television documentary Portrait of a Jazz Musician.

Horn became a practitioner of transcendental meditation. He attended training at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi‘s ashram along with The Beatles on their 1968 trip to India. Following his experiences in India, Horn’s recordings moved from jazz to world and new-age music.

Nathaniel Adams Coles (March 17, 1919 – February 15, 1965), known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American singer and jazz pianist. He recorded over 100 songs that became hits on the pop charts. His trio was the model for small jazz ensembles that followed. Cole also acted in films and on television and performed on Broadway. He was the first African-American man to host an American television series. He was the father of singer-songwriter Natalie Cole (1950–2015).

Nathaniel Adams Coles was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 17, 1919. He had three brothers: Eddie (1910–1970), Ike (1927–2001), and Freddy (1931–2020), and a half-sister, Joyce Coles. Each of the Cole brothers pursued careers in music. When Nat King Cole was four years old, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where his father, Edward Coles, became a Baptist minister. In September 1964, Cole began to lose weight and he experienced back problems. He collapsed with pain after performing at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. In December, he was working in San Francisco when he was finally persuaded by friends to seek medical help. A malignant tumor in an advanced state of growth on his left lung was observed on a chest X-ray. Cole, who had been a heavy cigarette smoker, had lung cancer and was expected to have only months to live. Against his doctors’ wishes, Cole carried on his work and made his final recordings between December 1 and 3 in San Francisco, with an orchestra conducted by Ralph Carmichael. The music was released on the album L-O-V-E shortly before his death. His daughter noted later that he did this to assure the welfare of his family. On Valentine’s Day, Cole and his wife briefly left St. John’s to drive by the sea. He died at the hospital early in the morning of February 15, 1965.

Lovie Lee (March 17, 1909 – May 23, 1997) was an American electric blues pianist and singer. He is best known for his work accompanying Muddy Waters. He also recorded a solo album, in 1992. He was the “adoptive stepfather” of the bluesman Carey Bell and thus the “grandfather” of Lurrie Bell.

He was born Edward Lee Watson in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and grew up in Meridian, Mississippi. He taught himself to play the piano and began performing in various churches and at rodeos and vaudeville shows. He had already acquired the nickname Lovie from a doting aunt. He found part-time employment playing with the Swinging Cats in the early 1950s. The group included Carey Bell, who Lee took under his “fatherly” protection, and together they moved to Chicago, in September 1956. Lee worked during the day in a woodworking factory, and for many years played in the evening in numerous Chicago blues nightclubs, including Porter’s Lounge. He was well known around Chicago for his blues piano playing. He later worked as an upholsterer, but he kept together his backing band, the Sensationals.

In the constellation of the swan near the nebula of the pelican lies the gas cloud of the butterfly next to a star known as the hen. That star, given the proper name Sadr, is just to the right of the featured frame, but the central Butterfly Nebula, designated IC 1318, is shown in high resolution. The intricate patterns in the bright gas and dark dust are caused by complex interactions between interstellar winds, radiation pressures, magnetic fields, and gravity. The featured telescopic view captures IC 1318‘s characteristic emission from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms mapped to the red, green, and blue hues of the popular Hubble Palette. The portion of the Butterfly Nebula pictured spans about 100 light years and lies about 4000 light years away.

Frederick Neil (March 16, 1936 – July 7, 2001) was an American folk singer-songwriter active in the 1960s and early 1970s. He did not achieve commercial success as a performer and is mainly known through other people’s recordings of his material – particularly “Everybody’s Talkin’“, which became a hit for Harry Nilsson after it was used in the film Midnight Cowboy in 1969. Though highly regarded by contemporary folk singers, he was reluctant to tour and spent much of the last 30 years of his life assisting with the preservation of dolphins.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in St. Petersburg, Florida, Neil was exposed to music at an early age, travelling around the US with his father, who was a representative for Wurlitzer jukeboxes. Neil was one of the singer-songwriters who worked out of New York City’s Brill Building, a center for music industry offices and professional songwriters. While composing at the Brill Building for other artists, Neil also recorded six mostly rockabilly-pop singles for different labels as a solo artist. He wrote songs that were recorded by early rock and roll artists such as Buddy Holly (“Come Back Baby” 1958) and Roy Orbison (“Candy Man” 1961).

Minoru Miki (三木 稔 Miki Minoru; 16 March 1930 – 8 December 2011) was a Japanese composer and artistic director, particularly known for his promotional activities in favor of Japanese (as well as Chinese and Korean) traditional instruments and some of their performers.

His vast catalogue, where aforementioned traditional instruments figure profusely either solo or in various types of ensemble with or without Western instruments, demonstrates large stylistic and formal diversity. It includes operas and several types of stage music as well as orchestral, concerto, chamber and solo music, and music for films. Miki was probably the second best known Japanese composer overseas after Tōru Takemitsu. He was a pioneer in the composition of contemporary classical music for large ensembles of traditional Japanese musical instruments. In 1964 he founded the Nihon Ongaku Shūdan (Pro Musica Nipponia ensemble), also known as Ensemble Nipponia, for which he has composed extensively.

Thomas Lee Flanagan (March 16, 1930 – November 16, 2001) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He grew up in Detroit, initially influenced by such pianists as Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, and Nat King Cole, and then by the newer bebop musicians. Within months of moving to New York in 1956, he had recorded with Miles Davis and on Sonny Rollins‘ landmark Saxophone Colossus. Recordings under various leaders, including the historically important Giant Steps of John Coltrane, and The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery, continued well into 1962, when he became vocalist Ella Fitzgerald‘s full-time accompanist. He worked with Fitzgerald for three years until 1965, and then in 1968 returned to be her pianist and musical director, this time for a decade.

After leaving Fitzgerald in 1978, Flanagan then attracted praise for the elegance of his playing, which was principally in trio settings when under his own leadership. In his 45-year recording career, he recorded more than three dozen albums under his own name and more than 200 as a sideman. By the time of his death, he was one of the most widely admired jazz pianists and had influenced both his contemporaries and later generations of players.

Flanagan was born in Conant Gardens, Detroit, Michigan, on March 16, 1930. He was the youngest of six children – five boys and a girl. His parents were both originally from Georgia. His father, Johnson Sr, was a postman, and his mother, Ida Mae, worked in the garment industry.

At the age of six, Flanagan’s parents gave him a clarinet for Christmas. He learned to read music from playing the clarinet, but within a few years he preferred the piano. The family had a piano in the house, and Flanagan received lessons from one of his brothers, Johnson, and Gladys Wade Dillard, who also taught Kirk Lightsey and Barry Harris. Flanagan graduated from Northern High School, which he attended with other future musicians, including saxophonist Sonny Red.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0lY3JuyN7k