Louis A. “Lou” Levy (March 5, 1928 – January 23, 2001) was an American jazz pianist Levy was born to Jewish parents in Chicago and started playing piano when he was twelve. His chief influences were Art Tatum and Bud Powell.

A professional at age nineteen, Levy played with Georgie Auld (1947 and later), Sarah Vaughan, Chubby Jackson (1947–1948), Boyd Raeburn, Woody Herman’s Second Herd (1948–1950), Tommy Dorsey (1950) and Flip Phillips. Levy left music for a few years in the early fifties and then returned to gain a strong reputation as an accompanist to singers, working with Peggy Lee (1955–1973), Ella Fitzgerald (1957–1962), June Christy, Anita O’Day and Pinky Winters. Levy also played with Dizzy Gillespie, Shorty Rogers, Stan Getz, Terry Gibbs, Benny Goodman, Supersax and most of the major West Coast players. Levy recorded as a leader for Nocturne (1954), RCA, Jubilee, Philips, Interplay (1977), and Verve. Levy died of a heart attack in Dana Point, California at the age of 72.

Wilbur Little (1928 in Parmele, North Carolina – 1987 in Amsterdam) was an American jazz bassist known for Hard bop and Post-bop.

Little originally played piano, but switched to bass after serving in the military. In 1949 he moved to Washington, DC, where he worked with “Sir” Charles Thompson among others. After that he was in J. J. Johnson‘s quintet from 1955 to 1958 and was also the bassist for the Tommy FlanaganTrio. He moved to the Netherlands in 1977 and lived there for the rest of his life.

Gene Rodgers (March 5, 1910, New York City – October 23, 1987, New York City) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. He is best known for being the pianist on Coleman Hawkins‘ famous 1939 recording of “Body and Soul“.

Born Eugene Ricardo Rodgers Jr, the eldest child of Eugene Ricardo Rodgers Sr (aka Eugene Richard Rodgers), and his wife Blanche Bona Cabey (both of whom were born in what was then the Danish West Indies / Danish Antilles, later the American Virgin Islands), he was named for his father. Gene had three younger siblings, Mildred (1914), Rowland (1918), and Genevieve (1920). Rodgers worked professionally from the mid-1920s, and in the next few years made recordings with Clarence Williams and King Oliver in addition to playing with Chick Webb and Teddy Hill. He started his own variety show in the 1930s, doing tours of Australia and England; while in the latter in 1936 he recorded with Benny Carter.

Upon his return he played with Coleman Hawkins (1939–40), Zutty Singleton, and Erskine Hawkins (1943). He did work in Hollywood in the 1940s, including an appearance in the film Sensations of 1945 with Cab Calloway and Dorothy Donegan. After this he worked mainly in New York, leading a trio for many years. He played with the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band in 1981-82.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PzJKwAn-O8

Farruca  is a form of flamenco music developed in the late 19th century. Classified as a cante chico, it is traditionally sung and danced by men. Its origin is traditionally associated with Galicia, a region in northern Spain.

An instrumental adaptation of the farruca was developed by guitarist Ramón Montoya and flamenco dancer Faíco in the 20th century. Others who stylized and expanded farruca include Antonio de Bilbao, Manolito la Rosa and El Batato. Although there are female flamenco dancers who exclusively danced farruca too (such as Rafaela Valverde “La Tanguera”), these female dancers originally danced the farruca wearing male clothing. Women dancers such as Carmen Amaya and Sara Baras have also created well-known versions of the dance.

Farruco is a way of calling the Franciscos and the Asturians in Andalusia. Farruco was also the name that people from Andalusia used to denominate people from Galicia, from where this song likely originates. In Flamenco, being mostly an oral tradition, the lyrics often give valuable hints about their origins, and Farruca lyrics undoubtedly allude to the Galicia region. Further proof can be established from the descending melody that is performed on the vowel ‘a’ at the end of each couplet and to close the “cante” (Spanish for song or singing), which in a certain way tends to imitate the Galician melos. Another feature of Farruca cante is the use of glossolalia, “con el tran-tran-tran-treiro”, which is reminiscent of the Galician region. It has to be stressed, though, that to this day its geographic origin has not been proven scientifically.

You can spot Mars in the evening sky tonight. Now home to the Perseverance rover, the Red Planet is presently wandering through the constellation Taurus, close on the sky to the Seven Sisters or Pleiades star cluster. In fact this deep, widefield view of the region captures Mars near its closest conjunction to the Pleiades on March 3. Below center, Mars is the bright yellowish celestial beacon only about 3 degrees from the pretty blue star cluster. Competing with Mars in color and brightness, Aldebaran is the alpha star of Taurus. The red giant star is toward the lower left edge of the frame, a foreground star along the line-of-sight to the moredistant Hyades star cluster. Otherwise too faint for your eye to see, the dark, dusty nebulae lie along the edge of the massive Perseus molecular cloud, with the striking reddish glow of NGC 1499, the California Nebula, at the upper right.

Jan Garbarek (born 4 March 1947) is a Norwegian jazz saxophonist, who is also active in classical music and world music.

Garbarek was born in Mysen, Norway, the only child of a former Polish prisoner of war, Czesław Garbarek, and a Norwegian farmer’s daughter. He grew up in Oslo, stateless until the age of seven, as there was no automatic grant of citizenship in Norway at the time. When he was 21, he married the author Vigdis Garbarek. He is the father of musician and composer Anja Garbarek.

Garbarek’s sound is one of the hallmarks of the ECM Records label, which has released virtually all of his recordings. His style incorporates a sharp-edged tone, long, keening, sustained notes, and generous use of silence. He began his recording career in the late 1960s, notably featuring on recordings by the American jazz composer George Russell (such as Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature). By 1973 he had turned his back on the harsh dissonances of avant-garde jazz, retaining only his tone from his previous approach. Garbarek gained wider recognition through his work with pianist Keith Jarrett‘s European Quartet which released the albums Belonging (1974), My Song (1977) and the live recordings Personal Mountains (1979), and Nude Ants (1979). He was also a featured soloist on Jarrett’s orchestral works Luminessence (1974) and Arbour Zena(1975).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4sQSWgkKjA

Bobby Shew (born March 4, 1941 Albuquerque, New Mexico) is an American jazz trumpet and flugelhorn player.

After leaving college in 1960, Shew was drafted into the U.S. Army and played trumpet with the NORAD band in Colorado Springs and on tour. After leaving the Army, Shew joined Tommy Dorsey‘s band and then played with the Woody Herman and then the Buddy Rich big bands in the mid-to-late 1960s. In 1972 Shew moved from Las Vegas to Los Angeles where he did much studio work as well as play with some of the top big bands of the era through the end of the 1970s: Akiyoshi/Tabackin, Bellson, Ferguson, and others. In addition to playing on several notable big band recordings starting in the 1960s, Shew recorded several albums as leader, starting with Debut in 1978.

Shew has mentored jazz musicians in New Mexico, and has led the Albuquerque Jazz Orchestra. He has taught a two-week workshop for high school students at the Skidmore Summer Jazz Institute in Saratoga Springs, New York, Shew also performs and teaches worldwide, including a two-week residency at the Graz University of Music in Austria in 2017. He has taught at leading European music schools in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, and also in Canada.

Zenzile Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 – 9 November 2008), nicknamed Mama Africa, was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, United Nations goodwill ambassador, and civil rights activist. Associated with musical genres including Afropop, jazz, and world music, she was an advocate against apartheid and white-minority government in South Africa.

Born in Johannesburg to Swazi and Xhosa parents, Makeba was forced to find employment as a child after the death of her father. She had a brief and allegedly abusive first marriage at the age of 17, gave birth to her only child in 1950, and survived breast cancer. Her vocal talent had been recognized when she was a child, and she began singing professionally in the 1950s, with the Cuban Brothers, the Manhattan Brothers, and an all-woman group, the Skylarks, performing a mixture of jazz, traditional African melodies, and Western popular music. In 1959, Makeba had a brief role in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa, which brought her international attention, and led to her performing in Venice, London, and New York City. In London, she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became a mentor and colleague. She moved to New York City, where she became immediately popular, and recorded her first solo album in 1960. Her attempt to return to South Africa that year for her mother’s funeral was prevented by the country’s government.

Makeba’s career flourished in the United States, and she released several albums and songs, her most popular being “Pata Pata” (1967). Along with Belafonte she received a Grammy Award for her 1965 album An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. She testified against the South African government at the United Nations and became involved in the civil rights movement. She married Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Black Panther Party, in 1968. As a result, she lost support among white Americans. The US government cancelled her visa while she was travelling abroad, leading her and Carmichael to move to Guinea. She continued to perform, mostly in African countries, including at several independence celebrations. She began to write and perform music more explicitly critical of apartheid; the 1977 song “Soweto Blues“, written by her former husband Hugh Masekela, was about the Soweto uprising. After apartheid was dismantled in 1990, Makeba returned to South Africa. She continued recording and performing, including a 1991 album with Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, and appeared in the 1992 film Sarafina!. She was named a UN goodwill ambassador in 1999, and campaigned for humanitarian causes. She died of a heart attack during a 2008 concert in Italy.

Makeba was among the first African musicians to receive worldwide recognition. She brought African music to a Western audience, and popularized the world music and Afropop genres. She also made popular several songs critical of apartheid, and became a symbol of opposition to the system, particularly after her right to return was revoked. Upon her death, former South African President Nelson Mandela said that “her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.”

Willie Johnson (March 4, 1923 – February 26, 1995) was an American electric blues guitarist. He is best known as the principal guitarist in Howlin’ Wolf‘s band from 1948 to 1953. His raucous, distorted guitar playing is prominent on Howlin’ Wolf’s Memphis recordings during 1951–1953, including the hit song “How Many More Years” (recorded May 1951). In 2017, Johnson was posthumously inducted in to the Blues Hall of Fame. Willie Lee Johnson was born in Senatobia, Mississippi. As the guitarist in the first band led by Howlin’ Wolf, he appeared on most of Wolf’s recordings between 1951 and 1953. He provided the slightly jazzy yet raucous guitar sound that was the signature of all of Wolf’s Memphis recordings. Johnson also performed and recorded with other blues artists in the Memphis area, including pianist Willie Love, Willie Nix, Junior Parker, Roscoe Gordon, Bobby “Blue” Bland and others.

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (UK: /vɪˈvældi/, US: /vɪˈvɑːldi, –ˈvɔːl-/;Italian: [anˈtɔːnjo ˈluːtʃo viˈvaldi] ; 4 March 1678 – 28 July 1741) was an ItalianBaroque composer, virtuoso violinist, teacher, impresario, and Roman Catholic priest. Born in Venice, the capital of the Venetian Republic, Vivaldi is regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe, being paramount in the development of Johann Sebastian Bach‘s instrumental music. He composed many instrumental concertos, for the violin and a variety of other musical instruments, as well as sacred choral works and more than forty operas. His best-known work is a series of violin concertos known as the Four Seasons.

Many of his compositions were written for the all-female music ensemble of the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for abandoned children. Vivaldi had worked there as a Catholic priest for 18 months and was employed there from 1703 to 1715 and from 1723 to 1740. Vivaldi also had some success with expensive stagings of his operas in Venice, Mantua and Vienna. After meeting the Emperor Charles VI, Vivaldi moved to Vienna, hoping for royal support. However, the Emperor died soon after Vivaldi’s arrival, and Vivaldi himself died in poverty less than a year later.

After almost two centuries of decline, Vivaldi’s music underwent a revival in the early 20th century, with much scholarly research devoted to his work. Many of Vivaldi’s compositions, once thought lost, have been rediscovered – in one case as recently as 2006. His music remains widely popular in the present day and is regularly played all over the world.

Image obtained with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the spiral galaxy observed by the European Commissioner for Science and Research, Janez Potocnik, when at Paranal. NGC 134 is a barred spiral with its spiral arms loosely wrapped around a bright, bar-shaped central region. The red features lounging along its spiral arms are glowing clouds of hot gas in which stars are forming, so-called HII regions. The galaxy also shows prominent dark lanes of dust across the disc, obscuring part of the galaxy’s starlight. The image is a colour composite based on data obtained in the B, V, R, and H- filters with the FORS2 instrument attached to Antu, UT1 of the VLT. During his stay on Paranal, the Commissioner, together with the observatory staff, prepared the observations of this Galaxy. At night, Janez Potocnik initiated these observations, and checked the quality of the images as they appeared on the control screens. Because the high-sensitivity detectors used on the VLT measure only the intensity of the light reaching their pixels, the colour information is acquired by taking a sequence of images through different coloured filters. Consequently, the Commissioner could not immediately see the attached image, but only black-and-white version of it. The final colour processing was done by Haennes Heyer and Henri Boffin, with input from Yuri Beletsky (all ESO).

James Emory Garrison (March 3, 1934 – April 7, 1976) was an American jazz double bassist. He is best remembered for his association with John Coltrane from 1961 to 1967.

Garrison was raised in both Miami, Florida and Philadelphia where he learned to play bass. Garrison came of age in the 1950s Philadelphia jazzscene, which included fellow bassists Reggie Workman and Henry Grimes, pianist McCoy Tyner and trumpeter Lee Morgan. Between 1957 and 1962, Garrison played and recorded with trumpeter Kenny Dorham; clarinetist Tony Scott; drummer Philly Joe Jones; and saxophonists Bill Barron, Lee Konitz, and Jackie McLean, as well as Curtis Fuller, Benny Golson, Lennie Tristano, and Pharoah Sanders, among others. In 1961, he recorded with Ornette Coleman, appearing on Coleman’s albums Ornette on Tenor and The Art of the Improvisors. He also worked with Walter Bishop, Jr. and Cal Massey during the early years of his career.

He formally joined Coltrane’s quartet in 1962, replacing Workman. The long trio blues “Chasin’ the Trane” is one of his first recorded performances with Coltrane and Elvin Jones. Garrison performed on many Coltrane recordings, including A Love Supreme. In concert with Coltrane, Garrison would often play unaccompanied improvised solos, sometimes as song introductions prior to the other musicians joining in. After John Coltrane’s death, Garrison worked and recorded with Alice Coltrane, Hampton Hawes, Archie Shepp, Clifford Thornton and groups led by Elvin Jones.

Garrison also worked with Ornette Coleman during the 1960s, first recording with him in 1961 on Ornette on Tenor. He and Elvin Jones recorded with Coleman in 1968, and have been credited with eliciting more forceful playing than usual from Coleman on the albums New York Is Now! and Love Call.

Dupree Bolton (3 March 1929 – 5 June 1993) was a jazz trumpeter from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, known for his recordings with Harold Land and Curtis Amy.

Dupree Bolton was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on 3 March 1929. His father was likewise a musician who earned a meager living working in the defense industry. The Bolton family later moved to Southern California where Dupree spent most of his childhood and teenage years. Dupree picked up the trumpet at an early age, becoming a professional by the time he was around 15 – running away from home to join Jay McShann’s band.

Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson (March 3, 1923 – May 29, 2012) was an American guitarist, songwriter, and singer of bluegrass, folk, country, blues, and gospel music. Watson won seven Grammy awards as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Watson’s fingerstyle and flatpicking skills, as well as his knowledge of traditional American music, were highly regarded. Blind from a young age, he performed with his son, guitarist Merle Watson, for over 15 years until Merle’s death in 1985 in an accident on the family farm.

Watson was born in Deep Gap, North Carolina, United States. According to Watson on his three-CD biographical recording Legacy, he got the nickname “Doc” during a live radio broadcast when the announcer remarked that his given name Arthel was odd and he needed an easy nickname. A fan in the crowd shouted “Call him Doc!” presumably in reference to the literary character Sherlock Holmes‘s sidekick Doctor Watson. The name stuck.

Nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel, Messier 83 (or NGC 5236) is a stunning face-on spiral galaxy located about 15 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Hydra. Its spiral arms are lined with dark lanes of dust and peppered with reddish, star-forming clouds of hydrogen gas. One of the deepest images ever taken of the Southern Pinwheel (combining more than 11 hours of exposure time), this view was captured with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which was built by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. Numerous background galaxies, which lie much farther away than Messier 83, appear around the edges of the image.