Roderick Victor Gaskin, born The Bronx, New York, November 23, 1934 is a jazz bassist.

Gaskin moved to Los Angeles in 1962 and started playing with Paul Horn and Red Mitchell before going on to become one of many bass players for the Jazz Crusaders. He also recorded with Curtis Amy and Dupree Bolton, before becoming a part of the West Coast jazz scene, accompanying Buddy Collette, Shelly Manne, and Bud Shank.

Between 1966 and 1970, he was a member of Cannonball Adderley's groups, and in 1970 recorded with Duke Ellington's octet, quintet, quartet and trio.

He started playing with the Billy Taylor Trio in the late 1970s, continuing until 1993,as well as with Johnny Hartman and Hank Jones.

Nathaniel Adderley (November 25, 1931 in Tampa, Florida – January 2, 2000 in Lakeland, Florida) was an American jazz cornet and trumpet player who played in the hard bop and soul jazz genres. He was the brother of saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley.

Adderley moved to Tallahassee, Florida when both parents were hired to teach at Florida A&M University. He and Cannonball played with Ray Charles in the early 1940s in Tallahassee. In the 1950s he worked with his brother's original group, with Lionel Hampton, and with J. J. Johnson, then in 1959 joined his brother's new quintet and stayed with it until Cannonball's death in 1975. He composed "Work Song," "Jive Samba," and "The Old Country" for this group.

After his brother's death he led his own groups and recorded extensively. During this period he worked with, among others, Ron Carter, Sonny Fortune, Johnny Griffin, Antonio Hart, and Vincent Herring.

He also helped in the founding and development of the annual Child of the Sun Jazz Festival, held annually at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida.

Josef Erich Zawinul (July 7, 1932 – September 11, 2007) was an Austrian-American jazz keyboardist and composer.

First coming to prominence with saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, Zawinul went on to play with trumpeter Miles Davis, and to become one of the creators of jazz fusion, an innovative musical genre that combined jazz with elements of rock and world music. Later, Zawinul co-founded the groups Weather Report and the world fusion music-oriented Zawinul Syndicate. Additionally, he made pioneering use of electric piano and synthesizers. Zawinul was named "Best Electric Keyboardist" 28 times by the readers of Down Beat magazine.

Several artists have honored Zawinul with songs, notably Brian Eno's instrumental "Zawinul/Lava", John McLaughlin's instrumental "Jozy", Warren Cuccurullo's "Hey Zawinul", Bob Baldwin's "Joe Zawinul", Chucho Valdés's "Zawinul's Mambo", Biréli Lagrène's instrumental "Josef" and Toninho Horta's instrumental "Balada para Zawinul". Zawinul's playing style is often dominated by quirky melodic improvisations — traversing bebop, ethnic and pop styles — combined with sparse but rhythmic playing of big-band sounding chords or bass lines. In Weather Report, he often employed a vocoder as well as pre-recorded sounds played (i.e. filtered and transposed) through a synthesizer, creating a very distinctive synthesis of jazz harmonics and "noise" ("using all the sounds the world generates").

Emile Berliner or Emil Berliner (May 20, 1851 – August 3, 1929) was a German-born American inventor. He is best known for developing the disc record gramophone (phonograph in American English). He founded The Berliner Gramophone Company in 1895, The Gramophone Company in London, England, in 1897, Deutsche Grammophon in Hanover, Germany, in 1898 and Berliner Gram-o-phone Company of Canada in Montreal in 1899 (chartered in 1904).

Berliner was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1851 into a Jewish merchant family. He completed an apprenticeship to become a merchant, as was family tradition. While his real hobby was invention, he worked as an accountant to make ends meet. To avoid being drafted for the Franco-Prussian War, Berliner migrated to the United States of America in 1870 with a friend of his father's, in whose shop he worked in Washington, D.C.. He moved to New York and, living off temporary work, such as doing the paper route and cleaning bottles, he studied physics at night at the Cooper Union Institute. After some time working in a livery stable, he became interested in the new audio technology of the telephone and phonograph, and invented an improved telephone transmitter (one of the first type of microphones). The patent was acquired by the Bell Telephone Company, see The Telephone Cases. But on February 27, 1901 the United States Court of Appeal declared the patent void. Berliner subsequently moved to Boston in 1877 and worked for Bell Telephone until 1883, when he returned to Washington and established himself as a private researcher. Emile Berliner became a United States citizen in 1881.

John Mayall, OBE (born 29 November 1933) is an English blues singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, whose musical career spans over fifty years. In the 1960s, he was the founder of John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, a band which has included Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Peter Green, John McVie, Mick Fleetwood, Mick Taylor, Don "Sugarcane" Harris, Harvey Mandel, Larry Taylor, Aynsley Dunbar, Hughie Flint, Jon Hiseman, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Andy Fraser, Johnny Almond, Walter Trout, Coco Montoya and Buddy Whittington.

Mayall's father was Murray Mayall, a guitarist and jazz music enthusiast. From an early age, John was drawn to the sounds of American blues players such as Leadbelly, Albert Ammons, Pinetop Smith, and Eddie Lang, and taught himself to play the piano, guitars, and harmonica.

Mayall spent three years in Korea for national service and, during a period of leave, he bought his first electric guitar. Back in Manchester, he enrolled at Manchester College of Art (now part of Manchester Metropolitan University) and started playing with semi-professional bands. After graduation, he obtained a job as an art designer but continued to play with local musicians. In 1963, he opted for a full time musical career and moved to London. His previous craft would be put to good use in the designing of covers for many of his coming albums.