Israfel or Israfil (Arabic: إسرافيل‎, Isrāfīl) ("The Burning One"^{[citation needed]}), is the angel of the trumpet in Islam, though unnamed in the Qur'an. Along with Mikhail, Jibril and Izra'il, he is one of the four Islamic archangels. In Judaism and Christianity, Israfel is as the same as Raphael.

Although the name "Israfel" does not appear in the Qur'an, mention is repeatedly made of an unnamed trumpet-angel assumed to identify this figure: "And the trumpet shall be blown, so all those that are in the heavens and all those that are in the earth shall swoon, except Allah; then it shall be blown again, then they shall stand up awaiting." —Qur'an (39.68).

In Islamic tradition he is said to have been sent, along with the other three Islamic archangels, to collect dust from the four corners of the earth, although only Izra'il succeeded in this mission. It was from this dust that Adam was formed.^{[unreliable source?]}

Israfel has been associated with a number of other angelic names not pertaining to Islam, including Uriel, Sarafiel and Raphael.

Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; he was orphaned young when his mother died shortly after his father abandoned the family. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. He attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. After enlisting in the Army and later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point, Poe parted ways with the Allans. His publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian".

Cheryl Ann Fulton is an American harpist. Fulton performs, records, teaches, and researches the harp. She is performer of historical harps, and one of the few harpists to play triple harp, medieval harp, and lever harps.

Fulton has performed on over thirty albums and soundtracks broadly ranging from medieval, baroque, orchestral, and contemporary music to Celtic music and film scores, on records labels such as PolyGram, Koch International Classics, Nonesuch, Gourd Music, and others. Her first solo album, The Airs of Wales, brought her recognition. She is a composer as well as a performer, and her original compositions from her second solo album, The Once & Future Harp (Gourd Music), have been featured on National Public Radio.

Fulton earned a B.S. degree in pedal harp, and an M.M. and D.M. in early music/historical harp from the School of Music of Indiana University, Bloomington. Her doctoral thesis on the history of the triple harp won her the Burton E. Adams Prize for Academic Research. Fulton is a Fulbright scholar who, in 1987, received a Fulbright Award for research and performance in Lisbon, Portugal, where she served as principal harpist for Portugal's orchestra, the Orchestre Gulbenkian. She is a contributing scholar for the new edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and has written a chapter for A Performers Guide to Medieval Music.

Paul Reed Smith (born February 18, 1956), is a luthier and the founder and owner of PRS Guitars.

Smith is originally from Bowie, Maryland.^{[citation needed]} He made his first guitar while at St. Mary's College of Maryland, and continued to build guitars after he finished college, making them one at a time, one a month. Together with another local, John "Orkie" Ingram, they formed the nucleus of what would become Paul Reed Smith Guitars.

Smith would often bring his guitars backstage at concerts, and eventually got his break when Derek St. Holmes, of the Ted Nugent Band, agreed to try out #2, the second guitar Smith had ever made. St. Holmes played the guitar for the first few songs of his set, and Smith told him that after he showed it to some other musicians, he would fly out to Detroit and give it to him. St. Holmes eventually sold the guitar for $200.

Smith then contacted Ted McCarty, former president of Gibson and creator of the Explorer, ES-335 and Flying V guitars, and McCarty became his mentor and adviser. The result of their collaboration was the current line of PRS Guitars, which include solid- and hollow-body guitars. The Private Stock line of PRS guitars are made utilizing a vast range of exotic materials including various stones, elaborately figured tone woods, and intricate shells for inlays.

Pat Martino (born August 25, 1944) is an Italian-American jazz guitarist and composer within the post bop, fusion, mainstream jazz, soul jazz and hard bop idioms.

Martino was born Pat Azzara in South Philadelphia. He began playing professionally at age 15. Martino played and recorded early in his career with musicians such as Willis Jackson and Eric Kloss. He also worked with many jazz organists, such as Charles Earland, Jack McDuff, Trudy Pitts, Jimmy Smith, Gene Ludwig, Don Patterson, Richard "Groove" Holmes. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Martino made many recordings as a sideman and also under his own name.

In 1980, Martino underwent surgery as the result of a nearly fatal brain aneurysm. The surgery left him with amnesia, leaving him, among other things, without some memory of the guitar and his musical career. With the help of friends, computers, and his old recordings, Martino made a recovery [1], and learned to play the guitar again.

His improvisation method, "Conversion to Minor", is often mistakenly thought to be based upon using exclusively minor systems for soloing. In fact, the system involves conceptualising chord progressions in terms of the relative minor chord/scale, but in practice this seems to be more a way for organising the fretboard, rather than justifying playing certain tones in terms of whether they are "correct" or not. Martino's lines contain chromatic notes outside any particular IIm7 chord that might be conceptualised over a chord progression; even in the examples he provides in his books and instructional videos. Indeed, on his bulletin board he has stated that he formulated the system more as a way to explain his playing, rather than as something to use to create music. In his own words, "although the analysis of some of my recorded solos have been referred to as modal, personally I’ve never operated in that way. I’ve always depended upon my own melodic instinct, instead of scale like formulas".