Coordinates: 40°02′21″N 44°32′30″E / 40.03917°N 44.54167°E / 40.03917; 44.54167

Arevshat (Armenian: Արևշատ; formerly, Nizhniy Agbash, Nerkin Agbash, Lusakert, and Arpavar) is a town in the Ararat province of Armenia.

James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) was an American singer, songwriter, musician, and recording artist. He is the originator of funk music and is a major figure of 20th century popular music and dance.

In a career that spanned decades, Brown profoundly influenced the development of many different musical genres. Brown moved on a continuum of blues and gospel-based forms and styles to a profoundly "Africanized" approach to music making. Brown performed in concerts, first making his rounds across the Chitlin' Circuit, and then across the country and later around the world, along with appearing in shows on television and in movies. Although he contributed much to the music world through his hitmaking, Brown holds the record as the artist who charted the most singles on the Billboard Hot 100 without ever hitting number one on that chart.

For many years, Brown's touring show was one of the most extravagant productions in American popular music. At the time of Brown's death, his band included three guitarists, two bass guitar players, two drummers, three horns and a percussionist. The bands that he maintained during the late 1960s and 1970s were of comparable size, and the bands also included a three-piece amplified string section that played during ballads. Brown employed between 40 and 50 people for the James Brown Revue, and members of the revue traveled with him in a bus to cities and towns all over the country, performing upwards of 330 shows a year with almost all of the shows as one-nighters. In 1986, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 1990 into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Ray Charles Robinson (September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004), known by his shortened stage name Ray Charles, was an American musician. He was a pioneer in the genre of soul music during the 1950s by fusing rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues styles into his early recordings with Atlantic Records. He also helped racially integrate country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records, most notably with his Modern Sounds albums. While with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be given artistic control by a mainstream record company.Frank Sinatra called Charles “the only true genius in show business.”

The influences upon his music were mainly jazz, blues, rhythm and blues and country artists of the day such as Art Tatum, Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan, Charles Brown, Louis Armstrong. His playing reflected influences from country blues and barrelhouse, and stride piano styles.

Rolling Stone ranked Charles number ten on their list of "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" in 2004, and number two on their November 2008 list of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time". In honoring Charles, Billy Joel noted: "This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley. I don't know if Ray was the architect of rock & roll, but he was certainly the first guy to do a lot of things . . . Who the hell ever put so many styles together and made it work?"

Caroline Esmeralda van der Leeuw (b. 26 April 1981 in Amsterdam), best known by her stage name, Caro Emerald, is a Dutch jazz singer. She debuted on 6 July 2009 with her single "Back It Up". Her debut album Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor set a new all-time chart record on 20 August 2010, spending its 30th week at number one on the Dutch album chart, beating the previous record set by Michael Jackson's Thriller by one week. The album has become the biggest selling album of 2010 in the Netherlands, selling over 300,000 copies so far. In total more than a million copies have been sold so far. On 3 October 2010, Van der Leeuw was awarded the Dutch Music Prize "Edison Award" for Best Female Artist.

Caroline Esmeralda van der Leeuw was born on 26 April 1981 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She was trained as a jazz vocalist at the Amsterdam Conservatory, graduating in 2005.

In early 2007 Dutch producer Jan van Wieringen invited van der Leeuw to sing the vocal on a demo track he was co-producing with songwriter/producer David Schreurs. The song, "Back It Up", had been written by Schreurs together with Canadian songwriter Vince Degiorgio, and was based on a hip-hop beat created by Jan and Robin Veldman. Caro's jazzy vocal style was considered a "perfect match" for the new song.