Paco de Lucía

Not one of his ten planets sits in a water sign. Fire takes six, with two apiece in earth and air, and five of the ten are mutable. The Sun, Mercury and Jupiter fill sixteen degrees of Sagittarius, the sign that measures a thing by how far it got from where it started. The record says de Lucia took flamenco guitar into jazz and made it a concert instrument.

Jupiter sits sixty degrees from Neptune at two hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the reading is generous imagination: vision, artistic scope, and a real ability to inspire other people. A guitarist who moved a form out of one scene and into another, and off a chair and onto a stage, is a record about scope, and this is the contact that carries it. Six planets in fire with none in water is the other half: the appetite is everywhere and almost nothing registers the cost.

Mars sits a fifth of a turn from Uranus at just over a quarter of a degree, quick reflexes and an instinct for the unconventional move. The Sun sits on the twenty ninth degree of Sagittarius, almost out of the sign, and in hard contact with Pluto at just under a degree. Mercury sits in easy contact with Saturn at just over a degree, structured thinking without strain. The Moon answers from Aries at seven and its sign is certain. A guitarist who moved an instrument from a chair to a concert stage needed the reflexes more than the structure, and the record gives him both ends of that.

He died at Playa del Carmen on 25 February 2014, at sixty six. Pluto stood square his natal Neptune at under a fifth of a degree that day and Neptune directly opposite his natal Mars at under three fifths, so the planet his tightest contact runs to was being worked from two directions. The Moon was at its last quarter and eighteen per cent lit. That is the phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.