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Saxophonist Sir John Dankworth Dies
Source:
All About Jazz
Sir John Dankworth, a totemic figure of the British jazz scene who worked as a musical director for artists including Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald, has died at the age of 82. The saxophonist, whose career spanned more than half a century, died yesterday in King Edward VII hospital, London. He had been ill for several months. Dankworth enjoyed a parallel career as a film and television composer, and wrote the theme tune for television shows The Avengers and ...
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Vocal Coach to Stars Maurice Finnell Dies
Source:
All About Jazz
Teacher, composer and vocal coach Maurice Finnell, who taught talent including Tony Bennett, Bette Midler, Tyne Daly and Warren Beatty, died Jan. 5 in New York from complications from a fall. He was 93.
Finnell was born in New Jersey, and started singing as a boy, performing the theme song for Douglas Fairbanks film “Reaching For The Moon" at the RKO Lincoln and Capital Theaters at the age of 16. He performed on radio networks in New York and Philadelphia, ...
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Going and Coming: John Norris, Infinite Quintet
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
GOING
To repeat: I have no intention of Rifftides becoming an obituary service, but as James Moody says his grandmother told him, “Folks is dyin' what ain't never died before," and some passings demand to be observed.
John Norris died yesterday in Toronto at the age of 76. He was the founder of the Canadian jazz magazine Coda, and of Sackville Records. Norris was a benevolent and resolutely independent spirit in music north of the border. He steadfastly resisted technological ...
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Joyce Collins, 1930-2010
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
The pianist and singer Joyce Collins died recently in Los Angeles following a long illness. She was 79. Highly respected in jazz circles, Collins played with a sensitive touch and subtle use of chords. Her singing was an outgrowth of those values, with attention to interpretation of the meaning of songs and, as Marian McPartland put it, “...deep feeling, a way of lingering over certain phrases, telling her story in a very poignant way." Collins's recorded debut as a leader ...
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Paul R. Jones Major Collector of African American Art Dies
Source:
Michael Ricci
Jones acquired drawings, paintings, photos, sculptures and other works by black artists. 'My goal has been to incorporate African American art into American art,' he once said.
Paul Jones began buying pieces in the 1960s after noting that African American art was underrepresented in public galleries. In 2008, he donated about 1,700 pieces valued at $5 million to the University of Alabama, which established an art collection in his name.
Paul R. Jones, a collector of African American art who ...
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J.D. Salinger: A Gift of Words and Silence
Source:
Michael Ricci
AN APPRECIATION In his greatest works, a clash between self-expression and self-effacement. “Don't ever tell anybody anything," J.D. Salinger wrote in the closing lines of “The Catcher in the Rye." “If you do, you start missing everybody."
For more than two decades now, I've thought about that ending as a piece of code. Not that Salinger, who died Wednesday at age 91 in Cornish, N.H., was an oracle, despite what his most dedicated followers -- those who hung ...
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J.D. Salinger, Reclusive Author of 'The Catcher in the Rye,' Dies
Source:
Michael Ricci
J.D. Salinger, one of contemporary literature's most famous recluses, who created a lasting symbol of adolescent discontent in his 1951 novel “The Catcher in the Rye," has died. He was 91.
Salinger died of natural causes Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., his son Matthew said in a statement released by the author's literary representative. Perhaps no other writer of so few works generated as much popular and critical interest as Salinger, who published one novel, three authorized collections ...
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