Obituary News

Bill Watrous Has Died

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
July 4, 2018

Trombonist Bill Watrous died yesterday in Los Angeles at the age of 79. Celebrated for his skill, range and speed, Watrous employed those attributes in a career that began with Billy Butterfield and included work with the big bands of Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson and Johnny Richards. In the early 1970s he recorded with his own big band, Manhattan Wildlife Refuge. Fellow trombonists admired Watrous for his technical achievement, but they may have envied him equally for his ...

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Lorraine Gordon, RIP

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
June 11, 2018

Lorraine Gordon, who inherited the Village Vanguard after her husband Max died in 1989, remained its proprietor and no-nonsense guiding spirit until her death yesterday in New York. She was 95. Under the Gordons, the Vanguard became quite likely the most famous jazz club in the world. Bill Evans, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis were among many musicians who made memorable live recordings and videos there. The club is a destination not ...

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Jack Reilly, RIP

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
May 25, 2018

News has arrived that the pianist Jack Reilly died of a massive stroke on Friday at his home in New Jersey. Mr. Reilly, 86, was an accomplished classical and jazz pianist who returned to his native New York in 1954 following Navy service and pursued graduate studies at the Manhattan School of Music. His early experience in jazz was with John LaPorta, Sheila Jordan, Ben Webster and George Russell, among other prominent figures in the bebop and post-bop eras. From ...

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Charles Neville

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
April 30, 2018

Mew Orleans is mourning the death on Friday of Charles Neville, saxophonist and ever-smiling presence in the Neville Brothers band from 1977 to 2015. Charles was a focal point with his brothers Cyril, Art and Aaron in the family band that became one of the city’s most successful and celebrated musical groups. For years, they were a fixture of the New Orleans Jazz And Heritage Festival. Neville died at home in Huntington, Massachusetts.He moved to New England in the 1990s, ...

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Bob Dorough Is Gone

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
April 24, 2018

Word has arrived that Bob Dorough died today at his home in Mount Bethel, Pennsylvania. He was 94. Dorough’s greatest fame in popular culture stemmed from his central role in the enormously successful television series Schoolhouse Rock. The program informed and entertained children, and many adults, from 1973 to 1985. Within the jazz community, Dorough was a beloved singer of literate and witty songs that he wrote and performed, usually accompanying himself as a skilled and harmonically adept pianist. In ...

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Cecil Taylor Is Gone

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
April 7, 2018

Cecil Taylor, a pianist who fashioned his music from myriad styles and sources, died yesterday in New York. He was 89. From his earliest recordings in the mid-1950s with bassist Buell Nieidlinger, drummer Dennis Charles and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, Taylor pursued daring and swam upstream against jazz orthodoxy. This is how critic Ben Ratliff put it in an obituary in today’s New York Times. At the center of his art was that dazzling physicality and the percussiveness of his ...

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Cecil Taylor: 1929-2018

Source: All About Jazz
April 6, 2018

We compiled several Tweets about pianist Cecil Taylor's profound impact on others through his music and his friendship. Scroll to the bottom and click the link to read more.

Thanks to Cecil Taylor for his creative courage and his uncompromising vision of what music can be. We mourn his passing but celebrate his life.

No one touched the piano like Cecil Taylor. The force, the ...

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Tower Records Founder Russ Solomon Passes

Source: HypeBot
March 7, 2018

Russ Solomon, founder of the legendary Tower Records chain, died on Sunday night, while drinking whisky and watching The Oscars. Solomon, 92, died from a heart attack, his son, Michael Solomon, told the Sacramento Bee. “Ironically, he was giving his opinion of what someone was wearing that he thought was ugly, then asked (his wife) Patti to refill his whisky,” Solomon told the paper. His father was apparently dead by the time Patti returned with the drink. Solomon was synonymous ...

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