Obituary News

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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Wesla Whitfield, RIP

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
February 11, 2018

Wesla Whitfield, a singer of uncommon talent, taste, musicianship and courage, died yesterday in St. Helena, California. Her husband and accompanist of more than three decades, the pianist Mike Greensill, announced her passing. She had been under treatment for bladder cancer and was recently in hospice care but died at home. She was 70. I once wrote, “Whitfield is often billed as a cabaret singer…but with her time sense, phrasing and inflection, the fuzzy border between cabaret and jazz disappears." ...

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Remembering John Perry Barlow - Grateful Dead Lyricist, Tech Futurist

Source: HypeBot
February 10, 2018

It's inadequate to call John Perry Barlow a product of the 1960's since he did so much to help shape it and the decades that followed. If being a lyricist for the Grateful Dead weren't enough, his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", published 22 years ago this week, and his work as a founding member of both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Freedom of the Press Foundation, cemented his status as an influential thinker. By Mike Masnick of techdirt I ...

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Hugh Masekela Has Died

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
January 24, 2018

Hugh Masekela, a hero of African popular music and an inspirational fighter against discrimination, died today in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was 78. Masekela’s rapid ascent to fame in the 1950s led to international recognition of his trumpet playing and his protests against his country’s apartheid policy that for decades subjugated South Africa’s black people. By the time of his 1968 hit “Grazing In The Grass,” he was a prominent figure in world culture. Masekela was a tenacious force in ...

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