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Bassist Jack Lesberg dead at 85
Source:
All About Jazz
ENGLEWOOD, NJ -- Jack Lesberg, a steadfast and versatile bassist who worked with many legends of jazz in the 1940's and 50's and also had a career as a symphonic player, died on Sept. 17 at the Lillian Booth Actors' Home in Englewood, N.J. He was 85.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease, his daughter Valerie Kaplan said.
Born and reared in Boston, Lesberg initially studied the violin, which he played in area clubs before switching permanently to double ...
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Bluesman, throat singer Paul Pena dead at 55
Source:
All About Jazz
SAN FRANCISCO --Paul Pena, a San Francisco blues guitarist who wrote one of the biggest hits for the Steve Miller Band, has died. He was 55.
Pena is perhaps best known for writing “Jet Airliner," a Top 10 hit in 1977. He's lived off the royalties from that song.
Pena also is familiar to audiences for the 1999 Academy Award-nominated documentary “Genghis Blues," which tells the story of how he took up Tuvan throat singing.
Pena died Saturday from complications ...
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Saxophonist Steve Marcus dead at 66
Source:
All About Jazz
NEW HOPE, Pa. (AP) - Steve Marcus, a jazz saxophonist who recorded and toured with Stan Kenton, Herbie Mann and Buddy Rich, died Sunday. He was 66.
Marcus died in his sleep at his home in New Hope, family members said.
He was a pioneer of the jazz fusion movement of the late 1960s, a musical movement that combined elements of rock 'n' roll and jazz.
Marcus had been touring lately with the quintet “Steve Smith and Buddy's Buddies," a ...
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Sterling Dorwin Weed: Oldest U.S. big band leader dies at 104
Source:
All About Jazz
ST. ALBANS, Vt. --Sterling Dorwin Weed, the nation's oldest known active bandleader, whose Weed's Imperial Orchestra played dates from the early 1930s to this summer, has died. He was 104.
“It was age, and he was just worn out, really," Derby said.
Weed studied piano as a youth, but said in an Associated Press interview in 2001 that his public career began in 1912, when he was 11. His older brother Ora, a trombonist, said the city band's piccolo player ...
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Bluesman Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown dies
Source:
All About Jazz
Weakened by lung cancer and heart disease and devastated by the destruction of his beloved New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, Grammy Award-winning singer and guitarist Clarence “Gatemouth" Brown died on Saturday. He was 81.
Brown died at his brother's home in Orange, Texas, where he had gone to escape the hurricane. His home in Slidell, La., just outside New Orleans, was destroyed by Katrina, said Rick Cady, his agent.
“He was completely devastated," Cady said. “... He evacuated successfully before ...
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Bluesman R.L. Burnside dies at 79
Source:
All About Jazz
MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- Blues artist R.L. Burnside, who redefined the blues genre by incorporating indie rock acts and hip-hop production, died September 1, 2005, at St. Francis Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 79.
Burnside was born November 21, 1926, in Harmontown, Mississippi, and spent most of his life in the north Mississippi hill country, where he worked as a sharecropper and a commercial fisherman and played guitar at weekend house parties. In 1968, noted folklorist George Mitchell recorded Burnside ...
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