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Leon Russell (1942-2016)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Leon Russell, a singer-songwriter and pianist who spent much of the early 1960s appearing on pop hits as a Los Angeles studio musician and who, in the years that followed, was a solo artist and composer of hits such as A Song for You, Tight Rope, This Masquerade and Superstar, died on Nov. 13. He was 74. Back in March 2014, I spent several hours with Leon at his home outside of Nashville. The house was loaded with eclectic furnishings ...
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R.I.P Leonard Cohen, "The Lord Of Song"
Source:
HypeBot
Front row seats at the Palace Theatre in Waterbury, CT to see Leonard Cohen on his comeback tour a decade ago will always rank in the top handful of the hundreds and hundreds of concerts that I've been privileged to attend. A true songsmith with a deep and caring soul has left us. Leonard Cohen, the influential singer, and songwriter, widely regarded as the poet laureate of the 1960s and 1970s has died at the age of 82. His death ...
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Bob Cranshaw + Kay Starr
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Bob Cranshaw (1932-2016), a Chicago-born jazz bassist who began recording in 1957 and became a significant force in the 1960s starting with Sonny Rollins' seminal album, The Bridge, in 1962, died on Nov. 2. He was 83. At a time when even the best jazz bassists seemed interchangeable to the average listener, Bob's playing stood out with sensitivity and grace. It has been said that while jazz groups play for audiences, bassists play for the soloist, serving largely as inventive ...
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Bob Cranshaw, 1932-2016
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
Bassist Bob Cranshaw succumbed to bone cancer yesterday at his home in New York City. He was 83. He may be best remembered as Sonny Rollins’s bassist for more than half a century, but Cranshaw’s career also included mainstay work with Dexter Gordon, James Moody, Kai Winding, Wes Montgomery, Duke Pearson, Mose Allison, Oliver Nelson, and dozens of other musicians in the top ranks of jazz. From a 2005 Rifftides post: Sonny Rollins, for reasons unclear to me, prefers the ...
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John Zacherle (1918-2016)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
John Zacherle, a rail-thin B-movie actor who in the late 1950s and '60s became a wildly popular host of children's television shows in Philadelphia and New York, where he appeared dressed as a ghoulish undertaker with a sophisticated wit and sinister laugh, died on Oct. 27, four days before Halloween. He was 98. Zacherle's death may come as a shock to millions of adults who watched him on TV as children, since many of us thought he was dead to ...
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Al Stewart (1927-2016)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Al Stewart, a first-chair swing trumpeter who recorded on some of the most significant New York big-band recordings of the late 1940s and '50s and toured with many marquee jazz orchestras, died on Oct. 17 in Sarasota, Fla., according to his daughter, Amy Abigail Stewart. He was 89. A superb studio sight-reader, Al was in the trumpet section on Benny Goodman's bebop recordings of 1949, Machito's Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite (1950), Chico O'Farrill's Second Afro Cuban Jazz Suite (1951), Maynard Ferguson's ...
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Claus Ogerman (1930-2016)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Claus Ogerman, an achingly beautiful jazz-pop orchestral arranger whose signature sound behind singers and instrumentalists featured violins scored in a high register with the violas, cellos and bass playing sensually voiced chords below, died in Germany on March 8. He was 85. News of Ogerman’s passing more than seven moths ago seems to have escaped traditional media in the States and other countries largely because his family was unavailable by phone to officially confirm his death. His family also decided ...
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Rudy Van Gelder (1924-2016)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Rudy Van Gelder, a New Jersey optometrist who in the late 1940s extended his passion for ocular precision to professional recording and wound up becoming one of jazz's finest and most enigmatic studio engineers, died on Aug. 25. He was 91. When Rudy started recording at his parents Hackensack, N.J., home (above), he knew virtually nothing about jazz. And throughout his career, he never developed much of a passion for it, despite being an ear-witness to some of jazz greatest ...
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