Home » Jazz News
Obituary News
Timely announcements covering new album releases, tours, concert series, special events, job postings, crowdfunding campaigns and more. You can find more news by searching our website, viewing our news stream, seeing what's trending or reading our blog posts. Subscribe to our news RSS feed and/or embed AAJ news content on your website or blog. Learn about our news service here. Submit news here.
Von Freeman, 1922-2012
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
Von Freeman had everything it took to be a world-famous tenor saxophonist. He chose, instead, to remain in his native Chicago for his entire career. Appearances at a few jazz festivals in the US and abroad were the main exceptions. Freeman’s death on August 11 was announced today. He would have been 89 on October 3. Freeman shared many of the influences that affected such contemporary Chicago tenor artists as Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin, Eddie Harris and Fred Anderson. Like ...
Continue Reading
NEA Statement on the Death of NEA Jazz Master Von Freeman
Source:
Chris M. Slawecki
NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman's Statement on the Death of NEA Jazz Master Von Freeman “On behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts, it is with great sadness that I acknowledge the passing of 2012 NEA Jazz Master Von Freeman. An extraordinary saxophonist with a sound all his own, Von Freeman's contributions to jazz – and specifically Chicago's jazz history – are numerous. We join many others in the jazz community and beyond in mourning his death while celebrating his ...
Continue Reading
New Orleans Iconic Musician Uncle Lionel Batiste Dies
Source:
Wade Luquet
Treme Brass Band bass drum player “Uncle" Lionel Batiste passed away on Sunday at the age of 80 after a short illness. In a city filled with characters, Uncle Lionel may be the most recognizable. He began to play the bass drum at the age of ten and was a French Quarter tap dancer as a child. He played with numerous brass bands before settling in as a member of the Treme Brass Band with whom he played hundreds of ...
Continue Reading
Pete Cosey, 1943-2012
Source:
Michael Ricci
Innovative guitarist 'knew what to do with just one note' Jazz guitarist Pete Cosey used electronic distortion and innovative methods of stringing and tuning his guitar to impress his signature sound on recordings by artists from bluesmen Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf to jazz great Miles Davis. “Pete's sound was something quite amazing," said Wendy Oxenhorn, executive director of the New York-based Jazz Foundation of America. “He took blues, funk, rap and jazz and combined it into a new sound." ...
Continue Reading
Disco Queen Donna Summer dies at 63
Source:
Michael Ricci
Like the King of Pop or the Queen of Soul, Donna Summer was bestowed a title fitting of musical royalty — the Queen of Disco. Yet unlike Michael Jackson or Aretha Franklin, it was a designation she wasn't comfortable embracing. “I grew up on rock 'n' roll," Summer once said when explaining her reluctance to claim the title. Indeed, as disco boomed then crashed in a single decade in the 1970s, Summer, the beautiful voice and face of the genre ...
Continue Reading
Legendary Bassist Donald "Duck" Dunn Passes Away At Age 70
Source:
Michael Ricci
Donald “Duck” Dunn, who played on hundreds of rock and soul classics as the bassist for Booker T. and the MGs, and later as a session player, passed away Sunday morning at the age of 70. Steve Cropper, the MGs guitarist, broke the news on his Facebook page at approximately 12:30AM Eastern time.
“Today I lost my best friend, the World has lost the best guy and bassist to ever live,” Cropper, his lifelong friend, wrote. “Duck Dunn died in ...
Continue Reading
Levon Helm: 1940-2012
Source:
C. Michael Bailey
By C. Michael Bailey The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. —William Faulkner It might be a hard sell to claim that Levon Helm was the voice of The Band, considering he was part of a trio of the most distinctive voices in rock music during what some call ...
Continue Reading
Teddy Charles: (1928-2012)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Teddy Charles, a hard-swinging four-mallet vibraphonist, composer, pianist and player-producer who in the late 1940s and early '50s transformed the steel-plated instrument into a cooler, jazz-classical protagonist, died on April 16, He was 84. Trained at the Juilliard School of Music, Teddy was able to reach effortlessly into modern classical music theory and deploy modal scales on solos—giving his compositions and recordings a fresh, hip sound. But what made Teddy's style special was he was able to combine long-hair ...
Continue Reading
