RIP, Alex

RIP, Nodar Kumaritashvili

The New York Times ran a tragically prescient article on Wednesday about the dangers of the Winter Olympics, citing the very track where Nodar died:

Safety is no more assured in Vancouver than it was on the way there. American bobsledders have called Curve 13 of the Olympic track “50-50,” for the chances of making it through without a wreck. The track was so surprisingly fast when it opened (a luger went a record 153.937 kilometers per hour — 95.65 m.p.h., or about 6 m.p.h. faster than ever before — during last year’s test event) that Josef Fendt, the president of the international luge federation, said, “It makes me worry.”

God willing, this will be the only fatality at the games, and this will also be a wake-up call to the IOC to reassess their priorities.

RIP, Teddy

RIP, Jay

RIP, Brittany

RIP, Al

RIP, Patrick Swayze

Seriously sad news for those of us who grew up on his movies. Road House is one of my all-time guilty pleasures. He was such a magnetic performer that he could make even the lousiest film watchable.

RIP, Jim Carroll

RIP, Hildegard Behrens

RIP, Rashied Ali

RIP, Les Paul

RIP, Willy DeVille

RIP, John Hughes

Planes, Trains and Automobiles:)

R.I.P. Merce Cunningham

RIP, Michael

RIP, Koko

kt

RIP, JGB

RIP, Lukas

Pound for pound, the best Mozart performer I ever heard.



Overture to The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

RIP, George Brecht

RIP, James Feldman

Dr. Feldman was the intellectual nerve center of BW for many years, in addition to being one of its most outrageously funny professors. He had a genuine mania that could be lightning in a bottle, yielding some of the best lectures I've ever heard.

He taught me two years of theory, one year of form, an introductory course on composition, a comparative literature class, and he was my thesis advisor. After four years of study with Dr. Feldman, I still felt like there was more to learn from him, and one of the great pleasures of my undergraduate years were the bull sessions with him in his office, which was always overflowing with books and hilarious non-sequiturs.

One of the most memorable demonstrations he ever gave of the power of harmony was when he was discussing the Neopolitan chord, of all things. He had demonstrated Chopin's use of it in his B-minor Prelude (below), taking care to point out that not only does Chopin use the bII but that he also throws off the pulse with a hemiola. The cumulative effect of the harmonic/rhythmic shift is a sort of a lift that he compared to a chapel which he used to frequent. He spoke of how he would often simply enter the chapel and stand at the back and no matter how heavy his mood, the calm of its atmosphere would lift his spirit. Sometimes, the lift would be gone as soon as he stepped back outside, but the chapel always remained a quiet and steady solace, a sanctuary of unbroken peace. To him, the three bars of C Major in this prelude were like that chapel.

After a painful battle with Lou Gehrig's disease, Dr. Feldman deserves his solace again. May the angels lead you, James:

RIP, Robert

RIP, Henry

American musical innovations tend to get overshadowed by European ones. With polytonality, it's Stravinsky who gets the credit for modernizing the concept, even though Ives had done it earlier.

The concept of spatial music was re-popularized by Stockhausen and Boulez, even though Henry Brant had embraced the format a few years earlier.

RIP, Humphrey

RIP, Charlton Heston

It's very sad to see that he passed away, as he was one of our all-time favorite actors. What a great screen presence he was in everything from film noir to all those wonderfully campy sci-fi flicks. The Ten Commandments is particularly cherished round these parts, and his epic performance in that film will always be a cinematic landmark.

We're also particularly fond of his later cameos in Wayne's World 2 and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet:

RIP, Arthur C. Clarke

RIP, Dorothy Stone

How tremendously sad. Dorothy was a founding member of the California EAR Unit, with whom echo has performed.

Their body of work is vast. Here they are, with Dorothy, performing Stockhausen's Dr. K-Sextet.

'Dr. K' is Dr. Alfred Kalmus, who turned 80 in 1969, when Universal Edition asked several of the composers on its roster to compose short works for a concert in his honor to be performed by, coincidentally enough, Fires of London.

RIP, Heath

How tremendously sad to hear of Heath Ledger's passing. He came an awfully long way as an actor in just a handful of films, and his partnership with Terry Gilliam was deeply promising. Heath had just turned in a wondrously silly performance in The Brother Grimm, and filming was well under way for The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus.

Heath's death continues the tremendous run of bad karma that has dogged Gilliam's productions, and the only images to emerge from the filming of Parnassus are eery shots of the actor hanging from a noose.

Here's hoping that enough of Heath's final performance was filmed to allow for one last chance to see this captivating actor onscreen.

RIP, Sir Ed

New Zealand's most famous son has died, and their TV 3 has an excellent video obit.

RIP, Hans

The Book of Sounds, Part 1
(1982)

RIP, Oscar

RIP, Dan

RIP, Ike

RIP, Karlheinz

August 22, 1928 - December 5, 2007

This is tremendously sad news. Apparently, he died on Wednesday, and the AP has not picked it up yet. Information is very scarce, at the moment.

We'll be posting a great deal more in honor of the amazing life and work of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

RIP, Evil

RIP, Kevin

RIP, Norman

RIP, Max

"Carolina Moon" Kenny Dorham, trumpet Lou Donaldson, alto Lucky Thompson, tenor Thelonious Monk, piano Nelson Boyd, bass Max Roach, drums

"Move" Miles Davis, trumpet Kai Winding, trombone Junior Collins, horn Bill Barber, tuba Lee Konitz, alto Gerry Mulligan, bari Al Haig, piano Joe Shulman, bass Max Roach, drums

RIP, Ron Parmentier

Ron taught guitar out of his studio apartment on Thompson Street in the West Village for decades, and about four years ago, he got the bug to perform again. He assembled a cadre of young musicians, and those of us who played with him at restaurants and bars in the neighborhood considered our gigs more of an extended master class than performances.

He and I played together as a duo more times than I can remember, and we only ever played a handful of tunes: "Night and Day", "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat", "A Love Supreme", "Beautiful Love", and a few others. Any one of those tunes could easily last an hour. Ron wasn't interested in much beyond 'conversing', as he put it, with me. Most of those conversations took place at 350 bpm, and it took a while to get used to speaking Ron's language.

In rehearsals, he'd talk for half an hour about the intricacies of second-species counterpoint and Schoenberg's harmonic concepts while he chain-smoked cigarettes and weed. In five minutes, he could give you enough conceptual homework to occupy your practice for a month. He was irascible, perpetually tardy, and he did not take kindly to requests to turn his amplifier down (in fact, such requests usually yielded the opposite result).

We went in to a studio once to record, and the 'conversation' just wasn't right. We were talking past each other; so, before we even got the levels set, we packed it in. Every time I saw him, there was always talk of going back in to the studio and playing more dates together. It will take another while to get used to not having Ron to talk to anymore.

[I'm not aware of any other recordings of Ron. There's talk of a memorial concert, and hopefully that will turn up some better specimens. Until then, here's a demo of us performing "Night and Day".]

RIP, Slava

From Fidelio Magazine, Spring 1999
Fidelio: on November 11 [1989] you played a Bach suite at Checkpoint Charlie.
Rostropovich: It was a simple need; I had to do it. And by myself, for sure. Because, this Wall was a symbol of my life, or my “two” lives—the one before 1974, and the one thereafter—which were so completely different, and could not be brought into harmony as long as this Wall existed.

Cello Suite No. 5 in C Minor, BWV 1011
Prelude : Allemande : Courante : Sarabande : Gavotte I : Gavotte II : Gigue

RIP, Kurt

RIP, Sol LeWitt

RIP, Luther

Luther Ingram
1937-2007

RIP, Betty Hutton

"Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" (With Howard Keel) | "A Bushel and a Peck" (With Perry Como) | "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief" | "Orange Colored Sky" | "It's Oh So Quiet"

RIP, Brad

RIP, J. Baudrillard

The matrix has you now...

RIP Peter Boyle

"Puttin' On the Ritz"
It's one of the only unfunny moments in one of the funniest films of all time, but for most folks, this is how he'll be remembered.

RIP, Malcolm

RIP, Schwarzkopf

"Blute nur, du liebes Herz", from Bach's St. Matthew Passion

RIP, Proof

Let me call it what it is. This is fucked up. Makes you wish someone would enact the Rock Law and make bullets cost $10K apiece.

"Forgive Me", with 50 Cent

"No More to Say", with Trick Trick & Eminem

"Kurt Kobain"

RIP, Jackie

My whole foundation in jazz is inherited from Jackie McLean. He was my mentor's mentor, having taught him at the Hartt School. Studying in the Jackie McLean style means grounding yourself in tradition. We studied history properly, to be certain, but there really was only one history book that we all had to memorize: Miles' autobiography.

And probably the best object lesson in the book on the importance of tradition actually involves Jackie:

Although Jackie could play his ass off, he still had a problem with his discipline and learning to play certain tunes...we had a real big argument in the recording studio over the way he wasn't playing "Yesterdays," or "Wouldn't You." Jackie had a lot of natural ability, but he was lazy as a motherfucker back then. I would tell him to play a certain tune, and he would tell me he "didn't know it."

"What do you mean you don't know it? Learn it," I would say.

So he would tell me some shit about the tunes being from another time period, and that he was a "young guy" and he didn't see why he had to learn "all that old shit."

"Man," I said, "music has no periods; music is music. I like this tune, this is my band, you're in my band, I'm playing this tune, so you learn it and learn all the tunes, whether you like them or not. Learn them."

...One time we were down in Philadelphia playing a club, me and Jackie, Art Blakey, Percy Heath, and, I think, Hank Jones on piano. Anyway, in walks Duke Ellington, Paul Quinechette, Johnny Hodges, and some other members of Duke's band. I said to myself, "Man, we gotta hit it now." So I called out "Yesterdays." I start the melody with Jackie, and then I played a solo and motioned for him to play a solo...He started playing around with the melody and fucked it up again, right? After the set was over and I'm introducing everybody in the band over the microphone--I used to do that shit back in the real old days--when I get to Jackie I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, Jackie McLean, and I don't know how he got his union card, since he never does know how to play 'Yesterdays.'"...After the set, Jackie runs up to me in the alley behind the club where Art and I were getting high and says, "Miles, that wasn't right, man, embarrassing me like that in front of Duke, man, who is my fucking musical daddy, you motherfucker!" He was crying!

So I said to him, "Fuck you, Jackie, you ain't nothing but a big fucking baby! Always talking about some shit that you're a young cat and so you can't learn that old music. Fuck that and you too! I told you, music is music. So you'd better learn your music or you ain't gonna be in my fucking band for much longer, you hear me? Learn the music that's required of you in order to play. You talking about Duke being out in the audience and that I embarrassed you when I introduced you like that. Well, motherfucker, you embarrassed yourself when you didn't play 'Yesterdays' right. Man, you don't think Duke Ellington knows how that tune goes? Are you crazy? I didn't embarrass you, you embarrassed your motherfucking self! Now, fuck all that crying and let's go back to the hotel."

May 17, 1932–March 31, 2006

RIP, Buck

"Love Is Strange" (with Susan Raye)

RIP, Professor X

Yes! I'm that kind of nigga
The one you fear, be scared you can't figger
The one that has the finger on the trigger, boom!
In the cut of zoom
In the darkness, the halo, the moon!
Stepping ta' ya' real soon
Ah! Check the blackness!
Me before those enter the lightness!
Masturbating!
Masquerading!
And you call your self righteous?
Follow me!
A peripheral, missionary, and ark commit-ness
Having intercourse with the nation of darkness!
Books with worms!
Jherri suited with last names like perms!
niggas, get your hands of your cracks, come to terms with yourself

RIP, Ali

RIP, Wilson

RIP, Richard

RIP R.L.

Another blues great toiling in obscurity. One of the great windfalls of his latter-day discovery is the modern production which makes his stuff all the more thrilling.

Hard Time Killing Floor

Bad Luck City