A founding member of ELO has been killed following a freak accident involving a giant bale of hay. Mike Edwards, 62, who played cello for the band [Electric Light Orchestra] for three years, died when the giant bale weighing 50 stone crashed down on top of his van. … Read full story
Ronnie James Dio, a legendary heavy metal singer who replaced Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath and also was lead singer for the bands Rainbow and Dio, has died. He was 67. …
Lena Horne, the silky-voiced singing legend who shattered Hollywood stereotypes of African Americans on screen in the 1940s as a symbol of glamour whose signature song was “Stormy Weather,” died Sunday in New York City. She was 92. …
Every musical era throws up its sharp-witted entrepreneurs with an eye to the main chance, ready to market the latest anti-establishment trend to the very mainstream it was created to oppose. In the late 1970s Malcolm McLaren achieved both respect and notoriety for his role in the selling of punk rock and the buccaneering way he guided the Sex Pistols through their brief and tempestuous career. In the process he became the best-known manager in rock music since Brian Epstein steered the Beatles to success in the 1960s. …
Singer Johnny Maestro, who performed the 1958 doo-wop hit “16 Candles” with The Crests and enjoyed a decades-long career with The Brooklyn Bridge, has died of cancer. He was 70. …
The urgent, jangling power-pop that Alex Chilton made with his band Big Star turned him into a cult icon and inspired the sound of a raft of bands that followed, from REM to Teenage Fanclub. …
July 6, 1928 - September 7, 2008
Peter Glossop was one of the pre-eminent baritones of the Sixties and Seventies and specialised in such testing roles as Rigoletto, Iago, Rodrigo (Don Carlos) and Count di Luna (Il trovatore). Although he was often heard in London — at both Sadler’s Wells and Covent Garden — he was one of the few British singers successfully to blaze a trail abroad and he appeared at all the world’s leading opera houses. …
Newton, MA, February 8, 1927 — Denver, CO, September 9, 2008
Nathaniel Merrill, who for twenty-eight seasons served as resident stage director at the Metropolitan Opera, directing the company’s premieres of Die Frau ohne Schatten (1966), Les Troyens (1973) and Porgy and Bess (1985) — as well as beloved productions of L’Elisir d’Amore (1960), Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1962) and Hansel and Gretel (1967) that endured in the Met’s repertory for decades — has died. …
Vernon Handley, one of the best-loved and most respected of British conductors, has died. Throughout his life he was a devoted champion of British repertoire, making some of the most intuitive and masterful recordings of works by Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Holst. It was also through Handley’s tireless — and most importantly, convincing — advocacy that many will have first developed a love of composers such as Bliss, Finzi, Howells, Rubbra and Bridge. …
July 18, 1944 - July 17, 2008
Roy Shirley was one of the mainstays of Jamaican music in the 1960s, enjoying a string of hits sung in a highly-mannered, soul-influenced vibrato voice that helped to establish the sound known as rock steady. He moved to Britain in 1973 and continued to record but branched out to open a record shop and to found the British Universal Talent Development Association to help foster promising but under-privileged young musicians. …
February 5, 1934 - August 20, 2008
Little Arthur Duncan was a blues man of the old school who sang in a soulful voice that owed as much to James Brown as to Robert Johnson and who blew his harmonica as if his life depended upon it. He played the blues for more than a half a century but did not begin recording until he was in his mid-fifties, finally enjoying in the sunset of his years the success that had eluded him as a younger man, when he was forced to work on building sites during the week while playing with minimal reward in the blues clubs of Chicago at the weekend. …
April 28, 1940 - August 20, 2008
Although he always operated in the giant shadow of his older brother Buddy Guy — the only serious rival to B.B. King as the greatest surviving blues man of them all — Phil Guy was a respected blues guitarist in his own right. He spent many years playing rhythm guitar in his brother’s band and later formed his own group, Phil Guy and the Chicago Machine. …
October 5, 1928 - August 25, 2008
… Hammond was an original. But he was also an archetype. While so many of his co-religionists spent the 1960s and beyond engaged in open warfare with their Catholic and nationalist fellow countrymen, Hammond followed his own path, empathising with both communities but only ever taking the side of the combatants’ shared humanity. He loved Ireland and all its people — especially their song. But most of all he loved Ulster, that curious hybrid of gaelic culture, Scottish influence and English dominance. …
October 5, 1938 - August 16, 2008
As the trumpeter with the Jamaican group the Skatalites, Johnny Moore played a key part in popularising the distinctive rhythms of ska, which later developed into reggae. His inventive soloing earned him the nickname “Dizzy” from his fellow musicians and the Skatalites enjoyed instrumental hits such as Guns of Navarone under their own name as well as playing on numerous recordings by other seminal Jamaican artists such as Prince Buster, Desmond Dekker and the Wailers. …
A female singer was found dead in her house in southern Seoul, Sunday, with the exact cause of her death remaining unknown. …
Eom, who released her debut album “The Story of 12 Love” last year, had worked as a flight attendant for more than a year. She started singing professionally following a recommendation from an entertainment agent who was on a flight she was working on.
Her agent said Eom suffered from depression and anthropophobia — a pathological fear of people — last year after her debut was not as successful as she hoped. They said she had started working on her second album two months ago. …
On what should have been one of the happiest days of their musical careers, Fort Collins band Tickle Me Pink was mourning the loss of one of its own. Tuesday morning TMP bassist Johnny Schou, 22, was found dead of unknown causes at the band’s Fort Collins home just hours before the group was to appear at a Denver in-store event celebrating Tuesday’s release of its major-label debut CD, “Madeline.” …
April 16, 1964 - June 14, 2008
Few bands demonstrated that jazz is no longer an exclusively American art form better than the trio led by the Swedish pianist Esbjörn Svensson. Mixing sparkling and virtuoso performances of jazz standards by the likes of Thelonious Monk with programmes of entirely original material, EST (as the trio were known) blurred the boundaries between jazz and both rock and classical music. They were widely regarded as Europe’s leading contemporary jazz group. Performances were brilliantly tailored to their audiences so that deeply-felt romantic ballads had the grey heads nodding in approval at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham whereas their gritty urban funk propelled by the drumming of Magnus Öström, with howling electronic bass effects from Dan Berglund, turned the Miles Davis Hall at Montreux into a teeming, sweaty mosh-pit for 18 to 25-year-olds. …
March 19, 1913 - February 14, 2008
Country and Western singer and entertainer dubbed ‘Australia’s first cowboy’, who became the world’s oldest recording artist
Smoky Dawson was one of Australia’s most enduringly popular entertainers. He was a western singer before it was coupled with country and was dubbed Australia’s first cowboy. He went on to become the world’s oldest recording artist. He made his first record, I’m a Happy Go Lucky Cowhand, in 1941 and his last, Homestead of My Dreams, in 2005, when he was 92, although a DVD featuring new performances was completed just before his death. …
Hugh Jarrett’s distinctive bass voice imbued Elvis Presley classics with unparalleled richness.
Mr. Jarrett, a member of the famed Jordanaires quartet, sang backup for Mr. Presley on “Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Love Me Tender,” “All Shook Up,” “Jailhouse Rock” and “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.” …
December 30, 1928 - June 2, 2008
“I don’t sound like nobody!” was Bo Diddley’s maxim in the 1950s, but over the decades dozens have tried to sound like him. Often imitated but not always acknowledged, the influence of the Bo Diddley beat — driving and relentless like the chant of a chain gang — is heard clearest and most famously on the Rolling Stones’ Not Fade Away. But that sound, which Bo Diddley called his “tradesman’s knock”, is just as discernible on U2’s Desire, or versions of the garage classic I Want Candy recorded by the Strangeloves and Bow Wow Wow two decades apart, or on George Michael’s Faith. …
Alexander “Sandy” Courage, an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated arranger, orchestrator and composer who created the otherworldly theme for the classic “Star Trek” TV show … died May 15 at the Sunrise assisted-living facility in Pacific Palisades…
Over a decades-long career, Courage collaborated on dozens of movies and orchestrated some of the greatest musicals of the 1950s and 1960s, including “My Fair Lady,” “Hello, Dolly!” “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” “Gigi,” “Porgy and Bess” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” …
Jim Hager, one of the Hager Twins who satirized country life with cornball one-liners on TV’s “Hee Haw,” died in Nashville, the show’s producer said Friday. He was 66.
Hager was at a coffee shop when he collapsed Thursday, Sam Lovullo said. He said he had been told that by Jon Hager, the surviving twin. …
JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) — Paul Davis, a singer and songwriter whose soft rock hit “I Go Crazy” stayed on the charts for months after its release in 1977, died Tuesday. He was 60. …
Al Wilson, the soul singer and songwriter who had a number of 1970s hits including “Show and Tell,” has died. He was 68.
Wilson died Monday of kidney failure at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fontana [California], according to his son, Tony Wilson of Yucaipa. …
Actor, writer and musician Gordon Clyde was known to radio listeners for his satirical and topical piano and song spots on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week and Woman’s Hour. He also had his own weekly show on the BBC World Service. …
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