Dead Celebrity Alert

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.

On stage he combined a rugged boldness with a robust vocal delivery; and he preserved a wonderful sense of Verdian line with a sharp understanding of melodic presentation. … Read full obituary

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. … Read full obituary

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. … Read full obituary

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. … Read full obituary

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. … Read full obituary

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. … Read full obituary

October 5, 1928 - August 25, 2008

There has always been in Ulster a breed of Protestants who, in the words of the poet Seamus Heaney, are at ease with a sense of Ireland and Irishness. One of these was the singer and documentary film-maker David Hammond, who died last week at the age of 79.

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. … Read full obituary

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. … Read full obituary

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. … Read full obituary

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.” …

An autopsy Tuesday was inconclusive, and there was no obvious cause of death, said Larimer County Chief Deputy Coroner Diane Fairman. Further examination, including toxicology and microbiology tests, will be necessary, but it could be weeks before a cause of death is known.

Those in the Colorado music scene were stunned and saddened by the loss. … Read full obituary

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.

At the heart of everything they did was Svensson’s piano playing…

The band had just finished recording its twelfth album, Leucocyte, and were about to begin an international tour encompassing this summer’s Edinburgh and Brecon jazz festivals. Svensson was scuba diving with a group in the Stockholm archipelago when he was found severely injured on the seabed. Attempts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful. … Read full obituary

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. … Read full obituary

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.”

Mr. Jarrett and the Jordanaires recorded 50 albums with Mr. Presley. He toured with the king of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s and in 1970 and acted in his movies. He was part of Mr. Presley’s famous waist-up appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1956. A skinny, beaming Mr. Jarrett wearing a plaid sport coat can be seen just over and behind Mr. Presley’s left shoulder, hand-clapping, finger-snapping and swaying to the music. … Read full obituary

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.

Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry aside, arguably none of the first generation of American rock’n’rollers had a greater impact on the subsequent course of popular music. Along with Berry, Diddley was also one of the first black performers to “cross over” and enjoy success in the predominantly white pop chart of the time. Among the classic singles to his name, all driven by the primitive but irresistible beat he likened to a freight train, were Diddy Wah Diddy, Who Do You Love?, Mona, You Can’t Judge a Book by Looking at its Cover, Road Runner and Say Man. The latter gave him his biggest American hit, but he also had a huge influence on the British beat boom of the 1960s. In addition to the Rolling Stones, those who covered his songs included the Kinks, the Animals, Manfred Mann and the Yardbirds, while the Pretty Things named themselves after one of his songs. … Read full obituary

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.”

But his most famous work is undoubtedly the “Star Trek” theme, which he composed, arranged and conducted in a week in 1965. …

He and Lionel Newman shared Academy Award nominations for their adapted scores for 1964’s “The Pleasure Seekers” and 1967’s “Doctor Dolittle.”

A friend and colleague of movie composers John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, he also provided the orchestration for such movies as “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Jurassic Park,” “Basic Instinct” and “The Mummy” and supplied arrangements for the Boston Pops while Williams was conductor in the 1980s and early 1990s. … Read full obituary