It’s one of those Isaac Hayes shut-your-mouth moments. I’m talking about the news that Hayes, at 65, had passed. He was a renaissance man in gold chains, a composer and arranger unafraid of style. He’d wear sunglasses the size of milk saucers while directing a room full of musicians onRead More

Editor’s note: This column ran as part of an obituary package on the national Gannett News Service wire upon Cab Calloway’s passing in 1994. by Nick DeRiso Between the tombstones of the two World Wars, there emerged the knock-down joys of swing music. Perhaps no single figure from the periodRead More

by Pico It was hardly a month ago when I was on this space talking up this brand new release by blues wunderkind Sean Costello called We Can Get Together. Costello really impressed me as the former guitar prodigy who was poised to take up a long-term residency at theRead More

Oscar Peterson, one of jazz music’s most recognizable modern-day pianists, was felled on Sunday not from the lingering effects of a 1993 stroke — he kept playing after that — but from kidney failure. He passed, aged 82, in his native Canada outside Toronto. Peterson’s stroke compromised his left handRead More

Everyone knew Loretta Lynn was at Shoney’s in West Monroe, Louisiana. It said so right on the side of her tour bus. But she wouldn’t come out.

by Pico At 6:00 a.m. this morning, singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg passed away peacefully at his home in Maine. He fought a three year battle with prostate cancer that was already advanced when diagnosed in 2004. He was 56 years old. He will of course always be remembered for the musicRead More

Max Roach, a drummer both of unparalleled force and towering intellect, has passed. A New York Times obit talks about the dramatic scope of his life’s work: Mr. Roach’s death closes a chapter in American musical history. He was the last surviving member of a small circle of adventurous musiciansRead More

Editor’s note: This column ran as part of an obituary package on the national Gannett News Service wire upon Dizzy Gillespie’s passing in 1993. People told him those bullfrog cheeks would ruin his playing. The embouchure, very important. Flinty, yet funny, John Birks Gillespie was insightful enough to understand thatRead More