As we reported last year, Lance Hahn, frontman of J Church and longtime punk fixture, had been ill for some time with kidney disease. He finally succumbed to the illness this weekend at age 40.
Bobby Byrd–best known for being the wayward James Brown’s benefactor when the young Brown was an aspiring singer fresh out of jail and then as Brown’s musical partner and confrere through the Godfather’s two-decade rise from ’60s soulman to ’70s funkateer, as well as a solo artist in Brown’s… More »
Joe Zawinul, the Viennese keyboardist renowned for his late ’60s work with Miles Davis’ early electric bands and his own superhuman fusion acrobatics in Weather Report, has died after a month-long hospitalization according to the Associated Press, with a “spokeswoman for Vienna’s Wilhelmina Clinic [confirming] his death without giving details”:
We sort of forgot to mention it in the rush to beat you over the head with the Video! Music! Awards! until you went numb, but biggest-opera-star-of-modern-times Luciano Pavarotti sadly passed on this week aged 71. More »
Hilly Kristal, the man behind CBGB, died on Tuesday following a battle with lung cancer and perhaps an even more debilitating battle over the last few years to keep the punk rock warhorse open:
In the first music death that’s truly punched me in the gut in quite a while, drummer Max Roach, who left his rhythmic stamp on so much post-war jazz, passed on today. More »
Lee Hazlewood, the maverick country singer and pop producer known best for his work with Nancy Sinatra in the 1960s and his fathomless baritone voice, died this weekend from complications due to renal cancer. He had turned 78 just several weeks prior. Hazlewood had been first diagnosed with the disease a few years back, and recently he had been almost sardonic in interviews in the face of the short time his doctors had given him to live. He was still recording despite the quick deterioration of his health, releasing his final album in 2006. It was just another example of the cussedness that made him one of pop’s most enduring oddballs.
Irish folk musician Tommy Makem passed away yesterday in New Hampshire at age 74, after a lengthy battle with lung cancer. More »
Tom Snyder died yesterday in San Francisco at the age of 71, after battling leukemia for several years. Inevitably, most of the obituaries that will cross the newswires today will mention his heavy smoking on Tomorrow, which followed Tonight on NBC from 1973 to 1982, and Dan Aykroyd’s Snyder impression from the early years of Saturday Night Live. But Snyder deserves to be heralded by music-nerd circles, too.
The video for Beck’s “Round The Bend,” which was created by video artist Jeremy Blake, somehow manages to be even more low-key and glacially paced than the song itself. The images slowly melt together, leaving abstracted, animated washes of bright colors while only occasionally revealing the nature of their form. There are no figures; when the face of Beck appears, it’s only as a two-dimensional representation directly lifted from the art that Blake created for the 2002 album Sea Change. It’s a gorgeous piece, and it’s likely the final music video of Blake’s career–he went missing last week and is now presumed dead.