Musicians Who Have Passed from COVID-19 in 2020

[humprof]

Mory Kante, Guinean singer and kora player and a superstar of West African music. He may have had Covid, but at the very least the lockdown prevented him from traveling to France for treatment for other medical conditions. Jon Pareles's obit in the Times reminds me that he played on the Talking Heads' Naked.



Also: nice piece on NPR tonight about how the jazz community is dealing with the loss of so many elders:
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/22/861202532/pandemic-strikes-jazz-community

 

[humprof]

Helen Jones Woods, 96. Played with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/obituaries/Helen-Woods-dead-coronavirus.html

 

[humprof]

Tom Waits has written a tribute to Willner. (The article below, which is full of fabulous Waitsian quotes, also mentions tributes by Nick Cave and Elvis Costello.)

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tom-waits-hal-willner-tribute-984844/
Also a new interview with Van Dyke Parks discussing Willner (and John Prine). Don't worry: Van Dyke is okay!

https://www.latimes.com/entertainme...-04-14/van-dyke-parks-hal-willner-coronavirus

For fellow Hal Willner fans: Burning Ambulance marks the 30th anniversary of his amazing, crazy, uncategorizable Mingus tribute, Weird Nightmare.
https://burningambulance.com/2022/11/04/weird-nightmare-30/

People will often describe albums that are just slightly off-center as sounding like nothing else out there. They’re usually exaggerating. Weird Nightmare, though, really is like nothing else. It’s unsettling, beautiful in a clanging and dissonant way (Robert Quine’s noise guitar solo on “Pithecanthropus Erectus” is like having someone install braces on your teeth just so they can yank them off again, and that’s before he somehow manages to throw in an allusion to the electric sitar on Miles Davis’s On the Corner for no goddamn reason at all), and it makes you feel like you’ve slept too long, and now you’re half-awake and vaguely feverish, plagued with ominous dreams you can’t fully recall, but trying gives you the shivers.

That album is probably too daffy and esoteric to ever get an Atmos upgrade. Willner's posthumous VU project, however, is nominally in Atmos, even if there's very little happening up top: