In Memoriam|

Photo: Chick Corea (from his website) | Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea (June 12, 1941 – February 9, 2021) was an American jazz composer, keyboardist, bandleader, and occasional percussionist. His compositions “Spain”, “500 Miles High”, “La Fiesta”, “Armando’s Rhumba” and “Windows” are widely considered jazz standards. As a member of Miles Davis’s band in the late 1960s, he participated in the birth of jazz fusion. In the 1970s he formed Return to Forever. Along with McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, and Keith Jarrett, Corea is considered one of the foremost jazz pianists of the post-John Coltrane era.

Corea continued to collaborate frequently while exploring different musical styles throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He won 25 Grammy Awards and was nominated over 60 times.

Armando Corea was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to parents Anna (née Zaccone) and Armando J. Corea. He was of southern Italian descent, his father having been born to an immigrant from Albi commune, in the Province of Catanzaro in the Calabria region. His father, a trumpeter who led a Dixieland band in Boston in the 1930s and 1940s, introduced him to the piano at the age of four. Surrounded by jazz, he was influenced at an early age by bebop and Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Horace Silver, and Lester Young. When he was eight, he took up drums, which would influence his use of the piano as a percussion instrument.

Corea developed his piano skills by exploring music on his own. A notable influence was concert pianist Salvatore Sullo, from whom Corea started taking lessons at age eight and who introduced him to classical music, helping spark his interest in musical composition. He also spent several years as a performer and soloist in the St. Rose Scarlet Lancers, a drum and bugle corps based in Chelsea.

Given a black tuxedo by his father, he started playing gigs while still in high school. He enjoyed listening to Herb Pomeroy’s band at the time and had a trio that played Horace Silver’s music at a local jazz club. He eventually moved to New York City, where he studied music at Columbia University, then transferred to the Juilliard School. He quit both after finding them disappointing, but remained in New York.

Corea began his professional recording and touring career in the early 1960s with Mongo Santamaria, Willie Bobo, Blue Mitchell, Herbie Mann, and Stan Getz. He recorded his debut album, Tones for Joan’s Bones, in 1966 (not released until 1968). Two years later he released a highly regarded trio album, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, with drummer Roy Haynes and bassist Miroslav Vitous.

In 1968, Corea began recording and touring with Miles Davis, appearing on the widely praised Davis studio albums Filles de Kilimanjaro, In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew and On the Corner, as well as the later compilation albums Big Fun, Water Babies and Circle in the Round.

In concert performances, he frequently processed the sound of his electric piano through a ring modulator. Utilizing this unique style, he appeared on multiple live Davis albums, including Black Beauty: Live at the Fillmore West, and Miles Davis at Fillmore: Live at the Fillmore East. His membership in the Davis band continued until 1970, with the final touring band he was part of consisting of saxophonist Steve Grossman, fellow pianist Keith Jarrett (here playing electric organ), bassist Dave Holland, percussionist Airto Moreira, drummer Jack DeJohnette, and, of course, Davis himself on trumpet.

Holland and Corea departed the Davis group at the same time to form their own free jazz group, Circle, also featuring multireedist Anthony Braxton and drummer Barry Altschul. They were active from 1970 to 1971, and recorded on Blue Note and ECM. Aside from exploring an atonal style, Corea sometimes reached into the body of the piano and plucked the strings. In 1971, Corea decided to work in a solo context, recording the sessions that became Piano Improvisations Vol. 1 and Piano Improvisations Vol. 2 for ECM in April of that year.
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Corea married his second wife, vocalist/pianist Gayle Moran, in 1972. He had two children, Thaddeus and Liana, with his first wife, Joanie; his first marriage ended in divorce.[21][22]
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Corea was excluded from a concert during the 1993 World Championships in Athletics in Stuttgart, Germany. The concert’s organizers excluded Corea after the state government of Baden- Württemberg had announced it would review its subsidies for events featuring avowed members of Scientology. After Corea’s complaint against this policy before the administrative court was unsuccessful in 1996, members of the United States Congress, in a letter to the German government, denounced the ban as a violation of Corea’s human rights. Corea was not banned from performing in Germany, however, and had several appearances at the government-supported International Jazz Festival in Burghausen, where he was awarded a plaque in Burghausen’s “Street of Fame” in 2011.

Corea died of a rare form of cancer, which had been only recently diagnosed, at his home in the Tampa Bay area of Florida on February 9, 2021, at the age of 79.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_Corea

https://chickcorea.com

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Feminist Funk Pioneer Betty Davis Dead at Age 77

Photo: Betty Davis album cover | Lyndsey Parker, Yahoo Music | Funk trailblazer Betty Davis has died of natural causes, according to Davis’s close friend, ethnomusicologist Danielle Maggio, who confirmed the news to Rolling Stone Wednesday morning. Betty, the ex-wife of jazz great Miles Davis and a legend in her own right, was 77.
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Known for her unapologetically raunchy lyrics and extreme performance style, Betty was banned from U.S. television, radio, and many concert venues due to pressure by religious groups and the NAACP, but she later came to be hailed as a feminist pioneer and visionary who was ahead of her time. In his 1990 biography, Miles Davis himself wrote, “If Betty were singing today she’d be something like Madonna, something like Prince, only as a woman. She was the beginning of all that when she was singing as Betty Davis.”

Betty Davis was born Betty Mabry on July 26, 1945 in Durham, N.C., grew up in Pittsburgh, and began writing songs at age 12. At age 16, she moved to New York City, where she attended fashion school, worked as a model, and immersed herself in the Greenwich Village music scene of the early ‘60s. It was there that she met soul singer Lou Courtney, who produced her first single, “The Cellar,” in 1963. She continued to release music, but got her first real break in 1967, when she penned the hit song “Uptown (to Harlem)” for the Chambers Brothers.

Betty met Miles Davis in 1966; the two began dating in 1968 and married in September of that year. The marriage only lasted until 1969 (in his autobiography, Miles, who was 19 years older than Betty, said she was “too young and wild” for him), but Betty became a major influence on Miles’s art — turning him on to her friends Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone and other popular psychedelic music of the late-‘60s counterculture era, and laying the groundwork for his 1970 landmark LP Bitches Brew. She appeared on the cover of Miles’s 1968 album Filles de Kilimanjaro, which featured one track, “Mademoiselle Mabry,” named after her.

After her marriage to Miles ended, Betty temporarily relocated to London, where T. Rex glam-rock star Marc Bolan encouraged her to keep writing her own material. When she returned to the States, she focused on her solo career, finally releasing her self-titled debut album in 1973. The explosive record featured such luminaries as Greg Errico and Larry Graham from Sly Stone’s band, Neal Schon and Michael Carabello from Santana, the Pointer Sisters, and Sylvester, and is hailed as a funk masterpiece.

Betty Davis was entirely written and arranged by Betty; according to the 2017 documentary Betty: They Say I’m Different, she was the first Black female recording artist to perform and write all of her own music and manage herself. During her career, she famously turned down a songwriting deal with Motown Records because she would not have control or ownership of her material, and she passed on a chance to have Eric Clapton produce one of her albums because she found his style too conservative.
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Read the whole article here:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/feminist-funk-pioneer-betty-davis-dead-at-age-77-194430941.html

Photo: The cover of Betty Davis’s landmark 1973 debut album. (Photos: Light in the Attic Records)
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Other Notable Musicians’ Deaths…

We are going to miss them so much. If you want to know more about any of the musicians we lost, please check them out at http://www.wikipedia.com

February 2021
9: Apurba Bezbaruah, 70, Indian singer; Betty Davis, 77, American funk and soul singer; Nora Nova, 93, Bulgarian singer.

7: Vasyl Felenchak, 74, Ukrainian conductor and teacher; Zbigniew Namyslowski, 82, Polish jazz musician and composer.

6: George Crumb, 92, American composer (Ancient Voices of Children, Black Angels, Makrokosmos), Pulitzer Prize (1968) and Grammy winner (2001); Bruce Greig, 54, American guitarist (Misery Index, Dying Fetus); Syl Johnson, 85, American blues and soul singer (“Is It Because I’m Black”, “Take Me to the River”); Lata Mangeshkar, 92, Indian playback singer (Parichay, Kora Kagaz, Lekin…), composer and politician, MP (1999–2005), complications from COVID-19; Hans Neuenfels, 80, German writer, theatre director, and opera director, COVID-19; Predrag Vraneševic, 75, Serbian singer and composer (Laboratorija Zvuka).

5: Rubén Fuentes, 95, Mexican classical violinist and composer; Damodar Hota, 86, Indian classical vocalist, musicologist and composer; Damirbek Olimov, 32, Tajik singer, traffic collision.

4: Gianluca Floris, 57, Italian writer and bel canto singer; Arthur Grigoryan, 63, Armenian composer.

3: Georges Athanasiadès, 92, Swiss organist and choirmaster; Donny Gerrard, 75, Canadian singer (Skylark), cancer; Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet, 83, Uruguayan composer and pianist.

2: Endo Anaconda, 66, Swiss singer-songwriter (Stiller Has) and writer; Joe Diorio, 85, American jazz guitarist.

1: Heo Cham, 72, South Korean radio and television presenter and singer; Dina Eaton, 70, British music editor (Godzilla, Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace), complications of surgery; Hiroshima, Japanese drummer (G.I.S.M.) (death announced on this date); Willie Leacox, 74, American drummer (America) (death announced on this date); Leslie Parnas, 90, American cellist; Glenn Wheatley, 74, Australian entertainment executive, talent manager (Little River Band, John Farnham) and musician (The Masters Apprentices), complications from COVID-19; Jon Zazula, 69, American record label executive, founder of Megaforce Records.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_in_2021

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