Les Barker 1947 - 2023

David Surette

The passing of New Hampshire guitar and mandolin player David Surette is a tremendous loss to the folk community in New England and beyond. He had the most elegant guitar style, and a way of fitting Celtic tunes to a six-string neck that made those tunes really live and breathe, as witness here on a couple of Breton dance tunes...



...and here on the O'Carolan tune Planxty Fanny Power, which has seen countless guitar arrangements in its time but none better than this one...



Our deepest condolences to his family and his friends.

Nanci Griffith, 1953 - 2021

One of the greats...

Little Richard, 1932 - 2020

Little Richard and Fishbone grab a Leadbelly tune and floor it.

"Well I may be right and I may be wrong/but you're gonna miss me when I'm gone..."

Jessye Norman, 1945 - 2019

I really have nothing to add to the cascade of tributes these last few days. Instead, while her Strauss and Wagner are getting plenty of social media airtime, I thought I'd post a bit of her Carmen documentary. She took a lot of critical heat for this project at the time -- her involvement with the role upset the gatekeepers -- but I like this clip (and the doc in general) because it shows her exercising her tremendous art in the less-guarded environs of the recording studio...which is to say, having fun.

Cathy Barton 1955 - 2019

Cathy Barton's compendium of songs and tunes was pretty much inexhaustible, and she was a killer banjo player, and she had a voice you could listen to all day. Everything in her cover of Gail Davies' Grandma's Song applies, except the "old" and swap out Oklahoma for Missouri. Over forty years, she and her husband Dave Para taught those old folk songs (and some newer ones), and those old tunes, to countless people. And if you wanted to know how a reindeer got into a song from the Ozarks, they could surely tell you. A rock-solid legacy, but gone too soon.

Alec Finn 1944 - 2018

Maybe the only bouzouki player in Irish music to play an honest to god bouzouki...

Montserrat Caballé 1933 - 2018

Liam O'Flynn, 1945 - 2018

One of the great uilleann pipers of our age. Here he is making Planxty work.



Addendum: NYT obituary has finally arrived.

Ursula Le Guin 1929 - 2018

For tweens of a certain stripe, she was the way into more problematically interesting fictive worlds than most of those lauded white-guy authors had to offer -- Earthsea could have been more of the Tolkienesque same, but she made magic a force with consequences as opposed to just another weapon to throw at some menace lumbering in your direction. And that was only the beginning of a canon built on hashing out thorny questions in abstract, one which will no doubt be much-revisited in the coming days. Meantime, NYT obit here.

for BK

Harry Dean Stanton, 1926 - 2017

Probably the only time I've ever thought "Dude, NO, do NOT rescue the cat!"

Otherwise, HDS's presence in a movie was like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval if the seal was an anarchy A.

Kishori Amonkar, 1932 - 2017

Obituaries from The Times of India and NPR.

John Hurt 1940 - 2017

Roberta Peters 1930 - 2017

Along with having one of those Met debuts, she did a lot to keep opera in the public eye. NYT obituary here.

the year of attrition

George Michael was kind of the pop culture wallpaper for me in the late 80's, but as someone who wore out more than one copy of A Day at the Races in the era of vinyl and live television events, this was a capital M Moment.

Russell Oberlin 1928 - 2016

For anyone who came to baroque vocal music back in the days when Vinyl was King, Russell Oberlin was an interesting feature of the landscape - a gesture toward HIPness in an age when Bach usually meant Big Technicolor Orchestra. He was out there planting the flag largely on his own, but perhaps the developments of the last twenty years made him feel fantastically vindicated. NYT obituary here. (Margalit Fox really should update her CT discography, tho.)

Peter Allen 1920 - 2016

Peter Allen was the announcer for the Met broadcasts from 1975, when he succeeded Milton Cross, to 2004, when Margaret Juntwait took the mic. He had this cool delivery that, while not being stagey, made every plot synopsis, costume description, and singer bio its own bit of theater. His cadences might seem slightly old skool now, but I miss them when the scripted Saturday tag-team act gets a bit too precious. NYT obituary here.

Amjad Sabri 1976 - 2016