Tag: obituary

Dickey Betts, a guitarist and co-founder of the Allman Brothers Band, died at home in Osprey, Florida, this morning (April 18), Rolling Stone reports. The cause was cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Betts’ manager David Spero told the publication. Betts was 80 years old.

Born in West Palm Beach and raised in Bradenton, Florida, Betts learned the ukulele, banjo, and mandolin as a child and played in rock bands as a teenager. In 1967, in his mid-twenties, he formed a group called Second Coming with bassist Berry Oakley, before joining Gregg and Duane Allman two years later. Betts was pivotal to the group, not only for his mythic solos, performed in tandem with Duane Allman until his death in 1971; Betts also penned the instrumental “Jessica” and their biggest hit, “Ramblin’ Man,” among many other songs. Though “Jessica” came out in 1973, a live recording of the song won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance in 1996. Betts was inducted with the band into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.

Betts released his debut solo album, Highway Call, in 1974. After the Allman Brothers Band split in 1976, Betts continued touring and recording with his solo project and his band Great Southern, but joined Allman Brothers in their on-and-off reunions. He went on to release several more solo LPs, plus live albums and compilations.

Betts suffered a brain injury in 2018; he was playing with his dog in the backyard of his Sarasota home when he slipped and cracked his head. A statement from his website said that he was “in critical but stable condition” and was scheduled to head into surgery, though he canceled a string of live dates.

In a statement to Rolling Stone upon his death, Betts’ family called the guitarist a “legendary performer, songwriter, bandleader, and family patriarch,” adding, “Dickey was larger-than-life, and his loss will be felt worldwide. At this difficult time, the family asks for prayers and respect for their privacy in the coming days.”

In an additional statement, the Allman Brothers Band said:

With deep sadness the Allman Brothers Band learned today that founding member Dickey Betts has passed away peacefully in his home in Sarasota, Florida, following a period of declining health.

Dickey wrote quintessential Brothers songs including “Blue Sky,” “Rambling Man,” “Jessica,” “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and many others. His extraordinary guitar playing alongside guitarist Duane Allman created a unique dual guitar signature sound that became the signature sound of the genre known as Southern Rock.

He was passionate in life, be it music, songwriting, fishing, hunting, boating, golf, karate or boxing. Dickey was all in on and excelled at anything that caught his attention.

Betts joins his brothers, Duane Allman, Berry Oakley, Butch Trucks and Gregg Allman, as well as ABB crew, members Twiggs Lyndon, Joe Dan Petty, Red Dog, Kim Payne and Mike Callahan in that old Winnebago in the sky touring the world taking their music to all who will listen.

Our condolences to his immediate family Donna, Duane & Lisa, Christy & Frank, Jessica, and Kim.

Play on Brother Dickey, you will be forever remembered and deeply missed.

Allman Brothers Band, Family, and Crew

Richard Horowitz, the composer and pianist who won a Golden Globe Award for his soundtrack, with Ryuichi Sakamoto, to The Sheltering Sky, died in Marrakesh, Morocco, on Saturday, April 13, according to a post on the Instagram page of his wife, Sussan Deyhim. In its own tribute, the New York label Rvng Intl., which reissued Horowitz’s album Eros in Arabia, heralded the “incredible tapestry of music [Horowitz] was a part of,” adding, “now you are all around us, reborn in the ultimate dimension.”

Horowitz was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1949, and spent much of his young adulthood traveling Europe performing music. In the 1970s, he studied electronic music in Paris and the ney (a traditional flute) in Morocco. He, in turn, released a series of albums based around the ney between the late 1970s and early 1980s

In 1981, Horowitz entered two important partnerships: the first with vocalist, dancer, and composer Sussan Deyhim—his future wife—and the second with Jon Hassell, who swiftly invited Horowitz to join his touring operation and work on records, including Power Spot, that synthesized ancient mysticism and modern music technology. The same year, he released Eros in Arabia, his formal debut album, under the moniker Drahcir Ztiworoh; it has since been heralded as a formative work in the development of American minimalism.

Throughout the decade, Horowitz collaborated with artists including David Byrne and Brian Eno and jazz greats such as Anthony Braxton, before partnering with Sakamoto for the North African–set romance movie The Sheltering Sky in 1990. He spent much of his life in Morocco, and, in 1998, co-founded the Gnawa and World Music Festival in the city of Essaouira, now attended by some half a million people each year. Around the same time, he was working on the score for what would become his best-known soundtrack, to Oliver Stone’s 1999 sports thriller Any Given Sunday.

In addition to his musical legacy, Sussan Deyhim’s post honored Horowitz as “a seeker, a master linguist (most especially fond of a good double entendre), a master pianist and ney player, a humorist, trickster, a loving partner, father, and grandfather, sometimes a critical snob, a traveler and world citizen who believed in our shared humanity. He will be missed beyond measure or time and we ask that he continue to guide us in the melody and tone of the universe.”

Calvin LeBrun, the New York radio DJ best known as Mister Cee, has died, the hip-hop station Hot 97 reports, citing his family. A cause of death has not been revealed. Mister Cee was 57 years old.

Mister Cee grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and, in 1988, he took part in the debut album from one of the New York neighborhood’s brightest young stars, Big Daddy Kane. Cee was the DJ on Long Live the Kane, and he’s the subject of the album’s penultimate track, “Mister Cee’s Master Plan.” Cee continued his work with Kane through the early 1990s, earning credits on 1989’s It’s a Big Daddy Thing, 1990’s Taste of Chocolate, 1991’s Prince of Darkness, and 1993’s Looks Like a Job For….

Cee is also often credited with discovering another pillar of Brooklyn hip-hop, the Notorious B.I.G. “I knew he was dope,” Cee recalled of the late legend last year. “I didn’t think he would become what he would before passing away. All I did at the time was try to get anybody and everybody to listen to him. Big Daddy Kane, Masta Ace, I would try to force Biggie down their throat like you gotta hear this guy. Had we had the wear with all we do now as grown men, me and Masta Ace could have put Biggie out or me and Kane.” Eventually, Mister Cee served as an executive producers on the Notorious B.I.G.’s iconic 1994 debut, Ready to Die.

Beyond his work as a producer, Mister Cee spent decades as a DJ on New York’s popular hip-hop radio station Hot 97 (WQHT-FM, 97.1). Writing about the DJ in 2013, The New York Times’ Jon Caramanica called Cee “the station’s institutional memory and its living link to history, its one reliable purveyor of hip-hop classics.” Cee was admired so much for his work with the station that fellow Brooklyn luminary Jay-Z shouted out him and Funkmaster Flex on 2009’s “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)”: “I made this just for Flex and Mister Cee.”

Despite his success, Mister Cee left Hot 97 in 2013 after several arrests for soliciting oral sex from transgender prostitutes. The DJ used his resignation as an opportunity to speak openly about his sexuality in an interview with Ebro Darden that Jody Rosen called “a watershed moment for hip-hop culture, which has slowly been casting off its long-standing homophobia.”

Keith LeBlanc, the Tackhead drummer, producer, and session musician best known for his work on classic hip-hop songs by Grandmaster Flash and Sugarhill Gang, died on Thursday (April 4) due to an undisclosed illness, his wife, Fran LeBlanc, told Variety. He was 69.

“All of us at On-U Sound are heartbroken to share the news that the great Keith LeBlanc has passed away,” his longtime label wrote in an obituary. “His writing and production skills were utilised by Living Colour, Peter Gabriel, The Cure, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails. As a drummer/programmer he worked with everyone from James Brown to Trevor Horn, Seal to R.E.M., The Rolling Stones, Jalal (Last Poets), The Stone Roses, Robert Palmer, Bomb The Bass, Annie Lennox, Tina Turner, Bryan Ferry, Depeche Mode and Sinead O’Connor…. An incredible drummer, producer and musical maverick, he will be hugely missed. Rest in power Keith.”

Born in 1954 in Bristol, Connecticut, LeBlanc gravitated towards drumming after studying Ringo Starr during one of the Beatles’ TV performances. LeBlanc moved from the practice pad at home to a proper drum kit in his school’s orchestra, and performed his first show at a club when he was 14.

In the 1970s, LeBlanc auditioned to replace his outgoing friend, Harold Sargent, in the house band at Sugar Hill Records. LeBlanc landed the gig and stayed in the house band until 1982, playing live drums on hip-hop songs that gave them a sharp groove: Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache,” “8th Wonder,” and their 1980 self-titled album; Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “It’s Nasty” and The Message; and more by the likes of Kool Moe Dee & the Treacherous 3, the Crash Crew, and the Funky 4+1. His style helped Sugar Hill songs stand out at a time when electronic drumming dominated.

LeBlanc landed his own independent hit in 1983 with “No Sell Out,” one of the first songs to integrate samples. The track, on which LeBlanc also used synthesizers and a drum machine, hit No. 60 on the UK singles chart. The single, which prominently features Malcolm X’s voice, was dedicated to the late activist, with all proceeds going to his family.

When LeBlanc met British producer Adrian Sherwood in the early 1980s, the two teamed up with LeBlanc’s former Sugar Hill collaborators bassist Doug Wimbish and guitarist Skip McDonald to form the industrial hip-hop band Tackhead. Together, they churned out dozens of records for On-U Sound, including 1988’s Tackhead Tape Time and 1989’s Friendly as a Hand Grenade. Though Tackhead broke up in the 1990s, they reunited to record the 2014 album For the Love of Money and hit the road for tours in 2004 and 2022.

Shigeichi Negishi, the Japanese entrepreneur who invented the first-ever karaoke machine, died on January 26, The Wall Street Journal reports. Negishi, who was based in Tokyo, was 100 years old.

Journalist Matt Alt, who interviewed Negishi for his book Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World, reported the news on X and expanded on Negishi’s legacy in an obituary for The Wall Street Journal. Negishi’s daughter confirmed her father’s death to Alt, stating that he died from natural causes after a fall.

Negishi was the head of an electronics company when he first envisioned what would become the Sparko Box—a blueprint for the globally-adored karaoke machine. Legend has it that Negishi was singing to himself as he walked into his office one day in 1967. After an employee poked fun at his sub-par crooning, Negishi realized he would surely sound better with the help of a backing track.

Negishi, who loved singing along to the radio and television programs, eventually had an employee wire together a speaker, tape deck, and microphone, testing the prototype with an instrumental version of Yoshio Kodama’s “Mujo no Yume.” After a trial run, he took the MacGyvered machine home and “convened history’s first karaoke party with his wife and children,” as Alt put it.

In an interview with Alt, Negishi discussed how he named his pivotal invention. Negishi first proposed “karaoke,” a contraction of the Japanese words for “empty” and “orchestra.” His distributor, however, would not allow it, saying that “karaoke sounded too much like kanoke”—which means coffin. The Sparko Box was born.

Though Negishi never patented the Sparko Box, he spent a period of time as a traveling salesman of the contraption, driving around Japan and demonstrating his invention at bars, restaurants, and hotels. He sold roughly 8,000 Sparko Boxes during this period, but eventually terminated his endeavors in 1975.

While there where a few Japanese inventors who created similar gadgets prior to karaoke’s widespread boom in the 1980s and ’90s, Negishi’s Sparko Box preceded them all. Even Japanese musician Daisuke Inoue, who created a similar gizmo called the 8 Juke, was four years behind the Sparko Box.

Alt reports that Negishi’s family watches over the sole remaining, and still functioning, Sparko Box.