Jazz icon
William Marcel Collette
Jazz icon Buddy Collette (born William Marcel Collette) died Sunday Sept. 19 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after suffering shortness of breath.
Buddy was a well-known saxophone, clarinet, and flute player who organized his own band at the age of 12 and started performing professionally by age of 17.
Collette contributed immensely to the jazz movement while he simultaneously rose to fame alongside life-long friends, bassist Charles Mingus, saxophonist Dexter Gordon, and drummer Chico Hamilton.
Collette was also a political and cultural activist in the battle against segregation in the music industry, and led a grassroots campaign to desegregate the Los Angeles musician’s union.
In the 1950’s, Collette became the first African American musician to perform on television, when he was featured on Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life.”
Collette is survived by daughters Cheryl, Veda and Crystal, son Zan, eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. He was 89.
Gil Scott-Heron the seminal author, poet, and musician died at the age of 62 on May 27 of undisclosed causes at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York’s Manhattan borough. A funeral service was scheduled for 8:30 am, at the Riverside Church, with a public viewing in the evening from 6 to 9 pm at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home at Madison Avenue and 81st Street. Scott-Heron is survived by his wife, Blaxploitation actress Brenda Sykes, and their daughter Gia Scott-Heron.
He taught a who’s who among those on the Los Angeles Jazz scene including Ernie Andrews, Roy Ayers, Dexter Gordon, Chico Hamilton, Horace Tapscott, and Vi Redd, and a number of these greats turned out recently as Jefferson High School renamed its auditorium in the honor of Samuel Rodney Browne. Not only did he graduate from the then-nearly all White school, but would later return to become the first African American teacher at the school.
We’re not called ‘Negroes’ anymore. It’s a racial identification from our past; we’ve moved on …now we’re black or African American. We rarely stop to think of the power behind the word ‘Negro,’ and that at one time in our history it stood for dignity, power, and love. It meant that none of us were free, until we were all free and that we had a special bond that manifested itself in education; honor and trusting in God to give us the strength to do what needed to be done.
Richard “Dick” Griffey, an iconic figure in the Black music who went from being a concert promoter to owning his own record label SOLAR (Sounds of Los Angeles Records)—credited for releasing hits such as “Fantastic Voyage” and “Rock Steady”—died Sept. 24, after complications from an earlier quadruple bypass surgery. He was 71.
SOLAR, founded in 1977, became the second largest African American-owned record company in the United States.
Although he gave only seven short years to his professional musical career, Jimi Hendrix, renamed James Marshall Hendrix by his father Al, had an impact that has lasted well beyond his untimely death at age 27. Forty years later, his achievements as a pioneering master of the electric guitar—including his innovative style of combining fuzz, feedback and controlled distortion which created a new musical form—still shine.
