The 2012 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[The Mad Monk]

Ray Easterling, NFL star, chronic traumatic encephalopathy sufferer, suicide victim.

[-Jrabbit]

Chris Ethridge, bassist, Flying Burrito Brothers and Willie Nelson Family Band, age 65.

RIP, brother.

[molly bloom]

Jazz hands rest quiet:

The percussionist Tony Marsh, who has died of cancer aged 72, was an inspired collaborator, combining intensity with restraint and stroking the drums more than he struck them. He worked with some of the most creative artists in European jazz of the past four decades, from the composer Mike Westbrook to the saxophonists John Tchicai and Evan Parker.

Marsh devoted his life to an art form short on cash and kudos, but long on creative satisfaction. In his last months he sought inspiration in the complex scores of the composer Iannis Xenakis; formed a new trio with two of London's most creative jazz 20-somethings; and, in March, played an impromptu London performance with the Chicago saxophone master Roscoe Mitchell that astonished those who witnessed it.

Marsh was born in Lancaster, the eldest of three brothers. The family moved to London after the second world war in search of better medical care for his tuberculosis, and he spent a long period of recuperation in St Thomas' hospital. That period of illness seriously hampered his formal education, but he became a good enough teenage footballer to enter trials for professional clubs.

He took up the drums as a military bandsman during national service in the 50s and would play them at Butlins' holiday camps and on cruise ships. In the 60s, he made a living in the West End of London as a jobbing drummer – also learning from records by the great American jazz bands of Clifford Brown (with the bebop drums pioneer Max Roach), Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

In the early 70s, Marsh joined the saxophonist Don Weller, the bass guitarist Bruce Colcutt and the guitarist Jimmy Roche in Major Surgery. The band only released one album, First Cut (1977), but it acquired lasting cult status. He also began productive relationships with the saxophonist Chris Biscoe, the Barbadian trumpeter Harry Beckett and the saxophonist Mike Osborne (in the last period of that cutting-edge artist's playing life, before mental illness incapacitated him in 1982).

Marsh then discovered Westbrook's brass band and big-band music, improv, cabaret and more. Marsh's relaxed dynamism powered an unusual Westbrook big band on an Ellington tribute at Amiens, France, in 1984. It became the landmark album On Duke's Birthday. Four years later, Marsh joined Biscoe's quartet, Full Monte.

Through his European tours with Westbrook, Marsh forged a link with the French jazz scene, regularly commuting between Paris and London until the early 2000s. In 1985, he joined Biscoe and a French brass section to record the bassist Didier Levallet's album Quiet Days, followed by a series of sessions led by Beckett – including one that Levallet considered among his best recordings, Images of Clarity (1992). He also played with the adventurous UK pianist Howard Riley, reeds player Paul Dunmall, and with the saxophonist Simon Picard and the bass virtuoso Paul Rogers on their recording News from the North (1991) for the Swiss experimental label Intakt.

Marsh then committed himself increasingly to life in London. He hugely enjoyed his monthly involvement in the experimental London Improvisers Orchestra (involving the composer/pianist Steve Beresford, Parker and a loose repertory company of others). He was also a permanent member of one of the most thrilling European free-improv trios of recent times, with Parker and the double bassist John Edwards. Marsh was also the driving force behind a genre-crossing quartet with the flautist Neil Metcalfe, the violinist Alison Blunt and the cellist Hannah Marshall.

Since 2011, he had begun a productive relationship with two hotly tipped newcomers, the reeds player Shabaka Hutchings and the bassist Guillaume Viltard. They played freely without prolixity, combined fine detail with spontaneity, and eschewed amplification.

"Listen closely, take a chance, keep going even if money's tight, and you'll find the real reward – that's why Tony was hip in the most meaningful sense," Parker says. "And he didn't need to play loud, or be loud, to get that intensity. It's like splitting diamonds or something. If you know exactly the right place to make the impact, you don't need to hit anything hard."

Marsh is survived by his daughter, Lizzie, his partner, Jane, and his brother, Leslie.

• Anthony Vincent Stewart Marsh, percussionist, born 19 August 1939; died 9 April 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/apr/23/tony-marsh

[molly bloom]

Gabriel blew his horn... and Love came along.

The precise, rich brass riffs on such records as Wilson Pickett's In the Midnight Hour, Sam & Dave's Soul Man and Otis Redding's Try a Little Tenderness were an integral part of the soul music of the 1960s. Among the horn players on those and dozens of other hits was the tenor saxophonist Andrew Love, who has died aged 70.

In 1965, he joined the Mar-Keys brass section at Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee, which already included the white trumpeter Wayne Jackson, who would form an enduring partnership with Love. Theirs was a symbolically important integrated unit at a time when racial segregation was still widespread in the American south. Among the first records on which the duo worked together was Redding's album Otis Blue (1965).

Love credited Redding as a major influence on the Stax horn sound. The singer asked for what he called "ensambos" at key moments on his records – prearranged sections where one saxophone and the trumpet played in unison, while another sax played in harmony. What the musicians themselves called the "fat" sound also owed much to the use by Love and Jackson of mouthpieces made of hard rubber rather than the metal mouthpieces preferred by other musicians.

The brass sound achieved on the Redding records soon became a trademark feature of the company's releases. It can be heard on numerous hits by Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas and Isaac Hayes. Love also worked with Stax singers on stage, notably on a 1967 tour of Europe and later that year at the Monterey Pop festival, where the young white audience was stunned by Redding's show.

Love was born in Memphis, the son of Roy Love, pastor of the Mount Nebo Baptist church, and his wife Dolly. After learning the trumpet at the age of 11, Andrew played with the band at his father's church. At Booker T Washington high school in south Memphis, the alma mater of many soul musicians including Booker T Jones of Booker T and the MG's and Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire, he took up the saxophone and played in school bands. Love attended Langston University in Oklahoma on a band scholarship before returning to Memphis in 1961.

He found work in various night clubs and his abilities were soon recognised by the bandleader and and studio musician Willie Mitchell. Mitchell hired Love to play on recording sessions and he moved house to live opposite the studio used by Mitchell, so as to be available to play at short notice. Mitchell's recordings were issued by the relatively successful Hi label but the city's biggest record industry player was Stax and when one of its regular session saxophonists left, Love was brought into the Stax fold.

Despite their essential contribution to the commercial success of Stax, Love and Jackson were paid only freelance session fees until they returned from the tour of Europe, when they were given retainers of $250 a week. They were also in demand to work in other Memphis studios, but when the Stax chief Jim Stewart demanded they record only for him, the duo decided to leave the company. This was in 1969, a time of great uncertainty at Stax, as it was about to be acquired by the Gulf and Western conglomerate.

Now rechristened the Memphis Horns, the duo were immediately offered their own recording contract by Atlantic Records. Bookings for recording session work also came flooding in and for the next three decades, Love and Jackson were in constant demand to work with rock and pop singers as well as soul stars. They can be heard on Elvis Presley's Suspicious Minds, Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond, almost all of Al Green's hits, and albums by Rod Stewart, Sting and U2. They also contributed to a series of albums by the younger blues singer Robert Cray.

Love retired in 2004, two years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's. With his blessing, Jackson continued to work as the Memphis Horns with other musicians. Earlier this year, the Memphis Horns were awarded a Grammy for lifetime achievement, but Love was too ill to attend the ceremony.

He is survived by his second wife, Willie Davis, two sons, two daughters, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

• Andrew Maurice Love, saxophonist, born 21 November 1941; died 12 April 2012

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=guardian+obituary+andrew+love&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CC0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fmusic%2F2012%2Fapr%2F22%2Fandrew-love&ei=f3eWT8TwFoyt8QOq1qGoBg&usg=AFQjCNGmgpKbH9MA-TY-hmgFkuU4KuTEcA

[-Jrabbit]

Love that Memphis Horns sound. Incredible artists.
RIP, Mr. Love.

[ColdWizard]

Stayin' Alive; Robin Gibb fully conscious and speaking.

[Uncle Sparky]

Billy Bryans (Parachute Club) is dead.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle2411780/

[SlowwHand]

Robin Gibb may be out of a coma, but he's going. Not that I want him to, but I believe he will go fairly soon.

[Uncle Sparky]

The Mayans are planning a kick-ass end to the 13th b'ak'tun, with Dick Clark hosting and an amazing jam session. Robin Gibb will add that high pop tenor voice.

[molly bloom]

Irish eyes not smiling:

When the National Gallery of Ireland acquired Louis le Brocquy's canvas A Family, in 2002, he became the first living Irish artist to have a painting in the collection. It is a modern parable. Le Brocquy, who has died aged 95, painted A Family in 1951, and Gimpel Fils, his London gallery from 1947 for the rest of his life, exhibited it that year. In 1952 a group of patrons offered to buy the painting for £400 and present it to the municipal gallery in Dublin, but the art advisory committee rejected it as incompetent.

Four years later, it won a prize at the Venice Biennale, was bought by the Nestlé Foundation and hung at its Milan headquarters until 2001. The Irish businessman Lochlann Quinn then bought it from Agnews in London for £1.7m, and with his wife, Brenda, presented it to the National Gallery of Ireland.

Le Brocquy's charm and modesty seemed insufficient defence against the vitriolic public abuse that accompanied his hometown rejection in 1952, but his inner strength was obvious early in life. Born in Dublin, he went to St Gerard's school in Wicklow and studied chemistry at Trinity College, Dublin, intending to forge a career alongside his father, Albert, in the family oil refinery. His mother, Sybil, was a lawyer and writer whose play Winning Ways was staged by the Abbey Theatre in 1932.

Louis took up painting as a hobby and myth has it that the two pieces accepted in 1937 for the admittedly crusty Royal Hibernian Academy's annual show were the first he had ever made. Whatever the truth, it became obvious to Le Brocquy that he was meant for a different kind of career with oils. He quit Trinity and embarked on a study tour through Europe in 1937-38.

Thus self-taught, he joined his younger sister, Melanie, a sculptor, and a group of rebels in helping to set up an avant-garde organisation, Irish Exhibition of Living Art, and exhibited at its launch in 1943. His career began to flourish in 1946 with the start of his so-called tinker period, a cubist-influenced series of paintings of groups of Irish travellers.

For many years he was treated by critics as a Celtic fringe follower of Picasso, but he was a true original, many of whose tinker-period paintings suggest late-period Picasso before the event. One highly suggestive work, Man Creating Bird (1948), is a lyrical and mildy disturbing allegory of a man with an upraised hand pulling at a thread attached to a squawking bird's throat held in his other hand. Everything in the picture seems on the point of flight, but what actually did take off was Le Brocquy's career as a tapestry designer, at which he was an unqualified success.

The best of the tapestries sprang from the work he did for Thomas Kinsella's poetic version of one story, The Táin (1969), about the gathering of people for a cattle raid from a body of medieval Ulster mythology. These were black and white blot illustrations of raw magnificence, incidentally including Medb Relieving Herself – another, presumably inadvertent, shadowing of Picasso (La Pisseuse of 1965).

A Family was a crucial point in Le Brocquy's work as a painter, not because of its history once it came off the easel, but because it introduced a new phase of activity involving painting in subdued colours: 1951-54, a grey period, then a white period following a sponsored visit to Spain. Passing through La Mancha in 1955, as he described it: "I stopped spellbound before a small group of women and children standing against a whitewashed wall. Here the intensity of the sunlight had interposed its own revelation, absorbing these human figures into its brilliance, giving substance only to shadow. From that moment I never perceived the human presence in quite the same way."

The paintings appeared now as a meditation on the state of being, of how it feels to be inside a body or a head, not how it looks, though the sequence of portraits of Irish writers from Oscar Wilde to his friends Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney are good likenesses – and fetched six and seven figures in the new Irish tiger economy.

Le Brocquy married Jean Stoney in 1938 but they divorced in 1948. In 1958 he married Ann Madden Simpson – Anne Madden the painter, as he always referred to her. They lived until the turn of the century in the south of France. She and their sons, Pierre and Alexis, survive him, as does Seyre, the daughter of his first marriage.

• Louis le Brocquy, artist, born 10 November 1916; died 25 April 2012

http://www.anne-madden.com/LeBPages/lebrocquy.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/apr/26/louis-le-brocquy?newsfeed=true

Samuel Beckett as depicted by le Brocquy:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]171575[/ATTACH]

[Al B. Sure!]

Junior Seau may have committed suicide. You heard it here first.

[OzzyKP]

http://gawker.com/5907713/beastie-boys-founding-member-adam-mca-yauch-dead-at-47

Beastie Boys Founding Member Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch, Dead at 47

Adam Yauch, better known to music fans as MCA of the legendary hip hop triumvirate Beastie Boys, passed away today at the age of 47 following a hard-fought battle with cancer.

Russell Simmons' Global Grind confirmed the tragic news this afternoon.

In 2009 Yauch announced that he was being treated for a cancerous tumor in his salivary gland. In 2011, Yauch posted an update on the Beastie Boys' website telling friends and fans he was not cancer-free as reported, but was "staying optimistic and hoping to be cancer free in the near future."

Yauch was absent at the Beastie Boys' Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction last month, but the band's official statement did not reveal why.

He is survived by wife Dechen Wangdu and their daughter Tenzin Losel Yauch.

[-Jrabbit]

Wow, RIP to one cool cat.

[Guynemer]

License To Ill was released 25 years ago. Damn.

[Tuberski]

George "Goober Lindsey, dead at 83:

http://tv.yahoo.com/news/george-lindsey-known-goober-pyle-dies-165308205.html

ACK!