Composer Henry Brant, who died in Santa Barbara on Saturday, April 26, at the age of 94, was American music’s first full-time proponent of Spatial Music -– the dividing up of separate instrumental bodies and redistribution of them over a wide area. This course of action, just as radical now as it was in the early 1950s when he started, was suggested to Brant upon hearing Charles Ives’ work The Unanswered Question, and in a sense, Brant spent the rest of his long life trying to answer it.

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Hard as it may be to believe, but Paul Davis — a soft-rock singer/songwriter who passed way on April 22 at the age of 60 — ranks high among the most successful singles artists on the Billboard charts, an achievement he rarely receives any credit for. Then again, Davis was so easy-going he tended to glide under the radar — his soft rock is so soft it didn’t command attention. Instead, it soothed, without ever seeming saccharine, even as synthesizers started to creep into his warm grooves in the early ’80s.

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On any list of underrated soul singers, Al Wilson has to rank near the top. Wilson, who died this past Monday of kidney failure at the age of 68, had one big hit in 1974 with “Show and Tell,” a peerless piece of smooth early ’70s soul that reached number one on the Billboard pop charts, in turn defining his career and suggesting that he was a one-hit wonder even though he followed it with a few hits over the next few years (”I Won’t Last a Day Without You/Let Me Be the One” in 1975, “I’ve Got a Feeling [We’ll Be Seeing Each Other Again]” in 1976). Like many seeming one-hit wonders, there was a lot more to Wilson than that one hit, and he never, ever stopped working — playing clubs and touring well beneath the radar of the mainstream, occasionally re-recording his hits (as he did on 2001’s Spice of Life), because that’s what you do when you’re a working musician. It’s unfortunate that all this hard work didn’t pay off in some kind of full-scale revival prior to his death, something like Arthur Alexander received before his death in 1993, since Wilson’s rich, nuanced singing — akin to a grittier Lou Rawls — deserved wider acclaim. What’s doubly sad is that there is a new CD out that showcases precisely why he’s worthy of such celebration. Kent, a division of the UK-based Ace Records, has just released Searching for the Dolphins, the first reissue of Al Wilson’s earliest recordings, containing all of his 1968 debut for Soul City records, Searching for the Dolphins, along with a bunch of singles he had for that label, Bell, and Carousel in the early ’70s.

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Journeyman Detroit jazz saxophonist Donald Walden has passed away. [Detroit Free Press]

Pete Doherty is finally headed to jail. [NME.com]

George Strait tops R.E.M. on the charts, marking his fourth Number One on Billboard’s Top 200. [Billboard.com]

The script for High School Musical 4 is apparently in the process of being written. [BBC]
 
 
Singer Toni Braxton has been hospitalized. [Eonline]

Coldplay puts people to sleep. Well, duh! [Contactmusic]

With his wife and family by his side, the legendary reggae Renaissance man Mikey Dread passed away on Saturday, March 15th after battling with a brain tumor. His death wasn’t a complete shock since his family and his record label, Dread at the Controls, had issued a press release last October, one that spoke of his positive attitude and valiant struggle against this disease. “Positive” was a word often associated with Mikey, but in this case you can attribute a great deal of his hope to the birth of his son on the 12th of that month. Often, in cases like this, friends and family will contribute thoughts and memories to some type of time capsule, one that the now five-month old Zylen Jahlight could explore when he’s older in order to know his father better. No doubt Zylen will be showered with adoring words of praise and regard for a man who was able to communicate his love of reggae, justice, and humanity in such a way that it became infectious.

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Classic film composer Leonard Rosenman died of a heart attack on Monday, March 3, at the age of 83, ending his long battle with Frontotemporal Dementia, a disability that attacks the brain. While Rosenman’s Oscar wins were for films in which he acted as a musical compiler, his signature work was elsewhere, scoring the James Dean features East of Eden (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955) in addition to films such as Fantastic Voyage (1966) and the TV adaptation of Flora Rheta Schreiber’s book Sybil (1976) starring Sally Field. The vaunted Hollywood studio system of old was finished by the time Rosenman entered the picture business, and he –- along with his contemporaries Alex North, Earle Hagen and Elmer Bernstein -– represented the first composers in the “New” Hollywood, working on independently produced features supported by the studios, for international productions and in television. Rosenman’s music was uncompromisingly contemporary in style, and was among the first film composers to utilize advanced compositional techniques such as serialism and microtones in major motion pictures. It was an achievement that was rather low-key; however, as even many film score buffs weren’t even aware of Rosenman’s work until the release in 1996 of Nonesuch’s outstanding The Film Music of Leonard Rosenman, conducted by composer John Adams.

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Jeff Healey was a rarity who was too often seen as a novelty. Struck with a rare ocular cancer as a baby, he lost his eyes when he was only one — the disease, retinoblastoma, claimed his life this March 2 when he was at the age of 41 — but his lack of sight hardly made him unusual among musicians. What was unique about Healey was his style of guitar playing: he laid a regular six-string across his lap, which gave him a unique instrumental attack — he could access more frets than most players, using his thumb as another fretting finger, giving him original phrasings — and also a distinctive visual style.

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A number of opera’s golden-age stars have passed away in recent years, but none quite so sadly as the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano who officially died yesterday, but whose life was effectively ended more than three years ago when, at the age of 83, he was beaten during a robbery at his Kenyan villa. He had been on life support in a Milanese hospital ever since, incapacitated by severe head injuries.

Di Stefano’s operatic career was comparatively short, starting in the late 1940s, hitting its stride in the 1950s, and effectively ending in the mid-1960s, but he did continue to sing in public in a limited capacity until the early ’70s. Di Stefano’s voice did not age well, arguably due to his choice to sing heavier dramatic repertoire that wasn’t suited to his essentially lyrical gifts, but in his prime he was one of the finest Italianate voices on the international scene. His 1953 recording of Puccini’s Tosca with Maria Callas in the title role and Victor de Sabata conducting is his most recognizable recording, and it was his continued partnership with Callas that cemented his status as a leading tenor. Ironically, or perhaps just fittingly, appearances with Callas on her farewell tour in 1973-74 — when both singers were suffering severe vocal decline — marked the official end of di Stefano’s public career.

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