The Tally: Jazz Carries On in the Midst of Terrible Losses
By Michael J. West
The spirit of the late Ralph Peterson — drummer, composer, bandleader, educator, all-around bad motherfucker and steadfast friend of Winter Jazzfest — might best be exemplified by his last words to a colleague. “If the Grim Reaper is coming for me,” he said, “he better bring a friend.”
Nobody could doubt it: When Ralph died of cancer on March 1, 2021, he’d given everything he had. But then, he’d done that all his life. He was a force of nature. His boundless energy and devotion to the music touched countless colleagues, protégés and students. Before its postponement on account of Omicron, Winter Jazzfest planned to bring together a healthy cross-section of all of these — saxophonists Bill Pierce, Craig Handy, and Tia Fuller; trumpeter Brian Lynch; bassist Essiet Essiet; and drummer Tyshawn Sorey — at Dizzy’s on January 18. Yet if it was Peterson’s name and memory on the marquee, it tacitly stood in for the scores of tragic losses the jazz community has endured since the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic began.
The piano titan McCoy Tyner passed away on March 6, 2020, a year (almost to the day) before Peterson. At the time, it was a tragic, heartbreaking occasion—but not an unexpected one. Tyner had been in ill health for quite some time; two years prior, at a gig at Washington DC’s Blues Alley, he had only been able to participate in half his own set. It was hard at that time to see Tyner’s death as the harbinger of a jazz-casualty avalanche.
The same day Tyner died, 21 passengers on a California cruise ship tested positive for COVID. A week later a national emergency and a worldwide pandemic had been declared, and it had claimed the life of saxophonist Marcelo Peralta in Spain. Then saxophonist Manu Dibango in Cameroon. A few days later it reached New York jazz via pianist Mike Longo. Then, in the space of two days, Wallace Roney, Ellis Marsalis and Bucky Pizzarelli. At that point it became clear that a catastrophe was unfolding.
I know this chronology well: I am the de facto obituarist for JazzTimes magazine. By the end of 2020, I had written 40 obits. As of this writing I have written 35 more. There are nearly 20 more jazz obituaries that I did not write these past two years. Jazz has likely never had such a sustained period of major losses.
Coronavirus isn’t the sole culprit. Tyner’s death was not COVID-related; neither were the deaths of Tony Allen, Jimmy Cobb, Freddy Cole, Chick Corea, Stanley Cowell, Jimmy Heath, Frank Kimbrough, Jymie Merritt, George Mraz or Ralph Peterson. But it’s hard not to see a sort of collateral damage. What the virus couldn’t kill by direct infection, it sapped by way of the lockdowns that shut performances all over the world. More than a few jazz musicians have described playing live as their “lifeblood”; figurative or not, when that lifeblood is cut off, what’s left?
It wasn’t only musicians that we lost. Broadcasters (Thurston Briscoe, Eulis Cathey, and Bob Porter), journalists (Stanley Crouch, Pamela Espeland, W. Royal Stokes, and Greg Tate), recording engineers (Al Schmitt), club owners (Gino Moratti, Joe Segal), festival producers (Bill Royston, George Wein), and even record store owners (Bob Koester) are all important members of the jazz community. Their losses are keenly felt by their peers and those who knew, loved, or were in any way affected by them.
If you’re reading this, that surely includes you. Any one of us can name great musicians whose work changed our life, whether a headliner like Corea or a sideman like Eugene Wright (who wasn’t seduced by his drum solo on Brubeck’s “Take Five”?). Yet you might also have had your first hearing of a favorite tune on Eulis Cathey’s shows at WBGO or SiriusXM. You might have gotten angry at “Putting the White Man in Charge,” or another one of Stanley Crouch’s provocative columns. You might have bought an old Coltrane or Elmore James album at the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago or had a wild time at New Orleans JazzFest one year, no matter what kind of music you were listening to. In any of those instances, your thanks go to someone who passed away these last two years.
Of course, if this time is mainly defined in our minds by the pandemic, it’s also a question of time itself. Jazz is now over a century old: 105 years just in recordings. Now, more than ever, the spectrum of elders in the jazz community (regardless of occupation) crosses multiple generations. Some of them had already spent multiple generations under stressful conditions: touring, hustling and stretching to make ends meet, at the very least. There are, of course, other and more unsavory aspects. The jazz life has never been easy. There’s no shortage of songs or stories over the last century or so to remind us of that.
Of course, even the elders can seem like superheroes, with a lifetime of staring down and overcoming adversities that would break the backs of us mere mortals. Henry Grimes and Giuseppi Logan come to mind, living lives (and dying deaths) of uncanny parallels. Both were born in 1935 in Philadelphia; both came to New York and staked out niches in the then-burgeoning free jazz movement; both struggled with mental illness that removed them from the scene and sometimes pushed them into homelessness. In the 21st century, both re-emerged and made astonishing, much-fêted comebacks (Grimes in 2003, Logan in 2009), restoring themselves in the jazz firmament. Both, after those turns of events, looked somehow invincible… which somehow increased the tragedy of their final parallel: Grimes and Logan both died in New York, both 84 years old, both from COVID, three days apart.
Or there’s Lee Konitz, whose career spanned an astonishing 75 years: He’d played for so long, and with so many, that when he passed on April 15, 2020 (incidentally the same day as Grimes), the very idea of a jazz world without him was inconceivable. A massive stroke in 2011, followed by another decade of health issues, had barely even slowed him down. How could we lose this indomitable spirit, a mere whippersnapper of 92?
Then there’s Ralph Peterson. He’d fought a long battle with cocaine addiction and lived to tell the tale. (Which he often did, with dignity and fortitude; if you attended WJF in 2020, you may remember him co-hosting a talk on the subject.) In the years that followed, he endured diabetes, morbid obesity, Bell’s palsy, and two bouts of cancer. It is no exaggeration to say that with each affliction, he emerged stronger than ever. When cancer came knocking a third time, it seemed all but certain that he’d notch yet another victory. “Even if the treatment knocks me down to 70 percent, I’m confident that 70 percent of Ralph Peterson is equivalent to 150 percent of most people,” he told me in 2018.
“But I’m not worrying about that,” he added. “The music is my path to immortality.”
If Ralph is a representative of all the jazz world’s recent casualties, let this stand as the epitaph for all of them as well. The music — whether they performed it, enabled it, presented it, marketed it, broadcast it or inspired debate about it — is each of their paths to immortality. No matter how many friends he brings, the Grim Reaper can’t take that.