RIP Adam Yauch

Adam Yauch, aka MCA, of the Beastie Boys passed away this week after a 3-year battle with cancer. Yauch is known as the Beastie who played bass, was really into Tibetan Buddhism, and was the only one with a rapping voice that wasn't annoyingly nasal. I listened to a lot of Beastie Boys stuff back in the early 90s, and while they weren't always the greatest in pure rap terms, they were usually innovative and interesting. And in an age when hip-hop was getting way too serious, they were one of the few big names in the genre willing to get stoopid and keep it fun. There's a nice obituary of MCA here.

RIP Jimmy Castor (1947 - 2012)

Jimmy Castor, legendary funk and latin boogaloo musician, passed away January 16th aged 64.
Castor is far from a household name but the singer, saxophonist and percussionist had a career spanning 3 decades and encompassing a wide variety of genres.

His best known track is probably It's Just Begun from 1972 (as The Jimmy Castor Bunch), which was never a hit at the time but later became a favourite of breakdancers who love its timbale breakdown and sheer kinetic energy. I still remember the first time I heard the song's distinctive saxophone hook; I was at a house party and I had to immediately seek out whoever owned the CD to find out what the hell was this cracking groove I was listening to.


That was the title track from his second album, yet Castor's musical career started way back in 1957 as a 10 year-old. He replaced Frankie Lymon in The Teenagers and cut the fun doo-wop track I Promise. Soon after he took up the saxophone, and found a home in New York's boogaloo scene, which brought together elements of American R&B with Cuban son and mambo. One of Castor's best-known hits - Hey Leroy, Your Mama's Callin' You - comes from this era, and was a minor chart hit in 1966.

Castor's light-hearted approach to music continued into the 70s, as he became known for what could be termed novelty hits. His biggest hit, Troglodyte, features no singing, only Castor telling a story about a funky caveman trying to get some action over a stomping groove, and also features the sampled-to-death introductory line, "What we gonna do right here is go back...wayyy back... back into time."
A character introduced in that song later became the basis for The Jimmy Castor Bunch's other major hit, The Bertha Butt Boogie. Again, its lyrics are incredibly silly, but the groove is absolutely unstoppable.

With other song titles like King Kong and Hey Leroy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon is Your Father, you get a sense that Castor had a fairly light-hearted approach to his job.


More obituaries: Gil Scott-Heron, Guru, Manute Bol, Amy Winehouse.

RIP Howard Tate, 1939-2011

60s R&B singer Howard Tate passed away this week aged 72. Tate was another sadly unappreciated soul giant who is revered amongst crate diggers for his blues- and gospel-tinged recordings, primarily from 1964 and 1968.

Probably the quintessential Howard Tate track is the majestic Get It While You Can. This is perhaps better known as a Janis Joplin song, but it's hard not to argue that Joplin's later version pales beside Tate's original.


Another favourite of mine is Ain't Nobody Home, also better known for being covered by BB King.


The composer of both songs, the great Jerry Ragovoy, also sadly passed away in July this year.

RIP Amy Winehouse (1983-2011)

British singer Amy Winehouse was found dead in her London home from causes yet unknown. She was 27.

Winehouse's dysfunctional personal life and troubles with substance abuse were legendary and had become something of a running pop-cultural joke. But that aside, let's focus on her music. She only released two albums, but each made a significant impact. Frank (2003) was nominated for a Mercury Music Prize, while Back to Black (2006) was a multi-platinum-selling number 1 hit around the world. The two albums when taken together show the breadth of Winehouse's singing and songwriting ability. Frank is a jazz album with soul and hip-hop inflections, while Back to Black is strongly influenced by 60s girl-group soul.

Winehouse deserves a lot of credit for re-introducing retro-soul to the mainstream; it was a style bubbling around in the early 00s waiting for a larger audience, until Back to Black put the genre back in the top 10. The key was Winehouse's use of Mark Ronson and Salam Remi as producers, and NYC's fabulous Dap Kings as her backing band. It is fair to say that the huge success of two other British female singers, Adele and Duffy, owes a lot to Winehouse's breakthrough with Rehab.

One of my all-time favourite dance-and-get-wild tracks is Winehouse's guest appearance on Mark Ronson's Versions album. Valerie is a cover of the Zutons' 2006 hit, which is very different but also awesome in its own right.


But while Winehouse's best-known work was similarly brash and brassy, her slower, tender moments were often even better. Love is a Losing Game, off her second album, is just amazing in it's timeless beauty.


Frank to me is an uneven album stylistically, and Winehouse herself said she was only 80% happy with it. But it has some wonderful songs, particularly this one, Help Yourself. The song title is sadly ironic.

RIP Gil Scott-Heron (1949 - 2011)

Another giant of music, the legendary singer Gil Scott-Heron, passed away this week aged 62. A prolific artist who released an album every year of the 1970s before his life began to go off the rails, Scott-Heron carved out a distinctive style of his own, blending jazz, soul, blues and funk with an early form of rap poetry.

Scott-Heron was one of those cats who never had anything resembling a hit on the pop charts, yet inspires reverence among those in the know, and was extremely influential to artists in a number of genres. He was also a complex and deeply flawed character; while his songs spoke eloquently and powerfully about the ills facing African-Americans, he spent most of his life from the early 80s onward in the grip of crack cocaine, and spent several years in jail in the 2000s for drug-related offences. It always seemed almost inconceivable that such a fate could befall a man as intelligent and positive as he. He did manage to release an album in 2010 (his first in 16 years), entitled I'm New Here.

I managed to catch the man live in the mid-90s, touring off what was his then-comeback album, Spirits. Gil was only in his mid-40s but I'd guessed him to be at least 20 years older due to his weathered, emaciated appearance. From that underrated album, Don't Give Up is not one of his better-known tracks, but it represents the breadth of his musical oeuvre, with his distinctive spoken/rapped delivery and blues-soaked singing over a jazzy groove. It's sad listening to these lyrics today, which reflect on his many frailties yet offer hope for a salvation that was never to come.


The song that most people know Gil Scott-Heron for was one of his very earliest releases, The Revolution will not be Televised. While the song's many pop-cultural references have long since dated, its fierce critique of television and mass consumerism's effect on societal consciousness is just as relevant now as it was back in 1970.

Scott-Heron has often been dubbed "The Godfather of Rap", something of a misnomer and a label he was apparently not fond of. His distinctive brand of poetry set to music did not directly give rise to hip-hop, although he was very influential to later generations of rappers. In many ways he resembled his contemporaries, The Last Poets, and like them is frequently associated with the black militancy of the era. But Scott-Heron's politics were often more nuanced, and in his poem Brother he skewers those so-called black revolutionaries who were more concerned with superficial displays of pride than actually bringing about positive change.

While his first album was primarily poetry accompanied by conga beats, his subsequent work revealed his more musical leanings. He played keys while singing in an unmistakable baritone that was unpolished but soulful and jazz-inflected.

We Almost Lost Detroit is from his 1977 album Bridges. Hip-hop fans might recognise chunks of the song sampled in Black Star's Brown Skin Lady and Common's The People.


The Bottle is one of Scott-Heron's better-known works, from his 1974 album Winter in America. On flute is his long-time collaborator Brian Jackson.

RIP Loleatta Holloway (1946 - 2011)

This week we lost another of the great voices of soul music, disco diva Loleatta Holloway, who died on 21 March at the age of 64. Beginning as a gospel singer in the 60s, Holloway had a career as a soul artist that never really got going until 1980, when she struck gold with the epic disco track Love Sensation. Disco as a genre has frequently (and often rightly) criticised for being vacuous, but Love Sensation in no way fits that description. Its elaborate arrangement is filled with enough hooks to fill several songs; which explains why so many artists have sampled it in songs that sound nothing like each other. (Personally I could listen and dance to the section between 0:45 and 1:03 on loop all day.) And of course at its centre is Holloway's massive and unmistakable vocal performance.
Many of you won't have heard this song, which I consider to be the single greatest disco tune of all, but you'll probably recognise bits of it from Black Box's 1989 UK #1 hit Ride on Time, which sampled Holloway's vocal extensively. (The Italo-house outfit were subsequently sued by Holloway and writer Dan Hartman for royalties.)

RIP Leslie Nielsen (1926 - 2010)

Actor Leslie Nielsen died this week aged 84 of pneumonia-related complications. I remember him as one of my favourite actors growing up, due to his roles in films like The Naked Gun, below.


Nielsen, born in Sasketchewan in Canada to a Danish father and Welsh mother, began his career in serious dramatic roles, such as Forbidden Planet, The Opposite Sex and The Poseidon Adventure. It wasn't until Airplane! in 1980 (known as Flying High in some parts of the world) that he switched to comedy; the movie was an absurd spoof of disaster movies, but used actors better known for straight dramatic roles. Nielsen's deadpan demeanour and great timing were perfect, and one of the film's memorable lines was listed by the American Film Institute in it's Top 100 Movie Quotes:


Nielsen's career then shifted to playing deadpan slapstick roles. The Abrahams-Zucker-Zucker directing team behind Airplane! cast Nielsen as Lt Frank Drebin in Police Squad!, a TV series that sent up the classic police dramas of old. The series was short-lived (cancelled after only 6 episodes), but its characters and many of its gags were recycled 6 years later for the big screen in The Naked Gun trilogy, which proved a big hit.

While Nielsen appeared in numerous comedic roles after The Naked Gun, few of them are worthy of recommendation. All in all, over his career he had appeared in over 100 films and 1500 television programs.

Interesting Leslie Nielsen fact: his brother Erik Nielsen was the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada during the 1980s.

RIP Solomon Burke (1940 - 2010)

We are entering an era where some of the greatest pioneering soul artists are getting well into their 60s and 70s and departing this life, and yesterday we just lost another one. "The King of Rock 'n' Soul" Solomon Burke passed away of natural causes, aged 70, aboard a flight to the Netherlands where he was scheduled to perform with Dutch blues/rock band De Dijk.

Burke was a legendary figure who didn't do things by halves. He famously fathered fathered 21 children, had 90 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren. Born in Philadelphia, he began as a preacher and hosted a gospel radio show before moving into secular music. Early in life he was trained as a mortician and ran a chain of funeral parlours alongside his musical career. And what a career it was; at least 36 albums over a career that spanned 50 years, and moved from gospel to soul, blues, rock and country. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.

While he remains one of the most influential artists to emerge from the early days of rock 'n' roll, he never had much in the way of major hits. Probably his signature tune is Cry to Me, which was later covered by the Rolling Stones and was a hit for Betty Harris, as well as much later appearing on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.

If there's one song penned by Burke that most people know however, it's Everybody Needs Somebody to Love, which he co-wrote in 1964 with Jerry Wexler and Bert Berns. Even if Wilson Pickett was to later record what many consider the definitive version, it endures as a magnificent example of the church's influence on the development of soul music.


Burke was no respecter of the artificial lines that divide "black music" from "white music", and some of his best work came in the last decade in collaboration with white blues/rock and country artists. His 2002 album Don't Give Up On Me, which won a Grammy for Best Blues Album, featured songs written by Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello. His 2006 album Nashville was a collaboration with a number of country artists; the below track Valley of Tears remains one of my all-time favourite tracks, and a fitting way to end this tribute to him.

RIP Greg Giraldo (1965 - 2010)

Comedian Greg Giraldo passed away this week after an overdose of prescription drugs. He was 44.

I first came across Giraldo with his many appearances on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn, in which he was almost always the funniest of the many comedians who appeared there. Like a surprisingly high number of comedians, he started out pursuing a career in law. Giraldo was born in the Bronx to a Colombian-born father and a Spanish-born mother. His Hispanic background, or lack of it, is explored hilariously in the below clip.

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Greg Giraldo - Not That Hispanic
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One of Giraldo's areas of expertise was roasting other comics on Comedy Central's roast specials. Below is his appearance at the roast of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong. (You need to wait about 2 minutes in before Giraldo comes on, although the first 2 minutes ain't bad.)

RIP Manute Bol: basketballer, humanitarian and originator of the phrase "My bad"

Former NBA star Manute Bol passed away this week, aged 47, after suffering acute kidney failure and complications from a rare skin condition (Stevens-Johnson Syndrome). Despite barely averaging more than 2 points a game, Bol cut a distinctive figure in the basketball world; he was the equal tallest man (at 7 feet 7 inches) to ever play in that league, and still holds the league record for the most blocked shots per minutes played. But his life story was fascinating in far more than basketball terms.

A Dinka herdsman from South Sudan, Bol only started playing basketball at age 15 after moving to the capital Khartoum. Eventually he made it to the NBA where he enjoyed a 9 year career. Outside of basketball he was very committed to the struggle of the South Sudanese against the country's brutal military, making many visits to refugee camps where he was hailed as a hero. After his attempts to negotiate a ceasefire between the warring sides, he was once offered the post of Sports Minister, but refused because the government insisted it was conditional on him converting to Islam. Of the around $6 million he earned over the course of his career, he donated around $3.5 million to a Dinka rebel group, but some bad business investments eventually left him penniless. He ended up returning to the US as a political refugee. He survived a car accident in 2004 which left him with a broken neck. Nonetheless through all these trials and tribulations, he devoted much of his later life to raising money for Sudanese refugees.



No one who was following basketball in the 80s or 90s will easily forget Bol's distinctive frame and shot-blocking ability. Perhaps his most famous moment was a game against Orlando in which he blocks 4 shots in about 5 seconds, as players foolishly kept coming back for more and he just kept rejecting them; you can watch it in the video below. He also became fond of shooting 3-pointers later in his career, not something you expect from such a tall player.



One thing basketball fans may not know, however, is that Bol is generally regarded to be the inventor of the now-popular phrase "My bad." In his early days in the US, when he spoke little English, Bol would apologise to teammates for his on-court mistakes by saying "my bad" instead of "my fault". The phrase became popular in the NBA and filtered down to street-ball levels, and then into mainstream popular culture.

(I've heard it claimed that others were using this term in the 70s and thus Bol didn't invent it; however it is still probable that Bol invented it independently and its popularisation started with him.)

I have two other favourite stories about Bol. One is that he is surely the only NBA player to have killed a lion in the wild with a spear (from his younger days herding cattle). His team-mate Charles Barkley, noting Bol's famously good-natured persona, quipped that if Manute could kill a lion, it must have been sleeping.

The other is about another aspect of Bol's acclimatisation to the NBA environment; despite not speaking a word of English until he was 20, he did learn the art of talking trash, in his thick Sudanese accent. After blocking an opponent's shot, he would quip, "Don't you have cable? Didn't the other guys tell you? Nobody dunks on Manute B-O-L!"

More about Manute Bol's life here.