8 Bay Area Musicians We Lost In 2022
While Speight preached and lived the spirit of bebop, trumpeter and singer Rich Armstrong embodied the populist possibilities of jazz as a charismatic artist. He was one of those musicians who became the center of attention in every band he joined, broadcasting live with his musical energy. His sudden death on Oct. 7 at the age of 55 prompted many memories and tributes that reflect just how far-reaching he was in the Bay Area music scene.
Armstrong seemed to be everywhere, and every band he played in took on his fun spirit. These include Roberta Donnay's Prohibition Mob Band, Lydia Pence and the Cold Blood, the Blue Moon Gypsies, whom he fronted, and various versions of the Jazz Mafia collective. Jazz and funk, R&B and pop, rock and soul. Armstrong was ready for anything and had a sixth sense for adding whatever was needed in a given situation, such as a searing solo with Boz Skaggs.
The death of Oakland Musica jazz pianist Duane Roberson on Aug. 28 at the age of 76 robbed the stage of a well-traveled artist who conscientiously cared for the little ones. A Vietnam War veteran who spent 12 years as the keyboardist and musical director of the San Francisco Pantomime Troupe, Roberson was a mainstay on the San Francisco Bay Area stage as bandleader and accompanist. He has mentored many young Bay Area artists, most notably through his work with the Berkeley jazz/funk/Latin/poetry group Mingus Amungus, which split from Berkeley High in the mid-1990s.
The East Bay soul and R&B community has also suffered many losses in 2022, starting on January 1 with the death of Oakland guitarist, songwriter, producer and record label owner Marvin Holmes . As the leader of Marvin Holmes & The Uptights, the patriarch of Oakland funk, he spread the East Bay vibe across the country with the 1969 hit "The Funky Mule, Part 1 & 2." His bands served as a proving ground for generations of Bay Area musicians, and Holmes spanned musical eras, playing on several of Too $hort's seminal albums in the 1980s.
In support of the East Bay scene, singer Freddie Hughes followed Holmes' death just two weeks later on January 18. In Auckland, particularly in the UK, the soul's international profile was in stark contrast to its relatively humble position at home. Before his recording career peaked with the 1968 hit "Send My Baby Back," Hughes played a key role in shaping the sound of East Bay soul in an era defined by black, church-educated singers leading laymen's fervent gospel appeals. settings. According to his son, Derrick Hughes (former singer of Tower of Power and Roberta Flack), Hughes died at the age of 78 from leukemia and complications from COVID-19.
With a career that predated the Bay Area spiritual pioneers in the 1960s, reed artist Richard Hadlock was one of the last faces of the traditional jazz scene that flourished in the Bay Area in the 1960s after World War II. (Fortunately, singer Barbara Dane is still with us.) A longtime Berklee resident, saxophonist, editor, journalist, historian, educator, and broadcaster, Hadlock is best known in some circles as the author of The Jazz Masters of the Twenties (Da Capo), a seminal book of biographical notes, which was first published in 1965. He died on February 2 at the age of 94.
As a DJ, Hadlock hosted his Annals of Jazz program on San Francisco station KJAZ in 1959, after which he worked for nearly two decades at KQED. In 1982, he brought Jazz Chronicles to Bay Area jazz station KCSM, which earned his work the 2020 Marian McPartland-Willis Conover Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Journalists Association.
But he only moved to the Bay Area as a clarinetist when trombonist Turk Murphy hired Hadlock for his Dixieland band. Hadlock played with nearly every major jazz figure for decades, taught kindergarten at Berklee, and wrote concert reviews, newspaper columns, and cover songs (including a Grammy-nominated essay for the Time Life box about pianist Joe Sullivan).
The death also affected high-profile figures who made the Bay Area an important incubator for new music technologies. On November 6, electronic music innovator Don Lewis died at the age of 81. Based in Pleasanton since 1981, he has worked extensively in the industry, collaborating with company founder Ikutaro Kakehashi on the Roland TR-808 drum machine and designing sounds for Yamaha DX7, Hammond and ARP keyboards. In pop music, he collaborated with Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones and the Beach Boys.