Prince
Bowie, Prince, Johnny and Ella
22/04/16 09:15
Bowie's death surprised me because he remained creative until the end, and gracefully kept his health concerns private.
Prince's death shocked for the same reason, and hit harder because he was my age. We don't like seeing our contemporaries die off. It only reminds us how little time we have left.
I own a lot of Bowie's music. None of Prince's. I enjoyed him in his heyday as much as anyone else, but as I got older, his music lost its grip on me, while retaining a warm, comfortable place in my nostalgic heart.
In my lifetime there have been two celebrity deaths that deeply affected me, partly due to the sheer size of my emotional reaction. The first was Johnny Carson. When I was a teenager, and often unhappy for various typical and atypical reasons, I would turn on the little black and white TV I had in my bedroom and watch him on The Tonight Show from under the covers. I watched him joke and banter, watched the guests come and go. I laughed a lot. At the time there was no significance to the ritual. It was just habit. No biggie.
Decades later, when I heard he died, I wept. I was shocked. He was a goddamned talk show host who'd retired more than a decade earlier; but I cried. Those teenaged nights with him clearly meant more to me than I had realized. He had been a friendly face when there were few, a presence I came to know to some degree, that I clearly depended on to end my day on a note far better than the ones struck until I tucked myself in and turned on that little TV. I cried when that presence left this world.
The other whose death shook me was Ella Fitzgerald. Now, I was never a big Ella fan. I was more of a Betty Carter man. In fact, I was in middle age by the time I began to appreciate the bulk of her work. However, there was one album of hers I found in high school. Called "Take Love Easy," it was duet album with the brilliant guitarist Joe Pass. Cut when she was in her late 50s, her voice had lost that fluttery, girlish quality that often annoyed me. She'd lost some of the flexibility that had fueled her (to my ears) too-often pointless embellishments. With a voice older and more world weary, she sang with a depth I hadn't heard before, made more palpable by Pass's solo guitar accompaniment. In fact, I think it was this album from the older Ella that offered me a doorway to her younger work.
When I heard she'd died, it wasn't just a person leaving. It was an epoch. When she died I played her Nelson Riddle arrangement of "But Not for Me," and I cried. It was for the world that produced something so innocently sublime. It was for the primacy of the Great American Songbook, the standard of musical grace that it embodied - so often through Ella Fitzgerald. It was for an era gone—one in which I had never even lived, but had somehow come to think I knew and had, unbeknownst to me, learned to love.
Listen here: Ella Fitzgerald with Nelson Riddle, "But Not for Me"
Prince's death shocked for the same reason, and hit harder because he was my age. We don't like seeing our contemporaries die off. It only reminds us how little time we have left.
I own a lot of Bowie's music. None of Prince's. I enjoyed him in his heyday as much as anyone else, but as I got older, his music lost its grip on me, while retaining a warm, comfortable place in my nostalgic heart.
In my lifetime there have been two celebrity deaths that deeply affected me, partly due to the sheer size of my emotional reaction. The first was Johnny Carson. When I was a teenager, and often unhappy for various typical and atypical reasons, I would turn on the little black and white TV I had in my bedroom and watch him on The Tonight Show from under the covers. I watched him joke and banter, watched the guests come and go. I laughed a lot. At the time there was no significance to the ritual. It was just habit. No biggie.
Decades later, when I heard he died, I wept. I was shocked. He was a goddamned talk show host who'd retired more than a decade earlier; but I cried. Those teenaged nights with him clearly meant more to me than I had realized. He had been a friendly face when there were few, a presence I came to know to some degree, that I clearly depended on to end my day on a note far better than the ones struck until I tucked myself in and turned on that little TV. I cried when that presence left this world.
The other whose death shook me was Ella Fitzgerald. Now, I was never a big Ella fan. I was more of a Betty Carter man. In fact, I was in middle age by the time I began to appreciate the bulk of her work. However, there was one album of hers I found in high school. Called "Take Love Easy," it was duet album with the brilliant guitarist Joe Pass. Cut when she was in her late 50s, her voice had lost that fluttery, girlish quality that often annoyed me. She'd lost some of the flexibility that had fueled her (to my ears) too-often pointless embellishments. With a voice older and more world weary, she sang with a depth I hadn't heard before, made more palpable by Pass's solo guitar accompaniment. In fact, I think it was this album from the older Ella that offered me a doorway to her younger work.
When I heard she'd died, it wasn't just a person leaving. It was an epoch. When she died I played her Nelson Riddle arrangement of "But Not for Me," and I cried. It was for the world that produced something so innocently sublime. It was for the primacy of the Great American Songbook, the standard of musical grace that it embodied - so often through Ella Fitzgerald. It was for an era gone—one in which I had never even lived, but had somehow come to think I knew and had, unbeknownst to me, learned to love.
Listen here: Ella Fitzgerald with Nelson Riddle, "But Not for Me"