Category Archives: Obit

It may have been the assertive way she said her name: “Annette!” Or that she was the tallest of the first batch of Mickey Mouse Club Mouskateers (certainly she was the first of them to mature). Something about the dark beauty Annette Funicello also made her seem like some kind of personification of the very [...]

They spent the day eulogizing the former prime minister, who likely put a stamp on British politics, for better or for worse, for more than a decade But few political leaders were as hated as Margaret Thatcher either. In fact it’s safe to say that there was more than one song over the years built [...]

She gets a bad rap in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. Her “How Much is that Doggie in the Window” is often cited as the kind of music in the mid 50s that the young new music was rebelling against. But there is something to be said about the languid, note-perfect style of the [...]

The master of Indian sitar, whose music influenced Western music at the highest levels, died Tuesday near San Diego. Ravi Shankar was 92. The office of India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called Shankar a “national treasure.” And certainly he had been a leading Indian classical musician for a decade before a young British man asked [...]

One day before his 92nd birthday, jazz great Dave Brubeck died at Norwalk Hospital in Connecticut on Wednesday. The pianist and composer was one of the first huge stars of the genre, giving a face and personality to the movement, much to his own embarrassment. Brubeck’s genius came in combining elements of classical and jazz [...]