Excerpted from
the New York Times:
Michael
Brecker, a saxophonist who won 11 Grammy Awards and was among the most
influential musicians in jazz since the 1960s, died yesterday at a hospital in
New York City. He was 57 and lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. The cause of death was
leukemia…
Having
taken a deep understanding of John Coltrane’s saxophone vocabulary and applied
it to music that merged with mainstream culture — particularly jazz fusion and
singer-songwriter pop of the 1970s and 80s — Mr. Brecker spread his sound all
over the world.
For
a time, Mr. Brecker seemed nearly ubiquitous. His discography — it contains
more than 900 albums — started in 1969, playing on the record “Score,” with a
band led by his brother, the trumpeter Randy Brecker. It continued in 1970 with
an album by Dreams, the jazz-rock band he led with his brother and the drummer
Billy Cobham…
His
long list of sideman work from then on wended through hundreds more records,
including those by Frank Zappa, Aerosmith, James Brown, Paul Simon, Joni
Mitchell, Lou Reed, Funkadelic, Steely Dan, John Lennon, Elton John, and James
Taylor, as well as (on the jazz side) Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Gonzalo
Rubalcaba, and Papo Vasquez. His 11 Grammys included two for “Wide Angles,” his
ambitious last album, released in 2003 with a fifteen-piece band he called the
Quindectet.
His
highest achievements were his own albums, both under his own name (starting in
1986) and with the Brecker Brothers band, as well as his early 80s work with
the group Steps Ahead. Mr. Brecker was scheduled to tour with a reunited
version of Steps Ahead in the summer of 2005 when his condition was publicly
announced — initially as myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone-marrow disorder,
which finally progressed to leukemia — and much of his work had to stop…
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