Joey Ramone

popular name: Joe Zawinul

date_of_death: September 11, 2007

age: 75

cause_of_death: Merkel-cell carcinoma (skin cancer)

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Joe Zawinul was an Austrian jazz and jazz fusion keyboardist and composer who first come to prominence with saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. Zawinul went on to play with Miles Davis and to become one of the creators of jazz fusion, a musical genre that combined jazz with rock. He co-founded the groups Weather Report and The Zawinul Syndicate. He pioneered the use of electric piano and synthesizer, and was named "Best Electric Keyboardist" twenty-eight times by the readers of DownBeat magazine.

popular name: Arnold Schoenberg

date_of_death: July 13, 1951

age: 76

cause_of_death: Myocardial infarction

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, has shaped much of 20th-century musical thought. Many composers from at least three generations have consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately reacted against it. Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify innovations in atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested that term) that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century classical music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, an influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea. Schoenberg's archival legacy is held at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna.

popular name: Albert Ayler

date_of_death: November 25, 1970

age: 34

cause_of_death: Suicide by drowning

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Ayler was an American avant-garde jazz saxophonist, singer and composer and the older brother of jazz trumpeter Donald Ayler. Ayler began recording music during the free-form jazz era of the 1960s and evoked incredibly strong and disparate reactions from critics and fans alike. Said Jon Goldman, an enthusiast who knew and recorded both brothers here. "It was out of the mainstream. It's still way out of the mainstream." On November 25, 1970, his body was found floating in the East River, at the foot of Congress Street Pier, in Brooklyn.