Joey Ramone

popular name: Kid Ory

date_of_death: January 23, 1973

age: 86

cause_of_death: Pneumonia and a heart attack

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Edward "Kid" Ory was an American jazz composer, trombonist and bandleader. One of the early users of the glissando technique, he helped establish it as a central element of New Orleans jazz. As trombonist and bandleader, Kid Ory was a pioneer of the traditional New Orleans jazz style and played a key role in the New Orleans Revival of the 1940s. He is credited as the leader of the first black New Orleans jazz band to make a recording, and Ory’s recording of “Creole Song” in 1944 is the first documented performance of a jazz-informed song sung in Creole patois. During his long musical career, he worked alongside with jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong, Joseph “King” Oliver, Jimmie Noone, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Sidney Bechet. Ory retired from music in 1966 and spent his last years in Hawaii.

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: Connee Boswell

date_of_death: October 11, 1976

age: 68

cause_of_death: Stomach cancer

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Connee Boswell was an American jazz female vocalists, and first starting performing with her sisters as the trio The Boswell Sisters in the 1920s and 1930s. They became a highly influential singing group due to their recordings and film and television appearances. Connee is widely considered one of the greatest jazz female vocalists and was a major influence on Ella Fitzgerald. In 1936, Connee's sisters retired and Connee continued on as a successful solo artist selling a total of 75 million records. Interesting to note that Connee sang from a wheelchair, or seated position, during her career as a result of contracting poliomyelitis (‘infantile paralysis’) in childhood. The general public was not aware of her condition although Boswell herself did not keep this secret. She was frequently active in philanthropic efforts to bring awareness and support to those affected by disabilities, including support of the March of Dimes.