Joey Ramone

popular name: Cootie Williams

date_of_death: September 15, 1985

age: 74

cause_of_death: Kidney disease

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Cootie Williams was an American jazz, jump blues, and rhythm and blues trumpeter who is best remembered for his tenure with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Cootie first played professionally with the Young Family Band (which included the future tenor sax superstar Lester Young) when he was 14. In his later teens, he settled in New York and worked with James P. Johnson, Chick Webb, and Fletcher Henderson. Joining the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1929, among the hundreds of Ellington recordings on which he is featured, the “miniature concertos” “Echoes of Harlem” and “Concerto for Cootie” are especially noted; he also led a small ensemble of fellow Ellington band members, Cootie Williams and His Rug Cutters, on outstanding recordings. Williams left Ellington in 1940 and spent a year in Benny Goodman’s band. In the face of the general decline of the big band business, he led a big band for much of the 1940s and rhythm-and-blues units after that. He rejoined Ellington in 1962; by then he was a somewhat coarser but no less dramatic player. After Duke’s death he played in the Mercer Ellington band into the 1970s.

popular name: Guy Lombardo

date_of_death: November 5, 1977

age: 75

cause_of_death: Heart attack

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Guy Lombardo was a Canadian and American bandleader, violinist, and hydroplane racer whose unique sweet jazz style remained popular with audiences for nearly five decades. Lombardo formed the Royal Canadians in 1924 with his brothers Carmen, Lebert and Victor, and other musicians from his hometown. They billed themselves as creating "the sweetest music this side of Heaven". The Lombardos are believed to have sold between 200 and 300 million records during their lifetimes, many featuring the band's lead singer from 1940 onward, Kenny Gardner. Lombardo is perhaps best remembered for his big band remote broadcasts which were carried on several national radio and television networks for nearly fifty years. Starting in 1929, the Royal Canadians began broadcasting live from the Roosevelt Grill in the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City as "radio's first nationwide New Year's Eve broadcast". Invariably, each broadcast closed with Lombardo's rendition of the song Auld Lang Syne as part of the annual New Year's Eve tradition. The broadcasts proved to be immensely popular and continued from this venue until 1959 when they were transferred to the Grand Ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel where they continued until 1976.

popular name: Sun Ra

date_of_death: May 30, 1993

age: 79

cause_of_death: Cumulative effects of congestive heart failure, respiratory failure, and multiple strokes

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: With over 200 albums over his 6 decade career, Sun Ra was revered in Europe as a genius and staged hundreds of concerts, at times with a nearly 100-piece orchestra. Taking the stage with his Arkestra members wearing wild costumes and flowing cloaks, concerts would include extended percussion jams, poetry, light shows, dancers and wicked progressive jazz. In later years the Arkestra, with Ra's eccentric piano style, began to re- create Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington and Jimmy Lunceford jazz classics of the Thirties amongst its more contemporary works to remain somewhat commercially relevant.