OBITUARIES
This folder includes obituaries for jazz musicians or persons of significance to the Australian jazz community, written by several contributors. Click on the INDEX box to access a list of obituaries contained in this folder.
OBITUARY: SAXOPHONIST ANDREW SPEIGHT KILLED IN TRAIN COLLISION
by Jeff Kaliss
San Francisco Classical Voice (SFCV), December 6, 2022
En route to teach his jazz improvisation class at San Francisco State University, saxophonist Andrew Speight (March 23, 1964 – Dec. 1, 2022) was killed last Thursday afternoon when his Porsche was struck by a Caltrain locomotive near his home in Burlingame. He was 58 years old and recently the subject of an SF Classical Voice feature. Speight’s lifelong loves of jazz performance and music education were modelled by his father John, a pianist and teacher, and his mother Niddrie, a singer, in their home in Sydney, Australia…
OBITUARY: ANDREW SPEIGHT 1964-2022
by Eric Myers
The Weekend Australian, December 12, 2022
Andrew Speight and his two younger sisters Caroline and Emma, were born in Sydney into a highly musical family. Their father John Speight, who died in 2007, was a school teacher and accomplished pianist, best-known from 1980 as the artistic director of the Manly International Jazz Festival, which still survives today. Their mother Niddrie Speight, now 82, was a star vocalist as a teenager who sang jazz and show tunes. "We’d wake up to music, listen to music through dinner, talk about what we were listening to, and go to sleep to music,” Andrew’s sister Emma Mayhew told writer Jeff Kaliss in the splendid obituary Kaliss published in the US publication San Francisco Classical Voice…
OBITUARY: THELONIOUS MONK 1917-1982
by Whitney Balliett
Goodbyes and Other Messages: A Journal of Jazz 1981–1990, Oxford University Press, 1991.
The pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, who died last week, at the age of 64, was an utterly original man who liked to pretend he was an eccentric. Indeed, he used eccentricity as a shield to fend off a world that he frequently found alien, and even hostile. A tall, dark, bearish, inward-shining man, he wore odd hats and dark glasses with bamboo frames when he played. His body moved continuously. At the keyboard, he swayed back and forth and from side to side, his feet flapping like flounders on the floor. While his sidemen soloed, he stood by the piano and danced, turning in slow, genial circles, his elbows out like wings, his knees slightly bent, his fingers snapping on the after-beat. His motions celebrated what he and his musicians played: Watch, these are the shapes of my music….