Composer, arranger and pianist Clare Fischer died Thursday, Jan. 26, his website has announced. He was 83. The L.A. Times reports that he died of complications from a heart attack suffered two weeks ago.

Fischer was a respected improvising pianist, but left his biggest mark behind the scenes as a composer, arranger and studio musician across idiom. “I’m not a pianist who writes — I’m a composer who plays,” he said on a February 2001 episode of Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, heard above. A few of his tunes, “Pensativa” and “Morning,” have entered standard jazz repertoire.

His first big break came while touring as pianist/arranger for the Hi-Los, a popular vocal quartet of its time. He was soon commissioned to arrange for various jazz artists, including Dizzy Gillespie on A Portrait of Duke Ellington. Fischer was known for his love of Latin American music and European classical music alike; he led and played in Latin jazz bands (especially with vibraphonist Cal Tjader), and wrote for strings and symphony orchestras. He was also tapped to write backing arrangements for myriad pop stars, including Chaka Khan and Rufus, Paul McCartney, Joao Gilberto, Brandy, Carlos Santana and Prince, often in collaboration with Brent Fischer, his son and a fellow producer/arranger.

“Each decade, I find myself being interested in something else,” Clare Fischer told McPartland. “So I pursue it.”

In that time, Fischer released 51 albums as a bandleader or solo pianist, spanning ensembles of all sizes and styles. One of his last — Continuum, a collection of works for big band — was nominated for a Grammy in November.

This weekend, we learned that the jazz businessman John Levy died on Friday. His wife, Devra Hall Levy, announced the news on Saturday in a press release available on John Levy’s website, Lushlife. He was nearly 100 years old.

Levy was once a musician of some renown — he played bass with Billie Holiday, Stuff Smith, George Shearing and many others — but he’s primarily remembered for his advocacy. He was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2006 for representing dozens of musicians as a manager, and also produced concerts and recordings.

According to Devra Hall Levy’s statement, John Levy’s clients included “Cannonball Adderley, Betty Carter, Randy Crawford, Roberta Flack, Herbie Hancock, Shirley Horn, Freddie Hubbard, Ahmad Jamal, Abbey Lincoln, Ramsey Lewis, Herbie Mann, Les McCann, Wes Montgomery, George Shearing, Dakota Staton, Stanley Turrentine, Joe Williams, and Nancy Wilson, who remains a John Levy Enterprises client to this day.”

Click here to hear a remembrance of Levy by NPR’s Sami Yenigun.

In 1974, trumpeter Jimmy Owens helped prepare and played on a Carnegie Hall concert of Thelonious Monk’s music. On the night in question, the orchestra featured a surprise soloist: Monk himself. It was one of the pianist’s last public performances. Thirty-eight years later, Owens has just been honored as a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, and he has a new album of Monk compositions arranged for seven players, called The Monk Project.

In Monk’s lifetime, his pieces weren’t played so very often, and interpreters often smoothed away their idiosyncrasies. After Monk’s death in 1982, jazz players started paying more attention to his tunes’ specific quirks, to the point where musicians jamming on them might simply mimic their counterparts in Monk’s band. Something like that happens here, a little — tenor saxophonist Marcus Strickland sounds like he’s been studying Monk’s last great tenor, Charlie Rouse.

Owens’ septet epitomizes one modern approach to Monk, not too straight, not too quirky. He doesn’t ape Monk’s sound, but instead honors his method: Keep the melody in mind at all times, leave plenty of space so the music can breathe, and make it sound old and new at once — rooted in the masters, but freshly shuffled. Owens knows Monk’s tunes swing all by themselves, if you play them right. His funny timing catapults the music forward. When Monk recorded “Brilliant Corners,” a tricky tune even for him, he doubled the tempo every other time through the melody — a weird move, but good show business. Owens puts “Brilliant Corners” through different rhythmic variations, leading to a slow conversation for four horns — avant-garde Dixieland.

That’s about as loose as it gets. Jimmy Owens mostly dresses Monk’s tunes for uptown wear — Monk the Harlem jam-session swinger. The four-horn voicings, with Howard Johnson on either tuba or baritone sax, grease the tunes for cooking. The champ rhythm section is Kenny Barron on piano, bassist Kenny Davis and drummer Winard Harper. On trombone, the versatile Wycliffe Gordon is a wizard with a plunger mute, adding some Ellingtonian earthiness.

A few rough spots turn up in Jimmy Owens’ own trumpet and flugelhorn solos on The Monk Project, which is a good sign in a way. He’s more concerned with showcasing the music and the ensemble than making himself look good. This midsize band jells so well, it might think of regrouping for some encores. The Monk Project makes me daydream about other composers whose music they could feature, like Tadd Dameron or Andrew Hill, or whomever Owens may be thinking about already.

The 8th Annual Valentine’s Day Jazz Concert will take place on Sunday, February 12, at 4 p.m., in Duke University’s Reynolds Industries Theater.  The concert will feature the Duke Jazz Ensemble, North Carolina Central University Jazz Ensemble and UNC-Chapel Hill Jazz Ensemble.  General admission is $15, students and senior citizen admission is $10.  For more information, call 919-684-4444 or visit www.tickets.duke.edu.

The “Matriarch of the Blues” has died. Music legend Etta James died Friday morning at Riverside Community Hospital in California of complications from leukemia. She was 73.

She was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles in 1938. Her first manager and promoter cut up Jamesetta’s name and reversed it: Etta James.

Her talent was discovered when she was 14 — the same age her mother was when James was born. Within three years, the foster-home runaway had her first hit, with the girl group The Peaches. Back then, “Roll With Me Henry” was deemed too racy for radio, “roll” being a sexual euphemism.

Etta James was still a minor when she toured with Little Richard. Then, she signed with leading blues label Chess Records and bleached her hair platinum blond.

“What I was doing was trying to be a glamour girl,” she told NPR’s Fresh Air in 1994. “Because I’d been a tomboy, and I wanted to look grown and wanted to wear high-heeled shoes and fishtail gowns and big, long rhinestone earrings.”

Darkness Beneath The Joy

James had grit in her voice that could melt like sugar or rub like salt in a wound. Between 1960 and 1963, she had 10 records on the R&B charts, including “Something’s Got a Hold on Me.”

Darkness runs beneath that joy — as does anger, says David Ritz, who wrote a biography of James.

“It isn’t like she sings that song,” Ritz says. “Sometimes, you feel she was going to war with the song.”

By the mid-1960s, James was into hard drugs, and her career hit the skids. She bounced checks, forged prescriptions and stole from her friends. A judge finally gave her a choice: prison or rehabilitation. In 1974, she spent months in recovery at a psychiatric hospital.

“I was around nothing but a lot of white kids,” James told Fresh Air. “They were all younger than I was. I remember on Saturdays, they would play rock ‘n’ roll records and I would say, ‘That music is really happening.’ My song, ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ — they had a version by Rod Stewart, and they kept saying, ‘This is the song you wrote!’ And I’d say, ‘All right!’ ”

Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones sent James a letter while she was in rehab and invited her to tour with the band if she stayed clean. In 1978, she joined the Stones on tour. By the ’90s, she’d reached a new generation of fans and won a Grammy. The next challenge was jazz.

“[Jazz] was too disciplined and too confining,” James said on Fresh Air. “I thought you had to be bourgeois to do that. I was a sloppy kid, wanted to be just wild. I think it took me maturing.”

James said making her tribute to Billie Holiday, 1994′s Mystery Lady, also honored her mother, who loved both Holiday and jazz. She said it helped make peace with the woman she idolized, and who had abandoned her.

It’s often said of Etta James that you could hear her whole life in her voice. James told NPR in 1989 that that made sense, though she mostly sang for herself.

“When I sing for myself, I probably sing for anyone who has any kind of hurt, any kind of bad feelings, good feelings, ups and downs, highs and lows, that kind of thing,” she said.

Etta James went to extremes, and owned them in her life, and in her music.

This story was originally published at npr.org.