Among his most famous numbers were “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” recorded by Elvis Presley; “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” recorded by the Tokens; and “What a Wonderful World,” recorded by Louis Armstrong.

“Can’t Help Falling in Love,” introduced in Presley’s 1961 film “Blue Hawaii,” was a million-seller. It has words and music by Weiss, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore.

“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (1961), based on a South African Zulu song first recorded in the 1930s, was given a reworked melody and new lyrics (“In the jungle, the mighty jungle/The lion sleeps tonight”) by Weiss, Peretti and Creatore. Their adaptation, which kept the refrain — “Wimoweh, wimoweh” — popularized in a 1950s version by the Weavers, became a million-selling hit for the Tokens. Widely recorded since, the song has been used in many motion pictures, including “The Lion King” (1994).

“What a Wonderful World” (1967), with words and music by Weiss and Bob Thiele, came to renewed attention after Armstrong’s recording of it was featured on the soundtrack of the 1987 film “Good Morning, Vietnam.” The Armstrong version has since become a contemporary standard.

George Davis Weiss’s other standards include “Lullaby of Birdland” (1952), the vocal version of George Shearing’s jazz standard, and many songs with his frequent collaborator Bennie Benjamin, among them “Surrender” (1946), recorded by Perry Como; “Confess” (1948), recorded by Patti Page; and “Wheel of Fortune” (1952), recorded by Kay Starr.

He collaborated on several Broadway musicals, the best known of which is “Mr. Wonderful” (1956), starring Sammy Davis Jr., for which Weiss contributed original music and lyrics with Jerry Bock and Larry Holofcener.

George David Weiss was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984. As president of the Songwriters Guild of America from 1982 to 2000, he spoke widely about copyright issues and testified before government bodies.

Richie Hayward was taken to a hospital around the Vancouver area with complications due to pneumonia after being diagnosed with liver cancer just last year. According to Exclaim News, the drummer passed away while awaiting a liver transplant, which he did not have the health insurance to receive.

Hayward served as Little Feat’s drummer from the beginning of the rock fusion group’s founding in 1969 and has been drumming with them every year of the 40 in which the band was active.

Collins’ guitar work can be heard on some of the biggest songs in the entire Funk cannon, including Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” and Parliament’s “Flash Light,” two songs Rolling Stone put in its list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” And Hip Hop music might sound a little different if it weren’t for Catfish — songs he played on were sampled on Hip Hop tracks by Snoop Dogg, Black Eye Peas, A Tribe Called Quest, 2Pac, Biz Markie, Kurtis Blow, Hammer, Grandmaster Flash and tons of others. In more recent years, Catfish played on songs by Deee-Lite and fellow Cincinnatian Freekbass and he was a contributor to the soundtrack for the 2007 hit comedy Superbad. Catfish will forever be remembered as one of the greatest Funk guitarists in the history of music.

London-born Parnell’s musical career stretched almost seven decades. He studied piano as a child, but found his niche on the drums, making his professional debut as a teenager in the English seaside town of Scarborough.

Serving in the Royal Air Force, he was part of a band that performed at the RAF Bomber Command HW in High Wycombe. Later he joined the renowned Ted Heath Band with jazz musicians Kenny Ball and Ronnie Scott, playing on dozens of recordings and broadcasts. He also had his own band at this time, and left Heath in 1951 to lead a 12-piece band and later a 16-piece band.

As musical director at British broadcaster ATV in the late 1950s, Parnell oversaw the music for the long-running variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium, produced specials featuring Tom Jones and Barbra Streisand, and served as The Benny Hill Show’s musical director.

In 1976, ATV began producing The Muppet Show, with its cast of Jim Henson’s puppets and human celebrity guests. Parnell conducted the orchestra for the variety show series’ 120 episodes, although its ostensible bandleader was the pop-eyed Muppet conductor, Nigel.

Parnell retired from ATV in 1982, but continued to perform with jazz bands near his home in Suffolk until three years ago. Two days before his death, he celebrated his 87th birthday with his family.

Sad news reached me last night as I learned that founding member of The Free Design, Chris Dedrick, has passed away.

Chris was one of my musical heroes, both for his vocal arrangements and also for his idiosyncratic approach to lyric-writing. One of Chris’ musical heroes was Gene Puerling of the Hi-Los (and later Singers Unlimited) whose vocal writing he hugely admired. I have to say I think Chris took vocal arranging to a whole new dimension.

I was lucky enough to speak to Chris on a number of occasions when I was putting my Enoch Light and Free Design websites together. He was always incredibly gracious and very generous with his time. He also provided me with lots of information and I wouldn’t have been able to build those sites without his help.

Chris had a long and illustrious career, latterly becoming a highly acclaimed soundtrack composer in his adopted homeland of Canada. But what pleases me most is knowing that he got to see the work he did with The Free Design acknowledged with a huge resurgence of interest in the band in the late 90s/early 00s.

Back in the late 60s/early 70s when The Free Design’s albums were originally recorded on Project 3, the label didn’t really have much in the way of distribution across the US so sadly only very few people got to hear The Free Design.

However, 30 years later, a renewed interest in the band led to the reissue of the band’s entire back-catalog (by Light in the Attic Records) and also finally a release of Chris’ “lost” solo album Be Free, which he recorded back in 1972.

This renewed level of interest also led to the band recording a whole new album (Cosmic Peekaboo) and contributing a new track to an album of Beach Boys covers (Caroline Now).

Since last September, Chris had been chronicling his battle with cancer on his blog. Yesterday, his wife Moira posted the sad news about his
passing here.

Miller had been an accomplished oboist and was still a force in the recording industry when he came up with the idea of recording old standards with a chorus of some two dozen male voices and printing the lyrics on album covers.

The “Sing Along With Mitch” album series, which began in 1958, was an immense success, finding an eager audience among older listeners looking for an alternative to rock ’n’ roll. Mitch Miller and the Gang serenaded them with tunes like “Home on the Range,” “That Old Gang of Mine,” “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

When the concept was adapted for television in 1961, with the lyrics appearing at the bottom of the screen, Miller, with his beaming smile and neatly trimmed mustache and goatee, became a national celebrity.

By then he had established himself as a hit maker for Columbia Records and a career shaper for singers like Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Mathis, Doris Day, Patti Page and Frankie Laine. First at Mercury Records and then at Columbia, he helped define American popular music in the postwar, pre-rock era, carefully matching singers with songs and choosing often unorthodox but almost always catchy instrumental accompaniment.

Tony Bennett’s career took off after Mitch Miller persuaded him to record the ballad “Because of You,” backing him with a lush orchestral arrangement by Percy Faith. It reached No. 1 on the pop charts in 1951.

By the end of the 1950s Miller’s eye and ear for talent and songs had been critical in making Columbia the top-selling record company in the nation.

Mitch Miller was the Midas of novelty music, storming the charts with records like Jimmy Boyd’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and providing singers with unusual instrumental backing: a harpsichord for Rosemary. Clooney, French horns for Guy Mitchell. One of his earliest hits, “Mule Train,” was recorded by the muscular-voiced Frankie Laine with three electric guitars, and Miller himself using a wood block to simulate the snapping of a whip.

Miller was also a studio innovator. Along with the guitarist Les Paul and a few others, he helped pioneer overdubbing, the technique by which different tracks are laid over one another to produce a richer effect. He also achieved what he called a sonic “halo” on numerous recordings by the use of what came to be called an echo chamber — actually an effect an engineer produced by placing a speaker and a microphone in a tiled restroom.

His touch was not always sure. When he had bagpipes accompany Dinah Shore on a song called “Scottish Samba” the result was, in Miller’s own words, “a dog.” And probably the nadir of Frank Sinatra’s recording career came after Mr. Miller left Mercury and took over pop production at Columbia in 1950.

Sinatra complained that Miller forced him to record inferior material like “Bim Bam Baby,” “Tennessee Newsboy” and, perhaps most notoriously, “Mama Will Bark,” a 1951 novelty duet with the television personality Dagmar that included dog imitations.

Interviewed by Time magazine in 1951, Miller was less than enthusiastic about the kind of gimmicky pop records that had become his specialty. “I wouldn’t buy that stuff for myself,” he said. “There’s no real artistic satisfaction in this job. I satisfy my musical ego elsewhere.”

In 1960 his singalong concept was given a one-time television test on NBC. The response was so favorable that “Sing Along With Mitch” became a mainstay of family television, running from 1961 to 1964, then returning in reruns in the summer of 1966.

Even at the singalongs’ height, many Americans considered them hopelessly corny. That sense only intensified as a younger generation came of age in the 1960s and musical tastes changed. There were news reports that shopping malls had begun piping Mitch Miller music on their sound systems as a way to discourage teenagers from congregating. Years later, in 1993, when David Koresh and members of his Branch Davidian cult were holed up in their compound in Waco, Tex., F.B.I. agents tried to flush them out by blasting “Sing Along With Mitch” Christmas carols.

The Willem Breuker Kollektief is seen as one of the earliest Dutch ensembles to present improvised music in a way that was accessible to the general public. Amsterdam-born Willem Breuker was awarded many prizes, including the 1993 VPRO Boy Edgar Prize.

Hummel’s Big Star roots date back to the Memphis band Icewater, which featured Big Star guitarist Chris Bell (who later died in a 1978 car accident) and Stephens before Chilton joined the group. Hummel played on Big Star’s debut #1 Record and Radio City, both listed on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Hummel wrote “The India Song” and “Way Out West” and has co-writing credits on some of the band’s most beloved songs, including “Back of a Car,” “Life is White” and “Daisy Glaze.” While Big Star developed a cult following decades later thanks to the support of famous fans like Paul Westerberg and R.E.M., the band was underappreciated in its own time, and Hummel quit to finish school prior to recording the group’s epic Third/Sister Lovers.

Hummel went on to become a longtime employee at Lockheed Martin, though he still occasionally played music on the side. When Big Star reunited in the mid-1990s, Hummel elected not to take part; the Posies’ Ken Stringfellow took over bass in his place.

(Source: RolingStone.com)

Born December 29, 1943, Bill was battling prostate cancer, and passed away from surgical complications.

The man known for masterminding the career of the heavy metal group KISS, Bill Aucoin also managed Billy Squier, Lordi, Billy Idol, and numerous other artists. His most recent venture was Aucoin Globe Entertainment, which he founded in 2007. In its three years, Bill and his company developed bands in the U.S. and around the world.

Jones was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on July 31, 1918. He was raised along with his brothers Thad and Elvin in the Pontiac, Michigan area, where their father was a Baptist deacon and lumber inspector. All three brothers went on to prominence as jazz musicians. Hank, the eldest, was the last one to pass on.

In 1989, The National Endowment for the Arts honored Hank Jones with its highest honor in jazz, the NEA Jazz Masters Award. He was also honored in 2003 with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Jazz Living Legend Award. In 2008, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. On April 13, 2009, the University of Hartford presented Jones with a Doctorate Degree for his musical accomplishments.

Hank Jones has recorded over sixty albums under his own name, and countless others as a guest. As a sideman he played with John Coltrane, Milt Jackson, Wes Montgomery, and many others.