Elton Dean lives forever, rests in peace - Progressive Rock Music Forum

Here a picture of Elton Dean jamming with Gong in Paris, October 1996. Left to right:
Steffe Sharpstring, Didier Malherbe, Elton Dean, Mike Howlett, Gilli Smyth and Daevid Allen; also playing, but not in the pic: Tim Blake and Pip Pyle.

Edited by USAGirl

Peace on Earth

One of THE great woodwind players in rock, period...I love his playing on every single album he's on that I know of...he'll be sadly missed, as younger players in rock who have that level of imagination seem to be lacking.

Very sad news indeed! He did some nice work with Soft Machine!

RIP!

RIO/AVANT/ZEUHL - The best thing you can get with yer pants on!

let's just stay above the moral melee
prefer the sink to the gutter
keep our sand-castle virtues
content to be a doer
as well as a thinker,
prefer lifting our pen
rather than un-sheath our sword

Taken from the All About Jazz pages -
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=8788

British jazz saxophonist Elton Dean died on the evening of February 7th, 2006, in a London hospital. For the last year in particular he had been suffering from heart and liver related health problems. He was 60.

Dean first gained acclaim as a member of the Keith Tippett Group, led by the English pianist and featuring the horn section of Dean, Marc Charig and Nick Evans, in 1969. Later that year, Dean, Charig and Evans were hired by Soft Machine to augment their core trio. After touring as a septet, the band was trimmed down to a quintet, then a quartet. This resulted in what many consider the “classic” Soft Machine line-up of Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge, Hugh Hopper and Elton Dean, which recorded Third (1970) and Fourth (1971) for CBS.

Dean left Soft Machine after 1972's Fifth to devote his time to his own group, Just Us, and various jazz-oriented line-ups, many of them featuring Tippett. Over the years however, he remained associated with the Soft Machine family (also known as the “Canterbury scene”), often in the company of bassist Hugh Hopper, while leading his own acoustic jazz quartets and quintets.

In the past few years Dean had again been involved in a variety of Soft Machine-derived line-ups : SoftWorks with Hugh Hopper, Allan Holdsworth and John Marshall; Soft Machine Legacy with Etheridge replacing Holdsworth; Soft Bounds, with Hopper and French jazzers Sophia Domancich and Simon Goubert; and the French-based PolySoft tribute project, again featuring Hopper. Soft Machine Legacy recorded its debut album in September, and the band were looking forward to supporting it with a series of live performances; a live DVD, recorded in Paris last December, is also set for release later this year.