Among the many pearls of wisdom that baseball legend Satchel Paige shared, he cautioned, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” I’m writing this article as fast as I can, half-panicked that between my deadline and the time it posts online, we’ll have lost another treasured artist as our ties to the past fray one incandescent talent at a time. While many of these musicians who died in 2024 lived long, enviably productive lives, several were cut far too short.
Sugar Pie DeSanto (Oct. 16, 1935 – Dec. 20, 2024)
An R&B star born and raised in San Francisco, DeSanto gained national renown with James Brown in 1959 and spent two years on the road with his revue as he became the Godfather of Soul. With her fierce stage persona and acrobatics, she was one of the few performers who could hold her own with Brown. The child of an African American mother and Filipino father, Peylia Marsema Balinton got her start singing around the Fillmore District. Discovered as a teenager by keen-eyed talent scout and bandleader Johnny Otis, she went on to make a series of scorching records, work collected in the 35-track anthology In the Basement: The Chess Recordings (which includes three pieces with fellow Fillmore-gal-turned-Chess-Records-star Etta James). DeSanto was a source of inspiration for generations of Bay Area R&B artists.
Zakir Hussain (March 9, 1951 – Dec. 15, 2024)
There is so much to say about the tabla virtuoso, whose presence in the Bay Area brought immeasurable knowledge and pleasure to the region over five decades. Jeff Kaliss’s appreciation for SF Classical Voice covers a lot of the requisite ground with affection and authority. I conducted a Zoom interview with Hussain for SFCV in the fall of 2020, a wide-ranging conversation in which he discussed his mother’s influence in more detail than usual.
Chloé Jean Bermudez (Feb. 14, 1982 – Dec. 12, 2024)
Chloé Jean Bermudez had been singing R&B around the North Bay for several years when veteran Vallejo impresario Jeff Trager suggested that Oakland guitarist, composer, and producer Ray Obiedo check her out. She’d been treated for breast cancer some years before, in 2016, and the disease reoccurred in 2020, but connecting with Obiedo set her on a new path. He produced her 2023 album Fairy Tale Fail, an impressive session encompassing R&B-inflected originals and simmering soul interpretations of standards like “Cry Me a River” and “Blue Skies.” He also featured her on his 2024 album Twist, surrounding her with top-shelf jazz players like pianist Peter Horvath and bassist Dan Feiszli. Performing and recording as Chloé Jean, she was a captivating song stylist cut down in her prime. The Sound Room in Oakland hosts a musical celebration of the singer on Jan. 14, featuring Obiedo and many vocalists, including Lilan Kane, Kim Nalley, Kenny Washington, Leah Tysse, and Tony Lindsay.
Sly Randolph (Nov. 30, 1945 – Dec. 2, 2024)
A Harlem native who moved to the East Bay in 1981, the drummer was a mainstay on the Bay Area music scene for some four decades. He established himself as a highly versatile accompanist in jazz combos, Broadway pit orchestras, society dance bands, and funk outfits, including Mystic Merlin, which recorded three albums for Capitol Records in the early 1980s. In the Bay Area, he was most visible during the two decades he spent powering Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers. As an educator, he taught at Oaktown Jazz Workshops, the Young Musicians Choral Orchestra, and in his private studio behind the Richmond house he shared with his wife Julie Rust. A beloved teacher, he mentored renowned drummers such as Darrell Green, Tim Angulo, Genius Wesley, and Jaimeo Brown, among many others.
Barbara Dane (May 12, 1927 – Oct. 20, 2024)
A powerhouse singer who moved effortlessly between traditional New Orleans jazz, Chicago blues, international protest anthems, gospel, and folk ballads, Dane always put her political beliefs before career ambitions. Largely calling the Bay Area home since 1949 (though with significant stints in Los Angeles and New York), she was also an effective guitarist, civil rights activist, club owner, and record producer whose politically oriented Paredon Records released 50 albums that are now archived at Smithsonian Folkways. With a resonant, soulful contralto, supple sense of time, and selfless commitment to Black music, she performed and recorded with a stellar constellation of foundational jazz, blues, and gospel artists, from Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, and Count Basie to Clara Ward, Mama Yancey, and the Chambers Brothers. Dane’s children picked up her mantle, as her son Pablo Menéndez founded the pioneering Cuban rock band Mezcla and her daughter Nina Menéndez spent decades as the Bay Area’s leading flamenco impresario.
Gail Dobson (July 31, 1942 – April 17, 2024)
While Dobson spent much of the past two decades focusing on music education, inculcating aspiring young performers into the joys of improvisation and interplay, she set an example as an adventurous jazz vocalist and enthusiastic percussionist in her own right. A San Francisco native, she was performing at North Beach clubs such as the Purple Onion and Hungry I when she married veteran jazz pianist George Muribus. But it was with her second husband, pianist Smith Dobson, that the singer made her most lasting impression. They led the house band at San Jose’s Garden City Club, collaborating with traveling jazz luminaries and nurturing many young musicians who came by to sit in at the end of the night. In the years following Smith Dobson’s death in 2001, she led her own combos featuring top players like saxophonist and flutist Mas Koga, guitarist Tim Volpicella, and the late bassist John Shifflett. Her legacy continues in the work of her son, East Bay tenor saxophonist and drummer Smith Dobson V, and daughter, New York vocalist and guitarist Sasha Dobson.
Calvin Keys (Feb. 6, 1942 – April 14, 2024)
An essential force on the Bay Area scene for five decades, the Oakland guitarist was a widely renowned jazz master who launched his independent recording career with 1971’s Shawn-Neeq on Oakland-based Black Jazz Records. It was a hard-grooving LP that became a treasured collector’s item (and was eventually reissued on vinyl by San Francisco’s Tompkins Square Records). Over the years, Keys performed at just about every venue, joint, and theater around the region, including a long residency at Oakland’s 57th Street Gallery. Something of an underground legend outside the Bay Area, he was hailed by jazz stars like the late pianist Ahmad Jamal, who hired Keys for his quartet in the mid-1970s, and guitarist Pat Metheny, who grew up in the Midwest hearing tales about the Nebraska-raised guitarist. Metheny dedicated his tune “Calvin’s Keys” to the luminary and in response to an email query several years ago replied, “Calvin Keys is the real deal!” Keys credited his long tenure in Jamal’s quartet with honing his pianistic approach to the guitar.
Ed Reed (Feb. 2, 1929 – Jan. 31, 2024)
The jazz vocalist released his first album at the age of 78 and spent the next dozen years fulfilling his lifelong ambition of performing on leading jazz stages with some of the art form’s finest accompanists. A master balladeer whose conversational phrasing transformed even the most familiar standards into taut, revelatory narratives, Reed struggled with heroin addiction for decades. After attaining sobriety in 1986, he gradually found his way back to singing, performing regularly at the Cheese Board Collective Pizzeria in Berkeley. Attending Jazz Camp West in 2005, he connected with Berkeley-reared multi-instrumentalist Peck Allmond, who was so struck by Reed’s voice and interpretive skills that he made it a personal mission for the singer to record an album. Reed didn’t just bring to life American Songbook characters and narratives. He rendered them with the rueful self-wisdom he’d acquired, interpreting the lyrics with fierce but gentle honesty. Listening to Reed, you knew no one else was infusing these songs with the same emotional insight and generosity, particularly with that deliciously behind-the-beat phrasing. He told his harrowing story with his wife Diane Reed in the braided memoir Double Helix: A Memoir of Addiction, Recovery, and Jazz in Two Voices.
