Mike Longo RIP

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Smalls Jazz New York...
"Dear Friends:

Today the Coronavirus claimed one of our own. Legendary jazz pianist Mike Longo passed away last night in the ICU at Mt. Sinai Hospital. Mike just recently played at Mezzrow with his longtime musical partner Paul West. As usual, he played with swing and grace and the bebop authority that was rightfully his. We all knew he was ill. Getting around was hard for him but it didn't stop him from making his gig. Little did I know it would be the last time in my life that I would see him... What can one say at a time like this? I don't want to mire myself in useless or infuriating platitudes..."


RIP indeed.

BN.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

WBGO obit (New York)....

"Mike Longo, who led a distinguished jazz career as a pianist, composer and educator, notably as longtime musical director for Dizzy Gillespie, died on Sunday at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. He was 83 and lived in New York.

The cause was COVID-19, confirmed Dorothy Longo, his wife of 32 years. She said Longo was admitted to the hospital early Tuesday morning, and had preexisting medical conditions.

Longo is not the first jazz casualty of the coronavirus — that tragic distinction belongs to Argentine saxophonist Marcelo Peralta, who died in Madrid on March 10 — but his prominent stature and breadth of associations bring the tragedy much closer to home for the jazz community in New York.

“He was a consummate musician, a dedicated musician and instructor,” says bassist Paul West, whose close musical association with Longo started in 1968, when both were members of Gillespie’s working band.

Longo served as musical director of that band, which had a front line of Gillespie on trumpet and James Moody on saxophones and flute, from the late 1960s through the first half of the ‘70s, and intermittently for more than a decade after that. He appears on Gillespie’s live Impulse! album Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac, and several others, including Portrait of Jenny. Here is footage of the band from a concert in Copenhagen in ’68, playing a Longo original called “Ding-a-Ling.”