🎀 Cute Composer Series: World Cancer Support Month — Jazz Lost Too Soon 🎗️🎷🎶 Sarah Vaughan (1924–1990) was called "The Divine One" — and it was not hyperbole 🎤✨ With a three-octave range, a vibrato that could stop time, and an improvisational intelligence that rivaled any instrumentalist in jazz history, Vaughan was the towering vocal genius of the bebop era. She won two Grammys including a Lifetime Achievement Award, received the NEA Jazz Masters designation, and was described by critic Scott Yanow as having "one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century." In 1989, appearing at The Blue Note in New York, she began experiencing breathlessness and had to cancel appearances. It was lung cancer 💔 She tried chemotherapy, recovered enough to plan a new album with Quincy Jones, and swore she'd record it "even if I have to sing it right from this bed." She didn't get the chance. She died April 3, 1990, aged 66, at home in Hidden Hills, California, while watching a television film in which her adopted daughter Paris was starring. She went quietly. One of the greatest voices in the history of recorded music, and cancer silenced it at 66. John Coltrane (1926–1967) was one of the defining voices of the 20th century — saxophonist, composer, and spiritual seeker whose music moved from bebop to modal jazz to free jazz in a decade of creative acceleration that left everyone else breathless 🎷🔥 Blue Train, Giant Steps, My Favorite Things, A Love Supreme — each one a new universe. Near the end of his life he endured weeks of stomach pains, refusing to see a doctor. When he finally entered the hospital, the diagnosis was liver cancer. He died on July 17, 1967, aged 40. Miles Davis said: "Coltrane's death shocked everyone, took everyone by surprise. I knew he hadn't looked too good… but I didn't know he was that sick — or even sick at all." In 2007, Coltrane received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize citation for "his masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz." He left behind one of the most concentrated bodies of musical genius in American history — all of it made in just over a decade 💙 👉 Which one's music do you want to explore more? VOTE BELOW👇& follow @daixcompose for more Cute Composer spotlights 💙 Recordings: 🎶 Sarah Vaughan: Send in the Clowns — live concert performance (Ontario Place Forum, Toronto, Canada) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu_3n7uom-c 🎶 John Coltrane: A Love Supreme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll3CMgiUPuU
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