Bassist Robert Black, who was a founding member of the Bang On a Can All-Stars and has also collaborated with Philip Glass, John Cage, Meredith Monk, and others, has died at age 67. According to the New York Times, Black passed away in his home in Hartford, Connecticut on Thursday, and his partner Gary Knoble said the cause was colon cancer.
More from NYT:
Mr. Black was already a prominent interpreter of modern music for bass when he was invited, in 1987, to perform at the first Bang on a Can festival, a freewheeling marathon of contemporary music in downtown Manhattan.
“He had a beautiful sound,” the composer Michael Gordon, one of the founders of Bang on a Can, said in an interview. “He did everything with the bass: He danced with it, he drummed on it, he scraped it, he coached all kinds of amazing sounds out of it.”
Read more here.
Rest in peace, Robert.