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Céline Dion and Herby Moreau from Dion's Facebook tribute.
FYI
Obituaries: Quebec TV Host Herby Moreau, Nova Scotia Country Star Angus Walker
This week we also acknowledge the passing of record producer Jim Gaines, singer and Prince's sister Tyka Nelson and Indian music pioneer Pandit Ram Narayan.
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Herby Moreau, a Haitian-born Canadian entertainment journalist and television presenter, died on Nov. 3, at the age of 56. A cause of death has not been reported.
Moreau arrived in Montreal from Haiti at the age of five. In 1989, he first worked in television as a production assistant for Julie Snyder on her show Sortir. After working with Snyder for 18 years, Moreau presented the TV shows Star Système and Star Académie. Through covering such star-studded events as covered A-list events like the Oscars and Cannes Film Festival, he became known as Quebec's 'prince of red carpets.'
Moreau also worked as a general news journalist for La Première, a correspondent for the magazine Elle Québec, and a daily cultural presenter for TVA. In 2009, he created his own TV channel on the internet, herby.tv. In 2014, he published the book Glamour et faux pas, recounting his memorable encounters with celebrities like George Clooney and Celine Dion.
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Celine Dion published a special tribute to Moreau online, recognizing their long-running relationship in media. In a social media post, Dion noted that "Herby Moreau was a friend, an internationally recognized journalist with whom I spent a lot of time on the Red Carpets," Dion shared on social media, "which he hosted with mastery, elegance and good humor. His smile will remain engraved in my heart."
Other tributes to Moreau describe him as a chic tastemaker and a light in the cultural landscape who always knew where the party was. "For me, Herby is a big part of how we consume the arts," said Elisapie at the recent ADISQ Gala, an event Moreau often worked.
Read an obituary in La Presse here.
Angus Reynolds Walker, a Nova Scotian country singer-songwriter, died on Nov. 7, at age 85.
Canadian country music historian Larry Delaney (Cancountry) tells Billboard Canada that "Walker was dubbed 'Canada's Prime Minister Of Country Music,' thanks largely to his recording of the Ben Kerr song 'Parliament Hill', a key entry on his album released in 1975.
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"The album also featured four of Angus Walker's own compositions including 'Diesel Drivin' Man', 'Down East Country Girl,' and a version of the Les Emmerson-penned hit song 'Signs.'"
Walker's 1965 single "Cadillacin' Around," released on London Records, reached the No. 2 position on the RPM Charts. He earned a Gold Leaf Award for Most Promising Country Music Artist, and he later placed three additional singles on the charts in 1970-71, including the Top 20 hit "Parliament Hill."
Delaney also reports that "Walker enjoyed a lengthy career in country and bluegrass, recording with The Birch Mountain Boys, Dougal Trineer & The Hackamores, Bob King and more, and he is featured on numerous Various Artists albums issued through the years on the Rodeo/Banff label."
Angus Walker was recently among the 2024 inductees of the Canadian Bluegrass Music Association's Hall Of Fame.
International
Jim Gaines, a veteran Grammy-winning record producer and engineer, died on Nov. 9, at age 83, after a prolonged illness.An obituary issued by Blind Raccoon Records noted that a "career that took him from mail boy at a radio jingles’ studio to one of popular music’s most celebrated producers and engineers, Jim Gaines’ life story reads like an Horatio Alger tale: an adventure that extols the virtues of hard work and determination.
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"Jim Gaines has earned his reputation as one of the most humble and generous men in a notoriously ruthless industry. These attributes served him well through five decades in the music business, where he has left an indelible mark on the music of artists such as Huey Lewis and the News, Carlos Santana, Stevie Ray Vaughan, George Thorogood, Steve Miller and countless others.
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In 2000, Gaines won a Grammy Award in the Album of the Year category, for producing the hit Santana album, Supernatural. His love of blues music earned him a Keeping The Blues Alive award in 2003."
The Arkansas-born Gaines moved to Memphis at a young age. Following his high school graduation, he began working at Pepper Tanner, one of the world’s largest producers of commercial jingles. After making tape copies, he climbed the company ladder, moving from mixing to tracking, to eventually supervising satellite studios around the region.
Gaines went on to produce and/or engineer albums for a long list of artists in many diverse genres. Those credits also include B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Miles Davis, Patti Labelle, Tower of Power, The Doobie Brothers, Journey, Eric Johnson and Coco Montoya. Check out a full list of credits here.
Artists he worked with praised Gaines effusively. George Thorogood stated that "Mr. Gaines’ expertise as a top-of-the-line producer was surpassed by his classy personality.”
Carlos Santana once called Gaines "a masterful craftsman" and said "He understands capturing the sounds of eternity and infinity. I am forever grateful to Jim for sharing his knowledge, wisdom, and heart with me."
In 2022, Gaines was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, at which he said, “I'm a lucky guy. I'm just a hard-working hillbilly from Arkansas, and I've been very lucky throughout my career to be involved with all these great artists. That's the way I look at it.”
Also in 2022, Gaines published a memoir, Thirty Years behind the Glass From Otis Redding and Stax Records to Santana’s Supernatural, out via via Texas A&M University Press.
Gaines is survived by his wife, singer/songwriter Sandy Carroll, who collaborated with her husband on many projects. A celebration of life is planned for January 2025 in Memphis.
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Tyka Nelson, a recording artist and Prince’s sister and only full sibling, died on Nov. 4, at age 64. Born to jazz musician John L. Nelson and Mattie Della Shaw in 1960, two years after Prince, Nelson was a singer-songwriter, releasing four albums across her career, starting with 1988’s Royal Blue. That album's biggest hit, “Marc Anthony’s Tune,” spent 11 weeks on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, peaking at No. 33, while “L.O.V.E.," spent seven weeks on the chart and topped at No. 52.
The Associated Press described her “Royal Blue” album as “mostly adult-contemporary or easy-listening” material, “far removed from Prince and the so-called Minneapolis sound. Hers is a mature, romantic sound aimed at 25- to 45-year-olds.”
Her subsequent albums were 1992’s Yellow Moon, Red Sky, 2008’s A Brand New Me, and finally, 2011’s Hustler.
According to the Star Tribune, Nelson was scheduled to retire and perform a farewell concert at the Dakota in downtown Minneapolis in June. Illness caused her not to take the stage. A few days before the concert, she said she had a mixtape on the way and was working on a memoir.
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Tyka Nelson and five half-siblings — Sharon Nelson, Norrine Nelson, John R. Nelson, Omarr Baker and Alfred Jackson — inherited equal interests in the Prince estate. She and two others sold their stake to a music publishing company, Primary Wave Music, LLC, which later assigned its interests to an affiliate, Prince OAT Holdings LLC.
Pandit Ram Narayan, an Indian musician and a legendary figure in world music as a pioneering virtuoso of the sarangi, has died on Nov. 9, at age 96.
Narayan popularized the bowed instrument sarangi as a solo concert instrument in Hindustani classical music and became one of the first internationally recognized sarangi players.
After working work in Indian cinema, Narayan became a concert solo artist in 1956, performing at the major music festivals of India. After sitar player Ravi Shankar successfully performed in Western countries, Narayan followed his example.
He recorded solo albums and made his first international tour in 1964 to America and Europe with his older brother Chatur Lal, a tabla player who had toured with Shankar in the 1950s. Narayan taught Indian and foreign students and performed, frequently outside India, into the 2000s. He was awarded India's second highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2005.
Narayan continued to perform and record in India and abroad for many decades and his recordings appeared on Indian, American, and European labels. During the early 1980s he typically spent months each year visiting Western nations. A 1989 U.K. performance of "Bhairavi" was covered by the Kronos Quartet on their 2009 album Floodplain. Narayan performed less frequently in the 2000s and rarely in the 2010s.
Renowned Toronto bassist, composer and record label head George Koller paid tribute to Narayan in a Facebook post. It reads (in part): "He took the Sarangi to places it had never been before...he could melt your heart with a phrase... while looking directly at YOU in the audience...or dazzle you with his superhuman technical innovations. I heard him in concert many times and we presented him in Edmonton around 1980. I was honoured to play the tamboura drone for his concert... and now I study Sarangi."
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