FAREWELLS

Bill Smith, a clarinetist, baritone saxophonist, and composer who worked in both the contemporary classical (where he was known as William O. Smith) and the West Coast jazz worlds, died February 29 of complications from prostate cancer at his home in Seattle, Washington. He was 93. As a jazz musician, Smith was best known as a founding member of the Dave Brubeck Octet in 1946; he continued working on and off with the legendary pianist through the latter’s death. He also performed with and composed for such West Coast stalwarts as Red Norvo, Shelley Manne, and Barney Kessel, as well as working in the 1990s with avant-garde iconoclast Anthony Braxton. On the classical side, Smith was himself something of an avant-garde iconoclast, known as a clarinet innovator in both performance and composition and as a pioneer in the use of tape and electronics.

Marcelo Peralta, an Argentine saxophonist renowned for his distinctive approach to the avant-garde and South American musical traditions, died March 10 at a hospital in Madrid, Spain—the first known COVID-19 casualty within the jazz community. He was six days past his 59th birthday. Born in Buenos Aires, Peralta had been a resident of Madrid since 1996. Though he dabbled in multiple jazz idioms, his specialty was a hybrid of free improvisation with Argentine and other Latin-American folk forms. A perennial performer at festivals in Spain, Peralta toured regularly through Europe and back to South America. At the time of his death he was also a professor of saxophone, improvisation, and jazz ensemble at Madrid’s School of Creative Music.

, a multi-instrumentalist and key creative force in the Sun Ra Arkestra over a