Frank Bourke, Australian football player, died he was 89.

Francis Michael "Frank" Bourke  was an Australian rules footballer who played for the Richmond Football Club in the Victorian Football League during the 1940s died he was 89..

(3 February 1922 – 27 December 2011)

He played one game during the 1943 season while on leave from the RAAF. After the war Bourke joined the club for the 1946 season playing in 9 games before a knee injury. He would come back to play in 1947 for 6 games before retirement. Frank Bourke is best known for being the start of the Tigers only three-generation family at the club being the father of Richmond Immortal Francis Bourke and grandfather of David Bourke.^[2]


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Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff, American-born Georgian aristocrat, New York City highway commissioner, died from esphogeal cancer he was 81.

Constantine Sidamon-Estiroff was an American born Georgian aristocrat and the New York City highway commisoner in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies in the administration of John V. Lindsay , died from esphogeal cancer he was 81..

(June 28, 1930 – December 26, 2011)

Early life

Constatine was born in New York City, New York into the house of Sidamon-Eristavi, claiming descent from the medieval kings of Alania. He was the son of Prince Simon Sidamon-Eristoff, a Georgian military officer, who emigrated to the United States after the Bolsheviks invaded Georgia in 1921 and Anne Tracy, a descendant of John Bigelow, an American diplomat in the mid-19th century.

Public Official

Sidamon-Estiroff served as the New York City Highway commissioner in the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay. Beginning with his appointment by Governor Malcolm Wilson of New York in 1974 until 1989 he then served as a member of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Then from 1989 until 1993 under President George H.W Bush he served as the director of the New York Region #2 (encompassing New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands) of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Sidamon Eristoff died on December 26, 2011 in New York City at the age of 81. His son Andrew Eristoff is the current New Jersey State Treasurer.



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Peter Collins Dorsey, American jurist, died he was 80.

Peter Collins Dorsey was a United States federal judge died he was 80..

(March 24, 1931 – January 20, 2012)

Education

Born in New London, Connecticut,^[1] Dorsey received a B.A. from Yale University in 1953 and an LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1959. He was a U.S. Naval Reserve from 1953 to 1956.

Career

He was in private practice in New Haven, Connecticut from 1959 to 1974. He was a U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut from 1974-77. He was in private practice in New Haven, Connecticut from 1977-83. He was a federal judge on the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut.
Dorsey was nominated by President Ronald Reagan on June 7, 1983, to a seat vacated by T. Emmet Clarie. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on July 18, 1983, and received commission on July 19, 1983. He served as chief judge from 1994-1998. He assumed senior status on January 2, 1998.

Death

He died after a long illness in 2012 in New Haven, aged 80. ^[2]



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James Rizzi, American pop artist, died he was 61.

James Rizzi  was an American pop artist who was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York died he was 61.. Until his death he resided and worked in a studio/loft in the SoHo section of Manhattan.

(October 5, 1950 – December 26, 2011^[1])

Biography

James Rizzi studied Fine Arts at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He came up with the idea of 3D multiples now mostly associated with his name when, having taken classes in painting, printmaking and sculpturing, he had to hand in grade work for all three subjects, but only had time for doing one. So he created an etching, printed it twice, handcolored it, and mounted parts of the one print on top of the other, using wire as a means of adding depth. Having received good grades from all three teachers, he stuck with the idea and developed it further.^[2]
Later, he married Gaby Hamill, a fashion designer. They later divorced. James Rizzi never had any children of his own, but has two nieces Jennifer Fishman and Laura Rizzi and one nephew Brian Rizzi who is also his godson. Finally a goddaughter Georgia Rae Pai Foster, daughter of Emrie Brooke Foster.
Rizzi was most famous for his 3D artwork, "especially the large, elaborate prints and teeming anthropomorphic cityscapes. His merry maximalism and delight in delirious detail and elaborate minutiae created a true art brand, a trademark style as recognizable as any in the world."^[3]
Late in life, he returned to painting. His "latest paintings combine his Picasso meets Hanna-Barbera drawing style with an increasingly chromatic palette and a complex graphic structure that simultaneously evokes cubism and the most sophisticated Amerindian friezes."^[3]


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Sam Rivers, American jazz musician and composer, died from pneumonia he was 88.

Samuel Carthorne Rivers  was an American jazz musician and composer. He performed on soprano and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet, flute, harmonica and piano  died from pneumonia he was 88..

(September 25, 1923 – December 26, 2011)

Rivers was born in Enid, Oklahoma. Active in jazz since the early 1950s, he earned wider attention during the mid-1960s spread of free jazz. With a thorough command of music theory, orchestration and composition, Rivers was an influential and prominent artist in jazz music.^[2]

Early life

Rivers's father was a gospel musician who had sung with the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Silverstone Quartet, exposing Rivers to music from an early age. Rivers was stationed in California in the 1940s during a stint in the Navy. Here he performed semi-regularly with blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon.^[3] Rivers moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1947, where he studied at the Boston Conservatory with Alan Hovhaness.^[2]
He performed with Quincy Jones, Herb Pomeroy, Tadd Dameron and others.

Blue Note era

In 1959 Rivers began performing with 13-year-old drummer Tony Williams, who later went on to have an impressive career. Rivers was briefly a member of Miles Davis's quintet in 1964, partly at Williams's recommendation. This quintet recorded a single album, Miles in Tokyo. However, Rivers' playing style was too unrefined to be compatible with Davis's music at this point, and he was soon replaced by Wayne Shorter. Rivers was signed by Blue Note Records, for whom he recorded four albums as leader and made several sideman appearances. Among noted sidemen on his own Blue Note albums were Jaki Byard, who appears on Fuchsia Swing Song, Herbie Hancock and Freddie Hubbard. He appeared on Blue Note recordings by Tony Williams, Andrew Hill and Larry Young.
Rivers derived his music from bebop, but he was an adventurous player, adept at free jazz. The first of his Blue Note albums, Fuchsia Swing Song (1964), adopts an approach sometimes called "inside-outside". Here the performer frequently obliterates the explicit harmonic framework ("going outside") but retains a hidden link so as to be able to return to it in a seamless fashion. Rivers brought the conceptual tools of bebop harmony to a new level in this process, united at all times with the ability to "tell a story" which Lester Young had laid down as a benchmark for the jazz improviser.
His powers as a composer were also in evidence in this period: the ballad "Beatrice" from Fuchsia Swing Song has become an important standard, particularly for tenor saxophonists. For instance, it is the first cut on Joe Henderson's 1985 The State of the Tenor, Vols. 1 & 2, and Stan Getz recorded it during the 1989 sessions eventually issued as Bossas & Ballads – The Lost Sessions.

Loft era

During the 1970s, Rivers and his wife, Bea, ran a jazz loft called "Studio Rivbea" in New York City's NoHo district. It was located on Bond Street in Lower Manhattan and was originally opened as a public performance space as part of the first New York Musicians Festival in 1970.^[4] Critic John Litweiler has written that "In New York Loft Jazz meant Free Jazz in the Seventies" and Studio Rivbea was "the most famous of the lofts".^[5] The loft was important in the development of jazz because it was an example of artists creating their own performance spaces and taking responsibility for presenting music to the public. This allowed for music to be free of extra-musical concerns that would be present in a nightclub or concert hall situation. A series of recordings made at the loft were issued under the title Wildflowers on the Douglas label.^[6]
During this era Rivers continued to record, including several albums for Impulse!: Streams, recorded live at Montreux, Hues (both records contain different trio performances later collated on CD as Trio Live), the quartet album Sizzle and his first big-band disc, Crystals; perhaps his best-known work from this period though is his appearance on Dave Holland's Conference of the Birds, in the company of Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul.

Later career

In the early 1990s Sam and wife Beatrice moved to Florida, in part to expand his orchestra compositions with a reading band in Orlando. This band became the longest-running incarnation of the RivBea Orchestra. He performed regularly with his Orchestra and Trio with bassist Doug Mathews and drummer Anthony Cole (later replaced by Rion Smith.)^[3] From 1996 to 1998 he toured and recorded three projects for Nato Records in France with pianist Tony Hymas and others. In 1998, with the assistance of Steve Coleman, he recorded two Grammy-nominated big-band albums for RCA Victor with the RivBea All-Star Orchestra, Culmination and Inspiration (the title-track is an elaborate reworking of Dizzy Gillespie's "Tanga": Rivers was in Gillespie's band near the end of the trumpeter's life). Other recent albums of note include Portrait, a solo recording for FMP, and Vista, a trio with drummers Adam Rudolph and Harris Eisenstadt for Meta. During the late 1990s he appeared on several albums on Postcards Records.
In 2006, he released Aurora, a third CD featuring compositions for his Rivbea Orchestra and the first CD featuring members of his working orchestra in Orlando.
Rivers died from pneumonia on December 26, 2011 at the age of 88 in Orlando, Florida.^[7][8]

Discography

Jemeel Moondoc and Rashid Bakr at Studio Rivbea July, 1976

Lake Eola, Orlando Fl in 2008

2007

As leader

• 1964: Fuchsia Swing Song (Blue Note)
• 1965: Contours (Blue Note)
• 1966: A New Conception (Blue Note)
• 1967: Dimensions & Extensions (Blue Note)^[9]
• 1973: Streams (Impulse!)
• 1971-73: Hues (Impulse!)
• 1974: Crystals (Impulse!)
• 1976: Sizzle (Impulse!)
• 1976: The Tuba Trio Vols. 1-3 (Circle)
• 1976: Jazz of the 70's (Circle)
• 1976: The Quest (Red / Pausa)
• 1976: Black Africa! Villalago (Horo)
• 1976: Black Africa! Perugia (Horo)
• 1977: Paragon (Fluid)
• 1978: Waves (Tomato)
• 1979: Contrasts (ECM)
• 1981: Crosscurrent (Blue Marge)
• 1982: Colours (Black Saint)
• 1995: Portrait (FMP)
• 1998: Culmination (RCA Victor/BMG France)
• 1998: Inspiration (RCA Victor/BMG)
• 2003: Celebration (Posi-Tone)
• 2006: Aurora (Rivbea Sound)
• 2007: Firestorm (Rivbea Sound)
• 2011: Trilogy (Mosaic)

As co-leader

• 1976: with Dave Holland - Dave Holland / Sam Rivers (Improvising Artists)
• 1976: with Dave Holland - Sam Rivers / Dave Holland Vol. 2 (Improvising Artists)
• 1977: with Mario Schiano - Rendez-vous (Vedette)
• 1977: with James Newton - Flutes! (Circle)
• 1983: with Stephen McCraven - Intertwining Spirits (Freelance Records) ^[10]
• 1995: with Improvisors Pool (Alexander von Schlippenbach) - Backgrounds for Improvisors (FMP)
• 1996: with Noël Akchoté / Tony Hymas / Paul Rogers / Jacques Thollot - Configuration (Nato)
• 1996: with Julian Priester - Hints on Light and Shadow (Postcards)
• 1997: with Alexander von Schlippenbach - Tangens (FMP)
• 1998: with Tony Hymas - Eight Day Journal (Nato)
• 1998: with Tony Hymas - Winter Garden (Nato)
• 2003: with Adam Rudolph / Harris Eisenstadt - Vista (Meta)
• 2004: with Ben Street / Kresten Osgood & Bryan Carrott - Purple Violets (Stunt)
• 2004: with Ben Street / Kresten Osgood - Violet Violets (Stunt)
• 2007: with Dave Holland / Barry Altschul - Reunion: Live in New York (Pi, 2012)

Compilations

• The Complete Blue Note Sam Rivers Sessions (Mosaic, 1996)

As sideman

With Barry Altschul

• You Can't Name Your Own Tune (Muse, 1977)

With Steven Bernstein

• Diaspora Blues (Tzadik, 2002)

With Miles Davis

• Miles in Tokyo (Columbia, 1964)

With Bruce Ditmas

• What If (Postcards, 1994)

With Brian Groder

• Torque (2007)

With Andrew Hill

• Change (Blue Note, 1966)

With the Dave Holland Quartet

• Conference of the Birds, (ECM, 1973)

With Bobby Hutcherson

• Dialogue (Blue Note, 1965)

With Jason Moran

• Black Stars (Blue Note, 2001)

With the Stephen McCraven Quartet

• Intertwining Spirits (Free Lance, 1982)

With Music Revelation Ensemble (James Blood Ulmer)

• In the Name of... (DIW, 1993)

With NOJO

• City of Neighbourhoods (True North, 2004)

With Don Pullen

• Capricorn Rising (Black Saint, 1975)

With Roots (Arthur Blythe, Chico Freeman, Nathan Davis, a.o.)

• Salutes the Saxophone - Tributes to John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and Lester Young (In & Out, 1992)
• Stablemates (In & Out, 1993)

With Kazuko Shiraishi

• Dedicated to the Late John Coltrane and Other Jazz Poems (Musicworks, 1977)

With Cecil Taylor

• The Great Concert of Cecil Taylor (Prestige, 1969)

With Tony Williams

• Life Time (Blue Note, 1964)
• Spring (Blue Note, 1965)

With Larry Young

• Into Somethin' (Blue Note, 1964)

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Emmanuel Cooper, British potter and writer, died he was 73.

Emmanuel Cooper OBE is a British studio potter and writer on arts and crafts  died he was 73..

(1938 – 21 January 2012^[1]) 

Cooper studied at the University for the Creative Arts.^[2] He also achieved a PhD degree at Middlesex University.
He is a member of the Crafts Council and is the editor of Ceramic Review. Since 1999, he has been visiting Professor of Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art. He is the author of many books on ceramics including his definitive biography of Bernard Leach that was published in 2003 (Yale University Press)^{[citation needed]} and is also the editor of The Ceramics Book, published in 2006.^{[citation needed]}
As a potter, Emmanuel's work falls into one of two general forms. In the first his vessels are heavily glazed in a volcanic form. The vessels, as a result of this heavy glazing, derive a lot of their appeal from their varied and uneven textures. In their most simple form they are very reminiscent of work by Lucie Rie. In their more extravagant forms though the vessels can be banded or use incredibly vivid colors to great effect including pink, vibrant yellow and deep reds and blues. His other form of work is much simpler in style using plain glazes, often in egg yolk yellow, occasionally spotted with gold flecks.
Emmanuel's work can be found in the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Royal Scottish Museum,^[2] as well as in many private collections. He has been awarded an OBE for services to art. Emmanuel Cooper died peacefully on 21 January 2012.


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Barbara Lea, American jazz singer and actress, died from Alzheimer's disease she was 82.

Barbara Lea  was an American actress and singer  died from Alzheimer's disease she was 82..


(April 10, 1929 – December 26, 2011)

Background

Barbara Ann LeCocq was born into a musical family; her musical heritage is traceable to a great uncle, Alexandre Charles LeCocq — an important nineteenth-century composer of French light opera. Barbara's father changed their surname to Leacock; she shortened it to Lea when she begin working professionally. Barbara grew up in a Detroit suburb and attended the girls-only Kingswood School (which merged in 1984 with the Cranbrook School to become the Cranbrook Kingswood School).
Boston was a hotbed of jazz in the late 40s and early 50s, allowing Lea to sing with major instrumentalists including as Marian McPartland, Bobby Hackett, Vic Dickenson, Frankie Newton, Johnny Windhurst, and George Wein. She worked with small dance bands there before attending Wellesley College on scholarship and majoring in music theory. She also sang in the college choir, worked on the campus radio station and newspaper, and arranged for and conducted the Madrigal Group and brass choir concerts.
Her professional career started upon graduation. Her early recordings for Riverside and Prestige met with immediate critical acclaim and led to her winning the DownBeat International Critics' Poll as the Best New Singer of 1956.^[1] She appeared in small clubs in New York, including the renowned Village Vanguard, and throughout the eastern U.S. and Canada, as well as on radio and TV.
She studied acting to improve her stage presence and, with the near-demise of classic pop in the early 60s, turned to the legitimate theatre, performing an impressive list of leading and feature roles in everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim. She moved to the West Coast and received her M.A. in drama at Cal. State-Northridge, then returned to New York and taught speech at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and acting at Hofstra University.
In the 1970s, with the resurgence of interest in show tunes and popular standards, Lea was literally sought out to appear in the Peabody Award-winning National Public Radio series "American Popular Song with Alec Wilder and Friends". She appeared in two shows—one featuring the songs of Willard Robison (10/03/1976) and one featuring songs performed and recorded by Lee Wiley (11/14/1976).^[2] This led to two lengthy feature articles in The New Yorker magazine, where Whitney Balliett declared "Barbara Lea has no superior among popular singers" (The New Yorker, May 20, 1985, p. 88), and a renewed singing career.
Lea starred in the JVC, Kool, and Newport Jazz Festivals several times, but her increasing devotion to the songs as written led to concerts of the works of Rodgers and Hart, Arthur Schwartz, Cy Coleman, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, and the Gershwins, as well as cabaret appearances devoted to Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, and Yip Harburg.^[3]
At the time of her death, more than a dozen of her CDs were available on the Audiophile label, which has a reputation for featuring the best in singers of classic pop, plus reissues of two early LPs on Fantasy/Original Jazz Classics, three recent releases on the European-based label, Challenge, as well as three recent releases on her private label.^[4][5]
She died in 2011 from complications of Alzheimer's disease.^[6][7][8][9]


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