Deaths
- January 8 - Richard Tucker, operatic tenor, 61 (heart attack)
- January 11 - Max Lorenz, Wagnerian tenor, 73
- January 16 - Paul Beaver, electronic jazz keyboardist, 49
- January 26 - Toti Dal Monte, operatic soprano, 81
- January 30 - Boris Blacher, composer, 72
- February 3 - Umm Kulthum, singer, songwriter, and actress
- February 4 - Louis Jordan, jazz musician, 66
- February 10 - Dave Alexander, bassist (The Stooges), 27 (pulmonary edema)
- February 13 – Eric Thiman, English composer, 74
- February 19 - Luigi Dallapiccola, composer, 71
- February 22 - Lionel Tertis, viola player, 98
- March 4 - Cornel Chiriac, Romanian record producer, broadcaster and jazz musician, 33 (murdered)
- March 15 - Sandy Brown, jazz musician, 46 (heart attack)
- March 16 – T-Bone Walker, African-American musician (b. 1910)
- March 27 - Sir Arthur Bliss, Master of the Queen's Musick, 83
- April 12 – Josephine Baker, African-American dancer (b. 1906)
- April 14 - Michael Flanders, lyricist, actor, humorist and singer (Flanders and Swann), 53 (intracranial berry aneurysm)
- April 23 - Pete Ham, singer and songwriter (Badfinger), 27 (suicide)
- May 2 - Conchita Badía, operatic soprano, 77
- May 13 – Bob Wills, American musician, 70
- May 18 - Leroy Anderson, U.S. composer and conductor, 66
- June 4 - Frida Leider, operatic soprano, 87
- June 16 - Don Robey, songwriter and producer, 72
- June 21 - David Tamkin, composer, 68
- June 29 - Tim Buckley, singer-songwriter, 28 (drug overdose)
- July 5 - Gilda dalla Rizza, operatic soprano, 82
- July 10 - Ernst Fischer, composer, 75
- July 14 - Zutty Singleton, U.S. jazz drummer, 77
- July 19 – Lefty Frizzell, Country Music Hall of Fame singer, 47 (stroke)
- August 8 – Julian Cannonball Adderley, American saxophonist (b. 1928)
- August 9 - Dmitri Shostakovich, composer, 68 (heart attack)
- August 10 - Neva Carr Glyn, operatic contralto, 67
- September - Flora Perini, operatic soprano, 87
- September 5
- Georg Ots, Estonian opera singer (b. 1920)
- Bill Sprouse Jr., Christian singer and songwriter, 26 (heart attack)
- September 20 – Vincent Lopez, American bandleader (b. 1895)
- October 1 - Al Jackson, Jr., R&B drummer, 39 (shot)
- October 28 - Oliver Nelson, jazz saxophonist, 43
- October 30 - John Scott Trotter, U.S. arranger and conductor
- December 8 - Gary Thain, rock bassist, 27 (heroin overdose)
- December 14 - Mongezi Feza, jazz trumpeter and flautist, 30 (pneumonia)
- December 17
- Noble Sissle, U.S. bandleader and singer, 86
- Hound Dog Taylor, blues musician, 60
- December 24
- Bernard Herrmann, composer, 64
- Tilly Losch, dancer and actress, 72
- December 25 - Julio Cueva, trumpeter, bandleader and composer, 78
- date unknown
- Will Mastin, American vaudevillian
- Patrick Kelly, Irish folk fiddler
Read more about this topic: 1975 In Music
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“I sang of death but had I known
The many deaths one must have died
Before he came to meet his own!”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“This is the 184th Demonstration.
...
What we do is not beautiful
hurts no one makes no one desperate
we do not break the panes of safety glass
stretching between people on the street
and the deaths they hire.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)