Commissioned by San Francisco Tape Center in the early 1960s, the Buchla 100 was an attempt to make music accessible to everyone, allowing participants to pick and choose parts of the instrument (“modular”) to create sound. Morton Subotnick’s 1967 masterpiece, Silver Apples Of The Moon, was arguably the first electronic album, breaking from academic tradition to anticipate techno with something rhythmic and tuneful, all performed on and made possible by Buchla’s inventions.

While arena-rockers used Robert Moog’s synths to excess in the ’70s, those drawn to Buchla’s instruments understood these were not only machines to make sound but also a way to understand the world. Just released on Friday, Sunergy pans generations of Buchla synths between Suzanne Ciani (Buchla 200e) and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith (Buchla Music Easel). The former studied with Buchla in the ’70s, while the latter is still relatively new to the instrument, discovering new and exciting waves to ride. They share not only their memories of the man but also how Buchla’s creations guide their lives.

Suzanne Ciani

He has been an integral part of my life for almost 50 years, so you can imagine the sense of loss I’m feeling now. From the time I first met him in Berkeley in 1969, his vision of a performable electronic music instrument guided and inspired my artistic and professional life. I worked at his “factory” after graduate school and my only goal was to own one of those expensive machines. I went to NYC in 1974 specifically to perform a live Buchla 200 concert and stayed for 20 years, using the Buchla on Madison Avenue to make the money I needed to launch my recording career. The “Coca-Cola Pop ‘n’ Pour Logo” sound was pure Buchla.

His instrument gave me wings in all directions. After I moved again to Berkeley in 1992, we reconnected as friends and tennis partners until he tempted me once again to get re-involved with the Buchla, this time the 200e. I’ve dropped everything these last several years to once again perform on the Buchla, feeling a sense of commitment to his vision, which I represented and worked to communicate for a dozen years in the early days, until the impossibility of fixing it brought me to the brink of a “breakdown,” so identified was I with that instrument.

So now my mission is to carry on his vision, which I have long-shared, and to make sure his legacy is kept alive. I loved him dearly.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

Don Buchla made it possible for me to share the way I hear and connect with the world using a language that I couldn’t find in any other instrument. His instruments have life in them. They are breathing electricity that you can sculpt. What makes his work so special and different from others is that every instrument he designed presents an opportunity to create an ecosystem. You can watch its behavior unfold the way you would craft a terrarium and let it have a life of its own while simultaneously being the observer and the creator. They talk back. They are conversational and offer the same mental stimulation any good friend would — engaging you to be in the moment and ready for spontaneity.

Even after months of working on a composition, or performing it hundreds of times, the wild Buchla continues to surprise me and give me the rare sensation of being an audience member to my creation. There is never a dull moment when I am in front of one of his instruments and I never feel at a loss for creativity or inspiration. I enter a space where I am comfortably riding the line between logic and emotion, listening and communicating from both the brain and the heart.

I find meditation with his instruments. They have taught me patience, inspired me to seek innovation, and to persist in problem solving when faced with challenges. These lessons have translated into my daily life and have taught me to seek to understand something first before asking for something from it.

I didn’t get the chance to know Don in depth personally. I met him a few times. From what I did gather, he seemed to be as thoughtful, witty, playful, and full of potential as his instruments. A genius to say the least. I am forever grateful to him.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Tupac Shakur was an enigma — a puzzle many of us could never piece together, but enjoyed trying, a confusing amalgam of profound art and troubled reality. But he was ours. He presented himself like a gift offering: no ribbons, no bows, no paper. He came in a plain box and he came opened — Me Against The World. And I think we embraced him for that, much in the same way we embraced James Dean and Nina Simone and Miles Davis, wild and free and honest — cultural icons with startling contradictions who not only narrated the wonders and the woes of our world; they literally changed it.

We were both born at the inception of rap music, amidst the rampant racism and police brutality of 1970s New York City. Hip-hop was young people’s resistance. It gave us words and beats to better understand the world, ourselves; to turn pain into joy, chaos into community. These were the times that birthed Tupac. And by the early ’90s, when rap music was exploding, he was primed to become its most charismatic and contradictory spokesperson.

His was a short life, with a long, complex legacy left behind. But leaving doesn’t always mean you’re gone. I visit schools every week, and when I ask students to name their favorite rapper, some say Kendrick Lamar, a few say Eminem — but many say Tupac. They quote lyrics from “Letter 2 My Unborn” and “California Love.” They’ve seen Juice and Poetic Justice, his breakout movies, where he seemed to own the camera so brilliantly that it became hard to know where the characters ended and Tupac began. “The unwillingness to let go of Tupac Shakur,” says Kierna Mayo, former editor-in-chief of Ebony magazine, “rests not so much in the tragedy of his sudden death, but in the very significance of his tumultuous life.”

Michael Datcher, a writer in Los Angeles, and I edited an anthology about the life of Tupac. We called it Tough Love, because we were passionate about his brilliance, but clear-eyed in our understanding of where he fell short. “He was in part playing out the cards dealt to him, extending and experimenting with the script he was handed at birth,” writes Michael Eric Dyson. “Some of his most brilliant raps are about those cards and that script — poverty, ghetto life, the narrow choices for black men, the malevolent neglect of a racist society.”

Writing about his problematic relationships with women (Shakur served nine months in prison for sexual assault). Tupac walked a tightrope — between rampage and reflection, between bane and beauty. He was the seventh son, living what W.E.B. Dubois called a double consciousness: one day, nihilistic rampage, the next, compassionate reflection.

Tupac Shakur captivated me, us: his voice, his rebelliousness, his confidence, his poetry. I spent a weekend with him, in 1992 — Charleston, S.C. I fashioned myself a concert promoter; Pac was my first booking. On the way to the venue, my teenage, wannabe-rapper brother, Ade, played his demo tape for Tupac. Way past cool and hyped for the big show, Tupac patiently listened and then extolled the virtues of education over the music business. Stay in school, little brother, he said, with that infectious smile. Be a black genius.

If only Tupac Shakur had lived long enough for us to see more of his.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Husney became Prince‘s first manager and helped negotiate the deal that would lead to the release of his early albums. Following Prince’s death Thursday at the age of 57, NPR’s Audie Cornish asked Husney to share a few memories of the boundary-smashing artist he knew as a precocious teenager. Hear the radio version at the audio link, and read more of their conversation below.

What was Prince like when you first took him on as an artist? Because I think one thing that set him apart from really all others is that he seemed to straddle a lot of different genres, and he did that across racial boundaries as well as musical ones.

Owen Husney: Yes, and he never wanted to be pigeonholed into one specific genre of music, because he always felt that he was capable [of more]. Even at that young age, he was very focused, very directed and highly intelligent. And he just wasn’t mimicking his influences — he was combining their sounds. He was making a whole new sound, which later would be defined, I guess, as the “Minneapolis sound.” He had the rare ability to not just mimic the sound of an artist that influenced him but to take it another level.

You knew him as Prince Rogers Nelson — when he first came on the scene, before he became just Prince. Can you remember something, an anecdote or a story from that time that really drove home to you that he knew who he was?

You know, he had just turned 18, and it was very much a co-working atmosphere between he and I at that point. Once he went on to his second album and all the subsequent albums, obviously, he became Prince, and he was very much in charge. But he was very willing to listen to me and to take my direction, which I think is probably the only time that ever happened, to be honest with you [laughs].

We had had a fight early on about something, and he walked out of my house in a huff. He called me several hours later, and he had written a song — you know, not about me or anything. It was a song called “So Blue” that went on the first album. And he played me the song, and it just was his way of saying, “I know what happened between us and I’m sorry.” I just remember sitting on the kitchen floor and listening to that song and getting tears in my eyes. And then we were patched up and on we went.

The thing that always strikes me about Prince is his ability to focus and have a direction of where he wants to go, and then making it happen. He was exhibiting the work ethic of a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He was beyond anybody that I had ever met.

He’s someone who was both very private and at times appeared very eccentric. What can you remember of his personality?

Well, all I can tell you from that level is that I consider myself to be a sensitive manager. And I think all managers need to be this way, but when Prince came along I noticed he was shy and a little bit removed. And I never sought to change him into something else — to say, you know, “Why can’t you be more like Sly Stone?” or something. I saw who he was, and there was a mystery about him even then. And so as a manager I noticed that, and I was able to just make that a part of who he was in all of our publicity and everything going forward. We did a first press kit with him that said very little, because Prince said very little. Because his music does the talking.

Is there a song you’d like us to remember him by?

I think, more than a song, you should remember … what he did to break down barriers. There are only a handful of artists that have broken down barriers between all the musical genres, and I think that’s how he should be remembered. I think he just has to be understood for the body of work he’s going to leave us — and I’m talking beyond just what we call traditional rock ‘n’ roll and funk and everything else. I think he’s got things that are in the vaults at Paisley Park that we will be unpacking for years to come, and we will be amazed.

I understand that, as his first manager, you helped him arrange his contract with Warner Bros., which allowed him a good deal of creative control over his music — considered, I think, unprecedented at the time. Can you talk about his legacy there? Because it seems, over the years, he has always been an advocate for creative control.

There has been no doubt. And when we signed the deal with Warner Bros., I had the great job of going to the chairman of Warner Bros. and saying that an 18-year-old artist, who has never made an album before, is going to be producing his own album and having complete creative control. I didn’t relish that meeting!

We kind of organized a test where they watched him in the studio. And at the end of him maybe getting halfway through the song, Lenny Waronker, who was president of Warner at that time, he pulled me out in the hallway and said, “We’re going to give him the complete control that you’re asking for.” So there’s an inner talent, a drive, and then there’s this ability that’s — you either have it or you don’t.

Prince is, to me, one of the greatest artists of our time. And I think he’s one of those legacy artists of which there’s maybe 10 or 11. I put him up there with Miles Davis, with Hendrix and Dylan. I put him up there in that stratosphere.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“It is with profound sadness that I am confirming that the legendary, iconic performer Prince Rogers Nelson has died at his Paisley Park residence this morning at the age of 57,” publicist Yvette Noel-Schure said. “There are no further details as to the cause of death at this time.”

Reporting from Paisley Park on Thursday, Andrea Swensson tells Minnesota Public Radio that she was among a few dozen people who had gathered at Prince’s estate after hearing of a death there — and that “even the journalists are hugging each other” after hearing that Prince died.

Swensson, who had met Prince and spent time with him as part of a retrospective about his film Purple Rain, described him as being “shy, sensitive — and flirtatious.”

News of Prince’s death emerged after police said Thursday that they were investigating a death at his compound in Chanhassen, Minn., with the Carver County Sheriff’s Office saying that deputies were on the scene.

The department said via a statement, “When deputies and medical personnel arrived, they found an unresponsive adult male in the elevator. First responders attempted to provide lifesaving CPR, but were unable to revive the victim. He was pronounced deceased at 10:07 am.”

The sheriff’s office later released a transcript of the 911 call that brought personnel to the scene. The dispatcher had to press the caller — who was on a cellphone — for a street address, which the caller didn’t know. Eventually the caller said it was Paisley Park, and the dispatcher knew where that was and was able to send an ambulance. Authorities have given no indication that any delay affected the outcome.

TMZ reports that Prince had recently had health problems:

“The singer — full name Prince Rogers Nelson — had a medical emergency on April 15th that forced his private jet to make an emergency landing in Illinois. But he appeared at a concert the next day to assure his fans he was okay. His people told TMZ he was battling the flu.”

Prince was just 19 when he released his first album, putting out For You in 1978. In the decades that followed, he went on to develop a unique sound and style that endeared him to generations of audiences — all while exploring new ground as an artist.

Anthony Valadez, a Los Angeles-based DJ and producer, tells NPR’s Here and Now that Prince also endeared himself to those he encouraged: “African-Americans rocking out.”

“You had to be stuck in a box,” Valadez says of 1980s music culture. “Even Michael [Jackson] faced a lot of that, trying to get his videos on MTV. And you had this African-American man standing with a guitar, and, man, it was just powerful, you know? It was just really powerful.”

Prince’s fifth album, 1999, exploded onto America’s music scene. Released in 1983, it included such hits as “Little Red Corvette” and “1999.” It also set the stage for Purple Rain, the 1984 movie and soundtrack packed with songs such as “When Doves Cry” and “Let’s Go Crazy” that became fixtures on the radio and established Prince as a pop culture icon.

As Swensson wrote for MPR about Purple Rain for the film’s 30th anniversary in 2014, “it grossed $7.7 million in its opening weekend, beating out Ghostbusters — and racked up comparisons to movies like the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night and Citizen Kane in glowing reviews from major media outlets.”

Prince also won two Grammys and an Oscar (for original song score) for Purple Rain. In 2007, he won a Golden Globe Award for best original song, “The Song of the Heart” from Happy Feet.

From 1985 to 2007, Prince won a total of seven Grammy awards — most recently for “Future Baby Mama.”

Praising Purple Rain and other Prince projects, Jesse Carmichael of the group Maroon 5 told NPR in 2009, “The reason Prince is an inspiration to me is that he’s obviously writing from the heart, and somehow he’s able to take these personal feelings, turn them into poetry and present them in a way that’s accessible and weird at the same time.”

Prince’s career was marked by a famous standoff with Warner Bros., the music company from which he split in 1996. Changing his name to a symbol, he was referred to for years as “the artist formerly known as Prince.”

In a sign that the rift had finally healed, Prince made a deal with Warner two years ago that gave him control of his own music catalog (during his career, Prince recorded well over 30 studio albums).

When he changed his name, Prince rejected the major-label system. In an interview with reporters last August, he echoed that idea again, saying “Record contracts are just like — I’m gonna say the word — slavery,” as NPR’s Eric Deggans reported.

As Eric wrote, Prince urged artists to get paid “directly from streaming services for use of their music, so that record companies and middlemen couldn’t take a share.”

News of Prince’s death spread on social media, sparking tributes from fans, fellow artists, celebrities and even President Obama, who released this statement:

“Today, the world lost a creative icon. Michelle and I join millions of fans from around the world in mourning the sudden death of Prince. Few artists have influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite so many people with their talent. As one of the most gifted and prolific musicians of our time, Prince did it all. Funk. R&B. Rock and roll. He was a virtuoso instrumentalist, a brilliant bandleader, and an electrifying performer.

” ‘A strong spirit transcends rules,’ Prince once said — and nobody’s spirit was stronger, bolder, or more creative. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, his band, and all who loved him.‎”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer,” it read.

Bowie’s death was confirmed by his son, Duncan Jones, who tweeted, “Very sorry and sad to say it’s true. I’ll be offline for a while. Love to all.”

The singer released his latest album, Blackstar, on his birthday on Friday. The New York Times described the album as “typically enigmatic and exploratory.”

In a career that spanned decades and incorporated various personas, including Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, Bowie was known for his innovative and wide-ranging musical styles and his highly theatrical stage presentation.

John Covach, director of the Institute for Popular Music at the University of Rochester, highlighted Bowie’s influence on rock in the 1970s, singling out the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust for the “Ziggy Stardust” persona that Bowie adopted.

Covach adds:

“Jim Morrison had flirted with the persona of the Lizard King already in the late 1960s, and the donning of a persona in UK pop singing could be traced back at least to Screaming Lord Sutch in the early to mid 1960s. Like Alice Cooper and Peter Gabriel at about the same time, Bowie’s performances became theatrical in ways that focused on the persona, and these shows took rock performance to new production levels, with greater emphasis on staging and costumes.

“Bowie’s creative and performing persona would change from album to album and from tour to tour, permitting him to transform his music in ways that fans might not have embraced in other artists (Madonna would adopt a similar strategy beginning in the 1980s).”

The New York Times reports:

“Mr. Bowie was his generation’s standard-bearer for rock as theater: something constructed and inflated yet sincere in its artifice, saying more than naturalism could. With a voice that dipped down to baritone and leaped into falsetto, he was complexly androgynous, an explorer of human impulses that could not be quantified.

“He also pushed the limits of ‘Fashion’ and ‘Fame,’ writing songs with those titles and also thinking deeply about the possibilities and strictures of pop renown.”

Bowie’s popularity hit another peak in the ’80s with the release of Let’s Dance. Hit singles from that album included the title track as well as “Modern Love” and “China Girl.”

In addition to his musical career, Bowie was an actor, appearing in films including The Man Who Fell to Earth and Labyrinth.

Bowie is survived by two children and his wife, the model Iman.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

According to the statement, Weiland died in Bloomington, Minn.; other details, such as the cause of death, were not revealed, citing his family’s desire for privacy.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

“Jamie Weiland, the singer’s wife, confirmed the news of his death to The Times in a brief conversation Thursday.

” ‘I can’t deal with this right now,’ she said, sobbing. ‘It’s true.’ ”

Weiland, whose career was marked by both Grammy Awards and drug and alcohol abuse problems, was the lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots, which had numerous hits in the 1990s, and of Velvet Revolver, a supergroup that paired him with former members of Guns N’ Roses.

Weiland’s hits with Stone Temple Pilots include “Interstate Love Song,” “Creep,” “Plush” and “Big Empty.”

At the time of his death, Weiland had been touring with his new band, The Wildabouts. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the band’s Thursday night show “was canceled nine days ago because of slow ticket sales.”

It was a far cry from the heights of Weiland’s career, when he became famous both for reeling off chart-topping rock songs and for his wide-ranging fashion sense — from shirtless to shirt-and-tie. Over his career, Weiland sold tens of millions of records worldwide.

His struggles with heroin and other drugs often derailed Weiland over the years, even as he kept performing. Visits to rehab and police stations were also a distraction from the singer’s powerful voice, a gravelly bass that he tamed to sing rock ballads such as Velvet Revolver’s “Fall to Pieces” — a song about a singer struggling with demons, and whose video includes the depiction of a seeming drug overdose.

Stone Temple Pilots broke up in 2003 and got back together in 2008 — only to split for good in 2013.

During Stone Temple Pilots’ hiatus, Weiland found success again with Velvet Revolver, with the single “Set Me Free” from the Hulk soundtrack and the aforementioned “Fall to Pieces” and “Slither” from the band’s album Contraband.

In 2012, Weiland published a book called Not Dead & Not for Sale, in which he described being the victim of rape as a schoolboy, and in which he detailed his struggles with addiction.

From the prelude:

“Every time I try to catch up to my life, something stops me. Different people making claims on my life. Old friends telling me new friends aren’t true friends. All friends trying to convince me that I can’t survive without them.

“Then there are the pay-for-hire get-off-drugs professionals with their own methods and madness. They help, they hurt, they welcome me into their institutions … and, well, their madness.

“Welcome to my life.”

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Price was known for taking no prisoners when he got on the microphone. His was principled aggression and his presence was alpha. His rhymes were often dazzling, and he was impatient with mediocrity, though he did have a soft spot for puns.

“He was really one of the most genuinely funny people that I knew,” says the New Jersey born producer known as Just Blaze, who was cracking jokes with Price on Twitter the day before he died. He remembers Price’s very dry humor, his inclination to say outlandish things in a way that was so witty you couldn’t help but laugh. “You know a lot of rappers have fake charisma? Where they can turn it on when the cameras are on, but that’s not really them? He was just the same dude all the time.”

He was the same dude from the early ’90s through today. Sean Price got his start in hip-hop as half of the duo Heltah Skeltah, which produced two classic albums. They were also part of the supergroup of New York rappers called the Boot Camp Clik. And Price made a name for himself as a solo artist who collaborated with the contemporary generation of rappers and producers.

“Aside from what I feel,” says Just Blaze, “the hip-hop community in general, we’ve lost a legend. I mean, this man did what he did, did it over the span of almost two decades, and consistently got better.”

Sean Price’s writing and character were widely admired — the hip-hop community flooded social media with tributes and personal stories this weekend.

“Obviously, he’s a street dude, came from a rough environment. But at the same time, still kind of had those same nerdy or geeky tendencies that I had. You know what I mean? There’s actually a lot of dudes like that, but you would just never know because they keep that guard up so much. There’s plenty of dudes who come from the street who are the hardest of the hardest street dudes, who go home and read comic books.”

Sean Price leaves behind his wife and three children. His latest project, Songs in the Key of Price, is due out later this month.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Coleman was an American icon and iconoclast — a self-taught musician born poor and fatherless in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1930, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, the Japanese Praemium Imperiale, two Guggenheims, a MacArthur, honorary doctorates and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master honor.

Ornette Coleman played his alto saxophone the way someone whistles to themselves walking down the street, unconcerned with rules about how a song is supposed to go. In 1997, Coleman told NPR that he believed in the unfettered, imaginative, original, expressive powers of melody.

“As a music, it allows every musician to participate in any form of musical environment without them changing their own personality, their own tone or their way of phrasing,” Coleman said.

And he put that belief into practice when he could. Coleman was raised by his single mother and sister. He learned music on his own and left home as a teenager to tour the deep south with a minstrel show. On the road, he faced rejection and even assault for an unorthodox, free style built on Texas blues. He wound up in Los Angeles, working as an elevator operator and trying to get a hearing in jam sessions. He finally made his first recording as a leader in 1958, Something Else.

Some praised Coleman for returning jazz to the kind of collective improvisation its earliest players used. Others heard only cacophony.

“In jazz before Ornette Coleman,” New York Times writer Jon Pareles told NPR in 1985, “people would devise solos that were designed to fit on top of the tune. If the tune was 32 bars long, the improvisation was 32 bars long, and it fit into whatever 32 bars of chords were in the tune. Ornette came along and said, ‘We don’t have to do it that way, we can take an improvisation that tells its own kind of story, that elapses according to the freedom of the song.’ He basically showed people a new kind of freedom. He broke them out of the maze of harmony.”

Coleman himself described his system as “sound grammar” or “harmolodics.”

“It’s the scientific form of sound based upon the human emotion of expression,” Coleman said. “That’s basically what it is and what it does.”

Coleman’s principle idea — that anyone can make music with anyone, and they don’t have to know much about each other to do it — made him able to retain his cry of the blues even while jamming with the Master Musicians of Jajouka from the mountains of Morocco. Musicians flocked to Coleman like he was the Pied Piper — and he played with them: Yoko Ono, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, not to mention the many jazz musicians who graduated from his bands. Yet Coleman himself was unfailingly modest. He was shy about cameras and might be oblique in conversation. It wasn’t that his vocabulary was peculiar, but his point of view was unique, coming from all directions, seeming to take in everything, imagistic and fundamental. But his musicians understood him.

“It was very easy for me to follow him,” said longtime bassist Charlie Haden in 1997. “And it’s always been easy for me to follow him because he’s very articulate, just in his own language, just as he is in his music.”

In December of 1960, Haden was part of Coleman’s radical experiment in collective improvisation — two quartets playing simultaneously — titled Free Jazz.

The recording inspired, licensed — or provoked — many better-established jazz musicians of the ’60s. But his experiments didn’t stop there.

“I never have classified music as being in different categories, so I started writing music which consists of violins and stuff like that,” Coleman said. “I think most people classify you as what you do when they see you in the contents of drums and things like that everybody they call that jazz. But when they see a violin or French horn something they call that classical music. And I really believe that any instrument can become the soloist instrument in any kind of contents.”

Skies of America, too, was scorned until 1986, when conductor John Giordano of the Fort Worth Symphony worked closely with Coleman on a revision. Performances by orchestras in Europe and the New York Philharmonic followed.

Ornette Coleman said that he liked to tell people, “‘I’m a composer who performs.’ Whenever I would hear a band with guitars and bass the melodic line sounded so full, it sounded like a full orchestra. So I said, well, if I could expand the melodic writing into a much fuller sound, I would be able to express more music.”

In the mid-1970s, Coleman re-invented himself again, forming an electric band that often included his son, Denardo. In a 2008 interview, Denardo Coleman explained that his father’s philosophy suffuses his art, is part of his bands’ rehearsals and comes to fruition in performance.

“I think it’s beyond just scale, key, all that,” he said. “Everything he’s talking about is what he always talks about, with us, as well. So we’re bringing everything — the performance is everything.”

It was Ornette Coleman’s life to express feeling freely and directly, in music, and also to ask the big, confounding questions.

“Does music have life?” he asked. His many fans and followers answer in the affirmative.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

He was born Riley B. King on a plantation in Itta Bena, Miss. He played on street corners before heading to Memphis, Tenn., where he stayed with his cousin, the great country bluesman Bukka White. His career took off thanks to radio; he got a spot on the radio show of Sonny Boy Williamson II, then landed his own slot on black-run WDIA in Memphis. He needed a handle. At first it was Beale Street Blues Boy. Then Blues Boy King. Finally B.B. King stuck.

You can’t mention names without talking about his guitar, Lucille. It was actually more than one. The story goes that the first was a $30 acoustic he was playing at a dance in Arkansas when two men got in a fight, kicked over a stove and started a fire. When King was safe outside, he realized he’d left the guitar inside. He ran back into the burning dance hall to save it. After he learned the fight had been over a woman named Lucille, he decided to name his guitar for her to remind himself never to get into a fight over a woman. And since then, every one of his trademark Gibson ES-355s has been named Lucille.

The sound he got out of her was what set him apart. Playing high up on the neck, he’d push a string as he picked it, bending the note to make it cry. He didn’t burn a lot of fast licks, but you could feel each note he played. Nobody sounded like B.B. King, though later on plenty of rockers tried. (Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green got closest.)

King scored an R&B hit in 1951 with “Three O’Clock Blues” and began the next stage of his life as a touring musician. According to his website, King and his band played 342 one-night stands in 1956. He performed more than 250 nights a year into his 80s, his distinctive guitar sound and smooth vocals filling just about every major venue in the U.S. and abroad. In 1991, he opened his own spot, B.B. King’s Blues Club in Memphis. Others followed, and King remained involved in how they were run.

He was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1984 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in ’87. He was so beloved that he received honorary degrees from the Berklee College of Music as well as Yale and Brown universities, among others.

In 1970, he scored a crossover hit with “The Thrill Is Gone.” It’s the tune everyone knows — classic B.B. King: Lucille’s piercing single notes punctuating each phrase.

The thrill is gone.
The thrill is gone away from me.
Although I’ll still live on,
But so lonely I’ll be.

That pretty well sums up how a lot of fans are feeling right now, now that B.B. King is finally gone.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Cocker performed for five decades, recording 40 albums and dozens of hits. But he told NPR two years ago that “You Are So Beautiful” was his favorite.

“It was originally a gospel song, and Billy Preston rewrote the lyrics that made it more of a love song,” Cocker said. “It kind of woke up something — that softer side.”

Cocker’s softer side was hardly in evidence early in his career. He was born in Northern England and, like The Beatles, started off playing pubs in skiffle bands. Then he blasted to the top of the U.K. charts in 1968 with a ferocious version of… a Beatles song. Cocker’s performance of “With A Little Help From My Friends” at Woodstock made him a star in the U.S. His voice seemed to scrape the bottom of the ocean. Onstage, his hands were everywhere — flailing, jerking, ecstatic.

“I don’t play piano or guitar,” Cocker said. “I feel the music [is] channeled through my body. I would just do these motions like Ray Charles… or air guitar.”

Cocker’s vast reserves of energy and charisma nearly drowned him. His Mad Dogs And Englishmen tour in 1970 remains a legend of rock ‘n’ roll excess. Cocker toured constantly through the ’70s, sometimes so drunk he would throw up on stage. Later, when he got clean, he joked it took years for the alcohol to drain from his body. When it finally did, Cocker found himself back on top of the charts with “Up Where We Belong,” a 1983 duet with Jennifer Warnes.

“It’s like sex without touching,” Warnes says, describing singing with Joe Cocker to NPR. “Or maybe it’s like jumping with him out of an airplane. You’re not lip-syncing, you have no idea where he’s going. You’re just going and, to me, it’s like extreme sports.”

Joe Cocker got less extreme as he aged. He settled down in Colorado, where his hobbies turned to fly-fishing, hiking and growing tomatoes in his greenhouse.

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