Only the good die young

Now I'm depressed. I just found out via Byzantium's shores that Scott Parkinson died. Scott was the principal trombonist with the Buffalo Philharmonic, and a former student of mine.

I first met Scott when I enrolled at Eastman in 1995. We played in the same jazz ensemble, and had fun making music and goofing off (once doing both when our whole jazz band set up outside the house of the director of jazz studies and blasted Malaguena at midnight). The next year, Scott was in one of my sections of Third-Year Aural Skills. That same year he really started to blossom as a player (no thanks to me, though he was also a very conscientous theory student). That same year he played the solos in Mahler's Third Symphony just beautifully, wowing everyone. I wasn't surprised to hear that he had won the Buffalo job.

A heart attack, Jaquandar heard on the radio. The death notice in the paper doesn't specify. My condolences to Scott's wife and family.