Oldest Living Musicians (Born Before 1930)

[Satchmo Distel]

Dick Hyman (8.3.27), also recorded as Knuckles O'Toole, still alive according to Wiki

[Stumpy Pepys]

Tony Bennett (b. 1926) is still with us.

And whether of not you consider him a musician, William Shatner (b. 1931) has released four LPs.

[Sits]

Sadly, Tony Bennett isn’t still with us (July last year).

[Stumpy Pepys]

Sadly, Tony Bennett isn’t still with us (July last year).

Shit you're right.

[ursus arctos]

Jazz drummer Roy Haynes is 99 and would play at the Blue Note on his birthday well into his 90s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Haynes

Ruth Slenczynska is 99, studied piano with Rachmaninoff and recorded an album in 2022

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Slenczynska

[Etienne]

Cleo Laine is still alive at 96.

[elguapo4]

Jane Morgan, number 1 in 1959 with The Day the Rains Came, is 99.

[diggedy derek]

Barbara Dane, folk/jazz singer and activist who wrote the song “I Hate The Capitalist System”, is 96, remarkably lucid, and released her autobiography last year.

[Satchmo Distel]

Peggy Seeger turns 89 in June

[Jah Womble]

But not born before 1930.

[WOM]

Trumpeter Ray Anthony - the last surviving member of the Glenn Miller Orchestra - is 102. He gets extra points for having been married to Mamie Van Doren in the 1950s.

[diggedy derek]

Not quite fitting your restriction, but jazz bassist Chuck Israels is about to release a book. Now in his late eighties, he’s old enough to have played with Billie Holiday.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Cleo Laine is still alive at 96.

Lordy. She used to send me behind the sofa in terror more times than episodes of Dr Who.

[elguapo4]

Trumpeter Ray Anthony - the last surviving member of the Glenn Miller Orchestra - is 102. He gets extra points for having been married to Mamie Van Doren in the 1950s.

Mamie herself recently blew out 93 candles, and just misses out on this thread.

[diggedy derek]

I forgot a monster one. Marshall Allen, saxophonist for The Sun Ra Arkestra, is 99. He can still (of as of a couple of years ago) smoke seasoned joint-passers under the table.

He was born in 1924. That's a couple of years before Miles Davis.

https://x.com/sylvie_longeron/status/1767828261621436840?s=20

[Jah Womble]

Cleo Laine is still alive at 96.

I can remember my dad commenting on how 'well preserved' she looked (as folk were wont to do back then) when she guested with Johnny Dankworth on some Saturday night TV show in the late seventies.

My old man - born two weeks after CL - has been gone nearly thirty years.

[Etienne]

He wasn't wrong to be fair, Jah Womble . This is her in 2007 at 80. (If it's blank, the photo is from her Wiki page)

[Satchmo Distel]

[Disco Child Ballads]

Tom Lehrer (born 1928) is still with us.

[Sean of the Shed]

*bookmarks thread for next year's dead pool comp

[Sean of the Shed]

Actually I think Cleo is one of my runners for this year.

[treibeis]

I know I can't mention Franz Eugen Helmuth Manfred Nidl-Petz, aka Freddy Quinn, as he was born in 1931, but I will anyway.

[G-Man]

My older sister, who was a big Freddy fan before finding her way to Peter Maffay via Roy Black, didn't know the real name of Germany's second-most famous Austrian right-winger. I couldn't quite remember it either, but said it was "something like Schniedelwutz", which is as comedy term for a penis. Nidl-Petz is phonetically close enough. I don't think poor Freddy has ever recovered respect in the eyes of my sister.

[G-Man]

There are lots of musicians who qualify for this thread, but who have been forgotten. On March 3 we lost two contenders for thjs thread: Canadian jazz singer and TV presenter Eleanor Collins, who was 104, and US jazz bandleader Bill Ramsay, 95. In February there were three, the oldest of them Cuban singer Juana Caballao, who was 98.