Just now on the radio they played a Bill Evans rendition of Michel Legrand’s What are you doing the rest of your life? with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman (although this was an instrumental, I love the song). I was a little surprised that Evans recorded this tune because somehow I had it in my mind that he was gone before the song came out.
Without trying to verify my memory of either Evans’s death date or the publishing date of the song, it occurred to me that this is not an isolated case. My memory of how long people have been gone is pretty spotty. It happens all the time when actors, entertainers and even politicians who have been out of the public eye for a while will have their dates flash up on the screen, or a thread acknowledging their deaths crops up, I will say to myself (and occasionally post) that “I thought he/she had been dead a long time.”
This thread is to allow for posts of examples of the sort that:
- I had no idea he/she was dead
- Was his/her death that long ago?
- Was he/she already gone when such-and-such happened?
- whatever
I find it hard to believe (for instance) that Miles Davis has been gone since 1991.
An additional thought will sometimes occur to me: he/she never got to see thus and such happen and somehow that just doesn’t make sense. Example: it is highly unlikely that if James Dean ever heard of Elvis Presley, Elvis would have been anywhere near a “star” at the time.
