RIP T

We just happened across the terrible news yesterday that keyboardist T Lavitz died last Thursday Oct 7 unexpectedly, in his sleep.



T was a breathtaking player, one of the few keyboardists bred from the soils of seventies fusion who could bind sheer firepower and uncommon warmth in the same bar. In the early Jazz Is Dead incarnations, T always struck me as the band's connective tissue, able to reach into the elusive soul of the original material and give it substance and challenge for the jazz-fusion players around him. Multi-lingual.

He always struck me as a friendly guy, a bit of a nerd and a reluctant virtuoso if there ever was one. One of the few guys at that level I never cringed over interviewing.

We were fortunate enough to interview him at least twice, and we'll include a paragraph from a 2000 piece we did on The Dixie Dregs, quoting T.

“But, you know what? Ever since I joined this band, when I was 22 years old, I have never, ever gotten tired of playing this music. There’s just something about Steve’s writing that makes this material so challenging and so much fun to play. It’s just incredibly orchestrated – I find that after a few days of playing a set, I know exactly how many seconds I have to change the settings on my keyboard for the next tune, how many seconds I have to towel off, scratch my nose, everything. Thing about this stuff, if you miss a bar someplace, you have to sit out a long time before you can jump in again, it all goes by so fast.. It’s fun, and it’s a workout.”

RIP man. Jeez, way too f-ing soon...