“Jane Little died like a warrior on the field of valor, clutching her bow so tightly that it had to be pried from her … fingers,” writes Judith Thurman in Tuesday’s (2/7) Newyorker.com. Little died on May 15, 2016 at age 87. “Her field was the stage of the Atlanta Symphony, in which she had played the bass from the age of sixteen until she keeled over in the middle of a performance, last year … having won a title that she had long coveted: the American musician with the longest tenure in any orchestra…. Little defied the expectations for a Southern woman of her generation and upbringing.… When she joined the Atlanta orchestra, during the nineteen-forties, many male musicians had been drafted; after the war … Little resisted the pressure to resign…. In all of her pictures, with or without an instrument—the spunky little girl in pigtails, the young beauty in a frilly gown, the fifties bombshell, the red-hot mama—Little radiates the contagious vitality of a virtuoso at living.” A video tracing Little’s path-breaking life and musical career is included.
Posted February 8, 2017
