Hm.
I've been watching this thread for a while and almost guessed that there wouldn't be many posts in it. This one was perhaps not for the Blue Note crowd.
If you, like me and some others on the board, have a much larger portion of swing and big band jazz in your collections and are able to live it up to some good Goodman sides on a Friday night (which I regularly do), this piece of news was a bit of a stunner: It just makes you remember that you are in fact listening to historic music. Hardly anyone left.
The sections just didn't blow anymore the way they did for Goodman (and some few others). I played my entire Goodman collection these past weeks for another project (and I think I'm up to 70 or 80 discs, all told) and it just all reminded me of how/why I got into this music in the first place.
Man, the section with Griffin was a powerhouse. He might not have been great as an individual player, but as a team man together with the aformentioned players, the section burned down the house ... and will continue to do so, no matter who's still around or who isn't.
A sad loss for all of us.