RIP, Sheila Cooper

[sgcim]

I just found out about the death of Sheila Cooper, a  singer/alto sax player I used to play with in a band in Brooklyn, back in the mid 80s. I was shocked to hear of her passing, and I thought I'd look her up here to find out about it, but her name didn't come up in a search I did. 

She was born in Ottawa, Canada in 1960, and became part of the Toronto jazz scene before moving to NYC where I met her. She was a talented, intelligent, beautiful young woman, and used to have a lot of great stories about Ed Bickert. She married the great tenor sax player Andy Middleton, and I remember hearing somewhere that they moved to Berlin.  She passed in 2021 in Vienna, Austria. Here's an example of her alto playing and singing with the great Polish pianist, Fritz Pauer: