Some say April is the cruelest month, but in 2025 I think it was December, when The WholeNote DISCoveries lost two beloved members of the team. I’ll come back to my dear friend Daniel Foley at the end of this column, but for openers I want to talk about Raul Luiz D’Gama Rose, or Raul da Gama as I knew him, who passed at the age of 70 after a long and valiant struggle with cancer.
Raul was a celebrated poet who came from a distinguished musical family. He began his studies at Trinity Music College in London and went on to achieve a Masters’ degree in Romance Languages. He wrote for numerous publications, notably CODA and Downbeat magazines and allaboutjazz.com. He helped Danilo Navas develop latinjazz.net, Jazz Global Media and the worldmusicreport.com.
Raul joined the WholeNote team in the fall of 2015, contributing three reviews to Volume 21, Number 4 – Contact Contemporary Music, Kronos Quartet and jazz singer Andrea Superstein – giving us a hint of his eclectic tastes.
Since that time, he filed nearly 450 reviews of releases in every genre that we cover, showing a depth of knowledge and understanding in virtually every field. Raul was my go-to reviewer when I had something a little off the beaten track, but also for mainstream releases and standard repertoire. I could always count on him to file on time, no matter how many assignments I burdened him with, and to find something interesting and enlightened about each disc. These pages just won’t be the same without his insights and observations. I will miss him dearly.
