Last Saturday, July 3, Mark Sandman collapsed on a stage just outside Rome. He was performing with Morphine, the Boston-based trio he'd led for the past decade. He was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. He'd suffered a massive heart attack.
I was in Montreal when I got the news the following day, attending the 20th-anniversary Festival International du Jazz with my wife. And it hit me hard. I'd been a Morphine fan for a long time. I'd seen Mark perform with and without the band dozens of times. And since the release of Morphine's first CD, in 1992, I'd gotten to know him personally. First he was just a subject to me, someone I interviewed, wrote about, and then bumped into from time to time. But gradually he'd become a friend who lived just up the street. We'd go out for a drink every once in a while, usually at about 11 o'clock. He'd call to discuss the grand piano he was thinking about buying, or to invite me over to his loft to hang out and listen to music for an afternoon. My wife and I would bump into Mark and his long-time girlfriend, Sabine, at neighborhood restaurants like Eat and the East Coast Grill. Because of tours like the one that took him to Italy last week or to NYC's Central Park on the Fourth of July last year, Mark wasn't always around. But eventually he would always turn up back in town, drinking Patrón and fresh-squeezed orange juice at the Middle East, playing a low-profile gig with his buddy Jimmy Ryan as the Pale Brothers at the tiny Lizard Lounge, or sitting in on keyboards with the Ray Corvair Trio at the Plough & Stars. That was something a lot of people had come to count on.