September 7, 1967 – September 27, 2025
Where have you gone, my little brother, the golden child I used to rock to sleep at night? My last living sibling has left us. Alone, I struggle to find meaning in this loss. May our 93-year-old father Milton never learn of it.
Nearly 11 years after I was born, he arrived — a so-called accident baby whom we all adored and spoiled. I remember a young Tony telling me that he wouldn’t do anything with his life other than music. And by all accounts he kept his word. I’m skeptical about the great artists he claimed to have accompanied, listed on his website and elsewhere, though that seems par for the course in the music business. (When I met B.B. King backstage once, he rolled his eyes as I mentioned other musicians who took credit in their album liner notes for having played with him.) Still, Tony was a dedicated guitar instructor, highly focused on theory.
If you’ll forgive the cliche, he marched to his own drummer his entire life. Like our late sister Reissa, he was a heavy cigarette smoker, but he rejected most established healthcare in favor of traditional medicine from Asia and other non-Western cultures. (It’s tragically ironic that, according to some of his closest students, Tony had at last given up smoking in a valiant effort to get healthy again.) His views on just about everything from science to politics were pretty fringy (perhaps less so in the age of MAGA), which alienated many of us yet apparently attracted others. As he got older Tony drifted away from most of his relatives, and we from him.
I believe I was the last family member to spend time with him in person. After visiting my late mother-in-law in Corpus Christi, Texas, before she passed away in the fall of 2023, I drove up to Austin to take him out for barbecue lunch. We hugged when I had to leave for the airport in San Antonio. I would neither see nor speak with Tony alive again.
Several years ago he decided to leave his birthplace of Montreal for greener pastures to advance his teaching career. After disappointing forays in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Las Vegas, he seemed to find fertile ground in Austin. (I had also recommended Nashville, Tennessee, to him as having promise for his line of work). In fact, it was one of his students who reported him unreachable when he showed up at Tony’s apartment for a lesson. On Saturday, September 27, with my permission an Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services team entered his apartment and found him deceased on the bathroom floor. He was 58 years old.
According to the Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office, there were no signs of foul play, suicide or drug paraphernalia. In all likelihood he died of a natural cause such as heart attack or stroke, though a more-definitive report on his death is still to come. When I last saw him he didn’t look well to me, overweight and at times breathing laboriously. But he seemed upbeat about his prospects in the Austin area, and I hope he was similarly optimistic in his final moments on this earth.