Wikipedia: Graham Berkeley/Talk

Graham Berkeley was a musician, a zealot, a raging intelligence, a bon vivant and a clown. He was above all a man who lived in vivid, three-dimensional color that paled much around him to washed-out shades of grey.

Those of us who worked with him were by turns charmed, intimidated and enthralled.

We were blessed and challenged by his presence; we are diminished and bereft by his passing.

May we remember him well and long.

I studied at the Royal College of Music with Graham in the early 1980s, and we even lived in the same student hostel (Victoria League Hostel) in Bayswater, West London, for a year. He was a funny guy. I remember walking with him to school many days, across Kensington Gardens.

Graham and I met again in the mid-1990s, when both of us had relocated to New York City. We literally ran into each other one day on Fifth Avenue, stopped and looked, and realized that we knew each other "from a previous life." At that point, he was living on Sixth Avenue, downtown. He had also "come out."

I did not find out about his passing until today, November 10, when speaking to my ex-professor at the Royal College of Music. This is very sad news.