7 pm Thursday, Sept. 10. This June, at dusk on the summer solstice, he died after requesting that his life support be disconnected.
Illness often strikes with cruel irony.
Kreutzfeld-Jakob disease progressively robbed choreographer George Balanchine of coordination before killing him, and H.L. Mencken spent the last years of his life unable to speak. It was in his tongue that ALS first manifested itself in the summer of 1984, and the progression of symptoms was captured on tape. Burdell was playing keyboard at the time, not trumpet, but in technical asides on a series of pre-production recordings, one can hear an increasing inability to make certain sounds over the course of a year. You realize what was happening. In addition to the speech problems, he developed a halting gait, and that's when, mistaken for a drunk, he started getting kicked out of bars.