Bobby Caldwell, ‘What You Won’t Do For Love’ singer, dies

Bobby Caldwell, a blue-eyed soul singer whose easy contact camouflaged his idiosyncrasies, died on Tuesday following a protracted sickness. He was 71.

His spouse Mary Caldwell introduced his dying on Twitter.

“What You Won’t Do For Love,” Caldwell’s lone Billboard Top 40 hit, is a defining single of late-Nineteen Seventies delicate rock, occupying a spot between mellow grownup modern and sultry quiet storm R&B. Although Caldwell hung out writing songs for grownup modern artists — he co-wrote “The Next Time I Fall,” successful duet for Peter Cetera and Amy Grant in 1986 — he carved out a bigger place in R&B than pop; early in his profession, the white singer was typically mistaken for Black because of his soulful phrasing and grooves. Although he was grounded in soul, fusion was Caldwell’s specialty. As his profession progressed, he threaded in stronger components of jazz, finally changing into a fixture in modern jazz settings.

As Caldwell maintained a profession as a easy jazz musician, youthful generations found rhythms and grooves mendacity in his albums from the Nineteen Seventies and early Nineteen Eighties. Initially sampled by Aaliyah on 1994’s “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number,” “What You Won’t Do for Love” become a foundational pattern in hip-hop after Tupac Shakur interpolated it on 1997’s “Do for Love.” It wasn’t the one Caldwell observe to supply supply materials for rappers: Common sampled “Open Your Eyes” in 2000, whereas Lil Nas X not too long ago sampled “Carry On.”

Caldwell dabbled in numerous jazz types, together with decoding the nice American songbook within the vein of Frank Sinatra. He continued on this vein till the late 2010s, when he put his profession on maintain to cope with the unintended effects of being “floxed,” a nasty response to a fluoroquinolone antibiotic. The situation finally led to his dying.

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