In Montreal’s Little Burgundy neighbourhood, a public-art organisation confirmed this week that the mural honouring Oliver Jones is being repainted. The timing was coincidental but freighted with meaning: on the evening of the same day, the 91-year-old pianist died after a long illness, and the image of a community quietly tending his likeness while he slipped away became a quiet emblem of the affection he commanded.

Jones was a child of that same quartier, a Black Montrealer who began playing piano at five and later spent nearly two decades as a musical director in Puerto Rico before returning home in the early 1980s. His comeback coincided with the birth of the Montreal International Jazz Festival, whose co-founder André Ménard recalled that Jones could fill provincial halls that few jazz artists could draw. Tributes from Quebec’s premier and Montreal’s mayor, who noted that a national funeral was under analysis, framed him as a figure who had projected the city onto the world’s stages while remaining profoundly attached to its streets. Fellow musician Gregory Charles described him as “one of the last heroic Black musicians from the multicoloured era of Montreal’s jazz cabarets,” a link to a time when, as Charles put it, “talent was worth more than marketing, and tenderness more than rivalry.”

Half a hemisphere south, Argentine folk music was absorbing its own blow. Alberto José Ovando, baritone, drummer and quena player for the legendary Salta ensemble Los Fronterizos, died on 19 July. The group’s social-media message spoke of a friend who “carried the flag of Los Fronterizos with pride,” and fans quickly shared memories of a formation that had carried the zambas and poetry of the Argentine north to Carnegie Hall and, crucially, to the 1964 recording of Ariel Ramírez’s Misa Criolla, a work that became a Latin American touchstone. Ovando’s death, Argentine outlets noted, resonated with particular force in Salta, where the group is woven into the province’s cultural identity and where generations have grown up with their harmonies as a kind of second mother tongue.

A third loss, less heralded but no less evocative, came from Los Angeles. Plas Johnson, the studio saxophonist whose sinuous solo on Henry Mancini’s theme for The Pink Panther earned the soundtrack three Grammys and an Oscar nomination, died on 15 July at 94. His son confirmed the news to the New York Times. Johnson’s career spanned sessions with Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Marvin Gaye, but it is that single, slinking melody — instantly recognisable, endlessly parodied — that fixed his name in the global imagination. In Montreal, Salta and Los Angeles, the week’s obituaries converged on a shared truth: these were musicians who did not merely perform a repertoire but who carried entire sonic worlds inside them, and whose departures have prompted their communities to pause and listen again to what remains.