annulla from Brooklyn, United States · CC BY-SA 2.0

Hal Willner spent decades as the music coordinator for Saturday Night Live while building a parallel career assembling eclectic tribute albums and live events that brought together jazz, classical, rock and Tin Pan Alley performers who rarely shared a stage. His work behind the scenes shaped how audiences encountered unfamiliar corners of American music. He died in April 2020 from complications of COVID-19, one of the pandemic's early losses in American entertainment.