(This is an off-topic post.)
Dänu Boemle, alias Sleepy Dan, alias Øml, a very close friend of mine, peacefully passed away yesterday afternoon after being seriously ill for many long years. He was 46 years old.

We were friends since 1984 when we began to play street music in Berne, Switzerland. I was a greenhorn teenager, he was a cheeky twen and we both loved the blues. Later on we used to be getting down a bit more funky but by the end of the decade each of us went his own path for a while. We got together again in the mid 90s, this time behind turntables, playing fine jazz and funk records in several Swiss music clubs. Dänu also helped out on our Plookers CD project in 1997 where he can be heard talking on the first and on the final track, as well as playing trombone on a still unreleased song. In the past years we continued to co-operate on various projects: music, his radio play, his web site, his books, his artwork, my wedding… But our friendship wasn’t only about music, art or work: at any given time he was like an older brother to me.
Well, to make this entry slightly less off-topic, I’ll try to turn it into a kind of Half Czech-In – or I should rather say Self Czech-In. Listen to the Ugly Blues Connection transferred from the copy of a “sub-master” cassette tape as captured in a small 8-track studio on February 16th 1985: Looking For Somebody, a Fleetwood Mac cover originally written by Peter Green. Christian Wolfarth played drums, Joel Kaiser was on bass, myself on guitar (you guessed it, I was the Czech of the group…) and Sleepy Dan was of course singing and playing bluesharp.
My old friend, I will miss you!
UPDATE:
More info about Dänu Boemle is now available on my site: machata.ch/boemle. And our friend Marc Krebs has written an obituary in Basler Zeitung from 27 February 2007 (in German).