When Brian Jones drowned in 1969, the Stones kept rolling. When Richard Manuel hanged himself in 1986, the Band played on. But when Mark E. Smith succumbed to cancer of the lungs and kidneys on Jan. 24, the Fall—the British post-punk band that he formed in 1976 and steered for the next four decades—fell for good.

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that Smith was the Fall. He hired and fired (and sometimes re-hired and re-fired) each of the 60-plus musicians who ever played with the group. (Two of them were his wives during their tenures.) He also sang all of the songs, most of which he co-wrote or wrote.

His detractors sometimes pointed out that, technically speaking, Smith’s sneeringly ranting vocals didn’t qualify as “singing” if by “singing” one meant the carrying of a tune with both hands. And Smith, at least partially, agreed. “I can actually sing if I want to,” he wrote in his autobiography Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith. “But the thing is, if people are saying you can’t sing, you end up shouting the lyrics out as hard as possible: when in doubt, shout.”

In a body of work that included over 30 studio albums, at least as many live albums, and even more compilations, Smith shouted about almost everything. And he did so amid, atop, and at times beneath a sound that, despite its having been made by an ever-shifting cast, remained surprisingly consistent in its deceptively primitive, rhythmically propulsive way. Other than the absence of keyboards (a rarity on the Fall’s recordings) and Smith’s voice (which had begun to fray), New Facts Emerge, which came out last July, could’ve fit in almost anywhere along the Fall’s musical timeline. Smith rarely, however, touched on romance, calling love songs “sugared denial.” “Mostly I’d rather leave that to everybody else,” he said in Renegade. “It’s all been said before.”

Such heterodox plainspokenness characterized Smith’s overall approach toward life. Although reared working class, he considered the leaders of Britain’s Labour Party to be poseurs. Although seldom financially flush, he resisted lucrative shortcuts at odds with his artistic convictions. And although they certainly hastened his end and maybe killed him outright, he made no secret of his enjoyment of stimulants, legal and forbidden.

To call Smith post-punk’s last individualist would be premature. (John Lydon is still alive, after all.) But he was certainly one of its staunchest. And as such he will be missed.

Zorn and Urmuz

Another staunch individualist, the mononymous Romanian Urmuz, is the subject of the latest album by the avant-garde jazz musician John Zorn.

Born in 1883 and dead by his own hand 40 years later, Urmuz published only seven short stories, two poems, and one essay, none of which earned him wealth or fame. But prototypical artists often endure neglect, and Urmuz was the prototypical surrealist, channeling the subconscious into sentences that morph continuously from the mundane to the shocking (or the comic) and back again, their submerged meanings not drowning but waving.

In The Urmuz Epigrams (Tzadik), Zorn and the percussionist Ches Smith take eight expressions from Miron Grindea’s English translation of Urmuz’s works and, using saxophone, piano, organ, guitar, bass, drums, vibraphone, glockenspiel, game calls, bizarre sound effects, and their own shrieking voices, give them phantasmagorical musical shape. They do so twice—the second time in scratchy versions intended to simulate how the music might’ve sounded in 1923, the year of Urmuz’s death.

“Some of the craziest music in the Zorn catalog!” says Tzadik’s PR. Crazy yes, boring no. —A.O.