Jeffrey B. Tripp Obituary

Jeff Tripp passed away on January 30, 2022, from a cerebral hemorrhage – the "Damocles Sword" he would say he lived under – which followed a heart valve replacement in 2008. But enough with his more morose proclivities and his short happy career as amateur diagnostician.

He grew up in Philadelphia, graduated from Penn Charter in 1961 and was a member of the Amherst College Class of 1965, despite leaving for good in the fall of 1964 on his motorcycle, just months shy of graduation.

His nomadic professional career was highlighted by his involvement in music, which began as a designer of guitar bridges popular on the colorful 70s music scene. Not two weeks before he died, he told me a story I'd never heard before about delivering a bridge to Tony Iommi and witnessing the band get paid for a Garden gig in a gym bag full of cash. He then moved with the times into the world of digital sound, designing a number of sound modulation tools still in circulation today. While the Synclavier 9600 Keyboard, Tripp Strip ribbon controller, Kurzweil MIDIBoard, and NoteBender are names you can perhaps only drop with a certain archetype of sound engineer, they have endured in their way, and that sound engineer's eyes will often light up. Well into his sixties, to his credit dad picked up the NoteBender's mid-80s promise of sound manipulation in three dimensions and, with his collaborators Paul DeRocco and David Mash, updated it based on the newly-available computing power as the HyperKeys (see https://www.youtube.com).

He was a talented guy who could and did fix appliances, engines, musical instrument. The breadth of his general knowledge was at times almost shocking, even if his discourse on subjects of all kinds was, well, a little infamous. He could not talk about a young Tom Brady without saying "triangulate.". He would simply assume in conversation that you had read The Playboy of the Western World, if never actually seen it staged. Or he knew maybe you hadn't, but that wasn't going to diminish one iota his enthusiasm for making his point as though you had.

His proudest accomplishment was raising his two boys, both graduates of Rockport High School. Rockporters may remember how fervently engaged with our lives and academic/athletic development he was, sometimes to the quixotic extent of attempting to ad-hoc officiate pickup games at Pingree Park. Teaching us things really was his idea of a good time and he treated it, methodically, as a lifelong career. He could brag on his kids with the worst of 'em.

He had lived in a great many places before moving to the North Shore in March 1980, but after taking up residence there his adoption was complete, devotional. He remained in thrall to the landscape Charles Olson had described. Though he left Rockport in 2016 for what proved a final chapter by Pleasant Pond in Wenham, he would drive back over the bridge to Long Beach on all but the sharpest days of the year.

He is survived by his two sons, Noel's wife Liza and their girls Lorelei, Ariel and Matilda, Lyle's wife Hazel and their children Sienna, Walter and Briar Rose and his niece, Abigail (m. Barbara, 1945-2009), her husband Frank Talarico and their boys Tripp, Abe, and Clive. We carry with us his love of basketball, Van Morrison, and the vagaries of the English language.

Informal service (GrampyFest 2022, anyone?) planned for Memorial Day Weekend, Cape Ann.

Donations humbly recommended to the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (https://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org)(animal) or St. Jude (http://www.stjude.org)(human).

Arrangements by Greely Funeral Home, 212 Washington Street, Gloucester, MA 01930.