Italian musician Pino Presti, active on Wikipedia as CoolJazz5, passed away in October, aged 83; the news was announced on October 28, a few days after his funeral.

Born in Milan, Presti started as a bass guitar player, before expanding his musical horizons to jazz, funk, Latin music and other genres, and becoming a composer, orchestra conductor and producer. Throughout his career, he worked with musicians such as Astor Piazzolla – for whom he played the bass on the original 1974 recording of Libertango – Quincy Jones, Shirley Bassey, Mina, Gerry Mulligan, Wilson Pickett and Stéphane Grappelli, among others.

As a Wikimedian, Presti made almost 17,000 edits across all projects, the most part of which was on the Italian Wikipedia, where he had first signed up in 2010 and created more than 80 pages. He was also active on the English Wikipedia and other versions, as well as Commons, regularly adding new information about his own life and career, while also writing about other fellow musicians and artists.

Lots of users remembered Presti on his talk page on it.wiki: some of them even reflected on the fact that, while they had some tense exchanges with him in the past, he never took advantage of his real-life status to prevail in discussions on-wiki and treated the mission of Wikimedia project with due respect.

The Signpost joins in offering condolences to the family.