The founder of the Creative Opportunity Orchestra, a musicans’ cooperative of composer-improvisers on the model of Chicago’s AACM, is suffering late stage breast cancer. Beautiful Tina Marsh, age 55, whose disease was successfully treated in the ’90s but recurred in 2008, is resting in a private home, with friends close by.

A pure-voiced vocalist who employs extended techniques in dramatic interpretations of songs such as Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” with brilliant control for deep affect but who has also conducted a wild ‘n’ wooly ensemble through open structures to fine result and been described as singing “scat to the highest power,” Tina has been a community-sensitive artist-activist in her adopted hometown for nearly 30 years. Having worked in musical theater on the east coast in the ’70s, she attended the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock in 1980, and upon returning to Austin organized CO2 from the core of her first band, the New Visions Ensemble. Since then more than 200 musicians have participated in CO2 under her direction.