Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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Obit watch: May 28, 2024.

Tuesday, May 28th, 2024

I didn’t want to post an obit watch yesterday because I thought it would distract from Memorial Day. So catching up…

Bill Walton. ESPN. Boston Globe (archived).

Richard “It’s a Small World” Sherman. NYT (archived).

Don Perlin, comic artist. (“Moon Knight”)

Adele Faber, author. I’m not a parent, but I have heard a lot of raves for How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.

FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Al Ruddy. He produced a couple of movies, and co-created “Hogan’s Heroes” and “Walker, Texas Ranger”.

Not exactly an obit, but Lee Goldberg wrote a nice tribute to Roger Corman.

He was cheap, but he paid us on time, treated us well and was a wonderful, creative collaborator.

Posted in Books, Movies, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 14, 2024.

Tuesday, May 14th, 2024

David Sanborn, jazz saxophonist. NYT (archived).

Alex Hassilev, the last surviving original member of the 1960s folk group the Limeliters.

Before Beatlemania gripped America’s youth in 1964, the country fell in love with the tight harmonies and traditional arrangements of folk music — and few acts drew more adoration than the Limeliters, a trio made up of Mr. Hassilev, Glenn Yarbrough and Lou Gottlieb.
Mr. Hassilev played banjo and guitar and sang baritone, not only in English but in French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian, all of which he spoke fluently. His bandmates were equally brainy: Mr. Gottlieb had a doctorate in musicology and Mr. Yarbrough once worked as a bouncer to pay for Greek lessons.
Urbane and witty, they packed coffeehouses and college auditoriums with a repertoire that mixed straight-faced folk standards like “The Hammer Song” and cheeky tunes like “Have Some Madeira, M’Dear,” “The Ballad of Sigmund Freud” and “Charlie the Midnight Marauder.”

They broke up in 1965, but reformed in various arrangements through the years.

Mr. Hassilev retired from the Limeliters in 2006, though he continued to play with them occasionally, and the band remains active today. Though they never returned to their 1960s popularity, they continue to play to large and enthusiastic audiences.

Alice Munro, Nobel prize winning author.

Ms. Munro was a member of the rare breed of writer, like Katherine Anne Porter and Raymond Carver, who made their reputations in the notoriously difficult literary arena of the short story, and did so with great success. Her tales — many of them focused on women at different stages of their lives coping with complex desires — were so eagerly received and gratefully read that she attracted a whole new generation of readers.
Ms. Munro’s stories were widely considered to be without equal, a mixture of ordinary people and extraordinary themes. She portrayed small-town folks, often in rural southwestern Ontario, facing situations that made the fantastic seem an everyday occurrence. Some of her characters were fleshed out so completely through generations and across continents that readers reached a level of intimacy with them that usually comes only with a full-length novel.
She achieved such compactness through exquisite craftsmanship and a degree of precision that did not waste words. Other writers declared some of her stories to be near-perfect — a heavy burden for a writer of modest personal character who had struggled to overcome a lack of self-confidence at the beginning of her career, when she left the protective embrace of her quiet hometown and ventured into the competitive literary scene.

…

The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien ranked Ms. Munro with William Faulkner and James Joyce as writers who had influenced her work. Joyce Carol Oates said Munro stories “have the density — moral, emotional, sometimes historical — of other writers’ novels.” And the novelist Richard Ford once made it clear that questioning Ms. Munro’s mastery over the short story would be akin to doubting the hardness of a diamond or the bouquet of a ripened peach.
“With Alice it’s like a shorthand,” Mr. Ford said. “You’ll just mention her, and everybody just kind of generally nods that she’s just sort of as good as it gets.”

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 10, 2024.

Friday, May 10th, 2024

Dennis Thompson, drummer for the MC5. He was also the last surviving member.

Pete McCloskey (R – California). He may be more famous for having run against Nixon for the presidential nomination in 1972.

I’ve been holding this one for a few days for reasons, but KVUE has a nice tribute to Robert “Bob” Reale. Mr. Reale was the founder and owner of Reale’s Italian Cafe, which is a swell Italian restaurant and a favorite of both myself and Lawrence.

Posted in Food, Music, Nixon, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 8, 2024.

Wednesday, May 8th, 2024

Wow. Busy.

Susan Buckner, actress. We may have to add “Deadly Blessing” to the movie list. Other credits include “B.J. and the Bear”, “Switch”, and “Police Academy 6: City Under Siege”.

Judy Devlin Hashman, badminton champion.

Before badminton established a world championship or joined the Olympics, the All England Open Badminton Championships was the sport’s pinnacle. Hashman won the women’s singles title in that event for the first time in 1954 at age 18. Then she added her record-setting nine more, the last in 1967.
She also won seven women’s doubles titles, six of them with her sister Susan Devlin, later known as Susan Peard.

Ian Gelder, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “EastEnders”, “Father Brown”, and “Rumpole of the Bailey”.

The paper of record finally ran an obit for Dick Rutan.

Steve Albini. NYT (archived).

Milton Diamond, who the NYT describes as a “sexologist and advocate for intersex babies”.

I probably would have skipped this one for notability, but the obit starts off with an account of the 1973 International Symposium on Gender Identity, at which Dr. Diamond got into a confrontation with Dr. John Money. Dr. Money was an advocate of “genital correction” surgery, while Dr. Diamond advocated leaving them alone.

Dr. Money rushed over to Dr. Diamond, getting in his face, furiously insisting he was right.
Dr. Diamond only replied, “The data is not there.”
At one point, eyewitnesses reported that Dr. Money slugged Dr. Diamond, though Dr. Diamond later said he didn’t remember it.

Turns out Dr. Diamond may have been right, and Dr. Money was (at best) a crank and possibly worse.

Since the 1990s, Money’s work and research has been subject to significant academic and public scrutiny. A 1997 academic study criticized Money’s work in many respects, particularly in regard to the involuntary sex-reassignment of the child David Reimer. Money allegedly coerced David and his brother Brian to perform sexual rehearsal with each other, which Money then photographed. David Reimer lived a troubled life, ending with his suicide at 38; his brother died of an overdose at age 36.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Planes, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 3, 2024.

Friday, May 3rd, 2024

The NYT ran two obits recently for people who were a little outside the mainstream of celebrity.

Larry Young passed away in March at the age of 56. Dr. Young was a neuroscientist, who got his PhD from UT Austin.

Professor Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, used prairie voles in a series of experiments that revealed the chemical process for the pirouette of heart-fluttering emotions that poets have tried to put into words for centuries.

…

With their beady eyes, thick tails and sharp claws, prairie voles are not exactly cuddly. But among rodents, they are uniquely domestic: They are monogamous, and the males and females form a family unit to raise their offspring together.
“Prairie voles, if you take away their partner, they show behavior similar to depression,” Professor Young told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2009. “It’s almost as if there’s withdrawal from their partner.”
That made them ideal for laboratory studies examining the chemistry of love.
In a study published in 1999, Professor Young and his colleagues exploited the gene in prairie voles associated with the signaling of vasopressin, a hormone that modulates social behavior. They boosted vasopressin signaling in mice, which are highly promiscuous.

…

Professor Young followed up with other prairie vole studies that focused on oxytocin, a hormone that stimulates contractions during childbirth and is involved in the bonding between mothers and newborns.
“Because we knew that oxytocin was involved in mother-infant bonding, we explored whether oxytocin might be involved in this partner bonding,” he said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2019.
It was.

…

“Love doesn’t really fly in and out,” Professor Young wrote in “The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction” (2012, with Brian Alexander). “The complex behaviors surrounding these emotions are driven by a few molecules in our brains. It’s these molecules, acting on defined neural circuits, that so powerfully influence some of the biggest, most life-changing decisions we’ll ever make.”

Frank Wakefield, mandolin guy.

In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Wakefield played with a host of bluegrass luminaries, including Jimmy Martin and the Stanley Brothers.

…

While still a teenager, Mr. Wakefield mastered the heavily syncopated “chop” chord of the bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, whom he met in 1961 and who immediately recognized Mr. Wakefield’s prowess as a mandolinist.
“You can play like me as good — or near as good — as I can,” Mr. Wakefield, in a 2022 interview with the Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association, recalled Mr. Monroe saying at their initial meeting. “Now you’ve got to go out and find your own style.”
Heeding Mr. Monroe’s advice, Mr. Wakefield did exactly that. He devised his own sound by alternating up and down strokes on his instrument with equal force to produce a clear, ringing tone and sustained rhythm, which he likened to a sledgehammer striking a steel rail in a 1998 interview with the bluegrass website Candlewater.com.

…

David Grisman, a student of Mr. Wakefield’s and a mandolin virtuoso in his own right, said in an often quoted passage from Frets magazine that Mr. Wakefield had “split the bluegrass mandolin atom” by taking the instrument beyond where Mr. Monroe had.
“Bluegrass,” the album that Mr. Wakefield made with Mr. Allen for Folkways Records in 1964 (and that a 19-year-old Mr. Grisman produced), proved ample confirmation of that claim: It featured versions of two of Mr. Wakefield’s most enduring originals, “New Camptown Races” and “Catnip,” both of which, with their developments in melody, tunings and chord changes, pushed the limits of what then constituted bluegrass.
Mr. Wakefield’s innovations didn’t stop there, though. By the mid-1960s he had begun composing sonatas for the mandolin and arranging classical pieces for traditional bluegrass ensembles. He performed with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1967 and made a guest appearance with the Boston Pops orchestra the next year.

Posted in Geek, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 2, 2024.

Thursday, May 2nd, 2024

Duane Eddy. NYT (archived).

Posted in Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: April 20, 2024.

Saturday, April 20th, 2024

In haste: Death finally caught the Midnight Rider.

Dickey Betts. THR.

Daniel C. Dennett, author.

An outspoken atheist, he at times seemed to denigrate religion. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.
According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.
For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.
Mr. Dennett irked some scientists by asserting that natural selection alone determined evolution. He was especially disdainful of the eminent paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose ideas on other factors of evolution were summarily dismissed by Mr. Dennett as “goulding.”

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Musical interlude.

Monday, April 8th, 2024

I know, this is an obvious choice, but it is still a classic:

Posted in Music | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: March 18, 2024.

Monday, March 18th, 2024

David Breashears passed away on March 14th. I haven’t seen much coverage of this, but I was able to find an obit from Outside.

I think most Everest fans are familiar with him. He did several climbing documentaries, including the IMAX “Everest”.

Breashears shot Everest during 1996 climbing season, and witnessed the deadly blizzard that killed eight climbers and was later chronicled by author Jon Krakauer in the Outside feature and best-selling book Into Thin Air. Breashears helped with the rescue and recovery of climbers after the incident, and his experience led to another Everest film, the 2008 Frontline documentary Storm Over Everest. The film included interviews with survivors, video from the 1996 expedition, and recreated scenes of the storm and rescue efforts.
Speaking to Frontline, Breashears said he felt it was necessary to retell the story via film and not just words to try and help viewers understand the tragedy. “For me, to see and hear direct testimony from a person who has overcome such adversity, has survived such a difficult and stressful event, is very powerful,” he said. “There is something so much more poignant about seeing a person’s face and looking into their eyes and hearing their voice than just reading about them on a written page.”

…

Breashears grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and was a great rock and ice climber, turning heads early as a youth in Eldorado Canyon. As told in a 2022 story in Climbing, Breashears earned the nickname “Kloeberdanz Kid” after a speedy ascent of the challenging route Kloeberdanz, 5.11c R in Eldorado Canyon at just 18 years old. His visionary 1975 first ascents of the difficult and committing routes Krystal Klyr and Perilous Journey, both 5.11b X, with the X for great danger in the event of a fall, remain legend. Among their other mountaineering feats, in winter 1982 Breashears and Jeff Lowe made the first ascent of the 4500-foot north face of Kwangde Lho (6011 meters) via a hard and technical route on extremely steep rock and ice. The face was unrepeated until 2001.

According to Wikipedia, he also did the climbing shots for David Lee Roth’s “Just Like Paradise” video.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 12, 2024.

Tuesday, March 12th, 2024

Eric Carmen, musician. NYT (archived).

I don’t have any association with or memories of “All By Myself”, but I do remember hearing “Hungry Eyes” a lot on the radio.

Jean Allison, actress. No “Mannix”, but she did do a fair number of cop and cop adjunct shows. Other credits include “Hec Ramsey”, “McCloud”, and “Lou Grant”.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: March 8, 2024.

Friday, March 8th, 2024

Vice Admiral Richard Truly (US Navy – ret.), astronaut and former NASA administrator. NASA.

Mr. Truly joined NASA in 1969, but he didn’t venture into space for 12 years, when he was the pilot of the shuttle program’s second orbital flight. The success of that flight proved that NASA could safely relaunch the Columbia shuttle, seven months after its maiden flight, and safely return it to earth.

…

In 1983, Mr. Truly, who was a captain at the time, commanded the Challenger during its third flight, the eighth overall in the shuttle program. It took off at night and landed in darkness — a first for the program. The flight also marked a personal distinction: Captain Truly was the first American grandfather in space.

…

But he returned to NASA as its associate administrator in charge of the shuttle program in 1986, less than a month after the Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight due in part to launching in too cold temperatures, killing its seven-person crew, which included a teacher, Christa McAuliffe.
A month into his new job, Captain Truly said that the next shuttle would be launched only in daylight and in warm weather (the Challenger was launched at 36 degrees Fahrenheit), and that it would land in California instead of Cape Canaveral, Fla.
“I do not want you to think this conservative approach, this safe approach, which I think is the proper thing to do, is going to be a namby-pamby shuttle program,” he said. “The business of flying in space is a bold business.”
He added: “We cannot print enough money to make it totally risk-free. But we certainly are going to correct any mistakes we may have made in the past, and we are going to get it going again just as soon as we can under these guidelines.”

…

He remembered walking to his office on his first day as associate administrator to find people crying in the corridor “because of the pounding they had been taking in the media,” he said in a 2012 interview with the Colorado School of Mines, where he was a trustee at the time.
“By that time,” he added, “rather than an airplane accident, it had been portrayed as NASA killed its crew. It was the start of the most tumultuous engineering, political, cultural, social endeavor that I ever found myself in.”

He was appointed administrator by George H.W. Bush, but (according to the NYT) left after three years because of a dispute with “Vice President Dan Quayle and his staff at the National Space Council, of which Mr. Quayle was the chairman.”

Between 1960 and 1963, he made more than 300 landings, many of them at night, on the aircraft carriers Intrepid and Enterprise, then became a flight instructor.

…

His honors included the Navy Distinguished Flying Cross, the Presidential Citizens Medal and two NASA Distinguished Service Medals.

Steve Lawrence, of Steve and Eydie fame. NYT (archived).

FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Akira Toriyama, manga guy and creator of “Dragon Ball”.

John Walker, AutoCAD and Autodesk guy.

The idiosyncratic Mr. Walker put his mark on a company that was anything but corporate in spirit. A 1992 article in The New York Times described Autodesk under Mr. Walker as “a cabal of counterculture senior programmers” who “took their dogs to work and tried to reach a consensus on strategy through endless memos sent by electronic mail.” (In those days, email was still a novelty in the business world.)
That same year, The Wall Street Journal scored a rare interview with Autodesk’s “founding genius.” The resulting article noted his quirks, including the fact that he did not allow the company to distribute his photograph in any form. He was prickly in manner during the interview, the reporter noted, and insisted that it be conducted in front of a video camera, debated each question and claimed a copyright on the conversation.

Posted in History, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 15, 2024.

Thursday, February 15th, 2024

Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, soprano.

Trained at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia and later at the Juilliard School in New York City, Ms. Fernandez made her mark in the 1970s as Bess in the Houston Grand Opera’s international traveling production of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” The tour took her to Europe, where she caught the eye of Rolf Liebermann, the impresario known for reviving the Paris Opera. He offered her a two-year contract.

…

…it was merely a prelude to a long career that included her New York City Opera debut in 1982, once again as Musetta in “La Bohème,” as well as performances throughout Europe.
In addition to making Musetta her own, she also made the title role in Verdi’s “Aida,” an Ethiopian princess held captive in ancient Egypt, a signature. At one point she even performed the role amid the temples of Luxor in Egypt itself.
In 1992, Ms. Fernandez won a Laurence Olivier Award, the British equivalent of a Tony, for best actress in a musical for her rendition of Carmen in “Carmen Jones.”

The prelude was her role in a movie, which is what she may be most famous for.

“Diva” was considered a high-water mark in the movement known as the cinéma du look, a high-sheen school of French film often centered on stylish, disaffected youth in the France of the 1980s and ’90s. A film with all the saturated color and gloss of a 1980s music video, it was an art-house hit that became a cult favorite for the initiated.
The story revolves around a young opera fan named Jules (played by Frédéric Andréi) who grows so infatuated with an American opera star named Cynthia Hawkins that he surreptitiously tapes one of her performances — despite her well-known decree that none of her work be recorded, since it would capture only a part of the power and immediacy of her grandeur.

Ms. Fernandez played Cynthia, and the tape plays the MacGuffin.

That grandeur is on full display in Ms. Fernandez’s opening scene, as she takes the stage in a hauntingly weathered old theater wearing a shimmering white gown and metallic eye shadow. She proceeds to mesmerize the house — and Jules — with a soaring rendition of the aria “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” (“Well, then? I’ll go far away”) from Alfredo Catalani’s opera “La Wally.”

When this came out in 1981, Siskel and Ebert reviewed it, and I wanted to see it. A moped chase through a subway? I was there, man. But at that time, it was hard for me to see foreign films in a theater, or on home video. I don’t recall “Diva” being re-released or playing anywhere when I was in college, even at the Union when they still had a film program.

Now, of course, I have “Diva” on blu-ray from Kino Lorber. And it is on our big movie list. I’ve been waiting until we can watch it as a group.

“Diva” was her only film role as an actress, though IMDB also credits her with a 1980 “TV movie” of “La Bohème” in which she sang “Musetta”. (Kiri Te Kanawa sang “Mimi”.)

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

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