Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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Obit watch: May 25, 2023.

Thursday, May 25th, 2023

Tina Turner. THR. Pitchfork.

I’m not badmouthing the dead, but I do think there’s something worth pointing out here:

“After suffering a stroke in 2009 because of my poorly controlled hypertension I struggled to get back up on my feet,” she penned. “This is when I first learned that my kidneys didn’t work that well anymore. They had already lost thirty-five percent of their function.”
Turner eventually “developed a fatal dislike” of her prescription pills and even “convinced” herself that they made her feel “worse.”
So without consulting with her doctors, she “replaced” her “conventional medication” with “homeopathic” remedies.
“Indeed, I started feeling better after a while,” the 12-time Grammy winner noted. However, she was in for a rude awakening when she went for her “next routine check-up.”
“Rarely in my life had I been so wrong. I had not known that uncontrolled hypertension would worsen my renal disease and that I would kill my kidneys by giving up on controlling my blood pressure,” she confessed.

Homeopathic “remedies”.

“Are the “dangers of mass popular delusion” not “so menacing”?“

Nicholas Gray, founder of Gray’s Papaya.

For the record: NYT obit for Rolf Harris.

Posted in Food, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Yes, I know…

Wednesday, May 24th, 2023

Tina Turner tomorrow, after the dust has had a chance to settle.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 24, 2023.

Wednesday, May 24th, 2023

Brian Shul, SR-71 pilot and author, passed away over the weekend.

I’ve had this obit on hold for a few days because I couldn’t find a good source to link to. FotB RoadRich forwarded the Flying obit, so much credit to him.

Bill Lee, musician.

Over six decades, in thousands of live performances and on more than 250 record albums, Mr. Lee’s mellow and ebullient string bass accompanied a pantheon of music stars, including as well Duke Ellington, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta, Simon and Garfunkel, Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.

He also wrote film scores for the first four feature films directed by Spike Lee, his son.

Chas Newby.

Newby was a member of John Lennon’s first band The Quarrymen, and news of his death was announced by The Cavern Club Liverpool — a music venue where The Beatles performed before finding global stardom.
“It’s with great sadness to hear about the passing of Chas Newby,” the venue wrote in a Facebook post. “Chas stepped in for The Beatles for a few dates when Stuart Sutcliffe stayed in Hamburg and latterly he played for The Quarrymen.”

Gerald Castillo, actor. Other credits include “FBI: The Unheard Music The Untold Stories”, “Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects”, the 1990 “Dragnet”, and the 1990-1991 “The New Adam-12”.

Kenneth Anger, the Hollywood Babylon guy. He also did some “experimental” films. (Edited to add: NYT obit archived.)

I’ve heard more than once that HB is notoriously inaccurate. I know, I know, but: Wikipedia.

And here’s a direct link to the “You Must Remember This” episodes (which I have not listened to yet, not being a regular listener of YMRT).

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

Obit watch: May 19, 2023.

Friday, May 19th, 2023

Andy Rourke, of the Smiths. THR. Pancreatic cancer got him at 59.

The Disney Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel.

Get this: A windowless, theme-park hotel with a mandatory 48-hour stay that costs a family of four $6,000 per visit didn’t work out.

Which, you know, is one way of looking at it. On the other hand:

“If you are into Star Wars, and you enjoy role playing, this is absolutely worth it,” wrote one reviewer. “In addition to the lodging, food (it’s a LOT of food), park admission (including lightning lane access to the rides), what you are really paying for is the experience that is put on by the characters and crew members.”

On the gripping hand:

Also notable, however, is the fact that there were only 43 reviews. Among the guests who didn’t enjoy their stays at the hotel was one who described the experience as “like being in a jail,” and another who dubbed it “the most expensive rip-off of my life,” saying they had to spend most of their time staring at their phone in order to participate in the role-playing game. “The hotel is surprisingly small, with few themed spaces to explore. Even the garden ‘climate simulator’ which is supposed to help with claustrophobia is small. I really don’t know why it’s so tiny, there is plenty of land to work with. It doesn’t feel immersive, it feels cramped.”

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Obit watch: May 2, 2023.

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2023

Gordon Lightfoot. THR.

I have poked my fair share of fun at the song, and will probably continue to do so. But there is something affecting about those lyrics. I think maybe it’s the idea of calm acceptance in the face of certain death.

Posted in Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 1, 2023.

Monday, May 1st, 2023

Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author. (When Bad Things Happen to Good People and other books).

Detective Troy Patterson of the NYPD.

One night in 1990, three punks tried to hold Officer Patterson up. The robbery went bad, and Officer Patterson was shot in the head. He’d been in a vegetative state for the past 33 years.

Patterson was promoted to detective in 2016.
The three suspects — Vincent Robbins, Tracey Clark and Darien Crawford — were later arrested in the unprovoked shooting.
Robbins, now 53, was convicted of assault and attempted-robbery charges and sentenced to a prison term of five to 15 years. He was released in 2000, state records show.
Clark, the alleged gunman in the shooting, also went to trial in the case. The outcome of the case is not immediately available, nor are any details of the charges against Crawford.

Tim Bachman, of Bachman-Turner Overdrive. You may recall that his brother, Robbie, passed in January.

Mike Shannon, former player and later broadcaster for the St. Louis Cardinals.

John Stobart, artist.

A product of Britain’s Royal Academy of Art, Mr. Stobart moved to the United States in 1970, when conceptual art, Op Art and minimalism were riding high in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.
Affable, unassuming and unfailingly candid, Mr. Stobart would have none of it. “I’ve never bought it, and the general public has never bought it either,” he said of abstract art in an interview with The Boston Globe in 1986. “That’s a lot of baloney, that stuff.”
Instead, he conjured the past as a master of richly detailed historical works brimming with schooners, brigs and sloops, their sails flapping under moody clouds, with shore lights twinkling in the distance.
Working out of studios in the Boston area, Martha’s Vineyard and several other locations, Mr. Stobart, who lived in Medfield, Mass., employed the same taste for exhaustive historical detail as Patrick O’Brian, the prolific Anglo-Irish author known for his bracing tales of naval heroics.
He left no detail to chance, traveling to the locations he painted, consulting old daguerreotypes of harbors and ships and going out to sea on various watercraft to learn the most arcane points about their engineering and behavior on the water.

…

By the mid-1980s, he had written the first of his three books, “The Rediscovery of America’s Maritime Heritage,” and thanks in part to a lucrative operation selling first-edition prints, was making up to $2.5 million a year. In recent years, his originals were selling for $15,000 to $400,000 through the Rehs Galleries in New York.

The obit reproduces some of Mr. Stobart’s paintings. I’m probably a sucker for representational art, but I like what I see there, and would be happy to have an original Stobart on my wall.

Posted in Art, Boats, Books, Cops, Law, Music, NYPD, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 27, 2023.

Thursday, April 27th, 2023

Jerry Springer. NYPost.

The NYT currently has a three paragraph blrub up, with “A complete obituary will follow.” I’ll either update or do a separate post once that goes up.

For almost three decades, from its launch in 1991 until its cancelation in 2018, his eponymous program became synonymous with gutter viewing. The Jerry Springer Show was ranked No. 1 on a TV Guide list in 2011 of the worst shows in the history of television, beating out such dubious competition as Cheaters and Temptation Island.

…

“My passion is politics,” he told Men’s Health magazine in 2015, “and I’ve always been able to separate how I make a living from my passions.”
That was not strictly true: the two did collide in 1974, when the political and the prurient came together in an incident that derailed Springer’s dream of becoming a major politician. Then a Cincinnati councilman, he was found guilty of soliciting prostitutes (astonishingly, he had paid them with checks) and forced to resign, his long-term hopes of being a governor or U.S. senator shattered.

…

Perhaps most impressively, he had a stage production based on his life, Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee’s Jerry Springer: The Opera, which ran in England for 609 performances and won the British version of a Tony, an Olivier Award, as best musical — which did not prevent 55,000 people from lodging complaints when it was broadcast on British television.

April Stevens, of “Deep Purple” fame.

Posted in Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 25, 2023.

Tuesday, April 25th, 2023

Harry Belafonte. THR.

Ron Faber. The THR obit concentrates on his stage career, but he did do a few movies and TV shows, including “The Exorcist”, “Law and Order”, and “Romeo Is Bleeding”.

Ginnie Newhart, Bob’s wife.

Ginnie and Bob were set up on a blind date by comedian Buddy Hackett (Ginnie was baby-sitting Hackett’s kids at the time).
“Buddy came back one day and said in his own inimitable way, ‘I met this young guy and his name is Bobby Newhart, and he’s a comic and he’s Catholic and you’re Catholic and I think maybe you should marry each other,’ ” she recalled in a 2013 interview.
They played pool at Buddy and his wife’s home the first time they met.
“It was just silly,” she said in 2005. “I was 20, 21, 21, and I think Bob was 32. And every time somebody would sink a ball in the pocket or whatever you’re supposed to do, [we’d] run around the table with our cue stick singing ‘Bridge on the River Kwai.’

They were married for 60 years.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 11, 2023.

Tuesday, April 11th, 2023

This is one I’ve been holding for a couple of days because I am lazy and shiftless: James Bowman. countertenor.

When Mr. Bowman started singing professionally in the 1960s, the countertenor — the highest of the male voices, working the same range as female contraltos and mezzo-sopranos — was something of a rarity on opera and concert stages. Alfred Deller, who died in 1979, was the go-to countertenor of the day, but his voice and his acting ability were said to have been limited.
“Bowman was a revolutionary talent,” the critic Rupert Christiansen, revisiting one of Mr. Bowman’s 1970s recordings, wrote in The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2019, adding that “his technique brought a new power to the countertenor repertory.”

…

“A friend came up from London and told me that Benjamin Britten was holding auditions for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Mr. Bowman said, referring to Mr. Britten’s 1960 opera, whose Oberon role had originally been written for Mr. Deller. “This is sort of a fairy story — I’d never done anything onstage in my life, but I wrote to Britten and I said, ‘I think I am eminently suited to the role of Oberon.’”
He was invited to audition.
“I knew that you could barely hear the people who had sung the part before,” he said. “So I went to Covent Garden and I made a big noise and socked them between the eyeballs — and it worked! The next thing I knew I was on tour.”
Oberon became one of his signature roles. Mr. Britten wrote other works for him as well, including the part of Apollo in “Death in Venice,” the 1973 Britten opera.

…

Mr. Bowman was heard frequently in concert settings as well, and he had a knack for deploying his musical gifts to striking effect in famed performance spaces. Tim Page, writing in The New York Times about a two-hour concert of works by Handel recorded at Westminster Abbey in 1985, called his voice “unusually versatile and pleasing.” Twenty years later, also in The Times, Bernard Holland, after catching him in a “Messiah” at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, said that Mr. Bowman “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”
His performances and his dozens of recordings encouraged other singers to explore the countertenor repertory, and Mr. Winwood said he was always generous with advice and support for younger singers.
“He would think nothing of hiring a studio and arranging a meeting with young singers who he had never even met,” Mr. Winwood said by email, “and I’m pretty sure he would never charge for his time.”

…

“He was such a brilliant, instinctive singer and musician, a huge character and incredibly kind and generous,” Mr. Short wrote, “but my fondest memories will always be of him giggling and snorting loudly at something totally outrageous he’d just whispered in the ears of anyone standing close by.”

…

“We’re a down-to-earth bunch who just happen to like singing in a high register,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 1996. “When I look around at my colleagues, I’m struck by how normal most of them are.”

Al Jaffee has passed at 102. THR. Tribute from Mad.

For those who don’t know, he was one of the great old-time “Mad Magazine” guys, perhaps most famous as the creator of the “fold-in” and “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions”.

Al was named the Reuben Awards’ Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 2008 and was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Society of Illustrators’ Hall of Fame in 2014. He holds the Guinness World Record for the longest career as a comic artist, beginning with his first publication in Joker Comics in 1942 and continuing through his time at MAD until his retirement last year.

“I had two jobs all my life,” Jaffee told the Times upon his retirement. “One of them was to make a living. The second one was to entertain. I hope to some extent that I succeeded.”

Myriam Ullens. Noted here because this is an odd story.

She was a single mom and successful pastry chef when she went looking for investors to expand her business. One of the people she went to seek investment from was the billionaire Baron Guy Ullens de Schooten Whettnal (who apparently prefers “Ullens” as the short form).

They fell in love and married. The two of them got out of the business world and into philanthropy, founding (among other ventures) the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

According to reports, Ms. Ullens and her husband were shot by her stepson while sitting in their car. Her husband was wounded in the leg.

According to the prosecutor’s statement, Nicolas attributed his actions to a family fight over money and said that moments before he shot his stepmother he had been arguing with her and his father at their home and had been asked to leave. He was being held in jail and has been charged with premeditated murder and violating weapons laws, the prosecutor’s office said.

For the record: NYT obit for Michael Lerner.

Elizabeth Hubbard, actress. She doesn’t have that many screen credits beyond the two soaps (“As the World Turns” and “The Doctors”) she was in, but she also did a fair amount of work on Broadway.

Posted in Art, Law, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: April 7, 2023.

Friday, April 7th, 2023

Mimi Sheraton, former food critic for the NYT. “Remembering Mimi Sheraton’s Writing and Cooking“.

An adventurer with a passion for offbeat experiences, an eclectic taste for foods and the independence to defy pressures from restaurateurs and advertisers, Ms. Sheraton was the first female food critic for The Times. She pioneered reviewing-in-disguise, dining in wigs and tinted glasses, and using aliases for reservations, mostly in high-end places where people knew her from repeat visits and lavished their attentions on her.
“The longer I reviewed restaurants, the more I became convinced that the unknown customer has a completely different experience from either a valued patron or a recognized food critic,” she wrote in her memoir, “Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life” (2004). “For all practical purposes, they might as well be in different restaurants.”
Colleagues and other restaurant critics described her reviews as tough but fair and scrupulously researched. The Times required three visits to a restaurant before publishing a review; she dined six to eight times before passing judgment. For an article on deli sandwiches, she collected 104 corned beef and pastrami samples in one day to evaluate the meat and sandwich-building techniques.

…

Another of her reviews, based on blind tastings by several Times staff members, favored private-label liquors over popular brand names of Scotch, bourbon, rye, vodka and gin. The review ran weeks before Christmas, the busy liquor-selling season.
“I heard that two million dollars’ worth of advertising had been canceled,” Ms. Sheraton recalled in her memoir. She approached the executive editor. “I asked Abe Rosenthal if that was true. He said, ‘That’s none of your business. It was a great story.’”

…

In her Greenwich Village townhouse, she had 2,000 cookbooks and a spacious kitchen overlooking a backyard where she grew chives, tarragon, mint, sage, rosemary and basil. And she read other restaurant critics, with whom she often disagreed.
“Well, whether they’re right or not, which means they agree with me,” she told The Times wryly in 2004, “food writers in general devote too much space to chefs’ philosophies. They’re not Picasso, after all — this is supper. So I don’t want to hear about a chef’s intentions. Call me when it’s good.”

Bill Butler, noted cinematographer. Other credits include “Raid on Entebbe”, “Capricorn One”, and “Hot Shots!”.

Nora Forster, John Lydon’s wife.

The punk rock icon and Forster met in 1975 at Vivienne Westwood’s famed punk shop Sex and married in 1979, according to Rolling Stone.
The two remained married till Forster’s death and did not have children.

Paul Cattermole, of S Club 7.

Posted in Food, Media, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 4, 2023.

Tuesday, April 4th, 2023

Sister Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou.

She was a world-class pianist:

…music that drew on her classical training but seemed to partake of rhythm and blues, jazz and other influences. The relatively few who discovered it knew they had found their way to something singular.
The musician Norah Jones was one who did, especially after hearing the album “Éthiopiques 21,” a collection of Sister Guèbrou’s piano solos that was part of a record series spotlighting folkloric and pop music from Ethiopia.
“This album is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard: part Duke Ellington, part modal scales, part the blues, part church music,” Ms. Jones told The New York Times in 2020. “It resonated in all those ways for me.”

As you may have guessed from the “Sister”, and the categories on this post, she went in a different direction:

She had a chance to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London and seemed on the way to a career as a concert pianist, the BBC documentary says, but that prospect fell through for reasons Sister Guèbrou would not detail. That led her to a spiritual reassessment of her life, and by her early 20s, she was a nun. She spent 10 years in a hilltop monastery in Ethiopia.
“I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years,” she told Ms. Molleson. “No shoes, no music, just prayer.”
She returned to her family and by the 1960s was recording some of her music; her first album was released in Germany in 1967, according to the website of a foundation established in her name to promote music education.
She made several other records over the next 30 years, donating the proceeds to the poor. In the mid-1980s, she left Ethiopia and settled into an Ethiopian Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem, spending the rest of her life there. Information on her survivors was not available.

She was 99.

Sharon Acker passed over the weekend.

The “Perry Mason” mentioned in the headline was actually “The New Perry Mason”, in which she played “Della Street” opposite Monte Markham’s Perry Mason. It lasted one season. Other credits include three “Quincy, M.E.” appearances, “The Rockford Files”, “Hec Ramsey”, “The Bold Ones: The Senator”, and a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Roy McGrath. Mr. McGrath was the former chief of staff for the governor of Maryland. Three weeks ago, he went on the run: the day his corruption trial was supposed to start. He was charged with “wire fraud, embezzlement, misconduct in office and improper use of state funds”.

Authorities tracked him down in Tennessee yesterday. There was a confrontation with FBI agents, and Mr. McGrath was shot. He died in a local hospital. At this point, it isn’t clear if his wound was self-inflicted or if he was shot by the FBI.

Posted in 1970s, Cops, FBI, Law, Music, Obits, Politics, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 3, 2023.

Monday, April 3rd, 2023

Ryuichi Sakamoto, Japanese musician. THR.

Cool story, bro:

In summer 2018, it emerged that Sakamoto had found the music so bad at his favorite Japanese restaurant in Manhattan (he had long divided his time between Tokyo and New York) that he contacted the chef and offered to create a playlist. He went on to do the same for a new bar and restaurant the chef opened, without payment or fanfare.

More:

Equally comfortable in futuristic techno, orchestral works, video game tracks and intimate piano solos, Mr. Sakamoto created music that was catchy, emotive and deeply attuned to the sounds around him. Along with issuing numerous solo albums, he collaborated with a wide range of musicians across genres, and received an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes.
His Yellow Magic Orchestra, which swept the charts in the late 1970s and early ’80s, produced catchy hits like “Computer Game” on synthesizers and sequencers, while also satirizing Western ideas of Japanese music.
“The big theme of him is curiosity,” the musician Carsten Nicolai, a longtime collaborator, said in a phone interview in 2021. “Ryuichi understood, very early, that not necessarily one specific genre will be the future of music — that the conversation between different styles, and unusual styles, may be the future.”

He also acted a little:

Mr. Sakamoto was beginning to achieve wide recognition in the early 1980s when the director Nagisa Oshima asked him to co-star, alongside David Bowie, in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Mr. Sakamoto, having no background in acting, agreed under the condition that he could also score the film.
The movie’s synth-heavy title track remained one of Mr. Sakamoto’s most famous compositions. He often adapted it, including for “Forbidden Colors,” a vocal version with the singer David Sylvian, as well as piano renditions and sweeping orchestral arrangements.

…

He began piano lessons at age 6, and started to compose soon after. Early influences included Bach and Debussy — whom he once called “the door to all 20th century music” — and he discovered modern jazz as he fell in with a crowd of hipster rebels as a teenager. (At the height of the student protest movement, he and his classmates shut down their high school for several weeks.)
Mr. Sakamoto was drawn to modern art and especially the avant-garde work of Cage. He studied composition and ethnomusicology at Tokyo University of the Arts and began playing around with synthesizers and performing in the local pop scene.

…

In 1978, Mr. Sakamoto released his debut solo album, “Thousand Knives,” a trippy amalgam that opens with the musician reciting a poem by Mao through a vocoder, followed by a reggae beat and a procession of Herbie Hancock-inspired improvisations. That year, the bassist Haruomi Hosono invited him and the drummer Yukihiro Takahashi to form a trio that became Yellow Magic Orchestra. (Mr. Takahashi died in January.)
The band’s self-titled 1978 album was a huge hit, and influenced numerous electronic music genres, from synth pop to techno. The group broke up in 1984, in part because Mr. Sakamoto wanted to pursue solo work. (They have periodically reunited since the 1990s.) Mr. Sakamoto continued tinkering with outré, high-tech approaches in his 1980 album “B-2 Unit,” which included the otherworldly electro single “Riot in Lagos.”

Lawrence mentioned that we’ve actually seen two films scored by Mr. Sakamoto in the past 12 months (“The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant”).

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

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