Yukihiro Takahashi, drummer and vocalist for the Yellow Magic Orchestra.
Mr. Takahashi and Yellow Magic Orchestra, which he founded in 1978 with the musicians Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono, were often ranked alongside the German electronic group Kraftwerk as pioneers in electronic music and significant influences on emergent genres like hip-hop, New Wave and techno.
Yellow Magic Orchestra was among the first bands to employ in live shows devices like the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer and the Moog II-C synthesizer, which they used to complement Mr. Hosono’s funky guitar and Mr. Takahashi’s tight, driving drums.
Unlike their German counterparts, who leaned into the avant-garde nature of electronic sound and referred to themselves as automatons, Yellow Magic Orchestra found ways to bend it toward pop music, blending in elements of Motown, disco and synth-pop.
In a 1980 appearance on the television show “Soul Train,” the band performed a souped-up version of Archie Bell and the Drells’ “Tighten Up,” after which a bemused Don Cornelius, the show’s host, interviewed Mr. Takahashi. Kraftwerk, it might go without saying, never appeared on “Soul Train.”
Jonathan Raban, writer.
Mr. Raban’s literary narratives of the places he visited and the people he met combined travelogue, memoir, reportage and criticism. What he was not, he insisted, was a travel writer.
“Travel writing seems to me a too-big umbrella, full of holes to let the rain in,” he told Granta magazine in 2008. “Anyone commissioned by a newspaper to write up meals and hotels in foreign holiday resorts is a travel writer. Anyone who does a guidebook is a travel writer.”
David Crosby, of Crosby, Stills & Nash and The Byrds. This seems to be breaking news: hattip on this to Lawrence. (Edited to add: NYT obit.)
Arthur Duncan, noted tap dancer.
There were more renowned tap dancers during his long career — Bill Robinson, Sammy Davis Jr. and Gregory Hines among them — but only Mr. Duncan had a regular national television showcase like the one he had on Saturday nights on the popular if square Welk show, from 1964 to 1982.
“‘Lawrence’ was not the hippest show around,” Mr. Hines told The Daily News of New York in 1989, when he was headlining “An Evening of Tap” at Carnegie Hall with Mr. Duncan and other dancers, including Bunny Briggs, Brenda Bufalino and Savion Glover. “But I’ll tell you, when nobody was home, I’d tune in, hoping to catch Arthur.”
He added, “He’s one of the most underrated dancers around, and a lot of that has to do with the association of the show. But other dancers know he’s great — and for a while he was the only one keeping tap in the public eye.”
…
“He did a number almost every day, and he could always count on knocking me out when he did ‘Jump Through the Ring,’” Ms. White wrote in her 1995 autobiography, “Here We Go Again: My Life in Television, 1949-1995.”
But broadcast during the Jim Crow era, some Southern stations threatened to boycott the show because of Mr. Duncan’s presence on it, a response that came as a “frightfully ugly surprise,” she wrote.
In the 2018 documentary “Betty White: First Lady of Television,” Mr. Duncan said, “People in the South resented me being on the show, and they wanted me thrown out.”But Ms. White did not yield.
“I’m sorry, but, you know, he stays,” she recalled saying to NBC. “Live with it.”
Following a thread on the Yukihiro Takahashi obit, I am reading that Ryuichi Sakamoto has given what he believes to be his final concert just last month. He has late stage cancer and may join his bandmate quite soon.
My parents watched Lawrence Welk every week, and at the time, I did not appreciate it. But as I have gotten older, I have learned that things that I was exposed to as a young person have combined to make me a better person. I think especially of having a music class in elementary school, where we had to sing songs with a piano playing teacher.
We sang some of the VBS songs that would never be allowed now, and some of the anti war protest songs about the Vietnam war like Blowing in the Wind, etc. But now I look to the youth and to the 20 and 30 somethings and realize that they have never been exposed to these songs, and I know that they are lesser for not ever having experienced this. Even if they did not support the messages sent by these sorts of things, just knowing about these things would have been helpful in how they could have understood how and why their parents and grandparents thought and felt the way that they did, and do.
And in many ways it has actually helped me to understand the discussions that we see today. I would have been called a liberal when I was young. But without changing my feelings or beliefs, I am now considered a conservative. Strange how that worked out.
One other thing, I actually prefer the .45 ACP myself, but financially it was more important that I go with the 9mm. I look at the ammo prices now, and see that they are not only coming down but ammo is getting more available, especially in bulk quantities. I suspect that the panic buying finally is somewhat over.