Aurelia Butler

In flight, the Eurasian kestrel is mostly silent, a small falcon that seems to defy physics as it faces the wind and hovers in midair, tail spread out like a fan. Flapping its wings vigorously, the bird of prey catches every eddy of the breeze while scanning the ground below for quarry.Perched in its breeding grounds, however, the kestrel emits a series of raspy screams, each note a single-syllabled kik-kik-kik. In June, a team of Israeli and French archaeologists proposed that 12,000 years ago the Natufians, people of a Stone Age culture in the Levant and Western Asia, mimicked the raspy trills of the Eurasian kestrel with tiny notched flutes, or aerophones, carved from waterfowl bones.The flutes, which were discovered decades ago at a site in northern Israel but were inspected only recently, may have been used as hunting aids, for musical and dancing practices or for communicating with birds over short distances, according to the study’s authors, who published their paper in Scientific Reports.“This is the first time a prehistoric sound instrument from the Near East has been identified,” said Laurent Davin, an archaeologist at the French Research Center in Jerusalem who made the discovery.The theory is largely based on fragments of seven wind instruments that were among 1,112 bird bones unearthed at Eynan-Mallaha, a prehistoric swamp village in the Hula Valley, which is still an important passageway for the more than two billion birds that annually migrate along the African-Eurasian flyway. The Natufians inhabited the Levant from 13000 to 9700 B.C., a time when humans were undergoing a massive shift from nomadic hunter-gatherers to more sedentary, semi-settled, open-air communities. The society featured the first durable, stone-based architecture and the first graveyards, with funerary customs that changed through time.Seven bird bone flutes from Eynan-Mallaha, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.The Hebrew University of Jerusalem“The Natufians bear witness to a completely crazy period in human history, abandoning the nomadic lifestyle practiced since the dawn of man to settle down in one place,” said Fanny Bocquentin, the lead archaeologist on the dig since 2022. “It’s a big responsibility, a challenge they successfully met, since in a way they gave rise to our way of life and our food regime.”Dr. Davin noted that the settlers of the valley had to find regular sources of food before they even knew how to cultivate them. “Before that time, they relied on game such as rabbits and foxes and gazelles,” he said. The lake and seasonal swamps that nearly covered the valley provided fish and an abundance of birds, most of them wintering waterfowl.The swamp was drained by Zionist pioneers as part of an infrastructure project in the early 20th century, and first excavated by a French mission in 1955. Since then, careful sifting has yielded bones from a wide range of local animal species. The flutes went unnoticed until last year when Dr. Davin observed marks on seven wing bones of Eurasian coots and Eurasian teals. Only one of the instruments was fully intact, and that was all of two and a half inches long.Closer inspection revealed that the marks were tiny holes bored into the hollow bones, and that one of the ends of the intact flute had been carved into a mouthpiece. Initially, Dr. Davin’s colleagues dismissed the holes as routine weathering. But when he subjected the delicate bones to micro-CT scans, he realized that the holes had been meticulously perforated and were spaced at even intervals. The bones had been scraped and grooved with small stone blades, he said, and they bore traces of red ochre and had microscopic wear patterns suggesting that the aerophones had seen considerable use. “The perforations were finger holes,” Dr. Davin said.To test out his theory, a team of archaeologists and ethnomusicologists fashioned three replicas of the intact bone flute. Unable to obtain carcasses of Eurasian coot or teal, the researchers used the wing bones of two female mallard ducks. Blowing into the replicas produced sounds that they compared with the calls of dozens of bird species plying the Hula Valley. The pitch range was very similar to that of two kinds of raptors known to nest in the area, Eurasian kestrels and sparrow hawks.

The research team determined that the finger holes had been made with a flint tool so precise that the holes could be sealed with a fingertip, the sine qua non of wind instruments. “For the Natufian to produce those flutes was a piece of cake,” said Anna Belfer-Cohen, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She added that the society produced a wealth of tools and highly sophisticated utensils, beaded jewelry, pendants of stone, bone, teeth and shells, as well as engraved bone and stone plaques.The flowering of music-making in the deep past is hotly debated. The oldest flute attributed to modern humans is a five-holed aerophone found in 2008 at the Hohle Fels cave in southwest Germany. Carved from the wing-bone of a griffon vulture, the flute may be 40,000 years old, making it one of the oldest instruments ever found.But some scholars point to a Neanderthal artifact known as the Divje Babe flute that was unearthed 28 years ago in a cave in northwestern Slovenia. That object, a young cave bear’s left thigh bone pierced by four spaced holes, is thought to date back at least 50,000 years. However, other scientists argue that the Divje Babe flute was simply the product of an Ice Age carnivore, possibly a spotted hyena, scavenging on a dead bear cub.Hamoudi Khalaily of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who collaborated on the bird flute study, has said that if the Natufians used the aerophones to flush birds out of the marshes, the discovery would mark “the earliest evidence of the use of sound in hunting.” In other words, the miniature flutes could have produced Stone Age duck calls.Natalie Munro, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, has an alternative hypothesis. “While we’re speculating, maybe the true purpose of the instruments was to communicate with a different animal altogether,” she said. Eynan-Mallaha was also home to a Natufian woman found buried with her hand resting on a puppy. The burial dates to 12,000 years ago and figures frequently in narratives of early dog domestication. “Maybe these bones and their high-pitched sounds were more akin to dog whistles,” Dr. Munro said. “They could have been used to communicate with early dogs or their wolf cousins.”Considering the flute’s harsh tone, few scientists maintain that it was intended as a melodic tool. Still, as John James Audubon observed of a pair of American kestrels, “Side by side they sail, screaming aloud their love notes, which, if not musical, are doubtless at least delightful to the parties concerned.” More

Not long after the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, Leonard Bernstein traveled to the once-divided German city and led a performance of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” replacing the word “Freude,” or joy, with “Freiheit” — freedom.In an echo of that historic concert, the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, a touring ensemble formed in the early months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, presented Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the suburbs of Berlin on Thursday. And, for the famous “Ode to Joy” choral finale, the text was translated to Ukrainian, with the key word being “slava,” or glory, as in “Slava Ukrainii”: Glory to Ukraine.“I’m driven by my passion for Ukraine,” the orchestra’s conductor, Keri-Lynn Wilson, said on Thursday afternoon before the concert, at the garden of Schönhausen Palace. “And my desire to get rid of Putin and his regime through culture.”Around her was a bustle of activity: ushers laying pillows on chairs, sound technicians consulting in a booth, pink umbrellas being placed to shield an orchestra from the sun. The orchestra, made up of 74 Ukrainian musicians — some of whom live in that country still, some of whom have fled — was about to perform as part of its second summer tour of Europe.“Russia says there’s no Ukrainian culture, or music, or language,” said Anna Bura, a violinist in the orchestra. “They want to erase Ukrainian culture. We want to show people we are here.”The program included the second violin concerto by the contemporary Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych, and ended with the Beethoven. While on vacation three weeks ago, Wilson arrived at the idea that the “Ode to Joy” should be sung in Ukrainian, and worked with Mykola Lukas and the vocal coach Ivgeniia Iermachkova to create a new singing translation of the Friedrich Schiller text.Keri-Lynn Wilson, right, conducted the orchestra, whose performances featured Valeriy Sokolov as the soloist in Yevhen Stankovych’s Second Violin Concerto.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesThe orchestra’s stop in Berlin coincided with Ukrainian Independence Day. Kyrylo Markiv, a violinist in the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, helped rehearse the choir, the Ukrainian Freedom Chorus, which was assembled for the occasion from the Diplomatic Choir of Berlin and other singers. He serves as a first-desk violinist in the Odesa Philharmonic and is choirmaster at the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa, which was built in the early 19th century, reconstructed between 1999 and 2003 and then damaged last month by Russian airstrikes.The night the cathedral was bombed, Markiv had left his violin there in preparation for a concert the next day. “My colleagues wrote in a work chat that the building was on fire,” he said. “I got dressed and went with my brother, who is a deacon there, and saw destroyed cars, fire. In the building, I looked for my violin. Everything was destroyed, but my violin was about 80 percent OK.”Now, his violin is being repaired by a luthier in Lviv. The attack, he said, strengthened his resolve for the tour. “I’m proud that we came to show our art,” he said. “These times are hard for us. We’re strong, and the European people make us stronger.”Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Wilson’s husband, helped to arrange and raise money for this tour and the one last summer. “The intensity of the war has raised the stakes this year,” he said. “These musicians all live there or have families there. The war makes everything more intense: their playing, their relationships with each other. Everything is magnified.”The violinist Anna Bura.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesKyrylo Markiv, the choirmaster of the Odesa Transfiguration Cathedral.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesAt a rehearsal on Thursday, as Wilson led the orchestra into a breakneck run-through of the Beethoven’s second movement, the two first-desk bass players, Nazarii Stets and Ivan Zavgorodniy, bounced along to the rhythm with broad smiles on their faces. Stets, who lives in Kyiv, said in an interview that this summer’s tour was less celebratory than he had hoped: “I expected it would be the victory tour, and it’s still a tour with continuous fighting.”A member of the Kyiv Camerata, a chamber orchestra that plays contemporary Ukrainian music, he had a solo recital scheduled on the day after the invasion began.“My bass was already at the concert hall,” Stets said. “I spent the night in my house, and then the war started.” After two months with his family in the west of the country, he returned to Kyiv. Since then, he has played in “a lot of charity and benefit concerts,” he said — mostly for the Music Unites charity fund, which donates medicine and food to children, and cars and communications equipment to soldiers.Many musicians have used their art to raise money. The cellist Denys Karachevtsev now lives in Berlin but spent the first year of the war in his hometown, Kharkiv, the site of vicious fighting at the beginning of the conflict. More than 600,000 residents fled that city as Russian shells and rockets destroyed homes and public buildings. A video he recorded of Bach’s fifth cello suite among the ruins garnered attention and donations.From left, the vocal soloists Vladyslav Buialskyi, Vassily Solodkyy, Nicole Chirka and Olga Kulchynska.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesBut music, Karachevtsev said, was just one part of his efforts. “I had my car,” he added, “so I was evacuating people and taking them to the trains, bringing back medicine and food. We didn’t know how the situation would go on.”The videos brought him to the attention of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which invited him to participate this year. “I think it’s a good way to continue helping our country,” he said. Now, Karachevtsev is studying in Berlin while continuing to teach students in Kharkiv online. It is still considered too dangerous to have in-person lessons. “The nearest Russian city is about 50 kilometers away,” he said. “It takes 30 seconds for the bombs to come.”As the sun began to set in Berlin, the orchestra ate dinner. Dignitaries, including Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Oleksiy Makeev, and the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, arrived as audience members began to file in for the free concert. Some sat in the chairs, and others spread out picnic blankets. Children ate ice cream; the atmosphere was warm and friendly.Audience members at the concert included Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Oleksiy Makeev, and the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesSome people wore Ukrainian flags and some a vyshyvanka, a traditional embroidered blouse. Viktoria Neroda, who arrived in Berlin as a refugee from Rivne in western Ukraine last year, said she was there primarily to celebrate Ukrainian Independence Day. “I love Ukrainian music,” she said in a German-language interview, “but I’m hearing this orchestra for the first time tonight.”This tour’s performances are taking place at an uneasy moment for Ukrainians. The war has dragged on far longer than many expected, and hopes for a quick victory, heightened by the success of Ukrainian self-defense early on, have faded. Life is lived between air raid sirens. Every week brings more bad news: friends killed fighting on the front, family members’ homes destroyed by drone strikes or rocket attacks.European solidarity, too, is shifting. Berlin is 10 hours by train from Przemysl, the Polish city near the Ukrainian border where, in the war’s first weeks, refugees poured in.Berlin citizens swung into action: operating welcome centers, bringing supplies to train stations, offering rooms in their apartments. Governments announced special visa rules for Ukrainian refugees. German lawmakers spoke of a “Zeitenwende,” an epochal change in German defense policy, and sent, if sometimes reluctantly, weapons and tanks to the Ukrainian army.At the Berlin State Opera, the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko withdrew under pressure from a new production of Puccini’s “Turandot” because she had not, the house stated, adequately distanced herself from the invasion. She had said that she opposed the war, but didn’t go as far as criticizing the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, whom she had supported in the past.Denys Karachevtsev, a cellist in the orchestra.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesNazarii Stets, a bass player.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesSolidarity is still visible, but it is also beginning to splinter. Many Germans, struggling with inflation, fuel bills and the country’s economic stagnation, are questioning the price of support. The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has been sympathetic to Putin, has surged in the polls. And classical music stages, where Russia was long a moneymaking destination, have also wavered. As the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra rehearsed last week, Netrebko was set to start rehearsals for a revival of Verdi’s “Macbeth” at the State Opera in September. (The company’s leader, Matthias Schulz, told Berlin public radio this year that Netrebko had spoken out, in his opinion, as far as she was able.)Thursday’s concert, then, was both a celebration of Ukraine’s independence and Germany’s solidarity, and part of an effort to preserve those two things. After speeches from the dignitaries, the orchestra launched into energetic, insistent Verdi, followed by a searing account of the Stankovych concerto. That piece ends with a sustained, harmonious major third in the strings, which clashes with the solo violin’s plucked minor third. The dissonance holds, softly, then fades out.The orchestra’s concert on Thursday was met with standing ovations.Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times More

The members of the Strokes tribute band Juicebox, like the crowds they draw, are predominantly Latino.On a Friday night, at the center of the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet, a large stage at this open-air California market stood in front of an expanse of picnic tables and food vendors.The swap meet, at the border of Los Angeles and Orange Counties, usually hosts tribute bands that pay homage to Rock & Roll Hall of Fame-enshrined acts like Metallica or Mexican American icons like Jenni Rivera. But that evening in March, Juicebox, Southern California’s leading Strokes tribute band, had gathered an enthusiastic, multigenerational audience ready to celebrate the group that has come to symbolize stylish downtown New York City rock in the early 2000s. There were leather jackets everywhere.Deep into the show, when the group played “50/50,” a forgotten track from the Strokes’ 2013 full-length “Comedown Machine,” a mosh pit started, earning the crowd a warning from the venue. As Juicebox left the stage after performing 47 singles, album cuts and B-sides over three sets, chants began, calling out for one more: “¡Otra! ¡Otra! ¡Otra!”The members of Juicebox, like the crowds they draw, are predominantly Latino, though the band’s founder and drummer, Jason Wise, is a 38-year-old self-described “Jewish dude” from Queens. He moved to Los Angeles in 2010 and fell in with a group of mostly Latino musicians he met through Craigslist who loved early 2000s rock bands as much as he did. Six years ago, Wise started Juicebox, which now features the lead vocalist Edgar Rene Espino, the guitarists George Campos and Renzon Sanchez and the bassist Tony Perez (who recently took over for John Leal). It usually plays twice a month, booking gigs across Southern California.Wise discovered the Strokes when he was in his midteens and they’ve been his favorite band ever since. “They are a big part of who I am as an individual and to be able to be part of spreading the fandom and the love of the Strokes to other people is something that I’m not tired of doing,” he said. “If I wasn’t in this band, I would go to these shows.”Juicebox, from left: George Campos, John Leal, Edgar Rene Espino, Jason Wise and Renzon Sanchez. Wise started the band six years ago.Saul Barrerala for The New York TimesThe Strokes themselves remain a major act in Latin America, which has a long tradition of supporting rock music. When the band performs “Reptilia” for festival crowds, it’s greeted with stadium-size fútbol chants.It’s not surprising that a place like Los Angeles County — where 49.1 percent of respondents (or more than 4.9 million people) in the 2021 census identified as Hispanic/Latino — is home to a large number of Latino Strokes fans.But Jeanette Diaz, a journalist and publicist from Los Angeles, believes that the pull of the Strokes is especially strong among the first-generation American children of immigrants, who can have complicated feelings about their identities and which culture they belong to. The band “could just do what they wanted to do and it was accepted, and a lot of people try to find that,” Diaz said. “It’s this idea of fitting in on your own terms, which a lot of Latin kids craved, maybe subconsciously.”Some members of Juicebox say they feel a closeness with the Strokes that comes partly from representation. (The drummer Fabrizio Moretti was born in Brazil, and the guitarist Albert Hammond Jr.’s mother is from Argentina.) “I see pictures of Fab and I’m like, I play soccer with that guy, he looks like someone I know,” said Sanchez, the Juicebox guitarist whose own background is half Lebanese and half El Salvadoran. “And a guy like Albert, who has big curly hair, that’s my brother. I can see myself in the Strokes.”Fans at a Juicebox show in late May.Saul Barrerala for The New York TimesThe most obvious antecedent to this fandom is the one for the Smiths, the maudlin but melodious Manchester band that broke up in 1987 but continues to enjoy a passionate following among Mexican Americans today. This relationship has been covered in articles, documentaries and books for over 20 years, and it too has inspired tribute bands, including the long-running Sweet & Tender Hooligans, fronted by Jose Maldonado, who is often called “the Mexican Morrissey.”José G. Anguiano, an associate professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, said he has seen similar phenomena in the region’s goth, metal and rockabilly worlds. “As people have moved away or they’ve aged out of certain subcultures or music scenes, it does seem like in Los Angeles, Latinos have moved in to take the reins,” he said. “What’s really cool is they’re taking the reins, not just in terms of being fans, but also fronting these tribute bands and producing their own music. They’re fully participating in every sense in these subcultures.”In 2022, the rising El Monte, Calif., band the Red Pears covered the Strokes’ “Automatic Stop” for Unquiet Live’s YouTube channel. In the video, their guitarist and vocalist, Henry Vargas, introduced the song as being by “Los Estrokes.” The Red Pears never thought it was strange that they knew so many Latino people who were into the Strokes because they all came to the group through Latino friends. But it was each band member’s individual love of the Strokes that helped bring them together and shape their sound.“In our city there was a lot of punk, ska and metal bands,” Vargas said in an interview. “We were the only ones that were branching out, trying out different stuff.”Before joining Juicebox in 2022, Espino, the band’s lead singer, was in a different Strokes tribute band for six years, but he’s never seen the real deal play live. He said he’s always been a bigger fan of the Arctic Monkeys, whose frontman, Alex Turner, famously started an album with the lyrics, “I just wanted to be one of the Strokes.”“I’m living his life right now,” Espino quipped.Sanchez, 26, is the Juicebox member most interested in re-creation. In a skinny tie or a polo shirt, he plays a white Fender Stratocaster at nearly chest-level, just like Hammond Jr. His mind was blown open by the Strokes when he was 14, after two brothers he used to be in a band with introduced him to the song “The Modern Age.”But an even younger cohort has recently embraced the Strokes through the Rick Rubin-produced album “The New Abnormal,” from 2020, which spawned a TikTok hit in “The Adults Are Talking.”“I didn’t know how they’re doing it, where they sound like they’re not trying, but they’re really trying,” Miguel Ponce, a D.J. and promoter, said of the Strokes.Saul Barrerala for The New York TimesOn a Friday night in late May, a crowd packed Knucklehead, a dive-y bar on an unglamorous block in Hollywood. Juicebox was on the bill alongside an Arctic Monkeys tribute band called Polar Primates for Room on Fire, a club night dedicated to early 2000s indie and alternative music. The Strokes’ time playing tiny New York City venues like the Mercury Lounge looms large in their history, but in reality, it lasted for barely a blip. Juicebox shows like this one let fans who were born too late or on the opposite coast reimagine themselves in that moment.During a phone interview a few days earlier, Room on Fire’s D.J. and promoter, Miguel Ponce, 29, explained that he learned about the Strokes from a friend on his high school baseball team, but it took a little time before he truly got it. “I heard the song ‘Ize of the World’ and I don’t know what it was, but all of a sudden it hit like a spark, dude,” he said. “I didn’t know how they’re doing it, where they sound like they’re not trying, but they’re really trying.”Ponce started Room on Fire in March 2022, but the early installments didn’t draw much of a crowd. After he had Juicebox play for the first time this past January, the party began to take off. “I started seeing the true potential of what I can do,” he said.Before the pandemic, Ponce used to book shows with local acts in Downtown Los Angeles. He already knew how much of an influence the Strokes had. “Most of the indie bands, they would dress like Julian Casablancas,” he said. “There’s no shame in that.” More

As a founder of the San Francisco band It’s a Beautiful Day, he was at the center, if not in the forefront, of the Haight-Ashbury acid-rock explosion.David LaFlamme, who infused the psychedelic rock of the 1960s with the plaintive sounds of an electric violin as a founder of It’s a Beautiful Day, the ethereal San Francisco band whose breakout hit, “White Bird,” encapsulated the hippie-era longing for freedom, died on Aug. 6 in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 82.His daughter Kira LaFlamme said the cause of his death, at a health care facility, was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Mr. LaFlamme had seemed an unlikely fit for the role of flower-power troubadour. He was a classically trained violinist who had performed with the Utah Symphony Orchestra. He was an Army veteran. “When I was a young man, I carried my M-1 very proudly and was ready to do my duty to defend my country,” he said in a 2007 video interview.But the times were the times, and in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love, he and his wife, Linda, a keyboardist, formed It’s a Beautiful Day. The band bubbled up from the acid-rock cauldron of the Haight-Ashbury district, which also produced the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and other groups.The band never found the commercial success of its hallowed San Francisco contemporaries. Its debut album, called simply “It’s a Beautiful Day” and released in 1969, climbed to No. 47 on the Billboard chart. “White Bird,” sung by Mr. LaFlamme and Pattie Santos, did not manage to crack the Hot 100 singles chart, perhaps in part because of its running time: more than six minutes, twice the length of most AM radio hits.Even so, the song became an FM radio staple, and an artifact of its cultural moment.The LaFlammes wrote the song in 1967, when they were living in the attic of a Victorian house during a brief relocation to Seattle. The lyrics took shape on a drizzly winter day as they peered out a window at leaves blowing on the street below.White birdIn a golden cageOn a winter’s dayIn the rain“We were like caged birds in that attic,” Mr. LaFlamme recalled. “We had no money, no transportation, the weather was miserable.”He later said the song, with its references to darkened skies and rage, was about the struggle between freedom and conformity. In an email, Linda LaFlamme said that she considered it a song of hope, and that the only rage they had felt was about the Seattle weather.Still, the song, with its pleading chorus, “White bird must fly, or she will die,” seemed to echo the mounting disillusionment of 1969, as marmalade skies turned into storm clouds with the realities of drug addiction and social turmoil, as epitomized by the bloodshed at the Altamont rock festival that year.“It was a very solemn period of music on that first album,” Mr. LaFlamme said in a 2003 interview published on the music website Exposé.“If I would have kept going that way,” he added, “I would have ended up like Jim Morrison, getting more and more into that personal torture trip.”It’s a Beautiful Day’s debut album, released in 1969, reached No. 47 on the Billboard chart. But the band never found a fraction of the commercial success of some of its fellow San Francisco bands.Columbia recordsDavid Gordon LaFlamme was born on May 4, 1941, in New Britain, Conn., the first of six children of Adelard and Norma (Winther) LaFlamme. He spent his early years in Los Angeles, where his father was a Hollywood stunt double, before settling in Salt Lake City, where his father became a copper miner.David was about 5 when he got his first violin, a hand-me-down from an aunt.“I began fooling around with it on my own and taught myself to play ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,’” he said in a 1998 interview. Formal training followed.After joining the Army — he was stationed at Fort Ord, near Monterey, Calif. — he suffered hearing damage from the firing of deafening ordnance. He ended up in a military hospital in San Francisco, then put down roots in the city after his discharge in 1962.He found lodging in the same house as his future wife, Linda Rudman. “By the second day that I was there, she and I had already written a song together,” he said.In 1967, Mr. LaFlamme formed a band called Electric Chamber Orkustra, also known as the Orkustra, with Bobby Beausoleil, a young musician who played bouzouki and would later be convicted of murder as a follower of Charles Manson. A run with Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks followed before the LaFlammes formed It’s a Beautiful Day.The band got its break in October 1968, when the promoter Bill Graham had it open for Cream in Oakland. It’s a Beautiful Day signed with Columbia Records soon after.The band’s second album, “Marrying Maiden,” rose to No. 28 on the album charts. But by then the LaFlammes had split up and his wife had left the band. (They divorced in 1969.)It’s a Beautiful Day carried on with varying lineups and released three more albums, including “At Carnegie Hall” in 1972, before disbanding a year later.In addition to his daughter Kira, from his first marriage, Mr. LaFlamme is survived by his third wife, Linda (Baker) LaFlamme, whom he married in 1982; his sisters, Gloria LaFlamme, Michelle Haag and Diane Petersen; his brothers, Lon and Dorian; another daughter, Alisha LaFlamme, from his marriage to Sharon Wilson, which ended in divorce in 1973; and six grandchildren.Mr. LaFlamme released several albums over the years, including a solo album in the mid-1970s called “White Bird,” which included a disco-ready version of the original single. It actually outperformed the original, peaking at No. 89 on the Billboard Hot 100.But, he said in 1998, “It was a very difficult period musically, because during that period disco music ruled the earth.”“It was really the day the music died,” he said. More

The famed Amateur Night at the Apollo enters its 89th year, and audiences are as outspoken as ever. More