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      How ‘Insomniac’ Became an a Cappella Sensation

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      Few people were aware of the 1994 single “Insomniac” by the rock duo Billy Pilgrim, and it quickly sank into obscurity. But a cappella groups can’t stop singing it. We set out to find an explanation.In high school, I joined Rebel Yell, an a cappella group named after the Billy Idol song. I mostly beatboxed or sang background vocals. But one year, my chorus teacher gave me a lead vocal.It was on a song called “Insomniac,” by a folk rock duo called Billy Pilgrim. Our audiences didn’t know the song before we sang it. None of us did, which made it an odd choice for contemporary a cappella, where most of the songs performed are big hits. I didn’t realize until years later that groups all across the country were singing this song, without knowing anything about the original version.But why?Billy Pilgrim performing in the early 1990s. Two students at Emory University, Kristian Bush and Andrew Hyra, formed Billy Pilgrim in the early 1990s, and their self-titled major record label debut came in 1994. “Insomniac” was released as a single, but never charted. The band, named for the lead character in the Kurt Vonnegut Jr. novel “Slaughterhouse-Five,” didn’t collect much acclaim either.The duo stopped playing together in 2000. Bush formed Sugarland with Jennifer Nettles, and his music career took off. Hyra became a carpenter.However, the strangest thing happened with “Insomniac.”It took on a life of its own. For almost three decades, the song has been a staple of a cappella groups all over the country at all levels, whether high school, colleges, professional groups or otherwise.Go on YouTube, and you’ll find countless performances of the song through the years. A sampling: The professional group Straight No Chaser. Ow! at Glenbrook North High School. Section 8 at Ohio University.Amid the roster of popular songs typically selected by a cappella groups, “Insomniac” stands out as an unusual favorite. Alex Kaplan, a 20-year-old junior at Wesleyan University, said he performed the song with his group, the Wesleyan Spirits, “a couple days ago.”“It’s not uncommon for the occasional song to sort of gain a foothold in the a cappella community if it’s got particular qualities that lend themselves well to performance,” Kaplan said. “‘Insomniac’ is a weird one because it’s, with maybe one or two exceptions, just about the most unknown song that I’ve seen multiple a cappella groups do.”It is a melancholy, guitar-driven love song, with lines like, “I can hear your bare feet on the kitchen floor/I don’t have to have these dreams no more.”The recording begins with a wailing Hammond organ and the middle of the song has a musical interlude, which extends into a jam of sorts. Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls sings background vocals on the Billy Pilgrim version.“I was looking for a girlfriend,” Bush, the song’s writer, said.The path for “Insomniac” becoming ubiquitous in the a cappella world began before the record was even released.Sheet music for “Insomniac.”Billy PilgrimIn the early 1990s, a cappella — singing without instrumental accompaniment, with the sheer power of the human voice — was changing.Groups like Rockapella and The Nylons were ushering in a new mainstream approach, different from the traditional barbershop quartet style of many predominantly white male groups of the time. This newer style of performance meant that every instrument on a given song was accounted for. Drums would be represented by beatboxing, guitar strums and piano chords represented by rhythmic vocal approximations.Deke Sharon, an a cappella-obsessed student at Tufts University, also helped pioneer the shift, particularly on college campuses. As musical director for the Beelzebubs, the Tufts group, he encouraged previously unperformed arrangements of pop songs. After graduating in 1991, Sharon aimed to make a career spreading the gospel of a cappella.“Everybody laughed,” he said. They said, “You can’t make a career out of a cappella,’” but he said he told them: “It’s so wonderful. If people only knew, they would literally fall in love.”Deke Sharon was part of a shift to a new style of a cappella where every instrument was accounted for. He started compiling the best performances from college campuses.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesThere wasn’t much recorded a cappella before that, except for occasional exceptions like Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy” or the Huey Lewis and the News cover of “It’s Alright.”Sharon formed a nonprofit called the Contemporary A Cappella Society, with the aim of popularizing this new, more modern form of vocalizing through a cappella festivals, awards shows and networking events for enthusiasts.He also had an idea. Back then, college groups had no way of spreading their music beyond campuses. There was no YouTube or Spotify. The web had yet to arrive, and even email was uncommon.Using a meticulously crafted database of groups that he had compiled in his dorm room, Sharon started taking submissions for “Best Of College A Cappella” compilation albums. Groups that made the cut would be on a compact disc that they could sell at shows. They could buy them from for $5 and sell them at shows for $15. Suddenly, a performance from, say, Rutgers University, could be available at Boston College.It was around this time that John Craig Fennell, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, joined the Virginia Gentlemen, an all-male offshoot of the Virginia Glee Club. Working at a summer camp in New Jersey, a co-worker handed him the newly released Billy Pilgrim debut.“You hear those first few squeezebox notes on the Billy Pilgrim track,” Fennell said. “I love it. it was immediately compelling.”An arrangement made by John Craig Fennell for the Virginia Gentlemen at the University of Virginia assigned vocal parts to all singers.John FennellHe saw an opportunity to take advantage of the shift in a cappella and stretch the abilities of the Virginia Gentlemen. He painstakingly transcribed the arrangement by hand — how most arranging was done back then — with voices emulating the sounds of the guitar and organ: “JUM-BUH-DUH, JUM-BUH-DUH.”The arrangement marked one the first times that all 14 members of the Virginia Gentlemen had their own vocal part on a song, he said.They submitted their recording to Sharon, who liked it enough to put it on one of the first “Best Of College A Cappella” albums in the mid-1990s.From there, the record hit campuses and the arrangement began to spread the old-fashioned way: word of mouth.Other groups copied the arrangement by ear. A member of the Wesleyan Spirits who had performed a version in high school brought it to the Spirits. That arrangement made its way to the Vineyard Sound, a group based on Martha’s Vineyard. Similar arrangements were performed at the University of Rochester and Plymouth State.“This song is what made me fall in love with my group,” Michelle Shankar, who was part of the Dartmouth Dodecaphonics from 2008 to 2012, said. “They open almost every show with this piece. It’s high energy, super upbeat, at least the a cappella version of it is. And it just starts with this wall of sound — that really high belt that’s like, ‘Whoaaa!’, and that just became an iconic line.”Many of the singers interviewed about the song could not help but sing a few bars, unprompted.Straight No Chaser during a performance. Its members have been singing “Insomniac” since it was a college group at Indiana University in the 1990s.Ashley White“It’s a perfect storm that is specific to ‘Insomniac,’” Walter Chase, a founding member of Straight No Chaser, said.Chase arranged a version after hearing it off the compilation album for the group in the mid-1990s, when it was still a college group at Indiana University: “When you’re a college student and one of the main purposes you do a cappella for is to sing for girls, to get attention and to be able to croon, the soloists’ material is this very heady love song.”On an annual retreat in New Orleans around 2000, the Wesleyan Spirits performed the song at a bar during the day. The bartender informed the group that it just so happened that Bush, the song’s writer, happened to be performing that same night. The Spirits returned that evening and Bush invited the group onstage to sing his song.“I remember trying to play it, and it was very square,” Bush said, laughing. “You can’t really play guitar to it.”Kristian Bush of Billy Pilgrim wrote the song “Insomniac” and performed it for the first time in 1994 with Andrew Hyra. The song became a staple for a cappella groups, despite it not being a hit itself.Elliot Liss for The New York TimesStill, Bush and Hyra had little awareness of the niche hit they had created. Hyra first realized it about a decade ago when he was sitting at a hotel in Martha’s Vineyard with his family, including his sister, the actress Meg Ryan.The Vineyard Sound were nearby and began to sing “Insomniac.”“I was like, ‘Holy cow!’” Hyra said.Ryan, who still calls herself Billy Pilgrim’s No. 1 fan, said she couldn’t believe her ears.“I’m not a singer, but I can always sing along with that song,” the actress said. “They always seem to write these songs that kind of give poetry to something very universal.”With the help of movies like “Pitch Perfect” and the former NBC show “The Sing-Off,” a cappella has gone more mainstream. Production values are higher, and transcription is easier using software. But the Virginia Gentlemen’s arrangement of “Insomniac” remains a constant.Billy Pilgrim reunited during the pandemic. The band has never made any money off the covers, but the song’s spread has left them elated. At concerts, “Insomniac” is their most requested song, Bush said. They even perform a new version.“Maybe that song should have been a big hit,” Hyra says.Bush finds the whole phenomenon delightful.“The music business is a whole series of ‘You’re already failing,’” he said, adding, “Every once in a while, something shows up and it ties a little balloon to your belt loop and suddenly you’re a little lighter, you know? And I think that’s what this does for me.” More

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      Linda Sharrock Has Lost Her Speech, but She’s Still Performing

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      Linda Sharrock, an avant-garde jazz musician who became aphasic after a 2009 stroke, has returned to the stage and inspired new generations.Last April, the Vienna-based avant-garde jazz vocalist Linda Sharrock gave her first New York performance in over 40 years: a sold-out concert at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, as part of a series curated by Solange. Appearing between the poet Claudia Rankine and the saxophonist Archie Shepp, Sharrock guided eight musicians through a fully improvised set while she howled powerfully over the cacophonous squall of free jazz in a declamatory style that evoked the evening’s program title, “The Cry of My People.”It wasn’t until after she’d received multiple standing ovations that most of the audience realized the 76-year-old singer wasn’t able to speak: Sharrock became aphasic after a 2009 stroke that paralyzed her right side; she now uses a wheelchair. A few weeks later at the Cambridge, Mass., home of the pianist Eric Zinman, who plays in her group the Linda Sharrock Network, Sharrock was unable to verbalize much more than “yeah,” “no,” “OK” and “I don’t know.”Despite her limited dialogical abilities, Sharrock was cheerful, charming and quick to laughter. Much of the talking was done by her caregiver — Mario Rechtern, an 81-year-old Austrian free jazz saxophonist who has, by his account, overseen her personal affairs and daily activities for the last 20 years. He not only plays in her band, he helps her dress, feeds her if necessary and carries her down the stairs.“This work with Linda is consuming,” Rechtern said, tugging at his woolly gray beard, “and at the same time, I cannot give in to the consuming, because when I give in, she’s lost. So it’s challenging.”Sharrock’s return to the stage — a manifestation of her stubborn refusal to be silenced — is one of the most stirring comeback stories in recent memory. Over a career stretching six decades, Sharrock has been a resolutely singular figure; almost no peers share her uniquely unorthodox vocal delivery. Too “out” for jazz’s in-crowd, she was relegated to relative obscurity. Yet her commitment to challenging her audience has ultimately made her a role model for experimental vocalists and Black female performers, providing a beacon of tantalizing possibilities.The poet and vocalist Camae Ayewa, who performs as Moor Mother, recalled hearing Sharrock’s music for the first time and “losing my mind,” she said in an interview. “I wrote a little poem about this because it was such urgency on my part to be like, ‘What is going on here? This is where I want to go! This is what I want to sound like!’ I hadn’t heard anyone before that had inspired me this way besides Betty Carter. I just started to be obsessed about it.”Sharrock’s vocal exclamations have become deeper and more guttural moans than the high-pitched shrieks of her early work with her then-husband, the musician Sonny Sharrock. In the late 1960s, Sonny revolutionized jazz guitar through volume, distortion and feedback while playing with Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, Wayne Shorter and Miles Davis. Linda’s approach was no less radical: On three albums of collaborations with Sonny, beginning with their remarkable 1969 debut “Black Woman,” her wordless exhortations included psychedelic sighs, orgasmic yodels and blood-chilling screams, all delivered with an intensity that made “Plastic Ono Band”-era Yoko Ono sound like Anne Murray in comparison.“I’ve never listened to any kind of a female jazz singer for any kind of inspiration or anything like that,” Sharrock said in a 1973 WKCR radio interview. “I was influenced by horn players,” she explained, citing incendiary saxophonists like Sanders and Albert Ayler.“The thing that killed me about her singing was that she was, if not the first, one of the few jazz singers who improvise,” Sonny said in the same WKCR conversation. “That’s one of the reasons she doesn’t use words: because it hinders your improvisation.”Sharrock was born Linda Chambers in Philadelphia, and lived with her grandmother and her younger brother, Pablo, in the working class Germantown neighborhood, according to Jacquelyn Bullock, a longtime friend and former neighbor. In an interview, she said that despite Sharrock’s confrontational vocal approach, offstage “she was quiet and demure,” with an interest in fashion and a distinctive sense of style. “She’s a gracious woman. Like most women, she likes nice things, and she has a great sense of humor.”Sharrock moved to New York after graduating from high school in 1965 with the intention to study painting, but soon became immersed in the Lower East Side’s jazz scene, where her inaugural professional gig was singing with Sanders. When she first began performing, she shaved off her eyebrows and kept her hair close-cropped, she told The New York Times Magazine in 1975. “It was the strangest look I could conceive of,” she said. “My life had taken such a drastic change, I wanted to present it physically.”She met Sonny through Sanders, and they married in 1967. Earnings for most free jazz musicians were lean, but that year, Sonny got the opportunity to work with the commercially successful jazz-funk flutist Herbie Mann, and spent most of the next seven years playing in his group. Linda went on tour with them and eventually joined the band, usually performing two of the couple’s compositions each night, “Black Woman” and “Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black.”The Sharrocks lived in an apartment at 77 East 3rd Street in the East Village; the pianist Dave Burrell was a neighbor and hosted rehearsals for the 1969 “Black Woman” album in his tiny living room. Burrell recalled in an interview that hearing Sharrock sing for the first time, “I felt a bolt of excitement,” he said. “I thought of her as a vocalist who could throw herself into the ‘Black is beautiful’ moment and movement, and that made her one of the boys, so having her around was cool.”Another “Black Woman” musician, the trumpeter Ted Daniel, was a childhood friend of Sonny’s from Ossining, N.Y. “She was one of a kind,” Daniel said in an interview. “I haven’t heard anybody sing with the raw passion and just that kind of freedom that she approached in her singing with Sonny in that band.”Released on the Vortex subsidiary of Atlantic Records, the trailblazing “Black Woman” failed to find a larger audience. A few years later, the couple put together the Savages, a working band that could play out regularly. The group included steel drums and Latin percussion and gigged at downtown venues like the Tin Palace and lofts like Studio Rivbea, said Abe Speller, the band’s drummer. The Savages recorded a soundtrack to Sedat Pakay’s 1973 short documentary “James Baldwin: From Another Place” and performed a live set in 1974 on WKCR, which are the only surviving souvenirs of their existence. Speller recalled the band holing up to rehearse before entering a studio in December 1977 to record a four-song demo tape, but the group failed to score a label deal and eventually fizzled out.After Linda and Sonny divorced, she moved to Turkey and then Vienna, where she met her second husband, the Austrian saxophonist Wolfgang Puschnig, a few years later. (Sonny died in 1994 at 53.) Initially they were just musical collaborators, Puschnig said in a video call from his home in southern Austria, but a relationship blossomed and they were married in 1987 while in Mozambique for a gig.Under their own names and in groups like the Pat Brothers, AM4 and Red Sun, Puschnig and Sharrock recorded more than 20 albums together on European and South Korean labels from 1986 to 2007, but her vocal approach had changed markedly. Puschnig said that she moved away from singing in her free style after consulting a former Ziegfeld girl turned palm reader, who told her, “I see you’re a singer, but you don’t use words, but you should because you have a talent to use words.”“So that’s how she started to do lyrics,” he said.The jazz fusion bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma performed with them for years, and produced “On Holiday,” Sharrock’s 1990 album of Billie Holiday covers, complete with new jack swing beats and a rapper. “She was pushing the ball,” Tacuma said in an interview, “thinking outside of the box, in terms of music, creativity, and improvisation, and trying to bring something about musically with her voice that had not been done before.”Puschnig said Sharrock’s health started to deteriorate in the mid-1990s, and though their romantic relationship ended around 1996, they continued working together as late as 2007. Around 2004, Rechtern — who had first met Sharrock in 1979 — began caring for her, and was granted power of attorney in 2007. “She was really falling into the nothingness,” Rechtern said. “If I wouldn’t have taken her she would be in a home.”During surgery for an intestinal blockage in 2009, Sharrock suffered her stroke, and spent the following two years in and out of the hospital. In 2012 she was visited in Austria by the jazz bassist Henry Grimes. “She was sitting on the couch while he played,” Rechtern recalled, “and I heard her very softly singing into the music.”Intrigued, Rechtern began gradually coaxing Sharrock to perform again. “She started to develop first this growl sound, this cry, because she couldn’t articulate,” he said. “Out of the blues and this typical sound, she found this explosion.”Beginning with “No Is No” in 2014, Sharrock has released five recordings in Europe since her stroke. Her recent music is more in the spirit of the free jazz she made with Sonny than her somewhat more conventional work with Puschnig, though her vocal range is understandably not the same.Sharrock responded affirmatively when asked if she had needed to sing and perform again, and when asked if she felt better while onstage, she cracked up laughing.“This music is healing for her,” Rechtern replied. “There’s no doubt.”Sharrock’s work and perseverance has inspired a new generation of artists. “So much of it doesn’t have lyrics,” Taja Cheek, who performs as L’Rain, said in an interview, “and isn’t easy to understand in a certain kind of way, but I understood it, and I felt it so viscerally when I first heard her that it got very emotional for me.”On a recent re-listen of “Black Woman,” Cheek said, “it sort of hit me like a ton of bricks that ‘Oh, Linda Sharrock is the lineage I might be a part of.’ I am able to do what I’m doing, and it can be met with a little bit of understanding, because Linda has already done something like this.”Sharrock’s resiliency has resonated with her old colleagues, as well. “It is very telling about the heart of a performing artist wanting to be able to do that until it’s completely impossible,” Burrell said, “another further dimension of the determination that she still has, no matter what the circumstances. I’m very proud of her.” More

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      Klee Benally, Navajo Activist and Artist, Dies at 48

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      He helped found a punk-rock band when he was 14. That led to a long career as an advocate for Native American and environmental causes.Klee Benally, a dynamic Navajo activist, artist and punk-rock musician who championed Native American and environmental causes, died on Dec. 30 in Phoenix. He was 48.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his sister, Jeneda Benally. She did not specify the cause.For decades, Mr. Benally, who lived in Flagstaff, Ariz., fought the expansion of the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort on one of the San Francisco Peaks, a mountain range just north of Flagstaff that 13 tribes consider sacred. He also fought the resort’s use of treated wastewater to make snow, a practice that Native Americans and environmental groups said was poisoning the ecosystem. He protested against a pumice mine on those same peaks, and against uranium mining and transport in the area.He campaigned for the rights and care of Indigenous homeless people and against racial profiling. He made films and art about his activism.He was a community organizer and a youth counselor; he taught media literacy and film to Indigenous teenagers; and he marched against the celebration of Thanksgiving. Late last year he published a book, “No Spiritual Surrender,” about his efforts practicing what he called Indigenous anarchy, and he created a board game, “Burn the Fort,” in which Native American warriors fight off colonizers (and learn some history while doing so).He chained himself to an excavator, was charged with trespassing and joined numerous legal complaints.But his first foray into activism was through music, in 1989. He was 14 when he and his siblings, Jeneda and Clayson, formed Blackfire, a high-velocity punk band that mixed traditional Navajo chants and music with protest songs about the oppression of Indigenous people.Mr. Benally embraced the middle-finger-to-the-world punk ethos — he loved the Ramones, whose music he introduced to his mother, a folk singer — and he could really shred a guitar. The Ramones loved Blackfire back: C.J. Ramone produced the band’s first EP, “Spirit in Action” (1994), and Joey Ramone sang on two of the songs on “One Nation Under” (2002), its first full-length album.Critics were admiring, too. In 2007, David Fricke of Rolling Stone touted Blackfire’s fourth album, “[Silence] Is a Weapon,” as “pure ire, CBGB-hardcore-matinee protest with jolts of ancient chorale.”The band played at South by Southwest and other music festivals but declined to play in bars, at least at first. Mr. Benally thought it would be hypocritical, given that alcohol abuse was an issue on reservations. In addition, at the time the Benally siblings were all under 21.“Some people watch too many movies and think John Wayne killed all the Indians or they’re out dancing with wolves,” he told The Albuquerque Journal in 2003, explaining Blackfire’s mission to educate audiences. “But in reality there are over 500 nations throughout the U.S. carrying on their cultures, their own individual ways of life, their own languages and their own ceremonies.”Mr. Benally in 2005. He spent decades protesting the expansion of a ski resort on a mountain range that 13 tribes consider sacred.Jill Torrance/Arizona Daily Sun, via Associated PressKlee Jones Benally was born on Oct. 6, 1975, in Black Mesa, Ariz., on the Navajo reservation near Flagstaff. Music and activism ran in the family. Klee’s father, Jones Benally, is a traditional Diné (as the Navajo call themselves) medicine man; his mother, Berta Benally, is an activist and folk musician of Russian-Polish Jewish heritage who grew up in the folk scene of Greenwich Village. The couple met in Los Angeles, where she was working with Hopi elders.Klee and his siblings were brought up with their father’s Diné traditions, and they grew up performing traditional dances. Their mother introduced them to the folk canon; Blackfire would later set some of Woody Guthrie’s poems to music. The area where they lived was part of a land dispute that forced the relocation of thousands of Navajo people, and attending protests became a family affair.In addition to his sister and his parents, Mr. Benally is survived by his wife, Princess Benally, and his brother.Blackfire went on hiatus after two decades, mostly so the Benally siblings could concentrate more directly on advocacy and activism.Mr. Benally often framed his environmental work in terms of religious freedom. “As Indigenous people in the so-called United States, we don’t have guarantees for our religious freedoms like the rest of you,” he told The Arizona Republic in 2013. “This is a struggle for cultural survival — the struggle to protect sacred spaces.”Mr. Benally was a local hero in Flagstaff, where he founded a number of community organizations and aid groups. He was both angry and pragmatic; he liked to say that everyone was indigenous to somewhere.“He was a powerhouse of anticolonial thought and action — ever ready to protect the land,” Dallas Goldtooth, a Native American activist and actor, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.Mr. Benally explained his worldview in a 2020 interview with Spirituality Health magazine: “As an artist, there’s no dichotomy between art and life with our traditional teachings as Diné people. There’s no separation; our life is creation. So our creative expression comes in many different ways. What I look at is: What are the issues facing our communities, and what strategies can be most effective? Is it going to be through song? Is it going to be through prayer or action? Or can it be all of them?” More

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      Norby Walters, 91, Dies; Music and Sports Agent Who Ran Afoul of the Law

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      He ran a highly successful booking agency, but his secret contacts with college athletes led to convictions (later reversed) for racketeering and fraud.Norby Walters, a booking agent for some of the country’s top disco, R&B, funk and hip-hop artists whose aggressive leap in the 1980s into signing college athletes to secret contracts before they turned pro led to legal problems, died on Dec. 10 in Burbank, Calif. He was 91.His son Gary confirmed the death, at an assisted living facility.Mr. Walters found his footing in show business through his ownership of restaurants, pizzerias, mambo joints and nightclubs, including the Norby Walters Supper Club on the East Side of Manhattan, near the Copacabana, which he opened in 1966.He walked away from the club business two years later after a customer at the supper club, shot two mobsters dead in front of about 50 people.“Everybody hit the floor,” Mr. Walters told The New York Times in 2016. “And this guy was very calm about it. He sat down at the bar, put the pistol down and waited to be taken.”Mr. Walters closed the club soon after.He switched to booking musical acts into nightclubs, lounges and hotels, which proved lucrative. Over the next two decades, the client list of Norby Walters Associates (later called General Talent International) included Gloria Gaynor, Dionne Warwick, Patti LaBelle, Parliament-Funkadelic, the Commodores, Luther Vandross, the Four Tops, Run-DMC, Kool & the Gang, Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy.In the early 1980s, Mr. Walters glimpsed a new opportunity in the top tier of college football players. With a partner, Lloyd Bloom, he established World Sports & Entertainment. From 1984 to 1987, the two men signed dozens of athletes to secret contracts that included inducements like cash, loans and cars in exchange for giving their agency exclusive rights to handle their future negotiations with N.F.L. teams, according to the 1988 federal indictment against them.Most of the inducements violated National Collegiate Athletic Association regulations and would have rendered the athletes ineligible to compete had their schools known about them. But Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom said their lawyers had assured them that the contracts were legal even if the players were still with their college teams.The indictment charged Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom with conspiring with the athletes to conceal the payments by having them agree to postdated contracts that appeared to have been signed after their last collegiate games.“The crime alleged that he conspired with students to steal their educations, which was preposterous, since the schools had little concern about whether they got an education,” Gary Walters said in a phone interview. He added, “Norby wasn’t doing anything different in the sports business than he did in the music business: giving fair compensation to players who had been denied it.”The government also charged that the contracts were backed by threats of violence, some involving the mobster Michael Franzese, a member of the Colombo crime family. When most of the athletes decided they did not want Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom to represent them but kept the cars and the money anyway, the indictment accused them of threatened to have their legs broken and threatened their families with physical harm.Gary Walters said his father denied having threatened anyone and also denied that Mr. Franzese had any involvement in his sports business.Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom were convicted of mail fraud and racketeering in 1989. Mr. Walters was sentenced to five years in prison and Mr. Bloom to three, but neither served a day.An appeals court reversed the racketeering convictions in 1990, ruling that the trial judge had not instructed the jury that the two men’s actions had been guided by their lawyers’ advice that the signings were legal.In 1993, the mail fraud convictions were also overturned.“Walters is by all accounts a nasty and untrustworthy fellow,” Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote in the 1993 ruling, “but the prosecutor did not prove that his efforts to circumvent the N.C.A.A.’s rules amounted to mail fraud.”Mr. Bloom was shot to death at his home in Malibu, Calif., later that year.By then, Mr. Walters had retired from his music and sports businesses, which had been damaged by the federal investigation, and remade himself as the host of celebrity parties and poker games.Norbert Meyer was born on April 20, 1932, in Brooklyn. His father, Yosele Chezchonovitch, a Polish immigrant, served in the Army (where he changed his name to Joseph Meyer) during World War I and later became a diamond courier and the owner of a nightclub in Brooklyn and a sideshow attraction at Coney Island. His mother, Florence (Golub) Meyer, was a homemaker.“I traveled all over the country with my father’s freak shows,” Mr. Walters told The Daily News of New York in 1987. “It was all a scam. There were no freaks, the alligator boy was a poor fellow with a horrible skin condition, the girl with no body was done with mirrors, the turtle girl was a dwarf with a costume.”Norby studied business at Brooklyn College from 1950 to 1951 and served in the Army until 1953. He and his brother, Walter, took over their father’s club that year and renamed it Norby & Walter’s Bel Air.On opening night, when Norby greeted customers by saying, “Hello, I’m Norby,” some responded by asking, “Oh are you Norby Walters?” When the brothers stepped outside, they saw that the neon sign outside the club did not have the necessary ampersand. It said, “Norby Walters Bel Air Club.”“I’ve been Norby Walters ever since,” he told The Atlanta Constitution in 1987. “My brother hated me for it.” His brother, who became known as Walter B. Walters, died in 2004.Norby Walters carried the name — which he eventually changed legally — through his restaurant, club, music and sports careers, and into his final chapter.From 1990 to 2017, he organized an annual Oscar viewing party, which he called Night of 100 Stars, in hotel ballrooms in Beverly Hills. It drew stars like Jon Voight, Shirley Jones, Charles Bronson, Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau. He was also the host of a regular poker party at his condos in Southern California, where the regulars included Milton Berle, Bryan Cranston, Richard Lewis, Jason Alexander, James Woods, Charles Durning, Mimi Rogers and Alex Trebek.The final chapter of Mr. Walters’s life included a regular celebrity poker party. At one such party, the attendees included (standing, from left) his wife, Irene; his son Gary; the actors Dan Lauria, Lou Diamond Phillips and Bruce Davison; and Mr. Walters himself, as well as (seated) the actors Ed Asner, Mimi Rogers, Jason Alexander, James Woods and Kristanna Loken.via Walters Family“It was $2 a hand,” Robert Wuhl, the actor and comedian, said by phone. “So the most anybody lost was $250 and the most anybody won was $300 to $400. It was all about the kibitzing. Buddy Hackett would come to kibitz.”The Oscar party was not as hot a ticket as those hosted by Vanity Fair magazine or Elton John, but it was more accessible. In 2016, for $1,000 a seat or $25,000 for a V.I.P. table package, a civilian without show business credentials could be admitted and hang out with celebrities.In addition to his son Gary, Mr. Walters is survived by two other sons, Steven and Richard. His wife, Irene (Solowitz) Walters, died in 2022.Nearly 30 years after his legal problems caused him to retire, Mr. Walters said he understood his place in the Hollywood pantheon.“As I always say to my wife,” he told The Times in 2016, a few days before his penultimate Oscar party, “‘I used to be important.’” More

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      Channeling the Pain of Chinese Immigrants, in Music and Verse

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      “Angel Island,” an oratorio by Huang Ruo, brings to life the stark poetry of Chinese detained on the California island in the first part of the 20th century.In “Angel Island,” a staged oratorio about the anguish and isolation of Chinese detainees at Angel Island Immigration Station in California, a choir recites a poem about tyranny and misfortune.“Like a stray dog forced into confinement, like a pig trapped in a bamboo cage, our spirits are lost in this wintry prison,” they sing in Chinese. “We are worse than horses and cattle. Our tears shed on an icy day.”The poem is one of more than 200 inscribed on barrack walls at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, where hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from China and Japan, were questioned and held — sometimes for months or even years — as they sought entry to the United States in the first part of the 20th century. Their harrowing accounts form the emotional core of “Angel Island,” by the Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo, which has its New York premiere this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a staging that is part of the opera and theater festival Prototype.The production, directed by Matthew Ozawa and featuring the Del Sol Quartet and members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, shines light on life at Angel Island, the port of entry for many Asian immigrants from 1910 to 1940, whose punishing atmosphere stood in contrast to the more welcoming spirit of Ellis Island.Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, in 1949.San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers, via Getty ImagesOfficials examine Japanese immigrants on a ship at Angel Island in 1931.Corbis HistoricalThe oratorio also tackles the legacy of injustice and discrimination against people of Asian descent in America, weaving in historical events, including the 1871 massacre of Chinese residents in Los Angeles and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the immigration of laborers from China.Huang described “Angel Island” as activist art, saying he wanted to “give people history that they didn’t learn in school.”“This is not just a Chinese American story,” he said. “This is an American story.”The oratorio, which premiered on Angel Island in 2021, comes to the stage at a time of heightened concern about the treatment of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States, following the wave of violence against people of Asian descent during the early years of the coronavirus pandemic.“Angel Island” hints at parallels between past and present — highlighting, for example, racist portrayals of Asians as carriers of disease in the late 1800s, a precursor to the pandemic’s xenophobia and the use of the “Chinese virus” label to describe Covid-19.In Ozawa’s staging, the dancer Jie-Hung Connie Shiau plays a modern-day woman who uncovers artifacts explaining her great-grandmother’s immigration to the United States. Through film and movement, she immerses herself in the world of her ancestors.The composer Huang Ruo at a recent rehearsal of “Angel Island.” “This is not just a Chinese American story,” he said. “This is an American story.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOzawa, who is Japanese American, said that taking part in “Angel Island,” which features a largely Asian American cast and creative team, was difficult because of the rawness of the history. But the work could also be uplifting.“It’s painful to be reminded of racism and prejudice and exclusion, but simultaneously it is very cathartic to be open with it and to allow ourselves to feel what our ancestors have felt and know that we’re not alone,” he said. “We are actually part of a much larger story that is filled with hope, redemption and the power to change things.”Huang and the Del Sol Quartet, which is based in San Francisco, began working on “Angel Island” in 2017, when they received a $150,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation to create an oratorio about the detainees. The immigrants, who came from China, Japan, India, Russia and elsewhere, faced overcrowded and unsanitary conditions at Angel Island. They were typically held for weeks or months, though some were detained for as long as two years. Ultimately, many were deported.Charlton Lee, a Chinese American violist in the quartet, had pitched the idea of an Angel Island project to Huang, who had previously collaborated with Del Sol, including on chamber performances of Huang’s music ahead of the American premiere of his first opera, “Dr. Sun Yat-sen,” in 2014. Lee, who had been impressed by Huang’s ability to set Chinese text to music, said he thought the history of Angel Island had been neglected.“We’re staring at Angel Island all the time — it’s in the middle of the bay — but people don’t know about the detention center,” he said. “They don’t know about the plight of these immigrants who were trying to come here, start a new life and were just stuck.”Members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street rehearsing in Brooklyn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn 2018, Huang and the quartet visited the island, now a state park. They examined the poems, written in classical Chinese, in which detainees described feelings of anger, fear and homesickness. They began to improvise inside the barracks, with members of the quartet accompanying Huang as he sang a melody in Chinese.“Being in that spot — it was haunting,” he said, “but it was also heartwarming to bring something alive back to a place that was so dead.”Huang selected a few poems to set to music: “The Seascape,” “When We Bade Farewell” and “Buried Beneath Clay and Earth.” He added in historical writings to be read aloud with accompaniment by the quartet. These included a discussion of the Los Angeles massacre in 1871, when a mob shot or hanged at least 18 Chinese residents; a list of questions used by American immigration officials in the late 1800s to assess whether Asian women were prostitutes; and an essay by Henry Josiah West from 1873 warning of a “Chinese invasion.”“The question” West wrote, “is shall we submit to the growth of this heathen Chinese Republic?”In 2021, after a yearlong delay caused by the pandemic, Huang and the Del Sol Quartet returned to Angel Island for the premiere.Lee said it was jarring to hear the music in the barracks, which he had seen as dark and foreboding.“It felt like the spirits were just coming out of the walls,” he said. “It’s almost like we performed some kind of ritual and all of a sudden these people who had suffered — they were able to smile.”Immigrants arriving at Angel Island’s quarantine station around 1911.Fotosearch/Getty ImagesSince then, “Angel Island” has been performed several more times, including in Berkeley, Calif., Washington and Singapore.Huang has recently expanded the piece, adding another poem, “The Ocean Encircles a Lone Peak,” and a movement about Fang Lang, a Chinese survivor of the Titanic shipwreck who was barred from entering the United States because of the Exclusion Act.The New York production is the first full staging of “Angel Island.” Dancers are featured throughout, and film plays an important role, with historical footage and videos of Angel Island, shot by Bill Morrison, projected on screens. Choir members mimic carving Chinese characters and poems.“This is really the manifestation of a community,” Ozawa said. “You want the audience fully immersed and to experience a sense of hypnotic ritualism.”And, he added, he would like the story to resonate with a broad audience.“Angel Island is still living and breathing within the bodies of so many Asian Americans,” he said. “My true hope is that we all recall, connect and learn from our personal heritage, our past, our ancestor’s experience coming to America, but also feel empowered by the material to ignite discourse, empathy and understanding toward those newly coming into the country.”The director Matthew Ozawa, center, said: “This is really the manifestation of a community. You want the audience fully immersed and to experience a sense of hypnotic ritualism.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe detainees’ poems remain at the center of “Angel Island” and give the work its spiritual grounding.Huang, who came to the United States as a student in the 1990s, stopping first in San Francisco, said he could relate to many of the poems.“There is that same feeling of what it means to leave your family behind,” he said, “and of coming to a place in hopes of a new life and not knowing what is ahead of you.”At the end of “Angel Island,” members of the choir leave the stage and encircle the audience, a gesture meant to help them feel part of the community of detainees.The final poem in the oratorio describes leaving Angel Island and preparing to return home. It speaks of jingwei, a mythological bird that tries to fill the sea with twigs and stones:Obstacles have been put in my way for half a year,Melancholy and hate gather on my face.Now that I must return to my country,I have toiled like the jingwei bird in vain. More

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      Overlooked No More: Cordell Jackson, Elder Stateswoman of Rock ’n’ Roll

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      This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.When Cordell Jackson’s long and mostly obscure musical career intersected briefly with American pop culture in the early 1990s (coinciding with her appearance in a popular beer commercial, in which she showed the guitarist Brian Setzer a few tricks), it was almost as if she had stepped out of a dream: grandma, resplendent in a shiny ball gown and bouffant, peering through her old-lady glasses while ferociously rocking out on a cherry red electric guitar, amp cranked up to 10.Even if we had never seen or heard Jackson before, she seemed to reside in the dusty bric-a-brac of our country’s collective unconscious: one of rock ’n’ roll’s forgotten pioneers, Cordell Jackson had been making music for more than half a century.Cordell Miller was born on July 15, 1923, to William and Stella Miller in Pontotoc, Miss., a small city once known as a hide-out for Jesse James’s gang of outlaws in the 19th century. She took an early interest in music-making, learning to play banjo, piano, upright bass and harmonica.By age 12, she was sitting in with her father’s string band, the Pontotoc Ridge Runners. “When I picked up the guitar, I could see it in their eyes: ‘Little girls don’t play guitar,’” she later recalled. “I looked right at ’em and said, ‘I do.’”Jackson moved through a variety of jobs, including interior decorator and D.J. on an all-female radio station, while waiting for her music career to take off.Jackson always claimed that she had been rocking out well before the men who would make rock ‘n’ roll famous. “If what I’m doing now is rock ‘n’ roll or rockabilly or whatever,” she told the newspaper The Tulsa World in 1992, “then I was doing it when Elvis was a 1-year-old. That’s just a fact.”Or, as she told Cornfed magazine: “Whatever song it was, I always creamed it, so to speak. I play fast. I have always gyrated it up.”In 1943, she married William Jackson, moved to Memphis and began trying to scratch her way into the male-dominated music scene. She eventually befriended and recorded demos with the producer Sam Phillips, who would go on to start Sun Records. But she grew impatient with Phillips, who saw her gender as an obstacle, and created Moon Records, becoming one of the first women in America to record and produce their own music (some say the first) and securing her place in history.“Cordell was immune to being told ‘no.’ It was almost like that was her art,” the country singer and songwriter Laura Cantrell said by phone. “A lot of artists are told ‘no’ — that what we want to do is not possible, but Cordell was absolutely determined to be an artist. That was not typical for a woman, especially in the South.”Recording sessions for Moon Records were held in Jackson’s living room, where she engineered, produced and released music by regional artists like Allen Page, Earl Patterson and Johnny Tate. Though Jackson initially hewed mostly to the production end of things, she also released some of her own performances, including 1958’s “Rock and Roll Christmas” and “Beboppers’ Christmas.”In 1958, Jackson released her own performances of “Rock and Roll Christmas” and “Beboppers’ Christmas” on her own label, Moon Records.But neither she nor her roster of artists hit the big time, and the 1960s and ’70s saw Jackson moving through a peripatetic series of other kinds of work: at a printing company; as an interior decorator with a real estate agency; as a D.J. on the all-female Memphis station WHER; running a junk shop. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, when she happened to cross paths with the musician, performance artist and filmmaker Tav Falco, that things really changed for her.The two first met at a Western Sizzlin steakhouse in Memphis, at a benefit for Don Ezell, the longtime gofer at Sun Records. “Every guitar player in Memphis was there,” Falco said in a video interview. That included Jackson, who approached him after hearing his band, the Panther Burns (featuring Alex Chilton), cover one of her originals, “Dateless Night.” The two became fast friends. He invited her to appear on bills with him and his band, and she accepted, despite the fact that, at almost 60, she had yet to play her first professional live gig.This marked the beginning of the startling second act of Jackson’s musical career, as she became — among a certain set — an elder stateswoman of grungy thrash guitar. During a 1988 appearance on the WFMU radio show “The Hound,” Jackson plugged in her guitar and let it rip; the result sounds less like a performance than a wild animal turned loose in the studio. In an interview, Jim Marshall, the show’s host, described Jackson’s playing as “some of the most vicious, nasty rock ’n’ roll guitar I’ve ever heard in my life.”Jackson in 1992 with the country singer Marty Brown, center, and the radio host Charlie Chase.Everett Collection, via ImagoJackson with members of the band the New Duncan Imperials in an undated photo.Ken CozzaShe headlined at colorful, now-vanished rock clubs in New York City, like CBGB, the Lone Star and the Lakeside Lounge, as well as at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, N.J. She mostly played solo, but occasionally local musicians backed her up, including the Brooklyn band the A-Bones. “There were no rehearsals,” Miriam Linna, the band’s drummer, recalled in an interview. “It was just, ‘Let’s go!’”Susan M. Clarke, editor and publisher of Cornfed magazine, added: “I can’t imagine anyone knew what to do with her. I’m surprised they didn’t have her committed.”Offstage, Jackson was down to earth but proper, and deeply religious. She did not curse, and she did not drink “anything but milk or water,” she told Roctober magazine in 1993. Falco recalled her saying that doctors had put her on “an all-meat diet,” and Kenn Goodman — whose Pravda Records released her album “Live in Chicago” in 1997 — said in an interview that whenever Jackson traveled (always in her yellow Cadillac; she disliked planes), it was with “her own steak, her own milk, and giant jugs of tap water from Memphis,” because she didn’t trust any other kind.Nancy Apple, a close friend and acolyte, said that when Jackson went grocery shopping, “she would wear white old-lady gloves — not for fashion; she’d just always say, ‘I don’t want to touch all that money!’” When she got home, Jackson would take any bills she had received as change, wash them in the sink and hang them from clothespins to dry.Eccentricities aside, it was what Jackson did onstage that was truly astonishing. Watching archival footage of her performances is a jolting experience. Speaking from the stage at a 1995 concert in Memphis, Jackson described her music as “anywhere from a barnyard disaster to classical.”There was an unbridled ferocity to Jackson’s playing, almost as though she were fighting with her guitar to give her what she wanted. Her compositions — most of them instrumentals — may not be terribly unusual, but what she did with them, in her urgent, raw and unapologetically abrasive way, was. Jackson didn’t just break guitar strings when she played. She broke picks. Jackson at her home in Memphis in 1992, when her mostly obscure musical career intersected briefly with American pop culture.John Focht/Associated PressIntonation didn’t seem to matter a whit to her. Neither did keeping time: In one interview, she said, “I’ve found that the faster I play, the more accurate I become.” Form and melody, too, seemed mostly beside the point. Instead, it was all attitude, attack, rhythm, speed and noise.She “was comfortable in her own skin,” said the bassist Marcus Natale of the A-Bones — she didn’t put on airs, made no concessions, and seems to have never been anything less (or more) than exactly who she was, her performances a testament to the exhilarating power of ragged, unmanicured music.“This is not a masterpiece,” she wrote on the sleeve of one of her records, “but it could be so bad you’ll like it.”Jackson died of pancreatic cancer on Oct. 14, 2004, in Memphis. She was 81.In her music, and in everything she set her mind to, Jackson was nothing if not determined. “I’ve never been confused about what I was supposed to do while I was down here,” she said in 1999. “If I think of it, I do it.”Howard Fishman is a musician and composer and the author of “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.” More

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      David Soul, a Star of the Hit Cop Show ‘Starsky & Hutch,’ Dies at 80

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      An actor and singer, he rose to fame in the 1970s as one half of the popular television crime-fighting duo. He also notched a No. 1 hit single in the U.S.David Soul, the doleful-eyed blond actor and singer who rose to fame portraying half of a cagey crime-fighting duo on the hit 1970s television show “Starsky & Hutch,” and who also scored a No. 1 hit single in 1977 with “Don’t Give Up on Us,” died on Thursday. He was 80.His death was confirmed in a statement by his wife, Helen Snell, who did not specify a cause or say where he died. He had been living in Britain since 1995 and became a British citizen in 2004.A Chicago-born son of a Lutheran minister, Mr. Soul had spent nearly a decade appearing on television shows like “Star Trek” and “I Dream of Jeannie”; he also had a regular role on the ABC western comedy series “Here Come the Brides,” before he won his career-defining role of Detective Ken Hutchinson, known as Hutch, also on ABC. The part would make him a regular presence in American living rooms, as well as a recognized heartthrob, from 1975 to 1979.As Hutch, Mr. Soul played the coolheaded Midwestern sidekick to Detective Dave Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser), a savvy Brooklynite given to wearing chunky cardigan sweaters. The two tooled around the fictional Southern California burgh of Bay City in a red Ford Gran Torino emblazoned with a giant Nike-esque swoosh running down each side as they cracked open cases with the help of their streetwise informant, Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas).Mr. Soul had first caught the eye of the show’s creators with an icy performance as a vigilante motorcycle cop in “Magnum Force” (1973), the first of several sequels to the hit 1971 Clint Eastwood film “Dirty Harry.” But he initially had misgivings about the Hutch character, seeing him as nothing more than “bland white-bread,” as he said in the 2004 television documentary “He’s Starsky, I’m Hutch.”“I didn’t like him,” he said. “I wanted to play Starsky.”Even as old-school tough guys with badges, the characters stood out on the 1970s cop-show landscape by sharing an onscreen emotional intimacy that was striking for its day.While being interviewed by the talk show host Merv Griffin, who pointed out that TV Guide had singled out “Starsky & Hutch” as television’s most violent show, Mr. Soul responded: “My opinion of the show is that it’s a love story. It’s a love story between two men who happen to be cops.”In an interview for The New York Post’s Page Six feature in 2021, Mr. Glaser said that he and Mr. Soul had kidded about the show’s homoerotic undertones “all the time.”With his place in the pop-culture firmament cemented, Mr. Soul was able to make good on his long-simmering ambitions to be a pop star.In 1977, the year after releasing his debut album, he shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with the lachrymose ballad “Don’t Give Up on Us.” Many years later, Owen Wilson, as Hutch, parodied the song in none-too-loving fashion in a 2004 feature-film comedy version of the show, which also starred Ben Stiller as Starsky and Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear.Mr. Soul, who often said that music was his priority over acting, released five albums in his career and notched four Top 10 hits in Britain in the 1970s, including “Don’t Give Up on Us,” which climbed to No. 1; “Silver Lady,” which also went to No. 1 although it reached only No. 52 in the United States; and “Going In With My Eyes Open” — No. 2 in Britain and No. 54 on the American chart.He became enough of a singing sensation that, in reviewing a 1977 concert of his at Radio City Music Hall, Robert Palmer of The New York Times described “camera-wielding teenage girls charging the stage, the flicker of hundreds of exploding flash cubes and a continual squealing.”Mr. Soul was born David Richard Solberg on Aug. 28, 1943, to Richard Solberg, a professor of political science and history as well as a theologian, and June (Nelson) Solberg, a teacher.In David’s youth, the family lived in Cold War-era Berlin as well as in South Dakota. He aspired to be a diplomat or a minister before turning his sights on a show business career. In his late teens, he learned that his girlfriend, Mim, was pregnant; under parental pressure, they married.Later, when he was 22, he found his wife another man, a friend of his, and left her and their young son, Christopher, to chase his dreams of stardom in New York.Once there, he whittled his surname down to Soul and, looking for a gimmick to boost his singing career, bought a $1 ski mask and rebranded himself as a mystery-shrouded pop crooner who never showed his face. After appearances on Merv Griffin’s show, he secured a deal with MGM Records and released a single, “The Covered Man,” in 1966.Once he tried to make it without the mask, however, his career faltered. Broke, Mr. Soul started selling himself sexually. “I was green,” he said in the documentary. “I was a kind of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’” a reference to the Oscar-winning 1969 film starring Jon Voight as a Texas dreamer turned Times Square hustler.Discouraged by the fizzling of his music career, Mr. Soul shifted to acting, breaking into Hollywood with an appearance on “Flipper,” the series centered on a pet dolphin.Once he made it big with “Starsky & Hutch,” he said, he spiraled into alcoholism before rediscovering religion in the 1980s. He met Ms. Snell, a public relations executive, in 2002, and they married in 2010.It was his fifth marriage. He had five sons and a daughter. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.After leaving the United States, Mr. Soul appeared in theater productions in London’s West End. In the mid-2000s, he landed the lead role of the outrage-courting talk show host in “Jerry Springer: The Opera.”Although he missed out on a financial windfall by selling his stake in “Starsky & Hutch” years ago for $100,000, according to a 2019 interview with The Sunday Times of London, he expressed few regrets.“I’ve had it all,” he said. “I’ve been a No 1 [star] in the world for a while — not now. I’ve had No 1 records around the world — not now. I have six wonderful children. I’m married to a wonderful woman. I’m happy. I’ve explored, I’ve seen, I’ve done.” More

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      Richard Gaddes, Opera Impresario Who Spotted Young Talent, Dies at 81

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      As leader of opera companies in Santa Fe and St. Louis, he welcomed new works as well as new artists.Richard Gaddes, a British-born opera impresario who nurtured young talent as director of companies in Santa Fe, N.M., and St Louis, died on Dec. 12 in Manhattan. He was 81.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Santa Fe Opera, where he served as general director for eight years, and by the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, of which he was a founder. The executor of his estate, Maria Schlafly, said he died after a brief illness.Leading the two companies over several decades, Mr. Gaddes (pronounced GAD-iss) helped spur the careers of younger stars like Thomas Hampson, Christine Brewer and Frank Lopardo, and brought prominent artists well known in Europe, like the soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and the conductor Edo de Waart, to audiences in the United States.His generous, open-minded embrace of an art form he saw as encompassing all others spurred his attempts to open it up — to new artists, new audiences and new works. In Santa Fe, he offered discounted tickets to New Mexico residents and staged a production of “The Beggar’s Opera” at the city’s El Museo Cultural using mostly local performers.“I don’t think I would be doing what I’m doing if it hadn’t been his leap of faith,” said Ms. Brewer, who had been a school music teacher before Mr. Gaddes heard her sing in a competition in St. Louis and decided to take a chance on her. She didn’t win the competition, but Mr. Gaddes sent her a check anyway.“Richard just said, ‘I heard it in your voice.’ He was super supportive,” Ms. Brewer said in a phone interview.Invited to create an opera company in St. Louis at the end of the 1970s, Mr. Gaddes had an idea at odds with local grand-opera expectations: to use the new company to engage young American singers at the beginning of their careers. His idea turned out to be fruitful.From left, Alan Kays, Stephen Dickson and Joseph McKee in a 1979 production of “Three Pintos” at the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, where Mr. Gaddes was general director.Opera Theater of Saint Louis“I recommended to them that rather than doing extravaganzas with elephants and camels and mob scenes in large spaces, what they should do is have an ensemble company presenting the cream of the crop of young American singers,” Mr. Gaddes said in an interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, which honored him in 2008.The conductor Leonard Slatkin wrote in an email that the St. Louis company “became a destination point for those starting careers.” He added that Mr. Gaddes “had an encyclopedic knowledge of the repertoire and knew what could and could not be done.”Mr. Gaddes pursued a similarly democratizing approach toward expanding the audience in Santa Fe. He had already had a long career there before becoming director in 2000, a post he held until 2008.“I felt there was a slight attitude of our being elitist,” he said, noting that the company, located seven miles outside the city, “didn’t have much to do with the locals.”His initiatives, including the reduced-price ticket scheme, transformed the audience, which went from being 38 percent New Mexican to over 50 percent.“What’s marvelous is, Richard has really taken the reins in a new era in which the piece of contemporary opera that everyone feels we are obliged to do does not have to be an act of sufferance,” the director Peter Sellars said in an interview after Mr. Gaddes was honored by the N.E.A. “It’s not like having to go in for invasive surgery. It is in fact, a pleasure.”Richard Gaddes was born on May 23, 1942, in Wallsend, an old coal mining and shipbuilding town near Newcastle in the north of England. His father, Thomas, worked in the local shipyards; his mother, Emily (Rickard) Gaddes, was a homemaker.He showed an early aptitude for music — his parents both sang in local choirs — and his mother, defying his father’s wishes, paid for his train ticket to London to audition at Trinity College of Music (now the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance), where he was immediately accepted. He graduated in 1964.To earn money, he turned pages at Wigmore Hall, then London’s premiere chamber music venue; started a series of lunchtime concerts at the hall, which became immensely popular; and went to work for an artist management company.Mr. Gaddes credited his days at Wigmore Hall with stirring his interest in helping young singers. “I turned pages for many great accompanists, including Gerald Moore,” he said in the 2008 interview. “I sat at the piano during the cycles of singers such as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau, los Ángeles, Hans Hotter. An amazing, amazing exposure to music that you couldn’t buy.”Spotted by the conductor John Crosby, the founder of the Santa Fe Opera, on a trip to London, he was eventually recruited to become the company’s artistic administrator in 1969, at age 25.He became founding general director of the Opera Theater of Saint Louis in 1976, and under his stewardship it became the first American opera company to receive an invitation to the Edinburgh International Festival. He returned to the Santa Fe company in 1994 and became its second general director in 2000.Mr. Gaddes is survived by his brother Harry. Another brother, Simon, died in 2011. More