Music

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Joseph Feingold, a Holocaust survivor who found unexpected fame late in life as the co-star of “Joe’s Violin,” an Oscar-nominated short documentary, died on April 15 at Mt. Sinai West Hospital in Manhattan. He was 97.His stepdaughter Ame Gilbert said the cause was complications of Covid-19.In 2014, Mr. Feingold was listening to his favorite classical music station, WQXR, when he heard about a program that gives used instruments to New York City schoolchildren. He took the bus from his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to Lincoln Center, and donated a cherished violin he no longer played because his fingers had grown stiff.Mention of his donation was made over the radio. The violin — and Mr. Feingold — had quite a story, as Kahane Cooperman, a filmmaker who was listening, soon discovered.Born on March 23, 1923, in Warsaw, Joseph Feingold was 17 when the Nazis invaded Poland. He and his father, Aron, a shoemaker, fled to the Russian-occupied east seeking safety. They were caught by the Russian army and sent to separate labor camps in Siberia. Six years of near-starvation and freezing cold followed.Mr. Feingold’s mother, Ruchele, and a younger brother, Henry, had both stayed behind in Poland and perished in the concentration camps, he later learned. Another brother, Alex, miraculously survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.While he was at a displaced person’s camp near Frankfurt, Germany, Mr. Feingold spotted a violin at a flea market and traded cigarettes for it. Music reminded him of happier times before the war, he said in a self-published memoir. Mr. Feingold back then would accompany his mother on the violin as she sang for family and guests.Mr. Feingold emigrated to New York City along with his father and brother and the flea-market violin.The trauma of the Holocaust trailed him. He got a late start in life, graduating from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture when he was 39 and marrying his wife, Regina, in his late 40s.He became a successful architect known for his mastery of the city’s byzantine building codes. He bought a brownstone on the Upper West Side and a ramshackle farmhouse in Ghent, N.Y., rebuilding the house and old barns, and cutting paths through the woods, to make a beloved retreat.Ms. Cooperman recounted Mr. Feingold’s saga in his 2017 documentary and also told the story of the violin’s recipient, Brianna Perez, a 12-year-old Dominican girl from the Bronx, and the friendship that formed between the two.In addition to Ms. Gilbert, Mr. Feingold is survived by four step-grandchildren and a step-great-granddaughter.He had difficulty in being open and warm with his family, relatives said. His relationship with his brother was complicated by the tragic history they shared.After his brother died last month from pneumonia, Mr. Feingold started having nightmares about the Holocaust.Apparently, such dreams had haunted him periodically for years, though Ms. Gilbert said she learned that only recently. She wished it were sooner. “It would have allowed me more compassion,” she said. More

One thing Gen-X kids used to do — other people, too, of course, but I’m talking about something specific — was hang around with friends and listen to records. You might have been skipping school, you might have been smoking weed, but it could just as well have been a Sunday afternoon with a two-liter bottle of soda. Maybe someone had a guitar or a drum kit you could mess around with, and maybe after a while you even started a band, but the main thing was being together, pooling your collective teenage energies against the forces of boredom and responsibility.Eventually, most of us negotiated a truce or surrendered outright. Not the Beastie Boys. And while there is admiration and affection on the faces of the middle-aged fans flocking to the Kings Theater in Brooklyn in “Beastie Boys Story,” there’s some envy-tinged nostalgia, too. As Adam Horovitz and Michael Diamond, the surviving members of the trio, explain from the theater’s stage — in a live appearance directed and filmed by their pal Spike Jonze — they turned goofing around with friends and musical equipment into a career and a way of life.[embedded content]All these years later, they still seem kind of amazed by the whole thing. The story they tell — a streamlined version of the narrative put forward in “Beastie Boys Book,” their fat 2018 best seller — is full of fun and also tinged with grief and regret. They did some stupid things along the way, and weren’t always good to their friends, most notably Kate Schellenbach, an original member of the group in the early 1980s (and later the drummer for Luscious Jackson). She was pushed aside when the Beasties teamed up with the producer Rick Rubin and the mogul-in-the-making Russell Simmons and mutated from a punk band into an improbable but hugely successful rap act.Barely out of their teens, the Beastie Boys — Ad-Rock (Horovitz), Mike D (Diamond) and MCA (Adam Yauch) — found themselves opening for Madonna, touring with Run-DMC and dominating MTV with “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!),” a bit of anti-bro satire that became a bro anthem. Brattiness became their brand, and they found themselves trapped in a collective persona and style of performance that turned impish irreverence into obnoxiousness.But then they grew up. With their chronicle parceled into chapters interspersed with old photographs and video clips, Horovitz and Diamond read their banter from teleprompters in the back of the theater, and own up to their earlier lapses without going into too much detail. They aren’t much interested in opening old wounds or settling scores, though the air in the theater gets pretty chilly when Rubin and Simmons — who the Beasties feel manipulated and exploited them — are mentioned.The heart of the story is the second act that began when the Beasties started taking themselves seriously as musicians and took control of their own creativity in the early 1990s. No longer a novelty act, they put out a run of four albums — “Paul’s Boutique,” “Check Your Head,” “Ill Communication” and “Hello Nasty” — that are still fresh, funny, surprising and beautiful.“Beastie Boys Story” has its own kind of beauty, even if the aesthetic is more dad rock than hip-hop. Horovitz and Diamond are good company — unassuming without false modesty; self-aware without irritating air quotes. They love each other, and they both loved Adam Yauch, who was 47 when he died of cancer in 2012. He was, in his friends’ recollections, the glue that held the Beastie Boys together, their ethical and intellectual guide as well as the one with the deepest sense of humor. His loss is both the film’s emotional anchor and the thread that connects its anecdotes and digressions. It’s a jaunt down memory lane and also a moving and generous elegy.Beastie Boys StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. Watch on Apple TV Plus. More

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Salsa musicians had a post-gig ritual in the Bronx. When the music stopped, off they’d go to Joe’s Place, a Puerto Rican restaurant, where the owner and chef José Torres would lay out a free spread. Perhaps it was their enthusiasm for his home-style food that prompted one musician not long ago to announce to a concert audience at Lehman College in the Bronx, “We’re off to Joe’s!”“It was for the musicians, but whoever wanted to come by, they certainly did,” said Eddie Palmieri, the Latin jazz pianist, who performed at that concert. “Everything in the buffet was on him. Talk about jam-packed! But that was him. He did things like that.”Mr. Torres died on April 12 at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. He was 73. The cause was Covid-19, his sister Aida Torres said.Mr. Torres opened Joe’s Place, an unassuming establishment on Westchester Avenue under the elevated tracks of the No. 6 subway line near the Parkchester neighborhood, in 1998. He turned it into a must-visit destination for music stars, a source of a free meal or a loan for out-of-work musicians, a favorite spot for family get-togethers, and even a place to mourn the loss of other musicians who were waked at one of the many nearby funeral homes.Like many other restaurants, its walls hold pictures of local kids made good. One shows Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.Mr. Torres was born on Sept. 21, 1946, in Puerto Rico and moved to the Bronx when he was 10. He was a mature child, Ms. Torres said, who watched his mother closely in the kitchen as she prepared traditional dishes like bacalao guisado and pernil. He left high school in his junior year to work as a soda jerk at a midtown Manhattan hotel.An employee there befriended him, she said. “He took him from the counter to the kitchen and taught him. From there, he started cooking, from grill man, line cook until he became a chef.”In addition to Ms. Torres, he is survived by two other siblings, three adult children and his fiancée, Janet Sanchez.Mr. Torres didn’t just feed musicians at his restaurant. He was their friend. For years, Mr. Palmieri would stop in every Wednesday to conduct business or catch up with musician friends like the guitarist Nelson Gonzalez or the archivist and producer Rene Lopez.“He wanted to put an Eddie Palmieri room upstairs, like a lounge,” the pianist recalled with a gravelly laugh. “Man, he was a unique individual who was in love with what he did. When he passed away, he broke a lot of hearts.” More