Audio Recordings, Downloads and Streaming

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Michael Henderson, Funk Bassist Turned Crooner, Dies at 71

      by

      He was a sideman with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis before embarking on a successful second career as a singer of soulful, romantic ballads.Michael Henderson, a self-taught bassist who performed and recorded in the 1960s and ’70s with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis, then remade himself as a soulful balladeer and songwriter, died on Tuesday at his home in Dallas, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. He was 71.His son, Michael Jr., said the cause was cancer.Mr. Henderson began his career early. He was about 14 and on tour with the Detroit Emeralds, an R&B group, when he met Mr. Wonder at a theater in Chicago.“There was a piano upstairs where the dressing rooms were,” Mr. Henderson said in the liner notes to “Take Me I’m Yours: The Buddah Years Anthology” (2018), a two-CD collection of his records from the 1970s and ’80s released by Soul Music Records. “Stevie was playing something I’d heard before, so I got my bass and sat down next to him. He started playing, and I started playing right along with him.”Mr. Wonder soon hired him. For the next five years, Mr. Henderson toured with Mr. Wonder while also working as a session musician for Motown Records. He said he had learned all he could from the influential Motown bassist James Jamerson, who would sometimes come to clubs or recording sessions where Mr. Henderson was playing.“I stayed close to James’s sound but began adding in my little stuff every now and then,” he said in the “Anthology” liner notes. “I’d go up the neck and find higher notes.”Mr. Henderson’s skills had advanced enough to pique Miles Davis’s interest when he heard him play with Mr. Wonder’s band in 1970 at the Copacabana in Manhattan. Davis had already begun using electric instruments and rock rhythms on “Bitches Brew” and other albums; now he wanted to take his music in more of a funk direction and decided to hire Mr. Henderson, who was not a jazz musician, to replace Dave Holland, who was best known as an upright bassist but had begun playing the electric bass with Davis.When the show was over, Mr. Henderson recalled in a 2017 interview for the website Lee Bailey’s Eurweb, which covers urban entertainment, sports and politics, Davis came backstage and told Mr. Wonder that he was “taking” his bass player.Over the next few years, Mr. Henderson recorded a string of albums with Davis, including “A Tribute to Jack Johnson,” “Live-Evil” and “On the Corner.” In a 1997 review of CD reissues of five Davis albums from 1969 to 1973, the New York Times critic Ben Ratliff cited “Live-Evil” and “In Concert: Live at Philharmonic Hall” as evidence of Mr. Henderson’s noticeable impact on Mr. Davis’s band.“Mr. Henderson made Davis’s band sound less searching, more hypnotic,” Mr. Ratliff wrote. “Instead of improvising and interacting with the band, he took a simple bass vamp and percolated it endlessly.”Mr. Henderson with Davis at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1973. One critic said that Mr. Henderson, who did not have a jazz background, had “made Davis’s band sound less searching, more hypnotic.”David Warner Ellis/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMichael Earl Henderson was born on July 7, 1951, in Yazoo City, Miss., and moved to Detroit with his mother, Rose Williams, who sang in church, and his stepfather, Earl Henderson, when he was young. During his childhood, he played cello and then switched to bass. Precociously talented, he was performing with local bands before his 12th birthday.“Mom was always cool with the noise I was making in the basement and backyard, and later as I began playing in the local bar scene,” he said in the liner notes. When he was 10 or 11, he saved enough money to take a bus to see a bill of Motown artists at the Fox Theater.“I told myself, ‘One day, I’m going to be onstage with all those artists,’” he said.Mr. Henderson was a sideman until 1976 — the year his time with Davis ended — when the jazz drummer and bandleader Norman Connors invited him to write and record a song for his album “Saturday Night Special.” He sang that song, “Valentine Love,” with Jean Carne. Mr. Henderson wrote and sang on the title song of Mr. Connors’s next album, “You Are My Starship,” and sang a duet with Phyllis Hyman on his song “We Both Need Each Other.”After making a deal with Buddah Records in 1976, Mr. Henderson’s transformation into a sexy crooner and songwriter continued. The cover of his 1981 album, “Slingshot,” showed him on a beach wearing a tiny aqua swimsuit.When Mr. Henderson appeared at the Roxy Theater in West Hollywood in 1979, Connie Johnson, a pop critic for The Los Angeles Times, wrote that he “isn’t a platinum sex symbol in the manner of Teddy Pendergrass — yet,” adding, “Currently, he’s in the same league as Peabo Bryson and Lenny Williams.”Mr. Henderson found success on the Billboard R&B chart with singles like “Take Me I’m Yours,” which hit No. 3 in 1978; “Wide Receiver,” which peaked at No. 4 in 1980, and “Can’t We Fall in Love Again,” another duet with Ms. Hyman that rose to No. 9 in 1981.After seven albums for Buddah, the last of them in 1983, he recorded “Bedtime Stories” for EMI America in 1986. That was his last solo album, although he continued to perform.In addition to his mother and a son, Mr. Henderson is survived by his daughters, Chelsea and Michelle Henderson, and his companion, DaMia Satterfield. He was separated from his wife, Adelia Thompson.In 2002, Mr. Henderson returned to Miles Davis’s music. He and several other Davis alumni, including the saxophonist Sonny Fortune and the drummer Ndugu Chancler, formed the group Children on the Corner; a year later, they released the album “Rebirth,” which reinterpreted and recreated Davis’s electric music from the 1970s.“This ain’t no smooth jazz,” Mr. Henderson told All About Jazz in 2003. “Don’t come to hear us and get ready to eat your steak and sit there and have a conversation with your old lady. It ain’t happenin’. Because when we hit the stage, we mean business. We’re going for the throat.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      William Hart, Driving Force Behind the Delfonics, Dies at 77

      by

      With hits like “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” his group pioneered the soulful Philadelphia sound.William Hart, who as the lead singer and chief lyricist of the soul trio the Delfonics helped pioneer the romantic lyrics, falsetto vocals and velvety string arrangements that defined the Philadelphia sound of the 1960s and ’70s, died on July 14 in Philadelphia. He was 77.His son Hadi said the death, at Temple University Hospital, was caused by complications during surgery.The Delfonics combined the harmonies of doo-wop, the sweep of orchestral pop and the crispness of funk to churn out a string of hits, 20 of which reached the Billboard Hot 100. (Two made the Top 10.)Almost all of them were written by Mr. Hart in conjunction with the producer Thom Bell, including “La-La (Means I Love You),” “I’m Sorry” and “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love),” all released in 1968, and, a year later, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” which won a Grammy for best R&B vocal by a duo or group.Alongside Motown in Detroit and Stax in Memphis, the Philadelphia sound was a pillar of soul and R&B music in the 1960s and ’70s. More relaxed than Motown and less edgy than Stax, it drew on both the doo-wop wave of the late 1950s — especially groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and Little Anthony and the Imperials — and a slowed-down version of the funk perfected by James Brown.Mr. Hart looked to all those artists, along with songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David, as inspiration. He preferred to write lyrics after the melodies were in place, working around the strictures they imposed to weave stories about heartbreak, jealousy and old-fashioned romance.“I could imagine at a very early age what a broken heart was all about,” he told The Guardian in 2007. “Being a young man, I had to put myself in that position. And I found I could just write about it. It’s like imagining what it’s like to jump off a cliff — you can write about it, but you don’t have to actually jump off that cliff.”In Philadelphia, the Delfonics became mainstays of the frequent “battles of the bands” held at the Uptown Theater, the white-hot center of the city’s soul scene, going toe to toe in satin lapels to see who could be the night’s smoothest crooners.Their reach went far beyond 1960s Philadelphia. Mr. Hart’s songs have a timeless, dreamy quality, at once emotion-laden and urbane. That’s one reason they have had second and third lives: Singers have remade them, rappers have sampled them, and filmmakers have featured them on soundtracks.The New Kids on the Block remade “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” in 1989, taking it to No. 8 on the Billboard pop chart. Prince covered “La-La (Means I Love You)” in 1996, the same year the Fugees released a reinterpreted version of “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love),” titled simply “Ready or Not.”The next year the Delfonics and Mr. Hart experienced an even bigger resurgence when Quentin Tarantino featured “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” on the soundtrack of his film “Jackie Brown” and as a plot point, using the songs’ smooth, nostalgic sound to draw together characters played by Pam Grier and Robert Forster.“I think the fact that our music is clean helps us make the crossover into the next generation,” Mr. Hart told The Philadelphia Tribune in 2008. “We sing songs that everyone of every age can enjoy. I write most of the songs, and that’s one thing I’ve always tried to do.”William Alexander Hart was born on Jan. 17, 1945, in Washington and moved with his family to Philadelphia when he was a few months old. His father, Wilson, worked in a factory, and his mother, Iretha (Battle) Hart, was a homemaker.His father gave him the nickname Poogie, which stuck with him long into adulthood.Along with his son, he is survived by his wife, Pamela; his brothers, Wilbert and Hurt; his sisters, Niecy and Peaches; his sons, William Jr., Yusuf and Champ; 11 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.William began writing songs when he was about 11 and immediately latched onto the themes of love lost and regained that would dominate his lyrics for decades.He joined his brother Wilbert and a friend from high school, Randy Cain, in a group they at first called the Orphonics, a variation on “aurophonic,” a term William saw on a stereo box. They tweaked the name to Delfonics at the suggestion of their manager, Stan Watson.Mr. Hart was still working a day job in a barbershop when a friend put him in touch with Mr. Bell, who was already well known around Philadelphia for the lush, sensual arrangements he had done for a local label.They became a hit-making duo, the Lennon and McCartney of West Philadelphia: Mr. Bell wrote the music and Mr. Hart supplied the lyrics, often almost simultaneously. Mr. Hart claimed they wrote “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” in two hours.The original Delfonics split up in 1975, but Mr. Hart continued to perform under the name, with lineups that might or might not include members of the original group. Wilbert Hart went on to tour with his own Delfonics, even after his brother won an injunction against him in 2000.In 2002 Wilbert Hart and Mr. Cain successfully sued William Hart for back royalties. The courtroom clash didn’t prevent the three of them from occasionally reuniting, at least until Mr. Cain’s death in 2009.Mr. Hart continued to tour using the Delfonics name, his falsetto a bit weaker but his presence still commanding. He also released a number of side projects, including “Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics” (2013), with Mr. Younge producing and Mr. Hart singing and sliding effortlessly back into the lyricist’s chair.“It’s like a blank canvas,” he said in a 2013 interview for the music magazine Wax Poetics. “I’m an artist; just give me the canvas, and I’ll paint the painting.” More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Patrick Adams, Master of New York’s Underground Disco Scene, Dies at 72

      by

      He produced, arranged or engineered many of the era’s biggest nightclub hits, even if his records rarely got much play on the radio.Patrick Adams, a producer, arranger and engineer who brought experimentation, sophistication and infectious grooves to countless soul and disco singles — his fellow producer Nile Rodgers called him “a master at keeping butts on the dance floor” — died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 72.His daughter, Joi Sanchez, said the cause was cancer.If you’ve boogied the night away at a disco or circled a roller rink in the last 50 years, chances are you’ve done it to music that Mr. Adams helped shepherd into existence, even if his name doesn’t ring a bell. Despite his low profile, he left his fingerprints everywhere, often as an engineer or arranger, sitting behind the mixing board for acts like Gladys Knight, Rick James and Salt-N-Pepa.His greatest legacy, though, was the scores of tracks he produced in the 1970s for New York’s underground disco scene, the energetic, transgressive and insanely creative corner of a genre often written off as cheesy and uncreative. If radio stations in Cleveland and Topeka weren’t playing music he had produced, you could be sure that New York clubs like Gallery and Paradise Garage were.“He was very underground,” Vince Aletti, who covered disco for Record World magazine, said in a phone interview. “He was really popular on a club level. He rarely broke through above that, but that kind of made him even more like he was ours.”Mr. Adams’s style varied from album to album, but each release was expertly crafted and irresistibly catchy, at once lofty and raunchy — like Musique’s “In the Bush,” a summer-defining club hit of 1978 that one critic said was among “the horniest records ever made.”As with many of Mr. Adams’s studio acts, Musique was in a way just a front for his own musical prowess. After a record executive hired him to create a disco hit, he wrote the music and lyrics, arranged the instruments (many of which he played himself) and hired the singers.He did much the same with acts like Inner Life, Phreek, Cloud One, Bumblebee Unlimited and the Universal Robot Band — a stable of groups, often drawing from the same pool of personnel, that allowed him to spread his creative wings in different directions.Some singles, like Inner Life’s “I’m Caught Up (In a One Night Love Affair),” are classic strings-and-beat disco, while others, like Cloud One’s “Atmospheric Strut,” are trippy blends of sci-fi funk and proto-house.But if Mr. Adams was in control, he was never dictatorial; his studio was always a collaborative space.“He gave you room to develop, as long as he thought it was creative,” Christine Wiltshire, who sang lead vocals for Musique, said in a phone interview. “He was never ‘This is the way it’s supposed to go.’”Unlike many disco producers then and many dance producers since, Mr. Adams had little regard for beats and loops. Those came later. He emphasized the melody, the lyrics and above all the story his songs were trying to tell.“If you start with a great song that has an attractive melody, a lyric that tells a story people can relate to, you’re way ahead of the game,” he told The New York Observer in 2017. “If you start with a beat, which in reality is not much different than anything anybody else could contrive with Fruity Loops or other computer software, you’re just one of a million people making noise.”Mr. Adams was best known for his disco work, but he got his start with soul bands in the early 1970s, and in the ’80s, after disco faded, he was an engineer for some of the leading acts in New York’s emerging hip-hop scene, like Salt-N-Pepa and Erik B. & Rakim.“I always look at music as music, not necessarily having a genre,” he told The Guardian in 2017. “I was not trying to make a disco record. I was trying to make just a great record.”Mr. Adams was born on March 17, 1950, in Harlem, where he grew up four blocks from the Apollo Theater. His father, Fince, was a merchant seaman, and his mother, Rose, was a homemaker.Patrick was musically inclined at an early age: His father bought him a trumpet when he was 10 and gave him an acoustic guitar when he was 12. He sang in choir and played guitar in a band, the Sparks, when he was 16.But his real interest was production. He experimented with his father’s reel-to-reel tape deck to master skills like overdubbing. He hung out at studios, learning about mixing boards. He would dissect songs he heard on the radio, trying to understand their arrangements and structure.“I always shopped for records by producer, arranger and songwriter,” he was quoted as saying in a profile by the journalist Jason King for the Red Bull Music Academy website. “The way D.J.s shop for records now is how I used to shop for records when I was a kid.”Later he would hang around the back door of the Apollo, so often that Reuben L. Phillips, who conducted the in-house orchestra, let him distribute sheet music.In the late 1960s he began working for Perception Records as an entry-level jingle writer; by 1970, he was executive vice president. A year later he discovered his first big act, the group Black Ivory, which sang slow-soul hits like “Don’t Turn Around” and “Time Is Love.”Mr. Adams became known around New York for his lush, energetic string arrangements, and in 1974 he left Perception to start his own arranging and engineering company. A year later he and the music promoter Peter Brown founded a label, P&P Records, to release his underground music.Mr. Adams never married, but he was in a longtime relationship with Ms. Wiltshire, the mother of Ms. Sanchez. They later separated, but the two remained close. Along with his daughter, he is survived by a brother, Gus; another daughter, Tira Adams; a son, Malcolm Holmes; and six grandchildren. His brother Terry died in 2020.Mr. Adams in performance at the Alhambra Ballroom in Harlem in 2017. Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool While Mr. Adams never won the sort of public acclaim given to fellow producers like Mr. Rodgers or Quincy Jones, he did enjoy a renaissance in the 1990s among D.J.s who fell in love with his innovative productions. He found a similar following among hip-hop artists like Mac Miller, Raekwon and Kanye West, all of whom sampled his music.Still, he seemed at ease with his relative anonymity.“You can tell a Nile Rodgers record a million miles away because it has an imprint that emanates from his guitar,” Mr. Adams said in a 2017 interview for the Red Bull Music Academy. “In my case I tried to avoid that. I didn’t want my records to sound the same.“Whether that was a positive thing or a negative thing, I don’t know. But at the same time there is a signature in my music — sometimes it’s harmonic, and sometimes it’s just in the quirkiness of things. And sometimes you just don’t hear it until somebody points it out to you and asks, ‘Oh, he did that record too?’” More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      A Boxed Set for the Birds Hopes to Save Them, Too

      by

      A star-studded, 242-track trove of songs and poems inspired by birdsong is the latest project in a series of releases raising awareness about its own threatened sources.ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Just before sunset on a warm weekday in early May, Avey Tare — a member of the psychedelic pop band Animal Collective — adjusted his glasses and squinted into the waning daylight. He could hear a woodpecker high in the Appalachian foliage along the Blue Ridge Parkway, hammering into a tree for dinner.As Tare peered into verdant spring treetops, though, a half-dozen songbirds interrupted his search with their evening serenades. “I love it when they’re all singing,” he said, smiling and scanning branches where wrens and juncos darted. “It reminds me of an orchestra tuning, just before they play. There’s space for everyone.”Tare added that he liked to wake up early in this mountain city and listen each morning. “That’s when you hear the most, before people …” Just then, a motorcycle whizzed down the parkway, and Tare never finished his thought.Randall Poster had never noticed the songbirds of the Bronx, where he has lived for most of his 60 years, until people started to quiet down earlier each day as the first pandemic winter approached in 2020. He admitted with a wink during a recent video call that his childhood knowledge of birds was limited to, “You know, Baltimore Orioles and the Philadelphia Eagles.”But when Poster — a powerhouse music supervisor for filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Todd Haynes and Wes Anderson — began talking about the birds he could hear, an environmentalist pal offered grim news. Human interactions alone possibly kill over 500 million birds each year in the United States. According to a 2018 report, one in eight of the world’s bird species now risk extinction. Common chemicals can ruin the very songs Poster suddenly loved. These statistics sparked an idea: What if he harnessed a quarter-century of industry connections into a fund-raiser for bird conservation, integrating the melodies he heard?Randall Poster peers through his Warby Parker “Birdoculars” in his office in the National Arts Club in New York.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesPigeons perching in a tree near the Staten Island Ferry terminal.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesCicek, a yellow-crowned Amazon parrot, eats lunch with its owner on the Upper East Side.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesOn Friday, Poster will release the first volume of “For the Birds,” a star-studded, 242-track collection of original songs and readings inspired by or incorporating birdsong; later this year, it will be bundled as a 20-LP boxed set to benefit the National Audubon Society. The project sprawled, he said, because birds seemed to be on everyone’s mind. “People were spending a lot of time looking out the window,” said Poster, one among the legion of bird-watching initiates in the pandemic. “There was so much that was unknown and unknowable that we were comforted by the fact nature was still doing its thing.”“For the Birds” unspools like a version of a soundtrack Poster might design for an Anderson film, cavorting through moods and styles at will. There are elegies and aubades, fiddle tunes and field recordings. A radiant electronic trance from Dan Deacon and a Beatles interpretation from Elvis Costello share space with a Jonathan Franzen reading; Laurie Anderson, Alice Coltrane (remixed), Yoko Ono and a reading from Wendell Pierce open separate LPs.“It’s a joy to hear other people discovering the wonder of birds,” Elizabeth Gray, the chief executive of Audubon, said from her Maryland home. “Just being able to watch birds fly, build nests and feed their young — it reminds me what makes us human.”The Fascinating World of Birds Ancient Swans: Paleontologists were able to reconstruct what a flightless bird that prowled the seas of Japan millions of years ago looked like. Avian Vagrants: Birds traveling outside their native range might not have lost their way. They could be adapting to environmental changes. Transfixing Beauty: Each spring and fall, the skies in Denmark come to life with the swirling displays of European starlings.Runaway Bird: A sighting in March confirmed that a flamingo that fled a zoo in 2005 has defied the odds to thrive in the wilds of Texas.Still, “For the Birds” is the most audacious entry in a new dawn chorus of charitable recordings that either use birdsong as fodder or as the entire track itself. In 2019, “Let Nature Sing” — a poignant mix of 24 chattering species — broke into Britain’s Top 20; in February, an album of 53 calls from threatened Australian birds bested international pop stars to land at No. 2 there.“Of all the things we need to work harder to protect, birds, like music, speak to everyone,” Anthony Albrecht, the Australian cellist whose Bowerbird Collective led that effort, said by video chat. “They’re such a visible — and audible — indicator of what we stand to lose.”Birdsong, current fossil records suggest, is at least 66 million years old, or contemporaneous with the last dinosaurs. Humans have most likely incorporated their sounds into music for as long as we’ve made it. Indian instruments evoking warbles, tribal African songs integrating calls, Olivier Messiaen compositions including avian transcriptions: Birdsong has been a cornerstone of musical development across cultures and centuries.“The range of sounds they use is about the same as the range we use, which is part of why we like them so much. We can hear them,” the musician Jonathan Meiburg said from his home in Germany. For two decades, he has recorded as Shearwater; last year, he released his first book, a kind of personal history of the “world’s smartest bird of prey,” the caracara.Several musicians on “For the Birds” spoke about their experience with birdsong as epiphanic. Tare wrote Animal Collective’s “Brown Thrasher,” which is part of Poster’s set, following a recent morning of field recording in the Blue Ridge Mountains, but he recalled discovering the mechanical clicks of a crow — imagine the sound of your car with a dead battery, but graceful — while living in Los Angeles as a musical milestone. “I’d never known they could sound like that,” he said, eyes wide.Lars “Bala” Lyons stands by while a red-tailed hawk (magnified by binoculars) perches above near Tompkins Square Park in New York.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesRon Lugo points out a bird to Marlys Ray in Central Park.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesGeese roam a lawn near Battery Park.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThe composer Nico Muhly remembered the whippoorwill that sang for his family at dinnertime in rural Vermont and how it shaped his early sense of listening. The whistler Molly Lewis still giggled when she recalled exchanging (and changing) melodies with an unseen songbird outside her window years ago. “I knew we were talking, and I just burst out laughing, overjoyed and amazed,” Lewis said by phone.Still, projects like this court instant cynicism. How much can musicians actually influence individual behaviors, let alone challenge the industrial forces mauling the environment? What is all this effort even worth?Such questions prompted Albrecht, the Australian cellist, to compile “Songs of Disappearance.” After years of performing pieces inspired by birds, including one work based on the potential Australian origins of songbirds, Albrecht wondered what difference he was making. “There’s a real challenge to connect with audiences that are not already aligned with your values,” he said, frowning. “It’s the idea of preaching to the converted.”Despite Albrecht’s lack of scientific training, a professor at Charles Darwin University, Stephen Garnett, encouraged him to enlist in the school’s conservation biology doctoral program. When Garnett told Albrecht he was publishing a major report indicating that a sixth of Australian bird species were at risk, Albrecht suggested a compilation that showcased the wealth of sounds that might be lost, a pre-emptive eulogy.They secured tracks from the country’s pre-eminent wildlife recordist and enlisted an Australian music-industry expert. By Christmas last year, department stores were demanding more copies. In six months, Albrecht’s lark has raised more than $70,000 for bird conservation. The sense that people care, however, motivates him more than the money.“It spiraled in a way that gave us a lot of hope that there is potential for the public to engage with these critical issues,” said Albrecht, who hopes to release a North American sequel. “You can do something wacky and have people respond.”Robin Perkins sees the wisdom in such wacky projects, too. For a decade, Perkins has worked for Greenpeace, whose sometimes-confrontational activism has often made the organization a punchline and lightning rod. But through his record label, Shika Shika, Perkins has paired dozens of musicians with the song of a threatened bird from their home country and asked them to turn it into a song. The effort has already raised more than $50,000.A dog stares down a duck standing near the Hudson River in lower Manhattan.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesBirds take a bath in Gramercy Park.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesChasing ducks in Battery Park.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesDue in June, the third volume, “A Guide to the Birdsong of Western Africa,” includes pleas for protecting wildlife by Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars and soaring techno from the Guinea-Bissaun producer Buruntuma, dotted by the prismatic chirps of a grey Timneh parrot.“You have to give people something they can understand. 1.5 degrees: What does that mean to me?” Perkins said by phone from Paris, referencing the number frequently cited as a dangerous threshold for global temperature rise. “Chaining yourself to a building has a role, and music has a different role — to help people imagine.”Long familiar with the vagaries of the entertainment industry, Poster won’t estimate how much money “For the Birds” might raise or if its star power can even propel it up the charts. But he is sanguine about the projects’ extra components — an exhibition of birdhouses set for June in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, sound baths and concerts, programs in Miami and Marfa and London.Poster even convinced the eyewear company Warby Parker to design and distribute at least 20,000 branded “Birdoculars” to school groups nationwide, the element that seemed to excite him most. Had someone given him a pair, after all, when he was a child in the Bronx watching five movies every weekend, he might have tuned into his surroundings sooner.“It’s like when you make a movie, and you hope there’s one kid in the audience who gets enough from it to go and make a movie — or just feel less alone,” Poster said. “We’re going to empower young people by giving them the basic tools to go look at birds, to help develop a younger generation of concerned citizens. Progress is made that way.” More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Klaus Schulze, Pioneering Electronic Composer, Is Dead at 74

      by

      In a prolific career spanning five decades, he helped pave the way for ambient, techno and trance music.Klaus Schulze, a German electronic musician whose hypnotic, pulsating, swirling compositions filled five decades of solo albums, collaborations and film scores, died on Tuesday. He was 74.His Facebook page announced the death. The announcement said he died “after a long illness” but did not provide any details.Mr. Schulze played drums, bass, guitar and keyboards. But he largely abandoned them in the early 1970s and turned to working with electric organs, tape recorders and echo effects, and later with early analog synthesizers. His music thrived on every technological advance.He played drums on the debut albums of the German bands Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel before starting a prodigiously prolific solo career. In 2000, he released a 50-CD retrospective set of studio and live recordings, “The Ultimate Edition.” But he was far from finished.While he announced his retirement from performing in 2010, he continued to compose and record. A new album, “Deus Arrakis,” is due in June.Mr. Schulze’s music encompassed the psychedelic jams of early krautrock, orchestral works, song-length tracks with vocals, an electronic opera and brief soundtrack cues. Much of his music was extended and richly consonant, using drones, loops and echoes in ways that forecast — and then joined and expanded on — both immersive ambient music and beat-driven techno and trance music.He was habitually reluctant to describe or analyze the ideas or techniques of his music. “I am a musician, not a speaker,” he said in a 1998 interview. “What music only can do on its own is just one thing: to show emotions. Just emotions. Sadness, joy, silence, excitement, tension.”Klaus Schulze was born on Aug. 4, 1947, in Berlin. His mother was a ballet dancer, his father a writer.He played guitar and bass in bands as a teenager, and he studied literature, philosophy and modern classical composition at the University of Berlin. Drawn to the avant-garde scene around the Berlin nightclub Zodiac, he played drums in a psychedelic rock trio, Psy Free.He became Tangerine Dream’s drummer in 1969 and performed on the group’s debut album, “Electronic Meditation,” a collection of free-form improvisations released in 1970. He was also experimenting with recordings of his latest instrument, an electric organ. But Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream’s guitarist and leader, didn’t want to use Mr. Schulze’s organ tapes onstage and told him, “You either play drums or you leave,” Mr. Schulze said in a 2015 interview.Mr. Schulze left. He formed a new space-rock trio, Ash Ra Tempel, and played drums on the band’s 1971 debut album before starting his solo career. Instead of drumming, he recalled, “I wanted to play with harmonies and sounds.”He didn’t yet own a synthesizer in 1972 when he made his first solo album, “Irrlicht” (“Will-o’-the-Wisp”). Its three drone-centered, slowly evolving tracks were made with his electric organ and guitar and with manipulated cassette recordings of a student orchestra.Mr. Schulze began playing solo concerts in 1973 and amassed a growing collection of synthesizers. “By nature I am an ‘explorer’ type of musician,” he told Sound and Vision magazine in 2018. “When electronic musical instruments became available, the search was over. I had found the tool I had been looking for: endless opportunities, unlimited sound possibilities, and rhythm and melody at my complete disposal.”Mr. Schulze’s 1975 album “Timewind,” dedicated to Richard Wagner, is widely regarded as his early pinnacle.Made in Germany MusicUsing drum machines and sequencers, Mr. Schulze introduced propulsive electronic rhythms to his music. His vertiginous album “Timewind” (1975) is widely regarded as his early pinnacle. In France, it won the Grand Prix du Disque International award, boosting his record sales with compulsory orders from libraries across the country. He moved to Hambühren, Germany, and built the studio where he would record most of his music over the next decades.“Timewind” was dedicated to Richard Wagner; its two tracks were titled “Bayreuth Return,” named after the town where Wagner’s operas are presented in an annual festival, and “Wahnfried 1883,” named after Wagner’s villa there. Mr. Schulze would later record a series of albums under the names Richard Wahnfried and then Wahnfriet. “The way Wagner’s music introduced me to the use of dynamics, subtlety, drama, and the possible magnitudes of music in general remains unparalleled to me,” he said in 2018.Another acknowledged influence was Pink Floyd. From 1994 to 2008, Mr. Schulze and the German producer and composer Pete Namlook collaborated on “The Dark Side of the Moog,” a series of 11 albums drawing on Pink Floyd motifs.In the mid-1970s, Mr. Schulze visited Japan to produce and mix the Far East Family Band, whose members included the electronic musician who would later go solo and achieve fame as Kitaro. He also recorded and performed with Stomu Yamashta’s Go, a group that included the English multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Steve Winwood, the American guitarist Al Di Meola and the American drummer Michael Shrieve. And he continued to pump out solo projects, including the soundtrack for a pornographic film, “Body Love” (1977).He collaborated through the years with Ash Ra Tempel’s guitarist, Manuel Göttsching. In 2000 Mr. Schulze and Mr. Göttsching revived the name Ash Ra Tempel for a duo album, “Friendship,” and a concert recorded as “Gin Rosé at the Royal Festival Hall.”Mr. Schulze toured Europe extensively from the 1970s until 2010, though he did not tour the United States. In 1991, he performed for 10,000 people outside Cologne Cathedral.In 1979, the German division of Warner Bros. Records gave him his own imprint, Innovative Communication, which had one major hit with Ideal, a Berlin band. He started his own label for electronic music, Inteam, in 1984. But he abandoned it three years later after realizing that it was losing money on every act’s recordings except his.Mr. Schulze in concert in Berlin in 2009. He gave up performing the next year but continued to compose and record. Jakubaszek/Getty ImagesMr. Schulze announced his switch from analog to digital synthesizers with the 1979 album “Dig It.” As sampling technology improved in the 1980s and ’90s, he incorporated samples of voices, instruments and nature sounds into his music. In the 2000s, as faster computers fostered more complex sound processing, he turned to software synthesizers.In 1994, he released “Totentag” (“Day of the Dead”), an electronic opera; in 2008, he began recording and touring with Lisa Gerrard, the singer and lyricist of the band Dead Can Dance. By the 2010s, he was mixing his new compositions in surround sound.Mr. Schulze is survived by his wife, Elfi Schulze; his sons, Maximilian and Richard; and four grandchildren.Through his copious projects, Mr. Schulze’s music maintained a sense of timing: when to meditate, when to build, when to ease back, when to leap ahead, how to balance suspense and repose, dissonance and consonance.“I prefer beauty, I always did,” he told an interviewer in 1997. “Of course, I also use brutal or unpleasant sounds sometimes, but only to show the variety. Beauty is more beautiful to a listener if I also show him the ugliness that does exist. I use it as part of the drama of a composition. But I’m not interested in music that shows only ugliness.“Also,” he added, “I believe that ugliness in music is more easy to achieve than — excuse the expression — ‘real music.’” More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Art Rupe, Who Brought Rhythm and Blues to the Mainstream, Dies at 104

      by

      As the founder of the independent label Specialty Records, he helped set the table for the rock ’n’ roll era by signing performers like Little Richard.Art Rupe, the founder of Specialty Records, an innovative independent label based in Los Angeles that brought rhythm and blues into the mainstream and helped set the table for the rock ’n’ roll era with singers like Little Richard and Lloyd Price, died on Friday at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 104.His death was announced by his daughter, Beverly Rupe Schwarz.Mr. Rupe created Specialty in 1946 with a niche audience in mind (hence the name). The major labels of the time, focused on mass-market pop hits, ignored the urbanized, blues-based music that appealed to Black audiences in the big cities. Mr. Rupe hoped to capitalize on this oversight by showcasing acts with “a big-band sound expressed in a churchy way,” as he put it to Arnold Shaw, the author of “Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues” (1978).In the late 1940s and early ’50s, artists like Roy Milton, Percy Mayfield and Joe Liggins consistently put Specialty in the Top 10 of what were known as the “race record” charts until Billboard magazine began using the term “rhythm and blues” in 1949. In 1952, on a scouting trip to New Orleans, Mr. Rupe recorded Lloyd Price, then 19, singing his own composition, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” That record, which featured Fats Domino on piano, became the top-selling R&B record of the year and broke through to white listeners, too.Mr. Rupe hit one of rock ’n’ roll’s mother lodes when he signed Richard Penniman, known professionally as Little Richard, on the strength of a scratchy audition tape. SpecialtyThree years later, Mr. Rupe hit one of rock ’n’ roll’s mother lodes when he signed Richard Penniman, known professionally as Little Richard, on the strength of a scratchy audition tape. During a lunch break at a recording session in New Orleans, Little Richard sat down at the piano and shouted out a risqué song he used in his nightclub act: “Tutti Frutti.” With hastily rewritten lyrics, the song became one of rock’s early classics, and the first in a string of Little Richard hits that included “Long Tall Sally,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “Rip It Up,” “Lucille,” “Keep a-Knockin’” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly.”“Art Rupe had a tremendous impact on rock ’n’ roll,” said John Broven, the author of “Record Makers and Breakers” (2009), a history of early rock ’n’ roll’s independent record producers. “‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ was really the first record to cross over and reach a teenage white audience, and then came Little Richard with ‘Tutti-Frutti’ and ‘Long Tall Sally.’ These were monumental records that almost created rock ’n’ roll in themselves.”Art Rupe was born Arthur Newton Goldberg on Sept. 5, 1917, in Greensburg, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh, and grew up in nearby McKeesport, where his father, David, was a salesman at a secondhand furniture store and his mother, Anna, was a music lover. After attending Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Miami University in Ohio, he moved to Los Angeles in 1939.He enrolled in business courses at U.C.L.A. with the idea of entering the film business; he also changed his last name to Rupe after being told by a relative that it had been the family’s original surname in Europe. After World War II broke out, he worked at a local shipyard on an engineering crew that tested Liberty ships.The movie business, he found, was tough to enter, and he shifted his attention to the recording industry. Responding to a newspaper ad, he invested $2,500 in a new label, Atlas Records, which lost most of his money and failed to produce hits by its two main artists, Nat King Cole and Frankie Laine.Roy Milton and His Solid Senders in a publicity photo. Mr. Milton, standing, a jump-blues singer, recorded numerous Top 10 R&B hits for Specialty.Courtesy of Colin EscottAfter selling his interest in Atlas for $600, Mr. Rupe created his own company, Juke Box Records, in 1944. “I called it Juke Box because the jukebox was the medium then for plugging records,” he told Arnold Shaw. “If you got a record into the boxes, it was tantamount to getting it on the top stations today.”Mr. Rupe was methodical. He bought $200 worth of race records and, stopwatch in hand, began analyzing musical structure, tempo and even titles to identify the common characteristics of the best-selling releases. Since the word “boogie” appeared in a disproportionate number of hit songs, Juke Box’s first record, an instrumental by the Sepia Tones, was given the title “Boogie No. 1.” It sold a more than respectable 70,000 copies, and Mr. Rupe was on his way.The jump-blues singer Roy Milton and his band, the Solid Senders, gave Juke Box its first big hit: “R.M. Blues,” released in 1945, which was said to have sold a million copies. Mr. Milton went on to record nearly 20 Top 10 R&B hits after following Mr. Rupe to Specialty, which he founded the next year after breaking with his Juke Box partners.In 1950 the pianist and bandleader Joe Liggins gave Specialty its first No. 1 hit, “Pink Champagne,” which became the top-selling R&B record of the year. Percy Mayfield, a singer and songwriter with a relaxed, swinging style who would later contribute “Hit the Road, Jack” and other songs to Ray Charles’s repertoire, topped the charts a year later with “Please Send Me Someone to Love.” Guitar Slim gave the label yet another No. 1 hit in 1954 with “The Things That I Used to Do,” one of the earliest records to put the electric guitar front and center.“Specialty was a little like the Blue Note label in jazz,” said the singer and music historian Billy Vera, who produced “The Specialty Story,” a boxed set of the label’s best sides released in 1994, and wrote “Rip It Up: The Specialty Records Story,” published in 2019. “Art was dollar conscious, but he did not let that stop him from going into the better studios and taking the time to rehearse. He took great pride and care to make quality records with quality musicians.”Specialty exerted a powerful influence on the British invasion bands of the 1960s, and even its second-tier acts had a ripple effect. Larry Williams, a New Orleans singer groomed by Specialty to fill the void when Little Richard left the music business in 1957, had solid hits with “Short Fat Fannie” and “Bony Moronie,” but even his lesser singles made an impression overseas. His single “She Said Yeah” was covered by the Rolling Stones and the Animals. The Beatles recorded three of his songs: “Bad Boy,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” and “Slow Down.” Don and Dewey, another Specialty act, never had a hit, but their sound greatly influenced the Righteous Brothers and Sam and Dave.Mr. Rupe, a longtime fan of gospel music, quickly made Specialty’s gospel division an industry leader, signing the Pilgrim Travelers, the Swan Silvertones, Alex Bradford, Brother Joe May and Sister Wynona Carr. Two of the label’s most famous gospel groups generated crossover stars for other labels: Sam Cooke became a pop star after leaving the Soul Stirrers, as did Lou Rawls, who recorded with the Chosen Gospel Singers.Mr. Cooke was the one that got away. In 1956, he recorded a pop tune, “Lovable,” produced by Specialty’s Bumps Blackwell with a lush background chorus and released with the singer’s name thinly disguised as Dale Cook. Mr. Rupe disliked the smooth pop treatment and let Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Cooke leave the label with the other recordings from that session in hand. One song, “You Send Me,” became a chart-topping hit and ignited Mr. Cooke’s remarkable career.“In all candor, I did not think ‘You Send Me’ was that great,” Mr. Rupe told an interviewer for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. “I never dreamed it would be a multimillion seller.”Mr. Rupe in 2019. He sold Specialty’s catalog in 1990 and created the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation in 1991.Rauh Jewish Archives, Heinz History CenterBy 1960, Mr. Rupe was growing disenchanted with the record business, particularly with the widespread system of payola, which required record companies to pay off disc jockeys and distributors to get their records heard.Increasingly, he let assistants like Harold Battiste, in New Orleans, and Sonny Bono, in Los Angeles, produce and market the label’s records. In 1990, he sold Specialty’s catalog to Fantasy RecordsWhile still at Specialty, Mr. Rupe invested successfully in oil and real estate and started his own oil company. In 1991 he created the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation, whose stated goals include “achieving positive social change by shining the light of truth on critical and controversial issues” and providing support for caregivers of people with dementia.In addition to his daughter — from the second of his three marriages, to Lee Apostoleris, which ended in divorce — Mr. Rupe is survived by a granddaughter; a step-grandson; and two step-great-granddaughters. His third wife, Dorothy Rupe, and three siblings died before him.In 2011, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame gave Mr. Rupe the Ahmet Ertegun Award for Lifetime Achievement, an honor given to record-company executives.“When I got into the business, few white people fooled around with this kind of music,” Mr. Rupe told Arnold Shaw. “I had no idea that it would ever appeal to so many white people.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      F.D.R. Speeches and Alicia Keys Album Added to National Recording Registry

      by

      A hit by the band Journey, radio accounts of the 9/11 attacks, “Buena Vista Social Club” and a recording of Hank Aaron’s 715th home run also made the registry.Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech about “a date which will live in infamy.” The rock band Journey’s song about “a small-town girl livin’ in a lonely world” who takes a midnight train going anywhere. And firsthand descriptions of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.Each of those are “unforgettable sounds of the nation’s history,” the Library of Congress said on Wednesday, adding that they are among 25 recordings selected this year for inclusion in the National Recording Registry.Since 2002, the Librarian of Congress, with advice from experts, has picked recordings that are at least 10 years old and are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” for inclusion in the registry.The program, library officials said, aims to provide a long-term archival home for the preservation of the recordings and to acknowledge their importance.The registry “reflects the diverse music and voices that have shaped our nation’s history and culture,” the librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, said in a statement.“The national library is proud to help preserve these recordings,” she added.Other recordings selected this year include Alicia Keys’ first album, “Songs in A Minor”; the 1997 album “Buena Vista Social Club”; a 1956 recording of Duke Ellington and his orchestra at the Newport Jazz Festival; and the 1974 radio call of Hank Aaron’s 715th home run, which broke a record previously held by Babe Ruth.The 575 recordings already included in the national registry include classical music; opera performances; blues and pop songs; monologues and poems; and speeches and radio broadcasts reflecting momentous news events. Among those are Robert F. Kennedy’s speech upon the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the 1973 Wailers album “Burnin’” and a 1977 recording of a Grateful Dead concert at Cornell University.That diversity can also be seen in this year’s selections, which include all of Roosevelt’s speeches as president and the 1981 Journey single turned karaoke favorite, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which the library described as “the personal empowerment anthem of millions.”One of the more somber recordings chosen this year consists of the Sept. 11, 2001, broadcasts by the radio station WNYC, which was located at that time in Lower Manhattan, blocks from the World Trade Center.That morning station employees broke with scheduled programming to describe the chaos of the terror attacks on the Twin Towers, broadcasting what the library called “the tragedy’s first eyewitness accounts.”“As the story unfolded,” the library wrote, “the dedicated staff of WNYC remained on the air.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Bobby Rydell, Teenage Idol With Enduring Appeal, Dies at 79

      by

      He had his first hit in 1959. Six decades later, teamed with his fellow singers Frankie Avalon and Fabian, he was still drawing crowds.Bobby Rydell, a Philadelphia-born singer who became a teenage idol in the late 1950s and, with his pleasant voice, stage presence and nice-guy demeanor, maintained a loyal following on tours even after both he and his original fans were well past retirement age, died on Tuesday in Abington, Pa. He was 79.The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Maria Novey, a spokeswoman.Mr. Rydell and two other affable performers who became stars in those years, Frankie Avalon and Fabian, grew up within about two blocks of one another in South Philadelphia. Long after their days on the pop chart were past them, they enjoyed great success on the oldies circuit. The three had toured extensively together since 1985, billed as the Golden Boys.Mr. Rydell did not just have staying power; he also made a comeback after years of alcohol abuse, which he chronicled in his autobiography, “Bobby Rydell: Teen Idol on the Rocks” (2016), written with the guitarist and producer Allan Slutsky. Near death, he had a kidney and liver transplant in July 2012. By that October he was back, singing on a cruise ship with Mr. Avalon. But five months later, he underwent cardiac bypass surgery. Some of his later appearances were charity promotions for organ donation.By 2014, his schedule was heavy again, including 11 concerts in Australia that February. He continued to perform for the rest of his life.Mr. Rydell performing with the City Rhythm Orchestra In Concert at Lincoln Center in New York City, in 2016.Bobby Bank/WireImage, via Getty ImagesMr. Rydell’s recording prime encompassed the era roughly between 1959, when Elvis Presley was in the Army and Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, and 1964, when Beatlemania hit America. It didn’t hurt that Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” was broadcast in those years from Philadelphia, the home of Mr. Rydell’s label, Cameo Records.Mr. Rydell’s repertoire included plaintive love ballads; slow, danceable tunes; occasional frenetic rockers like “Wild One” and “Swingin’ School”; and ageless songs like Domenico Modugno’s 1958 hit “Volare,” which became Mr. Rydell’s signature song in his later touring years.Mr. Rydell was a pop phenomenon but hardly a cutting-edge rock star. Still, he sold a lot more records than some of those who were. Over the course of his recording career he placed 19 singles in the Billboard Top 40 and 34 in the Hot 100. His name alone could conjure up an entire era: The 1970s rock musical “Grease,” in both its Broadway and movie versions, was set in 1959 at the fictional Rydell High School.Mr. Rydell was born Robert Louis Ridarelli on April 26, 1942. His father, Adrio, was a machine shop foreman, and in 1995 the city of Philadelphia honored South 11th Street, where he grew up, as Bobby Rydell Boulevard. Mr. Rydell’s 1963 song “Wildwood Days” paid homage to Wildwood, the New Jersey beach town where his grandmother had a boardinghouse and he spent his early summers; like Philadelphia, Wildwood later held an honorary street-naming for Mr. Rydell.Unlike some of the other pretty faces of his era, Mr. Rydell was a real musician. His father, a fan of the big bands, would take him as a child to see Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw at the Earle Theater in Philadelphia. At age 6, he told his father he wanted to play the drums like Gene Krupa, and he was singing in local nightclubs a year or two later.The bandleader Paul Whiteman had an amateur talent show, “TV Teen Club,” on Philadelphia television in the early 1950s. Young Bobby entered the contest when he was 9; he soon became a regular on the show, remaining for three years. Bobby’s father shortened the boy’s name to Rydell for the show.After a brief period as the drummer for a local group, Rocco and the Saints, which included Frankie Avalon on trumpet, Mr. Rydell went solo as a singer. His first three songs on the Cameo label were flops, but he scored in 1959 with “Kissin’ Time,” which Dick Clark, whose show had succeeded Paul Whiteman’s, immediately liked. It reached No. 11 on the Billboard chart.Mr. Rydell’s romantic voice, cute face and regular-guy personality drew screaming girls, but he also had enough adult appeal to be booked at the Copacabana in New York at 19.Reviewing his Copacabana performance in 1961, Variety complimented him on his “sense of career.” “Right now, he’s a teenager’s teenager,” the Variety critic said. “His style is packed with rhythm and bounce and his ‘nice boy next door’ demeanor is quite winning. Even the adults realize this, and it works to his advantage.”By his 21st birthday, Mr. Rydell had made three trips to perform in Europe and three others to Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Japan. In a 2011 interview, he recalled the reaction in Australia: “They stormed the stage, thousands and thousands of kids. The Australian police had to make a wedge to get us out of Sydney Stadium. It was scary, but all in all it was absolutely tremendous.” (Mr. Rydell went on to tour in Australia more than 20 times.)He also recalled that in 1963, in England, the Beatles climbed onto his tour bus to meet him. He didn’t know them, but they knew him. In the 2000 book “The Beatles Anthology,” Paul McCartney was quoted as saying that he and John Lennon based “She Loves You” on a Bobby Rydell song. He didn’t name the song, but his 1960 hit “Swingin’ School” includes a “Yeah, yeah, yeah” refrain. (Some sources say the song was “Forget Him,” which is somewhat similar lyrically.)Ann-Margret and Bobby Rydell in a scene from “Bye Bye Birdie” on the movie set in Hollywood in 1962.Associated PressColumbia Pictures signed him to a contract in 1961. But the only movie in which he made much of an impact was “Bye Bye Birdie,” released in 1963 and based on the hit Broadway musical of the same name, which poked fun at show business in general and rock ’n’ roll frenzy in particular. Mr. Rydell played Hugo Peabody, the meek high school steady of Kim McAfee, played by Ann-Margret, the small-town girl chosen to give the Elvis-like Conrad Birdie a kiss on national television. Dick Van Dyke and Janet Leigh were the film’s stars, but the parts of Hugo and Kim were considerably beefed up in the transition from stage to screen.In a radio interview in 2013 with Ted Yates of CKOC in Hamilton, Ontario, Mr. Rydell explained why he hadn’t stayed in Hollywood to make more movies: “I couldn’t. There was something about the lifestyle in California that I really wasn’t used to. I was basically a South Philadelphia kid, and I was an East Coast guy, and I really couldn’t stay out in California.” (Mr. Rydell also played a nightclub singer in the 1975 film “That Lady From Peking,” which was shot in Australia.)Underscoring his ties to his family and his city, and going against recommendations that he live on the West Coast, Mr. Rydell bought a house in 1963 in Penn Valley, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, and moved in with his parents and grandparents. He raised his children there, and moved in 2013 only because the house had grown too big for him and his wife. “I had the good fortune to spend my peak years as a recording artist during the golden age of the TV variety show,” Mr. Rydell wrote in his autobiography. “Throughout the early ’60s, I appeared on almost all of them.” Those included shows hosted by, among others, Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, Perry Como, Jack Benny, Milton Berle and, most notably, Red Skelton.After making two appearances on “The Red Skelton Hour” on which he just sang, he appeared in sketches intermittently from 1961 to 1969 as various characters, including Zeke Kadiddlehopper, cousin to Skelton’s country-bumpkin character Clem Kadiddlehopper.“Mr. Skelton fell in love with Bobby,” Mr. Rydell’s personal assistant, Linda F. Hoffman, said in 2013. “His son had passed away, and Bobby always felt he was looked upon by Mr. Skelton as a son. They were very close.”New York Times reviews of two rock ’n’ roll revival shows at Madison Square Garden suggested reasons for both his lesser place in the rock firmament and his future career longevity. In 1975, Ian Dove wrote: “Mr. Rydell is not your hard rocker — his era was in the late 1950s, when rock was being softened and made less frightening. With such songs as ‘Volare,’ he emerges more like a crooner than a rocker.” Reviewing a 1977 show, Robert Palmer wrote that Mr. Rydell “seemed uncomfortable with his rock ’n’ roll hits and would probably have become an Italian crooner had he not grown up in the rock ’n’ roll era.”After his television appearances dwindled, he continued to perform in nightclubs and nostalgia shows, and to tour Australia, until the promoter Dick Fox put the Golden Boys together in 1985, initially for a PBS special. Mr. Rydell, Mr. Avalon and Fabian would perform their own songs and then sing together; there would also be tributes to Frank Sinatra and to Mr. Rydell’s favorite singer, Bobby Darin.“When the three of us are onstage, we’re having fun,” Mr. Rydell said in a 2012 interview with the writer Pat Gallagher. “We’re not trying to fool anybody. Everybody has known us for the better part of 50 years. We just go out there and have fun and the audience can see that.”Mr. Rydell married his high-school sweetheart, Camille Quattrone, in 1968. She died in 2003. He is survived by his wife, Linda J. Hoffman (who is not related to Linda F. Hoffman); two children from his first marriage, Robert Ridarelli and Jennifer Dulin; and five grandchildren.In 2011, Mr. Rydell was characteristically modest. He praised Red Skelton and other show-business veterans for helping him along, recalled that in 1985 the touring trio didn’t think their act would last more than two years, and joked that the “G” sometimes fell off marquees where they performed, making their name “the Olden Boys.”He also said he felt odd that he was one of the first 10 people inducted into the Philadelphia Music Foundation’s Hall of Fame. “Leopold Stokowski, Dizzy Gillespie and Bobby Rydell,” he mused. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”Vimal Patel contributed reporting. More