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    Overlooked No More: Miriam Solovieff, Lauded Violinist Who Suffered Tragedy

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    She led a successful career despite coping with a horrific event that she witnessed at 18: the killing of her mother and sister at the hands of her father.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.On Feb. 23, 1940, Miriam Solovieff gave a recital at Town Hall in Manhattan. She was 18 and widely known as a violin prodigy, having toured much of the United States, Canada and Europe. It was no surprise, then, that the recital, presenting work by Mozart, Vivaldi and Alexander Glazunov, would receive positive reviews.What was surprising was the concert’s timing. Just six weeks earlier, Solovieff’s mother and younger sister — her entire family — were murdered by their estranged father.Solovieff had kept vigil by her mother as she lay dying from gunshot wounds in a hospital bed. And she ultimately heeded her mother’s urging that she not cancel the recital (it would be postponed a mere two weeks).The shootings became a tragedy so unspeakable that after the initial news reports, it was discussed only in hushed circles. For Solovieff, it opened a chasm between childhood promise, spent in the company of her cherished mother and sister, and an extraordinary adulthood, albeit one that bore tremendous emotional repercussions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. 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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      Overlooked No More: Chick Strand, Pioneering Experimental Filmmaker

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      Often turning her lens on women, she emerged as one of independent cinema’s fiercest proponents on the West Coast.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In Chick Strand’s 1979 film “Soft Fiction,” five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories, including one who describes being molested by her grandfather. As she talks, images of her performing household activities like cooking breakfast appear in splintered frames and enigmatic shapes.“It is a film about women who win,” Strand explained in a 1998 interview with the conceptual artist Kate Haug for the journal Wide Angle. “It is not about women who were victims or who had survived.”“They carry on,” she added, and by doing so they become “more potent, more powerful, more of themselves.”In “Femme Experimentale,” a research paper based on her interviews with several pioneering female filmmakers, Haug wrote that Strand’s “experimental techniques” in that 55-minute film disrupted “the visual codes of documentary film” with its “poetic transitions between narrators.”“Soft Fiction,” which is regularly screened in university film programs, retrospectives and museums around the world, was one of dozens of movies made by Strand, an experimental filmmaker who often trained her lens on women. Among the others were “Anselmo and the Women” and “Fake Fruit Factory,” both from 1986.Strand was a late bloomer by the standards of her day: She didn’t make her first film until she was 34. But she would go on to have momentous impact on the West Coast’s experimental film movement.A still from Strand’s film “Fake Fruit Factory” (1986), about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.Canyon Cinema Foundation“She rejects the classification of ‘feminist artist,’” the film scholar Gene Youngblood told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 1999, when some of Strand’s films were being shown at the College of Santa Fe. “And yet she has produced some of the most memorable portraits of female characters in the history of cinema.”Though she never achieved the same level of fame as contemporaries like Barbara Hammer and Shirley Clarke, scholars say her work was just as groundbreaking.Chick Strand was born Mildred Totman on Dec. 3, 1931, in Berkeley, Calif., to Russel and Eleanor Totman. Her father was a bank teller, her mother a homemaker. (Chick was a nickname given to her by her father).She first developed an interest in film while studying anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. By then she had already dabbled in photography.In the 1960s, inspired by the growing free speech movement, Strand began hosting makeshift screenings in her backyard with her first husband, Paul Anderson Strand, an artist, and the experimental film impresario Bruce Baillie. These “happenings,” as they called them, were intended to showcase highly personal, often esoteric audiovisual experiments among friends. As word spread, they quickly became carnivalesque productions, with Strand, Baillie and other regulars dressing in costumes and performing live while the films were shown to an increasingly large group of strangers.A still from Strand’s “Soft Fiction” (1979), in which five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories.Canyon Cinema FoundationIn 1961, she founded The Canyon Cinemanews, a journal for local filmmakers that Stanford University called “the main organ of the independent filmmaking community” when it purchased the journal’s archives in 2010. The journal offered what it described as “a cornucopia of announcements, letters, classifieds, how-to information, call-outs and more” for local filmmakers who lacked access to Hollywood.In 1966, the same year she began studying ethnography at the University of California, Los Angeles (and the same year her son, Eric, was born), Strand presented a three-minute short, “Angel Blue Sweet Wings,” at the New York Film Festival. The film captured the luminous, psychedelically colored landscape of Strand’s second home, in Mexico, through a roaming, almost dancing camera, with the faces of her friends collaged seamlessly over fuzzy bodies, plants and mountains. It was described as “an experimental film poem in celebration of life and visions” by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.In 1967, Strand helped start the Canyon Cinema collective with Baillie and the filmmakers Lawrence C. Jordan, Robert Nelson, Lenny Lipton and Ben Van Meter. The organization — part pop-up cinematheque, part artists’ cooperative — distributed experimental films by now-famous directors like Hammer, Clarke and Peggy Ahwesh. Canyon Cinema later became a full-time nonprofit, with many of its members’ works incorporated into the National Film Registry.By then Strand and her second husband, Neon Park, the artist known for his imaginative album covers, were splitting their time between California and Mexico. In Mexico, she began to explore assemblage and ethnography more formally in her art, resulting in several works now considered landmarks of West Coast cinema, including “Fake Fruit Factory,” about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.“I’d be tripping over the rocks and speaking this terrible Spanish,” Strand told L.A. Weekly in 2006. “But I was so incredibly interested, and people really responded.”Strand with her second husband, the artist Neon Park. They split their time between homes in California and Mexico.Canyon Cinema FoundationStrand then delved into what would become perhaps her best-known work: a 20-year trilogy of ethnographic films on the life of Anselmo Aguascalientes, a poor Mexican Indian tuba player. The first of these, “Anselmo” (1967), about his music, “represents an early example of Chick Strand’s abiding interest in documenting people, objects, animals and events through a heightened and poetic subjectivity, while at the same time using assemblage techniques that allow her to incorporate disparate, sometimes jarring elements,” Maria Pramaggiore, a professor of media studies at Maynooth University in Ireland, wrote in an essay, “Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnography,” published in the book “Women’s Experimental Cinema” (2007).The techniques used in “Anselmo” — and later in “Cosas de Mi Vida” (1976), about Anselmo’s life, and “Anselmo and the Women,” about his wife and mistress — would, Pramaggiore noted, become hallmarks of Strand’s documentary practice.Another key work, “Kristallnacht” (1979), was more technical, using the whites and blacks of 16-millimeter film negatives to craft a luminous existential tribute to Anne Frank. In that film, reflections play across shots of women swimming in a pool of water, sparking glimmers in the chiaroscuro darkness of each inverted image.Throughout her filmmaking career, Strand taught at the film arts program at Occidental College in Los Angeles, ultimately becoming the program’s director. She retired in 1996 but continued to produce groundbreaking experiments in film in her twilight years. As she told L.A. Weekly a decade into retirement: “I’m very satisfied creating works of art. I can’t seem to keep my mind from doing this, from painting or planning new films. It’s just what I love to do.”Strand died of cancer on July 11, 2009, at 77. But she lived long enough to see 350 of her personal items permanently entered into the Motion Picture Academy’s Film Archive in 2007. More

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      Overlooked No More: Dorothy Spencer, Film Editor Sought Out by Big Directors

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      She worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, Frank Capra and John Ford, and she was known for her deft touch, particularly with action movies.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.When Dorothy Spencer was asked what it took to become a film editor, her answer was always the same: patience.In a five-decade career, she worked as an editor on more than 70 movies and received four Academy Award nominations across a range of genres: the Oscar-winning 1939 western “Stagecoach”; the espionage thriller “Decision Before Dawn” (1951); the costume epic “Cleopatra” (1963); and the disaster movie “Earthquake” (1974). She was sought out by directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Joseph L. Mankiewicz for her deft touch, both with fight scenes and with subtle character moments.Bringing clarity to a confusing sequence might require sifting through 11 reels of footage, but Spencer easily got lost in her work.“I enjoy editing, and I think that’s necessary, because editing is not a watching-the-clock job,” she wrote in American Cinematographer magazine in 1974. “I’ve been on pictures where I never even knew it was lunchtime, or time to go home. You get so involved in what you’re doing, in the challenge of creating — because I think cutting is very creative.”Bill Elias, who worked with Spencer in the Universal Pictures editing department, spoke to her work ethic.“Every time I saw her,” he said in an interview, “she was sitting down at a Moviola” — the industry-standard film-editing machine in the era when the job required physically cutting and splicing film.In the movie industry, where important behind-the-camera roles have generally not been open to women, editing was an exception: Though the field was still dominated by men in Spencer’s day, there have been many notable women editors over the years, including Anne Bauchens (who edited Cecil B. DeMille’s films) and Thelma Schoonmaker (who edits Martin Scorsese’s). That might be because the job, which involved sorting and restitching, was somewhere between librarian and quilt maker — professions that were traditionally considered the domains of women.Spencer’s specialty was action movies, but one would not guess that from her short stature or from her quiet demeanor. “For some reason, I always seem to get assigned to pictures that are very physical,” she wrote in 1974.Not that she was complaining.“I like working on action pictures very, very much,” she said. “They’re more flexible, and I think you can do more with them.”“Stagecoach” (1939), the movie that made John Wayne a star, was one of four films for which Spencer was nominated for an Academy Award.Movie Poster Image Art/Getty ImagesDorothy Spencer, who was known as Dot, was born on Feb. 3, 1909, in Covington, in northern Kentucky, near the border of Ohio. She was the youngest of four children of Charles and Catherine (Spellbrink) Spencer. When she was a child, the family relocated to Los Angeles, where her older sister, Jeanne, began acting in movies (which she didn’t enjoy) and then became a writer and editor (which she did).Following her sister’s example, Dot started working in the film industry when she was a teenager — first as a junior employee at the Consolidated-Aller Lab, then as an assistant editor on silent movies like “The Strong Man” (1926) and “Long Pants” (1927), the first two features directed by Frank Capra.For four years beginning in 1937, Spencer worked with the editor Otho Lovering, cutting 10 films. She earned $5,000 in 1939 (about $102,000 in today’s dollars), but she still lived with her parents. That year marked the release of John Ford’s acclaimed western “Stagecoach,” which follows a group of strangers traveling together through perilous territory in the American Southwest in 1880. It was her most notable collaboration with Lovering — and not just because it made John Wayne a star.The editing of “Stagecoach” was regarded as masterly. Orson Welles said that he taught himself film editing by screening a print of “Stagecoach” 45 times at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Some aspects of the editing were groundbreaking: In his book “Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice” (2001), Don Fairservice pointed out that “Stagecoach” contained one of the earliest uses — maybe even the first — of the now-commonplace technique called a prelap, in which as one scene ends, dialogue from the next is already beginning on the soundtrack.Also innovative was the editing of the climactic action sequence, when Apache warriors attack the stagecoach. A fundamental law of film editing is the 180-degree rule: Although you can splice together a scene from diverse angles, you will confuse viewers if you cross an invisible 180-degree boundary, flipping the perspective so that a character who was facing left now faces right.In the attack sequence, Spencer and Lovering repeatedly and deliberately broke that rule. As David Meuel observed in his book “Women Film Editors: Unseen Artists of American Cinema” (2016), “by disorienting and confusing the audience, it created a closer bond between viewers and the characters in the stagecoach, who are themselves thoroughly disoriented and confused. So, rather than compromising the cinematic experience, this deliberate breaking of the 180-degree rule actually intensified it.”Spencer began working solo in 1941, and over the next decade she averaged two movies a year, working with notable directors like Hitchcock (“Lifeboat,” 1944), Elia Kazan (“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” 1945) and Ernst Lubitsch (five movies in which Spencer showed off her impeccable comic timing, including “To Be or Not to Be,” 1942).She made most of those films as a staff editor at the 20th Century Fox studio, a job she took in 1943 and kept for the next 24 years. During her tenure, the Hollywood studio system collapsed and the aesthetics of editing evolved; for example, dissolving from one scene to another went out of style.Spencer remained a constant, working with geniuses and journeymen, deferring to directors who had a vision in mind but offering creative flourishes when there were opportunities.“When you work with a new director who has never had any editing experience, he often asks for the impossible,” she wrote in 1974. “You can’t tell him it won’t work. You just have to do it his way and let him realize that maybe he was wrong.”In the soapy “Valley of the Dolls” (1967), directed by Mark Robson and based on Jacqueline Susann’s best seller about three young women struggling with the temptations of show business, she cut together some striking montages that nodded to the French New Wave. In one sequence, Patty Duke spits out water in the shower, does a multiple-exposure somersault, exercises on a rowing machine (with the top half and the bottom half of the screen deliberately out of sync) and gets married — a significant plot point, seen only in a black-and-white still photograph.Spencer needed all her unflappability and dedication on “Earthquake,” the eighth movie she made with Robson, which featured Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Richard Roundtree and the destruction of Los Angeles.Many scenes of seismic mayhem were filmed with multiple cameras, meaning that she had to wade through 200,000 feet of film. Her feedback spurred Robson to change his approach to filming the earthquake: Early in the shoot, she realized that “the shake wasn’t very noticeable because there was nothing in the foreground to serve as a reference for the degree of background movement.” So Robson made sure there was a prominent steady object to orient viewers.By the time of “Earthquake,” Spencer was mostly retired and living in the rural town of Encinitas, Calif. She edited one last movie — “The Concorde … Airport ’79,” another disaster film — but otherwise kept her distance from Hollywood; her death at 93, on May 23, 2002, went unnoticed in the press.Frank J. Urioste, a three-time Oscar nominee for film editing himself, said in an interview, “I wanted to work for her one time, just so I could say I got to work for Dorothy Spencer.”If he had, he might have learned a lesson about striving for perfection: “The more you see a film, the more critical you get,” she wrote in 1974. “But a paying audience sees the film only once, so perhaps they won’t catch it.” More

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      Overlooked No More: Sylvia Rexach, Puerto Rican Singer and Composer

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      She was especially known for reinventing boleros — songs of stringent, abiding love — amid Puerto Rico’s sexist and militaristic society in the mid-20th century.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.A woman positioned close to a microphone announces a title into the silence, as if preparing to read a poem: “En Mis Sueños” (“In My Dreams”). A guitarist plays a precise and dramatic introduction to a bolero.At modest volume, the woman, Sylvia Rexach, begins to sing, with a smoky voice and non-virtuosic authority. She describes a fantasy loop in which an ex-lover briefly visits her in her dreams, leaving behind a “wake of love” (“estela de amor”). The dream will return again when she wants it to, which she will. She may not want more than the fantasy. (She may even want less: to be free of repetitive desire.) There is no sense of possession nor, really, of loss. There will be no reciprocity in this relationship, and she seems not only to accept the situation but to be an adept within it, a powerful expert.This description could pertain to more or less every track on “Sylvia Rexach Canta a Sylvia Rexach,” a luminous, séance-like record made in a San Juan studio in July 1958 by the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter, then 36, and her friend the guitarist Tutti Umpierre. The tempos remain similar, as do the images and themes: moons, night and oblivion; celestial flashes; troublesome desire; waves and what they leave behind.The album, after it was released in the mid-1960s by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña — a government-funded operation and the island’s equivalent to the Smithsonian Institution — was barely distributed outside Puerto Rico and has only recently appeared on streaming services. It is the only commercially issued recording of Rexach performing her own songs, and it was not even intended as such: It was a reference document for posterity attesting to how her songs should sound, made at the behest of the studio’s owner. It includes “Olas y Arenas” (“Waves and Sands”), “Alma Adentro” (“Inner Soul”) and “Y Entonces” (“And So”), which over the years have been taken up by other performers in many styles.Rexach (pronounced reck-SAHTCH) was a gifted composer of boleros — songs of stringent, abiding love in slow 2/4 time. The bolero began in Cuba at the end of the 19th century and gained popularity across Latin America in the late 1920s. But by the ’40s and ’50s it could reflect a more modern sensibility, one in tune with the wild subconscious. It could just about accommodate someone like Rexach, an artist to the core, “una bohemia” — not a casual description but a committed identity.“It meant that she liked the nightlife, and sang with her friends in groups, and saw the sun come up,” her daughter, the actor and singer Sharon Riley, said in an interview.There had been important female bolero composers before Rexach, most famously María Grever of Mexico. But Puerto Rico’s sexist and militaristic society in the mid-20th century created particularly difficult circumstances that forced women artists like Rexach and the poet Julia de Burgos to invent their own tradition.The eminent musicologist Cristóbal Díaz Ayala described Rexach as virtually unclassifiable within the Latin American music of her time. Her lyrics projected a frank sexuality and a near-indifference to shame. They could look like passionate resignation, or calm defiance. “I am the sand that the wave never touches,” she laments in “Olas y Arenas.”She could destabilize and diffuse what the scholar Elaine Enid Vázquez González has called “the boleristic ‘I’”: In her songs, the narrator’s desire doesn’t entirely travel outward toward its object, as had been common in bolero lyrics. It travels inward, more toward her own memory and the senses. The listener follows it there.Rexach was 36 when she recorded an album with the guitarist Tutti Umpierre. The songs on that record have been performed by many other musicians, including Linda Ronstadt and Tito Rodríguez.Archivo General de Puerto RicoSylvia Regina Rexach González was born on Jan. 22, 1922, one of seven children of Julio Rexach, who was of Catalan descent and ran Farmacia Rexach, a drugstore next door to the family’s home, and María Teresa González, a society woman and organizer of annual carnival activities. Her well-to-do family lived in Santurce, the district east of San Juan’s Old City known for its density of musicians and artists.At Central High School in Santurce, Sylvia proved an indifferent student but one who was indispensable to the school’s performing-arts programs. One afternoon in the mid-1930s, while on a school outing, she played her song “Di Corazon” (“Tell Me, Heart”) on a piano at the Escambrón Beach Club. The bandleader Rafael Muñoz, who was on a break from rehearsing for an evening performance, heard it and asked her who wrote it. Her father signed a contract on her behalf with the publishing company Peer International, and Muñoz recorded the song before Rexach finished her junior year.In 1943 she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps for three months, working as a desk clerk. Around this time, while publicizing a brand of rum outside a grocery store, she met Bill Riley, an Army cook from Connecticut. They fell in love, quickly married, had three children and were legally joined for 13 years, mostly unhappily, with a long separation toward the end. According to Sharon Riley, her father was often violent with her mother, especially when both had been drinking.In the 1940s and ’50s, Rexach worked in clubs as the leader of the vocal group el Combo Las Damiselas (later known as el Combo de Sylvia Rexach) and with musical-theater revues, both on the island and occasionally in New York City. She helped form a publishing organization through which she advocated for composers’ rights; wrote scripts for radio and television comedy shows, as well as advertising jingles for aspirin and detergent; and wrote a cultural criticism column for El Diario de Puerto Rico, praising the unsung and the local while reacting against exploitative business practices.She also raised her children as a single mother, and she wrote songs. About 50 have been published, though a friend, the singer José Luis Torregrosa, believed that many more “were left on the tabletops of the cafes where we were drinking.” Several were recognized during her life through versions by well-known singers — particularly Lucho Gatica’s “Y Entonces,” released in 1959 — but many more came later, as performed by Tito Rodríguez, La Lupe, Cheo Feliciano and others. The song “Alma Adentro” alone has passed through many sensibilities: Linda Ronstadt covered it on her Grammy Award-winning 1992 album, “Frenesí,” as did the New York-based jazz saxophonist Miguel Zenón in 2011. on a record named after the song. Miramar, the bolero revivalist band with roots in Puerto Rico, researched her life before creating their own subtle version, included on their album “Dedication to Sylvia Rexach,” released in 2016, which drew some attention to the composer in the United States. And the Spanish singer Angela Cervantes and the Cuban jazz pianist Pepe Rivero recently released their own version, spreading her work to audiences that barely knew her music.Aspects of Rexach’s life have created around her an aura of tragedy. But those who knew her spoke of a different set of qualities, including hilarity, bravery and loyalty.Archivo General de Puerto RicoRexach died on Oct. 20, 1961, of stomach cancer. She was 39.Her position in history remains unfixed — somewhere between institution and cult, often rediscovered and sometimes not discovered at all. A Telemundo mini-series about Rexach’s life, broadcast in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s and starring Sharon Riley, told her story in dramatic tones. There have been two theaters named for her in San Juan; the current one, inside the Centro de Bellas Artes, Puerto Rico’s major arts center, is built roughly on the site of her family’s old house. A well-researched Spanish-language biography, “Sylvia Rexach: Pasión Adentro,” by Virianai Rodríguez Santaliz, was published in Puerto Rico in 2008, but it has not been translated into other languages and has gone out of print.Rexach was a woman of integrity who continues to resist easy definition and enshrinement. She was melancholic, and aspects of her life have created around her an aura of tragedy: her troubled marriage and divorce; her long illness; her son Billy’s opiate addiction and prison time in New York City; her early death at the Women’s Hospital of Santurce.Yet those who knew her well, as detailed in Santaliz’s biography, have stressed a different set of qualities: hilarity, bravery, generosity, loyalty, perfectionism. Marta Romero, one of her bandmates in el Combo Sylvia Rexach, once called her “a volcano of mercy in constant eruption.” The great songwriter Tite Curet Alonso also compared her to nature, calling her “a true cultural bruma.” The word “bruma,” which she used in “Olas y Arenas,” means mist, and implies that she has become part of the atmosphere. More

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      Overlooked No More: Klaus Nomi, Singer With an Otherworldly Persona

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      His sound and look influenced everyone from Anohni to Lady Gaga. He also sang backup vocals for David Bowie.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.A wide range of musical genres fueled New York’s nightclubs in the late 1970s and early ’80s, including new wave, no wave, punk and post punk. Klaus Nomi, who performed during that era, defied being categorized under any of them.“I wouldn’t give it a label,” Nomi said of his sound in a Belgian television interview. “Maybe the only label is my own label: It’s Nomi style.”His music combined opera, infectious melodies, disco beats, German-accented countertenor vocals and undeniable grandeur. He influenced everyone from the singer-songwriter Anohni to Lady Gaga; in 2009, when Morrissey was asked to select eight essential records for the BBC radio program “Desert Island Discs,” Nomi’s version of Schumann’s “Der Nussbaum” made the list.Nomi’s stage look was equally eclectic, and inseparable from his sound. The gender-fluid mix included dark, dramatically-applied lipstick as well as nail polish, the occasional women’s garment and often a giant structured tuxedo top that suggested Dada as much as sci-fi. His style influenced the fashion world as well, in collections by designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and Riccardo Tisci.Nomi’s look was indisputably nonbinary, and a bit otherworldly. “He still comes across as an outrageously expressive and strange figure,” Tim Lawrence, author of the 2016 book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983,” said in a phone interview.“There was something about his entire being, which seemed to be queer, around makeup and voice and music and dress,” Lawrence said.Nomi — or Klaus Sperber, the name he was born with — moved to New York City from his native Germany in the early 1970s. He fell in with a group of creative friends and in late 1978 joined many of them to perform at New Wave Vaudeville, a series of quirky variety shows. The bill included a stripper, a singing dog and a performance artist dressed as a sadistic nun.Nomi, in the background at center, at the Mudd Club in Manhattan in 1979, the year he met David Bowie there.Alan KleinbergAs the closing act, Nomi sang an aria from Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” while wearing a transparent raincoat over a shiny, fitted top and pants along with dramatic eye makeup and lipstick.“He really blew people’s minds,” Ann Magnuson, who directed the shows, said in an interview. “He had all these snarky punk rockers out there who were speechless.”With the performances came a new name, inspired by the name of a magazine focused on outer space, Omni.“Klaus said, ‘I can’t go out as Klaus Sperber,’” his friend Joey Arias, the singer and performance artist, recalled by phone. “‘That’s not a star’s name.’”Soon he was performing as Klaus Nomi at tastemaker Manhattan clubs like Max’s Kansas City and Hurrah, with a set list created with the help of Kristian Hoffman, a musician who served for a time as his musical director. The material included edgy originals and unconventional takes on well-known hits. Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” became an enraged dirge, for example; the chorus of “Lightnin’ Strikes” morphed into an aria. The thought was that pop songs would “catch the ear of an audience who isn’t ready for opera,” Hoffman said in an interview.As The New York Times put it in a review of one of his performances, Nomi’s music was “positively catchy, in a strange sort of way.”One night in late 1979, Nomi and Arias were at the Mudd Club, in TriBeCa, when they met David Bowie there. Nomi called him later — Bowie had asked him to, scribbling his phone number with a friend’s eyeliner — and Nomi and Arias were recruited to be Bowie’s backup singers for an appearance that December as the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.”For the show’s three songs, they wore clinging women’s Thierry Mugler dresses, purchased at Henri Bendel. The look was extremely provocative at the time, especially on national television. Throughout, the TV cameras’ focus seemed to be as much on them as on Bowie.“It legitimized everything, because it had been sort of a private scene, and all of a sudden there it is, right in front of you on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said Katy Kattelman, a designer who is known professionally as Katy K and who was a friend of Nomi’s.Soon after, Nomi signed a record deal with RCA France. His debut album, titled simply “Klaus Nomi,” was released in Europe in 1981; a second album, “A Simple Man,” came out the next year. The records sold well — “Klaus Nomi” earned gold-record status in France — and he performed abroad to packed venues.Nomi returned to New York toward the end of 1982, excited by the prospect of possible American tours and releases. But he arrived gaunt and exhausted — he had contracted AIDS. He died of complications of the illness on Aug. 6, 1983. He was 39.A scene from the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song” showing Nomi getting ready for a performance.Palm PicturesNomi at Hurrah, one of many nightclubs he performed at in New York City.Harvey WangKlaus Sperber was born on Jan. 24, 1944, in Immenstadt, a town in what was then West Germany. He was raised by his mother, Bettina, who worked odd jobs. A fling with a soldier, whom Klaus never met, resulted in his birth. When he was a child, he and his mother moved to the city of Essen, about 400 miles away. Opera music was often playing in their house, and it set Klaus on his path.“The first time I heard an opera singer on the radio I said, ‘My God, I want to sing just like that,’” he said in interview footage that is included in the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song.” As a teenager, he became equally fond of Elvis Presley.He moved to West Berlin and worked as an usher at Deutsche Oper, where he sometimes sang for colleagues after the audience had left. But he aspired to sing professionally, and, Arias said, “he felt like he was at a dead end.”“He wanted to come to New York because he felt like it would change his life,” Arias added.Nomi settled in Manhattan’s East Village. He worked for a while in the kitchen of the Upper East Side cafe and celebrity hangout Serendipity 3 and started a baking business with Kattelman called Tarts, Inc., supplying restaurants with desserts made in Nomi’s St. Marks Place apartment.Nomi was known to frequent after-hours clubs, like the Anvil and Mineshaft, where casual sex was commonplace. There were sexual encounters at home as well — Arias said he once arrived at Nomi’s apartment to find a naked Jean-Michel Basquiat toweling off.To get a green card, he married a woman, Melissa Moon, a U.S. citizen, in 1980.“I don’t think he was in any way being anything that wasn’t himself, which was pretty gay as far as I knew,” said the artist Kenny Scharf. “When you’re creating your persona, the sexuality part is obviously part of the persona. It was all part of his sense of style and him being an artist in every way.” More

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      Overlooked No More: Sinn Sisamouth, ‘King’ of Cambodian Pop Music

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      He and his singing partner, Ros Serey Sothea, drew from a wide range of Western and local influences. They disappeared after the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.Before the singer-songwriter Sinn Sisamouth disappeared, he had become a fixture on radio programs and in nightclubs in Cambodia and beyond. For more than two decades, from the 1950s until the mid-’70s, fans praised his smooth voice and evocative lyrics about love and the Cambodian landscape.He and his bandmates — most notably the singer Ros Serey Sothea — stood out for their versatile repertoire of jazz, rock ’n’ roll and popular Khmer ballads, among other styles. Sometimes they would use the melody of a Western song — the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” for example — while adding orchestration and writing original Khmer lyrics for it.They played a major role in defining the sound of Cambodia’s popular music industry, with Sinn Sisamouth emerging as one of the country’s most revered stars.Then, in 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power, enacting a four-year campaign of execution, forced labor, disease and famine that killed at least 1.7 million people. The work of artists and intellectuals was brutally repressed, and Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea were among the many Cambodians who disappeared amid the violence and upheaval.Even now the circumstances of their deaths are unclear, though family members are certain they are no longer alive. Sinn Sisamouth’s granddaughter Sin Setsochhata said that, based on research by her father, her family believes that Sinn Sisamouth disappeared in the southern province of Kandal, which borders Vietnam. Some believe he died in a labor camp. The Guardian reported in 2007 that he had been shot. By some accounts, before his execution, believed to be in 1976, he pleaded to sing one last song.Many of Sinn Sisamouth’s recordings survived, however, and they still exert a deep influence on Cambodian culture.“He was a pioneer,” the Cambodian musician Mol Kamach said in “Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll,” a 2014 documentary film, by John Pirozzi, about Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Serey Sothea and other musicians. “He was an example to other professional singers that singing modern is like this.”Sinn Sisamouth was believed to have been born on Aug. 23, 1933, in the northeastern province of Stung Treng. (Some accounts list his birth year as 1932 or 1935.)His father, Sinn Leang, was a prison warden; his mother was Sib Bunloeu, according to a 1995 article in The Phnom Penh Post. At the age of 7 or 8, Sinn Sisamouth moved to the western province of Battambang, where his uncle helped him develop an early interest in playing traditional Khmer music on stringed instruments like the tro khmer, a type of fiddle, and the chapei, a lute.Sinn Sisamouth arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital, when he was 17 and enrolled in a medical school there with the goal of becoming a hospital nurse, but he never lost his love of music. He performed for sick patients to help them relax, his granddaughter said, and spent his breaks playing his mandolin under a tree.He later began performing live at the headquarters of Cambodia’s newly established national radio, and his profile rose.“When it came to singing technique, Sinn Sisamouth was king,” Prince Panara Sirivudh, a member of the Cambodian royal family, said in the documentary. “His voice was so beautiful, and he wrote very sweet songs.”Popular Western music was imported to Cambodia as early as the 1940s by the royal palace and by Cambodians who could afford to travel to Europe, and the country’s rock ’n’ roll scene began in earnest in the 1950s, according to a study by LinDa Saphan, the associate producer of the documentary and a professor of sociology at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City.The sound blended high-pitched, operatic singing with the distorted electric guitar solos that were popular in American music at the time.Sinn Sisamouth became representative of this new style because he had an ability to write both ballads and upbeat rock songs, Saphan wrote, but the voices of Ros Serey Sothea and other female vocalists on his recordings were the “final touch that made this Cambodian mix so enticing.”Early in his career, Sinn Sisamouth was invited to perform with Cambodia’s royal ballet; he appeared in dapper suits and bow ties, his hair combed back. He also traveled overseas — to India, Hong Kong and beyond — with a traditional band formed by the queen’s son, Norodom Sihanouk, a composer and saxophonist (and future king) who played a major role in developing the country’s cultural industries in the postcolonial era.It was a hopeful time in Cambodia’s history: The country had achieved independence from France in 1953 and was shaping its identity and culture.As Sinn Sisamouth’s popularity grew, his former neighbors in the countryside marveled at hearing his songs on the radio. Some referred to him as “golden voice” or the “Elvis of Cambodia.”“A medical student — how can he sing?” the villagers said at the time, his sister recalled in the documentary.He met Ros Serey Sothea when she was 17 at the national radio station and recorded with her for more than a decade.Though they were never romantically involved, “their musical conversations were love stories filled with a sense of yearning and despair, of palpable loss, yet holding out the possibility of reconciliation,” Saphan wrote.By the early 1970s, amid a scene of go-go bands, big hairdos and youthful exuberance, the duo had produced several hit songs, including a few for Cambodian films. Sinn Sisamouth also wrote and directed the 1974 film “Unexpected Song,” which included some of his original music and a performance by Ros Serey Sothea.The duo’s music has received renewed interest. Sinn Sisamouth is the subject of a forthcoming documentary film, “Elvis of Cambodia,” and Ros Serey Sothea is the subject of a graphic novel, “The Golden Voice,” which is scheduled to be published next year.Sinn Sisamouth married one of his cousins, Khao Thang Nhoth, and they had three sons and a daughter, according to The Post. One of his sons, Sin Chanchhaya, also became a musician.For all of Sinn Sisamouth’s performing prowess, he was an introvert who spent most of his time alone, his granddaughter said. Often after having dinner with his family he would retire to his studio to compose.“All the emotions — the spirit, the connection, the interior feelings — were expressed through his music,” she said. More

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      Overlooked No More: Jobriath, Openly Gay Glam Rocker in the ’70s

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      His space alien persona and theatrical rock music drew comparisons to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character. But American audiences seemed unwilling to accept his sexuality.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.On March 8, 1974, American TV viewers got their first glimpse of the American glam rocker Jobriath on the popular NBC music program “The Midnight Special.” Jobriath, who was introduced by the singer Gladys Knight as “the act of tomorrow,” made a striking debut, wearing a futuristic silver-gray, hoop-shaped costume and singing a baroque-sounding number titled “I’maman.”For his second song, the electrifying “Rock of Ages,” he wore a tightfitting, one-piece purplish suit and a large, bubble helmet that, with the touch of his fingers, broke apart into petals that surrounded his head. His space alien persona and theatrical rock music drew comparisons to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character, and his swaggering sound was likened to that of Mick Jagger. Onstage he moved like a ballet dancer.“We were so excited,” the actress Ann Magnuson, then a teenager, said in a phone interview. “‘Oh, did you see that helmet?’ You would talk about that in school the next day.”But Billy Cross, who played the guitar alongside Jobriath, remembered the performance, and the audience, differently. “It was horrible,” he said in a phone interview. “They hated us, and that wasn’t fun.”Such was the complicated existence of Jobriath, who is generally regarded as the first openly gay rock star. His image came with risks: He released just two albums, and both were poorly received by an audience that was largely unwilling to accept his effeminate persona. His short-lived career became a footnote to rock ’n’ roll history, and he ultimately died alone, his body discovered by the police some time later.Jobriath performing on NBC’s “The Midnight Special” in 1974. He emerged onstage in a futuristic silver-gray, hoop-shaped costume.Gary Null/NBC, via Getty ImagesFor his second number on “The Midnight Special,” Jobriath wore a tight-fitting one-piece purplish suit.Gary Null/NBC, via Getty ImagesHe was born Bruce Wayne Campbell on Dec. 14, 1946, in Pennsylvania (accounts differ on precisely where), the second of three children of James and Marion (Salisbury) Campbell. His father came from a military background, and his mother was a homemaker who later worked as an insurance secretary. (The full name he used, Jobriath Salisbury, was “an amalgam of his teenage obsession with religion and his mother’s maiden name,” Robert Cochrane wrote in the liner notes of a 2004 Jobriath compilation.)Bruce Campbell was a musical prodigy who could sight-read any composition at the piano, said Peter Batchelder, who met him in 1964 when they were music students at Temple University.“He could play pretty much the whole first movement of the Prokofiev second piano concerto,” he said by phone. “He could handle musical data like nobody I ever met before or since.”Finding Temple’s music courses elementary, Bruce dropped out after one semester and joined the military. “He wanted to impress his father,” said his half brother, Willie Fogle. “Of course he hated it, so he ran away.”Relocating to California under the name of Jobriath Salisbury, he agreed to play the piano accompaniment for a friend who was auditioning for the 1968 Los Angeles production of “Hair.” The musical’s director, seeing Jobriath as a good fit for a production celebrating the counterculture, gave him a role. “We were all dumbfounded,” said Oatis Stephens, a friend who also acted in “Hair.” “It was like, ‘Why aren’t you playing concerts with the Philharmonic?’”Jobriath later joined the New York City company of “Hair” but was fired, by his account, for upstaging the other actors. He then found himself lost and binging on alcohol. “I was floating down in the gutter,” he told Interview magazine in 1973.He was rescued, however, by the music entrepreneur and club owner Jerry Brandt, who heard a demo tape that Jobriath had sent to CBS Records. Brandt asked to become his manager.“He could write, he could sing, he could dance,” Brandt said in the 2012 documentary “Jobriath A.D.” “I bought it. I mean, he seduced me, period.” (Brandt died in January.)At Brandt’s direction, Jobriath transformed himself from a 1960s hippie to a glittering rock star, and in interviews he took aim at musicians like Bowie and Marc Bolan, the frontman for the band T. Rex, whose personas only hinted at sexual ambiguity.“I’m a true fairy,” he would say. He told NBC Los Angeles: “There’s a lot of people running around, putting makeup on and stuff, just because it’s chic. I just want to say that I’m no pretender.”Brandt brought Jobriath to the attention of Elektra Records, which signed him for a reported $500,000, a huge sum at the time for an unknown musician, equal to almost $3 million today. (In Mick Houghton’s 2010 book “Becoming Elektra,” Jac Holzman, the label’s founder, said that the actual figure was closer to $50,000.)Jobriath in May 1983 when he performed as a cabaret musician. He was found dead that summer, from AIDS, in his room at the Chelsea Hotel.Hopkins, NYC, via the Bruce Campbell estateJobriath’s debut album, titled simply “Jobriath” and released in October 1973, was a mix of glam rock, cabaret and funk, all given sophisticated arrangements at the Electric Lady recording studios in Manhattan. His lyrics could be risqué (“I’d do anything for you or to you,” he sang in “Take Me I’m Yours”), tender (“I know the child that I am has hurt you/And I was a woman when I made you cry,” in “Be Still”) or witty (“With you on my arm Betty Grable lost her charm,” in “Movie Queen”).“The material just impressed me by its complexity, sensitivity, breadth and quirkiness,” Eddie Kramer, who co-produced the record with Jobriath, said in a phone interview. “He was a genius.”Before the album was released, Brandt mounted a heavy promotional campaign, including full-page advertisements in Rolling Stone and Vogue, posters on the sides of buses and a gigantic billboard in Times Square depicting Jobriath as a nude statue. Coinciding with the album’s release, Jobriath had planned to make his live performance debut with three shows at the Paris Opera House, where he would emerge in a King Kong costume climbing a mini replica of the Empire State Building. The production cost was estimated at an exorbitant $200,000.The ad campaign is one reason Jobriath is considered to this day to have been among the music industry’s most overhyped acts.With the gay liberation movement growing in the early 1970s, Brandt assumed that Jobriath would be readily embraced. “The kids will emulate Jobriath,” he told Rolling Stone in 1973, “because he cares about his body, his mind, his responsibility to the public as a leader, as a force, as a manipulator of beauty and art.”The album earned some positive reviews, including one from Rolling Stone, which said it “exhibits honest, personal magnetism and talent to burn.” Other publications were more mixed. In his review for The New York Times, Henry Edwards made the inevitable comparison to Bowie. “Jobriath, too, writes about ‘space clowns,’ ‘earthlings’ and ‘morning starships,’” he wrote. “The results can only be described as dismal.”Sales of the album were poor, and the Paris Opera House shows were scrapped.“When it started out,” said Cross, Jobriath’s guitarist, “it was all about the music. After Jerry Brandt got involved, it was all about the career. Then after that started to take hold, it was all about Jobriath’s sexuality. America was not ready for that.”Jobriath put out a second album, “Creatures of the Street,” in 1974 and embarked on a national tour, only to encounter homophobic slurs during a performance at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. By the next year, even after his appearance on “The Midnight Special,” Elektra had dropped Jobriath from its roster, and he and Brandt had parted ways.“He didn’t sell any records,” Brandt said in “Jobriath A.D.,” the documentary film. “What gets a record company going is the smell of money. And there was no money. He didn’t generate 50 cents.”From the late 1970s onward, Jobriath performed pop standards as a cabaret musician, calling himself Cole Berlin, and lived at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. In a 1979 interview, he spoke of his former alter ego in the past tense: “Jobriath committed suicide in a drug, alcohol and publicity overdose.” He was found dead at the Chelsea Hotel in the summer of 1983. He was 36. AIDS, which had reached epidemic dimensions by then, was given as the cause.In the decades since his death, Jobriath’s music has been reissued, and a number of musicians have expressed admiration for him, including Morrissey, Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters and Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott.Jobriath’s impact on L.G.B.T.Q. music history also went through a reappraisal. “He was a sexual hero,” the British singer Marc Almond wrote in The Guardian in 2012. “For all the derision and marginalization he faced, Jobriath did touch lives.”Today, those who knew Jobriath in his various guises — classical music wunderkind, glam rocker, interpreter of the Great American Songbook — remember his talent. “Whether he was composing epic symphonic music of searing intensity (and orchestrating it at 16) or brazenly appropriating the Rolling Stones’s idiom,” Batchelder, his former classmate, said in an email, “there was always beauty in his work.” More