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      Bob Koester, Revered Figure in Jazz and Blues, Dies at 88

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      Mr. Koester’s Delmark Records and his Chicago record store were vital in preserving and promoting music the big labels tended to overlook.Bob Koester, who founded the influential Chicago blues and jazz label Delmark Records and was also the proprietor of an equally influential record store where players and fans mingled as they sought out new and vintage sounds, died on Wednesday at a care center in Evanston, Ill., near his home in Chicago. He was 88.His wife, Sue Koester, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Mr. Koester was a pivotal figure in Chicago and beyond, releasing early efforts by Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Jimmy Dawkins, Magic Sam and numerous other jazz and blues musicians. He captured the sound of Chicago’s vibrant blues scene of the 1960s on records like “Hoodoo Man Blues,” a much admired album by the singer and harmonica player Junior Wells, featuring the guitarist Buddy Guy, that was recorded in 1965.Delmark captured the sound of Chicago’s vibrant blues scene in records like Junior Wells’s “Hoodoo Man Blues.” It also documented early examples of the avant-garde jazz being promulgated in Chicago by musicians like Anthony Braxton.“Bob told us, ‘Play me a record just like you played last night in the club,’” Mr. Guy recalled in a 2009 interview with The New York Times, and somehow he caught the electric feel of a live performance. In 2008 the record was named to the Grammy Hall of Fame.About the same time, Delmark was recording early examples of the avant-garde jazz being promulgated by the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an organization formed in Chicago in 1965. The company’s recordings were not, generally, the kind that generated a lot of sales.“If he felt something was significant, he wasn’t going to think about whether it would sell,” Ms. Koester said by phone. “He wanted people to hear it and experience the significance.”As Howard Mandel, the jazz critic and author, put it in a phone interview: “He followed his own star. He was not at all interested in trends.”For decades Mr. Koester’s record store, the Jazz Record Mart, provided enough financial support to allow Delmark to make records that didn’t sell a lot of copies. The store was more than an outlet for Delmark’s artists; it was packed with all sorts of records, many of them from collections Mr. Koester bought or traded for.“The place was just an amazing crossroads of people,” said Mr. Mandel, who worked there for a time in the early 1970s. Music lovers would come looking for obscure records; tourists would come because of the store’s reputation; musicians would come to swap stories and ideas.Mr. Koester in an undated photo. His store was packed with all sorts of records, many of them from collections he bought or traded for.Chicago Sun-Times“Shakey Walter Horton and Ransom Knowling would hang out there, and Sunnyland Slim and Homesick James were always dropping by,” the harmonica player and bandleader Charlie Musselwhite, who was a clerk at the store in the mid-1960s, told The Times in 2009, rattling off the names of some fellow blues musicians. “You never knew what fascinating characters would wander in, so I always felt like I was in the eye of the storm there.”Mr. Mandel said part of the fun was tapping into Mr. Koester’s deep reservoir of arcane musical knowledge.“You’d get into a conversation with him,” he said, “and in 10 minutes he was talking about some obscure wormhole of a serial number on a pressing.”Ms. Koester said the store held a special place in her husband’s heart — so much so that when he finally closed it in 2016, citing rising rent, he opened another, Bob’s Blues and Jazz Mart, almost immediately.“He loved going into the studio in the days when he was recording Junior Wells and Jimmy Dawkins,” she said, “but retail was in his blood.”He especially loved talking to customers.“Often they came into the store looking for one thing,” she said, “and he pointed them in another direction.”Robert Gregg Koester was born on Oct. 30, 1932, in Wichita, Kan. His father, Edward, was a petroleum geologist, and his mother, Mary (Frank) Koester, was a homemaker.He grew up in Wichita. A 78 r.p.m. record by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in his grandfather’s collection intrigued him when he was young, he said in an oral history recorded in 2017 by the National Association of Music Merchants. But, he told Richard Marcus in a 2008 interview for blogcritics.com, further musical exploration wasn’t easy.“I never liked country music, and growing up in Wichita, Kansas, there wasn’t much else,” he said. “There was a mystery to the names of those old blues guys — Speckled Red, Pinetop Perkins — that made it sound really appealing. Probably something to do with a repressed Catholic upbringing.”College at Saint Louis University, where he enrolled to study cinematography, broadened his musical opportunities.“My parents didn’t want me going to school in one of the big cities like New York or Chicago because they didn’t want me to be distracted from my studies by music,” he said. “Unfortunately for them, there were Black jazz clubs all around the university.”Music lovers would come to the Jazz Record Mart looking for obscure records; tourists would come because of the store’s reputation; musicians would come to swap stories and ideas.Sally Ryan for The New York TimesHe also joined the St. Louis Jazz Club, a jazz appreciation group. And he started accumulating and trading records, especially traditional jazz 78s, out of his dorm room. The rapidly growing record business crowded out his studies.“I went to three years at Saint Louie U,” he said in the oral history. “They told me not to come back for a fourth year.”His dorm-room business turned into a store, where he sold both new and used records.“I’d make regular runs, hitting all the secondhand stores, Father Dempsey’s Charities, places like that, buying used records,” he told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1993 for an article marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of his record label. “And I’d order records through the mail. Then I’d sell records at the Jazz Club meetings. That was the beginning of my retail business.”He had started recording musicians as well. He originally called his label Delmar, after a St. Louis boulevard, but once he relocated to Chicago in the late 1950s he added the K.He acquired a Chicago record shop from a trumpeter named Seymour Schwartz in 1959 and soon turned it into the Jazz Record Mart. His label not only recorded the players of the day but also reissued older recordings.“He loved obscure record labels from the ‘30s and ‘40s, and he acquired several of them,” Mr. Mandel said. “He reissued a lot of stuff from fairly obscure artists who had recorded independently. He salvaged their best work.”Mr. Koester was white; most of the artists he dealt with were Black.“He was totally into Black music,” Mr. Mandel said. “Not only Black music, but he definitely gave Black music its due in a way that other labels were not.”That made Mr. Koester stand out in Chicago when he went out on the town sampling talent.“When a white guy showed up in a Black bar, it was assumed he was either a cop, a bill collector or looking for sex,” Mr. Koester told blogcritic.com. “When they found out you were there to listen to the music and for no other reason, you were a friend. The worst times I had were from white cops who would try and throw me out of the bars. They probably thought I was there dealing drugs or something.”It was the atmosphere of those nightclubs that he tried to capture in his recording studio.“I don’t believe in production,” he said. “I’m not about to bring in a bunch of stuff that you can’t hear a guy doing when he’s up onstage.”In addition to his wife, whom he met when she worked across the street from his store and whom he married in 1967, Mr. Koester is survived by a son, Robert Jr.; a daughter, Kate Koester; and two grandchildren.Ms. Koester said their son will continue to operate Bob’s Blues and Jazz Mart. Mr. Koester sold Delmark in 2018.Mr. Koester’s record company played an important role in documenting two musical genres, but his wife said that beyond playing a little piano, he was not musically trained himself.“He would say his music was listening,” she said. More

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      Paul Oscher, Blues Musician in Muddy Waters’s Band, Dies at 74

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      He played harmonic, guitar and piano, often all at the same time. He died of complications of the coronavirus.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Paul Oscher was 20 when he started playing harmonica for Muddy Waters. It was 1967, and he was a rare sight for the times: a white man playing in a Black blues band of such prominence. He more than held his end up for Mr. Waters, the legendary star. Mr. Oscher later recalled his old boss saying, “I don’t care what color he is as long as he plays the soul I feel.”Rick Estrin, a harmonica player from San Francisco, in a phone interview, recalled seeing Mr. Oscher play behind Mr. Waters in Chicago, baby faced but sounding like he’d been born decades earlier.“He had an emotional intensity to his playing that he could turn up and down like a preacher,” Mr. Estrin said. “An internal rhythmic groove, relaxed and seductive. The blues were like a religion to him.”Mr. Oscher died on April 18 at a hospital in Austin, Texas. He was 74. The cause was complications of Covid-19, Nancy Coplin, his former manager, said.Mr. Oscher had been living in Austin since 2013, playing locally and on tour. His most recent album, “Cool Cat,” was released in 2018.“You know, the one thing about playing the blues is the older you get, the more respect you get,” Mr. Oscher told the filmmaker Jordan Haro, who made a short film about him in 2017. “It’s not like a rock star who’s seen and then he’s gone. I just play low-down blues, and I play it the same way I played it 50 years ago.”Paul Allan Oscher was born on Feb. 26, 1947, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up in the East Flatbush section. His father, Nathan Abraham Oscher, owned a factory that made false teeth; his mother, Mildred Marie (Hansen) Oscher, was a homemaker who later worked in local and state politics. An uncle gave Paul a harmonica when he was 12, but he didn’t learn how to make the most of it until one day, in his after-school job delivering groceries, a customer who just happened to be a blues musician overheard him trying to play “Red River Valley” and proceeded to teach him the ropes.By 15 he was playing in Black clubs in Brooklyn and had become part of a network of musicians in that scene. He was 17 when he was introduced to Mr. Waters one night after a Waters show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem; three years later, when Mr. Waters returned for a gig in New York City and was short of a harmonica player, he invited Mr. Oscher to sit in. At the end of the show, Mr. Waters offered him a job.For a time Mr. Oscher lived in the basement of Mr. Waters’s Chicago house, sharing the space with Otis Spann, the noted Chicago blues pianist and member of Mr. Waters’s band. Mr. Oscher later said that he had learned his blues timing from Mr. Spann.He toured with the band throughout Europe and the United States, often clad like his bandmates in a red brocade Nehru jacket. (Mr. Waters wore a black suit.) When they hit the segregated South, he was typically not allowed to stay in the same hotel as his bandmates, and he remembered how the group fell silent one day on the road as they passed a sign declaring, “You Are Entering Klan County.”Mr. Oscher left the band in the early 1970s to pursue a solo career back home in New York City. Over the years he performed with Eric Clapton, Levon Helm, T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker and many others.In addition to the harmonica, he played the piano and the guitar, often all at the same time — his harmonica in a neck rack, his guitar on his lap and one hand on the keyboard. He also played the accordion and the vibraphone.In the late 1990s, Mr. Oscher was playing at Frank’s Cocktail Lounge in Brooklyn when he met Suzan-Lori Parks, the playwright and author, and she asked him to teach her to play harmonica. They married in 2001 and parted amicably in 2008, later divorcing but remaining friends. Mr. Oscher had no immediate survivors.“Paul was a righteous guy, a real sweetheart and a real blues man,” Ms. Parks said in an interview. “That meant there were a lot of blues. He’d learned how to be an adult by hanging out with blues cats. The older Black men in Muddy’s band helped him become whole.”When she was working on her Pulitzer Prize-winning play Topdog/Underdog, a darkly comic fable of sibling rivalry and Black manhood that uses three-card monte as a narrative spine, Mr. Oscher taught her the mechanics of the card game. He just happened to be a whiz at that street hustler’s old standard. More

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      Bob Porter, Jazz Producer and Broadcaster, Dies at 80

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      Hundreds of albums bore his name, notably reissues of classic material. And he helped make WBGO the biggest jazz radio station in the New York area.Bob Porter, who as a record producer guided the reissue of vast swaths of the classic jazz canon, and who as a broadcaster helped build WBGO into the largest jazz radio station in the New York City area, died on April 10 at his home in Northvale, N.J. He was 80.The cause was complications of esophageal cancer, his wife, Linda Calandra Porter, said.Rock ’n’ roll had mostly eclipsed jazz in the public ear by the time Mr. Porter produced his first album for Prestige Records, the organist Charles Kynard’s “Professor Soul” (1968), for which he also wrote the liner notes. Mr. Porter began regularly producing sessions for the label, mostly in the soul-jazz style of the day, including outings by the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, the organists Jimmy McGriff and Charles Earland and the guitarist Pat Martino, among many others.He went on to take part in the creation of hundreds of albums as a producer and author of liner notes for a variety of labels. Much of that work was on boxed sets and reissues of archival material.He won a Grammy in 1978 for his liner notes to the five-disc “Charlie Parker: The Complete Savoy Studio Sessions,” which he also produced. He later won the best historical album Grammy in 1986, for producing the compilation “Atlantic Rhythm and Blues 1947-1974, Vols. 1-7.”Interviewed that year by Rolling Stone, Mr. Porter recalled putting together the Atlantic box alongside Ahmet Ertegun, the label’s famed co-founder. Some of Atlantic’s original master tapes had burned in a fire, so Mr. Porter drew upon his network of fellow vinyl collectors to track down original pressings. His main goal, he said, was accuracy and completeness.“We tried to list in copious detail everything we could about the original recording date — the singers, the bands, every piece of information we could unravel,” he said. “The most important thing in doing any work of this nature is that you get it right.”But he also wanted to make a historical point about how social history shapes genre. “We decided to stop in 1974 because that, in a sense, marked the end of an era,” he said. “When you get into disco and rap music, you’re really talking about something that’s very different. The conditions in the country were a lot different when this music was being made. I think that the demise of soul and R&B may ultimately be viewed as a casualty of integration.”In the 1980s, jazz’s commercial fortunes perked up, in thanks partly to the advent of compact discs, which led listeners to buy reissues of old albums. Working most often with Atlantic, Mr. Porter led the remastering process for CD reissues by the likes of Duke Ellington, Ray Charles and Lester Young.As soon as WBGO hit the airwaves at 88.3 FM in 1979, broadcasting out of Newark but reaching across New York City, Mr. Porter started volunteering as a host. Two years later he began a daily show, “Portraits in Blue,” which went on to be syndicated by NPR stations around the country and would continue for the next 40 years. He later hosted two additional shows: “Saturday Morning Function,” which focused on R&B and jump blues, and “Swing Party,” heard on Sunday mornings.On his own podcast earlier this month, Nate Chinen, the director of editorial content at WBGO, called Mr. Porter “a Mount Rushmore figure when it comes to Newark public radio — someone who was on the air, really, from Day 1.”Robert Sherwin Porter was born in Wellesley, Mass., on June 20, 1940, to David Porter, who ran the financial advisory firm David L. Babson & Company, and Constance (Kavanaugh) Porter, a homemaker. The eldest of four siblings, Bob attended Whittier College in California, where he studied English before serving in the Army, stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his brothers, John and William Porter; a sister, Linda (Porter) Owens; a son from a previous marriage, David Porter; two stepsons, Michael and Rick Tombari; and a granddaughter.After his military service, he returned to Whittier to complete his degree. While still in school he began contributing to DownBeat magazine. His articles caught the attention of Bob Weinstock, the head of Prestige, who was impressed by Mr. Porter’s erudition and offered him a job with the label.Mr. Porter’s passion for the artistic and cultural history of African-American music stretched back to its earliest known recordings, and he was deeply knowledgeable about blues as well as jazz.He received awards from various music societies and foundations. In addition to his two Grammys, those included a 1986 W.C. Handy Award (now known as the Blues Music Award) from the Blues Foundation and a 2003 Community Service Award from the Bergen County chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. In 2009, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.Mr. Porter became a published author late in life, self-releasing “Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community, 1945-1975” in 2016. That book gave a detailed history of the jazz musicians who were especially popular in Black communities just after World War II, but who at the time had rarely come under the gaze of white critics.A white writer himself, Mr. Porter felt compelled to redress the omission. “Black communities had their own heroes, and Black fans of jazz had their own way of responding to the music,” he wrote in the book’s preface. “I have helped dozens of researchers and writers through the years, and I always hoped that one of them would tackle this untold story. Nobody did, and now most of the greatest players are gone. Thus, I decided to do this myself.” More

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      Viola Davis and Andra Day Are Up for Best Actress at the Oscars

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Awards SeasonOscar Nominations HighlightsNominees ListSnubs and SurprisesBest Director NomineesStream the NomineesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOscar Nominations 2021: Two Black Women Are Up for Best ActressAndra Day and Viola Davis are the category’s first pair of Black nominees since 1973, when Diana Ross was nominated for “Lady Sings the Blues” and Cicely Tyson was up for “Sounder.”Andra Day, left, as Billie Holiday, and Viola Davis as Ma Rainey. It’s been nearly 50 years since two Black stars competed for best actress in the same year.March 15, 2021Updated 5:03 p.m. ETAndra Day was just the second Black woman to win best actress in a drama at the Golden Globes.Now, she’s part of another milestone: For the first time in nearly 50 years, two Black women are up for best actress in the same year.Day, who plays the iconic singer Billie Holiday in the Hulu biopic “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” and Viola Davis, who plays another pioneering singer in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” are the first pair of Black actresses to be nominated since Diana Ross (“Lady Sings the Blues”) and Cicely Tyson (“Sounder”) faced off in 1973.And, in a twist of fate, Day is nominated for the same role that Ross played. Though, she’s probably hoping for better luck: Ross lost the 1973 race to Liza Minnelli, who won for her performance as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret.”Day told Variety in January that she took an immersive approach to her character, including losing nearly 40 pounds and taking up drinking and smoking cigarettes. “I just asked God to give me all of the pain and trauma,” she said. It was her first acting role in a major film.Though “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” received mixed reviews, Day garnered critical acclaim for what The New York Times co-chief film critic A.O. Scott called her “canny and charismatic” performance. Her voice, he wrote, “has some of Holiday’s signature breathy rasp and delicate lilt, and suggests her ability to move from whimsy to anguish and back in the space of a phrase.”This is Davis’s fourth nomination (she won best supporting actress in 2017 for her role in “Fences”). In “Ma Rainey,” she plays blues singer Ma Rainey alongside Chadwick Boseman’s trumpeter, Levee, in what was the late actor’s final film role before he died of colon cancer in August.“Davis brilliantly portrays both the vulnerable position and indomitable spirit of this sturdy figure,” Mark Kermode wrote in The Guardian in December, “with fiery eyes shining through the dark shadows and battered rouge of her makeup, proudly standing her ground.”Day and Davis will go up against Vanessa Kirby (“Pieces of a Woman”), Frances McDormand (“Nomadland”) and Carey Mulligan (“Promising Young Woman”).In the more than 90 years the awards have been handed out, there has been only a single Black best actress winner — Halle Berry for “Monster’s Ball” in 2001.“It’s one of my biggest heartbreaks,” she told Variety last year. “The morning after, I thought, ‘Wow, I was chosen to open a door.’ And then, to have no one … I question, ‘Was that an important moment, or was it just an important moment for me?’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      New Year's Eve Playlist From Around the World

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      @media (pointer: coarse) { .at-home-nav__outerContainer { overflow-x: scroll; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; } } .at-home-nav__outerContainer { position: relative; display: flex; align-items: center; /* Fixes IE */ overflow-x: auto; box-shadow: -6px 0 white, 6px 0 white, 1px 3px 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15); padding: 10px 1.25em 10px; transition: all 250ms; margin-bottom: 20px; -ms-overflow-style: none; /* IE 10+ */ […] More

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      Othella Dallas, Keeper of Katherine Dunham’s Flame, Dies at 95

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOthella Dallas, Keeper of Katherine Dunham’s Flame, Dies at 95Ms. Dallas taught the Afro-Caribbean-influenced Dunham dance technique in Europe well into her 90s. She also had a career as a blues, jazz and R&B singer. An early member of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, she later had success as a singer.Credit…via Peter WydlerDec. 11, 2020Othella Dallas, who was one of the last surviving early members of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the nation’s first self-supporting Black modern dance troupe, and taught the Afro-Caribbean-influenced Dunham technique in Europe well into her 90s, died on Nov. 28 at a nursing home in Binningen, Switzerland. She was 95.Her son, Peter Wydler, said the cause was lung cancer.The sound of conga drums reverberated at Ms. Dallas’s studio in Basel, Switzerland, for years as she gyrated to their rhythm. Her students watched reverently, eager to learn from a woman who had learned from Dunham, the matriarch of Black dance, who died in 2006.“I had three mothers in my life,” Ms. Dallas said in a 2016 documentary film about her, “What Is Luck?” “My mother, my grandmother and my godmother. And then I had Katherine Dunham. My professor.”Ms. Dallas’s dance school, which she opened in 1975, is considered the only school in Europe that teaches pure Dunham technique, a polyrhythmic style rooted in early Black dance that Dunham developed through her ethnographic research in the Caribbean in the 1930s. Alvin Ailey studied with Dunham in the 1940s, and the technique’s legacy lives on institutionally at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York.Ms. Dallas teaching a class at her dance school in Basel, Switzerland, last year. She continued to teach well into her 90s.Credit…Renata SagoBut as the style’s prominence diminished, Ms. Dallas’s devotion to teaching it rendered her a powerful living link to dance history.Glory Van Scott, a former principal Dunham dancer who is a master teacher of the technique, said Ms. Dallas was among the last of her era.“Very few are left from her generation,” Dr. Van Scott said. “But as long as there’s someone out there doing Dunham, we’re still here.”“You feel it like a religion,” she added. “It’s in our bloodline. You live with it when you teach it. You respect it. And then you give it to someone else, so they may have the honor of teaching it and seeing the genius of Dunham.”Ms. Dallas left the Katherine Dunham Dance Company in 1949, and although she was associated with her illustrious mentor her whole life, she hardly lived in her shadow.She seized her own spotlight in the 1950s as a blues and R&B singer, sharing stages with Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole. She appeared at the Apollo Theater in Harlem with Sammy Davis Jr. And she had the distinction of singing in a stage musical orchestrated by a young Quincy Jones, “Free and Easy,” which flopped so badly that it left him and his band broke and stranded in Europe.Ms. Dallas settled in Switzerland in the 1960s, but she also kept performing, gradually becoming an esteemed elder stateswoman of the blues. In 2005, she played at the founding concert of the Festival da Jazz in St. Moritz, and she went on to perform there annually. Last year she received a Swiss Jazz Award.Ms. Dallas at the Festival da Jazz in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in 2010. She performed at the festival annually starting in 2005.Credit…Giancarlo Cattaneo/fotoSwiss.comAfter decades running her school in Basel, she became known as an eccentric local personality. She wore elaborate jewelry and colorful headwraps, and she rode the bus to class, her diminutive figure lugging a roller bag filled with leotards and dance equipment.Ms. Dallas was born just before the Great Depression in Memphis and grew up waiting in breadlines with her mother. She lived in a creaky old house on the outskirts of town. And she was filled with verve from the start.“I was dancing since I came out of my mother’s womb,” she said in the documentary. “I said, ‘Where are the people? Where’s the microphone? Where’s the musicians? I’m ready to dance.’”In the 1930s, while Ms. Dallas was studying ballet in St. Louis, Dunham visited the school one day, and Ms. Dallas caught her attention.“They said, ‘Go dance for Ms. Dunham,’” Ms. Dallas recalled. “And Ms. Dunham, she had her eye on me. I’ll never forget that.”When she was 19, Ms. Dallas headed to New York at Dunham’s invitation to study at her school near Times Square. She was initiated into Dunham’s militaristic training regimen, required to scrub floors, wash clothes and do her teacher’s hair.“My attitude,” Ms. Dallas told The New York Times last year, was “to bleed her, to get everything that I ever wanted to learn in my life about dance.”Ms. Dallas, right, with Katherine Dunham in 1949. “I had three mothers in my life,” Ms. Dallas once said. “My mother, my grandmother and my godmother. And then I had Katherine Dunham. My professor.”Credit…via Peter WydlerMs. Dallas performed on Broadway in 1946 in “Bal Nègre,” a revue staged and choreographed by Dunham, and toured with the company throughout Europe. In Paris, she met a Swiss engineer named Peter Wydler. When Dunham discovered that Ms. Dallas intended to get married, she was initially furious, but she served as Ms. Dallas’s witness and popped the Champagne at the wedding in 1949. Eartha Kitt sang “C’est Si Bon.”Ms. Dallas left the company later that year to stay with her husband in Switzerland. She taught the Dunham technique in Zurich in the 1950s, but soon left to pursue a music career back in America. In 1975, finally settled in Europe, she opened her dance school in Basel.“Yes, I’ve had luck,” she said in the documentary, reflecting on her improbable life. “I’ve been lucky to have so much. That means, what is luck?”Othella Dallas was born Othella Talmadge Strozier on Sept. 26, 1925, in Memphis. Her father, Frank, was a pharmacist. Her mother, Thelma Lee, was a seamstress who also sang in vaudeville. A grandmother ran a music school. Othella attended high school in St. Louis and aspired to become a doctor.As a girl, she suffered from rickets; doctors suggested resetting her legs. Instead, as she told it, her grandmother took her to a voodoo priest, who prescribed that her legs get massaged in greasy dishwater while he recited an incantation.After enough dips in the kitchen sink, he said she was cured.“Let her dance,” he proclaimed.“Let her dance where?” her mother asked. “Those old dirty nightclubs?”“I don’t care where she dances,” he said. “But let her dance.”Before long, Dunham discovered Ms. Dallas and invited her to New York. As Ms. Dallas studied with her, Dunham’s ambitions for her dance company grew. She pursued Broadway and eyed an international tour.“She said, ‘I’m going to put my people on Broadway,’” Ms. Dallas recalled. “And as the first Black company on Broadway, we had to work like a dog.”Of those days, Dunham once wrote: “We weren’t pushing ‘Black Is Beautiful.’ We just showed it.”Ms. Dallas pursued her singing career in the 1950s, changing her surname from Strozier because her manager thought “Dallas” looked slicker on a marquee.In 1960, after making annual visits to her family in Europe for several years, she joined her husband and son in Switzerland, and they settled in Binningen, a town just outside Basel. She kept a scrapbook in her bedroom filled with photographs and press clips from her day in the spotlight.When Dunham died in 2006, Ms. Dallas recommitted to teaching her mentor’s technique. She traveled across Europe hosting workshops at dance schools and events.“She was aware she was pretty much the only one from her time still being able to teach,” her son said. “It was important for her to keep it pure.”Ms. Dallas in Zurich in 2019. Credit…Beda SchmidIn addition to her son, Ms. Dallas is survived by two grandchildren and a half brother, Frank Strozier, a jazz saxophonist. Her husband died in 1982.Ms. Dallas learned she had lung cancer in 2018. Her final performance was a two-hour set at the Atlantis club in Basel this February. She continued to teach at her school three days a week until the lockdown began in March. She was moved to a nursing home over the summer.During her last weeks at the school, she stuck to a favorite routine. When the studio emptied out after class, she liked to put on a Ray Charles CD. As the music played, she danced in front of the mirror by herself.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More