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      Ellen McIlwaine, Slide Guitarist With a Power Voice, Dies at 75

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      Early in her career she played with Jimi Hendrix. She went on to record several well-regarded albums. But she remained under the radar.In the mid-1960s Ellen McIlwaine spent about a month playing in New York with a fellow guitarist whose musical tastes she shared, an undiscovered talent named Jimi Hendrix. They made an unusual pair — a white woman working on her slide-guitar skills and a Black guy developing his own flamboyant style. It was going pretty well, and she thought about formalizing the partnership.“I talked to my manager about Hendrix,” Ms. McIlwaine recalled almost 30 years later in an interview with The Calgary Herald, “and wanting to get a group together, and he said: ‘Oh, I know who that is. He’s Black. You don’t want him in your group.’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t want you for my manager.’”That was the music scene at the time — bubbling with talent and experimentation, yet also still hindered by misguided ideas about who should be allowed to become a star.“People back then thought like that,” Ms. McIlwaine said. “They’d even say things to me like, ‘Ellen, you can’t play the guitar because nobody will be able to look at your body while you sing.’”Hendrix soon went to England and broke out of that box. Ms. McIlwaine became a dazzling slide guitarist and recorded a string of albums but never quite achieved the fame of female guitarists and singers like Bonnie Raitt and Chrissie Hynde, who were just a few years younger.Ms. McIlwaine died on June 23 in Calgary, Alberta, where she had lived for years. She was 75.The cause was esophageal cancer, her friend Sharron Toews said.An international upbringing grounded Ms. McIlwaine in a wide array of musical influences, and her live shows put them all on display — sometimes she would sing a blues number in Japanese. Music critics and guitar aficionados appreciated her, but hits proved elusive.“Ellen was wasted on the boomers,” Ms. Toews said in a phone interview. “She should have come out 20 years later, because the millennials would have been blown away by someone of her talent.”Ms. McIlwaine said she started playing her signature slide guitar after seeing the guitarist Randy California, later of the band Spirit, at a club in New York and being struck by his unusual technique: He’d break the neck off a wine bottle and use it as a slide.“I thought, Well, I can do that,” she told The Record of Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, in 2006.In the group Fear Itself, which played a brand of psychedelic blues and released a self-titled album in 1968, she was the rare female guitarist fronting an otherwise male band. But the band broke up after a few years, and in 1972 she released the first in a string of solo albums, “Honky Tonk Angel.”Ms. McIlwaine’s “Honky Tonk Angel,” released in 1972, was the first in a string of solo albums.The next year John Rockwell, reviewing her performance at Kenny’s Castaways in Manhattan for The New York Times, conveyed the range of her material, a mix of covers and original songs.“Her voice is a big, well‐trained, controlled pop soprano that seems equally at home in country, blues, gospel, rock, Latin and folk idioms,” he wrote, “and her guitar playing sounds as confidently virtuosic as anyone you might hear.”“What makes Miss McIlwaine so extraordinary,” he added, “is the way she manages to fuse all her influences into something unique.”Her most recent album, “Mystic Bridge,” a collaboration with the tabla virtuoso Cassius Khan, was released in 2006 on her own label, Ellen McIlwaine Music (“just so nobody gets confused about whose music it is,” as she told The Calgary Herald that year).“I’m tired of being on labels,” she said, having been frustrated at times with the limitations placed on what she recorded. “It’s people with temporary jobs making permanent decisions about your career.”Frances Ellen McIlwaine was born on Oct. 1, 1945, in Nashville and adopted as a baby by William and Aurine (Wilkens) McIlwaine. They were Methodist missionaries, and soon the family had relocated to Kobe, Japan, where she attended a Canadian international school.“We had 200 students, kindergarten to grade 12, and 28 nationalities,” she told the Canadian newspaper chain Postmedia in 2019. “So I was exposed to world music before it was called world music.”Her parents got a piano when she was young, and by 5 she was playing it.“They played hymns for prayers on it every morning,” she told The Record, “and I played rock ’n’ roll every afternoon when they were gone.”Ms. McIlwaine would sometimes babysit for younger children at the school.“We’d be riding our tricycles around in the auditorium,” Jane Moorhead, one of those charges, said in a phone interview, “and she’d be banging out ‘Blueberry Hill’ on the piano. She was an awful lot of fun to have as a babysitter.”Ms. McIlwaine earned her high school diploma at the school and returned to the United States in 1963.“When we came back to the United States and I started college in Tennessee, the only piano was in the boys’ dorm,” she said, “so I borrowed a guitar that belonged to somebody, and I liked it.”She dropped out of college and tried art school in Atlanta, playing in clubs while studying. The singer and songwriter Patrick Sky saw her there and advised her to go to Greenwich Village, which she did, meeting Hendrix and others who were part of the music scene there.Richie Havens was something of a mentor as she refined her guitar playing; once when she complained to him that she couldn’t play all the notes he could with his larger hands, he encouraged her to find her own way. She developed unusual tunings for her guitar and a powerhouse vocal style that, as one writer put it, “is strong enough to strip paint at 10 paces.”Ms. McIlwaine lived in Woodstock, N.Y., for a time, as well as in Connecticut, but eventually settled in Canada, where she was better known than she was in the United States. Her other albums included “We the People” (1973); “Everybody Needs It” (1982), on which Jack Bruce of Cream played bass; and “Looking for Trouble” (1987).No immediate family members survive.Though Ms. McIlwaine continued to perform until becoming ill, for the last eight or nine years she had also driven a school bus to support herself, Ms. Toews said, something she enjoyed doing because she loved children. But she might not have needed that money had things been different during her prime.“If I had a nickel for every up-and-coming young, white, male guitar player I’ve opened for over the last 41 years,” Ms. McIlwaine told The Record in 2006, “I’d be really rich.” More

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      Bobby Rush Lived the Blues. Six Decades On, He’s Still Playing Them.

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      On the heels of winning his second Grammy, and on the verge of publishing a memoir, the singer, guitarist and harmonica player is enjoying a long-delayed moment of recognition.The air was thick with termites when Bobby Rush stepped onto an outdoor stage in New Orleans for one of his first live performances in over a year — an uncharacteristically long break, the result of pandemic shutdowns, in a career that began in the wake of World War II.It was early May, and the swarming was so bad that the blues musician wove the insects into his lyrics: “Somebody come get these damn bugs.” He later moved to the ground in front of the stage, determined to continue his show in the dark, beyond the reach of the termite-attracting lights.“I never seen anything like that before,” Rush said by phone a week later, from his home in Jackson, Miss. “I could hardly play my guitar.”Rush has relied on practical improvisations, often in unglamorous circumstances, his entire life. His first guitar was a diddley bow he made from hay wire nailed to the side of his childhood home. Much later, Rolling Stone christened him “The King of the Chitlin Circuit,” an acknowledgment of the years he spent touring the network of small clubs for Black performers and audiences, mainly in the South, in a 1973 Silver Eagle Trailways bus he customized himself.On the heels of winning his second Grammy in March, and on the verge of publishing a memoir in June, Rush, now in his 80s, is enjoying a moment of recognition. A lesser-known figure compared to many of the luminaries he has considered friends and mentors, including Elmore James, Muddy Waters and B.B. King, Rush is one of the last remaining Black blues musicians who experienced the horror of Jim Crow-era racism and participated, however tangentially, in the genre’s postwar flowering.“I may be the oldest blues singer around, me and Buddy Guy,” he said in October, during the first of several conversations, this one via video conference. Rush sat at the edge of a couch at his son’s house in Jackson, slouching to peer into a laptop screen and trotted out a quip he uses onstage: “If I’m not the oldest, I’m the ugliest.”Rush’s book offers three possible birth years — 1940, 1937 and 1934. “All I know is in 1947, I was plowing in the field with a mule,” he said.Imani Khayyam for The New York TimesHe wore the same New Orleans Saints baseball cap over his Jheri curls during an in-person interview a week later, at the Grammy Museum in Cleveland, Miss. Speaking through a mask, he reflected from a dressing room chair about the “heavy” experience of outliving so many contemporaries. He was there to accept the Crossroads of American Music Award, a lifetime achievement of sorts.“I’ve known so many of these cats,” he said. “I’ve lived the history.”Scott Billington, a veteran producer who has worked with many blues musicians, including Rush, said the singer, guitarist and harmonica player is indeed among the last of a dying breed. “Bobby’s almost unique in the blues world today, because he has connections that go back so far,” he said. “He’s made this transition into a sort of iconic American figure.”Rush believes the racial awakening triggered by the murder of George Floyd, and reinforced by the pandemic, leaves him well positioned to reach a public primed to hear the blues with fresh ears. “I think what we thought was forwards wasn’t forwards,” he said of the suggestion that Floyd’s killing represented a step backward in the struggle for racial justice. “I been having feet on my neck all my life.”Rush’s memoir, “I Ain’t Studdin’ Ya: My American Blues Story,” written with Herb Powell and due out June 22, is frank about many things, including the reason he’s received so many standing ovations in recent years.“I’ve got enough good sense to know they are not applauding because I’m a household name,” he writes. “What they’re standing for is that I’m still here, doing it my way.”Rush onstage in 2000. He has become known for his over-the-top shows filled with music, comedy and quips.Linda Vartoogian/Getty ImagesFor much of his career, Rush tailored his show — a mix of soul, funk and blues interspersed with bawdy storytelling — to an audience he says was “99 percent Black.” He went decades without ever cracking into the broader, mainly white audience that brought fame (if not always fortune) to the blues’ biggest stars.That started to change around the turn of this century, when Rush starred in “The Road to Memphis,” one in a series of documentaries about the blues, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, that aired on PBS in 2003. Rush was a senior citizen by then, or about to be. His book offers three possible birth years — 1940, 1937 and 1934. Rush claims not to know the answer.“All I know is in 1947, I was plowing in the field with a mule,” he said.Rush was born Emmett Ellis Jr. in northwest Louisiana. His father, Ellis Sr., was a preacher and sharecropper; his mother, Mattie, a mixed-race homemaker who passed for white. Rush, the sixth of 10 children, said his mother acted differently when the family went into town.“Many times when I was in the public, she wasn’t my mom. She was my babysitter, and my dad was her chauffeur,” he said. “It was a strange situation.”Rush’s family moved to Sherrill, a small town in the Arkansas Delta, when he was still a child. By his early teens, Rush was regularly sneaking into the music clubs in nearby Pine Bluff, a hub of Black culture and commerce.In his book, the Arkansas Delta years are when Rush becomes a character in the history of the blues. It is where he befriended Elmore James, learned to wear his hair like Big Joe Turner, absorbed the harp playing of Sonny Boy Williamson, and first saw the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, the Black vaudeville group that he briefly joined.Arkansas is also where Rush fell in love with the spaces where African-American culture flourished in the segregated South, and changed his name. In “juke joints we fixed onto being segregated. Being in the thick of ourselves with our own groove,” he writes. “There was freedom in these places.”Rush stands over six feet and has a taste for dapper clothes.Imani Khayyam for The New York TimesRush joined the Great Migration north when he moved to Chicago in the early ’50s. He got a job pumping gas, and started a family with his first wife, Hazel. As a musician, he spun his wheels.He was in Chicago over a decade before he cut his first single, “Someday,” released in ’64. He bought a hot dog cart to park outside clubs where he played — and ended up making more money selling hot dogs. In 1969, he opened Bobby’s Barbeque House.He was a savvy, prolific networker. Rush’s book is strewn with lessons in life and music gleaned from legends like Waters, Jimmy Reed and Little Walter, a neighbor who taught him the basics of tongue-blocking, a harmonica technique. In his memoir, he recalls the harp player explaining, “That’s how you git it dirty — make them notes bend.”Rush was ultimately more successful living the blues in Chicago than playing them. The chapter of his book where he discovers Hazel was cheating on him — including with a police officer who put Rush in jail for a night in order to be with her — is one of many where he admits feeling inferior to his more successful friends.“Hidden behind the hurt of her infidelity were feelings of inadequacy,” he writes. “My status in the world felt small.”Part of the hurt came from discovering that racism in the North was comparable to what he knew in the South. The memoir includes a story about a gig in the 1950s he took in a small theater outside Chicago, where he and his band were forced to play behind a curtain. The job was offered to him by a Black musician friend. In one of our interviews, Rush said he wished he could go back in time and ask the friend, “Why you recommend me to a place where I got to play behind the curtain? Why you think I would do that?”The raw vulnerability was at odds with Rush’s physical presence. He stands over six feet and is fit for a person of his age, which, coupled with a taste for dapper clothes — he changed into a tuxedo to record a solo acoustic performance at the museum — allows him to slip easily into the role of an eminent, occasionally immodest bluesman. (He often claims to have made nearly 400 records; the discography in his memoir lists 67, including singles.)Powell, Rush’s co-author, said the musician softened as he reflected on the pain he’d experienced — including the deaths of three of his four children, from complications of sickle cell disease — during interviews for the book.“When we started to look back at his formative years, it created a bond between us that allowed the sensitivity — unusual for a man of his age — to come through,” Powell said. “He cried a bit, which was beautiful.”“I’ve lived the history,” Rush said.Imani Khayyam for The New York TimesThe way Rush talks about affairs of the heart suggests a greater emotional complexity than many of his songs, and his stage show, would imply. In our first conversation, he discussed the inspiration for the song “Porcupine Meat” that a casual listener could assume is about little more than sex. The truth is deeper.“I loved her more than she loved me,” he said. “I wanted to leave her, but I was afraid that she would find someone else better than I, and I’d never find someone that compared to her.”Rush moved from Chicago to Jackson in 1983, to be closer to family and the Black fans who frequented the Black-owned juke joints where he’d found a loyal audience — and better money.“A Black man will pay another Black man what he’s worth,” he said.Rush continued to play live, finding ways to reach new ears. Christone Ingram, the 22-year-old blues guitarist and singer, was in grade school in Clarksdale, Miss., when he first heard Rush’s music coming through the windows of his neighbor’s house.“I just loved his style,” Ingram said in a phone interview. “He was the first one I heard that brought the funk to the blues.”In the mid ’90s, while playing a blues festival in the Netherlands, Rush realized the vaudeville-inspired show that delighted the juke joint crowds didn’t go over as well with larger, mainly white blues audiences. Vasti Jackson, a guitarist and longtime collaborator, was in Rush’s band at the time. “His thing was as much about the talking, telling stories, the comedy,” Jackson said. Jackson recalled advising Rush, “To get this kind of audience, you got to make it raw.”Rush ultimately took the advice to heart. In 2016, the producer Billington convinced him to record what became the album “Porcupine Meat” with a group of New Orleans musicians.“Chorus after chorus he never repeated himself. There was one great idea after another,” Billington said of Rush’s harmonica playing during the sessions. “The sound of his playing has such depth and authority that you couldn’t mistake it for anyone else in contemporary blues.”“Porcupine Meat” went on to win a Grammy, Rush’s first, a validation of his turn toward a rootsier blues sound.Scott Barretta, a blues historian based in Greenwood, Miss., likened Rush’s success with white audiences to the second act Big Bill Broonzy had in the ’50s, after transitioning from urban to folk-blues and receiving support from white taste makers Studs Terkel and Alan Lomax.A difference, he said, is that Rush has “been able to keep a foot in both markets” — something Rush calls “crossing over, but not crossing out.”The past 16 months have been good to Rush, even though they started with him contracting a fever so persistently high he wondered, “Am I going to make it out of this thing alive?”Rush’s battle with what he assumes was Covid-19 — he was never tested — made news not long before he was ready to promote the August 2020 release of “Rawer Than Raw.” It’s a collection of solo acoustic blues songs, a mix of originals and standards by Mississippi blues legends like Howlin’ Wolf, Skip James and Robert Johnson.Rush performed a sample of the songs at the museum last fall, stomping his foot to keep rhythm. Asked if there was a club he was eager to play when the pandemic was over, he mentioned Blue Front Café, in Bentonia, Miss., the oldest surviving juke joint in the state. It’s tiny.“I’d probably have to play outside,” he said. “I don’t mind playing the juke joint, but I’m bigger than that now.” More

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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