Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Song Hae, Beloved South Korean TV Host, Dies at 95

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      Born in what is now North Korea, he was known for his cheeky grin and folksy wisecracks as the host of South Korea’s weekly “National Singing Contest” for more than three decades.SEOUL — Song Hae, who fled North Korea as a young man during the Korean War, became a beloved television personality in South Korea and was recognized by the Guinness World Records as the world’s “oldest TV music talent show host,” died at his home in Seoul on Wednesday. He was 95.His death was confirmed by Lee Gi-nam, the producer of a 2020 documentary on Mr. Song’s life, which charted a tumultuous course that reflected South Korea’s modern history through war, division, abject poverty and a meteoric rise. No cause of death was given.A jovial Everyman figure known for his cheeky grin and folksy wisecracks, Mr. Song became a household name in South Korea when he took over in 1988 as the host of the weekly “National Singing Contest,” a town-by-town competition that mixes down-home musical talent, farcical costumes, poignant life stories and comedic episodes.Mr. Song was recognized by Guinness World Records in April as the “oldest TV music talent show host.”Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHis talent show, which he announced with his booming voice piped into households in South Korea every Sunday, ran for more than three decades. Mr. Song traveled to every corner of South Korea and to the Korean diaspora in places like Japan and China, and even to Paraguay, Los Angeles and Long Island, N.Y. He continued as host until the show went on hiatus during the coronavirus pandemic, and officially remained at its helm at the time of his death.While the show was on hold, his health seemed to deteriorate without his weekly outlet, according to Jero Yun, director of the documentary, “Song Hae 1927.”“It was, in some ways, the driving force of his life, meeting people from all walks of life through the program and exchanging life stories,” Mr. Yun said. “People would always recognize him, crowd around him and want to talk to him.” Referring to the K-pop megagroup, Mr. Yun added, “He might as well have been BTS.”Mr. Song was posthumously awarded a presidential medal for his contributions to South Korea’s culture, the president’s office announced on Wednesday. He was entered into Guinness World Records in April.Mr. Song was born Song Bok-hee on April 27, 1927, under Japanese occupation in what is now Hwanghae Province in North Korea. His father was an innkeeper. A few months after the Korean War broke out in 1950, he left his home at 23 to avoid being drafted to fight for the North, and made his way south. He eventually boarded a U.N. tank landing ship, not knowing where it was headed. Staring out at the water, he would later say, he renamed himself Hae, for the character meaning sea.He left behind his mother and a younger sister in North Korea, and well into his 90s, any mention of them would reduce him to tears.After the ship took him to the South Korean city of Busan, on the peninsula’s southern coast, he served as a signalman in the South’s army. He had said in interviews that he was one of the soldiers who tapped out the Morse code in July 1953 transmitting the message that there was a cease-fire halting the war.After his discharge from the army, he peddled tofu in impoverished postwar South Korea before joining a traveling musical theater troupe, in which he sang and performed in variety shows. He eventually became a radio host, anchoring a traffic call-in show that catered to cab and bus drivers. It aired an occasional segment in which the drivers would dial in for a sing-off.In 1952, Mr. Song married Suk Ok-ee, the sister of a fellow soldier he had served with in the war, and they had three children. After 63 years of marriage, Mr. Song and his wife held the wedding ceremony they never had, having originally married in the poverty and turmoil of their youth. She died in 2018.He is survived by two daughters, two granddaughters and a grandson. In 1986, his 21-year-old son was killed in a motorcycle accident, and Mr. Song could not bear to continue working on his radio traffic show. Around the same time, he was tapped to host the singing contest for the national broadcaster, KBS.With Mr. Song at its center, the show quickly became a national pastime, particularly among older residents and those in rural communities — groups that the program spotlighted and that were seldom seen on television.Grandmothers break-danced and rapped; grandfathers crooned sexy K-pop numbers. Countless young children charmed the host onstage, some of whom went on to become stars. Once, a beekeeper covered in bees played the harmonica while a panicked Mr. Song cried out, “There’s one in my pants!”Mr. Song never fulfilled his lifelong dream of revisiting his hometown in North Korea, but because of his show, he came tantalizingly close.A memorial to Mr. Song at a hospital in Seoul on Wednesday.Korea Pool/Yonhap via APIn 2003, during a period of détente between the Koreas, the show filmed an episode in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. The songs were carefully screened by the North’s censors to include only propagandist ones, and the atmosphere was so tense that Mr. Song never broached the possibility of visiting his hometown, Chaeryong, even though it was just 50 miles south of the capital, he said in interviews.At one point during the trip, he recalled, he got drunk with his North Korean minder, who told him that he wouldn’t recognize his hometown anyway because everything had changed in the intervening five decades and most of the people had moved away.In a 2015 biography of Mr. Song, Oh Min-seok, a poet and professor of English literature, wrote: “As a refugee who fled south during the Korean War, there is a loneliness that is wedged in his heart like a knot. He has no problem connecting with anyone, from a 3-year-old to a 115-year-old, from a country woman to a college professor, from a shopkeeper to a C.E.O. That’s because inside, he’s always pining for people.”In South Korea, the show’s contestants and adoring fans became his family. Women — including the show’s oldest contestant, a 115-year-old — took to calling him “oppa,” or older brother, Mr. Song later recalled.“Who else in the world can claim to have as many younger sisters as I do?” he said. “I’m happy because of the people who boost me, applaud me, comfort me.” More

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      Ingram Marshall, Minimalist Composer of Mystical Sounds, Dies at 80

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      An influential figure in American experimental music, he was part of a group of composers who stripped music down to basic elements and used digital sounds.Ingram Marshall, a minimalist composer known for the mystery and melancholy of his works, which featured sounds as disparate as San Francisco fog horns and Balinese bamboo flutes, died on May 31 in New Haven, Conn. He was 80.His wife, Veronica Tomasic, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Marshall was an influential figure in American experimental music, part of a group of composers who, beginning in the 1960s, stripped music down to basic elements of rhythm and tempo and incorporated digital sounds. A self-described “expressivist,” he was known for haunting, mystical works that fused various traditions, among them European Romanticism, Indonesian gamelan and electronics.“A musical experience should be enveloping,” Mr. Marshall said in a 1996 interview for Yale University’s Oral History of American Music. “Almost in a narcotic way. Not to be zoned out or in a trance exactly, but to be really wrought up in it. If you can do that, I think you’ve done something.”He produced a varied body of work, including chamber pieces for renowned ensembles like the Kronos Quartet, brass sextets, choral works and solo guitar pieces. Much of his music blended conventional instruments with prerecorded, computer-manipulated sounds.“His music was very emotional, but not in a saccharine, neo-Romantic way,” the composer John Adams, a longtime friend, said in an interview. “It was his own very unique, very sentimental style, but sentimental in the very best sense of the word.”An admirer of Romantic-era composers like Sibelius and Bruckner, Mr. Marshall had a deep knowledge of the Western classical canon that informed his style, even as he veered in new directions.“He was not afraid of being very direct and expressive,” said Libby Van Cleve, an oboist who directs the Yale oral history project and for whom Mr. Marshall wrote three pieces. “His biggest impact was just having the courage to write such deeply heartfelt and expressive music in the electronic realm.”Ingram Douglass Marshall was born on May 10, 1942, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in Westchester County, to Harry Reinhard Marshall Sr., a banker, and Bernice (Douglass) Marshall, an amateur pianist.At the encouragement of his mother, he began singing at a young age and joined a church choir. His interest in music deepened, and in 1964 he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music from Lake Forest College in Illinois. He later attended Columbia University and then the California Institute of the Arts, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1971 and taught classes in electronic music.Mr. Marshall in 2005. “A musical experience should be enveloping,” he once said. “Almost in a narcotic way. Not to be zoned out or in a trance exactly, but to be really wrought up in it.”Thomas McDonald for The New York TimesWhile at the California Institute, he met several Indonesian performers and became entranced by their music. Intent on immersing himself in Indonesia’s sounds, he secured a Fulbright grant and traveled to the country for four months in 1971.The visit was a turning point. He soon began incorporating into his music elements of Indonesian culture, including the gambuh, a traditional Balinese flute. He adopted a more unhurried style, a development he attributed to his immersion in Indonesian music.“I realized that the ‘zip-and-zap, bleep-and-blap’ kind of formally organized electronic music I had been trying to do simply wasn’t my way,” Mr. Marshall said in the Yale interview, speaking about his experience in Indonesia. “I needed to find a slower, deeper way of approaching electronic music.”In 1981, he produced one of his best-known works, “Fog Tropes,” a somber meditation that paired field recordings of foghorns in the San Francisco Bay Area with brass instruments.“A lot of people are reminded of San Francisco when they hear this piece, but not I,” Mr. Marshall once said. “To me it is just about fog, and being lost in the fog. The brass players should sound as if they were off in a raft floating in the middle of a mist-enshrouded bay.”Mr. Marshall’s admirers lauded the spiritual quality of his works. Some drew comparisons to the so-called holy minimalists of Eastern Europe, including the prominent Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.“True, he does not write explicitly liturgical music, nor does he cultivate any priestly airs,” Adam Shatz wrote in a 2001 article about on Mr. Marshall in The New York Times. “But his music is some of the most stirring spiritual art to be found in America today.”The composer Steve Reich, another friend, said the mystery in Mr. Marshall’s work made it distinct. He described the music as a mix of American spirituality, “impenetrable, mysterious Northern fog and mist,” and gamelan.“Ingram can’t be pinned down so easily,” Mr. Reich said in an interview. “It’s not just minimalism, or whatever other moniker you want to put onto it, but it’s radiantly intelligent and beautiful.”After more than 15 years in California, Mr. Marshall returned to the East Coast in 1990, settling in Hamden, Conn., outside New Haven. He continued to compose and teach, serving as a part-time lecturer at the Yale School of Music from 2004 to 2014.Along with his wife, Mr. Marshall is survived by a son, Clement; a daughter from a previous relationship, Juliet Simon; and four grandchildren.While he was not religious, Mr. Marshall sometimes spoke about the spiritual power of music. He said he hoped that after disasters, artists could help bring understanding to the world.“Composers, poets and artists always feel useless in the wake of calamity,” he told The Times in 2001. “We are not firemen; we are not philanthropists or inspirational speakers. But I think it is the tragic and calamitous in life that we try to make sense of, and this is the stuff of our lives as artists.” More

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      Grachan Moncur III, Trombonist Whose Star Shone Briefly, Dies at 85

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      He mixed free jazz and post-bop in notable 1960s and ’70s recordings. But he withdrew from the jazz scene, in part because of a dispute over publishing rights.Grachan Moncur III, a trombonist and composer who came to renown in the 1960s and early ’70s for his deft playing of a hybrid of post-bop and free jazz, but who later receded from the spotlight, died on June 3 — his 85th birthday — in a hospital in Newark.His son Kenya said the cause was cardiac arrest.“Whenever I have a conversation about what’s wrong with the jazz business, I always start out by saying, ‘Where is Grachan Moncur?’” the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, one of Mr. Moncur’s most important collaborators, told The New York Times in 2003.Long before Mr. McLean asked that question, Mr. Moncur (pronounced mon-KUR) had started his jazz career as a teenager, jamming at the New York nightclub Birdland and sitting in with the drummer Art Blakey’s band, the Jazz Messengers. In 1959, he went on the road with Ray Charles.But after about two years, feeling a need to perform with a smaller ensemble based in New York City, he was recruited to join the Jazztet, a sextet formed by the trumpeter Art Farmer and the saxophonist Benny Golson. He played with that group until it disbanded in 1962, then took that summer off to study the challenging and unconventional music of Thelonious Monk. His goal was to learn how to write his own.“I just wanted to get the sound of his music inside of my body,” Mr. Moncur said in an interview with the website All About Jazz in 2003.On a night when he had written two compositions, he said, he got a call from Mr. McLean, whom he had known since Mr. Moncur was a teenager, asking him to join his ensemble for rehearsals and club dates in advance of recording an album for Blue Note Records.That album, “One Step Beyond,” and “Destination … Out!,”both released in 1963, were critically praised documents of a transitional period in jazz when musicians like Mr. McLean and Mr. Moncur were blending the harmonic advances of the bebop era with the more adventurous spirit of the avant-garde. They contained five of Mr. Moncur’s compositions, among them “Ghost Town,” which conjures up desolation in long passages where little is heard except reverberations on vibes and cymbals.Mr. Moncur then recorded two albums for Blue Note as a leader, “Evolution” (1963) and “Some Other Stuff” (1964), with stellar accompaniment. Both albums featured Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone and Tony Williams on drums; “Evolution” also featured Lee Morgan on trumpet and Mr. McLean, while the “Some Other Stuff” lineup included Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone.Reviewing “Evolution” in The Pittsburgh Courier, the critic Phyl Garland praised Mr. Moncur’s technique and the album’s title number, which, she wrote, evoked images of “mankind emerging from one murky, primeval mire into another, undergoing one subtle change after another, as does the music.”What might have been a longer relationship with Blue Note ended after two albums in a dispute over publishing rights. In the end, he managed to retain his rights to the music from “Evolution,” but he sensed that he would not last long at the label.“They were very disappointed with that, and they kind of dropped me like a hot potato,” Mr. Moncur told All About Jazz. He believed he was blackballed over his position — a position he later came to regret. In retrospect, he said, he wished he had found a way to compromise with Alfred Lion, Blue Note’s founder.“I think my mind was really going to a revolutionary attitude more on the business trip than it was on a musical trip,” he said, “because I was kind of determined on trying to own my own music.”Grachan Moncur III was born on June 3, 1937, in Manhattan. His father, Grachan II, played bass with the Savoy Sultans, a swing ensemble, at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. His mother, Ella (Wright) Moncur, was a beautician whose clients — and friends — included the singer Sarah Vaughan.Although enamored of the trombone from age 5, Grachan nonetheless received a cello from his father. But the cello did not inspire him, so his father gave him a trombone. Lessons followed. He also had a role model for the trombone: his father, who played the instrument.“I have never, up until today, heard anybody with a sound like my father,” Mr. Moncur told All About Jazz. “He had a timbre that was very dark and clear. That sound, it just kind of stayed with me, and I always wanted to produce that same type of — project that same type of sound that my father had.”He graduated from the Laurinburg Institute, a historically Black prep school in North Carolina that Dizzy Gillespie had attended in the 1930s. Back in New York, he attended the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School, then kick-started his career in nightclubs before joining Ray Charles’s orchestra.In 1964, Mr. Moncur learned that the Actors Studio was looking to cast a musician for its Broadway production of James Baldwin’s civil rights drama “Blues for Mister Charlie.” Mr. Moncur played two roles, one of them a trombonist, and contributed a piece of music.He recorded “Some Other Stuff” three months after the play opened; two of the cuts on the album, “Gnostic” and “Nomadic,” were reflections on his breakup with a girlfriend and his departure from his $27-a-week apartment.“I was a nomad after losing my room, and I was a gnostic because I had to survive by my wits,” he told The Times.He continued to record, releasing two albums in 1969 on the French label BYG Actuel, “New Africa” and “Aco del de Madrugada” (“One Morning I Waked Up Very Early”), and another, “Echoes of Prayer,” with the Jazz Composers Orchestra, in 1974. But he was entering a long, relatively quiet period during which he made almost no records but ran jazz workshops in Harlem in a studio called Space Station; performed in Europe; and taught jazz at the Newark Community School of the Arts.In 1994, Mr. Moncur adapted his four-movement “New Africa” suite into a theatrical piece for the Alternative Museum in Manhattan. The poet Amiri Baraka, a friend, was the producer.In addition to his son Kenya, Mr. Moncur is survived by his wife, Tamam Tracy (Sims) Moncur; two other sons, Grachan IV and Adrien; his daughters, Ella and Vera Moncur; his twin brothers, Lofton and Lonnie; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His son Toih died in 2016, and his daughter Hilda died in 1992. He lived in Newark.In 2004, the composer and arranger Mark Masters brought together Mr. Moncur and seven other musicians to reprise, with new charts, eight of Mr. Moncur’s pieces for an album, “Exploration,” released on the Capri label.“As a composer, he was original and singular,” Mr. Masters said in a phone interview. “He wasn’t derivative of anyone. I see the Monk influence, but Monk wasn’t hovering over him. His music doesn’t sound like anyone else’s.” More

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      Dave Smith, Whose Synthesizers Shaped Electronic Music, Dies at 72

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      His innovations included the first polyphonic, programmable synthesizer and the universal connectivity of MIDI.Dave Smith, a groundbreaking synthesizer designer, died on May 31 in Detroit. He was 72.The cause was complications of a heart attack, said his wife, Denise Smith. Mr. Smith, who lived in St. Helena, Calif., had been in Detroit to attend the Movement Festival of electronic music, which ran from May 28 to 30, and died in a hospital.A statement from Mr. Smith’s company, Sequential, said, “He was on the road doing what he loved best in the company of family, friends and artists.”Mr. Smith introduced the first polyphonic and programmable synthesizer, the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, in 1978. It was used on 1980s hits by Michael Jackson, the Cars, Madonna, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, a-ha, Duran Duran, Genesis, the Cure and Daryl Hall & John Oates. Over the next decades, instruments designed by Mr. Smith were embraced by Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Dr. Dre, Flying Lotus, Nine Inch Nails and James Blake, among many others.In the early 1980s, Mr. Smith collaborated with Ikutaro Kakehashi, the founder of the Roland instrument company, to create MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), a shared specification that allows computers and instruments from diverse manufacturers to connect and communicate, making for countless sonic possibilities.Justin Vernon, who records as Bon Iver, wrote on Twitter, “Dave Smith made the best keyboards ever … that’s saying it lightly.”Denise Smith said in an interview: “He loved the people who used his instruments. He was very curious about how they used his instruments, how they made them sound.”David Joseph Smith was born in San Francisco on April 2, 1950, the son of Peter and Lucretia Papagni Smith. He played piano as a child and guitar and bass in rock bands, in high school and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. One of his college projects was working on a program to compose music, printing out the scores on a plotter. After graduating, he worked on what was then a new technology — microprocessors, integrated circuits on a chip — at the aerospace company Lockheed, in the area of California that would become known as Silicon Valley.He was intrigued by the synthesizer sounds on Wendy Carlos’s 1968 album, “Switched-On Bach,” he said in a 2014 interview with the Red Bull Music Academy. “It just had this life in it that was just amazing to hear.”In 1972, his interests in music and electronics converged when he bought a Minimoog, an early Moog synthesizer. He then built his own sequencer, a device to store and play patterns of notes on the Minimoog. In 1974, he started a company to build sequencers, Sequential Circuits — at first as a nights-and-weekends project, then as a full-time job, eventually as a company with 180 employees.Unlike a piano or organ, early synthesizers, like the Moog and ARP, could generate only one note at a time. Shaping a particular tone involved setting multiple knobs, switches or dials, and trying to reproduce that tone afterward meant writing down all the settings and hoping to get similar results the next time.The Prophet-5, which Mr. Smith designed with John Bowen and introduced in 1978, conquered both shortcomings. Controlling synthesizer functions with microprocessors, it could play five notes at once, allowing harmonies. (The company also made a 10-note Prophet-10.) The Prophet also used microprocessors to store settings in memory, providing dependable yet personalized sounds, and it was portable enough to be used onstage.Mr. Smith’s small company was swamped with orders; at times, the Prophet-5 had a two-year backlog.But Mr. Smith’s innovations went much further. “Once you have a microprocessor in an instrument, you realize how easy it is to communicate digitally to another instrument with a microprocessor,” Mr. Smith explained in 2014. Other keyboard manufacturers started to incorporate microprocessors, but each company used a different, incompatible interface, a situation Mr. Smith said he considered “kind of dumb.”In 1981, Mr. Smith and Chet Wood, a Sequential Circuits engineer, presented a paper at the Audio Engineering Society convention to propose “The ‘USI’, or Universal Synthesizer Interface.” The point, he recalled in a 2014 interview with Waveshaper Media, was “Here’s an interface. It doesn’t have to be this, but we all really need to get together and do something.” Otherwise, he said, “This market’s going nowhere.”Four Japanese companies — Roland, Korg, Yamaha, and Kawai — were willing to cooperate with Sequential Circuits on a shared standard, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Kakehashi of Roland worked out the details of what would become MIDI. “If we had done MIDI the usual way, getting a standard made takes years and years and years,” Mr. Smith told the Red Bull Music Academy. “You have committees and documents and da-da-da. We bypassed all of that by just basically doing it and then throwing it out there.”In 2013, Mr. Smith told The St. Helena Star: “We made it low-cost so that it was easy for companies to integrate into their products. It was given away license free because we wanted everyone to use it.”Sequential Circuits made the first MIDI synthesizer, the Prophet-600, in 1982, and MIDI was formally announced in 1983. Nearly four decades later, the MIDI 1.0 standard is still ubiquitous, and MIDI controllers, which specify the parameters of an electronic tone, are available in everything from keyboard, wind and string instruments to cellphone apps.In 2013, 30 years after MIDI was introduced, Mr. Smith and Mr. Kakehashi shared a Technical Grammy Award.Yamaha bought Sequential Circuits in 1987, but by then cheaper digital synthesizers had grown more popular than analog instruments like the Prophet-5, and in 1989 Yamaha shut the company down.Mr. Smith married Denise White in 1989, and they settled in St. Helena, in Northern California. In addition to her, he is survived by their daughter, Haley; their son, Campbell; and four siblings.Mr. Smith worked in synthesizer research for Yamaha and then for Korg, where he was among the designers of the Wavestation, which was used for hits by Depeche Mode and Genesis. In the 1990s, he turned to designing software synthesizers — programs creating sound directly from a computer. He was president of Seer Systems, which in 1997 introduced the first professional software synthesizer, the Windows program Reality.But Mr. Smith decided he preferred using and designing hardware, and he returned to a hands-on experience making music. As analog synthesizers gained a new following in the 21st century, he founded Dave Smith Instruments in 2002. He collaborated with Roger Linn, the inventor of the LM-1 drum machine, on a new analog drum machine, the Tempest, and with another synthesizer inventor, Tom Oberheim, on the OB-6.In 2018, after Yamaha returned the rights, he renamed his company Sequential, and in 2020, when Mr. Smith turned 70, the company introduced a revived, updated Prophet-5.“Ultimately whatever I design is something that I want to be able to play when I’m done,” Mr. Smith told Waveshaper. “Otherwise, what’s the point?” More

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      Ken Bode, Erudite ‘Washington Week’ Host on PBS, Dies at 83

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      Beginning in 1994, he brought to the moderator’s role credentials as a political activist, an academic and a national correspondent for NBC News.Ken Bode, a bearded, bearish former political operative and television correspondent who, armed with a Ph.D. in politics, moderated the popular PBS program “Washington Week in Review” in the 1990s, died on Thursday in Charlotte, N.C. He was 83.His death, in a care center, was confirmed by his daughters, Matilda and Josie Bode, who said the cause had not been identified.Beginning in 1994, Mr. Bode (pronounced BO-dee) coupled congeniality and knowledgeability in steering a Friday night discussion among a rotating panel of reporters about the issues of the day coming out of Washington. His role, as he saw it, was to “bring in people who are really covering the news to empty their notebooks and provide perspective, not to argue with each other,” he told The Washington Post in 1999.As host of the program, now called “Washington Week,” he succeeded Paul Duke, who had helmed that roundtable of polite talking heads for two decades, and preceded Gwen Ifill, a former NBC News correspondent who died in 2016 at 61. The program, which debuted in 1967, is billed as TV’s longest-running prime time news and public affairs program. The current host is Yamiche Alcindor.The program’s loyal and generally older viewers were so brass-bound in the 1990s that when Mr. Bode took over, even his beard proved controversial. He proceeded to introduce videotaped segments and remote interviews with correspondents and bring more diversity to his panel of reporters.He also took more liberties with language than his predecessor.Mr. Bode moderating an episode of “Washington Week in Review.” He hosted the program from 1994 to 1999 while teaching politics at DePauw University in Indiana. PBSEnding an interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post about President Bill Clinton’s economic policies, Mr. Bode quoted a British newspaper’s snarky prediction that the president’s impending visit to Oxford, England, would present people with an opportunity to “focus on one of the president’s less well-publicized organs: his brain.” He described a vacancy on the Supreme Court as constituting “one-ninth of one-third of the government.”Still, Dalton Delan, then the newly-minted executive vice president of WETA in Washington, which continues to produce the program, wanted to invigorate the format. He proposed including college journalists, surprise guests and people-on-the-street interviews and replacing Mr. Bode with Ms. Ifill (she said she initially turned down the offer) — changes that prompted Mr. Bode to jump, or to be not so gently pushed, from the host’s chair in 1999.Kenneth Adlam Bode was born on March 30, 1939, in Chicago and raised in Hawarden, Iowa. His father, George, owned a dairy farm and then a dry cleaning business. His mother, June (Adlam) Bode, kept the books.Mr. Bode in his office in 1972, when he was involved in Democratic politics.George Tames/The New York TimesThe first member of his family to attend college, Mr. Bode majored in philosophy and government at the University of South Dakota, graduating in 1961. He went on to earn a doctorate in political science at the University of North Carolina, where he was active in the civil rights movement.He taught briefly at Michigan State University and the State University of New York at Binghamton, and then gravitated toward liberal politics.In 1968, Mr. Bode worked in the presidential campaigns of Senators Eugene McCarthy and George S. McGovern. He became research director for a Democratic Party commission, led by Mr. McGovern and Representative Donald M. Fraser of Minnesota, that advocated for reforms in the selection process for delegates to the 1972 Democratic National Convention. He later headed a liberal-leaning organization called the Center for Political Reform.His marriage to Linda Yarrow ended in divorce. In 1975, he married Margo Hauff, a high school social studies teacher who wrote and designed educational materials for learning-disabled children. He is survived by her, in addition to their daughters, as well as by a brother and two grandsons.After working in politics, Mr. Bode began writing for The New Republic in the early 1970s and became its politics editor. He moved to NBC News in 1979, encouraged by the network’s newsman Tom Brokaw, a friend from college, and eventually became the network’s national political correspondent. In that role he hosted “Bode’s Journal,” a weekly segment of the “Today” show, on which he explored, among other issues, voting rights violations, racial discrimination and patronage abuses, as his longtime producer Jim Connor recalled in an interview.Mr. Bode left the network a decade later to teach at DePauw University in Indiana, where he founded the Center for Contemporary Media. While at DePauw, from 1989 to 1998, he commuted to Washington to host “Washington Week in Review” and wrote an Emmy-winning CNN documentary, “The Public Mind of George Bush” (1992).Beginning in 1998, he was dean of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism for three years and remained a professor there until 2004.Mr. Bode said he retired from broadcast journalism for family reasons. “I was raising my kids from 100 airports a year,” he said. As he told The New York Times in 1999, “I knew then that my problem was, I’ve got the best job, but I’ve also got one chance to be a father, and I’m losing it.” More

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      Jim Seals, Half of a Popular 1970s Soft-Rock Duo, Dies at 79

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      Teamed with Dash Crofts, he hit it big with “Summer Breeze” in 1972. The two went on to have chart success with “Diamond Girl” and other songs.Jim Seals, half of Seals & Crofts, a soft-rock duo who had a string of hits in the 1970s, including the Top 10 singles “Summer Breeze” and “Diamond Girl,” died on Monday evening at his home in Nashville. He was 79.His wife, Ruby Jean Seals, said the cause was an unspecified “chronic ongoing illness.”Mr. Seals and his musical partner, Dash Crofts, were still teenagers when they were asked to join an instrumental group, the Champs, which had had a No. 1 hit in 1958 with “Tequila.” By the mid-1960s they had tired of the band and of the loud, sometimes angry strains that were infusing the hard rock of the time.Adherents of the Baha’i faith, they sought to make a calmer brand of music, mixing folk, bluegrass, country and jazz influences and delivering their lyrics in close harmony.“Jim Seals plays acoustic guitar and fiddle,” Don Heckman wrote in The New York Times in 1970 in a brief review of their second album, “Down Home,” “and Dash Crofts plays electric mandolin and piano; together they sing coolly intertwined, and quite colorful, vocal harmony.”With the lilting, nostalgia-seeped single “Summer Breeze,” released in 1972, the two found international stardom. They had developed a modest following, but that song changed everything, as they found out when they arrived in Ohio to play a show.“There were kids waiting for us at the airport,” Mr. Seals told Texas Monthly in 2020. “That night we had a record crowd, maybe 40,000 people. And I remember people throwing their hats and coats in the air as far as you could see, against the moon.”The song, written jointly by the two men, featured the kind of chorus that sticks in the brain:“Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, / Blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”The single reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, and a follow-up, “Hummingbird,” made the Top 20. “Diamond Girl” in 1973 reached No. 6. “Get Closer” in 1976 also reached No. 6.But the duo’s run of success basically ended when the decade did, and they called it quits for a time.“Around 1980, we were still drawing 10,000 to 12,000 people at concerts,” Mr. Seals told The Los Angeles Times in 1991, when the two revived the act. “But we could see, with this change coming where everybody wanted dance music, that those days were numbered.”Six years earlier, though, the pair had begun to fall out of favor with some listeners and critics because of their sixth album, “Unborn Child,” which was released in 1974 not long after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights. The title track urged women who were considering an abortion to “stop, turn around, go back, think it over.”Mr. Seals, in a 1978 interview with The Miami Herald, acknowledged that the record damaged the duo’s career.“It completely killed it for a while,” he said. Radio stations refused to play the record. Some Seals & Crofts concerts were picketed, although there were also hundreds of letters of support. In the 1991 Los Angeles Times interview, Mr. Seals said the pair never intended the song to be a lightning rod.“It was our ignorance that we didn’t know that kind of thing was seething and boiling as a social issue,” he said. “On one hand we had people sending us thousands of roses, but on the other people were literally throwing rocks at us.“If we’d known it was going to cause such disunity,” he continued, “we might have thought twice about doing it. At the time it overshadowed all the other things we were trying to say in our music.”James Eugene Seals was born on Oct. 17, 1942, in Sidney, Texas, to Wayland and Susan Seals. His father worked in the oil fields, and Jim spent much of his childhood in Iraan, a boomtown in southwest Texas.“There were oil rigs as far as you could see,” Mr. Seals told Texas Monthly. “And the stench was so bad you couldn’t breathe.”His father played a little guitar and his mother played the dobro, so informal jam sessions were a common way to pass the time in the household. When a fiddler came by one evening, young Jim was taken with the instrument, and his father ordered him one from a Sears catalog.Later he took up the saxophone, which led to an invitation to join a rockabilly band called the Crew Cats that played at dances and in local clubs. The band’s drummer quit right before a show at a junior college, and the drummer from another band on the bill sat in — Darrell Crofts, known as Dash.The two became friends and played with the Champs for several years out of Los Angeles. Both mastered other instruments, including the guitar. Once they hit it big as a duo, they knew the image they wanted to project and tried to stay true to it. In 1973, when they were about to tour England, Mr. Seals told a reporter that they had pulled out of a previous European engagement.“We were going to tour there earlier, but we had a last-minute change of mind when we found out that we’d be playing with Black Sabbath,” he said. “I’m sure they’re a fine band, but I’m not sure that the audience would be quite right for us.”Mr. Seals, left, and Mr. Crofts in an undated promotional photo.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn addition to his wife, Mr. Seals is survived by their two sons, Joshua and Sutherland; a daughter, Juliet Crossley; and three grandchildren. A sister, Renee Staley, and a half brother, Eddie Ray Seals, also survive him. His brother, Dan Seals, a singer who had success in the late 1970s as a member of another soft-rock duo, England Dan & John Ford Coley, died in 2009. The two brothers toured together for several years before Dan Seals’s death, with Jim Seals’s two sons sometimes playing with them.Maia Coleman More

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      Paul Vance, Lyricist Behind an ‘Itsy Bitsy’ Bikini, Dies at 92

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      His daughter’s experience wearing a bikini on a beach in 1960 inspired him to write a novelty song that became a No. 1 hit.Paul Vance, who described the uncertain path of a girl in a risqué two-piece bathing suit as she advanced from a locker to the shore in the novelty hit song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” died on May 30 in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 92.His daughter Paula Vance confirmed the death, at a nursing facility.It was Paula, who at 2 years old, inspired the song. On a family trip to the beach in 1960, she wore one of the itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikinis that her Aunt Lena had made for her and two of her cousins. But her shyness made her retreat, at first, because of the reaction of two boys who exclaimed that she was wearing no clothes.When she re-emerged, she wrapped herself in a blanket before venturing into the water. While in the water, the bottom of her bikini fell off. Heading home, the lyrics to “Itsy Bitsy” started coming to Mr. Vance. He called Lee Pockriss, his songwriting partner on a number of hits.“I sang the lyric on the phone and by the time he got to my office a couple of hours later, he had 90 percent of the tune written,” Mr. Vance was quoted as saying in the obituary for Mr. Pockriss in The Los Angeles Times in 2011.The song was soon recorded by Brian Hyland, a 16-year-old heartthrob from Queens, and it spent 15 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including one week at No. 1. Before Mr. Hyland was introduced on “American Bandstand” — where a little girl would re-enact Paula Vance’s experience on a set with a bath house and mock waves — the host Dick Clark called “Itsy Bitsy” the “hottest or coolest record in the country, the biggest thing around.”“Itsy Bitsy” endured longer than its time on the charts, though. It has been covered dozens of times by artists as diverse as Connie Francis, Kermit and Miss Piggy, and Devo and used in commercials for products like Yoplait Light and Special K cereal.Joseph Philip Florio was born on Nov. 4, 1929, in Brooklyn to Philip and Concetta Florio. His father delivered ice in a horse-drawn wagon. His mother was a homemaker.He began writing lyrics when he was 13 but had no clear path to being a composer. He described himself to The Palm Beach Post in 2015 as a “dese, dose and dem” guy who avoided falling in with the Mafia. Instead, he served in the Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., then opened a junkyard and auto salvage business. He was already in his mid-20s when he met Mr. Pockriss, a composer who had done graduate work with Aaron Copland.“It’s an ideal professional combination,” Mr. Pockriss told The Associated Press in 1960, adding: “He understands the public. I understand the profession.”Their 1957 song “Catch a Falling Star” was a hit for Perry Como in 1957 and the first record certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America.Paul Vance in an undated photo with one of his gold record awards. He had a long career collaborating on songs recorded by Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka, Patti Page and others.via Vance familyThe success of “Catch a Falling Star” let Mr. Vance focus on songwriting, and he changed his name to sound less ethnic. With various collaborators, including Mr. Pockriss, he wrote songs originally recorded by Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka, Tommy James and the Shondells, and Patti Page.Mr. Vance cajoled Clint Holmes into recording his and Mr. Pockriss’s song “Playground in My Mind” by following him into a men’s room to make his pitch, at a venue in the Bahamas, where Mr. Holmes was performing. Speaking to The Palm Beach Post, Mr. Holmes said of Mr. Vance, “His enthusiasm struck me more than the song.” The song, though, became Mr. Holmes’s only top 10 hit.While still writing songs, Mr. Vance owned and bred horses for harness racing.In addition to his daughter Paula, he is survived by another daughter, Connie Vance Cohen; a son, Joseph; a sister, Joanne Florio, a singer; nine grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. His wife, Margaret (Curte) Vance, died in 2012. His son Philip died in 2009.Mr. Vance was erroneously reported to have died in 2006 when the wife of a man named Paul Van Valkenburgh, who had indeed died, asserted that her husband had written “Itsy Bitsy” under the name Paul Vance. The obituary, by The Associated Press, was picked up by many news outlets, including The New York Times. (Corrections ensued, and The Times published a corrective article.)But the false report shook up Mr. Vance’s family and friends. His music publisher confirmed that Mr. Vance, not the deceased man, was the songwriter and that he was still collecting royalties.But as Mr. Vance told The Orlando Sentinel in 2006, some people still called thinking he was dead, and he would inform them: “This is Heaven. Who do you wish to speak to? Paul Vance? Oh, yeah, he just got up here.” More

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      Bill Walker, Nashville Force as Conductor and Arranger, Dies at 95

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      He scored chart-topping records for country stars and later served as the musical director of “The Johnny Cash Show.”NASHVILLE — Bill Walker, a conductor and arranger who became a musical force in Nashville, scoring popular recordings for country stars like Marty Robbins and Connie Smith and serving as musical director for Johnny Cash’s primetime television variety show, died on May 26 at a rehabilitation facility near here. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law Terri Walker, who said he had developed pneumonia after recent knee replacement surgery.A classically trained pianist, Mr. Walker orchestrated blockbuster hits like Eddy Arnold’s “Make the World Go Away” (1965) and Sammi Smith’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” (1970). Both records reached No. 1 on the country chart and crossed over to the pop Top 10.He also served as arranger and conductor for, among many other recordings, Donna Fargo’s “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.,” a chart-topping country single that stalled just outside the pop Top 10 in 1972.In the process he had a hand in shaping both the lush, sophisticated Nashville Sound of the 1960s and the soulful “countrypolitan” sensibility that came after it.Mr. Walker, left, in an undated photograph with Earl Poole Ball and Johnny Cash. In addition to working on “The Johnny Cash Show,” he wrote and conducted the arrangement for Mr. Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”Joseph Cates via Earl Poole BallEmpathy and elegance were his calling cards, along with a knack for plumbing the emotional heart of a song, a gift that was nowhere more evident than in his work on “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”“Take the ribbon from my hair,” Ms. Smith implores her lover as Mr. Walker’s gossamer arrangement caresses the ache in her voice.His sympathetic strings likewise lent pathos to George Jones’s lovelorn “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” a No. 1 country hit in 1980.“You are there to make the artist sound good, not to show how clever you can be,” Mr. Walker said of his philosophy of recording in a 2015 interview at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.“That’s how I used to do it,” he continued. “It didn’t matter if the artist was a hillbilly singer from back in the woods somewhere or Perry Como. You give them the same attention no matter what.”Mr. Walker in the early 1970s with Loretta Lynn and Ray Charles as they rehearsed for an NBC television special.Courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumWilliam Alfred Walker was born on April 28, 1927, in Sydney, Australia, the eldest of three children of Alfred and Beryl (Gabb) Walker. His father was a dairy farmer, his mother a homemaker.William began playing the piano at age 5 and soon started taking private lessons. While in high school and college he performed in clubs and taught himself the rudiments of arranging by listening to popular recordings on the radio. He received his formal training at Sydney University’s Conservatorium of Music, graduating in 1955.In 1957 he moved to South Africa to become the musical director of the Johannesburg division of RCA Records, where he released 23 largely instrumental albums of pop and Latin music that featured him on piano backed by large and small ensembles.He also produced sessions for the country superstar Jim Reeves, who encouraged him to move to Nashville; Mr. Walker arrived the weekend Mr. Reeves died at 39 in a fatal plane crash, in July 1964.He started working with Mr. Arnold and helped revive the singer’s career at a time when ballad singers were being eclipsed on the country chart by artists like Buck Owens and Roger Miller, who were more attuned to up-tempo rock ’n’ roll.Mr. Walker later turned down a chance to succeed Chet Atkins as head of the Nashville office of RCA before becoming the musical director of “The Johnny Cash Show” on ABC-TV in 1969. There, he helped bring Southern culture to living rooms and dens across the country by collaborating with Mahalia Jackson, Roy Acuff, Louis Armstrong and an array of other guests.He also wrote and conducted the arrangement for Mr. Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” a live recording from the show that went to No. 1 on the country chart in 1970. Mr. Cash typically signed off each episode of his program with the salutation, “Goodnight, Mr. Walker!”After The Johnny Cash Show ended its run in 1971, Mr. Walker spent the next two decades working as an independent producer for singers like Ferlin Husky and Wanda Jackson and managing his own label, Con Brio Records. In the early ’70s he worked with Ray Charles and Loretta Lynn for an NBC television special. Mr. Walker worked with ensembles on at least four continents, including studio professionals on the East and West Coasts of the United States.via Marco MusicFrom 1991 to 1998 he was the musical director for “The Statler Brothers Show,” a popular musical variety show on the Nashville Network. He remained active as a producer and arranger into the 2000s, writing scores for TV specials and movies at a time when session musicians relied primarily on improvised, or “head,” arrangements.Mr. Walker is survived by his wife of 51 years, Jeanine (Ogletree) Walker, a former Nashville session singer; a daughter, Beth Walker; a son, Colin, from a previous marriage; his sister, Julianne Smith; his brother, Robert; and 13 grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren. Two sons, Jeff and Peter, and a daughter, Lisa Gibson, all from previous marriages, died.Mr. Walker worked with ensembles on at least four continents, including studio professionals on the East and West Coasts of the United States. For the arrangements that he composed, though, he preferred the intuitive, less-is-more approach of the session musicians he first encountered in Nashville in the 1960s.“That’s the thing with Nashville players,” he said in his interview at the Country Music Hall of Fame. “They all listen to each other and they join in the licks. It’s the stuff you can’t write. You can only give them the idea and let them go with it.” More