Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Charles Fuller, Pulitzer Winner for ‘A Soldier’s Play,’ Dies at 83

      by

      He was the second Black playwright to win the award and later adapted the play into an Oscar-nominated film, “A Soldier’s Story.”Charles Fuller, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982 for “A Soldier’s Play,” which finally made it to Broadway 38 years later, in a production that earned two Tony Awards, died on Monday in Toronto. He was 83.His wife, Claire Prieto-Fuller, confirmed the death.Mr. Fuller was only the second Black playwright to win the Pulitzer for drama. (Charles Edward Gordone won in 1970 for “No Place to Be Somebody.”) His plays often examined racism and sometimes drew on his background as an Army veteran. Both of those elements were evident in “A Soldier’s Play,” which was Mr. Fuller’s reimagining of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and centered on the murder of a Black Army sergeant and the search for the culprit.The play was first staged in 1981 by the Negro Ensemble Company with a cast that included Denzel Washington. Frank Rich, in his review in The New York Times, called it “a relentless investigation into the complex, sometimes cryptic pathology of hate” and praised Mr. Fuller’s delineation of both the Black and the white characters.“Mr. Fuller demands that his Black characters find the courage to break out of their suicidal, fratricidal cycle,” Mr. Rich wrote, “just as he demands that whites end the injustices that have locked his Black characters into the nightmare.”Hollywood came calling. A 1984 film version, retitled “A Soldier’s Story” and directed by Norman Jewison, had a cast that included Mr. Washington, Howard E. Rollins Jr., David Alan Grier, Wings Hauser, Adolph Caesar and Patti LaBelle. It received three Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Fuller’s screenplay.Denzel Washington, left, and Charles Brown in 1981 in Mr. Fuller’s acclaimed play “A Soldier’s Play,” staged by the Negro Ensemble Company in New York.Bert AndrewsIn “A Soldier’s Play” and his other works, Mr. Fuller strove to serve up not idealized Black characters but ones who reflected reality.“In the ’60s and early ’70s, Black plays were directed at whites,” Mr. Fuller told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, when the Negro Ensemble Company’s production of “A Soldier’s Play” was staged in San Diego. “They were primarily confrontational pieces, whose major concern was to address racism and white-Black relationships in this country. Now we are much more concerned with examining ourselves, with looking at our own situations — historically in many instances. We are seeing characters who are more complex, ones who have bad qualities as well as good ones.”“A Soldier’s Play,” he told The Times in 2020, drew in part on his upbringing in a tough neighborhood of North Philadelphia.“I grew up in a project in a neighborhood where people shot each other, where gangs fought each other,” he said. “Not white people — Black people, where the idea of who was the best, toughest, was part of life. We have a history that’s different than a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t cheat on each other, kill each other, love each other, marry each other, do all that, things that, really, people anywhere in the world do.”Kenny Leon (with microphone), who directed a 2020 revival of “A Soldier’s Play” on Broadway, addressed Mr. Fuller, third from left, onstage after a performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCharles H. Fuller Jr. was born on March 5, 1939, in Philadelphia. His father was a printer, and his mother, Lillian Teresa Fuller, was a homemaker and foster mother. He was a student at Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia when he attended his first play, a production performed in Yiddish at the Walnut Theater.“I didn’t understand a word,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1977, but somehow it sparked his interest in becoming a playwright.He studied for two years at Villanova University and then joined the Army, where his postings included Japan and South Korea. After four years, he returned to Philadelphia, taking night classes at LaSalle College (now University) while working as a city housing inspector.In 1968, he and some friends founded the Afro-American Arts Theater in Philadelphia, but they had no playwrights, so Mr. Fuller gave it a try.One result was his first staged play, “The Village: A Party,” about a racially mixed utopia, which was produced in 1968 at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.“What the evening proves,” Ernest Albrecht wrote in a review in The Home News of New Brunswick, N.J., “is that the theater is not Fuller’s bag.”But Mr. Fuller kept at it. In the 1970s he relocated to New York, where the Negro Ensemble Company in 1974 staged his drama “In the Deepest Part of Sleep” and opened its 10th-anniversary season in 1976 with another of his plays, “The Brownsville Raid,” based on a 1906 incident in Texas in which Black soldiers were accused of a shooting. Walter Kerr, writing in The Times, praised Mr. Fuller for not making the play a simple story of racial injustice.“Mr. Fuller is interested in human slipperiness, and his skill with self‐serving, only slightly shady evasions of duty helps turn the play into the interesting conundrum it is,” Mr. Kerr wrote.Although he set out as a playwright to examine difficult questions, Mr. Fuller did so with a certain degree of optimism about the future of the United States.“America has an opportunity, with all its technology, to develop the first sensible society in history,” he said in the 1977 interview with The Inquirer. “It could provide all its people with some rational way to live together while still glorying in their cultural diversity.”By the late 1980s, though, he had tired of New York and moved to Toronto, where he was living at his death. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, David; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.“A Soldier’s Play” was finally produced on Broadway in 2020 by the Roundabout Theater with a cast that included Mr. Grier and Blair Underwood. It was eligible to win the best-revival Tony even though it had never been produced on Broadway previously — the more familiar prerequisite for the category — because, under Tony rules, it was by 2020 considered “a classic.” Mr. Grier himself won a Tony for best actor in a featured role in a play.“It has been my greatest honor to perform his words on both stage and screen,” Mr. Grier said of Mr. Fuller on Twitter, adding that “his genius will be missed.” More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Sacheen Littlefeather, Activist Who Rejected Brando’s Oscar, Dies at 75

      by

      The actress was booed at the Academy Awards in 1973 after she refused the best actor award on Marlon Brando’s behalf in protest of Hollywood’s depictions of Native Americans.Sacheen Littlefeather, the Apache activist and actress who refused to accept the best actor award on behalf of Marlon Brando at the 1973 Oscars, drawing jeers onstage in an act that pierced through the facade of the awards show and highlighted her criticism of Hollywood for its depictions of Native Americans, has died. She was 75.Her death was announced on Sunday by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The cause of death was not immediately known.Her death came just weeks after the Academy apologized to Ms. Littlefeather for her treatment during the Oscars. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in August, Ms. Littlefeather said she was “stunned” by the apology. “I never thought I’d live to see the day I would be hearing this, experiencing this,” she said.When Ms. Littlefeather, then 26, held up her right hand that night inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles — clearly signaling to the award presenters, the audience and the millions watching on TV that she had no desire to ceremoniously accept the shiny golden statue — it marked one of the best-known disruptive moments in the history of the Oscars.“I beg at this time that I have not intruded upon this evening, and that we will, in the future, our hearts and our understandings, will meet with love and generosity,” Ms. Littlefeather said at the podium, having endured a chorus of boos and some cheers from the crowd.Donning a glimmering buckskin dress, moccasins and hair ties, her appearance at the 45th Academy Awards, at the age of 26, was the first time a Native American woman had stood onstage at the ceremony. But the backlash and criticism was immediate: The actor John Wayne was so unsettled that a show producer, Marty Pasetta, said security guards had to restrain him so that he would not storm the stage.Ms. Littlefeather and Mr. Brando had become friends through her neighbor, the director Francis Ford Coppola.Associated PressShe told The Hollywood Reporter in August: “When I was at the podium in 1973, I stood there alone.”Ms. Littlefeather, whose name at birth was Marie Cruz, was born on Nov. 14, 1946, in Salinas, Calif., to a father from the White Mountain Apache and Yaqui tribes in Arizona and a French-German-Dutch mother, according to her website. After high school, she took the name Sacheen Littlefeather to “reflect her natural heritage,” the site states.Her website said she participated in the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island, which began in 1969 in an act of defiance against a government that they said had long trampled on their rights.Her acting career began at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in the early 1970s. She would go on to play roles in films like “The Trial of Billy Jack” and “Winterhawk.”Ms. Littlefeather said in an interview with the Academy that she had been planning to watch the awards on television when she received a call the night before the ceremony from Mr. Brando, who had been nominated for his performance as Vito Corleone in “The Godfather.”The two had become friends through her neighbor, the director Francis Ford Coppola. Mr. Brando asked her to refuse the award on his behalf if he won and gave her a speech to read just in case.With only about 15 minutes left in the program, Ms. Littlefeather arrived at the ceremony with little information about how the night would work.A producer for the Oscars noticed the pages in Ms. Littlefeather’s hand and told her that she would be arrested if her comments lasted more than 60 seconds.Then, Mr. Brando won.In the speech, Ms. Littlefeather also brought attention to the federal government’s standoff with Native Americans at Wounded Knee.She later recalled that while she was giving the speech, she had “focused in on the mouths and the jaws that were dropping open in the audience, and there were quite a few.”The audience, she recalled, looked like a “sea of Clorox” because there were “very few people of color.”She said some audience members did the so-called “tomahawk chop” at her and that when she went to Mr. Brando’s house later, people shot at the doorway where she was standing.Last month, Ms. Littlefeather spoke at a program hosted by the Academy called “An Evening with Sacheen Littlefeather,” recalling how she had stood up for justice in the arts.“I didn’t represent myself,” she said. “I was representing all Indigenous voices out there, all Indigenous people, because we had never been heard in that way before.”And when she spoke those words, the audience erupted in applause.“I had to pay the price of admission, and that was OK,” she said. “Because those doors had to be open.”After learning that the Academy would formally apologize to her, Ms. Littlefeather said it felt “like a big cleanse.”“It feels like the sacred circle is completing itself,” she said, “before I go in this life.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Joe Bussard, Obsessive Collector of Rare Records, Dies at 86

      by

      His life revolved around his massive hoard of fragile 78 r.p.m. disks of jazz, blues, country and gospel music recorded between the 1920s and ’50s.Joe Bussard, who made it his life’s obsession to collect rare 78 r.p.m. records — some 15,000 of them, encompassing jazz, blues, country, jug band and gospel — and who spread his love for the music on radio and among visitors who joined him to listen to the fragile disks in his basement, died on Monday at his home in Frederick, Md., one floor above his hoard. He was 86.His death, in hospice care, was confirmed by his daughter, Susannah Anderson. She said the cause was pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed in 2019.“He basically lived the songs, breathed the songs and passed them on to as many people as he could,” John Tefteller, a rare-records dealer and auctioneer, said in a phone interview. “It was his life from morning to night. I consider him a national treasure.”And any fan of his treasures could come to his house and listen to his 78s.“Anybody who got ahold of him, he’d say, ‘Come on over,’” Ms. Anderson said.From his home near the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mr. Bussard (pronounced boo-SARD) drove the country roads of the South seeking 78s that had been languishing in people’s homes. He was selective about what he brought back to his basement. He loved jazz but detested any jazz recorded after the early 1930s. He loved country music but decreed that nothing good came after 1955. Nashville? He called it “Trashville.” Rock ’n’ roll? A cancer.“How can you listen to Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw when you’ve listened to Jelly Roll Morton?” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2001. “It’s like coming out of a mansion and living in a chicken coop.”One day, in the 1960s, Mr. Bussard was driving the streets of Tazwell, a small town in Virginia — the kind of place he often canvassed door to door, asking people if they had 78s — when he met an old man who said he had some 78s at the shotgun shack where he lived.From a dusty box under the man’s bed, Mr. Bussard found some good country records (Uncle Dave Macon, the Carter family) and then the sort of mind-blowing discoveries he craved: a 78 on the Black Patti label, which recorded jazz, blues and spirituals in the late 1920s.“‘Oh my Gahhd!’” he recalled thinking in the liner notes to his CD “Down in the Basement: Joe Bussard’s Treasure Trove of Vintage 78s” (2002). “It was all I could do to keep my hands from trembling.”“So I laid it down, you know, and said, ‘Oh, that’s nice,” he continued. “The old man says, ‘Oh, them, there’s a lot of them in there.’”There were 15 Black Patti records, and the old man, who didn’t care for them, asked for $10 for the bunch. Years later, Mr. Bussard said, he was offered $30,000 for one of them, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues” by Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull. He didn’t sell it.“When I leave this world,” he added, “I think I’m gonna have that record laying on top of me in my coffin.”Mr. Bussard with an early record by the country music star Jimmie Rodgers, a particular favorite.Ted Anthony/Associated PressMr. Bussard built his life around his records. After working in a supermarket and in his family’s farm supply business, he held no regular job after the late 1950s. He was supported by his wife, Esther (Keith) Bussard, a hairdresser, and his parents.“It’s like my mom and I were in one world, he was in another,” Susannah Anderson said in a phone interview. “It was hard. He was like an absent father, even though he was in the house.”In a profile of Mr. Bussard in Washington City Paper in 1999, his wife was quoted as saying that if she had not been a “born-again, spirit-filled Christian, who the day I married him made a commitment to God,” she “would have left long ago.”But, she added, she loved music as well (she blared bluegrass records in another part of the house while her husband blared his music from the basement), respected his collection and appreciated that he was “saving it for history.”Mr. Bussard found kinship in people like Ivy Sheppard, a disc jockey and 78 collector with whom he recorded radio programs for several stations including WAMU in Washington and WBCM in Bristol, Va., all built mostly around his rare records but also including some of hers. He recorded shows for a variety of stations over more than 40 years.Ms. Sheppard recalled that she and Mr. Bussard often talked for hours on the phone while listening to records. She described visiting his basement as “the greatest experience in the world.”She added, “I’m lost in this world without that crazy old man. He was my best friend.”Joseph Edward Bussard Jr. was born in Frederick on July 11, 1936. His father ran a farm supply business, and his mother, Viola (Culler) Bussard, was a homemaker.When he was 7 or 8, Joe began stocking up on records by Gene Autry, the star of western movies who was known as “the Singing Cowboy”; within a few years he heard the country singer Jimmie Rodgers and was smitten. When he couldn’t find any of Rodgers’s records at a local store, he began hunting for them, knocking on local doors until a woman gave him a box that contained two of Rodgers’s 78s.As a teenager, he began hosting a local radio show from his parents’ basement. When he got his driver’s license, he expanded his search for the records he loved — the 78s made of hard, brittle shellac resin, the format that preceded vinyl — while canvassing in Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina.It became an obsession, one that delighted him and made him dance and play air sax, air guitar and air banjo in his basement. (He also played the guitar and mandolin.)He made one last trip a month ago, to a flea market in Emmittsburg, Md., in search of 78s, but didn’t find any.“He had a lot of record hunting left in him,” Ms. Anderson said, adding that there were no plans, for now, to move the collection.Mr. Bussard in his basement in 1965. He not only collected 78s; he also built a studio there to make his own.Collection of Marshall WyattMr. Bussard not only collected 78s; he also built a basement studio in his parents’ house in the 1950s to make his own. Under his Fonotone label, he recorded artists like the Possum Holler Boys, a country and rockabilly band, and the Tennessee Mess Arounders, a blues group (he was a member of both), as well as the influential fingerstyle guitarist John Fahey. (He later moved his collection and his studio to the house he shared with his wife and daughter.)A five-CD collection containing 131 of Mr. Bussard’s 78s, “Fonotone Records: Frederick Maryland (1956-1969),” was released in 2005 by Dust-to-Digital and nominated for a Grammy Award for best boxed or special limited-edition package.In 2003, Mr. Bussard was the subject of a documentary, “Desperate Man Blues: Discovering the Roots of American Music,” directed by Edward Gillan.In addition to Ms. Anderson, he is survived by three granddaughters. His wife died in 1999.Once, in a little coal town in southwest Virginia, Mr. Bussard asked a gas station attendant where he could find records and was told to go to a nearby hardware store. When he got there, the owner guided him to a cache of 5,000 records, which had never been played.“The first one I pulled out was ‘Sobbin’ Blues,’ by King Oliver on Okeh, absolutely new, at least a $400 record,” he excitedly recalled in the Washington City Paper interview, referring to a record label founded in 1918. “The next one I pulled out was ‘Jackass Blues’ on Vocalion by the Dixie Syncopators.” He picked out four stacks of 78s and paid $100.“I was so high when I went out of that store,” he said, “I could have floated.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Sue Mingus, Promoter of Her Husband’s Musical Legacy, Dies at 92

      by

      Charles Mingus was among the greatest bassists in jazz. She worked tirelessly to ensure that he was known as a great composer as well.Sue Mingus, the wife of the jazz bassist, composer and bandleader Charles Mingus, whose impassioned promotion of his work after his death in 1979 helped secure his legacy as one of the 20th century’s greatest musical minds, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 92.Her son, Roberto Ungaro, confirmed her death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.Though Charles Mingus’s reputation as a brilliant if volatile performer was secure by the time he died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, at 56, Sue Mingus made sure he was also elevated to the pantheon of great jazz composers, alongside the likes of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.She organized three bands, each with different strengths, to wrestle with the more than 300 compositions he left behind, including his posthumously discovered masterpiece, the two-hour orchestral work “Epitaph.” He had despaired of seeing it performed in his lifetime, hence its title, but Ms. Mingus managed to bring the piece to the stage in a landmark performance at Lincoln Center in 1989.Mingus had exacting ideas about how each note from each member of his band should sound. But his wife saw that he had left his compositions supple and wide open to interpretation, allowing generations of musicians to return to them again and again. What resulted was a fresh, alluring texture rarely found in legacy bands playing the music of Ellington, Glenn Miller and others.“None of those leaders posthumously had the advantage of a Sue Mingus,” the jazz critic and journalist Nat Hentoff, a close friend of the Minguses, told The Boston Globe in 2004. “She’s got players who really dig into that music and remember that Mingus used to say, ‘You can’t play your own licks. I want you to play the music, but be yourself.’”Ms. Mingus with her husband’s basses in the late 1980s.Mingus ArchiveCharles and Sue made an unlikely couple: He was a temperamental Black bohemian raised in the Watts section of Los Angeles; she was a white Midwestern former debutante. And yet they clicked almost immediately after a chance encounter in 1964 at the Five Spot, a club in Lower Manhattan.He was playing his regular gig; she was there to soak in the city’s jazz scene, having recently appeared in “OK End Here,” a short film by the photographer Robert Frank with a score by the saxophonist Ornette Coleman.“My life had been one of order and balance, founded on grammar and taste and impeccable manners,” Ms. Mingus wrote in “Tonight at Noon: A Love Story” (2002), her memoir of their relationship. “And yet something about the man across the room seemed oddly familiar, like someone I already knew.”By the end of the 1960s they were more than lovers: She was his manager, his agent, his confidante and emotional support system. She booked his shows, arranged grants and teaching positions, and helped keep him levelheaded and relatively clean of the prescription drugs and alcohol that had disrupted his earlier career.And when, in the mid-1970s, he received his A.L.S. diagnosis, she hunted down experimental surgeries. They were in Mexico for one such treatment when he died; following his wishes, she spread his ashes in the Ganges River in India.It was after his death that Ms. Mingus showed the true strength of her commitment. She arranged for a two-day festival of Mingus’s music at Carnegie Hall, and soon afterward oversaw the creation of Mingus Dynasty, a seven-piece band that played both old Mingus standards and pieces he never brought to life, often arranged by Mingus’s longtime collaborator Sy Johnson, who died in July.The Minguses at their home in the Manhattan Plaza complex in Midtown Manhattan in 1978.Sy Johnson/Mingus ArchivesMs. Mingus had her husband’s compositions cataloged and donated to the Library of Congress, one of the largest gifts ever of a Black musician’s work. When one of the catalogers found the 200-page, 15-pound score for “Epitaph,” she wrangled 31 musicians to perform it, under the direction of the composer and conductor Gunther Schuller.That concert, a decade after Mingus died, revived interest in his music and led to the creation of two more repertory bands.In any given week in New York, a jazz fan might head to the Fez, a basement club on Lafayette Street, to hear the Mingus Big Band, then shuffle over to the City Hall Restaurant in TriBeCa to catch the Mingus Orchestra, which put more focus on composition and featured exotic instruments like bassoon and French horn. In between, one could pick up any number of recordings released under her record labels, Revenge and Sue Mingus Music.Revenge, which released music previously available only on bootleg recordings, demonstrated just how dedicated Ms. Mingus was to her husband’s legacy.By the late 1980s she had grown exasperated with the high volume of bootleg recordings of Mingus concerts. She got in the habit of taking as many as she could from record stores, not bothering to hide her antipiracy vigilantism and daring clerks to stop her.On a trip to Paris in 1991, one clerk did. She was whisked off to see the manager, who berated her before picking up the phone to call the police.“I told him to go right ahead,” she wrote in the liner notes to “Charles Mingus: Revenge,” a 1996 concert album. “I also suggested he call the daily newspapers as well as the television crews for the evening news and also the principal French jazz magazines whose offices happen to be across the street, so that I could explain everything to everyone at once.”The manager put down the phone and let her leave, with the records in hand.Sue Graham was born on April 2, 1930, in Chicago and raised in Milwaukee. Her family was musical: Her father, Louis Graham, was a businessman and amateur opera singer, and her mother, Estelle (Stone) Graham, was a homemaker and harpist.After graduating from Smith College with a degree in history in 1952, she moved to Paris, where she worked as an editor at The International Herald Tribune.A later job editing for an airline magazine called Clipper took her to Rome, where she met and married the artist Alberto Ungaro. They had two children, Roberto and Susanna, and moved to New York City in 1958. She worked for New York Free Press, an alternative weekly, and in 1969 founded Changes, a cultural magazine.She later separated from Mr. Ungaro, who died in 1968. Along with her children, Ms. Mingus is survived by four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.For all her decades of effort, Ms. Mingus remained unwilling to take full credit for burnishing her husband’s legacy.“It keeps itself alive,” she told The Boston Globe in 2002. “I just happen to be a passenger.” More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Coolio, ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ Rapper, Dies at 59

      by

      From a bookish, asthmatic child to crack addict to mainstream hitmaker, the West Coast M.C. charted a unique path to hip-hop stardom.Coolio, the rapper whose gritty and sometimes playful takes on West Coast rap and anthemic hits like “Gangsta’s Paradise” made him a hip-hop star in the 1990s, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 59.His longtime manager, Jarez Posey, confirmed his death.Mr. Posey, who worked with the rapper for more than 20 years, said he was told that Coolio died at about 5 p.m. at a friend’s house. No cause was given. Coolio, whose legal name was Artis Leon Ivey Jr., achieved mainstream superstardom and critical success with “Gangsta’s Paradise” in 1995. The track, which featured the singer L.V., spent three weeks atop Billboard’s Hot 100 and was later named the chart’s No. 1 song of the year. It won the Grammy for best rap solo performance in 1996.The song, later certified triple-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, outshone the movie it was featured in, “Dangerous Minds.” Its music video won best rap video and best video from a film at the MTV Video Music Awards.“Coolio still builds his raps on recognizable 1970s oldies, and he delivers intricate, syncopated rhymes as if they were conversation,” Jon Pareles wrote in an album review in The New York Times, noting that “Gangsta’s Paradise” uses “the somber minor chords” of “Pastime Paradise,” by Stevie Wonder.The song nearly did not make it into “Dangerous Minds,” The Times critic Caryn James noted in 1996. She wrote that the late addition “turned a preachy Michelle Pfeiffer film about an inner-city teacher into a hit that sounded fresher than it really was.”Coolio’s other hits included “Fantastic Voyage” — the opening song on his debut album — and “1, 2, 3, 4 (Sumpin’ New),” which were both nominated for Grammys. “C U When U Get There,” which samples Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major,” was a standout track on his third album of the 1990s, “My Soul.”But nothing could match the success of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” a song that, with its piercing beat and ominous background vocals, became instantly distinguishable for millions of ’90s rap fans, especially with a memorable opening verse based on Psalm 23:“As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at my life and realize there’s nothin’ left.”The song would expand the commercial possibilities of hip-hop, but Coolio would later say that he sometimes lamented how the track seemed to overshadow his other bodies of work, particularly follow-up albums.Still, he told PopkillerTV in 2018 that the song had taken him on “a great ride.” Its popularity has endured for decades, with the music video garnering a rare billion-plus views on YouTube.Artis Leon Ivey Jr. was born on Aug. 1, 1963. He grew up in Compton, Calif., a place known for producing some of hip-hop’s most successful artists, such as Dr. Dre and Kendrick Lamar.He told The Independent in 1997 that as a child, he would play board games with his single mother, to whom he later dedicated his success. After a turbulent youth — the bookish, asthmatic child became a teenage gang member, juvenile offender and drug addict — Coolio worked as a volunteer firefighter.In his 20s, he moved to San Jose to live with his father and fight fires with the California Department of Forestry, The Ringer reported. There, he became more spiritual. He later credited Christianity for helping him overcome his addiction to crack.When he embarked on his music career, he quickly gained a following among the rapidly growing audience of hip-hop fans, who had been enraptured by the music of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.After performing with the group WC and the Maad Circle alongside WC, Sir Jinx and DJ Crazy Toones, Coolio went solo. His debut album, “It Takes a Thief” (1994), garnered praise for clever lyrics infused with funky rhythms.“Gangsta’s Paradise” had a vast cultural imprint, even spawning a parody in Weird Al Yankovic’s “Amish Paradise” that replaced the streets with pastoral lyrics about churning butter and selling quilts.Reflecting on his career, and on the success of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Coolio told Rolling Stone in 2015 that he was on tour in Europe when the song went No. 1 on the charts and he realized: “I was No. 1 all over the entire planet — not just in the States. I was No. 1 everywhere that you can imagine.”On Wednesday, the rapper Ice Cube recalled the significance of Coolio’s music at the time, writing on Twitter that he had witnessed “first hand this man’s grind to the top of the industry.”Coolio, whose spindly and sprouting cornrows defined his look, went on to sell 4.8 million records throughout his career, according to Luminate, the tracking service formerly known as Nielsen Music.He expanded his influence by writing and performing the theme song for “Kenan & Kel,” a Nickelodeon staple in the late 1990s. Coolio later became a fixture on reality TV, starting with “Coolio’s Rules,” a 2008 series that focused on his personal life and his quest to find love in Los Angeles.A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. Coolio had four children with Josefa Salinas, whom he married in 1996 and later divorced.Years after he topped the charts and solidified himself as a mainstream artist, Coolio confronted legal trouble, pleading guilty to firearms and drug charges.The rapper, who struggled with asthma all his life, served as the spokesman for the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, according to his official online biography. At a 2016 performance in Brooklyn, N.Y., Page Six reported, he had an asthma attack and was saved by a fan who had an inhaler.In recent years, Coolio had become aware of his indelible mark on hip-hop. He said in 2018 that after years of lamenting over his struggles in the music industry, he had realized that “people would kill to take my place.”“I’m sure after I’m long gone from this planet, and from this dimension,” he said, “people will come back and study my body of work.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Rita Gardner, an Original ‘Fantasticks’ Star, Is Dead at 87

      by

      In 1960 she originated the lone female role in an Off Broadway show that became part of theater history thanks to a record-setting run.Rita Gardner, who in a long cabaret and theater career earned an enduring place in stage history in 1960, when she originated the role of Luisa in the musical “The Fantasticks,” the longest-running musical in theatrical history, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 87.Claire-Frances Sullivan, her personal assistant and caretaker, said the cause was leukemia.Ms. Gardner was in her mid-20s and not particularly well known when she responded to an audition notice for “The Fantasticks,” a romantic fable with a book and lyrics by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt. She had called Lore Noto, the show’s producer, before attending the audition, and he told her that though the creative team already had another actress in mind for the part, she should audition anyway.“I didn’t know Tom or Harvey or anybody,” she said in an interview for the book “The Amazing Story of ‘The Fantasticks’” (1991), by Donald C. Farber and Robert Viagas. “I came in, essentially, off the street. They didn’t know me either.”She sang the song she had once used to win an “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” contest, “Over the Rainbow.” Mr. Schmidt heard a quality he liked.“With a lot of singers you can tell when they go from head to chest voice; it’s two different voices,” he said in an interview for the same book. “With Rita it was all one voice. Rita was like a pop singer, yet she could do these obbligato things, and it didn’t seem strange.”She got the part of Luisa (also sometimes called simply “the Girl”), the only female role in the piece. The show, whose signature number, “Try to Remember,” became a standard, opened in May 1960 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. Tickets were $3.75.In The Daily News, Charles McHarry pronounced the show “recommended without reservation.” But in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson, while having kind words for the actors, thought the story lost steam. “Although it is ungrateful to say so,” he wrote, “two acts are one too many.”In a 2000 interview with The Associated Press, Ms. Gardner recalled that keeping the show open was touch and go until that August, when the production took time off amid the New York City summer and played in East Hampton, N.Y., for a week.“All the posh people saw it and told their friends,” she said. “Audiences started to grow.”Ms. Gardner with the other members of the original cast of “The Fantasticks,” including, top row center, Jerry Orbach.PhotofestThe show ran for 42 years, closing in 2002 after more than 17,000 performances, and then reopened in 2006 and ran until 2017. Ms. Gardner stayed only until the end of 1960. (Jerry Orbach, who was also in the original cast, left at about the same time.) But she was with the show long enough to record the original cast album.In a 2001 interview with The Bradenton Herald of Florida, Ms. Gardner recalled that, about 10 years earlier, she had attended a production of “The Fantasticks” for the first time as an audience member.“I didn’t know I had been in something so good,” she said.She was in Bradenton performing a revue she had assembled called “Try to Remember: A Look at Off Broadway,” in which she sang songs from “The Fantasticks” and other shows and told stories. A few months earlier she had staged the show at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, the same theater where she had originated the “Fantasticks” role 40 years earlier. There, her performance started at 10 p.m. — because “The Fantasticks” was still running in the theater’s main evening slot.Rita Schier was born on Oct. 23, 1934, in Brooklyn to Nathan and Tillie (Hack) Schier. She studied opera and dance and sang in a close-harmony group called the Honeybees; in the late 1950s she appeared in a revue called “Nightcap,” which featured songs by the then unknown Jerry Herman. In 1957 she married the playwright Herb Gardner, who would become known for “A Thousand Clowns.” Their marriage ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Peter Cereghetti. At her death she was married to Robert Sevra, who is her only immediate survivor.Ms. Gardner left “The Fantasticks” to appear in a movie called “One Plus One” (1961), and she had small parts in other movies over the years. She also appeared on television, including in several episodes of “Law & Order,” the show that helped make Mr. Orbach an instantly recognizable star. She appeared on Broadway in “A Family Affair” (1962) as well as in the 1963 revival of “Pal Joey,” among other shows.She performed frequently on the cabaret circuit, where she employed not only her fine singing voice but also her droll sense of humor. In her show “Try to Remember,” she talked about life beyond Broadway’s bright lights.“Off Broadway is not just a location, it’s a definition,” she said. “The Actors Equity definition is a theater that has less than 300 seats, but my definition growing up Off Broadway was a little different. It was a theater that had less than 300 seats, most of them broken.” More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Ray Edenton, ‘A-Team’ Studio Guitarist in Nashville, Dies at 95

      by

      In a career that spanned four decades, he played on thousands of sessions and accompanied many of the biggest names in country music.NASHVILLE — Ray Edenton, a versatile session guitarist who played on thousands of recordings by artists like the Everly Brothers, Charley Pride, Neil Young and Patsy Cline, died on Sept. 21 at the home of his son, Ray Q. Edenton, in Goodlettsville, Tenn. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his daughter, Ronda Hardcastle.A longtime member of Nashville’s so-called A-Team of first-call studio professionals, Mr. Edenton contributed discreet, empathetic rhythm guitar to myriad hits in a career that spanned four decades. His name was less known than his musicianship, but generations of listeners knew the records he helped make famous, a body of work estimated to exceed 10,000 sessions.Ms. Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,” Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass,” Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler,” Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” and Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough” were among the blockbuster country singles, many of them also pop crossover successes, that featured his guitar work.“I did 22 sessions in five days one week,” Mr. Edenton, who retired in 1991 at age 65, said in looking back on his years as a studio musician during an interview at an event held in his honor at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in 2007.“That’s four a day for three days and five a day for two days,” he went on. “You don’t go home on five-a-days, you sleep on the couch in the studio.”On the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Bye Bye Love,” both of which reached the pop, country and R&B Top 10 in 1957, Mr. Edenton played driving, syncopated acoustic guitar riffs alongside Don Everly.“I lived for quite a few years off those licks I stole from Don,” he said at the 2007 event.It was in fact the two men matching each other note for note that gave those big-beat Everly classics their distinctive stamp.Although primarily a rhythm guitarist, Mr. Edenton was occasionally featured on lead guitar, notably on Marty Robbins’s 1956 recording “Singing the Blues,” which was galvanized by his careening electric guitar solo. His lead work on 12-string acoustic guitar was heard on George Hamilton IV’s 1963 hit “Abilene” — a record that, like “Singing the Blues,” topped the country chart and also reached the pop Top 20.Mr. Edenton was also a songwriter. His chief credit was “You’re Running Wild,” a Top 10 country single for the Louvin Brothers, written with his brother-in-law at the time, Don Winters, in 1956. (He also played rhythm guitar on the recording.)Mr. Edenton in the studio with the singer Charlie Louvin. He co-wrote “You’re Running Wild,” a Top 10 country single for Mr. Louvin and his brother Ira, in 1956.Hubert Long Collection, Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumMr. Edenton’s work as a session musician reached beyond country music, with singers like Julie Andrews, Rosemary Clooney, Sammy Davis Jr. as well as rock acts like Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison and the Sir Douglas Quintet. He played on Mr. Young’s acclaimed 1978 album, “Comes a Time.”He also took part in the Nashville sessions that produced the album “Tennessee Firebird,” a pioneering fusion of country and jazz released by the vibraphonist Gary Burton in 1967.“Everybody in the world came here, and we recorded with all of them,” Mr. Edenton said of Nashville’s studios in his Country Music Hall of Fame interview. “You might do a pop session in the morning and bluegrass in the afternoon and rock ’n’ roll at night.”In 2007, Mr. Edenton, who played mandolin, ukulele and banjo as well as guitar, was inducted with the rest of the A-Team into the Musicians Hall of Fame.Ray Quarles Edenton was born on Nov. 3, 1926, in Mineral, Va., a gold-mining town about 50 miles northwest of Richmond. He was the youngest of four children of Tom Edenton, a sawmill operator, and Laura (Quarles) Edenton, a homemaker.Young Ray taught himself to play ukulele and guitar at an early age and later provided music for square dances with his two older brothers, who played fiddle and guitar.In 1946, after serving in the Army, he joined a band called the Rodeo Rangers, which performed at dances and on the radio in Maryland and Virginia. Two years later he became the bassist for the Korn Krackers, an ensemble led by the guitarist Joe Maphis that appeared on the Richmond radio show “Old Dominion Barn Dance.” He began working at WNOX in Knoxville in 1949 before being treated for tuberculosis in a Veterans Administration hospital, where he spent 28 months.Mr. Edenton with the singer Jeanne Pruett and others. “Everybody in the world came here, and we recorded with all of them,” Mr. Edenton said. “You might do a pop session in the morning, and bluegrass in the afternoon, and rock ’n’ roll at night.”Hubert Long Collection, Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumMr. Edenton moved to Nashville in 1952 and became a guitarist at the Grand Ole Opry while also working in the touring bands of, among other luminaries, Hank Williams and Ray Price. A notable early recording session was “One by One,” a honky-tonk weeper that was a No. 1 country hit for Red Foley and Kitty Wells in 1954.Most country acts of the era did not feature drummers in their lineups. Mr. Edenton’s nimble, unobtrusive guitar playing, inspired by the cadences of a snare drum, created a steady demand for his services among record companies, especially when he was tapped to fill the vacancy created on the A-Team when the guitarist Hank Garland suffered disabling injuries in a car accident in 1961.Besides his daughter and his son, Mr. Edenton is survived by his wife of almost 50 years, Polly Roper Edenton. His marriage to Rita Winters, a country singer who performed under the name Rita Robbins, ended in divorce.“People often ask me about session musicians and why, back in those days, only a few people made all the records,” Mr. Edenton said in 2007, reflecting on his heyday with Nashville’s A-Team.“It was several things. You had to learn real quick. You had to adapt real quick. And if you couldn’t do that, you couldn’t do sessions.” More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Pharoah Sanders, Whose Saxophone Was a Force of Nature, Dies at 81

      by

      Pharoah Sanders, a saxophonist and composer celebrated for music that was at once spiritual and visceral, purposeful and ecstatic, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 81.His death was announced in a statement by Luaka Bop, the company for which he had made his most recent album, “Promises.” The statement did not specify the cause.The sound Mr. Sanders drew from his tenor saxophone was a force of nature: burly, throbbing and encompassing, steeped in deep blues and drawing on extended techniques to create shrieking harmonics and imposing multiphonics. He could sound fierce or anguished; he could also sound kindly and welcoming. He first gained wide recognition as a member of John Coltrane’s groups from 1965 to 1967. He then went on to a fertile, prolific career, with dozens of albums and decades of performances.Mr. Sanders in a recording studio in 1968. He made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” in 1964, shortly before he began working with John Coltrane.Gilles Petard/RedfernsMr. Sanders played free jazz, jazz standards, upbeat Caribbean-tinged tunes and African- and Indian-rooted incantations such as “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” which opened his 1969 album, “Karma,” a pinnacle of devotional free jazz. He recorded widely as both a leader and a collaborator, working with Alice Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Randy Weston, Joey DeFrancesco and many others.Looking back on Mr. Sanders’s career in a 1978 review, Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote, “His control of multiphonics on the tenor set standards that younger saxophonists are still trying to live up to, and his sound — huge, booming, but capable of great delicacy and restraint — was instantly recognizable.”Mr. Sanders told The New Yorker in 2020: “I’m always trying to make something that might sound bad sound beautiful in some way. I’m a person who just starts playing anything I want to play, and make it turn out to be maybe some beautiful music.”Pharoah Sanders was born Farrell Sanders in Little Rock, Ark, on Oct. 13, 1940. His mother was a cook in a school cafeteria; his father worked for the city. He first played music in church, starting on drums and moving on to clarinet and then saxophone. (Although tenor saxophone was his main instrument, he also performed and recorded frequently on soprano.) He played blues, jazz and R&B at clubs around Little Rock; during the era of segregation, he recalled in 2016, he sometimes had to perform behind a curtain.In 1959 he moved to Oakland, Calif., where he performed at local clubs. His fellow saxophonist John Handy suggested he move to New York City, where the free-jazz movement was taking shape, and in 1962, he did.At times in his early New York years he was homeless and lived by selling his blood. But he also found gigs in Greenwich Village, and he worked with some of the leading exponents of free jazz, including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Sun Ra.It was Sun Ra who persuaded him to change his first name to Pharoah, and for a short time Mr. Sanders was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra.Mr. Sanders made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” for ESP-Disk in 1964. John Coltrane invited him to sit in with his group, and in 1965 Mr. Sanders became a member, exploring elemental, tumultuous free jazz on seminal albums like “Ascension,” “Om” and “Meditations.”After Coltrane’s death in 1967, Mr. Sanders went on to record with his widow, the pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, on albums including “Ptah, the El Daoud” and “Journey in Satchidananda,” both released in 1970.Mr. Sanders had already begun recording as a leader on the Impulse! label, which had also been Coltrane’s home. The titles of his albums — “Tauhid” in 1967, “Karma” in 1969 — made clear his interest in Islamic and Buddhist thought.His music was expansive and open-ended, concentrating on immersive group interaction rather than solos, and incorporating African percussion and flutes. In the liner notes to “Karma,” the poet, playwright and activist Amiri Baraka wrote, “Pharoah has become one long song.” The 32-minute “The Creator Has a Master Plan” moves between pastoral ease — with a rolling two-chord vamp and a reassuring message sung by Leon Thomas — and squalling, frenetic outbursts, but portions of it found FM radio airplay beyond jazz stations.During the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Sanders’s music moved from album-length excursions like the kinetic 1971 “Black Unity” toward shorter compositions, reconnections with jazz standards and new renditions of Coltrane compositions. (He shared a Grammy Award for his work with the pianist McCoy Tyner on the 1987 album “Blues for Coltrane.”) His recordings grew less turbulent and more contemplative. On the 1977 album “Love Will Find a Way,” he tried pop-jazz and R&B, sharing ballads with the singer Phyllis Hyman. He returned to more mainstream jazz with his albums for Theresa Records in the 1980s.But his explorations were not over. In live performances, he might still bear down on one song for an entire set and make his instrument blare and cry out. During the 1990s and early 2000s he made albums with the innovative producer Bill Laswell. He reunited with the blistering electric guitarist Sonny Sharrock — who had been a Sanders sideman — on the 1991 album “Ask the Ages,” and he collaborated with the Moroccan Gnawa musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania on “The Trance of Seven Colors” in 1994.Mr. Sanders at the 1996 North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands.Frans Schellekens/RedfernsInformation on Mr. Sanders’s survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Sanders had difficult relationships with record labels, and he spent nearly two decades without recording as a leader. Yet he continued to perform, and his occasional recorded appearances — including his wraithlike presence on “Promises,” his 2021 collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician known as Floating Points — were widely applauded.Reviewing “Promises” for The Times, Giovanni Russonello noted that Mr. Sanders’s “glistening and peaceful sound” was “deployed mindfully throughout the album,” adding, “He shows little of the throttling power that used to come bursting so naturally from his horn, but every note seems carefully selected — not only to state his own case, but to funnel the soundscape around him into a precise, single-note line.”Mr. Sanders and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician and composer known as Floating Points, during the recording of the album “Promises” in Los Angeles in 2019.Eric Welles-NyströmIn 2016 Mr. Sanders was named a Jazz Master, the highest honor for a jazz musician in the United States, by the National Endowment for the Arts.In a video made in recognition of his award, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington said, “It’s like taking fried chicken and gravy to space and having a picnic on the moon, listening to Pharoah.” The saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin said, “It’s like he’s playing pure light at you. It’s way beyond the language. It’s way beyond the emotion.” More