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      Sandy Nelson, Drummer Who Turned His Rhythms Into Hits, Dies at 83

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      His “Teen Beat” hit No. 4 in 1959, and more than 30 albums followed.Sandy Nelson, one of the few musicians in pop history to score Top 10 hits as a featured drummer, something he did early in a career that included more than 30 albums, died on Feb. 14 at a hospice center in Las Vegas. He was 83.His son, Joshua Nelson Straume, said the cause was complications of a stroke that Mr. Nelson had in 2017.Mr. Nelson was a session drummer in Los Angeles when, in 1959, he recorded “Teen Beat,” a propulsive instrumental whose dominating drum part was inspired by something he had heard at a strip club he visited with fellow musicians.“While they were looking at these pretty girls in G-strings, guess what I was doing?” he told The Las Vegas Weekly in 2015. “I was looking at the drummer in the orchestra pit.”“He was doing kind of a ‘Caravan’ beat,” he added, referring to a jazz standard. “‘Bum ta da da dum’ — small toms, big toms. That’s what gave me the idea for ‘Teen Beat.’”Mr. Nelson had played in the backing band for Art Laboe, a popular Los Angeles disc jockey who also had a small record label, Original Records, and Mr. Nelson took the song to him hoping that he’d press it. Instead, Mr. Laboe tested it on his radio show.“The little rascal, he played the actual acetate from the lathe,” Mr. Nelson recalled, “and he wasn’t going to press it up unless he got a few calls.”Mr. Laboe, he said, got three calls from impressed listeners, and that was enough: Mr. Laboe pressed the record. By October 1959 it had reached No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, a rare achievement for a drum-centered instrumental.Mr. Nelson scored again in 1961 with “Let There Be Drums,” which reached No. 7.Two years later, he was riding his motorcycle on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles when he collided with a school bus and was badly injured. Part of his right leg was amputated. But he returned to drumming, learning to play the bass with his left leg.“In the long run,” he told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2017, “I developed a little better technique.”He recorded a string of instrumental albums with session players in the 1960s and ’70s with titles like “Boss Beat” (1965) and “Boogaloo Beat” (1968), many of them filled with covers of hits of the day that showcased his drumming. He was not proud of much of that work.“I think the worst version ever of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ was done by me,” Mr. Nelson told L.A. Weekly in 1985, “and, oddly enough, it was a big seller in the Philippines. I guess they like squeaky saxophones or something.”But among these covers were glimpses of his interest in explorations that foreshadowed electronic ambient music. “Boss Beat,” for instance, in addition to takes on “Louie, Louie” and other hits, included “Drums in a Sea Cave,” in which Mr. Nelson played along to the sound of ocean waves.He was still experimenting late in life. His friend and fellow musician Jack Evan Johnson said that Mr. Nelson was especially proud of “The Veebles,” a whimsical five-track concept album released on cassette in 2016 that had an extraterrestrial sound and theme.“It’s about a race of people from another planet,” he told The Las Vegas Sun in 1996, when the long-gestating project was just beginning to take shape. “They’re gonna take over the Earth and make us do nothing but dance, sing and tell dumb jokes.”Sander Lloyd Nelson was born on Dec. 1, 1938, in Santa Monica, Calif., to Lloyd and Lydia Nelson. His father was a projectionist at Universal Studios.“My parents had these roaring parties with Glenn Miller records,” he told L.A. Weekly, “and the sound of those got to be like dope to me — I had to hear those records.”The drumming particularly interested him, and in high school he started playing.“I felt piano was too complicated and I’d have to take lessons and learn how to read music,” he said. “With drums, I could play instantly.”He said he once played in a band with a teenage guitarist named Phil Spector, who was later a famous and then infamous producer; Mr. Spector brought Mr. Nelson in to play drums on “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” a 1958 hit for Mr. Spector’s band the Teddy Bears.He also played on “Alley Oop,” a 1960 novelty hit for the Hollywood Argyles about a comic strip caveman, though not on drums. As Gary S. Paxton, who recorded the song with a group of studio musicians, told the story to The Chicago Sun-Times in 1997, Mr. Nelson was a last-minute addition.“We already had a drummer,” Mr. Paxton said, “so Nelson played garbage cans and did background screams.”Over the years other musicians have cited Mr. Nelson’s early records as an important influence; one was Steven Tyler, who started out as a drummer before finding fame as Aerosmith’s vocalist. In a 1997 interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune, Mr. Tyler recalled trying to imitate one of Mr. Nelson’s riffs as a child.“I played that until I wore out my little rubber drum pad,” he said. “I wore out the first two Sandy Nelson albums.”Mr. Nelson acknowledged that he had not handled his early success well.“I spent most of the money on women and whiskey, and the rest I just wasted,” he told The Review-Journal. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Lisa Nelson.Mr. Nelson settled in Boulder City, Nev., in about 1987 and became a colorful local fixture, running a pirate radio station out of his house for about seven years before the FCC shut him down, Mr. Johnson said. And then there was the cave.Mr. Nelson had a lifelong fondness for underground spaces, and in Boulder City he set about digging his own cave in his backyard with a coffee can and pickax. The project took him 12 years.“I got a ‘cave tour’ once,” Mr. Johnson said by email, “and it was quite something, precarious even — dug down at a very steep angle into the hard desert soil, with no kind of support structure whatsoever and just enough room to scoot down into it for a ways until the room opened up at the bottom.”“He had an electric keyboard down there,” he added.Mr. Nelson told The Las Vegas Sun that he enjoyed relaxing in his backyard cave.“It’s a place to cool off,” he said.“I go in without my leg,” he added. “There’s more room.” More

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      Gary Brooker, Singer for Procol Harum, Dies at 76

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      The pianist and singer composed the band’s music for five decades, including the hit “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”Gary Brooker, the singer and pianist of the early progressive rock group Procol Harum, who co-wrote songs including “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the improbable but overpowering hit during the 1967 Summer of Love, died on Saturday at his home in Surrey, England. He was 76.Mr. Brooker had been receiving treatment for cancer, the band said in a statement confirming his death.With his grainy, weathered-sounding voice and a piano style steeped in gospel, classical music, blues and the British music hall, Mr. Brooker led Procol Harum in songs that mixed pomp and whimsy, orchestral grandeur and rock drive. Mr. Brooker composed nearly all of Procol Harum’s music; Keith Reid, who did not perform with the band, provided lyrics that invoked literary and historical allusions and spun tall tales, sometimes at the same time.Although “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was both its first and biggest hit, and the band steadfastly avoided showmanship, Procol Harum sustained a five-decade career. It recorded and toured steadily until 1977, and it regrouped sporadically in lineups led by Mr. Brooker to continue making albums until 2017. Mr. Brooker, the band’s statement said, “was notable for his individuality, integrity, and occasionally stubborn eccentricity. His mordant wit, and appetite for the ridiculous, made him a priceless raconteur (and his surreal inter-song banter made a fascinating contrast with the gravitas of Procol Harum’s performances).”“A Whiter Shade of Pale” drew on Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Air on a G String” for its chord progression; Matthew Fisher’s organ opened with a stately melody and Mr. Brooker sang a countermelody, somberly offering the surreal paradoxes of Mr. Reid’s lyrics. In 2009, Mr. Fisher successfully sued to receive a shared credit for composing the song.Procol Harum’s combination of classical influences, elaborately poetic lyrics and extended compositions made it a progenitor of progressive rock, but Mr. Brooker habitually shrugged off that category. “Prog — it was not invented when we started,” he told Goldmine magazine in 2021. “We always try to be progressive in what we do. So, we made our first album and then we tried to move on, to progress.”Mr. Brooker performing at the O2 Arena in London in 2020. Procul Harum performed for five decades.Gareth Cattermole/Getty ImagesGary Brooker was born on May 29, 1945, in London. His father, Harry Brooker, was a musician; Gary learned piano, cornet, trombone, guitar and banjo while growing up. Harry Brooker died when Gary was 11 and his mother, Violet May Brooker, found work on a factory assembly line.Mr. Brooker dropped out of college to work as a musician, and at the end of the 1950s he began playing in the Paramounts, which largely performed American R&B songs. By the time the Paramounts broke up in 1966, they had shared bills with the Rolling Stones and the Beatles; later, Mr. Brooker would play studio sessions and concerts with the former Beatles.Mr. Brooker started a new band, which included Mr. Fisher, to play the songs that he had begun writing with Mr. Reid: the Pinewoods, which were soon renamed Procol Harum, fractured Latin for “beyond these things.” The new band’s combination of piano and organ was uncommon in British rock, though American gospel groups used it, as did the rock group the Band. Mr. Brooker described his initial idea for the band as “a bit of classical, a bit of Bob Dylan, a bit of Ray Charles.”Procol Harum’s first recording session, working with studio musicians, yielded “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” When it became a hit, the guitarist Robin Trower and the drummer B.J. Wilson, who had been in the Paramounts, joined Procol Harum to record its self-titled 1967 debut album. Its structural ambitions expanded on its 1968 album, “Shine On Brightly,” which included the five-part, 18-minute suite “In Held ’Twas in I.”Mr. Brooker married Françoise Riedo in 1968. She survives him.The title track of Procol Harum’s 1969 album “A Salty Dog” featured a dramatic orchestral arrangement by Mr. Brooker, and Procol Harum soon began performing with orchestras. Its 1971 album, “Live in Concert with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra,” brought it an American hit with an expansive remake of “Conquistador,” from Procol Harum’s debut album. By then, both Mr. Fisher and Mr. Trower had left Procol Harum and Mr. Brooker was the band’s clear leader. Its 1973 album, “Grand Hotel,” reveled in orchestration; its 1974 “Exotic Birds and Fruit” emphatically rejected it. The songwriters Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller produced “Procol’s Ninth” in 1975.In 1977, Mr. Brooker decided that “For the time being, Procol Harum had nothing more to say.” He joined Eric Clapton’s band in the late 1970s, touring and recording, and he made solo albums. Mr. Brooker’s 1985 album, “Echoes in the Night,” was produced by Mr. Fisher and included contributions from Mr. Reid and Mr. Wilson.Mr. Brooker, left, with Jack Bruce of Cream, Peter Frampton and Simon Kirke of Bad Company. They were honored at RockWalk in Los Angeles in 1997.Fred Prouser/ReutersMr. Brooker restarted Procol Harum in 1990 with Mr. Fisher, Mr. Trower and Mr. Reid to record “The Prodigal Stranger.” During the long gaps between Procol Harum’s studio albums — the band released “The Well’s on Fire” in 2003 and “Novum” in 2017, for which Pete Brown replaced Mr. Reid as the lyricist — Mr. Brooker toured with Procol Harum, performed with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band and Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings, and organized charity concerts that brought him recognition as a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2013. In 2021, Procol Harum released “Missing Persons” and “War Is Not Healthy,” a final pair of reflective Brooker-Reid songs.Mr. Brooker soberly assessed his band in 2021.“We don’t do a lot of grooves, but we do a good bit of rock,” Mr. Brooker told Goldmine. “Down in the core, though, there’s the music where I’m trying to reach the people and to make them feel something that’s right. And I don’t mean they’re going to jump up and down and want to dance. Fine if they’re going to. But I mean, if I saw a tear roll down their face that would be a good reaction — to reach people in their emotions, in the inside somewhere, not just on the surface.” More

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      Mark Lanegan, 57, Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age Singer, Dies

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      Known for his deep, world-weary voice, he was part of a generation of Seattle musicians who put grunge music on the map.Mark Lanegan, a singer for Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age and an integral part of the 1980s and 1990s grunge scene in the Pacific Northwest, died on Tuesday at his home in Killarney, Ireland. He was 57.SKH Music, a management company, confirmed his death in a statement but did not specify a cause.In the statement, SKH Music called Mr. Lanegan “a beloved singer, songwriter, author and musician.”Though his stints in the bands Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age and the Gutter Twins never brought him the kind of fame achieved by Nirvana and Soundgarden, other Seattle grunge bands, he was known for his scratchy yet full-bodied voice that could take a song to both soaring heights and melancholy lows.Mr. Lanegan’s voice was a defining element of hits like Screaming Trees’ 1992 song “Nearly Lost You” and Queens of the Stone Age’s 2000 record “Feel Good Hit of the Summer.” He wrote candidly about drugs and a self-destructive lifestyle.Mark William Lanegan was born on Nov. 25, 1964, in Ellensburg, Wash., a small farming city, according to his IMDb page.He is survived by his wife, Shelley, SKH Music said. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.A full obituary will appear shortly.Ben Sisario More

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      Jamal Edwards, Force in British Rap, Dies at 31

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      Edwards set up SB.TV, one of the first YouTube channels dedicated to British rap music, and was also key to Ed Sheeran’s early success.When Jamal Edwards founded his YouTube channel in 2006, it was a rare platform dedicated to British rap music. Chris Jackson/Chris Jackson Collection, via Getty ImagesLONDON — Jamal Edwards, the founder of a music YouTube channel that gave an early platform to British rap stars including Stormzy, Skepta and Dave, as well as pop stars like Ed Sheeran, died on Sunday. He was 31.His death of “a sudden illness” was confirmed by his mother, Brenda Edwards, a well-known TV presenter in Britain. “Jamal was an inspiration to myself and so many,” she said in a statement.Edwards set up the YouTube channel SB.TV in 2006, at first posting clips of rappers performing on street corners and in public housing projects. A few years later, he widened the channel’s focus to include interviews, and music in other styles, including pop from emerging artists. Edwards posted a video of Ed Sheeran in 2010, more than a year before the British singer-songwriter released his first single on a major label.Sheeran went on to make several videos for the channel. In a clip from 2017, he credited SB.TV with “starting my career properly.”Edwards grew up in Acton, a suburb of London. When he was 15, his mother gave him a video camera for Christmas, which he used to record friends rapping. Edwards told the BBC in 2014 that he started the YouTube channel after friends expressed frustration that they didn’t know how to get their music on MTV. “I was like, ‘I’ve got a camera for Christmas, I’m going to start filming people and uploading it,’” he said.His first clip — a rough and ready recording featuring the rappers Soul and Slides — was made during a college trip to a chocolate factory and uploaded to a YouTube channel Edwards named SB.TV after the name he sometimes rapped under: SmokeyBarz.Friends were initially sceptical of the project, Edwards told the BBC. But soon, SB.TV was getting attention from young British rap fans who had few other platforms catering to their tastes.The channel had accumulated 1.2 million subscribers at the time of Edwards’s death, and was seen as a key force in British rap for several years, even as other YouTube channels like GRM Daily gained more subscribers and a higher profile.On Monday, numerous British music stars praised Edwards. The singer Rita Ora, who recorded clips for SB.TV early in her career, paid tribute in an Instagram post to the belief Edwards had shown “in me and so many of us before we even believed in ourselves.”Dave, one of Britain’s highest profile rappers, shared a picture of Edwards on Twitter, with the message, “Thank you for everything.”Despite the underground roots of Edwards’s fame, he had long been recognized by Britain’s establishment. In 2014, he went to Buckingham Palace, the home of Britain’s royal family, to receive one of the country’s highest honors for his services to music. Edwards also founded a charity, JE Delve, that works with young people in the suburb where Edwards grew up.“Most kids who come from where I come from would never believe they could go to Buckingham Palace in a million years,” Edwards told The Guardian newspaper in 2017. “Maybe seeing me do that will give them more self belief.” More

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      Leslie Parnas, Celebrated Cellist and Musical Diplomat, Dies at 90

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      His success at a competition in Moscow in 1962 earned him global renown and gave him a platform as a musical emissary.Leslie Parnas, a renowned cellist and teacher whose second-place award at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at the height of the Cold War helped propel him to a storied career, died on Feb. 1 at a rehabilitation facility in Venice, Fla. He was 90.The cause was heart failure, his eldest son, Marcel, said.Mr. Parnas, who hailed from a family of musicians in St. Louis, was 30 when he won the silver medal at the second Tchaikovsky competition in 1962, the first time it included a cello category. His success in Moscow, where he performed for Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, earned him global renown and gave him a platform as a musical emissary.He was the only American cellist to win a top award that year — the other winners were Russian — and his success came only four years after the pianist Van Cliburn clinched the gold medal at the first Tchaikovsky competition, which was viewed as an American triumph.Mr. Parnas, known for his lyrical playing, returned regularly to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and ’70s for concerts before large crowds. He studied Russian, offered advice to aspiring performers there and lobbied Soviet officials to send musicians to study in the United States. He later served as a juror for the Tchaikovsky competition.“When I play music,” he told The New York Times in 1978 during a visit to Leningrad, “it is not only an example of emotional freedom, but it is also a message for peace and for the right of each individual to express himself.”Mr. Parnas received the silver medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow from the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.via Parnas FamilyLeslie Parnas was born on Nov. 11, 1931, the son of Eli Parnas, who worked at a paper box factory and played the clarinet, and Etta (Engel) Parnas, a piano teacher.He began studying cello at a young age and made his debut at 14 with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, playing Édouard Lalo’s cello concerto at a children’s concert. Two years later he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with the renowned cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. He graduated in 1951.After a stint in the U.S. Navy Band, he returned to Missouri to serve as principal cellist in the St. Louis Symphony, a position he held from 1954 to 1962. From the outset, his talents were on display. When a soloist was late for a performance of the Brahms double concerto for violin and cello, Mr. Parnas stepped in at the last minute, dazzling the audience.He also caught the attention of the eminent cellist and conductor Pablo Casals, who presented him an award at an international cello competition in Paris in 1957.It was the beginning of a long friendship. Mr. Parnas and Mr. Casals collaborated in a variety of venues, including the Marlboro Music School and Festival in Vermont and Mr. Casals’s festival in Puerto Rico.Mr. Casals, one of the most revered musicians of the 20th century, could be an intimidating figure. But he had a rapport with Mr. Parnas. During a class in 1961, Mr. Casals chastised Mr. Parnas for playing with too much vibrato. Without missing a beat, Mr. Parnas offered to sell him some.“None of us would ever have dared say something like that,” said Jaime Laredo, a violinist and conductor who often played with Mr. Parnas. “Leslie could get away with things like that. They had a mutual respect.”When Mr. Casals died in 1973, Mr. Parnas was a pallbearer at his funeral.The renowned musician Pablo Casals became a friend of Mr. Parnas, who was a pallbearer at his funeral.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty ImagesMr. Parnas honed a soaring sound in repertoire that ranged from Brahms to Shostakovich. He won praise for a 1964 recording of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, with Mr. Laredo and the pianist Rudolf Serkin.He could be headstrong, changing tempos on a whim and instructing colleagues to play quietly during his solos.“He was a very instinctive player,” Mr. Laredo said. “He wasn’t that particular about following the score to the nth degree. He just played naturally.”He made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1965, playing Schumann’s cello concerto. In his review, the Times music critic Howard Klein called him a “fiery and romantic cellist.”“Mr. Parnas did not play so much as he sang the work,” Mr. Klein wrote. “The daring way he dug into those high position passages added a gambler’s excitement.”Mr. Parnas became a fixture on the chamber music scene, including at Marlboro, where he performed for many years. He joined the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1969 as a founding member, helping cement its reputation as a magnet for top artists. From 1975 to 1984 he was artistic director of Kneisel Hall, a chamber music festival and school in Blue Hill, Maine.Ida Kavafian, a violinist and violist who played alongside Mr. Parnas in the early days of the Chamber Music Society, said his expressiveness was striking.“It was the kind of sound that would just wrap you up, envelop you, and you felt it was all around you,” she said. “It was an experience.”As his performance career waned, Mr. Parnas focused on teaching, including at Boston University, where he served as an adjunct associate professor of music from 1963 to 2013.Agnes Kim, a cellist who studied with him from 2004 to 2008, said he spoke often about the importance of not letting technique interfere with musical expression.“He was a legendary teacher, but to me he was never that faraway, mystical person,” she said. “He was just so friendly, so humble. He always had his playful grin every time I went to the classroom.”Along with his son Marcel, Mr. Parnas is survived by another son, Jean-Pierre, and four grandchildren, two of whom are professional musicians. He married Ingeburg Rathmann in 1961; she died of breast cancer in 2009.Marcel Parnas said that his father continued playing his 1698 Matteo Goffriller cello almost every day until late in life, and that he was especially fond of Bach’s cello suites.“For him, music was everything,” he said. “That was the way he lived: to play the cello.” More

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      Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, Champion of Indigenous Peoples, Dies at 85

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      As a teenager, she was the star of a film about an Aboriginal girl raised by a white family. As an adult, she fought discrimination in Australia against her people.Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, who as a teenager was believed to be the first female Indigenous person to star in a feature film in Australia and later became an Aboriginal rights activist, died on Jan. 26 in Alice Springs, in Australia’s Northern Territory. She was 85 and had been living in Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland.Her daughter, Ngarla Kunoth-Monks, said the cause was a stroke. Her family gave permission to use her name and image.Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was cast in the title role of “Jedda,” a film directed by Charles Chauvel, which he wrote with his wife, Elsa. The story is about a teenager who is raised apart from her Aboriginal culture by a white woman after her mother dies in childbirth. Eventually, she is abducted by an Aboriginal man (played by Robert Tudawali).The Chauvels had come to her school in 1953, chosen her for the lead and taken her to locations around the Northern Territory and in Sydney. Away from her family and school, she recalled being lonely and scared. She said Mrs. Chauvel bullied her and, on several occasions, she tried to escape but did not succeed. She did not know how to be an actor, so she did as she was told, speaking the words she was fed.“I was in a state of confusion, a state of trauma,” Mrs. Kunoth-Monks said in an interview with Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive in 1995. “I really didn’t want to ask questions about what I was doing there, or what they were going to do with me. I was quite literally petrified that I wasn’t going to see my family, or my country, again.”She attended the premiere in the summer of 1955 at a segregated theater in Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, but was allowed, she said, to sit in the whites-only section.In a review of “Jedda” in The Age, a newspaper in Melbourne, the critic Brian McArdle wrote that despite some rough edges to Mr. Chauvel’s direction, “It is easily the most significant film to have emerged from an Australian studio in the past two decades.”Mrs. Kunoth-Monks recalled being horrified when she saw the sexual context of scenes with Mr. Tudawali in which he touched her. But looking back as an adult, she recognized in her character’s assimilation into her white foster mother’s world a subject that was not only true to life for people like her in Australia but one that would animate her future activism.Mrs. Kunoth-Monks in 1955, the year her movie, “Jedda,” was released. “It is easily the most significant film to have emerged from an Australian studio in the past two decades,” one critic wrote at the time.History and Art Collection / Alamy Stock PhotoRosalie Lynette Kunoth was born on Jan, 4, 1937, in Utopia. Her father, Alan, sheared sheep. Her mother, Ruby Ngale, was a homemaker, and was an Aboriginal of the Anmatjere group. Her father’s parentage was mixed: his father was German and his mother was part-Aboriginal.Five years after the release of “Jedda” — the only movie she acted in — she joined an Anglican order in a suburb of Melbourne, where she took her final vows as a nun in 1964. But she recalled feeling sheltered from the travails of Aboriginal peoples, which she followed on television, and left the order in 1969. The next year, she married Bill Monks, whose sister had known Mrs. Kunoth-Monks while she was still a nun.She soon joined the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, where she persuaded college students to help young Indigenous students with their school work, and set up what she said was the first group home for Aboriginal families in Victoria whose goal was to keep children from being separated from their parents.She left in 1977 to run a hostel in Alice Springs; started the social work section at a hospital there; was the chairman of the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service; a commissioner of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, an adviser on Indigenous affairs to the chief minister of the Northern Territory and chairman of Batchelor Institute, a school for Aboriginal students, also in the Northern Territory.Malarndirri McCarthy, a senator in the Australian parliament from the Northern Territory, in a statement after Mrs. Kunoth-Monks’s death, praised her “quietly spoken yet determined focus on challenging institutional racism.”In 2008, Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was elected to a four-year term as president of the Barkly Shire, a local governmental entity in the Northern Territory. It was a year after the Australian government’s imposition of a series of laws on the Northern Territory that were, in part, designed to crack down on child sexual abuse and alcoholism in Indigenous communities.The government’s raft of measures — referred to as the Intervention — included the compulsory acquisition of dozens of Aboriginal communities under five-year federal leases; restricting the sale, consumption and purchase of alcohol in certain areas, and linking income support payments to school attendance for people on Aboriginal land.Mrs. Kunoth-Monks opposed the Intervention as discriminatory because it so clearly targeted Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. As part of her protest, she and the Rev. Dr. Djiniyini Gondarra, a clan leader and ceremonial lawman in the Northern Territory, met in 2010 in Geneva with the United Nations’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.The two later issued a report which said: “Ordinary Australians can see this injustice in a democratic country and know that it shouldn’t be happening. When you share with a body such as the U.N.,” they wrote, “straight away they see that Australia is racist and that the Government does not govern with the spirit of peace and order.”In addition to her daughter, she is survived by many grandchildren; her sisters Teresa Tilmouth and Irene Kunoth; her brothers, Don Kunoth and Colin Kunoth; her foster daughters, Elaine Power, Natasha Adams and Patrice Power, and her foster son, Mathew Adams. Her husband died in 2011.In 2014, Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was a featured voice in “Utopia,” a documentary by John Pilger about the mistreatment of First Nations peoples, as Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders are called.In a panel discussion on Australian television after the film’s release, she articulated her opposition to the federal government’s policies toward her people and any attempt to forcibly assimilate them.“This is the country I came out from,” she said. “I didn’t come from overseas. I came from here. My language, in spite of whiteness trying to penetrate into my brain by assimilationists — I am alive, I am here and now — and I speak my language.”She added, “I practice my cultural essence of me.” More

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      Beverly Ross, Teenage Songwriter in Rock ’n’ Roll’s Youth, Dies at 87

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      With hits like “Lollipop,” she became a top woman songwriter in the early 1960s, but she quit the business in frustration over the theft of her work.Beverly Ross, who with hits like “Lollipop” became one of the top women songwriters in rock ’n’ roll’s early years, but who ended her career early after a work relationship turned sour, died on Jan. 15 in a hospital in Nashville. She was 87.The cause was dementia, said her nephew, Cliff Stieglitz.While in high school, Ms. Ross would ride the bus from her family’s home in New Jersey to hang around the Brill Building, then the center of New York music publishing. There she managed to strike up conversations with songwriters like Julius Dixon.In 1954, when Ms. Ross was only 19, she collaborated with Mr. Dixon on her breakout song, “Dim, Dim the Lights (I Want Some Atmosphere).” A recording of it by Bill Haley & His Comets reached No. 11 on the Billboard singles chart, just months before the band’s “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” became the first rock ’n’ roll song to reach No. 1.Rolling Stone would later describe “Dim, Dim the Lights” as “the first ‘white’ song to cross over to R&B.” It had bluesy electric guitar riffs, a jaunty walking bass and lyrics of come-hither flirtatiousness, even as it maintained an adolescent innocence, inspired by high school crushes and party games like spin the bottle: “I’m full of soda and potato chips/But now I wanna get a taste/Of your sweet lips.”That combination of upbeat rhythms and lightly romantic themes became Ms. Ross’s formula.She and Mr. Dixon scored another hit with “Lollipop,” a song as sweet and compact as the titular candy. A 1958 recording by the Chordettes reached No. 2 and became an enduring pop-culture earworm, with appearances on “The Simpsons” and in a commercial for Dell computers.The Chordettes’ 1958 recording of “Lollipop,” which Ms. Ross wrote with Julius Dixon, reached No. 2 on the Billboard chart and became an enduring pop-culture earworm.Denver Post via Getty ImagesBy the early 1960s Ms. Ross had become, along with Carole King and a few others, one of the top women writers in rock, “one of only a sprinkling of female writers to make it in a vehemently male structure,” Mark Ribowsky wrote in “He’s a Rebel: Phil Spector, Rock and Roll’s Legendary Producer” (2000).In a memoir published in 2013, Ms. Ross explained why she walked away from the music business.Ms. Ross also co-wrote songs recorded by stars like Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison. But in just a few years, her career would abruptly unravel.By Ms. Ross’s telling, in 1960 she struck up a working friendship with a then-obscure aspiring songwriter who stood to benefit from her clout: Phil Spector. The two worked on song ideas, cut a demo tape and confided in each other about troubles in their families. Ms. Ross introduced him to players in the industry.While they were tinkering with a riff together one night, Ms. Ross recalled, Mr. Spector suddenly declared he had business to attend to and ran out the door.Soon, Ms. Ross was shocked to hear the riff, in the hit song “Spanish Harlem” by Ben E. King. Mr. Spector had used it without giving Ms. Ross credit (he and Jerry Leiber were the credited writers) — and he had also begun to ignore her.From then on, she declined to work if it would bring her into the orbit of Mr. Spector, but she was still determined to prove she could write hits and co-wrote several more in the early ’60s, including “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” which as recorded by Lesley Gore reached No. 5.Then she quit, spiraling into what she described to Mr. Ribowsky as “a suicidal depression.”“This strange move I made away from the enormous acceptance and potential I’d worked so diligently to achieve left me hanging in nowheresville,” she wrote in a dishy, score-settling memoir, “I Was the First Woman Phil Spector Killed” (2013), “but I may have saved my sanity by doing it.”Yet Ms. Ross also lived with regret. “I should have just bowed down and realized I’d been asked to write for the ‘royalty of rock ’n’ roll,’” she wrote.Beverly Ross was born on Sept. 5, 1934, in Brooklyn and grew up in Lakewood, N.J. Her father, Aron, worked as a cobbler with his brother in New York City and then as a chicken farmer in Lakewood. Her mother, Rachel (Frank) Ross, worked as a bookkeeper for the shoe business and helped out at the farm.Bev, as she was called, aspired from a young age to a career in music, but she did not know how to get started. She encountered musicians who were performing at a hotel where her sister worked in Lakewood, and she struck a deal with one of them: He would tell her how to break into the industry if she set him up on a date with her sister.All the man had to do, it turned out, was inform Bev of the existence of the Brill Building.Ms. Ross’s burst of songwriting success gave her an income in royalties that she lived on comfortably. She resided for many years in an apartment on the Upper West Side, but later bought a house in Nashville and began writing country music.She is survived by her companion, Ferris Butler, a comedy writer. They married in the mid-1970s and later divorced, but they reconnected and were together for the final years of her life. More

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      Ian McDonald, of the Bands King Crimson and Foreigner, Dies at 75

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      As a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter with King Crimson, he helped propel the progressive rock movement. He found more commercial success with Foreigner.Ian McDonald, a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter whose work with the British band King Crimson helped propel the progressive rock movement of the 1960s and ’70s, and who went on to help found the immensely popular group Foreigner, died on Feb. 9 at his home in New York City. He was 75.The cause was colon cancer, said his son, Maxwell, who is also a musician.Though Mr. McDonald’s work with Foreigner reaped far greater financial rewards than his efforts with King Crimson — his trio of albums with Foreigner sold a combined 17 million copies — his earlier band far outdistanced them in creativity and influence. Their debut album, “In the Court of the Crimson King” (1969), with its radical sound and structure, was a watershed work in the history of rock. It was the only release in the band’s wide catalog in which Mr. McDonald had full involvement.For the album, he was a co-writer of every song, played nine instruments and provided primary production.“Ian brought musicality, an exceptional sense of the short and telling melodic line, and the ability to express that on a variety of instruments,” the band’s leader, Robert Fripp, wrote in the liner notes to a box set of King Crimson’s work released in 1997. In a recent email he said, “In 1969, I trusted Ian’s musical sense ahead of my own.”For the title track of “In the Court of the Crimson King,” Mr. McDonald wrote the music and provided a Mellotron hook that became one of the most recognizable uses of that instrument in rock history. Highly melodic, the sound provided a striking contrast to the fury of the album’s other most famous song, “21st Century Schizoid Man.” Fired by the combination of Mr. McDonald’s shrieking alto-saxophone and Mr. Fripp’s brutalist guitar, “21st Century Schizoid Man” both startled and thrilled listeners.Pete Townshend of the Who was so impressed, he wrote ad copy for the album in Rolling Stone magazine that read: “Twenty-first century schizoid man is everything multi-tracked a billion times, and when you listen you get a billion times the impact. Has to be the heaviest riff that has been middle-frequencied onto that black vinyl disc since Mahler’s 8th.”The album went gold in the United States and made the Top 5 in the band’s native Britain. At the end of a U.S. tour to promote the album, Mr. McDonald left the band, as did the drummer, Michael Giles. “I was probably not emotionally mature enough to handle it, and I just made a rather rash decision to leave without consulting anyone,” Mr. McDonald told Sid Smith in the 2001 book “In the Court of King Crimson.”In 1970, the two departed members released their own album, “McDonald and Giles,” which showcased Mr. McDonald’s vocal skills as well as his Beatle-esque sense of melody. That same year, several long songs he had helped write for King Crimson appeared on the group’s second album, “In the Wake of Poseidon.” In 1974, Mr. Fripp invited him back, and he played on two tracks of the band’s “Red” album, released that year. The band broke up shortly thereafter.King Crimson in 1969; from left, the leader and guitarist Robert Fripp, the drummer Michael Giles, the singer and guitarist Greg Lake, the multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald and the lyricist Peter Sinfield. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWhen work slowed for him in England in the mid-1970s, Mr. McDonald moved to New York, where he helped form Foreigner with another British transplant, Mick Jones.Foreigner’s debut album in 1977 made Billboard’s Top 5 list and sold more than five million copies. One song Mr. McDonald helped write, “Long, Long Way From Home,” became a Top 20 Billboard hit. He was a co-producer of all three albums that he recorded with Foreigner, including “Double Vision” (1978) and “Head Games” (1979).Ian Richard McDonald was born on June 25, 1946, in Osterley, Middlesex, England to Keith McDonald, an architect, and Ada (May) McDonald, a homemaker. His father played banjo and piano, and, in a house filled with music, Ian played guitar and piano.His multi-instrumental approach broadened at 15, when he left school and entered the British Army as a bandsman. “I was taught clarinet, and from there I taught myself flute and saxophone,” he told Big Bang Magazine in 1999. “I was exposed to a number of different musical styles.”After leaving the army and moving to London, he met Mr. Fripp, who had a whimsical group called Giles, Giles and Fripp, including Michael Giles and his brother Pete. Mr. McDonald recorded songs with them before they evolved into King Crimson, with the singer and bassist Greg Lake replacing Pete Giles.Almost immediately a buzz grew around them, leading to an invitation to perform at a Rolling Stones free concert in London in Hyde Park; the event was originally meant to introduce the Stones’ new guitarist, Mick Taylor, but it wound up doubling as a salute to the musician he had replaced, Brian Jones, who had died two days earlier. Audience estimates for the show range from 250,000 to 500,000. In 2013, The Guardian reported that “King Crimson nearly stole the show.”The trailer for a forthcoming documentary titled “In the Court of the Crimson King” shows Mr. McDonald apologizing to Mr. Fripp for leaving the band so soon after it began. His run with Foreigner also ended when he was fired by Mr. Jones, who, Mr. McDonald said, desired more control. (Mr. McDonald did play with the band for its 40th-anniversary tour in 2017.)In 2002, he formed a group with other ex-members of Crimson (without Mr. Fripp) called the 21st Century Schizoid Band, which toured and released several live albums. Mr. McDonald issued a solo album in 1999, “Driver’s Eyes,” and formed a new rock-oriented group, Honey West, which featured his son, Maxwell, on their album “Bad Old World” (2017).In addition to his son, Mr. McDonald is survived by his sister, Linda Rice.Throughout his life he remained proud of how King Crimson’s debut album had endured.“One thing I tried to do as the main producer was to have every moment be able to be listened to hundreds of times so that, hopefully, the album would stand the test of time,” he told the entertainment blog The Los Angeles Beat in 2019. “Here we are 50 years later, and people are still talking about it.” More