Deaths (Obituaries)

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      JoAnna Cameron, an Early Female Superhero on TV, Is Dead at 73

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      In addition to achieving Saturday morning fame as Isis, she was said to have appeared in more national television commercials than anyone in advertising history.JoAnna Cameron, who in the 1970s portrayed Isis, the first female character on television with superpowers, and appeared in more national network television commercials than anyone else, died on Oct. 15 in Oahu, Hawaii. She was 73. The cause was complications of a stroke, said Joanna Pang Atkins, who starred with Ms. Cameron on the Saturday morning children’s series “Isis.”Ms. Cameron, who broke into the movies in 1969 with a small part in a Bob Hope film, blazed a trail when she arrived on the small screen as Isis in September 1975, two months before Lynda Carter made her first appearance as Wonder Woman. “The Bionic Woman,” starring Lindsay Wagner, began in January 1976.“Isis” starred Ms. Cameron as Andrea Thomas, a high school science teacher who had acquired the powers of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of healing and magic. Running with the speed of a gazelle, flying like a falcon and displaying superhuman strength, she used her extraordinary powers to fight crime.The series ran on CBS from 1975 to 1977; reruns were later syndicated as “The Secrets of Isis.”Ms. Cameron’s other television roles included appearances on “Columbo,” “Marcus Welby, M.D.” and “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors.”A lithe brunette, she also received tremendous exposure as a television model for scores of commercial products. The Guinness Book of World Records said in 1979 that she had appeared in more than 100 commercials on network television, more than anyone else in advertising history.Advertisers spent more than $100 million “using JoAnna as the beauteous centerpiece of their commercials for cosmetics, shampoo, wine, beer, pantyhose and breath freshener,” TV Guide reported in 1979, adding that “she certainly has a face that can sell a product.”Ms. Cameron was outdoorsy and athletic, and she appeared in commercials skiing, scuba diving, piloting a jet, driving a racecar and romping through a field of flowers. She flew with the Blue Angels and worked to promote the United States Navy. But many of her other commercials were for personal products. In an ad for pantyhose, she struck a Mrs. Robinson-like pose. In a cigarette spot, she smoked. She also made a brief foray into directing commercials, but did not enjoy it.When she appeared on “The Merv Griffin Show,” Mr. Griffin said that if all her commercials were strung together, they would run for 150 hours, or six days of continuous viewing. He noted that advertisers said she had “the perfect face,” although he did not specify what that meant.When Mr. Griffin asked her if she felt pretty, she demurred. “Pretty,” she said, “comes from being healthy and feeling good about who you are and what you do.”Patricia Kara Cameron was born on Sept. 20, 1948, in Greeley, Colo., where her parents, Harold and Erna (Borgens) Cameron, operated a drive-in restaurant.She showed an interest in acting from an early age. While in high school, she worked with the Little Theater at Colorado State College, where she had a part in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”Moving to California in the 1960s, she worked part time at Disneyland as a tour guide. She was a winning contestant on “The Dating Game” and JoAnna finalist on the televised beauty pageant “The Dream Girl of 1967.”Her big break came when she became friends with Bob Hope’s daughter, Linda. Mr. Hope cast her in “How to Commit Marriage” (1969), a comedy in which he starred with Jackie Gleason and Jane Wyman.On Mr. Gleason’s advice, she dropped the name Patricia and started calling herself JoAnna Cameron, although her screen credits list her variously as Jo Anna Cameron, Joanna K. Cameron, Joanna Kara Cameron and Joanna Cameron.Her other movies included “Pretty Maids All in a Row” (1971) and “B.S. I Love You” (1971). She was under consideration for the role of Jenny Cavilleri in “Love Story” (1970), but it went to Ali MacGraw.After her last movie, in 1980, she moved permanently to Hawaii, where she had often visited. She lived a quiet and anonymous life there, a friend in Hawaii said by email, and few people knew about her Hollywood career or that she had starred in “Isis.”With a nursing degree she had earned in California, she turned to patient care, working in private facilities or patients’ homes and providing comfort and care — similar to hospice work.She also had a marketing degree, and she later became a marketer for two major hotels. Information about survivors was not immediately available.Asked in a 2002 interview for an “Isis” fan website if she had ever been afraid of being typecast by her role as Isis, she expressed no doubt.“Who’s afraid of being typecast as a superhero?” she responded. “If you have to be typecast, take superhero. Or Egyptian goddess.” More

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      Ronnie Wilson, Founder of the Gap Band, Dies at 73

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      After beginning his career as a teenager, he joined with his two younger brothers to record R&B hits like “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” and “Outstanding.”Ronnie Wilson, the founder of the Gap Band, which rode a funky party sound to success on the R&B charts in the late 1970s and throughout the ’80s, died on Tuesday. He was 73.The death was announced on Facebook by Mr. Wilson’s wife, Linda Boulware-Wilson. She did not say where he died or what the cause was.The Gap Band topped the R&B charts four times and placed 15 songs in the R&B Top 10 from 1979 to 1990; two of its singles, “Early in the Morning” and “You Dropped a Bomb on Me,” reached the pop Top 40 in 1982. Ronnie Wilson primarily played keyboards but also contributed horn and percussion parts in a rotating vocal and instrumental arrangement with his two younger brothers, Robert, who mainly played bass, and Charlie, the lead singer.Hits like “Burn Rubber on Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)” (1980) defined the Gap Band’s sound, which The New York Times critic Stephen Holden described in 1981 as “swinging minimalist funk — sweaty, slangy and streetwise.” Some of their other best-known tracks, like “Outstanding” (1982), struck an erotic tone in a softer manner — less stomping of the feet, more rolling of the hips.The Gap Band appeared on “Soul Train,” the premier television showcase for Black music at the time, and appeared in concert alongside bands like Kool & the Gang.In the years after their popularity peaked, the Gap Band’s tunes were sampled hundreds of times. Ashanti’s 2002 hit “Happy” got its leisurely, bouncy sound from “Outstanding,” and N.W.A.’s canonical “Straight Outta Compton” sped up and darkened “Burn Rubber on Me.”The Gap Band on “Soul Train” in 1979.Afro American Newspapers/Gado, via Getty ImagesIn an interview with the weekly San Francisco newspaper The Sun-Reporter in 1999, Mr. Wilson said that he and his younger brothers were addressed with the honorific “Uncle” before their names by current music stars like Snoop Dogg “because we helped to lay the foundation for hip-hop.”Ronnie Wilson was born on April 7, 1948, in Tulsa, Okla. His father, Oscar, was a minister, and Ronnie and his brothers grew up playing music in church.Ronnie formed his first band as a teenager, and over time he got his brothers involved. The word “Gap” in the Gap Band’s name came from Greenwood Avenue, Archer Street and Pine Street in Tulsa’s Greenwood district — the neighborhood, once known as Black Wall Street, that was the site of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.The group got an early boost in the music business, and met stars like Bob Dylan, thanks to the rock singer and pianist Leon Russell, long based in Tulsa, who had the Gap Band back him on his album “Stop All That Jazz” (1974). The Wilson brothers signed their first major-label deal, with Mercury, a few years later.Ronnie Wilson later worked as a minister and continued to perform occasionally. His brother Charlie pursued a successful solo singing career. The other brother in the band, Robert, died in 2010.A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.Sheelagh McNeill More

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      Camille Saviola, ‘Deep Space Nine’ and Stage Actor, Dies at 71

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      She was known for her comic work in cabarets, for her performance in the musical “Nine” on Broadway and for her role in a “Star Trek” spinoff.Camille Saviola, an actress and singer who made an impression in the musical “Nine” on Broadway, in assorted cabaret spoofs and on television in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and other series, died on Oct. 28 in a hospital in North Bergen, N.J. She was 71.Alyssa Romeo, a great-niece, said the cause was heart failure.Ms. Saviola frequently drew comparisons to Ethel Merman for her big voice, which she liked to use to comic effect. One character she played in more than one cabaret show received the Ten Commandments of Soul from James Brown, earning her something of a nickname: “the Italian Godmother of Soul.”Onstage, she was best known for originating the role of Mama Maddelena, a spa manager, in the original production of “Nine,” the Arthur Kopit-Maury Yeston musical about a film director having a midlife crisis, which opened on Broadway in May 1982 and ran for almost two years. She was featured in a comic number, “The Germans at the Spa.”But she wasn’t limited to comedy. In 2005, for instance, she starred in a production of “Mother Courage and Her Children,” Bertolt Brecht’s famed antiwar play, in Pasadena, Calif.“As Mother Courage, Camille Saviola is wily, indomitable and eminently practical,” Daryl H. Miller wrote in reviewing that performance in The Los Angeles Times.She endeared herself to a different group of fans when she was cast in “Deep Space Nine” as Kai Opaka, a spiritual leader on the planet Bajor. Though she appeared in only four episodes, from 1993 to 1996, Ms. Saviola was well known to followers of the franchise, many of whom posted about her death on social media.In a 1995 interview with a “Deep Space Nine” fan magazine that is quoted on the website Memory Alpha, Ms. Saviola talked about how she got the part.“I went in — every character actress was there — and did a little reading, the real thing,” she said, referring not to a script reading but to a tarot card reading. “My grandmother read cards and tea leaves down in Greenwich Village — she never charged people money — and I have a little bit of that gift.”Camille Saviola was born on July 16, 1950, in the Bronx to Michael and Mary (D’Esopo) Saviola. The performing bug bit early.“I wanted to be Elvis Presley, and at 6 I was already lip-syncing to his records and putting on magic shows,” she told The New York Times in 1985. “By the time I was 7, I knew a thousand jokes. Around puberty, I discovered Judy Garland.”Ms. Saviola in 2003. She was seen on Broadway, in cabarets and in more than 40 film and television roles. Bruce Glikas/FilmMagicShe graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York and, her great-niece said, studied voice for a time at City College, but she left to work Off Off Broadway and in summer stock. She also sang with an all-female rock group for a time.In 1980 she was in the original Off Off Broadway cast of “Starmites,” a science fiction musical, billed only as Camille and belting out a number called “Hard to Be Diva.” (The show made Broadway briefly in 1989, though without her.) She was also in a touring production of the rock opera “Tommy,” playing the characters the Mother and the Acid Queen.In March 1985, at the Ballroom Theater in Manhattan, she was the central figure in a cabaret musical called “Hollywood Opera” that parodied eight classic films.“At the center of this nonsense stands the commandingly funny singer-actress Camille Saviola, who delivers two showstopping bits,” Stephen Holden wrote in a review in The New York Times. “The first is a heaving caricature of Anna Magnani retelling the story of ‘The Rose Tattoo’ in a pattery tarantella called ‘Della Rose’s Turn.’ Later, with Perry Arthur taking the Paul Henreid role, Miss Saviola, impersonating Bette Davis with Groucho Marx eyebrows, demolishes once and for all our fond memories of the two-cigarettes-in-the-dark love scene from ‘Now Voyager.’”Later that year she incorporated some of those bits into her own cabaret show, “Secrets of the Lava Lamp,” which found her alternately singing and telling stories.Ms. Saviola had small parts in two Woody Allen movies, “Broadway Danny Rose” (1984) and “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985), the first of her more than 40 film and television roles. She had recurring roles on the 1990s TV series “The Heights” and “Civil Wars” and, more recently, on “First Monday,” “Judging Amy” and “Entourage.” In 2018 and 2019 she had a recurring role on the TV Land series “Younger.”Ms. Saviola, who at her death lived in West New York, N.J., is survived by a sister, Mary Ann Horman. More

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      Nelson Freire, Piano Virtuoso of Warmth and Finesse, Dies at 77

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      Hailing from Brazil as one of the great pianists of the last half of the 20th century, he recalled masters of the first half in his virtuosity. But he shunned the limelight.Nelson Freire, a reclusive pianist whose fabled technique and sensitive, subtle musicianship made him a legend among pianophiles, died on Monday at his home in Rio de Janeiro. He was 77.His manager, Jacques Thelen, confirmed the death. He said Mr. Freire had been suffering from trauma after a fall in 2019, which led to surgery on his upper right arm and left him unable to play.Mr. Freire was one of the greatest pianists of the past half century, possessing a gift that, in its grace of touch and its ease of virtuosity, recalled playing from the great masters of the half-century before that.“You will be hard pressed to find a recital of comparable warmth, affection and finesse,” the critic Bryce Morrison wrote of a Debussy album from Mr. Freire in 2009, in words that might also have spoken for his artistry as a whole. “Here, there is no need for spurious gestures and inflections; everything is given with a supreme naturalness and a perfectly accommodated virtuosity that declare Freire a master pianist throughout.”That Mr. Freire was indeed a master pianist had never been in doubt. A child prodigy, he gave his first performance at 4 and was attracting attention at international competitions before his teens. His playing had a wisdom that critics rarely failed to describe as innate.“There was hardly a single forced or teasing effect, not a sigh of sentimentality, not a line of hectoring rhetoric,” Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe wrote of a recital of Franck, Ravel, Chopin, Villa-Lobos and Liszt in 1977. Mr. Freire, the critic continued, possessed “one of the biggest natural talents for the keyboard that I have ever heard.”Even so, his profile remained relatively limited. Comparisons to Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz abounded, but Mr. Freire was an uncommonly reticent artist, giving fewer concerts than many of his peers, recording only rarely early in his career and remaining indifferent to publicity.“There is a big difference between music and the music business,” he was quoted as saying in a 1992 profile in The Baltimore Sun. “It’s a completely different language, and when I get too involved in talking it, I get a little bit sick. As for talking about myself, it actually bores me.”For much of his career, such reticence reduced aficionados, as The Sun put it, to treat “pirate Freire tapes with the veneration an art historian might accord to a recently rediscovered Rembrandt.”But that began to change in Mr. Freire’s last two decades, when a series of recordings brought him wider attention.“Whether Mr. Freire is shy or merely introspective, it is impossible to say,” Allen Hughes of The New York Times wrote of the pianist’s New York recital debut in 1971. He noted that Mr. Freire had “projected little of his own personality to the audience.”“He was there, he played splendidly and that was it.”Mr. Freire at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009. Critics often noted his self-effacing quality. “He was there, he played splendidly and that was it,” one wrote of a 1971 recital.Rachel Papo for The New York TimesNelson José Pinto Freire was born in Boa Esperança, in southeastern Brazil, on Oct. 18, 1944. His father was a pharmacist, and his mother was a teacher who bought a piano for Nelson’s sister, Nelma, one of four older siblings. Nelson began to play from memory what he had heard Nelma practice. After 12 lessons of his own, each of which involved a four-hour bus ride down dirt tracks, his first teacher said that he had nothing left to teach the boy.The family moved to Rio de Janeiro to find a new mentor; his father gave up his career to work in a bank there. But Nelson, then 6, was an unruly child, unwilling to be taught. With his parents about to give up, they found Lucia Branco, who had trained under Arthur de Greef, a pupil of Franz Liszt’s. Branco placed the boy with her student Nise Obino. “My relationship with her was very strong,” Mr. Freire said of Ms. Obino in 1995, “the strongest in my life.”His break came in 1957, when he entered Rio’s first international piano competition and emerged a finalist. Brazil’s president, Juscelino Kubitschek, offered him a scholarship to study wherever he wanted to. He chose Vienna, and moved there at 14 to work with Bruno Seidlhofer, joining a class that included Rudolf Buchbinder and Martha Argerich, both of whom would go on to major international careers.Ms. Argerich and Mr. Freire became frequent duo partners (and lifelong friends), both in concert and on record, her impulsive, electrifying style blending well with his tonal palette and impeccable timing.“I didn’t do much work,” Mr. Freire nonetheless recalled of his two years in Vienna. He initially spoke no German and remained, after all, a teenager far from home.Little success followed his return to Brazil, until he won first prize at the Vianna da Motta International Music Competition in Lisbon and the Dinu Lipatti Medal, presented in London, in 1964, accelerating his career in Europe.Mr. Freire began recording for Columbia in the late 1960s, taping solo works by Schumann, Brahms and Chopin, as well as a double album of concertos by Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Grieg and Schumann, with Rudolf Kempe conducting the Munich Philharmonic. That album, Time magazine reported in 1970, “caught the critics by surprise and sent them scurrying for superlatives.”Mr. Freire would scarcely return to the recording studio until 2001, after which he embarked on a golden period with Decca that produced nuanced, masterly releases of everything from Bach to Villa-Lobos, one of several Brazilian composers whom he played with pride.Perhaps most valuable were standard-setting discs of the Chopin études, sonatas and nocturnes, as well as Brahms concertos with Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.“This is the Brahms piano concerto set we’ve been waiting for,” the critic Jed Distler wrote in Gramophone in 2006, praising it for fusing “immediacy and insight, power and lyricism, and incandescent virtuosity that leaves few details unturned, yet always with the big picture in clear sight.”Mr. Freire is survived by a brother, Nirval. His parents were killed in 1967 when a bus they were using to travel to hear Mr. Freire perform in Belo Horizonte, in their home state of Minas Gerais, plunged into a ravine.Whatever repertoire Mr. Freire turned to, he had a depth of tonal variety, a poetry of phrasing and a natural, almost joyous refinement.In “Nelson Freire,” a 2003 documentary film, he is shown watching a video of a joyous Errol Garner playing jazz piano. “I’ve never seen anyone play with such pleasure,” he said.“That’s how I found the piano,” Mr. Freire continued. “The piano was the moment, when I was little, when I felt pleasure. I’m not happy after a concert if I haven’t felt that kind of pleasure for at least a moment. Classical pianists used to have this joy. Rubinstein had it. Horowitz had it, too. Guiomar Novaes had it, and Martha Argerich has it.”What about you, the interviewer asked?Mr. Freire lit a cigarette, looked up shyly, and smiled. More

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      Pat Martino, Jazz Guitarist Who Overcame Amnesia, Dies at 77

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      He was one of the genre’s most acclaimed players when brain surgery left him with no memory. But he recovered and made music for another three decades.Pat Martino, whose trailblazing career as a jazz guitarist seemed to end prematurely in 1980 when brain surgery left him with no memory, but who then painstakingly relearned the instrument, and his own past, and went on to three more decades of innovative musicianship, died on Monday at his home in South Philadelphia. He was 77.Joseph Donofrio, his longtime manager, said the cause was chronic respiratory disorder, which had forced Mr. Martino to stop performing after a tour of Italy in November 2018.Mr. Martino’s playing began drawing attention when he was still a teenager. Having been expelled from a Roman Catholic high school in 10th grade (“Something took place between me and one of the priests there,” he wrote years later. “If I remember correctly, it had something to do with bubble gum.”), he became a professional musician, joining the singer Lloyd Price’s big band and then, in 1962, the saxophonist Willis Jackson’s combo.In 1967, when he was in his early 20s, he released his first album, “El Hombre,” on the Prestige label, and a series of well-regarded records followed. At the start of his career he often drew comparisons to earlier jazz guitarists like Wes Montgomery, but by the 1970s he was forging his own sound. “Pat Martino: Breaking Barriers Between Rock & Jazz,” a 1975 headline in The San Francisco Examiner read.On a tour supporting his first albums for Warner Bros., “Starbright” (1976) and “Joyous Lake” (1977), Mr. Martino began experiencing frequent headaches and seizures, something he had dealt with occasionally since childhood. One seizure came while he was onstage in France in 1976.“I stopped playing and stood there for about 30 seconds,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Here and Now!” (2011, with Bill Milkowski). “During these moments of seizure, it feels like you’re falling through a black hole; it’s like everything just escapes at the moment.”Mr. Martino at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater in 2006, accompanied by Albert Heath on drums.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIn the book, he described going through a series of misdiagnoses and ill-advised treatment, including electroshock. He retired from performing and turned to teaching at the Guitar Institute of Technology in Hollywood, but his problems worsened; at one point, he wrote, a doctor told him he had two hours to live.A condition called arteriovenous malformation, a tangling of arteries and veins, was diagnosed. An aneurysm resulted in emergency surgery to remove a large tumor; when he awoke, he had no memory.“When you don’t remember something, you have no idea of its existence,” he wrote. “And upon awakening after the surgery, I remembered nothing.“But it wasn’t a disorienting feeling,” he continued. “If I had known I was a guitarist, if I had known those two people standing by my bedside in the hospital were in fact my parents, I then would’ve felt the feelings that went along with the events. What they went through and why they were standing there looking at me then would’ve been very painful for me. But it wasn’t painful because to me they were just strangers.”His parents helped him relearn his past, showing him family photographs and playing him his own albums. Picking up the guitar again was another form of memory recovery.“I had to start from Square 1,” he told The Edmonton Journal of Alberta, Canada, in 2004. “But once I made the decision to try, it activated inner intuitive familiarities, like a child who hasn’t ridden their bicycle for many years and tries to do so again to reach a destination. There are moments of imbalance, but it’s subliminal, and it emerges after some mistakes, and then it strengthens.”By the mid-1980s he was performing again. Jon Pareles, reviewing one performance, at Fat Tuesday’s in Manhattan in 1986, found Mr. Martino as virtuosic and unpredictable as ever.“He can play chorus after chorus of bebop lines, zigzagging through the chromatic harmonies of his own tunes,” Mr. Pareles wrote. “But more often than not, he turns bebop conventions sideways. He starts a line on an unexpected beat, breaks his runs up to insist on a single note or riff, inserts odd-length leaps into standard licks and shifts accents around the beat. His playing is articulately wayward, approaching tunes from odd angles and taking rewarding tangents; he makes song forms seem slippery and mysterious.”In 1987, Mr. Martino released a new album. It was called “The Return.”Mr. Martino at a nightclub in Asbury Park, N.J., in 1967, the year he released his first album, “El Hombre.”Pat Martino CollectionPatrick Azzara (he took Martino, which his father had also used, as a stage name) was born on Aug. 25, 1944, in Philadelphia to Carmen and Jean (Orlando) Azzara. His father, known as Mickey, was a tailor who also worked as a guitarist and singer. He would hide his guitar from young Pat, though in the autobiography Mr. Martino suggests that this “was a bit of reverse psychology on his part” — once the boy took up the instrument, his father encouraged his career and introduced him to various musicians.Mr. Martino was in bands as a boy, including one with the future pop star Bobby Rydell, who lived nearby. One of the guitar greats Mr. Martino’s father took him to meet, backstage after a concert in Atlantic City, was Les Paul, who asked young Pat to play a little something.“What came out of that guitar was unbelievable,” Mr. Paul wrote in the liner notes to Mr. Martino’s 1970 album, “Desperado.” “His dexterity and his picking style were absolutely unique. He held his pick as one would hold a demitasse … pinkie extended, very polite. The politeness disappeared when pick met string.”As Mr. Martino grew more experienced, his view of jazz evolved, largely shaped by Eastern philosophies; he did not, he told The Examiner in 1975, consider himself a jazz musician.“Jazz is a way of life,” he said. “It’s not an idiom of music. Jazz is spontaneous improvisation. If you ever leave your house with nowhere to go, and just walk for pleasure, observing and looking around, you’ll find that you improvise.”And he did not consider himself a “guitar player,” he said, though he once did.“I no longer view myself that way because I don’t want to be depersonalized by my instrument,” he said. “I’m an observer of my environment, including the guitar; I see the guitar in everything.”In his autobiography, he described the process of recovering the ability to play.“As I continued to work out things on the instrument,” he wrote, “flashes of memory and muscle memory would gradually come flooding back to me — shapes on the fingerboard, different stairways to different rooms in the house. There are secret doorways that only you know about in the house, and you go there because it’s pleasurable to do so.”The records he made after his surgery included “All Sides Now” (1997), on the Blue Note label, an album on which he shared tracks with other famed guitarists, including Mr. Paul. Two of his albums, also on Blue Note, were nominated for Grammy Awards, “Live at Yoshi’s” (2001) and “Think Tank” (2003).His surgery and the recovery period, Mr. Martino said, changed what he was after in his music.“It used to be to do everything I possibly could to become more successful in my craft and my career,” he told the Edmonton paper. “Today, my intention is to completely enjoy the moment and everything it contains.”Mr. Martino is survived by his wife of 26 years, Ayako Asahi.Mr. Martino had other health issues over the years, but Mr. Donofrio, his longtime manager, said his resilience was remarkable.“Every time I thought he was going to be down and out,” he said, “he came back stronger than before.”Jeff Roth contributed research. More

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      Ronnie Tutt, 83, Dies; Powerful Drummer Backed Rock and Pop Stars

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      He was a force in Elvis Presley’s TCB band and accompanied other big names like Jerry Garcia, Billy Joel and Elvis Costello.NASHVILLE — Ronnie Tutt, the prolific and versatile drummer who accompanied both Elvises, Presley and Costello, as well as other major figures in rock and pop like Jerry Garcia and Neil Diamond, died on Oct. 16 at his home in Franklin, Tenn. He was 83.His death was confirmed by his wife, Donna, who said he had lived with chronic heart problems.Mr. Tutt was singing jingles and drumming in local bands in Dallas when, in his early 30s, he was hired to play drums in Presley’s TCB (Taking Care of Business) band for a series of historic engagements at the International Hotel outside Las Vegas in 1969.Presley’s four-week residency there marked his triumphant return to the stage after an eight-year hiatus, reviving a career hampered by uninspired movie roles and an image that had lost relevance in the face of the ’60s counterculture.The comeback — a transformation that also invigorated Las Vegas’s nightclub scene — was due in no small part to the strength of Presley’s rhythm section, a dozen of whose performances were documented on the live portion of the 1969 album “From Memphis to Vegas/From Vegas to Memphis.” Foremost among them was a racing take, nearly eight minutes long, of “Suspicious Minds” featuring Mr. Tutt’s hyperkinetic, barely controlled drumming.Mr. Tutt’s powerful yet nuanced style enlivened many of Presley’s studio recordings from this period as well, including “Burning Love,” a Top 10 pop hit in 1972 that lives up to its incendiary title. Admired for his use of cymbals, Mr. Tutt was known for his ability to anticipate Presley’s moves onstage and accentuate them on the drums.“Elvis always bragged how you intuitively could keep up with his stage moves, even when he tried to trick you,” Presley’s ex-wife, Priscilla Presley, wrote in a tribute addressed to Mr. Tutt on Instagram.Mr. Tutt did studio work for other artists while in Presley’s employ. He provided empathetic support to Billy Joel’s 1974 Top 40 hit “Piano Man.” He contributed propulsive cymbal and snare rhythms to Gram Parsons’s “Ooh Las Vegas,” a 1974 recording that featured Emmylou Harris on vocals. In the 1970s, Mr. Tutt played in both Ms. Harris’s Hot Band and the Jerry Garcia Band.Working concurrently with Presley and Garcia, the Grateful Dead founder and lead guitarist, proved a study in contrasts, Mr. Tutt said: His work with Presley was meticulously rehearsed, his sessions with Garcia more impromptu and improvisational, akin to jazz.“Elvis’s music was a lot more in your face; you could never play enough,” he recalled in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone. “With Jerry we never talked about it, but I just knew that my role with that band, no matter what configuration it was, was to help keep it together. We weren’t there to do flashy solos.”Ronald Ellis Tutt was born on March 12, 1938, in Dallas, the only child of Frank and Gladys Tutt. His father owned a dry-cleaning business; his mother was a homemaker.Young Ronnie took dance lessons at an early age. His first instrument was ukulele, followed by guitar, violin and trumpet. He did not begin playing the drums until his senior year in high school.“When I was 3, I started dancing, so the rhythm of everything was more important to me than the melodic,” Mr. Tutt said, discussing his affinity for the drums in a 2016 interview with the website Elvis Australia. “I was frustrated with playing trumpet and guitar because I wanted to express myself rhythmically. It was a very easy transition.”He worked as a drummer with Presley until Presley’s death in 1977. He then played on recordings by the Carpenters, Mink DeVille and others before joining Mr. Diamond’s band, as a drummer and background singer, in 1981. Onstage, Mr. Tutt routinely drew ovations for his drum crescendos during performances of Mr. Diamond’s 1969 pop hit “Holly Holy.”He remained with Mr. Diamond until 2018, while continuing to do studio work on projects like Mr. Costello’s “King of America” (1986) and Los Lobos’ “By the Light of the Moon” (1987). From 1997 to the mid-2010s he also appeared in “Elvis: The Concert,” a touring extravaganza that featured video footage of Presley performing, with new live backing by members of the TCB band and other musicians.In addition to his wife, Mr. Tutt is survived by seven daughters, Cindy Rutter, Tina Dempsey, Christine Edson, Terie Tutt, Rhonda Henderson, Elisia Notermann and Rachael Dodson; two sons, Ron Jr. and Jared; 16 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Another son, Nathan, died 10 years ago.Though he was not known as a producer, Mr. Tutt served in that role, albeit uncredited, on “Burning Love” while Felton Jarvis, Presley’s regular producer, was recovering from a kidney transplant.“He was lying on his back in the control room at RCA,” Mr. Tutt said of Mr. Jarvis in his interview with Elvis Australia. “Emery Gordy came up with the bass line, and I produced the record for Felton — you know, the whole session.”“It more described the kind of music that we were trying to get Elvis to do at the time,” he said of “Burning Love” and the aspirations that he and other members of Presley’s Nashville rhythm section had for the session. “So I take a little pride in that.” More

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      Bruce Gaston, American Maestro of Thai Music, Dies at 75

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      A transplanted Californian and former conscientious objector, he infused Thai music with Western sounds as a prominent composer and performer based in Bangkok.Bruce Gaston, a transplanted Californian who helped revolutionize Thai classical music by injecting it with Western instruments and forms and who became one of Thailand’s leading performers and composers, died on Oct. 17 at his home in Bangkok. He was 75.The cause was liver cancer, his son, Theodore, said.Together with two Thai musicians, Mr. Gaston founded Fong Nam, which means “bubbles,” an ensemble that worked to revive forgotten Thai classical pieces as well as to create modern forms, performing in concerts and in recording studios. Mr. Gaston played a piano or an electronic synthesizer among the gongs and woodwinds of a piphat percussion orchestra.He was a prominent and respected figure in Thailand as a composer, performer and teacher. In 2009, he became the only foreigner to receive the Silpathorn Award, which honors artists who make notable contributions to Thai arts and culture.“I want to find a form that transcends this polarity between East and West, between the we’s and the they’s,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1987. “It’s silly to talk about East and West now. Technology has brought us all together.”Mr. Gaston argued that infusing traditional Thai music with new forms was vital to its health, but that those new elements “must grow out of that tradition, or you risk losing everything that reminds you of who you are and who you were.”Somtow Sucharitkul, a prominent Thai-American writer and musician, called Mr. Gaston’s music a “new fusion” in which “traditional Thai ideas and Western structures were fluid, and could blend back and forth and fuse and have a uniquely Thai sensibility.”Writing in The Bangkok Post, he said, “If anyone can lay claim to the title of ‘He who lit the revolutionary torch,’ it is Bruce Gaston.”Mr. Gaston developed a compositional language, informed by his training in Western classical and contemporary music, that “evoked but did not imitate Thai music,” said Kit Young, an American pianist, composer and artistic adviser who is the co-founder of Gitameit Music Institute in Myanmar and who lived in Thailand for many years.Bruce Gaston was born on March 11, 1946, in Los Angeles to Marcus and Evangelin Gaston. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father was a pastor. He graduated from the University of Southern California with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and earned a master’s degree in music in 1969. He received a draft deferment during the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector and was assigned to alternative service as a teacher overseas.Mr. Gaston traveled to Jamaica before moving to Thailand, where he became entranced by Thai music that was played during cremation ceremonies at a temple near his home, Theodore Gaston said. In 1971 he developed a curriculum in music at Payap College, in the northern city of Chiangmai.Mr. Gaston began experimenting with combining Thai and Western forms and wrote an opera on Buddhist themes called “Chu Chok” in 1976. It was performed at the Goethe Institute in Thailand and in Germany during 1977-1978. He studied in Bangkok with Boonyong Kaetkhong, a master of the ranat, which is similar to a xylophone.Mr. Gaston and another musician, Jirapan Ansvananda, founded Fong Nam in 1981.“If you want to have influences from the West, great,” his son said, “but better to use it as a flavor and not the main thing. That is the Fong Nam way. If you listen, you can tell that it’s pretty much Thai.”Fong Nam recorded a series of CDs of traditional music for the Nimbus, Celestial Harmonies and Marco Polo labels, said John Clewley, a Bangkok-based British professor of music who writes a column in The Bangkok Post called World Beat.Mr. Gaston became fluent in Thai and applied his talents widely, lecturing on music at Chulalongkorn University, composing for movies and theatrical shows and performing for years at a famous Bangkok beer hall, the Tawan Daeng Brewery.Early on he had a thriving business with other musicians writing jingles for Thai television commercials. “We sell banks, beer, all kinds of food, soft drinks, cars, perfumes, soaps and dishes,” he told The Times in 1984. “I’d say we have the majority of the market in Thailand.”He married Sarapi Areemitr in 1976. Along with his son, she survives him.Mr. Gaston said his music aimed to bridge gaps between generations as well as cultures.“Sometimes we can’t understand each other, the old and the young,” he said in 1987, when he was 41. He added: “In changing and discovering new forms, the old members of the orchestra have the hardest time. There are moments when the old boys play better than we ever will in the traditional style, and moments when they just can’t keep up with us.“But you just play together. — that’s the most important thing,” he said. “You don’t just say, ‘Forget it.’”Muktita Suhartono contributed reporting. More

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      Rose Lee Maphis, Early Star of Country Music TV, Dies at 98

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      She and her husband, Joe (“Mr. and Mrs. Country Music”), helped give birth to a West Coast music scene later associated with Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.NASHVILLE — Rose Lee Maphis, the singer and guitarist who, with her husband, Joe, was a mainstay of the early years of live country music television, died on Tuesday at her home here. She was 98.Her son Jody said the cause was kidney failure.Billed as “Mr. and Mrs. Country Music,” the Maphises rose to prominence in the 1950s as members of the cast of “Town Hall Party,” a pioneering TV barn dance seen on KTTV in Los Angeles. On the strength of Ms. Maphis’s exuberant stage presence and her husband’s dazzling guitar work, the couple — often in matching Western-wear suits — helped give birth to the unfettered West Coast country music scene later associated with Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.The Maphises achieved early acclaim with “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music),” a twanging barroom lament released by Okeh Records in 1953.“Dim lights, thick smoke and loud, loud music/It’s the only kind of life you’ll ever understand,” Mr. Maphis (pronounced MAY-fiss) sang, admonishing the song’s wayward wife as Ms. Maphis added sympathetic harmonies on the chorus. “Dim lights, thick smoke and loud, loud music/You’ll never make a wife to a home-loving man.”“Dim Lights” became a honky-tonk standard and has been recorded by Conway Twitty, Flatt & Scruggs, the New Riders of the Purple Sage and others. Though credited as one of its writers, Ms. Maphis always insisted that the composition was solely her husband’s. He wrote the song, she said, while driving home one night from Bakersfield’s renowned — and notoriously smoky — Blackboard Cafe.The Maphises recorded throughout the 1950s and ’60s, but given their commitment to performing on regularly scheduled broadcasts, they never really had the chance to promote their releases at radio stations or in live venues across the country. Instead they concentrated on TV and radio work, appearing with country stalwarts like Tex Ritter and Merle Travis and rockabilly insurgents like Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson.The couple met when they were both appearing on the WRVA radio show “Old Dominion Barn Dance” in Richmond, Va., in 1948 and had been dating by the time they moved to California in 1951, at the urging of Mr. Travis. They married when Mr. Maphis’s divorce from his first wife became final in 1952.The Maphises later recorded with their son Dale. But they had more success on television than they did on records.Moving to the West Coast proved inspiring for them both. They were especially energized by the differences between the dance halls of California and the venues they had played in the East.“There was a real separation between the music on the West Coast and in Nashville,” Ms. Maphis said in a 1998 interview with Vintage Guitar magazine. “On the West Coast, people danced, and bands had drummers.”“All the people getting up and dancing while you were performing, that was strange to us,” she elaborated. “West of the Mississippi, people danced. East of the Mississippi, they watched and listened.”Doris Helen Schetrompf was born on Dec. 29, 1922, in Baltimore. Her parents, Stanley and Margaret (Schriever) Schetrompf, were farmers.Doris began playing the guitar at 15; two years later, she was hired to play on a local radio show in Hagerstown, Md., where she grew up. She acquired her nickname there, after the show’s announcer introduced her as “Rose of the Mountains” because of her habit of wearing flowers in her hair.After graduating from high school in 1941, she attended business college, worked various jobs and teamed up with three other young women to form the Saddle Sweethearts, a Western-style group that toured with Gene Autry and the Carter Family.Despite their relative success, the Sweethearts had all but called it quits when Ms. Maphis and another member of the group were invited to join “Old Dominion Barn Dance,” where Mr. Maphis was a founding member. Before long he and she had moved to the West Coast and joined its burgeoning live country music TV scene.Known as the “King of the Strings,” Mr. Maphis, who often played a double-neck Mosrite guitar (which he had helped design), also became a first-call session musician. He appeared on recordings by Rick Nelson and on the soundtracks of movies like “God’s Little Acre” and “Thunder Road,” both in 1958.The couple had three children between 1954 and 1957, beginning a period of domesticity that by 1968 would have them moving to Nashville, where they began performing at the Grand Ole Opry.By the early ’70s Ms. Maphis had all but dropped out of the music business. She eventually took a job as a seamstress at the theme park Opryland USA, where her youngest son, Dale, was working as a musician.Besides her son Jody, who is also a musician, Ms. Maphis is survived by her daughter, Lorrie Harris, and a granddaughter. Her son Dale died in 1989 in an automobile accident. Mr. Maphis died of lung cancer in 1986 at 65.In the early 2010s, after five decades out of the limelight, Ms. Maphis volunteered as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. Not long after she began, the museum mounted an exhibition on the Bakersfield Sound that she and her husband had helped shape, including a video of them singing “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke.”Few of the museum’s visitors made the connection between their host and the exhibit, which also included Ms. Maphis’s Martin D-18 guitar, until one female patron asked her about it.“She came back downstairs when she was through with her tour,” Ms. Maphis explained to The Hagerstown Herald-Mail. “She asked, ‘The guitar that’s up there, is that your guitar?’“She saw my name tag,” Ms. Maphis went on. “I told her ‘Yes.’ She was the only one who ever did that.” More