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      Jean-Jacques Beineix, ‘Cinema du Look’ Director, Dies at 75

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      His first feature, “Diva,” a visually unusual tale, is credited with starting a new, style-focused genre of filmmaking in France.Jean-Jacques Beineix, a French film director whose debut feature, the eye-popping, droll thriller “Diva,” was much acclaimed, especially outside of France, in the early 1980s and is often credited with starting a genre of French filmmaking known as the cinéma du look, died on Jan. 13 at his home in Paris. He was 75.His family announced his death to Agence France-Presse, saying Mr. Beineix (pronounced Beh-nix) died after a long illness. Unifrance, the organization that promotes French film, issued a statement praising “his innovative, intensely visual, iconic cinema.”In “Diva,” a fan surreptitiously tapes the performance of a renowned American soprano who has forbidden any recordings of her singing, setting off a chain of complications, including blackmail. One unusual aspect of the film was that the title character was played by a real-life opera singer, Wilhelmenia Fernandez. But the most unusual thing about the movie, for that time, was its look, full of color, references to other films and odd camera angles.“Everything is seen through glass, in mirrors or as reflected from the surfaces of mud puddles,” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times in 1982, when the movie, which had opened in France the year before, played in New York. “If a scene isn’t shot from a low angle, it’s shot from a chandelier.”Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, was also struck by the visual bravura.“It’s a mixture of style and chic hanky-panky,” she wrote of the film, “but it’s also genuinely sparkling. The camera skids ahead, and you see things you don’t expect. Beineix thinks with his eyes.”Its style was also sometimes called the new New Wave.“In contrast to the old New Wavers,” Manohla Dargis of The Times explained in 2007, when a new print of “Diva” was shown at Film Forum, “who sought to interrogate the relationship between the real and the image, the new New Wavers seized on the unreality of cinema, underscoring its falsity, its theatricality, its surface.”Luc Besson and Leos Carax were among the other directors often included in the genre, although that was not always a compliment; some critics faulted the films for emphasizing style over substance. Certainly Mr. Beineix’s subsequent movies — he made only a few more features — were greeted with mixed reviews at best.The best known of those was “Betty Blue” (1986), a drama about an obsessive love affair. Sheila Benson, in The Los Angeles Times, named it one of the year’s 10 best.“Beineix’s power is to draw us to the center of this tempestuous love affair, to feel its magnetic pull as strongly as we sense its imminent doom,” she wrote.But Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, said that the film “has a shallow, sunny prettiness and little more.” Its two leads, Béatrice Dalle and Jean-Hugues Anglade, spent quite a bit of the film unclothed.“If either of them made it through the filming without catching a bad cold, it’s a miracle,” Ms. Maslin wrote.Mr. Beineix accepted that his films might inspire ridicule as well as praise.“That’s the risk you take,” he told The Gazette of Montreal in 2001. “But if an artist doesn’t take risks, what’s left? There has to be at least a minimum of provocation in art. That’s what films should do.”Jean-Hugues Anglade and Béatrice Dalle in the 1986 film “Betty Blue,” which divided critics. The Los Angeles Times named it one of its top 10 of the year, but The New York Times described it as having a “shallow, sunny prettiness.”Cinema Libre StudioJean-Jacques Beineix was born on Oct. 8, 1946, in Paris. He loved movies from an early age, he said, but didn’t immediately pursue a career in filmmaking.“I was never the kind of cinephile who belonged to any club,” he told The International Herald Tribune in 2006. “I didn’t get down on my knees at the Cahiers du Cinema altar” — a reference to the famed film magazine.Instead, after earning a degree in philosophy and then studying medicine for several years, he took a leap of faith.“I finally left the university when I was 24,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1982, “to take a job as an assistant film director at the lowest level. I brought coffee to people and enjoyed every minute of it because I didn’t have to study anymore.”Throughout the 1970s, he worked his way up from second assistant director (including on the 1972 Jerry Lewis film “The Day the Clown Cried”) to first assistant director on films by Claude Zidi, Claude Berri and others. He gained valuable experience, but by the end of the 1970s was beginning to chafe at being an understudy.“I was seeing things done one way, and I wanted them to be done differently,” he told The Tribune.So he made “Diva,” though the film was not an instant success — largely, he thought, because it could not be easily pigeonholed. Critics in France didn’t like it, and promoters didn’t know how to promote it.A film still from “Diva.” Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, was struck by the visual bravura, describing it as “genuinely sparkling.”Rialto Pictures“Eventually, though, word of mouth turned everything around,” he said. And foreign audiences began discovering the movie. At the 1981 Festival of Festivals in Toronto it finished second in the audience voting for the event’s most popular film, behind “Chariots of Fire.”His follow-up, “The Moon in the Gutter,” did not fare as well. It was booed at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983 and flopped.Mr. Beineix’s films after “Betty Blue” included “IP5: The Island of Pachyderms” in 1992. The cast included the revered actor and singer Yves Montand, who died of a heart attack in November 1991 near the end of the filming. Mr. Beineix felt that people blamed him for the death. Shortly afterward, both his mother and his press agent, a close friend, also died. He didn’t make another feature film for almost a decade.“It’s like you’ve been punched and punched and punched,” he told the film website Nitrate Online in 2001. “It built up, and suddenly I couldn’t make a picture.”His return to filmmaking, with the comic thriller “Mortal Transfer” in 2001, was not successful.Mr. Beineix’s survivors include his wife, Agnes, and a daughter, Frida. More

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      Former Miss USA Cheslie Kryst Dies at 30

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      Ms. Kryst, who was also a correspondent for the television show “Extra,” was found dead on Sunday in New York.Cheslie Kryst, a correspondent for the celebrity news program “Extra” who won the Miss USA title in 2019 while working as a lawyer, was found dead on Sunday in New York. She was 30.Ms. Kryst died in a fall from a high-rise building on Manhattan’s West Side, where she had an apartment, the New York Police Department said. Her death was being investigated as a suicide, Lt. Thomas Antonetti, a department spokesman, said on Monday.“Extra,” which also announced her death, provided a statement from her family that said Ms. Kryst “embodied love and served others, whether through her work as an attorney fighting for social justice, as Miss USA and as a host” on the show.Ms. Kryst joined “Extra” as a correspondent in the fall of 2019, and later earned two Daytime Emmy Award nominations for outstanding entertainment news program for her work, according to Variety.Ms. Kryst shooting a segment for the show “Extra” in New York in 2019.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesIn the hours before her death, Ms. Kryst shared a picture of herself on Instagram with the caption, “May this day bring you rest and peace.”Cheslie Kryst was born on April 28, 1991, in Jackson, Mich., and moved to Charlotte, N.C., when she was a toddler, according to a profile from SouthPark Magazine. She later graduated from the University of South Carolina with a business degree and then earned an M.B.A. and a law degree from Wake Forest University.In 2017 she joined Poyner Spruill, a law firm based in North Carolina, where she focused on civil litigation. The firm said in a statement on Sunday that Ms. Kryst “was a passionate advocate both in and out of the courtroom.” After she was crowned Miss USA, she and Poyner Spruill agreed that she would go on sabbatical, and she later left the firm, according to its managing partner, Dan Cahill.Although Ms. Kryst worked as a lawyer for some time, she was no stranger to beauty pageants. Her mother, April Simpkins, was crowned Mrs. North Carolina in 2002. “My mom was the second Black Mrs. North Carolina, so I knew no matter what, I was going to compete,” Ms. Kryst told The New York Times in 2020.Ms. Kryst started her pageant career as a teenager and won the Miss Northwestern pageant while in high school. In 2019, she was crowned Miss North Carolina and went on to win Miss USA, becoming the oldest contestant ever to win at age 28. She later represented the United States at the 2019 Miss Universe Competition, finishing in the top 10.In the midst of a rising career that required long days, Ms. Kryst told The Times in December 2019 that down time was the key to balancing her busy schedule, which included traveling for events as Miss USA and maintaining her blog, White Collar Glam, where she discussed affordable workplace fashion. Mental health was also a priority for Ms. Kryst, who said in a Facebook video in 2019 that she regularly spoke with a counselor. “When I’m not talking to my counselor, I take time at the end of every single day to just decompress,” she said. “I unplug. I shut my phone off. I don’t answer messages. I just sit and watch my favorite movie.”Ms. Kryst also used her rise to fame and presence on the pageant stage to make a statement about diversity. She described herself as a Black woman of mixed race heritage and told The Grio in 2019 that she intentionally wore her hair natural during the Miss USA pageant. “Winning with my natural hair was really important to me because I thought, this is the way that my hair grows out of my head,” she said. “I should be OK to wear my hair like this.”In an essay published by Allure magazine last year, Ms. Kryst reflected on the challenges of growing older and challenging conventional thinking about women’s appearances and opinions.“A grinning, crinkly-eyed glance at my achievements thus far makes me giddy about laying the groundwork for more, but turning 30 feels like a cold reminder that I’m running out of time to matter in society’s eyes — and it’s infuriating,” she wrote. “After a year like 2020, you would think we’d learned that growing old is a treasure and maturity is a gift not everyone gets to enjoy.”Ms. Kryst is survived by her parents and five siblings.If you are having thoughts of suicide, in the United States call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Go here for resources outside the United States.Christine Hauser More

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      Howard Hesseman, the D.J. Johnny Fever in ‘WKRP in Cincinnati,’ Dies at 81

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      Mr. Hesseman played a fallen radio star who landed in the Midwest on the popular sitcom, which captured the misadventures of a struggling station.Howard Hesseman, the actor and improvisational comedian best known for playing a stuck-in-the-’60s radio disc jockey in the TV sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati,” died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 81.His wife, Caroline Ducrocq, said he died at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center of complications from colon surgery last summer.Mr. Hesseman received two Emmy nominations for playing Dr. Johnny Fever on “WKRP in Cincinnati,” which ran on CBS for four seasons from 1978 to 1982.The series portrayed a struggling Top 40 rock radio station, where the staff rages against the age of disco with hard rock and punk songs. Mr. Hesseman’s hard-living character, having been pushed from a Los Angeles station where he was a star, serves as a senior member of the counterculture at the Midwestern outlet after smooth-talking his way into a job.“I think maybe Johnny smokes a little marijuana, drinks beer and wine, and maybe a little hard liquor,” Mr. Hesseman told The New York Times in 1979. “And on one of those hard mornings at the station, he might take what for many years was referred to as a diet pill. But he is a moderate user of soft drugs, specifically marijuana.”Johnny Fever was a cherished character on TV who embodied the essential traits of 1960s counterculture: the worship of rock bands; not-so-veiled drug references; long, shaggy hair.In one scene, he is wearing dark sunglasses while D.J.ing, speaking in a relaxed tone as he leans into the microphone and says in a thick voice, “We’re still rocking on the mighty KRP, where the razor man is standing by to sharpen up your day.”He told WXYZ-TV Detroit in 2012 that the show was made up of “a lovely company of actors, bolstered by a lovely bunch of writers, so it made going to work fun every day.”From left: Tim Reid, Loni Anderson, Jan Smithers and Howard Hesseman at a program in Beverly Hills in 2014 that reunited the cast of “WKRP in Cincinnati.” Michael Tran/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesSome were probably not surprised to see Mr. Hesseman excel in that role. In San Francisco, where Mr. Hesseman helped start an improvisational comedy troupe, The Committee, he worked as a radio D.J. in 1967. At the Bay Area station, KMPX, he played “strange tapes” from the rock movement and smoked “a lot of pot — always against my will, of course,” he told People Weekly in 1979.Mr. Hesseman told The Times in 1979 that he spent 90 days in the San Francisco County Jail in 1963 for selling an ounce of marijuana — a conviction that was later thrown out for entrapment. He would later say that smoking marijuana was “sort of a residual hobby.”Before embarking on his acting and comedy career, Mr. Hesseman spent time in Salem, Ore., where he was born and raised as an only child by his mother and stepfather.An uncle in Colorado told him about acting, and years later, Mr. Hesseman would say, “Every time that I perform, it’s like repaying him a debt.”He briefly attended the University of Oregon, but he left school and moved to San Francisco, where he could focus on his career.Mr. Hesseman, who was also admired for his improvisational talent, played small parts in “The Andy Griffith Show” and “Sanford and Son.”George Spiro Dibie, the former national president of the International Cinematographers Guild, recalled in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation that Mr. Hesseman’s experience was evident on the set of “Head of the Class,” a sitcom that ran on ABC from 1986 to 1991.“He was even telling some directors what to do,” he said. Mr. Hesseman played Charlie Moore, a teacher at a Manhattan high school contending with a class of overachieving students.Mr. Hesseman as the high school teacher Charlie Moore in “Head of the Class.”ABC Photo Archives, via Getty ImagesHe landed roles in cult classics like the mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap,” where he acted alongside Michael McKean, who said on Twitter on Sunday that it was “impossible to overstate Howard Hesseman’s influence on his and subsequent generations of improvisers.”In 1981, after two marriages ended in divorce, he met Ms. Ducrocq, an actress from France who was visiting Los Angeles. Ms Ducrocq’s friend asked her if she wanted to swim at an actor’s pool, and she said yes.“I had no idea who he was,” Ms. Ducrocq said, laughing.She stayed at his place for dinner, and then stayed when he brought out a bottle of Champagne, which, she later learned, he had never drunk in his life. In 1989, they married.He loved listening to jazz, swimming and catching up with his godchildren, she said.Mr. Hesseman once said in an interview that “the smile keeps you feeling younger; work keeps you feeling a little bit more agile.”He is survived by Ms. Ducrocq. More

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      Hargus Robbins, Pianist on Country Music Hits, Dies at 84

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      A revered member of Nashville’s A-Team of studio musicians, he was a major contributor to Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” album.NASHVILLE — Hargus “Pig” Robbins, one of country music’s most prolific session piano players and a key contributor to Bob Dylan’s landmark 1966 album, “Blonde on Blonde,” died on Sunday. He was 84.His death was announced on the website of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. It did not say where he died or specify the cause.A longtime member of Nashville’s so-called A-Team of first-call studio musicians, Mr. Robbins appeared on thousands of popular recordings made here between the late 1950s and mid-2010s.Many became No. 1 country singles, including Hank Snow’s “I’ve Been Everywhere” (1962), Loretta Lynn’s “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” (1966) and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” (1974). Several also crossed over to become major pop hits, Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” (1961) and Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” (1978) among them.An instinctive melodicist who valued understatement over flash, Mr. Robbins helped establish the piano as an integral part of the smooth, uncluttered Nashville Sound of the 1960s. He also was a big reason that folk and rock acts like Joan Baez and Mr. Dylan began traveling to Nashville to adopt the impromptu approach to recording popularized here.The former Kingston Trio member John Stewart referred to him as “first-take Hargus Robbins” when, on the closing track of Mr. Stewart’s acclaimed 1969 album, “California Bloodlines,” he listed the Nashville session musicians who appeared on it. Mr. Stewart was acknowledging Mr. Robbins’s knack for playing musical passages flawlessly the first time through.Mr. Robbins’s influence was maybe most pronounced as the Nashville Sound evolved into the more soul-steeped “countrypolitan” style heard on records like George Jones’s 1980 blockbuster single, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”Mr. Robbins’s rippling, jazz-inflected intros to Charlie Rich’s “Behind Closed Doors” (1973) and Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (1977) became enduring expressions of the Southern musical vernacular of their era. Both records were No. 1 country and crossover pop singles.“Of all the musicians on my sessions, he stood the tallest,” the producer and A-Team guitarist Jerry Kennedy said of Mr. Robbins in an exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame.“He has been a backbone for Nashville,” added Mr. Kennedy, who worked with Mr. Robbins on hits by Roger Miller and Jerry Lee Lewis, and on “Blonde on Blonde.”Mr. Robbins acquired his distinctive nickname, Pig, while attending the Tennessee School for the Blind in Nashville as a boy.“I had a supervisor who called me that because I used to sneak in through a fire escape and play when I wasn’t supposed to and I’d get dirty as a pig,” Mr. Robbins said in an interview cited in the Encyclopedia of Country Music.He lost vision in one of his eyes when he was 3, after accidentally poking himself in the eye with a knife. The injured eye was ultimately removed and Mr. Robbins eventually lost sight in his other eye as well.While at the School for the Blind he studied classical music, but he would also play jazz, honky-tonk and barrelhouse blues.Mr. Robbins’s wide-ranging tastes served him well, equipping him for work on soul recordings like Clyde McPhatter’s 1962 pop hit, “Lover Please” (where he was inscrutably credited as Mel “Pigue” Robbins), andArthur Alexander’s “Anna (Go to Him),” a Top 10 R&B single from 1962 covered by the Beatles.Afforded the chance to stretch out stylistically on “Blonde on Blonde,” Mr. Robbins played with raucous abandon on “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” the woozy, carnivalesque No. 2 pop hit hooked by the tagline “Everybody must get stoned.” He employed a tender lyricism, by contrast, on elegiac ballads like “Just Like a Woman” and “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”Hargus Melvin Robbins was born on Jan. 18, 1938, in Spring City, Tenn. His first big break came in 1959 when the music publisher Buddy Killen secured him an invitation to play on Mr. Jones’s “White Lightning.” Spurred by Mr. Robbins’s rollicking boogie-woogie piano, the record became a No. 1 country single.Another opportunity came two years later, when the producer Owen Bradley, needing someone to fill in for the A-Team pianist Floyd Cramer, hired Mr. Robbins to play on the session for Ms. Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” Mr. Cramer soon embarked on a solo career, creating an opening for Mr. Robbins on the A-Team.Mr. Robbins flirted with a solo career in the ’50s, recording rockabilly originals under the name Mel Robbins. “Save It,” an obscure single from 1959, was covered by the garage-punks the Cramps on their 1983 album, “Off the Bone.”One of Mr. Robbins’s instrumental albums, “Country Instrumentalist of the Year,” won a Grammy Award for best country instrumental performance in 1978.Working as a session musician was nevertheless his stock in trade, as a scene from Robert Altman’s 1971 movie “Nashville” memorably attests. Upbraiding his recording engineer when a hippie piano player nicknamed Frog shows up to work on their session instead of Mr. Robbins, the narcissistic country singer played by Henry Gibson shouts, “When I ask for Pig, I want Pig!”Mr. Robbins performing at the Country Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2012.Wade Payne/Invision, via Associated PressMr. Robbins was named country instrumentalist of the year by the Country Music Association in 1976 and 2000. Even after he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2012, he continued — then in his 70s — to do studio work with latter-day hitmakers like Miranda Lambert and Sturgill Simpson.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Losing his eyesight may or may not have helped Mr. Robbins cultivate a keener musical sensibility. His playing, in any case, revealed a commitment to listening and imagination that had him responding to his collaborators with a singular depth of feeling.“Pig Robbins is the best session man I’ve ever known,” said Charlie McCoy, a fellow A-Teamer, at a reception held in Mr. Robbins’s honor at the Country Music Hall of Fame. “Anytime Pig’s on a session everyone else plays better.”“If you’re going to be a good player,” Mr. Robbins said at the event, “you have to come up with something that will complement the song and the singer.” More

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      Tito Matos, Virtuoso of a Puerto Rican Sound, Dies at 53

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      A lifelong champion of the plena genre, he helped rejuvenate it for a new generation both in Puerto Rico and in New York.Tito Matos, a master percussionist, revered educator and lifelong champion of the Puerto Rican style of music known as plena, died on Jan. 18 in San Juan, P.R. He was 53.His wife, Mariana Reyes Angleró, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Matos was a virtuoso of the requinto, the smallest and highest-pitched hand-held drum, or pandereta, used in plena. Rooted in African song traditions, plena emerged in the early 20th century on the southern coast of Puerto Rico and came to be known as “el periódico cantado,” or “the sung newspaper.” In street-corner style, it narrated stories, some gossipy, about love and the concerns of everyday working-class and Black Puerto Ricans. In its early years, wealthy elites maligned the genre.Mr. Matos was a member of multiple plena groups but first gained wide recognition with the band Viento de Agua, founded in New York in 1996. It reimagined plena and bomba, another Afro-Puerto Rican style of music and dance, by infusing them with jazz textures, exuberant horn sections and Cuban batá rhythms.For Mr. Matos, the band’s first album, “De Puerto Rico al Mundo” (1998), opened the door to a dynamic career that transformed him into one of the foremost plena practitioners of his generation.Héctor René Matos Otero was born on June 15, 1968, in the Río Piedras district of San Juan, one of three children of Héctor Matos Gámbaro and Hilda I. Otero Maldonado. His father was an accountant and a salsa enthusiast; his mother is a homemaker.Raised in Villa Palmeras, a barrio of the Santurce section that is considered a nexus of bomba and plena, Héctor embraced plena as an 8-year-old when his grandfather gave him his first pandereta, for the Three Kings Day holiday. Héctor had no formal musical training and could not read sheet music, but his love for plena was planted.He moved to New York in 1994 and eventually completed a degree in landscape architecture at City College. He entered a new diasporic community of musicians, joining Los Pleneros de la 21, an intergenerational East Harlem ensemble, and learning from plena masters who had migrated to New York in the 1940s and ’50s.Mr. Matos, third from left, playing the pandereta in 2014. “He got a lot of young people to just pick up a pandereta,” a friend said, “who were not necessarily interested in plena.”Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIn New York, he met Ricardo Pons and Alberto Toro, two saxophonist-arrangers. “Tito was addicted to plena,” Mr. Pons said in a phone interview. “Un fiebrú,” he added, laughing, “like he had a fever.”Historically, only certain families were custodians of plena, charged with keeping its traditions and rhythms alive. “It was a problem, because they were very restrictive,” Mr. Matos said in an interview in 2010.Instead, Viento de Agua sought innovation. “It was not about conserving plena or bomba,” Mr. Pons said; “it was about doing whatever we wanted with it.”The group’s album “De Puerto Rico al Mundo” was infused with an irreverent, imaginative spirit. Writing in The New York Times, Peter Watrous praised it as “exuberant and raucous.”The group performed in Mexico, Cuba and across the United States, sometimes accompanied by a full jazz band.“Tito was super, super gregarious and charismatic,” Ed Morales, a journalist, author and friend of Mr. Matos, said in a phone interview. Mr. Matos, he added, had a special ability to reach Puerto Ricans both on the island and in the diaspora and instill in them a sense of communion — particularly when he performed at a biennial concert at Hostos Community College in the Bronx.“You really got to feel the connection between people in Puerto Rico and people in New York more than almost any other place,” Mr. Morales said.In the early 2000s Mr. Matos returned to Puerto Rico, where he became an educator and cultural advocate. He co-founded Plenazos Callejeros, a monthly initiative that gathered musicians across Puerto Rico for spontaneous plena performances on street corners.“He got a lot of young people to just pick up a pandereta,” Mr. Morales said — “people who were not necessarily interested in plena, because maybe they thought it sounded corny or something, or it wasn’t like salsa or hip-hop or reggaeton.”Today, plena is undergoing a cultural renaissance; in recent years it has played a central role in progressive political gatherings and protests in Puerto Rico, including those in the summer of 2019 that led to the resignation of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló.Subsequent projects led Mr. Matos to collaborate with stars like Eddie Palmieri, Ricky Martin and the jazz saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón. Mr. Matos later founded the band La Máquina Insular, which focused on returning plena back to its roots.In 2015, he and his wife founded La Junta, a bar and performance space in Santurce, where they hosted live music and plena workshops. Hurricane Maria destroyed the space in 2017, but its spirit was revived in “La Casa de la Plena,” a historical exhibition, curated by the couple, that opened in May 2021 at the Taller Comunidad La Goyco, a community center they established in an abandoned Santurce school building they had renovated.In addition to his mother and his wife, whom he married in 2013, Mr. Matos is survived by their son, Marcelo; two children from previous marriages that ended in divorce, Celiana and Héctor; a brother, Yan Matos Otero; and a sister, Glennis Matos Otero.A procession this month honoring Mr. Matos in San Juan drew hundreds.Taller Comunidad – La GoycoOn Jan. 21, Mr. Matos was honored with an immense procession in Santurce. Friends, family members and dozens of fans walked the streets, drumming on panderetas and singing words of gratitude. “Muchas gracias, te amamos,” they chanted — “Thank you very much. We love you.” More

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      Beegie Adair, a Jazz Master in Country Music’s Capital, Dies at 84

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      In a city defined by honky-tonks and string ties, she had a 60-year career as a jazz pianist and a mainstay of the local scene.Beegie Adair, whose status as a renowned jazz pianist was all the more noteworthy for the place where she built her career — Nashville, the home of country music — died on Jan. 23 at her residence in Franklin, Tenn. She was 84.Monica Ramey, her manager and frequent vocal partner, confirmed the death. She did not provide a cause but said Ms. Adair had been in failing health.If you happened to live in Nashville and found yourself more a fan of Cole Porter than Porter Waggoner, chances are you came across Ms. Adair at some point in her six-decade career. Starting in the early 1960s, she could be found at least once a week playing at the Carousel, a downtown nightclub, or later at F. Scott’s, a restaurant in the Green Hills neighborhood.Being a jazz musician in Nashville is something like being a surfer in Las Vegas, and those who make it need flexibility and hustle — qualities Ms. Adair possessed in surplus.She played hotel lobbies and retirement homes. She and her husband, Billy Adair, wrote jingles for television commercials. And she was in constant demand as a session musician, appearing on more than 100 albums by a wide range of artists, including Dolly Parton, Henry Mancini, and Mama Cass Elliot.“She was omnipresent,” Roger Spencer, who played bass in the Beegie Adair Trio, said in an interview. “If there was an opportunity to play, she was there.”Ms. Adair mostly played American songbook standards, with a restrained, relaxed technique. She adapted to the venue: If it was a restaurant, she receded to the background; in a club, she could dominate the room.“I’ve played with her in just about every kind of musical setting you can play in Nashville over the years,” George Tidwell, a veteran Nashville jazz trumpeter, said in an interview. “And I never played anything where I didn’t think she was the right person to do it.”She released her first album, “Escape to New York,” in 1991. A few years later she formed her trio, with Mr. Spencer on bass and Chris Brown on drums. They toured frequently, including trips to Tokyo and London. Starting in 2011, they played annual gigs at Birdland, in Midtown Manhattan, and later added regular shows at Feinstein’s/54 Below, also in Midtown. They recorded 35 albums and, according to Ms. Ramey, sold some two million copies over the last four decades.Back home, Ms. Adair was the de facto leader of Nashville’s jazz scene, especially during a rough stretch in the 1970s and ’80s when venues closed and gigs were few. What kept her going was the knowledge, not always obvious to the outside observer, that the scene was larger than it seemed, with musicians playing country for the money and jazz for themselves, even if it meant nothing more than jam sessions in someone’s basement.“There are a lot of wonderful jazz players here that don’t get heard often because they’re doing studio work all of the time,” she told The Nashville Banner in 1997. “Every horn player that does studio work is probably a jazz player underneath their skin.”In addition to working steadily as a jazz pianist, Ms. Adair was in constant demand as a session musician.via Adair Music GroupBobbe Gorin Long was born on Dec. 11, 1937, in Cave City, Ky., a small town about halfway between Nashville and Louisville. She began taking piano lessons at 5 and by her teenage years was playing in clubs in Tennessee and Kentucky.Her parents, Bobbe (Martin) Long and Arthur Long, ran a gas station, where young Bobbe also worked when she wasn’t playing piano. To differentiate her from her mother, her father called her “B.G.,” after her first two initials, and the nickname stuck.Ms. Adair graduated with a degree in music education from Western Kentucky University in 1958. After teaching music for three years in Owensboro, Ky., she moved to Nashville for graduate studies in education at Peabody College, now a part of Vanderbilt University.But she was already building a career as a musician in the city’s downtown clubs, especially along Printers Alley, then and now a center of Nashville nightlife. By 1963 she had dropped out of Peabody to play music full time.Ms. Adair came under the wing of the saxophonist Boots Randolph, a resident musician at the Carousel best known for his 1963 hit “Yakety Sax.” He got her gigs and introduced her to the city’s many producers and studio managers, who, though they mostly recorded country and rock ’n’ roll, were always looking for talented, dependable session musicians.Another local music luminary, the guitarist and producer Chet Atkins, was the first to bring her on as a regular at his recording sessions, and his recommendations brought her a steady stream of work in and out of the studio. She played in the house band for “The Johnny Cash Show” and for the local TV host Ralph Emery (who also died this month).She married Mr. Adair in 1974. He died in 2014. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Adair was a prolific musician in his own right, and he built a career as an instructor, eventually becoming a professor at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. In 1995, the couple joined Mr. Spencer and his wife, Lori Mechem, to start the Nashville Jazz Workshop.The workshop trained a new generation of jazz musicians in Nashville, and in recent decades the scene there has started to make a comeback, with its former students starting to win national recognition. In 2016, Ms. Adair and her trio were invited to play Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York. “The best thing of all for us was that there were a lot of our fans from Nashville in attendance,” she told The Nashville Scene in 2016, a few days after the show. “I think our appearance there is another indicator that people all over the country recognize that there are great jazz musicians here, and that there is an audience for the music.” More

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      Carol Speed, Vixen of the Blaxploitation Era, Dies at 76

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      In the mid-70s, thanks to two beloved B movies, she had a moment in the spotlight and enjoyed celebrity status in the Black press.Carol Speed, the leading lady of the cult blaxploitation films “The Mack” and “Abby,” who used her sex appeal for poignant drama in one and campy horror in the other, died on Jan. 14 in Muskogee, Okla. She was 76.Her family announced her death in a statement published online. It did not specify the cause.A button-nosed Californian, Ms. Speed became a B-movie headliner in the 1970s playing a demon and a prostitute. For those roles, her fresh-faced prettiness provided a dramatic contrast, making it all the more striking for her to portray a character in the throes of lurid desire or enmeshed in a melancholy plight.The blaxploitation genre — a burst of low-budget movies in the 1970s that starred Black actors and dealt with gritty urban themes — often featured female characters who were forced against their will into danger and squalor. But it also accorded them powers unusual for women in mainstream Hollywood movies of the time. Like blaxploitation’s most famous actress, Pam Grier, Ms. Speed fit that mold.In the horror film “Abby” (1974), she played the title character, a middle-class marriage counselor in Louisville, Ky., who dotes on her husband and sings in the choir of the church where he preaches — until she is possessed by an ancient Nigerian devil known as Eshu. It was the sort of movie where the resident exorcist wears bell bottoms and a luxurious mustache, and where Satan’s playing field lies under a disco ball.Ms. Speed’s smile caused her to scrunch up her face, a seemingly sweet gesture that she turned into a twisted instrument for expressions of lust and violent glee. During one sequence, she toggled back and forth between embodying a distraught loving wife and a demon with super strength.A few months after it was released on Christmas Day, The New York Times called “Abby” among the most financially successful B movies of its time. Yet following a lawsuit from Warner Bros. that accused it of stealing the plot of “The Exorcist” (1973), the movie was pulled from theaters. In the years to come, viewing “Abby” became a rare and sought-after opportunity for fans.Ms. Speed, left, with Terry Carter and Juanita Moore in a scene from “Abby.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMs. Speed appeared in several other blaxploitation movies, most notably “The Mack” (1973), a classic of the genre in which she played the girlfriend and head prostitute of the pimp protagonist (played by Max Julien, who died this month). In the 1970s, Ms. Speed also acted in other low-budget movies and on TV shows, including “Julia” and “Sanford and Son.”“Seems like everywhere I turn I’m getting one offer or another,” she told Jet magazine in 1973.Ms. Speed made frequent appearances in the Black press of that era as a quotable and photogenic celebrity. She was among the “Bachelorettes ’72” featured in Ebony, and she was on the July 1976 cover of Jet, which said she “often has been characterized as a sex symbol.” A photograph of her at a 1975 charity tennis tournament appeared in Jet alongside pictures of Bill Cosby and Aretha Franklin at the same event. Her semi-autobiographical 1980 novel, “Inside Black Hollywood,” was “scandalous” and became “the talk of the town,” according to Jet.Carol Ann Bennett Stewart was born on March 14, 1945, in Bakersfield, Calif., to Cora Valrie Stewart and Freddie Lee Stewart. At San Jose City College, she staged a popular production of “The Bronx Is Next,” Sonia Sanchez’s play about Black revolutionaries. She soon received a scholarship to study at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.Her career started at a casino in Reno, Nev., where she worked as a backup singer to the pop star Bobbie Gentry.Ms. Speed’s real life had its share of blaxploitation-style drama. While she was filming “The Mack,” her boyfriend was fatally shot in Berkeley, Calif. Around that time, she was struggling to afford her home in Hollywood Hills, trying to support her son, Mark Speed, and throwing another man out of her house. He left, but he took many of her possessions with him — even her bedspread.Then Ms. Speed was cast in the movie for which she would become best known. “Abby took me out of California into a new adventure,” she said in an interview published on a website devoted to William Girdler, the director of “Abby.”“Abby” was among the most financially successful B movies of its time. But following a lawsuit from Warner Bros. that accused it of stealing the plot of “The Exorcist,” it was pulled from theaters. LMPC via Getty ImagesShe is survived by a sister, Barbara Morrison, and a grandson.During the filming of “Abby,” Ms. Speed said, multiple tornadoes tore through Louisville, and a mansion where the cast had attended a lavish party was destroyed. When Ms. Speed appeared on set in her demonic get-up, the generator started malfunctioning.Perhaps she inhabited her role too well. Her colleagues were rattled, Ms. Speed said, adding, “The crew had almost started to believe that I was possessed by the powerful sex-crazed Eshu.” More

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      Peter Robbins, Original Voice of Charlie Brown, Dies at 65

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      Mr. Robbins, who first gave voice to the “Peanuts” character in a 1965 Christmas special, had struggled with mental illness and addiction in recent years.Peter Robbins, whose voice brought the “Peanuts” character Charlie Brown to life on television in the 1960s but who struggled with mental illness and served prison time later in his life, died on Jan. 18 in Oceanside, Calif. He was 65.The cause of death was suicide, according to the San Diego County Medical Examiner.A list of his survivors was not immediately available.At age 9, Mr. Robbins achieved a breakthrough when the producers of the 1965 TV movie “A Charlie Brown Christmas” cast him as the voice of the hapless but endearing central character.Introduced in Charles M. Schulz’s popular comic strip “Peanuts,” Charlie Brown would become a sentimental presence on the screen with his catchphrase, “Good grief!,” familiar yellow shirt and frequent teasing by his friend Lucy.Mr. Robbins, who was born Louis G. Nanasi, would share in the franchise’s success, narrating at least six other television and movie productions, including “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” in 1966 and “You’re in Love, Charlie Brown” a year later.During his career, Mr. Robbins appeared in episodes of the television shows “Rawhide,” “The Munsters,” “Get Smart” and “My Three Sons,” according to IMDb.In the decades after his work as the voice of Charlie Brown, Mr. Robbins was unable to sustain his early success and publicly grappled with mental illness and substance abuse.In a 2019 interview with KSWB-TV, a Fox station in San Diego, he said that he had bipolar disorder. The station spoke to Mr. Robbins after his release from prison, where he had served 80 percent of a nearly five-year sentence for threatening several people, including the San Diego County sheriff and the property manager of a mobile home park near San Diego.In 2013, Mr. Robbins pleaded guilty to threatening his onetime girlfriend and stalking a doctor who performed breast-enhancement surgery on her, the station reported.He was arrested again in 2015 for violating the terms of this probation, according to the station, which reported that Mr. Robbins had made criminal threats toward a judge and written letters from jail offering to pay $50,000 to have William D. Gore, the San Diego County sheriff, killed.“I went on a manic phase where I bought a motor home, a mobile home, two German sports cars and a pitbull named Snoopy,” Mr. Robbins told the station in 2019.The actor said he regretted not getting help sooner for his mental illness.“I would recommend to anybody that has bipolar disorder to take it seriously,” he said, “because your life can turn around in a span of a month like it did to me.”If you are having thoughts of suicide, in the United States call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Go here for resources outside the United States.Susan Campbell Beachy More