Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Barbara Campbell Cooke, 85, Widow of the Slain Sam Cooke, Is Dead

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      They were teenage sweethearts, but their marriage turned tragic, and when she married the protégé singer Bobby Womack, the publicity was intense and the boos were loud.Their story started out as if lifted from one of his love songs. Sam Cooke was 18 and Barbara Campbell was only 13 when they met on the South Side of Chicago.Fifteen years later, Mr. Cooke, by then a pop superstar, was dead, murdered in a motel tryst gone awry. And only three months after his death, Barbara Campbell Cooke, his widow, would marry her husband’s protégé Bobby Womack, the gravelly-voiced soul singer and guitarist. Widely publicized, their union made them pariahs in their families, to much of the music community and to Mr. Cooke’s adoring fans.In her later years Ms. Cooke lived in relative obscurity, and when she died in April at 85, no public announcement was made, at her and her family’s wish. The death was recently confirmed by David Washington, a Detroit radio host who is close to the Cooke and Womack families. No cause was given.The Cookes’ life together and its aftermath were the stuff of Greek tragedy. Mr. Cooke, once a teenage gospel singer, was music royalty, a movie-star-handsome crooner of hits like “You Send Me” and “Wonderful World,” as well as the wrenching “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which would become a civil rights anthem.The son of a preacher, he took a firm stand in playing the American South, refusing to perform for segregated audiences. He was a canny businessman who retained the rights to his work and built a publishing and recording company to promote the work of others. He was a voracious reader, of everything from James Baldwin to William L. Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” (Aretha Franklin, who as a young singer was often on tour with him, remembered buying the book just because he had it.)He was also a voracious womanizer. Mr. Cooke was 33 when he was shot by the manager of a $3-a-night motel in Los Angeles in December 1964 while chasing a prostitute who had stolen his clothes and money. Conspiracy theories still surround the death.Barbara was his teenage sweetheart but only one of many girlfriends. She had their daughter, Linda, when she was 17; three other women would also have daughters by Mr. Cooke.Barbara and Sam had married and divorced other people before marrying each other in Chicago in 1959, with Mr. Cooke’s disapproving father, the Rev. Charles Cook, performing the ceremony. The couple settled down in Los Angeles in a vine-covered Cape in the Hollywood area. (Mr. Cooke had added an “e” to his name at the start of his career.)The marriage was a hard bargain. Mr. Cooke, steely in his ambition and chronically unfaithful, went about his life while Ms. Cooke fended for herself. In his exhaustive biography “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke” (2005), Peter Guralnick noted how Ms. Cooke, whom he had interviewed at length, had tried to keep her end up, attempting to read James Baldwin at her husband’s prompting and joining a group of philanthropic African American women known as the Regalettes. And she had her own affairs, as she explained to Mr. Guralnick.In 1963, their third child, Vincent, drowned in their pool when he was 18 months old. A year later, Mr. Cooke was dead.When Mr. Cooke died, Ms. Cooke was still numb from grief over her son’s death and humiliated by the tawdry circumstances of her husband’s murder, she told Mr. Guralnick. She said she had welcomed the 19-year-old Mr. Womack into the house as a kind of protector. She was 29 at the time. At her urging, they married in early 1965.In his own memoir, “Bobby Womack: My Story” (2006), Mr. Womack likened Ms. Cooke’s proposal to a scene out of the “The Graduate,” the 1967 film in which a dazed and disillusioned young man is seduced by a friend of his parents. “If you promise to give me five years,” Ms. Cooke told Mr. Womack, by his account, “I will give you a lifetime. You know, whatever you need to do. I just need you to walk with me here.”Mr. Womack wrote of his new wife: “She could, and did, take a lot. She could endure.” He added: “She and Sam were a pair. They lived each other. They really did.”The marriage of Ms. Cooke and the soul-singer and guitarist Bobby Womack, a protégé of Sam Cooke’s, attracted wide publicity in 1965. Mr. Cooke had been murdered three months earlier. EBONY MediaBut it upset many people to see Mr. Womack, sometimes in Mr. Cooke’s clothes, squiring Mr. Cooke’s widow about. The couple received hate mail, including a package containing a baby doll in a coffin. At a Nancy Wilson concert, when Ms. Wilson introduced the couple sitting in the audience, the crowd booed. In his telling, Mr. Womack, goaded by his new wife, took to cocaine. He also began a sexual relationship with the Cookes’ daughter, Linda, by then a teenager. When Barbara found them in bed, she shot Mr. Womack, the bullet grazing his temple. (Ms. Cooke was not charged, according to Mr. Womack’s book.) They divorced in 1970.Years later, Linda Cooke married Mr. Womack’s brother Cecil, and the couple became a recording duo, Womack & Womack. Linda now goes by the name Zeriiya Zekkariyas, a nod to her African heritage.Ms. Cooke and Bobby Womack had a son, whom they named Vincent, after the Cookes’ drowned baby. Vincent Womack struggled with drugs and alcohol, his father wrote, and committed suicide in 1986 when he was 21.Bobby Womack experienced fame early on when the Rolling Stones covered his 1964 song “It’s All Over Now,” their first No. 1 hit. He died in 2014 at 70, but not before suffering other tragedies. Another son of his, Truth, died when he was a baby, and Mr. Womack’s brother Harry was murdered by a girlfriend.“I don’t speak to Barbara no more,” Mr. Womack wrote in his memoir. “Linda doesn’t speak to her. Haven’t spoken to Cecil for years. No one speaks to no one.”Barbara Campbell and her twin sister, Beverly, were born on Aug. 10, 1935, in Chicago. She attended Doolittle Elementary School. Mr. Cooke had graduated from high school when they met, but Barbara, a teenage mother, worked two jobs to support herself and her child.In 1986, when Mr. Cooke was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Ms. Cooke stood by Mr. Cooke’s father to accept the award on the singer’s behalf.“I think if Sam were able to be here tonight, he would be thrilled just to see me on this stage,” Mr. Cooke’s father declared. (The elder Mr. Cook had not initially been thrilled with his son’s transition from gospel to secular music.)Ms. Cooke is survived by Ms. Zekkariyas and another daughter, Tracey Cooke; her twin sister, Beverley Lopez; and a granddaughter.Family members and Mr. Guralnick declined to speak about Ms. Cooke’s life and death, citing her wish for privacy.But Ms. Cooke had the last words in Mr. Guralnick’s nearly 750-page biography. The author quoted her reminiscing about falling in love with Mr. Cooke, and he with her, and about their wandering through Chicago’s Ellis Park in the snow when they were teenagers.“We’d walk around the park and fantasize,” she told Mr. Guralnick. “We didn’t have a dime between us, but you’d have thought I was the princess and he was the prince. Every time a Cadillac went by, I’d say, ‘That’s our chauffeur. He’s coming to take us to our mansion.’”She added: “Everybody wants a happy ending. That’s the way I see it.” More

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      Sarah Dash, the ‘Glue’ of the Vocal Trio Labelle, Is Dead at 76

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      She brought her church-rooted soprano and high harmonies to the rock and funk powerhouse best known for the No. 1 hit “Lady Marmalade.”Sarah Dash, a founding member of the groundbreaking, million-selling vocal trio Labelle, died on Monday. She was 76.Her death was announced on social media by Patti LaBelle and Nona Hendryx, the other members of Labelle. They did not say where she died or what the cause was.Ms. Dash brought her church-rooted soprano and high harmonies to Labelle, which began as a 1960s girl group before reinventing itself as a socially aware, Afro-futuristic rock and funk powerhouse, costumed in glittery sci-fi outfits and singing about revolution as well as earthy romance. In 1974, Labelle had a No. 1 hit, “Lady Marmalade,” and performed the first concert by a pop group — and a Black group — at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.In Ms. LaBelle’s 1996 autobiography, “Don’t Block the Blessings,” she wrote, “It was perfect harmony, the way we sounded together, the way we fit together, the way we moved together.”Ms. Hendryx, speaking by phone on Monday, described Ms. Dash as “a little ball of energy.” She added that Ms. Dash had played a crucial role in Labelle’s vocal interplay.“Sarah was very meticulous about vocal parts,” Ms. Hendryx said. “Patti and I would just want to do whatever we wanted to do, and Sarah had really great ears and was really great with harmony. That was her strength. She was the glue.”Labelle reached its commercial peak with the 1974 album “Nightbirds,” produced by Allen Toussaint with a New Orleans backup band and featuring the hit single “Lady Marmalade.”Sarah Dash was born in Trenton, N.J., on Aug. 18, 1945, the seventh of 13 children of Abraham and Mary Elizabeth Dash. Her father was a pastor, her mother a nurse. She grew up singing in the Trenton Church of Christ choir and turned to secular music as a teenager. She met Ms. Hendryx when the two girls’ church choirs shared a bill, and invited her to join her in the Del-Capris, a local doo-wop quintet.In 1961, Ms. Dash and Ms. Hendryx joined Patricia Holte and Cynthia Birdsong, members of a Philadelphia group, the Ordettes, to form a quartet, which they named the Blue Belles. Because there was already another group called the Bluebells, Ms. Holte adopted the name Patti LaBelle and the group became Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles (sometimes spelled Blue Belles or Bluebells).Their first hit was not actually by them; “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman” was recorded by a Chicago girl group, the Starlets. But because of contractual complications, the single was credited to the Bluebelles, who performed it on tour and on television.The Bluebelles had minor hits of their own with gospel-charged versions of standard songs including “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “Danny Boy,” and the group worked through the 1960s on the R&B circuit, recording on the Newtown, Cameo-Parkway and Atlantic labels. For years, they played three shows a night, up to 300 nights a year, at clubs and theaters; in New York City, they became known as the Sweethearts of the Apollo.Labelle performing on Cher’s television variety show in 1976. From left: Nona Hendryx, Ms. Dash and Patti LaBelle.CBS via Getty ImagesMs. Birdsong left the group to join the Supremes in 1967, but the trio persevered. In 1966, the group had performed on the BBC pop program “Ready, Steady, Go!,” and the members had stayed in contact with a producer from the show, Vicki Wickham. Ms. Wickham became their manager, along with the Who’s management team, Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert.The Bluebelles metamorphosed into Labelle in 1970. Abandoning the formal gowns and wigs of a girl group for jeans, tie-dye and Afros, the group moved from the R&B circuit to rock clubs like the Bitter End in Manhattan.In 1971, Labelle released its self-titled debut album and collaborated with Laura Nyro on her album “Gonna Take a Miracle”; the group also opened for the Who on an arena tour. The trio’s 1972 album, “Moon Shadow,” started with the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”; its 1973 album, “Pressure Cookin’,” featured a medley of the Thunderclap Newman song “Something in the Air” and Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”Along with its sociopolitical messages, Labelle adopted a new look designed by Larry LeGaspi: “campy space costumes of channel-quilted metallic leather, disclike cowls and boots with stratospherically high stacked heels,” as Guy Trebay wrote in The New York Times. Labelle was at the forefront of glam-rock and Afro-Futurism.While Ms. LaBelle’s acrobatic voice often dominated Labelle’s arrangements, Ms. Dash was prominent in songs like “(Can I Speak to You Before You Go to) Hollywood.”Labelle reached its commercial peak with the 1974 album “Nightbirds,” produced by Allen Toussaint with a New Orleans backup band. Although most of its songs were written by Ms. Hendryx, its hit was by Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan: “Lady Marmalade,” a tale of a memorable New Orleans prostitute, with the refrain “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?”Labelle made two more albums, “Phoenix” and “Chameleon,” before breaking up in 1977, with its members pulling in different musical directions: disco for Ms. Dash and Ms. LaBelle, rock for Ms. Hendryx. They moved into solo careers, and Ms. Dash started hers with a hit in 1978: “Sinner Man,” from her solo album simply titled “Sarah Dash,” the first of four she made in the 1970s and ’80s. “Oo-La-La, Too Soon,” from her 1980 album “Oo-La-La, Sarah Dash,” was turned into a commercial jingle for Sasson jeans.Ms. Dash in performance at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 2012. After Labelle broke up in 1977, she began her solo career in 1978 with a hit single, “Sinner Man.” Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesShe also recorded widely as a session singer — with Nile Rodgers, the Marshall Tucker Band, the O’Jays, Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones. She looked back on her career in the 1990s with one-woman shows and an autobiography, “A Dash of Diva.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Dash stayed in touch with the members of Labelle and appeared on solo albums by Ms. LaBelle and Ms. Hendryx. The trio had a club hit together in 1995 with “Turn It Out,” heard on the soundtrack of the movie “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.” In 2008, Labelle reunited for a full album, “Back to Now,” followed by a tour.Ms. Dash gave her final performance on Saturday night, two days before her death, when she joined Ms. LaBelle during a performance in Atlantic City.“Sarah Dash was an awesomely talented, beautiful and loving soul who blessed my life and the lives of so many others in more ways than I can say,” Ms. LaBelle posted on social media. “And I could always count on her to have my back!” More

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      Saadi Yacef, ‘Battle of Algiers’ Catalyst and Actor, Dies at 93

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      At the center of the Algerian effort to throw off French rule, he re-created that role in Gillo Pontecorvo’s searing 1966 movie, based on a book by Mr. Yacef.Saadi Yacef, a revolutionary leader who fought French rule in Algeria in the 1950s and then set in motion — and acted in — “The Battle of Algiers,” Gillo Pontecorvo’s acclaimed 1966 film about the long anti-colonialism struggle, died on Sept. 10 in Algiers, the capital. He was 93.His daughter Zaphira Yacef, who confirmed the death, said he had had heart problems.Mr. Yacef became involved in opposition movements while still a teenager and in 1954 joined the Front de Libération Nationale, the F.L.N., the leading nationalist organization during the war for independence. The war lasted from 1954 to 1962, ending with the country’s liberation from France.He became the organization’s military chief in Algiers in 1956, ordering bombings and other guerrilla attacks until his arrest by French paratroopers the next year in the part of the city known as the casbah. He was sentenced to death.“While I was in prison the executions were always done at dawn,” he told The Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, in 2007, “so when I saw the sun coming through the prison bars I knew I was going to live through another day. But I was very certain that I would be executed.”Charles de Gaulle, who was elected president of France in 1958, eventually set Mr. Yacef free. That began an entirely different chapter in Mr. Yacef’s life. While in prison he had written “Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger” (“Memories of the Battle of Algiers”), his account of a particularly violent three-year portion of the war.Once Algeria became independent, the F.L.N., ruling the country, sought to commission a film about the freedom fight, with Mr. Yacef leading the effort.“At that time,” he told Le Monde in 2004, “everyone swore by Italian neorealism. That’s why I went to Italy to look for a screenwriter and a director for ‘The Battle of Algiers.’”With a script based on his book, he met with Mr. Pontecorvo, who was said to have been considering his own movie about the Algerian War, one that he hoped would star Paul Newman as a French paratrooper turned journalist. Mr. Yacef and his backers nixed that idea, and Mr. Pontecorvo found Mr. Yacef’s script propagandistic, but they continued to talk. Mr. Yacef arranged to bring Mr. Pontecorvo and his screenwriter, Franco Solinas, to Algiers for an extended stay so they could study up on the revolution, see locations where the fighting had occurred and meet people who had fought.The resulting movie, filmed in Algeria with Mr. Yacef as a producer, had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 and caused a sensation for its startling realism. Some scenes, especially of bombings, looked so authentic that the film in its initial showings was preceded by a disclaimer saying that no newsreel footage had been used.“There are a couple of sequences which look very dangerous,” the director Steven Soderbergh said in a video for the Criterion Collection when it released a fresh version of the film in 2004. “I don’t know if you could do them now.”Mr. Pontecorvo, who died in 2006, used nonactors almost exclusively, including Mr. Yacef, who played a character largely based on himself.“Pontecorvo insisted that I appear in the film,” he told Le Monde. “I had to play in the movies moments that I had lived seven years before. The war, the prison, the torture — all of this was still fresh in my memory.”Mr. Yacef in 2012. “While I was in prison the executions were always done at dawn,” he said of his incarceration by the French, “so when I saw the sun coming through the prison bars I knew I was going to live through another day. But I was very certain that I would be executed.”Ryad Kramdi/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSaadi Yacef was born on Jan. 20, 1928, in Algiers to Mohamed and Keltoum Yacef, who were bakers. His schooling was interrupted by World War II when the Allies commandeered his school for use as a barracks.After the war Saadi was apprenticed to become a baker as well. He also played soccer for one of Algeria’s top teams, the Union Sportive de la Médina d’Alger, from 1952 to 1954. By then he had also been pulled into the growing anticolonial movement.In addition to his daughter Zaphira, Mr. Yacef, who lived in Algiers, is survived by his wife, Baya Boudjema Yacef, whom he married in 1965; four other children, Salima, Saida, Omar and Amin; and nine grandchildren.The revolution that Mr. Yacef helped further was known for atrocities on both sides, and Mr. Pontecorvo’s film, which focused on the fighting in Algiers from 1954 to 1957, did not pull punches.“Apart from Orson Welles, no one before had so imaginatively imitated the look of a newsreel,” the film critic Stuart Klawans wrote in The New York Times in 2004, “although Welles had pulled the trick only for the ‘March of Time’ segment of ‘Citizen Kane,’ whereas Mr. Pontecorvo kept up his illusion for 123 minutes.”The movie won the Golden Lion in Venice, that festival’s top award, and in 1967 it was chosen to kick off the New York Film Festival. It was nominated for Oscars for best foreign language film, screenplay and director.The movie has been studied over the years both by militant groups like the Black Panthers and by the Pentagon. Mr. Yacef, who later in life served as a senator in Algeria’s national assembly, readily acknowledged that orders he had issued resulted in many deaths, but he drew a distinction between actions committed in the cause of liberation and the actions of more recent groups in exporting terrorism. He had particular disdain for suicide bombings, a tactic his resistance fighters did not employ.“The fight gave meaning to our lives,” he said in 2007. “We weren’t in it to die.” More

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      Irma Kalish, TV Writer Who Tackled Social Issues, Dies at 96

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      A female trailblazer in the TV industry, she and her husband took on topics like rape and abortion in writing for sitcoms like “All in the Family” and “Maude.”Irma Kalish, a television writer who tackled abortion, rape and other provocative issues in many of the biggest comedy hits of the 1960s and beyond as she helped usher women into the writer’s room, died on Sept. 3 in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 96. Her death, at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home, was attributed to complications of pneumonia, her son, Bruce Kalish, a television producer, said.Ms. Kalish’s work in television comedy broke the mold for female writers. What women there were in the industry around midcentury had mostly been expected to write tear-jerking dramas, but beginning in the early 1960s Ms. Kalish made her mark in comedy, notably writing for Norman Lear’s caustic, socially conscious sitcoms “All in the Family” and its spinoff “Maude” in the ’70s.She did much of her writing in partnership with her husband, Austin Kalish. They shared offices at studios around Los Angeles, usually working at facing desks producing alternating drafts of scripts.“When I became a writer, I was one of the very first woman comedy writers and later producers,” Ms. Kalish said in an oral history for the Writers Guild Foundation in 2010. She added, referring to her husband by his nickname, “One producer actually thought that I must not be writing — I must be just doing the typing, and Rocky was doing the writing.”To combat sexism in the industry, she said, “I just became one of the guys.”Ms. Kalish moderated an event sponsored by the Writers Guild in Los Angeles. She made a mark writing for Norman Lear’s topical sitcoms “All in the Family” and “Maude.”  Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times via GettyWriting for “Maude,” Ms. Kalish and her husband, who died in 2016, worked on the contentious two-part episode “Maude’s Dilemma” (1972), in which the title character, a strong-minded suburban wife and grandmother in her late 40s (played by Bea Arthur), had an abortion. When it was broadcast, Roe v. Wade had just been argued in the United States Supreme Court and would be decided within months, making abortion legal nationwide. Controversy over the episode rose swiftly; dozens of CBS affiliates declined to show it.Mr. and Ms. Kalish earned a “story by” credit, and Susan Harris was credited as the script writer; Mr. Kalish said in an interview in 2012 that he and Ms. Kalish had come up with the idea for the episode.Lynne Joyrich, a professor in the modern culture and media department at Brown University, called the episode a watershed moment for women’s issues onscreen. “Maude’s Dilemma” and episodes like it, she said, demonstrated “the way in which the everyday is also political.”The Kalishs’ takes on social issues also found their way into “All in the Family.” One episode centered on Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton), the wife of the bigoted Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), weathering a breast cancer scare. Another focused on the couple’s daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers), as the victim of a rape attempt.The topical scripts “elevated us in the eyes of the business,” Mr. Kalish said in a joint interview with Ms. Kalish for the Archive of American Television conducted in 2012.Mr. and Ms. Kalish were executive producers of another 1970s hit sitcom, “Good Times,” about a Black family in a Chicago housing project, and continued to write for that program and numerous others.Ms. Kalish’s career spanned decades, beginning in the mid-1950s, and included writing credits for more than three dozen shows, many that would make up a pantheon of baby boomers’ favorite sitcoms, among them “The Patty Duke Show,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “My Favorite Martian,” “F Troop,” “My Three Sons” and “Family Affair.” She also had producing credits on some 16 shows, including “The Facts of Life” and “Valerie.”Ms. Kalish’s work laid a track for other female sitcom writers to follow. As she said to the comedian Amy Poehler in an interview in 2013 for Ms. Poehler’s Web series, “Smart Girls at the Party,” “You are a descendant of mine, so to speak.”Ms. Poehler, beaming, agreed.Irma May Ginsberg was born on Oct. 6, 1924, in Manhattan. Her mother, Lillian (Cutler) Ginsberg, was a homemaker. Her father, Nathan Ginsberg, was a business investor.Irma attended Julia Richman High School on the Upper East Side and went on to Syracuse University, where she studied journalism and graduated in 1945. She married Mr. Kalish, the brother of a childhood friend, in 1948 after corresponding with him while he was stationed in Bangor, Maine, during World War II.After the couple moved to Los Angeles, Mr. Kalish became a comedy writer for radio and television. Ms. Kalish worked as an editor for a pulp magazine called “Western Romance” before leaving to stay home with their two children. Her first writing credit, on the dramatic series “The Millionaire,” came in 1955.She joined the Writers Guild in 1964 and began writing with her husband more consistently. The Writer’s Guild Foundation, in their “The Writer Speaks” video series, called them “one of the more successful sitcom-writer-couples of the 20th century.”Ms. Kalish was active in the Writers Guild of America West chapter and in Women in Film, an advocacy group, serving as its president.The couple’s last television credit was in 1998, for the comedy series “The Famous Jett Jackson,” which was produced by their son, Bruce. They wrote a script dealing with ageism.Along with her son, she is survived by her sister and only sibling, Harriet Alef; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Her daughter, Nancy Biederman, died in 2016. In the interview with the Archive of American Television, Ms. Kalish expressed her desire to be known as her own person, not just Austin Kalish’s wife and writing partner.“Sure, God made man before woman,” she said, “but then you always do a first draft before you make a final masterpiece.” More

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      Anthony Johnson, Actor Known for ‘Friday,’ Dies at 55

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      Mr. Johnson, whose other film credits include “House Party” and “Menace II Society,” died on Sept. 6, his agent said.Anthony Johnson, an actor and comedian known for small but memorable roles in “Friday,” “House Party” and about two dozen other movies, died on Sept. 6. He was 55.His death, in a hospital in Los Angeles County, Calif., was confirmed by his agent, LyNea Bell, and the county medical examiner’s office; neither specified a cause.Mr. Johnson is perhaps best known for playing Ezal, a drug addict and thief who unintentionally interrupts a heist, in the 1995 movie “Friday,” starring Ice Cube. Mr. Johnson’s other film credits, sometimes as A.J. Johnson, include “House Party” (1990), “Menace II Society” (1993) and “B.A.P.S.” (1997).Mr. Johnson was born on Feb. 1, 1966, and grew up in Compton, Calif.“If you made it out of Compton, you can make it anywhere,” he said in a 2018 interview with VladTV. “You had to be really careful and watch yourself back in them days.”In a 2013 interview for a YouTube series called “Conversations of an Actor,” Mr. Johnson said his father, Eddie Smith, was a stuntman who worked with Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall and other stars. His father, he said, helped him get his start in the industry by getting him involved in work behind the scenes.“He told me whenever I’m on camera to always stand out, to do something on camera to make people remember me,” Mr. Johnson said in the 2018 interview.In the 2013 interview, Mr. Johnson said he had never taken an acting class.“It’s, like, real easy to act,” he said. “You just put yourself in the situation that you’re not in but you really want to be in.”Mr. Johnson’s survivors include his wife, Lexis, and three children, as well as a brother, Edward Smith, and a sister, Sheila.As the news of Mr. Johnson’s death spread on Monday, actors and performers shared memories and brief appreciations on social media. Ice Cube described Mr. Johnson on Twitter as a “naturally funny dude.”The rapper and actor Shad Moss, who is also known by his stage name, Bow Wow, credited Mr. Johnson with helping to set his career in motion. In a video on Instagram, he said that Mr. Johnson had been serving as the M.C. on the 1993 Chronic Tour, headlined by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, when he picked Mr. Moss out of the crowd and invited him backstage.“If it wasn’t for A.J. Johnson’s eyes, and then picking me out of the crowd out of 20,000 people in Ohio, I don’t think there would have ever been a Bow Wow,” he said. “You will truly be missed, and you’re definitely going to go down in history as one of the greatest.”In addition to performing standup comedy and acting in movies, Mr. Johnson said in 2013 that he had also appeared in plays, and expressed a desire to return to the stage.“It’s like doing standup,” he said. “I love it. I love the theater. That’s where I’m going back.”Mr. Johnson said that Robin Harris, an actor and comedian who also appeared in “House Party,” had helped him early in his career, including by giving one of his first shots at doing standup.“I did about three minutes and got booed,” Mr. Johnson said in the 2013 interview. “He told me to go home and make up some jokes. I came back, and the rest is history.” More

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      Adalberto Álvarez, Latin Dance Music Maestro, Is Dead at 72

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      He was known as the “Gentleman of Son” because of his infectious enthusiasm for repopularizing the genre considered the bedrock of the Cuban sound.Adalberto Álvarez, one of Cuba’s most celebrated musicians, who as a bandleader helped revive and refashion Cuban son, a fusion of European and African styles and instruments that was vital to Latin dance music, died on Sept. 1 in a hospital in Havana. He was 72. The cause was complications of Covid-19, the official Cuban newspaper Granma said.An award-winning composer and arranger, Mr. Álvarez was known as “El Caballero del Son” (the “Gentleman of Son”) because of his passion for the genre and the infectious enthusiasm with which he repopularized it. Son is at the root of salsa, among other Latin dance genres, and is considered the bedrock of the Cuban sound.“I don’t think there is a composer more important for Cuban popular music than Adalberto,” Isaac Delgado, one of Cuba’s best-known salsa singers, said in a phone interview. “He created a sound that was very individual to him.” Mr. Delgado and Mr. Álvarez recorded an album together, “El Chévere de la Salsa-El Caballero del Son,” released in 1994.Mr. Álvarez was one of the most covered of the soneros, as singers of son are known, of the past 35 years. Salsa and merengue bands and performers like Juan Luis Guerra, El Gran Combo and Oscar De Leon have all recorded his compositions. His style influenced New York City’s salsa scene in the 1970s and ’80s as well.With his two most famous ensembles, Son 14 and Adalberto Álvarez y Su Son, Mr. Álvarez garnered numerous honors, among them a National Music Award in Cuba in 2018 and several Cubadisco awards. His first hit, in 1979, was “A Bayamo En Coche” (“To Bayamo in a Carriage”), followed by “El Regreso de Maria” (“Maria’s Return”) and, later, “Y Qué Tú Quieres Que Te Den?” (“And What Do You Want Them to Give You?”), among others.Onstage he was a crowd-pleaser, flashing a blinding smile. But he was more than an entertainer; he influenced the evolution of Cuban music by returning to its musical roots.“My main objective always is to get dancers dancing,” he said in a 2014 interview. “This is our mission, to give people joy.”Son had waned in popularity after the 1959 Cuban revolution. But in the 1970s Mr. Álvarez saw an opening and began to compose music that combined traditional elements of son with more modern Latin dance music, like salsa and timba. He emphasized son instruments, like the tres, a signature Cuban guitar with three sets of double strings. He then threw in son’s vocal improvisations and its famous call-and-response pattern and incorporated the double-entendre lyrics found in the trova, a troubadour-based musical genre.This ajiaco, or stew, of traditional and modern made Mr. Álvarez unique among Cuban bandleaders at the time, said Marysol Quevedo, an expert in Cuban music and an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Miami. “What he represents was this perfect hybrid of the traditional and influences from abroad,” she said.Unlike many Cuban artists of the era, Mr. Álvarez received permission from Cuba’s Communist government to travel abroad, starting with a trip to Venezuela in 1980. (President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba expressed condolences on his death.) This freedom of movement gave him access to Latin music outside Cuba and kept him in touch with contemporary musical trends. In 1999, after he and his band performed in New York City, Peter Watrous of The New York Times called their sound “modern and unstoppable.”Mr. Álvarez served as a groundbreaker in other ways. A priest in the Yoruba religion La Regla de Ocha-Ifá, he was one of the first Cubans to bring songs focused on his beliefs to the stage and into the recording studio. Religions like Ifá — a blend of Roman Catholicism and West African spiritual beliefs — were banned and practiced covertly in atheistic Cuba until 1992, when the government declared itself secular and barred religious discrimination. Ifá and other Santería religions are now commonplace and openly practiced.The ban did not stop Mr. Álvarez from recording, in 1991, one of his greatest hits, “Y Qué Tu Quieres Que Te Den?,” which focuses on Ifá and asks listeners to think about what they desire from the orishas, or deities. The song served as a tribute to his religion, but also as a public acknowledgment of its popularity.Adalberto Cecilio Álvarez Zayas was born Nov. 22, 1948, in Havana and grew up in Camagüey, a city in central Cuba. His father, Enrique Álvarez, was a musician, and his mother, Rosa Zayas, was both a musician and a singer.He attended the National School of Arts in Cuba, where he studied composition and orchestration. He later taught students for a spell until landing a job writing songs for the group Conjunto Rumbavana in 1972, having impressed the band’s leader, Joseíto González. It was Mr. González who introduced Mr. Álvarez to the idea of reviving Cuba’s dance tradition.Mr. Álvarez wrote one of his first songs for Rumbavana, “Con Un Besito, Mi Amor” (“With a Kiss, My Love”); another of his compositions for the group was the celebrated “El Son de Adalberto.”With his dedication to son intensifying, Mr. Álvarez moved to Santiago de Cuba, in the easternmost Oriente province, where it had originated. He formed Son 14 in 1978 and Adalberto y Su Son in 1984.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Álvarez astutely understood that son could not survive on its own; it needed to be coupled with modern life for it to be rejuvenated — a realization that led to his fresh, original sound.“I consider myself to be the bridge between contemporary music and the establishment,” he said in 2001. “All my musicians are very young. So definitely I represent the new generation.” More

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      Bennie Pete, Bandleader Who Kept the Beat After Katrina, Dies at 45

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      A tuba player and the leader of the Hot 8, one of New Orleans’s high-profile brass bands, he brought music to his fellow citizens in the difficult days after the storm.Bennie Pete, a New Orleans tuba player who co-founded and led the Hot 8, one of the city’s high-profile brass bands, and dedicated himself to preserving the musical traditions of the Big Easy after Hurricane Katrina, died on Sept. 6 at a hospital there. He was 45.His wife, Lameka Segura-Pete, said the cause was complications of sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease, and Covid-19.The soul of New Orleans is rooted in music. Second-line parades march for hours down its streets, with brass bands followed by dancers holding feathered parasols and sipping drinks. New Orleans honors its dead with jazz funerals that strut through town, celebrating life through a musical sacrament with the city.Born and raised in the Upper Ninth Ward, Mr. Pete embraced this heritage. He started playing the tuba at 10 and joined a marching band in middle school. At 18, he helped bring together two brass bands, the Looney Tunes and the High Steppers, into the Hot 8.The Hot 8 began playing for tips on Bourbon Street and in Jackson Square, in the heart of the French Quarter. They performed outside a housing project in the Central City neighborhood, where people sat down with bags of crawfish and bottles of Abita beer to listen. Mr. Pete once found himself leading a jazz funeral for a dog.“He was a popular dog for one of the popular musicians,” he told Esquire magazine in 2014, “and they threw a big second-line parade through the streets for him. They’d make a reason to party.”By 2000, the Hot 8 had established itself as part of a vanguard of young brass bands that were upholding the jazz and funk traditions of New Orleans yet playing with a contemporary sound. The Hot 8’s repertoire included songs by the Specials and Marvin Gaye, and the band incorporated rap and hip-hop into its style. The musicians led second lines on Sundays for social aid and pleasure clubs; crowds formed at night to watch them play in bars in the Treme neighborhood.After Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, the preservation of New Orleans’s musical heritage became a matter of serious concern. Countless musicians were displaced and evacuated, and longstanding jazz and blues clubs were left in ruin. Mr. Pete and a few bandmates ended up in Atlanta.Two months later, the Hot 8 regrouped to lead the first jazz funeral in New Orleans after the storm. The band played with donated instruments, and members of the procession wore salvaged pieces of finery. The parade, which honored a celebrated chef, Austin Leslie, started at Pampy’s Creole Kitchen in the Seventh Ward before ambling to the former site of Chez Helene, where a sign greeted the marchers: “We won’t bow down. Save our soul.”“Bennie wanted to play for these people to give them that New Orleans love that was missing,” his wife said of his activities after Katrina. “He and the band got busy spreading the culture around.”Maria ZbaskaAs despair weighed on the city, the Hot 8 began performing at evacuation shelters and emergency medical centers. They drove around in a van, stopping to jam for crowds until little second lines formed, before heading to another part of town. It wasn’t long before they became local heroes.“Bennie wanted to play for these people to give them that New Orleans love that was missing,” his wife said. “He and the band got busy spreading the culture around.”When Spike Lee learned of the Hot 8, he decided to feature them in his 2006 documentary about New Orleans, “When the Levees Broke,” which brought them national attention. They were signed to a British record label; they toured with Lauryn Hill and performed with Mos Def. They appeared on the HBO show “Treme” and recorded with the gospel group the Blind Boys of Alabama.But even as music returned to New Orleans after the storm, the Hot 8 endured more misfortune. Their snare drummer, Dinerral Shavers, was shot dead in his car in December 2006. It was only the latest in a series of tragedies for the band.In 1996, the trumpet player Jacob Johnson was shot in the head at his home. In 2004, the trombonist Joseph Williams was killed in an encounter with the police. And just after Katrina, the trumpeter Terrell Batiste lost his legs in a road accident.Mr. Shavers’s murder especially rattled Mr. Pete.“I wanted to move,” he told OffBeat magazine. “I was tired of New Orleans. I felt like I would be the one next.”Ultimately, Mr. Pete resolved to stay, and the Hot 8 recorded an album to honor their fallen bandmates.The Hot 8 Brass Band in 2017. From left: Christopher Cotton, Tyrus Chapman, Anthony Brooks, Harry Cook, Mr. Pete, Larry Brown, Alvarez Huntley and Andrew Calhoun.Melissa FargoReleased in 2012, “The Life & Times Of …” was nominated for a Grammy Award as best regional roots music album. The group released “Tombstone,” a sister album also based on the theme of remembrance, the next year. The Hot 8 was also featured on a 2015 compilation album, “New Orleans Brass Bands: Through the Streets of the City,” on the Smithsonian’s Folkways label.“Everything kind of worked,” Mr. Pete told Esquire. “Yeah, we are the Hot 8 who went through these things, but we’re still here, and this is who we are after the storm.”Bennie Gerald Pete Jr. was born on July 10, 1976. His father was a maintenance worker in the Garden District. His mother, Terry (Thomas) Pete, was a homemaker.As a boy, Bennie attended a Baptist church in the Seventh Ward where his maternal grandfather was pastor, and he danced in the aisles as he sang gospel music. He graduated from Alcée Fortier High School in 1994.In addition to his wife, Mr. Pete is survived by three sons, Brannon, Brennon and Bennie III; two stepdaughters, La’Shae Joseph and Laila Trask; and two sisters, Yvete and Terneisha Pete.Over the last decade, the Hot 8 began touring regularly in Europe; in New Orleans, the band performed on the vaunted stages of Tipitina’s and the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival.Mr. Pete suffered a seizure in 2014 and was diagnosed with sarcoidosis. In 2018, he underwent surgery for prostate cancer. During the lockdown, his health deteriorated and he lost 100 pounds. When the Hot 8 recently resumed their Sunday residency at the Howlin’ Wolf, Mr. Pete didn’t join them onstage.In the days after his death, brass bands in New Orleans mourned him with music. They led second lines through Treme, Central City and the Garden District. The soulful notes of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” a hymn played to send off the dead, echoed into the night. More

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      Ralph Irizarry, Innovative Latin Percussionist, Dies at 67

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      A colleague said Mr. Irizarry, who played timbales with Ray Barretto and Rubén Blades and led his own bands, expanded the instrument’s possibilities “to the nth degree.”Ralph Irizarry, a master of the timbales who played in groups led by the conga player Ray Barretto and the singer Rubén Blades before forming his own well-regarded bands, died on Sept. 5 in a hospital in Brooklyn. He was 67.His daughter, Marisa Irizarry, said the cause was multiple organ failure caused by a bacterial infection in his lungs that led to septic shock.Mr. Irizarry’s virtuosic timbale playing placed him in the tradition of masters like Tito Puente, said Bobby Sanabria, a percussionist and educator who occasionally performed with Mr. Irizarry.“Ralph took the instrument and expanded on its possibilities to the nth degree,” augmenting it with cowbells and other percussion instruments, Mr. Sanabria said in a phone interview. But he refused to use a bass drum or add to his band a drummer who played a standard trap set.“If you closed your eyes, you’d say, ‘Who the hell is playing the drums?’” Mr. Sanabria said. “Then you see this freaking guy with his two hands, his timbales, a snare drum and cymbals.”In a tribute on his website, Mr. Blades described a critical element of Mr. Irizarry’s playing.“Irizarry’s percussive lesson is clear,” he wrote. “Not everything is pyrotechnics — we must not always fill the silences.” Mr. Irizarry’s timbales “conversed,” he added, “sometimes in whispers, with a sense of syncopation, of time and rhythm always flowing, never repeated.”Throughout his career — and especially after he formed the septet Ralph Irizarry & Timbalaye in the late 1990s — Mr. Irizarry was clearheaded about the music he wanted to play.“I knew that the Latin jazz I wanted to do was going to be about Latin rhythms organized under the structure of jazz,” he said in an interview in 2015 with the Latin Jazz Network, a website dedicated to advancing the music.Reviewing a performance by Timbalaye at Scullers Jazz Club in Boston, Bob Blumenthal of The Boston Globe wrote that Mr. Irizarry and the conga player Robert Quintero “attacked the music with incredible speed and power, often starting at a fierce dynamic level and building from there.” He added, “At the same time, their precision in negotiating the breaks and shifts that spice the band’s arrangements was beyond reproach.”Ralph Irizarry was born on July 18, 1954, in East Harlem to parents from Puerto Rico. His father, Francisco, owned convenience stores, and his mother, Gloria (Sanabria) Irizarry, was a homemaker. The family moved to the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn when Ralph was 2.When Ralph was 8, he recalled, his father received a set of timbales to settle a $25 debt with a drug dealer.Mr. Irizarry once said, “I knew that the Latin jazz I wanted to do was going to be about Latin rhythms organized under the structure of jazz.” Alan Nahigian“They had real skins, probably calf skins,” Mr. Irizarry told the Latin Jazz Network. He and his two brothers made sticks out of clothes hangers and destroyed the skins in one day. But several years later, after his family had moved to South Ozone Park in Queens, a neighbor who had congas and who assumed that Ralph knew how to play them asked him to jam.He retrieved the wrecked timbales, put plastic skins on them and played with the neighbor.“I remember I hit the timbale one time and it was like love at first sight,” he said. “I felt something I have never felt before. All my skin felt it. I shook.“Two days later,” he added, recalling a trip to Manhattan, “I went to Manny’s music store on 48th Street and bought brand-new timbales, sticks, everything.”When he was 17 and gaining confidence as a timbalero, he moved with his family to Puerto Rico, where he hoped to get musical work. He did get some, but he also felt prejudice against him as a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent.Mr. Irizarry returned to New York in 1974 and after a few years was hired by Mr. Barretto, the dynamic conga player and popular bandleader. In 1983, Mr. Irizarry became a founding member of Mr. Blades’s band, Seis del Solar, which recorded albums, toured and played at Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall.“With four percussionists, two keyboardists and a bassist,” Jon Pareles wrote in a New York Times review of the band’s 1985 performance at Carnegie Hall, “Seis del Solar can sound like a stripped-down salsa group, a jazz-rock band, or both.”When Mr. Blades decided to go solo in the mid-1990s, he encouraged the band to continue to perform as an instrumental group and retain its name. They did that for a brief time, recording two albums until Mr. Irizarry decided to form his own group, Timbalaye.In 2004, Mr. Irizarry formed a second ensemble, Son Cafe, an eight-piece salsa dance band.He recorded with both bands. He also reunited with Seis del Solar for a tour that culminated with “Todos Vuelven Live,” which won the Latin Grammy for best salsa album in 2011.Mr. Irizarry stayed busy with both his bands for several years after that. But in 2015 he received a diagnosis of inclusion body myositis, a rare degenerative condition that causes muscle weakness. It forced him to stop performing in 2018.“He pushed to the very end,” his daughter said in a phone text. “It was a very big blow for him, but he never showed that much sorrow — he just knew at some point his hands and legs would keep getting weaker and weaker.”In addition to Ms. Irizarry, he is survived by his wife, Elizabeth (Jackson) Irizarry; his sons, Ralph Jr., and Marlon; his sister, Dolores Irizarry; his brothers, William and John; and five grandchildren.Mr. Irizarry was single-minded about the timbales from the start. As a teenager he would practice in the basement of his family’s house, playing along with the latest records he had bought. One day, he recalled, he was practicing and didn’t hear his father walk in.“For some reason I turned around, and my father was at the bottom of the steps of the basement, and he had a tear coming out of his eye,” he told Truth Revolution Records in a video interview in 2015, when the label released a Timbalaye album. “He had never heard me play.” More