Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Dennis ‘Dee Tee’ Thomas, Saxophonist for Kool & the Gang, Dies at 70

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      Mr. Thomas was a co-founder of the band, which was known for its hits such as “Celebration,” “Get Down on It” and “Jungle Boogie.”Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas, a saxophonist and a founding member of the band Kool & the Gang, died on Saturday in New Jersey. He was 70.Mr. Thomas died in his sleep, according to a statement from his representatives that did not specify a cause of his death or where in New Jersey he died.Mr. Thomas was a co-founder of the long-running band Kool & the Gang, known for hits such as “Celebration,” “Get Down on It” and “Jungle Boogie.” He saw the band, which experimented with sounds from soul, funk, jazz, pop and R&B, through numerous lineup changes.Mr. Thomas was a “huge personality” in the band, his representatives said, and he helped style the performers’ wardrobes to ensure “they always looked fresh.”“Dennis was known as the quintessential cool cat in the group, loved for his hip clothes and hats, and his laid-back demeanor,” the statement said.The band won a Grammy Award in 1978, the decade when several of its upbeat hits climbed the charts.Around the time the band won a Grammy, it entered a slow period before adding a new vocalist, J.T. Taylor, and adapting its sound to match the disco sensibilities of the era. The group re-emerged in 1979 with the smash “Ladies’ Night,” an ode to a night of partying and dancing.Kool & the Gang, which formed in 1964, experimented with sounds from soul, funk, jazz, pop and R&B.Echoes/RedfernsThe band members followed the hit with the 1980 song “Celebration,” a timeless classic that embodied the group’s buoyant sound. The track became a staple at sporting events and any other displays of joy and enthusiasm. The song was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress, an honor reserved for 25 songs every year that showcase the rich heritage of American music.The band members lent their voices to the 1984 charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” A number of the decade’s biggest artists recorded the track to draw attention to a famine in Ethiopia.Mr. Thomas formed Kool & the Gang in 1964 with six of his friends — Robert Bell, known as Kool; Ronald Bell; Spike Mickens; Ricky Westfield; George Brown; and Charles Smith. They first called themselves the “Jazziacs,” the statement said, before settling on the name “Kool & the Gang,” a nod to Robert Bell.“We learned that we had to simplify, that most simple music will grab a wide part of the audience,” Mr. Thomas told The New York Times in 1973, about choosing the group’s musical style. “Everybody in the group was a jazz musician at heart, but we knew we had to play R&B to make money.”Mr. Thomas was the band’s “budget hawk” in the early days, his representatives said, adding that he could be seen “carrying the group’s earnings in a paper bag in the bell of his horn.”Mr. Thomas’s alto saxophone solos were featured on several of the band’s tracks. He could also play the flute and percussion instruments, and he was the master of ceremonies at the band’s shows.His last performance with the band was on July 4 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.Dennis Thomas was born on Feb. 9, 1951, in Orlando, Fla. He and his parents moved to Jersey City, N.J., when he was 2 years old, The Times reported in 1973. He grew up in the city’s Lafayette section, where he met the other founding members of Kool & the Gang.“We want to play a universal music,” Mr. Thomas said in 1973. “We want to lift our audiences up so they think about what they’ve heard.”The band had a dozen top 10 hits on the Billboard charts, and the group received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015.Mr. Thomas was married to Phynjuar Saunders Thomas and lived in Montclair, N.J., his representatives said.One of his daughters, Michelle Thomas, was an actress on television shows, including “The Cosby Show,” “Family Matters” and “The Young and the Restless.” She died in 1998 of cancer at age 30. He was also preceded in death by another of his daughters, Tracy Jackson.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter Tuesday Rankin; his sons David Thomas and Devin Thomas; his sisters Doris Mai McClary and Elizabeth Thomas Ross; his brother Bill Mcleary; an aunt and several nieces, nephews and grandchildren, the statement said. More

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      Paul Cotton, Mainstay of the Country-Rock Band Poco, Dies at 78

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      He joined the band for its third album and expanded its emotional and stylistic palette with his sinewy, blues-inflected guitar work and brooding baritone vocals.Paul Cotton, the lead guitarist and frequent lead singer and songwriter for the country-rock band Poco, died on July 31 near his summer home in Eugene, Ore. He was 78.His wife, Caroline Ford Cotton, said he died unexpectedly but she did not cite a cause. His death came less than four months after that of Rusty Young, Poco’s longtime steel guitarist.Mr. Cotton joined Poco, replacing the founding member Jim Messina in 1970, just in time to appear on the group’s third studio album, “From the Inside” (1971). Produced by Steve Cropper, the guitarist with the Memphis R&B combo Booker T. & the MGs, the project signaled a new artistic direction for the band, maybe nowhere so much as on the three songs written by Mr. Cotton.Rooted more in rock and soul than in the country and bluegrass that had hitherto been the group’s primary influences, Mr. Cotton’s sinewy, blues-inflected guitar work and brooding baritone vocals on songs like the ballad “Bad Weather” greatly expanded Poco’s emotional and stylistic palette.“There was no doubt that he was the guy to replace Jimmy,” Richie Furay, who founded the band with Mr. Messina and was its principal lead singer, said about Mr. Cotton’s impact on the band in a 2000 interview with soundwaves.com. “We knew that he was bringing a little bit of an edge to our sound, and we wanted to be a little more rock ’n’ roll sounding.”Mr. Young said in the same soundwaves piece, referring to Mr. Furay and Poco’s longtime drummer, George Grantham: “You have to remember, we had some very high singing voices at the time. Paul had a much deeper voice, and he had that rock sound.”Poco became a major influence on West Coast country-rock acts like Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles and, a generation later, on alternative-country bands like the Jayhawks and Wilco.Poco in 1972. Seated, from left: Mr. Cotton, Timothy B. Schmit and Rusty Young. Standing: George Grantham, left, and Richie Furay. Ian Showell/Keystone, via Getty ImagesFormed in Los Angeles in 1968, the group originally consisted of Mr. Messina and Mr. Furay, both of them formerly with the influential rock band Buffalo Springfield, along with Mr. Young, Mr. Grantham and the bassist Randy Meisner, a future member of the Eagles. (Timothy B. Schmit, another future Eagle, replaced Mr. Meisner when he left the band in 1969.)Mr. Furay departed in 1973, disillusioned over the group’s lack of success compared with that of his ex-bandmates in Crosby, Stills & Nash and the Eagles, especially after the release of critically acclaimed but commercially disappointing Poco albums like “A Good Feeling to Know” (1972) and “Crazy Eyes” (1973).Poco’s remaining members carried on without Mr. Furay, with Mr. Cotton doing much of the singing and songwriting, until the group went on hiatus in 1977 and he and Mr. Young went into the studio to record as the Cotton-Young Band.In 1978, ABC, the duo’s label, released the recordings, made with British musicians who had accompanied pop hitmakers like Leo Sayer and Al Stewart, but insisted on crediting the band as Poco.“Legend,” the album that resulted, yielded an unanticipated pair of hits, the band’s first and only Top 40 singles: the glittering “Crazy Love,” written and sung by Mr. Young, which reached No. 1 on the adult contemporary chart, and the similarly burnished “Heart of the Night,” written and sung by Mr. Cotton. The album was certified platinum for sales of one million copies.Poco continued to tour and release recordings into the 2000s, with Mr. Cotton, Mr. Young and Mr. Grantham anchoring the lineup.Mr. Cotton performing at a festival in Indio, Calif., in 2009. He spent three decades on and off with Poco and also released a handful of solo albums between 1990 and 2014.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesNorman Paul Cotton, the oldest of five children, was born on Feb. 26, 1943, in Fort Rucker, Ala., in the southeast part of the state. His father, Norman, owned a line of grocery stores. His mother, Edna, kept the books for the family business. Young Norm, as he was known as the time, began playing guitar at 13.When he was 16, the Cottons moved to Chicago, where he attended Thornton Township High School. While there he started a band, eventually known as the Rovin’ Kind, that released several singles and appeared on “American Bandstand.”In 1968, after seeing them perform at a club in Chicago, the producer James William Guercio, best known for his work with the jazz-rock band Chicago, signed the group to Epic Records. Mr. Guercio advised them to change their name and relocate to Los Angeles, where they renamed themselves Illinois Speed Press. Mr. Cotton began billing himself as Paul rather than Norm.Illinois Speed Press, with Mr. Cotton and Kal David as twin lead guitarists, released a pair of roots-rock albums for Epic, to little commercial effect. Mr. Cotton was invited to join Poco in 1970, shortly after the release of the band’s second and last album, “Duet.”Besides his wife of 16 years, Mr. Cotton is survived by his sons, Chris and James; two brothers, David and Robert; two sisters, Carol and Colleen; and a grandson.Mr. Cotton spent three decades on and off with Poco and also released a handful of solo albums between 1990 and 2014. An avid fisherman and sailor, he moved to Key West, Fla., in 2005.Poco went through numerous lineup changes during its more than 40 years in existence, but one of the constants, from Mr. Cotton’s arrival in 1970 until his retirement in 2010, was his partnership with Mr. Young.“There’s always been something there,” Mr. Cotton said of his relationship with Mr. Young in 2000.Mr. Young added: “He’s never lost that voice, or that great guitar playing. I can count on him. I wouldn’t want to do this without him.” More

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      Herbert Schlosser, a Force Behind ‘S.N.L.’ and ‘Laugh-In,’ Dies at 95

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      As a top NBC executive, he wrote a memo envisioning the show that became “Saturday Night Live.” He also helped recruit Johnny Carson and oversaw a raft of hit shows.Herbert Schlosser, a longtime NBC executive who put an indelible stamp on the network by negotiating Johnny Carson’s first deal to host “The Tonight Show,” putting “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” on the air and overseeing the development of “Saturday Night Live,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his wife, Judith Schlosser.Mr. Schlosser was president of NBC in 1974 when he faced a late-night predicament: Carson no longer wanted the network to carry repeats of “Tonight” on weekends. But pleasing Carson, the network’s most important star, led to an inevitable question: What would NBC televise at 11:30 on Saturday nights?Mr. Schlosser wrote a memo in early 1975 that laid out the fundamentals of an original program that would be televised from NBC’s headquarters at Rockefeller Center; would be carried live, or at least taped on the same day, to maintain its topicality; would be “young and bright,” with a “distinctive look, a distinctive set and a distinctive sound”; would “seek to develop new television personalities”; and would have a different host each week.“Saturday Night is an ideal time to launch a show like this,” Mr. Schlosser wrote. “Those who now take the Saturday/Sunday ‘Tonight Show’ repeats should welcome this, and I would imagine we would get much greater clearance with a new show.”A sketch from the first episode of “Saturday Night Live,” seen on Oct. 11, 1975; from left, George Coe, John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Gilda Radner. The formula for the show had been spelled out in a memo by Mr. Schlosser earlier that year.Herb Ball/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty Images“Saturday Night Live,” originally called just “Saturday Night” — which followed much of Mr. Schlosser’s formula, and which was produced, then as now, by Lorne Michaels — made its debut on Oct. 11, 1975, after Game 1 of the World Series, between the Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds. Mr. Schlosser had attended the game in Boston with Bowie Kuhn, the strait-laced baseball commissioner, and invited him to his hotel room to watch.“He didn’t laugh. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s Bowie,’” Mr. Schlosser recalled in “Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of ‘Saturday Night Live’ as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests” (2002), by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. “And then after a while, he started to chuckle. And then he’d actually laugh. And I figured, ‘Well, if he likes it, it’s going to have a wider audience than most people think.’”Mr. Michaels, in a phone interview, said that Mr. Schlosser had been a staunch backer of the show.“We wouldn’t have been on the air without him,” he said. “‘Live’ was his idea, not mine. He just believed in the show. He protected it.”Mr. Schlosser, a lawyer, had been an executive in NBC’s business affairs department, where he negotiated programming contracts to carry, among other events, the 1964 Summer Olympics from Tokyo and talent deals like ones with the comedian Bob Hope, whose specials were a mainstay of NBC’s prime-time schedule.“There were always kickers to his deals,” Mr. Schlosser told the Television Academy in an interview in 2007. With each new one, NBC had to buy a piece of land from Hope, one of the largest private landowners in California.“We bought it, got capital gains and never lost money on it,” Mr. Schlosser said.In 1966, Mr. Schlosser was named NBC’s vice president for programs on the West Coast, based in Burbank, Calif. Over six years, he was involved in developing numerous shows, among them some with Black stars, like the popular comedian Flip Wilson’s variety series and “Julia,” a sitcom starring Diahann Carroll as a single nurse with a son. He also hired the first woman and the first Black person to be vice presidents in the department.Flip Wilson, left, and Richard Pryor in 1973 on “The Flip Wilson Show,” which Mr. Schlosser had helped develop.Paul W. Bailey/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesMr. Schlosser particularly championed “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” a fast-paced satirical series that made its debut in early 1968. It was considered outrageous then for the political and risqué humor of its skits, performed by a cast of future stars including Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin.George Schlatter, the executive producer of “Laugh-In,” recalled that Mr. Schlosser had protected him from those within NBC who found the show’s content offensive.“Every Tuesday morning there was a parade into his office — censors, lawyers, bookkeepers,” Mr. Schlatter said by phone. “They’d say, ‘Herb, talk to him.’ Then he’d say to me, ‘I promised them I’d talk to you.’ And he’d say, ‘Just keep doing what you’re doing.’”Herbert Samuel Schlosser was born on April 21, 1926, in Atlantic City, N.J. His father, Abraham, owned a furniture store; his mother, Anna (Olesker) Schlosser, was a homemaker.After serving stateside in the Navy, he studied public and international affairs at Princeton University, graduating in 1949. Two years later, he graduated from Yale Law School.He started as a lawyer with a Wall Street firm, but the insurance work there bored him, and he moved to Phillips Nizer Benjamin Krim & Ballon (now called Phillips Nizer LLP), a Manhattan firm with many film and television clients. That experience led to his hiring around 1957 as general counsel of California National Productions, a film, merchandising and syndication subsidiary of NBC. He later became its chief operating officer before moving to NBC’s business affairs department in 1960.Johnny Carson in his first appearance as host of “The Tonight Show,” on Oct. 1, 1962. Mr. Schlosser had led the negotiations that brought him to NBC from ABC.NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesAs a lawyer with the department, he led the talks to bring Carson to NBC to replace Jack Paar as the host of “Tonight” in 1962. At the time, Carson was with ABC as M.C. of the game show “Who Do You Trust?,” and ABC required him to fulfill the last six months of his contract.Mr. Schlosser said he had agreed to pay Mr. Carson $2,500 a week (about $21,000 today). But when ABC held up his departure, one of Mr. Carson’s agents made a further demand.“He said, ‘Now that you can’t get him, we want more money,’” Mr. Schlosser recalled in the Television Academy interview. “I said, ‘We’re sticking with our price.’”Mr. Schlosser rose steadily at NBC. He was named executive vice president of the television network in 1972; promoted to president a year later; and named president of the National Broadcasting Company, the network’s corporate parent, in 1974 and chief executive in 1977.“He supported quality programs and had an idea that news was probably the most important thing the networks did,” Bud Rukeyser, a former executive vice president of corporate communications for NBC, said in a phone interview. “He gave news the benefit of the doubt. If news wanted a half-hour to do something, the answer was always yes.”But Mr. Schlosser was ousted in 1978 and replaced by Fred Silverman, who had engineered ABC’s rise to first place in prime-time ratings as its chief of programming.Mr. Schlosser’s standing had been hurt by NBC’s inability to produce a new prime-time hit series the previous season and climb out of third place.Shortly before Mr. Schlosser left NBC, the network presented “Holocaust,” a four-part mini-series that he had greenlighted. It won eight Emmy Awards. His main contribution to the project, he said, was persuading the executive producer, Herbert Brodkin, to change the title of the series, which had been called “The Family Weiss,” after some of its main characters.Mr. Schlosser and his wife, Judith, in 2011 at an event held by the Museum of the Moving Image at the Manhattan restaurant Cipriani. Mr. Schlosser was the museum’s first chairman. Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesMr. Schlosser didn’t have to go far for his next job: He was named an executive vice president of RCA, NBC’s parent company. His assignment was to develop software for RCA’s SelectaVision videodisc project. Three years later, he was named to run all of RCA’s entertainment activities, which also included RCA Records (but not NBC).He left in 1985 to become a senior adviser at Wertheim & Company, a Wall Street investment bank, as well as chairman of the planned Museum of the Moving Image, which opened in Queens in 1988. He remained there as either chairman or co-chairman until 2013.In addition to his wife, Judith (Gassner) Schlosser, Mr. Schlosser is survived by his son, Eric, the author of “Fast Food Nation”; a daughter, Lynn Jacobson, a former television executive; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.Mr. Schlosser once recalled his certainty that “Saturday Night Live” could be a part of NBC for a long time, just as “Tonight” and “Today” were. Another model of late-night success at NBC under his watch was “The Midnight Special,” a series featuring pop and rock performers, that was broadcast on Fridays after “The Tonight Show” from 1973 until 1981.“NBC had this tradition of succeeding with shows like that,” he told the Television Academy. “To me, it was a no-brainer.” More

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      Arthur French, Negro Ensemble Company Pioneer, Dies at 89

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      He more or less stumbled into a career as an actor, but it proved to be a long and prolific one, on film, on television and especially on the stage.Arthur French, a prolific and acclaimed (if relatively unsung) actor who was a founding member of the Negro Ensemble Company, died on July 24 in Manhattan. He was 89.His death, in a hospital, was announced by his son, the playwright Arthur W. French III, in a post on Facebook.Mr. French more or less stumbled into his theatrical career. After abandoning early plans to become a preacher, he aspired to be a disc jockey, but when he showed up at the D.J. school he had hoped to attend, he found that it had closed after bribery investigations began into the radio payola scandal of the late 1950s.Fortunately, the Dramatic Workshop, where Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler taught, was located in the same building, and Mr. French signed up for classes. He was coached by the actress Peggy Feury; he caught the attention of Maxwell Glanville’s American Negro Theater; and his career as a supporting actor was born.Mr. French made his professional debut Off Broadway in “Raisin’ Hell in the Son,” a spoof of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1962. Three years later he appeared in Douglas Turner Ward’s “Day of Absence,” which spawned the Negro Ensemble Company. He first appeared on Broadway in Melvin Van Peebles’s musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” in 1971.“That’s when I decided to quit my Social Service job,” he said in a recent interview with the arts journal Gallery & Studio. He had been working days as a clerk with New York City’s welfare department.Mr. French appeared in Broadway revivals of “The Iceman Cometh” (1973), “Death of a Salesman” (1975) and “You Can’t Take It With You” (1983). His films included Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” (1992) and “Crooklyn” (1994). Among his many television appearances were three episodes of “Law & Order,” two of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and one of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”Reviewers often called attention to his sonorous voice and the civility of his performances; his notices in The New York Times were consistently positive. Reviewing his portrayal of Bynum, a “conjure man,” in a 1996 revival of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at the Henry Street Settlement, Vincent Canby called it “a variation on the seer, sometimes the idiot savant, who turns up with regularity in Mr. Wilson’s work but never as fully realized as the character is here.”When Mr. French was seen in “Checkmates” at the same theater that year, Lawrence Van Gelder wrote in The Times, “The real treats are Ruby Dee and Arthur French as the Coopers, gifted old pros who tickle the funny bone and touch the heart.”He occasionally directed, most recently a 2010 production of Steve Carter’s 1990 play “Pecong,” a retelling of the Medea story set in the Caribbean, at the Off Off Broadway National Black Theater.Mr. French taught at the HB Studio in New York. He received an Obie Award for sustained excellence of performance in 1997 and a Lucille Lortel Award for his supporting role in August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” in 2007. In 2015, he was awarded a Paul Robeson Citation from the Actors’ Equity Association and the Actor’s Equity Foundation for his “dedication to freedom of expression and respect for human dignity.”Mr. French, right, with Frankie Faison in the Signature Theater Company’s 2006 production of August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running.” Mr. French won a Lucille Lortel Award for his performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesArthur Wellesley French Jr. was born on Nov. 6, 1931, in Harlem to immigrants from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean. His father, a former seaman, died young; Arthur himself survived a bout with asthma. His mother, Ursilla Idonia (Ollivierre) French, was a garment workers’ union organizer, and Arthur helped her earn extra money by embroidering material she took home.His mother encouraged him to take music lessons, which led to a piano recital at Carnegie Hall. He attended Morris High School in the Bronx before transferring to the Bronx High School of Science; after graduating, he attended Brooklyn College.In 1961, he married the singer Antoinette Williams. She died before him. In addition to their son, he is survived by a daughter, Antonia Willow French, and two grandchildren.In the Gallery & Studio interview, Mr. French was asked what he had learned about himself during his 50-year career.“I like the world of fantasy,” he replied. “And my father told me, ‘Learn something so well that you won’t have to lift up anything heavier than a pencil.’” More

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      Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, Rock Journalist, Dies at 75

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      She took the music seriously at a time when not many writers did. Among her books was a memoir of her life with one of its biggest stars, Jim Morrison.Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, who wrote about rock when music journalists were just beginning to take it seriously, and through her work met Jim Morrison, frontman of the Doors, with whom she said she had a marriage of sorts, died on July 23. She was 75.Her death was announced on the Facebook page of Lizard Queen Press, a publishing enterprise that she founded and that published her recent books. The announcement did not give a cause or say where she died.In the late 1960s, originally as Patricia Kennely (she later changed the spelling of her last name and, in 1979, added “Morrison”), she was a writer for and then editor of Jazz & Pop, a small but well-regarded magazine. She interviewed Morrison in 1969, and when they shook hands there was “a visible shower of bright blue sparks flying in all directions,” she wrote in a 1992 memoir, “Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison.” They soon became romantically involved.Ms. Kennealy-Morrison practiced Celtic paganism; on her Facebook page she described herself as “Author, ex-rock critic, Dame Templar, Celtic witch, ex-go-go dancer, Lizard Queen. Not in that order.” (“Lizard Queen” was a reference to a line from a Jim Morrison poem, in which he wrote, “I am the Lizard King.”) In 1970 she and Morrison exchanged vows in a “handfasting ceremony” that involved drops of their own blood.She said her book “Strange Days” (also the title of the Doors’ second album, from 1967) was a response to the 1991 movie “The Doors.” Oliver Stone, who directed the film, had consulted her on it, and she even played the Wicca priestess who presides over the handfasting. (Val Kilmer played Morrison; Kathleen Quinlan played Ms. Kennealy-Morrison.) But she said she was outraged by the film when she saw it at a screening, feeling that it trivialized the ceremony, did not give enough prominence to her relationship with Morrison, and misrepresented him.Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison and Kathleen Quinlan as Ms. Kennealy-Morrison in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” (1991). Ms. Kennealy was not a fan of the film.Alamy“If Oliver had been at that screening, we would never have had to worry about his movie ‘JFK,’” she told The Daily Mail of London in 1992, referring to Mr. Stone’s next film. “I would have killed him.”Critics said the book was just an attempt to gain attention and usurp the place in the Morrison mythos of Pamela Courson, another of his love interests, who called herself his common-law wife. Morrison died in 1971 in Paris at 27; Ms. Courson, who was with him at the time, died a few years later, also at 27. Drugs were suspected in both deaths.In her book, Ms. Kennealy-Morrison blamed Ms. Courson for Morrison’s death, in a bathtub in his apartment. “She fed heroin to the man she claimed to love, leaving him dying while she nodded out,” she wrote.In late October 2010, on the eve of Samhain, a Celtic religious festival that inspired Halloween, Ms. Kennealy-Morrison spoke to The Daily News in New York about her plans for marking the occasion.“I will place a light in the window to guide the souls in the night,” she said. “I will have food, pork and apples in Celtic tradition for the ancestors from the other world. I will talk to my beloved dead, including my father and grandmother. It will be a joyful and deeply holy occasion. Jim usually shows up. And when he does, I will celebrate Samhain, the new Celtic year, with my husband.”Patricia Kennely was born on March 4, 1946, in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island. In 1963 she enrolled at St. Bonaventure University, a Franciscan institution in Allegany, N.Y., to study journalism. That’s where she discovered the Celtic religion.“They had an amazing library on the subject at St. Bonaventure’s, I guess operating on the principle of ‘Know thy enemy,’” she told The Daily News.She transferred to Harpur College in Binghamton, N.Y., after two years and earned an English degree in 1967. While there she discovered the political activism that was brewing on campuses across the nation. She also discovered rock music, and one 1966 album in particular.“It was called ‘Jefferson Airplane Takes Off,’” she wrote in “Rock Chick: A Girl and Her Music,” a 2013 compilation of her Jazz & Pop writings. “And so did I.”While in college she earned extra money as a go-go dancer at nightclubs.“Scorning the white boots and pastel-microdress go-go-girl template that was prevalent across the land, I went Dark Side,” she wrote, “wearing a black leather-look fringed bikini, black fishnets and black knee-high boots.”“I looked like Zorro’s kinky girlfriend,” she added.Ms. Kennealy-Morrison said her book “Strange Days” was a response to Oliver Stone’s movie. Critics said it was an attempt to gain attention and usurp another love interest’s place in the Morrison mythos.After graduating, she landed a job as an editorial assistant at Crowell-Collier & Macmillan Publishing in Manhattan. She saw the first cover of Jazz & Pop magazine on a newsstand in 1967 (it had been founded as Jazz magazine in 1962 by Pauline Rivelli, who in 1967 broadened it into rock coverage and renamed it) and began lobbying for a job there. She was hired as an editorial assistant in early 1968. By the end of that year she had been named editor. The magazine was one of several that came along about the same time that took the music more seriously than the fanzines of the era. (Rolling Stone was founded in 1967.)Ms. Kennealy-Morrison’s pieces set the tone for Jazz & Pop. In the April 1970 issue, she wrote about the influence that religions of various kinds were having on music. She thought, for instance, that the band Coven was invoking black magic in dangerous ways. “Black magic is NOT merely an interesting new wrinkle for the PR crowd to play with, or a hot new ad copy slant,” she cautioned.Three months later she blasted rock fans as not being selective enough and not applying their intellects to what they were hearing.“How many excruciating guitar solos, how many organ solos that were so boring your legs started to hurt, how many meaningless vocal improvisations, have we all sat through?” she wrote. “And at the conclusions of all of these various monuments to rock ego, how many standing ovations have we bestowed?”Steve Hochman, a music journalist who was also a friend, wrote of her influence in a Facebook post noting her death.“As a writer and editor of Jazz & Pop magazine,” he wrote, “she helped establish the then-embryonic realm at a time when few thought of pop music as worthy of such critical attention.”Jazz & Pop went out of business in 1971.Ms. Kennealy-Morrison’s survivors include two brothers, Kevin and Timothy Kennely. A sister, Regina Kennely, died in March.Beginning in the mid-1980s, Ms. Kennealy-Morrison wrote a series of fantasy novels, collectively known as “The Keltiad,” which drew on Celtic legends and mythology. More recently, under the name Patricia Morrison, she wrote mysteries with musical themes, drawing on her time in the rock world. Among the titles are “Scareway to Heaven: Murder at the Fillmore East” and “Daydream Bereaver: Murder on the Good Ship Rock & Roll.” More

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      Willie Winfield, Angelic-Voiced Doo-Wop Singer, Is Dead at 91

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      For more than 60 years, he sang with various incarnations of the Harptones. “His voice was unique,” one concert producer said, “and it lasted his whole life.”Willie Winfield, whose silken lead vocals with the Harptones in the 1950s made him a favorite of doo-wop connoisseurs, even though the group never achieved wide mainstream commercial success, died on July 27 in a hospital in Brooklyn. He was 91.The cause was cardiac arrest, his daughter Tina Winfield said.Mr. Winfield’s angelic voice was first heard in the early days of rock ’n’ roll, and he continued to sing when doo-wop groups turned into nostalgia acts in the 1970s. He toured with various incarnations of the Harptones until he retired in 2019, when he was 89.“He had one of the best voices around,” Dick Fox, a producer who booked the Harptones dozens of times on his live oldies shows, said in a phone interview. “His voice was unique, and it lasted his whole life. He never lost the higher register.”During the 1950s, Mr. Winfield and the Harptones performed at the Apollo Theater and at shows promoted by the influential disc jockeys Alan Freed (at the Brooklyn Paramount) and Murray the K (at Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey). They were seen in the 1956 musical revue film “Rockin’ the Blues.”Among the group’s best-known songs were “A Sunday Kind of Love,” “Since I Fell for You” and “My Memories of You.”“Singing the songs for me feels fresh every time,” Mr. Winfield told the critic David Hinckley in a 1985 interview for The Daily News. “It’s the way people respond. All of a sudden, I forget my age. I lose all sense of everything except the song. I go back to the first time we recorded, when we had no idea what would happen.”Robert Palmer, the chief pop music critic of The New York Times, wrote in 1982 that Mr. Winfield’s voice had “immaculate pitch and an insinuating way with a phrase.” But despite Mr. Winfield’s memorable voice, the Harptones’ exquisite harmonies and the jazz-inspired arrangements of Raoul Cita, their pianist, they never reached the same level of commercial success that contemporaries like the Drifters, the Cadillacs and the Flamingos did.Willie Lee Elijah Winfield was born on Aug. 24, 1929, in Surry, Va. His father, also named Willie, was a merchant seaman. His mother, Christine (Cooke) Winfield, was a homemaker.Mr. Winfield sang in a church group in Norfolk and with his brothers Clyde and Jimmy. After he moved to New York in 1950, he and his brothers sang on street corners with two other men and practiced under the Manhattan Bridge.In 1953, some members of another doo-wop act, the Skylarks, merged with some from the Winfield brothers’ group, forming a new group, which they first called the Harps and, soon after, the Harptones. In addition to Mr. Winfield and Mr. Cita, the lineup consisted of William Galloway, Billy Brown, Nicky Clark and William Dempsey. Mr. Dempsey is the only member of the original group who is still alive.The Harptones “demand consideration in any serious discussion of the truly immortal acts of the doo-wop era,” Jason Ankeny wrote on the website AllMusic. But success proved elusive.Charlie Horner, who runs the Classic Urban Harmony website, said in an interview that the Harptones were popular in New York and other cities in the Northeast, as well as in Chicago, but that their local successes did not add up to any national hits.However, he said, if Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues chart had a Top 100 (instead of a Top 10 or 20) during the Harptones’ most productive years, in the mid-1950s, they might have had as many as 10 hits. Their only chart hit, “What Will I Tell My Heart,” peaked at No. 96 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961.The fact that the Harptones recorded for a succession of small labels with limited distribution did not help their cause.Mr. Winfield received a lifetime achievement award at the East Coast Music Hall of Fame Awards ceremony in Wildwood, N.J., in 2019. He gave his final performance that same year.George Napolitano/Media Punch, via Alamy Live News“At one time we decided to try to promote our own records,” Mr. Winfield said in the 1985 Daily News interview, which Mr. Hinckley repurposed last week on the website Medium. “It was like, give the D.J. $75 to play the record. Our producers should have been taking care of that.”In the mid-1960s, Mr. Winfield began delivering prayer cards to funeral homes; he retired from that job in 1995. He continued to perform part time with versions of the Harptones, notably as background vocalists on “René and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” a tender song on Paul Simon’s album “Hearts and Bones” (1983) that recalls the doo-wop music that Mr. Simon grew up listening to.In addition to his daughter Tina, Mr. Winfield is survived by another daughter, Stephanie Winfield; his sons, Vincent, Timothy and DeWayne; two sisters, Serita Alexander and Goldie Bronson; two brothers, Clyde and Abraham; 44 grandchildren; and 22 great-grandchildren. His wife, Alice (Battle) Winfield, died in 2011.At Mr. Winfield’s final performance, at a doo-wop weekend in April 2019 at Half Hollow Hills East High School in Dix Hills, N.Y., he wrapped up his career with another signature ballad, “Life Is But a Dream.”He sat on a stool until the end of the song and, after the group sang “Will you take part in,” he rose, steadying himself on his cane, and finished the line and the song in his familiar tenor — “my life … my love? That is my dream.”And he hit the high notes. More

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      in Television

      Jay Pickett, Veteran Soap Opera Actor, Dies at 60

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      His credits included “General Hospital,” “Days of Our Lives” and “Port Charles.” He died while filming a western in Idaho, where he was raised.Jay Pickett, an actor known for his roles in TV soap operas like “General Hospital” and “Days of Our Lives,” died on Friday while filming a movie in Idaho. He was 60.Travis Mills, the director of “Treasure Valley,” which was set to star Mr. Pickett, said on Sunday that Mr. Pickett fell ill while preparing to shoot a scene near Oreana, Idaho. There was no official explanation for the cause of death, he said.Jim Heffel, a co-star on “Treasure Valley,” said in a Facebook post that Mr. Pickett “died sitting on a horse ready to rope a steer in the movie.”Mr. Mills said Mr. Pickett suddenly slumped over. “We were getting ready to film this scene, and he was just sitting there on horseback,” Mr. Mills said, adding that people on the set did CPR until paramedics arrived a few minutes later by helicopter. He was declared dead at the scene, Mr. Mills said.“Treasure Valley,” a western about a man who rebuilds his life after a fire destroys his family, was being filmed where Mr. Pickett grew up and had many connections, Mr. Mills said. During car rides through the valley to find places to film, Mr. Mills recalled, Mr. Pickett would make comments such as “That’s where my brother lived” and “That’s where I went to elementary school.”Jan Larison, Mr. Pickett’s younger sister, said, “His passion was to come back and make films about the lives he was raised around.”Jay Harris Pickett, the fourth of five children, was born on Feb. 10, 1961, in Spokane, Wash., to E. Richard Pickett, a cattle broker, and Virginia Pickett, who worked in agriculture for the federal government.The Pickett family moved about 400 miles south, to Caldwell, Idaho, where Jay was raised, Ms. Larison said. He graduated from Vallivue High School in 1980 and attended Treasure Valley Community College, where he played football and met the woman he would marry, Elena Bates.After community college, he attended Boise State University, where he continued to play football, eventually earning a bachelor’s degree in theater arts, his sister said. Then, he went to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a master’s degree, also in theater.While studying theater, Mr. Pickett played quarterback for his college football team and participated in rodeos, his sister said. His skills on the stage, on the field and in the saddle did not go unnoticed, particularly among some of Ms. Larison’s friends. “They all just wanted to come over and meet him,” she recalled.In his 20s, Mr. Pickett began his acting career with small roles in the TV series “Rags to Riches,” “China Beach” and “Mr. Belvedere,” which all began airing in the 1980s.Jay Pickett and Julie Pinson in “Port Charles” in 1997.Tom Queally/Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesIn 1991, he played Dr. Chip Lakin in “Days of Our Lives,” an NBC soap opera that featured Mr. Pickett in 34 episodes. In “Port Charles,” a spinoff of “General Hospital” about the lives of medical interns and doctors at the fictitious Port Charles General Hospital, Mr. Pickett played Frank Scanlon, a dedicated paramedic and substitute teacher. The show ran from 1997 to 2003 on ABC.Mr. Pickett’s budding fame was observable, sometimes in unexpected places. While accompanying him in Las Vegas, Ms. Larison overheard a conversation about her brother that took place in a restroom: “Oh my goodness, did you see — that was Jay Pickett out there!” she recalled one woman as saying.Mr. Pickett portrayed Detective David Harper on ABC’s “General Hospital” from 2007 to 2008, and in 2012 he wrote, acted in and produced “Soda Springs,” a western film that also starred Tom Skerritt and Michael Bowen.“The sudden passing of my pal Jay Pickett is very sad,” Kin Shriner, who worked alongside Mr. Pickett on “General Hospital,” said on Twitter. “He loved acting and Westerns, and when we got together we laughed a lot.”Mr. Pickett went on to appear in numerous shows and TV movies, including “NCIS: Los Angeles” in 2015, the TV series “Queen Sugar” in 2017 and “Soldier’s Revenge,” a movie released in 2020.Apart from “Treasure Valley,” Mr. Pickett had roles in four films that were in postproduction as of Sunday, according to the Internet Movie Database.In addition to his sister, Mr. Pickett is survived by his wife, Elena, whom he married in 1985; their three children: Maegan, 35, Michaela, 29, and Tyler, 15; and three other siblings, Dee Pickett, Ginna Maggard and Rich Harris Pickett. Mr. Pickett’s father died in 2005, and his mother died in 2013.Mr. Pickett died on the seventh day of what was supposed to be a 20-day film shoot for “Treasure Valley,” according to Mr. Mills. “I truly believe it is some of the best work he did in his career, if not the best,” he said.Mr. Mills said he might seek to publish the script of the film, which Mr. Pickett wrote, and turn the footage into a short film or video tribute to the actor. More

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      in Music

      Chuck E. Weiss, Musician Who, in Love, Inspired a Hit Song, Dies at 76

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      He and Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones were inseparable in the late ’70s, and when Mr. Weiss’s romantic life took a turn, Ms. Jones memorialized it in “Chuck E.’s in Love.”Chuck E. Weiss, blues musician, club owner and outsize Los Angeles character immortalized in Rickie Lee Jones’s breakout hit song, “Chuck E.’s in Love,” died on July 20 at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 76.His brother, Byron, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Weiss was a voracious musicologist, an encyclopedia of obscure jazz and early R&B artists, a drummer, a songwriter and a widely acknowledged rascal who in the mid-1970s landed in Los Angeles from his native Denver with his friend the singer-songwriter Tom Waits.At the Troubadour, the venerable West Hollywood folk club, where Mr. Weiss worked for a time as a dishwasher, they met another young singer-songwriter, a former runaway named Rickie Lee Jones. Mr. Waits and Ms. Jones became an item and the three of them became inseparable as they caroused through Hollywood, stealing lawn ornaments and pranking people at music industry parties (like shaking hands with dip smeared on their palms).Ms. Jones’s song about Mr. Weiss, “Chuck E’s in Love,” was the opening track of her debut album, in 1979. “It seems sometimes like we’re real romantic dreamers who got stuck in the wrong time zone,” Ms. Jones told Rolling Stone in 1979, describing Mr. Weiss and Mr. Waits as her family at the time.They lived at the Tropicana Motel, a seedy 1940s-era bohemia on Santa Monica Boulevard. “It was a regular DMZ,” Mr. Weiss told LA Weekly in 1981, “except everyone had a tan and looked nice.”In the fall of 1977, on a trip home to Denver, Mr. Weiss called his buddies back in Los Angeles, and when Mr. Waits put down the phone, he announced to Ms. Jones, “Chuck E.’s in love!”Two years later, Ms. Jones’s fanciful riff on that declaration — “What’s her name?/Is that her there?/Oh, Christ, I think he’s even combed his hair” — had made her a star. (Though the last line of the song suggests otherwise, it was not Ms. Jones whom Mr. Weiss had fallen for; it was a distant cousin of his.)The song was a hit single, the opening track of Ms. Jones’s debut album, “Rickie Lee Jones,” and a 1980 Grammy Award nominee for song of the year. (“What a Fool Believes,” performed by the Doobie Brothers, took the honor.)Mr. Weiss in an undated photo. “He was a thrilling guy, and a disaster for a time, as thrilling people often are,” Ms. Jones said. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn an essay in The Los Angeles Times on July 21, Ms. Jones wrote that when she first met Mr. Waits and Mr. Weiss, she couldn’t tell them apart. “They were two of the most charismatic characters Hollywood had seen in decades, and without them I think the entire street of Santa Monica Boulevard would have collapsed.”In a phone interview since then, she said of Mr. Weiss: “There was mischief in him, he was our trickster. He was a thrilling guy, and a disaster for a time, as thrilling people often are.”Charles Edward Weiss was born in Denver on March 18, 1945. His father, Leo, was in the salvage business; his mother, Jeannette (Rollnick) Weiss, owned a hat store, Hollywood Millinery. Chuck graduated from East High School and attended Mesa Junior College, now Colorado Mesa, in Grand Junction.His brother is his only immediate survivor.In his early 20s, Mr. Weiss met Chuck Morris, now a music promoter, when Mr. Morris was a co-owner of Tulagi, a music club in Boulder, Colo. When blues performers like Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker came through, they often traveled alone, and it was up to Mr. Morris to find them a local band. He would ask Mr. Weiss to fill in as drummer.In 1973 Mr. Morris opened a Denver nightclub called Ebbets Field (he was born in Brooklyn), which drew performers like Willie Nelson, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Mr. Waits. Mr. Weiss filled in there too.Mr. Weiss performing in 1999 at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. Gravel-voiced, shaggy-haired and long on patter, he was a bluesman with a Borcht Belt sense of humor.Ebet RobertsAt the time, as Mr. Weiss recalled in 2014, he was trying to record his own music and in the habit of asking performers to play with him. That’s how he met Mr. Waits. “And I think what happened was I saw Waits do some finger-poppin’ stuff at Ebbets Fields one night,” he said, “and I went up to him after the show. I was wearing some platform shoes and a chinchilla coat, and I was slipping on the ice on the street outside because I was so high, and asked if he wanted to do some recording with me. He looked at me like I was from outer space, man.”Nonetheless, he said, they became fast friends.Mr. Waits, interviewed by The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999, described Mr. Weiss as “a mensch, a liar, a monkey and a pathological vaudevillian.”Mr. Waits and Mr. Weiss ended up collaborating on a number of things, in one instance co-writing the lyrics to “Spare Parts (A Nocturnal Emission),” a barroom dirge on Mr. Waits’s album “Nighthawks at the Diner,” released in 1975. Mr. Waits produced two albums for Mr. Weiss; the first, “Extremely Cool,” in 1999, was described in one review as “a goofy, eclectic mix of loosely-played blues and boogie-woogie.”Though his songwriting was singular — “Anthem for Lost Souls” was told from the point of view of a neighbor’s cat — Mr. Weiss was best known for his live performances. Gravel-voiced, shaggy-haired and long on patter, he was a bluesman with a Borcht Belt sense of humor.Mr. Weiss in 2002 in Los Angeles.Damian Dovarganes/Associated PressFor much of the 1980s Mr. Weiss played at a Los Angeles club called the Central, accompanied by his band, The Goddamn Liars. He later encouraged his friend Johnny Depp to buy the place with him and others. They turned it into the Viper Room, the celebrity-flecked ’90s-era nightclub.He was often asked how he felt about his star turn in Ms. Jones’s hit. “Yeah, I was flabbergasted,” he told The Associated Press in 2007. “Little did we know that, all in all, we would both be known for that for the rest of our lives.”But the rest of their lives would no longer be intertwined.“When ‘Chuck E.’s in Love’ passed from the heavens and faded into the ‘I hate that song’ desert, from which it still has not really recovered, he and I became estranged, and everyone fell away from everyone,” Ms. Jones wrote of Mr. Weiss in her Los Angeles Times essay. “Waits left, the brief Camelot of our street corner jive ended. I had made fiction of us, made heroes of very unheroic people. But I’m glad I did.”Later, on the phone, she said, “Two of the three of us became very successful musicians, but not Chuck, and he knew a lot of people.” She added: “We think being the famous one is winning, but I’m not sure. Chuck did all right.” More