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      Yoshi Wada, Inventive Creator of Sound Worlds, Dies at 77

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      A member of the Fluxus performance art movement (and a contractor by trade), he incorporated bagpipes, electronics and, yes, plumber’s materials in his music.Yoshi Wada, a Japanese-born composer and artist who drew a following creating cacophonous, minimalist performances on homemade instruments and was a member of the Fluxus performance art movement that took root in New York in the 1960s, died on May 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 77.His son and musical collaborator, Tashi Wada, confirmed the death but said the cause was not known.Yoshi Wada’s music was characterized by dense, sustained sounds that could create mind-bending acoustic effects. He borrowed widely from different musical traditions — Indian ragas, Macedonian folk singing and Scottish bagpipes — all while supporting his musical life by working in construction.In one early technique, in the 1970s, he attached mouthpieces to plumbing pipes that could extend more than 20 feet. In ritualistic, multihour concerts, he immersed listeners in the richly resonant drones that emanated from this Alphorn-like instrument, which he called an Earth Horn.Combined with electronics created by the sound artist Liz Philips, the pulsating sonorities of the pipes offered a new take on the minimalist style then in vogue.“The result was certainly one of the more coloristically attractive of the many recent instances of minimalist, steady-state sound that one hears these days,” John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote of one Wada concert in 1974, at the Kitchen in Lower Manhattan, “rather like an evening’s worth of the very beginning of Wagner’s ‘Rheingold.’”Mr. Wada’s idiosyncratic singing and use of bagpipes became the basis for two important albums in the 1980s, released on free-jazz labels. One, “Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile,” was recorded in an empty swimming pool; to delve more deeply into the project, Mr. Wada slept in the pool. The other release, “Off the Wall,” made in West Berlin through a grant he had received, combined bagpipes with a handcrafted organ and percussion.“What I’d like to get is a feeling of the endless space,” he said in a 1987 interview. “I want to create this feeling of infinity by sound.”Mr. Wada also created elaborate sculptural sound installations. For “The Appointed Cloud,” in 1987, he hung organ pipes and gongs in the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens. Guided by a computer program developed by David Rayna, visitors would press buttons to change the sound of the composition in real-time.“A lot of young children came,” Mr. Wada recalled in 2016, “and they went crazy pushing the buttons and enjoyed it quite a lot.”Mr. Wada performed with his son, Tashi, in 2018. They became a duo in recent years. Dicky Bahto via RVNG Intl.Yoshimasa Wada was born on Nov. 11, 1943, in Kyoto, Japan, to Shukitchi Wada, an architect, and Kino Imakita. His father died in World War II, and his childhood was marked by the hardships of the postwar years.Yoshi had powerful early experiences hearing monks chant in a local Zen temple. Enthralled by Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman, he took up jazz saxophone as a teenager. He studied sculpture at the Kyoto City University of Fine Arts and sought out avant-garde collectives in Japan, like the Gutai group and Hi-Red Center.“It was looking at the moon in a Zen garden for a whole night,” Mr. Wada later recalled of a “happening” presented by the artist and musician Yoko Ono. “It was quite a nice feeling. I remember that afterwards I took a bath and went home.”After receiving his bachelor’s in fine arts degree, he moved to New York in 1967. George Maciunas, widely credited as the founder of the Fluxus movement, lived in Mr. Wada’s building. Soon, Mr. Wada was enmeshed with Fluxus’s high-minded absurdism, making music from cardboard tubes and syncopated sneezes.Mr. Maciunas had started purchasing abandoned buildings in the area of Manhattan that would become known as SoHo and converting them into artists’ co-ops, and he conscripted Mr. Wada to help with the carpentry and plumbing.Never having trained in music formally, Mr. Wada took lessons in electronic music from the composer La Monte Young and became, in the early 1970s, a disciple of the guru Pandit Pran Nath, who taught North Indian classical singing in Mr. Young’s studio.“He tried to absorb everything, at a very high spiritual level,” Mr. Young said of Mr. Wada in an interview. “He was a very pure and noble person.”His fascination with the microtonal inflections and hypnotic drones of Indian ragas, along with his dissatisfaction with standard instruments, led Mr. Wada to create the Earth Horns. But his musical interests continued to expand. He heard Macedonian folk singing at a festival and decided to study it, then started a small choir to sing eerie, modal improvisations. He attended Scottish Highland games in the late 1970s and was struck by the possibilities of the bagpipe.After learning the solo bagpipe style known as “piobaireachd,” Mr. Wada built his own “adapted” version of the instrument — with plumbing fittings, pipes and air compressors — for evening-length performances that fused composition and improvisation.“In studying all of these different traditions, one thing he always talked about was that he wanted to find ways to make them his own,” his son, Tashi, said in an interview.Mr. Wada performing at the Signal Gallery in New York in 2016. “He tried to absorb everything at a very high spiritual level,” the composer La Monte Young said. “He was a very pure and noble person.”Peter GannushkinMr. Wada supported his family by continuing his construction work, even starting his own contracting company. He stored his menagerie of makeshift instruments in the subbasement of their building, one of those that Mr. Maciunas had developed. Tashi Wada recalled that a childhood drum kit once found its way into one of his father’s sound installations.Beginning in 2007, Tashi Wada, who is also an experimental composer, helped reissue his father’s older recordings, which are now available on the label Saltern. In 2009, the Emily Harvey Foundation, which promotes the arts and which had preserved some of Mr. Wada’s Earth Horns, invited him to reprise his 1970s performances. The original electronic drone system was lost to history; instead, Tashi re-created the parts live. Father and son became regular musical collaborators.Mr. Wada’s first wife was Barbara Stewart. He married Marilyn Bogerd in 1985; they divorced in 2014. In addition to their son, he is survived by their daughter, Manon Bogerd Wada, and a granddaughter.In 2016, Tashi Wada interviewed his father for the arts magazine BOMB and asked him about the hallucinatory effects that he said he had experienced in the 1980s while practicing his music in a small studio space in West Berlin.“I wasn’t taking drugs at that time,” Mr. Wada said. “It wasn’t needed. Sound draws me into a dreamlike world, when the sound is in tune. It’s a very good effect and keeps me awake.” More

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      Patrick Sky, ’60s Folk Star and Later a Piper, Dies at 80

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      He was a part of the folk revival emanating from Greenwich Village, mixing melodic songs and satire. Then he became infatuated with the uilleann pipes.Patrick Sky, who established himself as part of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the mid-1960s with smooth guitar-picking and a Southern twang that could be melodic or sassy, then became adept at playing, and making, the notoriously difficult instrument known as the uilleann pipes, died on May 26 in Asheville, N.C. He was 80.His wife, Cathy Larson Sky, said the cause was cancer. He died at a hospice center and lived in Spruce Pine, N.C.Mr. Sky’s best-known song was probably “Many a Mile,” a weary-traveler lament that opened his debut album, titled simply “Patrick Sky,” in 1965. It was covered by others, including Buffy Sainte-Marie, his girlfriend early in his career. He was also skilled at “sardonic, satiric rags and blues,” as The New York Times put it in 1965, and as his career advanced, those elements of his repertoire became more caustic.That aspect of his music culminated in what fRoots magazine called “the most politically incorrect folk album ever,” a 1973 release titled “Songs That Made America Famous.” The track titles — “Vatican Caskets” and “Child Molesting Blues” among them — convey the tenor of the record.“America’s full of prudes, you know,” Mr. Sky told fRoots in 2017. “So I just did a record that’d sort of gouge them in the eye with a stick.”By then, though, Mr. Sky, who was of both Irish and Creek Indian heritage, had turned his attention to the uilleann pipes, perhaps the most difficult instrument to play in the arsenal of Irish music, after meeting the master piper Liam O’Flynn at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in the early 1970s. Mr. Sky learned not only to play the instrument but also to make it, something he did for the rest of his life, helping to revive a faded art. In 2009 he and his wife, a fiddler, made an album, “Down to Us.”One magazine called this 1973 release by Mr. Sky “the most politically incorrect folk album ever.” Patrick Leon Linch Jr. (who legally changed his name in the 1960s) was born on Oct. 2, 1940, in College Park, Ga., outside Atlanta. His father was a munitions worker, and his mother, Theron Rutilla Heard Linch, was a registered nurse.Patrick grew up in Georgia, Louisiana and other parts of the South and was interested in music from an early age. In 1957 he enlisted in the Army, serving in an artillery unit until his discharge the next year.“I began playing at little coffeehouses,” he said in an interview for the book “Folk Music: More Than a Song” (1976), “eventually finding my way to Florida.”There he met Ms. Sainte-Marie, and a few years later, when she went north to New York, he did, too. His Southern sensibilities sometimes made for an amusing fit with the Greenwich Village folkies he began socializing and playing with. His wife said he used to tell about the time the musician Dave Van Ronk and other friends offered to take him out for soul food, a term he didn’t know. At the restaurant, when the collards and fatback, cornbread, fried pork chops and such arrived, his friends asked what he thought.“Back home,” he told them, “this is what we just call ‘food.’”As folk music enjoyed a boom, a music newsletter called Broadside began sponsoring “singing newspapers,” as they were described — concerts at which a string of performers would sing topical songs, often written for the occasion. Mr. Sky played at the first one, at the Village Gate in 1964, to a crowd of 500; Pete Seeger was the master of ceremonies, and the other performers included Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Jack Elliott and Ms. Sainte-Marie.In February 1965, Mr. Sky played a bigger venue, Town Hall, in Midtown. In his review, Robert Shelton of The Times called him “an important new folk-song talent.” Mr. Sky went on to play to 2,400 at Carnegie Hall in December 1966.Mr. Sky performing at the Eagle Tavern in Greenwich Village in 1986. His Southern sensibilities had made for an amusing fit with the Village folkies he played and socialized with in the 1960s.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesHis second album, “A Harvest of Gentle Clang,” had been released that year. Mr. Sky became a regular at folk festivals, clubs and colleges, and two more albums followed before the decade’s end: “Reality Is Bad Enough” in 1968 and “Photographs” the next year.But he began performing less and less, and after “Songs That Made America Famous,” he retired for a time, though he began doing shows again in the 1980s, adding the pipes to his performances.Few people played that instrument at the time. In a segment filmed several years ago for “Around Carolina,” a local cable show, Mr. Sky, who lived in Rhode Island for a while, joked about his unusual obsession.“I used to tell people I was the best piper in all of New England,” he said, “which is true because I was the only piper.”He continued to perform with his wife at pipers’ festivals and other events until 2018, when he was found to have Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Sky earned a bachelor’s degree in poetry at Goddard College in Vermont in 1978 and a master’s degree in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993.Two early marriages ended in divorce. He married Cathy Anne Larson in 1981. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their son, Liam Michael Sky; a son from an earlier marriage, Marcus Linch; and three grandchildren. More

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      Jerome Hellman, Producer of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ Dies at 92

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      His movie producing career consisted of just seven films, but they earned him six Academy Awards, three for “Midnight Cowboy” and three for “Coming Home.”Jerome Hellman, who produced “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), the only X-rated film ever to win the best picture Academy Award, and who went on to solidify his reputation with other tough-minded dramas, like the Oscar-winning “Coming Home,” died on May 26 at his home in South Egremont, Mass., in the Berkshires. He was 92.The death was confirmed by his wife, Elizabeth Empleton Hellman.Almost no one at the 1970 Academy Awards ceremony expected “Midnight Cowboy” to win. The movie was the gritty urban story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a young, handsome, naïve and not particularly bright Texan who decides to start a new life in New York City as a male hustler catering to wealthy older women, and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a grubby Bronx con man with a debilitating limp who becomes Joe’s unlikely ally.Shot with an initial budget of only $1 million, the movie included straightforward but far from pornographic depictions of straight and gay sex, prostitution and gang rape. The film’s rating was later upgraded to R.Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times seemed hesitant to overpraise the film, which was based on James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 novel of the same name. It was “tough and good in important ways,” Mr. Canby wrote, “slick, brutal (but not brutalizing)” and “ultimately a moving experience.”Mr. Hellman didn’t even bother to write an acceptance speech.“I probably only said 10 words” after Elizabeth Taylor handed him the trophy, Mr. Hellman told The Los Angeles Times in 2005. “It must have been the shortest speech in the history of the Oscars.”Mr. Hellman’s entire movie producing career consisted of seven films, but they earned him six Academy Awards, not to mention an additional 11 nominations. Three Oscars were for “Midnight Cowboy”; John Schlesinger also won as best director and Waldo Salt for best adapted screenplay.The other three — for best actor, best actress and best original screenplay — were for “Coming Home” (1978), an ambitious drama directed by Hal Ashby. Mr. Voight and Jane Fonda starred in the film, he as a paraplegic Vietnam War veteran with a social conscience, and she as a military wife who becomes his lover while her conservative straight-by-the-book husband is deployed in the same war.Jon Voight, left, and Dustin Hoffman in a scene from the 1969 film “Midnight Cowboy,” the only X-rated film ever to win the best picture Oscar.United ArtistsBetween those two successes, “The Day of the Locust” (1975), also directed by Mr. Schlesinger, was another story altogether. Based on Nathanael West’s novel, set on the fringes of 1930s Hollywood, it was a depressing tale of a seductive but tainted promised land where some people came to fail and some to die. William Atherton, Donald Sutherland and Karen Black starred, respectively, as an Ivy League designer, a sexually repressed accountant and an untalented starlet.Many critics found the film off-putting, and it did not do well at the box office. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker said it had “no emotional center.” Although Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times loved Mr. Sutherland’s performance, he found most of the characters too clearly doomed to care about.But Mr. Canby wrote in The Times that the film was “in many ways remarkable,” declaring its subject a metaphor for the decline of Western civilization and “second-rateness as a way of life.”Judith Crist, then the acclaimed founding movie critic for New York magazine, praised “The Day of the Locust” in a full-page review. “So brilliant is” this film, she began, “so dazzling and harrowing its impact, so impotent are the superlatives it evokes” that you almost want to avoid looking at it directly, like a solar eclipse. She concluded, “To call it the finest film of the past several years is to belittle it.”The National Board of Review named it one of the year’s 10 best films.Jerome Hellman was born on Sept. 4, 1928, in Manhattan, the second child of Abraham J. Hellman, a Romanian-born insurance broker, and Ethel (Greenstein) Hellman. After high school, he served two years in the Marine Corps, then began his working life as a messenger in the New York office of Ashley-Steiner, a talent agency.He rose through the ranks and founded his own agency in 1957, before he was 30. But he sold that business in 1963 and became a full-time movie producer, beginning with George Roy Hill’s comedy “The World of Henry Orient” (1964). Peter Sellers played the title role, a New York concert pianist who is trying to initiate an affair with a married woman but is being stalked by two adoring adolescent girls. The film was both well reviewed and a hit.His other films as producer were Irvin Kershner’s “A Fine Madness” (1966), starring Sean Connery as a poet with writer’s block, and “Promises in the Dark” (1979), starring Marsha Mason as a doctor treating a teenage cancer patient. It was the only film that Mr. Hellman ever directed, and only because Mr. Schlesinger, who was scheduled to do so, had dropped out.Mr. Hellman’s last film was “The Mosquito Coast” (1986), directed by Peter Weir from Paul Theroux’s novel about an inventor who moves to a tropical island with his family, tries to create a utopia and fails. Harrison Ford starred.Mr. Hellman in 2009. At one point he described his earlier films as “unique, different, fraught with risk, problematical.”Neilson Barnard/Getty ImagesMr. Hellman was married to Joanne Fox from 1957 to 1966 and to Nancy Ellison, a photographer, from 1973 to 1991. In addition to his third wife, a film promoter whom he married in 2001, his survivors include a son, J.R.; a daughter, Jenny Hellman; and a grandson.Authors and commentators considered Mr. Hellman a driving force in the creation of what some called the New Hollywood of the 1970s, where power shifted from big-studio committees to independent filmmakers with purpose. But the era didn’t last long. In 1982, in an interview with The New York Times, he described the films he had made up to that point as “unique, different, fraught with risk, problematical.”“People just can’t believe that after the success of ‘Coming Home,’ I couldn’t just do what I wanted,” Mr. Hellman observed. But the studios, he said, were now run by business types who needed every film to be a blockbuster.“All that my success has won me is the luxury of immediate access to top executives,” he said. More

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      B.J. Thomas, ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head’ Singer, Dies at 78

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      Mr. Thomas, who won five Grammys, helped introduce a smooth, down-home sensibility to the AM radio airwaves in the 1960s and ’70s.B.J. Thomas, a country and pop hitmaker and five-time Grammy winner who contributed to the Southernization of popular music in the 1960s and ’70s, died on Saturday at his home in Arlington, Texas. He was 78.The cause was complications of lung cancer, said a spokesman, Jeremy Westby of 2911 Media.Mr. Thomas’s biggest hit was “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” which was originally featured in the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and spent four weeks at the top of the pop chart in early 1970. Written and produced by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, “Raindrops” — a cheery ditty about surmounting life’s obstacles — won the Academy Award for best original song later that year. Mr. Thomas’s recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014.Mr. Thomas placed 15 singles in the pop Top 40 from 1966 to 1977. “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” a monument to heartache sung in a bruised, melodic baritone, reached No. 1 on both the country and pop charts in 1975. “Hooked on a Feeling,” an exultant expression of newfound love from 1968, also reached the pop Top 10. (Augmented by an atavistic chant of “Ooga-chaka-ooga-ooga,” the song became a No. 1 pop hit as recorded by the Swedish rock band Blue Swede in 1974.)Mr. Thomas’s records helped introduce a smooth, down-home sensibility to the AM airwaves, an approach shaped by the fusion of country, gospel, rock and R&B in the music of Elvis Presley. Also recognizable in hits by singers with similarly expressive voices like Brook Benton and Conway Twitty, this uniquely Southern mix of styles became common currency on radio playlists across the nation.Mr. Thomas’s biggest hit single,“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014.J.P. Roth Collection“I try to give the soft pop sound a natural relaxed feeling,” Mr. Thomas said in “Home Where I Belong,” a memoir written with Jerry B. Jenkins. “I guess that’s why my records always cross over and are good sellers on the pop and rock charts, as well as country.”His debt to Presley’s romantic crooning notwithstanding, Mr. Thomas cited the music of Black R&B singers like Little Richard and Jackie Wilson as his greatest vocal inspiration.“We all loved Elvis and Hank Williams, but I think Wilson had the biggest influence on me,” he said in his memoir. “I couldn’t believe what he could do with his voice. I’ve always tried to do more with a note than just hit it, because I remembered how he could sing so high and so right, really putting something into it.”Mr. Wilson’s stamp is certainly evident on “Mighty Clouds of Joy,” a rapturous, gospel-steeped anthem that reached the pop Top 40 for Mr. Thomas in 1971. His command of musical dynamics is especially impressive on the chorus, where, lifting his voice heavenward, he goes from a hushed whisper to a flurry of ecstatic wailing before bringing his vocals back down to a murmur for the next verse.Mr. Thomas came by his sense of redemption the hard way: He struggled for the better part of 10 years with a dependence on drugs and alcohol that almost destroyed his marriage and his life. After getting clean in the mid-’70s, he enjoyed parallel careers as a country and gospel singer, releasing three No. 1 country singles over the ensuing decade and winning five Grammy Awards in various gospel categories.Mr. Thomas had 15 singles in the pop Top 40 from 1966 to 1977.Reed Saxon/Associated PressBilly Joe Thomas was born on Aug. 7, 1942, in Hugo, Okla., the second of three children of Vernon and Geneva Thomas, and raised in Rosenberg, Texas, some 40 miles southwest of Houston. The family was poor, a condition exacerbated by his father’s violent temper and drinking. As an adolescent, Mr. Thomas began singing in the Baptist church his family attended.He and his older brother, Jerry, joined the Triumphs, a local pop combo, while in high school, with Mr. Thomas singing lead. In 1966, after three years of playing at area dances and American Legion halls, the band had its first hit with a rendition of Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” that reached the pop Top 10.Credited to B.J. Thomas and the Triumphs and issued on the small Pacemaker label, the record was eventually picked up for distribution by the New York-based Scepter Records, home to major pop artists of the day like Dionne Warwick and the Shirelles. With sales of more than a million copies, it secured Mr. Thomas a place on the bill of a traveling rock ’n’ roll revue hosted by Dick Clark, the “American Bandstand” host and producer.Despite the persistence and severity of his alcohol and drug use, Mr. Thomas’s recordings remained a constant on the pop chart for the next decade. “Rock and Roll Lullaby,” a Top 40 hit in 1972, featured Duane Eddy on guitar and backing vocals from Darlene Love and the Crystals. Three years earlier, Mr. Thomas had enjoyed an extended run at the Copacabana in New York, brought about by the runaway success of “Hooked on a Feeling.”Mr. Thomas started on the path to recovery after converting to Christianity in the mid-’70s, a period in which he also reconciled with his wife, Gloria, after repeated separations. In 1977, following a year or so in recovery, he sang at the memorial service for Presley, whose death that year was due largely to his excessive use of prescription medications.Mr. Thomas continued to make albums and tour into the 2000s. Over the years, he also sang and testified at the crusades of the evangelist Billy Graham and at other large religious gatherings.He is survived by Gloria Richardson Thomas, his wife of 53 years; three daughters, Paige Thomas, Nora Cloud and Erin Moore; and four grandchildren.At its smoothest and most over-the-top, Mr. Thomas’s music could border on schmaltz. But at its most transcendent, as on the stirring likes of “Mighty Clouds of Joy,” he inhabited the junction of spirituality and sentiment with imagination and aplomb, making records that invariably had listeners singing along.“The greatest compliment a person could pay my music is to listen and sing along with it and think that he can sing just as good as me,” he said in his memoir, alluding to the accessibility of his performances. “He probably can’t, of course, or he’d be in the business, but I want it to sound that way anyway.” More

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      Chi Modu, Photographer Who Defined 1990s Hip-Hop, Dies at 54

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      His images of the Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre and many more helped shape rap music’s visual identity.The Notorious B.I.G., stoic and resplendent in front of the twin towers. Tupac Shakur, eyes closed and arms in the air, tendrils of smoke wafting up from his lips. Eazy-E, perched atop his lowrider, using it as a throne. Mobb Deep, huddled with friends on the rooftop of a Queensbridge housing project. Nas, reflective in his childhood bedroom. Members of the Wu-Tang Clan, gathered in a circle and staring down at the camera, sharpness in their eyes.For the essential rap stars of the 1990s, odds are that their defining images — the ones imprinted for decades on the popular consciousness — were all taken by one person: Chi Modu.In the early and mid-1990s, working primarily for The Source magazine, at the time the definitive digest of hip-hop’s commercial and creative ascendance, Mr. Modu was the go-to photographer. An empathetic documentarian with a talent for capturing easeful moments in often extraordinary circumstances, he helped set the visual template for dozens of hip-hop stars. The Source was minting a new generation of superheroes, and Mr. Modu was capturing them as they took flight.Mr. Modu died on May 19 in Summit, N.J. He was 54. His wife, Sophia, said the cause was cancer.A portrait of Tupac Shakur taken by Mr. Modu in Atlanta in 1994. The two  had a special rapport, which spanned several years and photo shoots.Chi ModuWhen hip-hop was still gaining its footing in pop culture and the mainstream media hadn’t quite caught up, The Source stepped into that void. So did Mr. Modu, who was frequently the first professional photojournalist his subjects encountered.“My focus coming up,” Mr. Modu told BBC Africa in 2018, “was to make sure someone from the hip-hop community was the one responsible for documenting hip-hop artists.”His photos appeared on the cover of over 30 issues of the magazine. He also photographed the cover of Mobb Deep’s breakthrough 1995 album, “The Infamous…,” and “Doggystyle,” the 1993 debut album from Snoop Doggy Dogg (now Snoop Dogg), as well as Bad Boy Records’ “B.I.G. Mack” promotional campaign, which introduced the rappers the Notorious B.I.G. and Craig Mack.“We were pretty primitive in our look at that time, and we needed someone like him,” Jonathan Shecter, one of the founders of The Source, said.Mr. Modu’s personality, he added, was “super cool, no stress, no pressure. He’d just be a cool dude hanging out with the crew. A lot of rappers felt he was someone they could hang around with.”Mr. Modu’s signature approach was crisp and intimate — he rendered his subjects as heroes, but with an up-close humility. As that generation of emerging stars was learning how to present themselves visually, he helped refine their images. (He had a special rapport with Tupac Shakur, which spanned several years and shoots.)“When you bring that high level of skill to an arena that didn’t have a high level of skill, you can actually create really important work,” he told Pulse, a Nigerian publication, in 2018.For Mobb Deep’s album cover, he scheduled time in a photo studio, which yielded the indelibly ice-cold cover portrait of the duo. “A huge part of our success was that cover — he captured a vibe that encapsulated the album,” Mobb Deep’s Havoc said. “To see a young Black brother taking photos of that nature was inspiring.”But Mr. Modu also spent a day with the duo in Queensbridge, the neighborhood they hailed from, taking photos of them on the subway, by the Queensboro Bridge, on the roof of the housing project building Havoc lived in. “Twenty-five years later they feel almost more important,” Havoc said. “They give you a window into that time.”Mr. Modu in 2011 with his fellow hip-hop photographer Ricky Powell, who also died this year.Brian Ach/Getty ImagesIn addition to being a nimble photographer — sometimes he shot his images on slide film, with its low margin for error — Mr. Modu was a deft amateur psychologist. “He could flow from New York to Los Angeles and go into every ’hood. There was never a problem, never an issue,” Mr. Shecter said. His wife remembered Mr. Modu leaving a Jamaican vacation to photograph Mike Tyson, only to arrive and learn Mr. Tyson didn’t want to shoot; by the end of the day, via charm and cajoling, Mr. Modu had his shots.Mr. Modu was also a careful student of the dynamic balance between photographer and subject — the celebrity was the raison d’être for the shoot, but the photographer was the shaper of the image. “The reason I am able to take control is that I am here trying to help you go where you are trying to go,” Mr. Modu told Pulse. “I’m on your team. I’m the one looking at you. You may think you are cool but I have to see you as cool to press my shutter.”Jonathan Mannion, a friend of Mr. Modu’s and a hip-hop portraitist of the following generation, said Mr. Modu played a crucial role in establishing the presence of sophisticated photography in hip-hop. “He kicked a lot of doors off their hinges for us to walk through,” Mr. Mannion said.Christopher Chijioke Modu was born on July 7, 1966, in Arondizuogu, Nigeria, to Christopher and Clarice Modu. His father was a measurement statistician, and his mother worked in accounting and computer systems processing. His family emigrated to the United States in 1969, during the Biafran war.His parents later returned to Nigeria, but Mr. Modu stayed behind and graduated from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and received a bachelor’s degree in agribusiness economics from Rutgers University’s Cook College in 1989. He began taking photographs in college — using a camera bought for him as a birthday gift by Sophia Smith, whom he began dating in 1986 and would marry in 2008 — and received a certificate in photojournalism and documentary photography from the International Center of Photography in 1992.Getty ImagesHe shot for The Amsterdam News, the Harlem-based newspaper, and became a staff photographer at The Source in 1992 and later the magazine’s director of photography.After leaving The Source, he consulted on diversity initiatives for advertising and marketing companies and was a founder of a photo sharing website. And he continued to take photos around the world, capturing life in Yemen, Morocco, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.Is addition to his wife, Mr. Modu, who lived in Jersey City, is survived by his mother; three sisters, Ijeoma, Anaezi and Enechi; a brother, Emmanuel; and a son and daughter. In the early 2010s, Mr. Modu began efforts to reignite interest in his 1990s hip-hop photography, initially by partnering with a New York billboard company to display his work.“He felt there were certain gatekeepers, especially in the art world,” Ms. Modu said. “He always said the people are the ones that appreciate the art and want the art that he had. And with the billboard thing, he was taking the art to the people.”The billboard project, called “Uncategorized,” led to exhibitions in several cities around the world. In 2014 he had a solo show at the Pori Art Museum in Finland. In 2016 he released “Tupac Shakur: Uncategorized,” a book compiling photographs from multiple shoots with the rapper.Working in an era when the conditions of celebrity photo shoots were far less constrained than they are now, he retained the rights to his photographs. He sold posters and prints of his work, and licensed his photos for collaborations with apparel and action-sports companies. Last year, some of his photos were included in Sotheby’s first hip-hop auction.Years after his hip-hop picture-taking heyday, Mr. Modu still left an impression on his subjects. DJ Premier of Gang Starr — a duo Mr. Modu photographed for the cover of The Source in 1994 — recalled taking part in a European tour of hip-hop veterans in 2019. During a stop in Berlin, he heard from Mr. Modu, who was in town, and arranged backstage passes for him.When Mr. Modu arrived, he approached a room where the members of the Wu-Tang Clan were all gathered. DJ Premier recalled the rapturous reception: “As soon as he walked it in, it was almost like a cheer — ‘Chiiiiiiiiiiiiii!’” More

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      Gavin MacLeod, ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ and ‘Love Boat’ Actor, Dies at 90

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      After years as a journeyman with a long list of credits but little name recognition, he found stardom on two of the biggest television hits of the 1970s and ’80s.Gavin MacLeod, who tasted stardom after years as a journeyman actor when he landed roles on two of the most successful television series of the 1970s and ’80s — as the news writer Murray Slaughter on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Capt. Merrill Stubing on “The Love Boat” — died on Saturday at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 90. His nephew Mark See confirmed the death. He said that the cause was unknown, but that Mr. MacLeod had recently had health issues.When Mr. MacLeod was invited to audition for the pilot of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in 1970, he was almost 40, a recovering alcoholic and still looking for a breakthrough role after more than a dozen years as a working actor with a string of modest stage, film and television credits — notably on the sitcom “McHale’s Navy” — but little name recognition.The audition was for the role of Lou Grant, the gruff newsroom boss of Ms. Moore’s character, Mary Richards, a sweet-natured associate news producer at a fictional Minneapolis television station. But Mr. MacLeod asked instead if he could read for the more understated role of Murray, saying he felt more comfortable playing Mary’s co-worker than her superior. (The role of Lou Grant went to Ed Asner.)“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” ran from 1970 to 1977 and became one of the most acclaimed comedies in television history, winning Emmys and a devoted audience, not least because it centered on a young, single professional woman — still an adventurous premise at the time — and offered quick-witted comedy with generous doses of the real world, addressing serious topics like drug use, homosexuality, women’s rights and premarital sex.As Murray, the balding, humble head writer and Mary’s office best friend, Mr. MacLeod was given to firing zingers at the show’s other regulars, especially the pompously vain anchorman, Ted Baxter (Ted Knight, a longtime friend of Mr. MacLeod’s). He saw Murray as an Everyman character.Mr. MacLeod, right, played a humble TV news writer and Ed Asner played his gruff boss on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”Photofest“Murray represented all the brown-baggers — not just in newsrooms, but in all sorts of professions,” he wrote in his autobiography “This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith and Life” (2013). “People felt they knew me.”Just weeks after “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” finished filming its final episode, Mr. MacLeod was offered the lead role of Captain Stubing on “The Love Boat.” That show was a hit as well, running from 1977 to 1986.Mr. MacLeod and other cast members from “The Love Boat” received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2018. From left: Fred Grandy, Ted Lange, Jill Whelan, Mr. MacLeod, Cynthia Lauren Tewes and Bernie Kopell.Mike Nelson/EPA, via Shutterstock“The Love Boat,” which revolved around Mr. MacLeod’s affable white-suited captain and a crew of regulars, ventured into new television territory by offering simultaneous plot lines in each episode, all having to do with the humorous, and amorous, adventures of the cruise ship’s passengers, played by guest stars. (Mr. MacLeod later became a pitchman for Princess Cruises.) But unlike “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which was acclaimed for its writing and its willingness to defy the sanitized conventions of situation comedy, “The Love Boat,” produced by Aaron Spelling, was vilified by critics as just another example of safe, formulaic TV comedy. Mr. MacLeod defended the show. “I don’t care if it reflects life or not,” he said. “I love happy endings. Life’s so heavy these days that people want to escape.”Gavin MacLeod, the older of two children, was born Allan George See on Feb. 28, 1931, in Mount Kisco, N.Y. His family later moved to nearby Pleasantville. His father, George, was an electrician who died of cancer in 1945; his mother, Margaret (Shea) See, had worked for Reader’s Digest.Allan graduated from Pleasantville High School in 1947 and received a scholarship to Ithaca College, in upstate New York, graduating in 1952 with a degree in drama.After a stint in the Air Force, he moved to New York City to look for acting jobs, working at first as an usher and an elevator operator at Radio City Music Hall, where he met Joan Rootvik, a Rockette. They married and went on to have four children before divorcing in 1972.In the early 1950s he adopted his stage name in remembrance of Beatrice MacLeod, his drama teacher at Ithaca. He chose the first name Gavin after a character in an episode of the anthology television series “Climax.”After finding some stage work, Mr. MacLeod made his television debut as a guest star on “The Walter Winchell Files,” a crime drama. His first credited movie role was a small part as a police lieutenant in “I Want to Live!,” a 1958 drama with Susan Hayward as a woman facing the death penalty. In 1959 he appeared in the Korean War film “Pork Chop Hill” and Blake Edwards’s naval comedy “Operation Petticoat.”By the 1960s Mr. MacLeod was appearing regularly on television series, with guest-starring roles on “Perry Mason,” “Combat!,” “Death Valley Days,” “Dr. Kildare,” “The Untouchables” and other shows. His part on “McHale’s Navy,” which starred Ernest Borgnine, was his first job as a series regular. His character, Seaman Joseph Haines, one of a crew of misfits aboard a World War II PT boat, was known as Happy. But Mr. MacLeod, feeling underused, was anything but.“I had, like, two lines a week,” Mr. MacLeod said in a videotaped interview for the Archive of American Television. “I started feeling sorry for myself; I started drinking. I felt that as an actor I was just going down the tubes.”As he told the story, one night he was driving, while drunk, on Mulholland Drive in the hills above Los Angeles when he impulsively decided to kill himself by driving off the road. But he stopped himself, jamming on the brakes at the last moment. Shaken, he recalled, he made his way to the nearby house of a friend, the actor Robert Blake, who persuaded him to see a psychiatrist.He quit “McHale’s Navy” in 1964, after two seasons, and began finding more satisfying parts, including a supporting one in the 1966 film “The Sand Pebbles” with Steve McQueen.After his divorce, Mr. MacLeod married Patti Kendig, a dancer, in 1974. They also divorced, in early 1982, but remarried each other in 1985, by which time they had both become born-again Christians. Mr. MacLeod documented their story, as well as his decades-long struggle with alcoholism, in a 1987 book, “Back on Course: The Remarkable Story of a Divorce That Ended in Remarriage.”In addition to his wife, Mr. MacLeod is survived by two sons, Keith and David; two daughters, Meaghan MacLeod Launier and Julie MacLeod Ruffino; 10 grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and a brother, Ron See.Mr. MacLeod became active in religious-oriented entertainment, hosting programs on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and starring in Christian-themed films like “Time Changer” (2002) and “The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry” (2008).His later television work also included guest-starring roles on “The King of Queens,” “Jag,” “Touched by an Angel” and “Oz,” the HBO prison drama. In 2010, according to his autobiography, Mr. MacLeod quit television in the middle of an audition for an episode of “Cold Case” and returned to what he said was his greatest professional love: theater. He did do some television work after that, but most of his work for the rest of his life was in stage productions in the Los Angeles area.William McDonald and Jesus Jimenez contributed reporting. More

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      John Davis, a Voice Behind Milli Vanilli, Dies at 66

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      The singer was one of the voices behind the pop duo Milli Vanilli, fronted by Fabrice Morvan and Rob Pilatus, who later admitted that they did not sing on their albums or in concert.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.John Davis, one of the real voices behind the lip-syncing duo Milli Vanilli, died in Nuremberg, Germany, on Monday. He was 66.His daughter, Jasmin Davis, who confirmed the news of his death on Facebook, said he had Covid-19.While living in Germany, Mr. Davis started unknowingly singing for Milli Vanilli in the 1980s after he met Frank Farian, a German music producer. Mr. Farian asked Mr. Davis to work on a project, but he did not disclose that his voice would be used for others to lip-sync, Mr. Davis told The Hustle podcast on an episode posted in April.Only later would he discover that his voice was being used by Fabrice Morvan, one-half of the pop duo Milli Vanilli, with Rob Pilatus.“The truth is, I signed a contract with Frank Farian before I even knew who Milli Vanilli was,” Mr. Davis said. “One evening, I was sitting at home watching my TV, and I saw Fab singing ‘Girl I’m Gonna Miss You.’”Milli Vanilli was best known for hits like “I’m Gonna Miss You” and “Girl You Know It’s True,” and won the Grammy for best new artist in 1989.By 1990, Milli Vanilli’s work had sold more than seven million copies, but after Mr. Morvan and Mr. Pilatus admitted that they did not actually sing on Milli Vanilli’s albums or in concerts, they were stripped of the award.Mr. Morvan and Mr. Pilatus then told The Los Angeles Times that they wanted to give the award to those who actually voiced their work, including Mr. Davis, Brad Howell and Charles Shaw.“I didn’t want the Grammy because it was their faces and our voices,” Mr. Davis said. “I was mad.”Mr. Pilatus died in 1998, but Mr. Davis and Mr. Morvan later had an amicable relationship and even performed together.On Friday, Mr. Morvan shared a video with pictures of him performing with Mr. Davis.“Your golden voice will continue to be heard, you best believe that those classic records will live just like you eternally,” Mr. Morvan said on Twitter.Additional details about survivors were not immediately available on Saturday.Mr. Davis, who was born on Aug. 31, 1954, in Anderson, S.C., was stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army and stayed there for much of his life, he told The Hustle podcast.In Germany, Mr. Davis found many opportunities to play in Army clubs in the 1970s, he told the podcast.Mr. Davis said he learned how to play music from his father, a choir director who played piano and guitar.“My one mission I had on this earth was to become a musician and to play music,” Mr. Davis said.Those We’ve LostThe coronavirus pandemic has taken an incalculable death toll. This series is designed to put names and faces to the numbers. More

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      Alix Dobkin, Who Sang Songs of Liberation, Dies at 80

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      She broke new ground in 1973 with her album “Lavender Jane Loves Women,” recorded and distributed by women for women, which sketched out a lesbian separatist utopia.Long before K.D. Lang transformed herself from a country artist into an androgyne pop idol and sex symbol, smoldering in a man’s suit on the cover of Vanity Fair being mock-shaved by the supermodel Cindy Crawford; long before Melissa Etheridge sold millions of copies of her 1993 album, “Yes I Am,” and in so doing came out as a gay rock star; and long before the singer-songwriter Jill Sobule’s “I Kissed a Girl” hit the Billboard charts, the folk singer Alix Dobkin chopped her hair off, formed a band and recorded “Lavender Jane Loves Women.”Released in 1973, it was the first album recorded and distributed by women for women — arguably the first lesbian record. Ms. Dobkin started her own label, Women’s Wax Works, to do it.Once a folk star playing Greenwich Village clubs with Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ms. Dobkin turned to writing songs like “View From Gay Head” (“Lesbian, Lesbian/Let’s be in No Man’s Land”). Her lyrics sketched out a lesbian separatist utopia and also poked fun at its vernacular and customs, as she did in “Lesbian Code,” which contained lines like “Is she Lithuanian?,” “Is she Lebanese?” and “She’s a member of the church, of the club, of the committee/She sings in the choir.”Her music was the soundtrack for many young women coming out in the 1970s and ’80s, a rite of passage spoofed by Alison Bechdel, the graphic memoirist, in her long-running comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” (A panel titled “Age 21” showed a young woman with cropped hair and pinwheel eyes, smoking a bong and reading Mary Daly’s “Gyn/Ecology,” another feminist touchstone, as the lyrics from Ms. Dobkin’s “The Woman in Your Life Is You” waft around her, a Lavender Jane album cover propped up in a corner.)“I can’t tell you how cool it was as a young dyke to see those album covers,” said Lisa Vogel, founder of the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, otherwise known as Michfest, where Ms. Dobkin would perform for decades. “To see someone not trying to pass one bit.”Ms. Dobkin died on May 19 at her home in Woodstock, N.Y., after suffering a brain aneurysm and a stroke. She was 80. Her former partner Liza Cowan announced the death.She was a star of the women’s festivals that were an expression of the alternative economy lesbian feminists were building in the ’70s — a byproduct of second-wave feminism — with their own books, publishing companies, record labels and magazines. Michfest was the biggest, an entire city built from scratch each season in Oceana County, complete with health care clinics, crafts, workshops and food for thousands. It was a complete matriarchal society. No men were allowed.When the festivals began in the mid-’70s, there were no safe spaces for lesbians, said Bonnie J. Morris, a historian and archivist of feminist music and the author of “Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women’s Music Festivals.” “You weren’t welcome to have a double bed in a hotel; there were no Disney Gay Days. Festivals were a way to get together, share information and recharge.”It was backstage at a women’s festival in 1983 that Ms. Etheridge first met Ms. Dobkin. “She was in the tradition of the classic folk troubadour, changing the world through song and cleverness,” Ms. Etheridge said in an interview.“She made an impact,” she added, “and she did it with humor. Until I heard Alix, I had no idea I would be an out lesbian performer; I just wanted to be a rock star.”“When I told her I was thinking of recording an album, she said, ‘Oh, Melissa, there’s no radio station that’s going to play a lesbian.’ After ‘Yes I Am’ came out — and I came out — she said to me, ‘Damn it, you proved me wrong. I’m so grateful.’”Alix Cecil Dobkin was born on Aug. 16, 1940, in New York City. She was named for an uncle, Cecil Alexander Kunstlich, a womanizing, drug-addicted ne’er-do-well who cleaned up his act and was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Her parents, Martha (Kunstlich) and William Dobkin, were, like many Jewish intellectuals of the time, Communist Party members and social activists. Alix grew up listening to the folk music of Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie, as well as the Red Army Chorus and Broadway show tunes, and singing at home with her parents.Ms. Dobkin at her home in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1980.Liza CowanAlix was 16 when the F.B.I. began investigating her. She had joined the Communist Party that year, but her parents had become disillusioned and left; there were too many F.B.I. informants, her father told her later.The F.B.I. followed Ms. Dobkin until she turned 30, noting in her file that she had become a housewife and mother. The file, which Ms. Dobkin retrieved in 1983 under the Freedom of Information Act, proved useful decades later, when she was writing her memoir, “My Red Blood” (2009). It recorded her many addresses and helpful dates, like that of her wedding in 1965, though it had the venue wrong.Ms. Dobkin studied art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia, earning a bachelor’s degree, with honors, in 1962. A fellow student and Communist Party member was also a booker at a local nightclub, and he began to manage her, often along with a young comic named Bill Cosby. He found the pair regular work at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village, where she met her future husband, Sam Hood, whose parents owned the place, as well as Mr. Dylan and other folk luminaries. When Ms. Dobkin married Mr. Hood, her career as a performer took a back seat to his as a producer. They divorced amicably in 1971, when their daughter, Adrian, was a year old.Like many women in that transitional time, Ms. Dobkin was frustrated by her role as a housewife and had joined a consciousness-raising group. When she heard Germaine Greer, the feminist author of “The Female Eunuch,” interviewed on the countercultural radio station WBAI, it was a revelation. She wrote to Ms. Cowan, a producer at the station who had conducted the interview. Ms. Cowan invited her on the program to perform, and the two women fell in love.After they got together, Ms. Dobkin decided she wanted to make music for and by women only. Ms. Cowan would go on to found lesbian magazines like Dyke, A Quarterly. In the mid-’70s, the couple bought a 70-acre farm in rural Schoharie County, in central New York State — not an easy locale to plunk down a gay family.“I remember being called a ‘hobo’ by the kids in school,” Adrian Hood said, “though they were trying to say ‘homo’. I craved a normal mom with long hair.”Ms. Dobkin in performance in Ulster County, N.Y., in 2017. “She made an impact,” her fellow singer Melissa Etheridge said, “and she did it with humor.”Retts ScauzilloMs. Dobkin’s tour schedule slowed down a bit in the late ’90s, and when Ms. Hood had her own children, Ms. Dobkin took on a new role.“She was a stay-at-home grandma by choice, which allowed me to work full time,” said Ms. Hood, who is dean of students and director of admissions at a day school in Woodstock. “That was a huge gift. She was able to express that everyday maternal attention that she missed with me.”In addition to her daughter, Ms. Dobkin is survived by her brother, Carl; her sister, Julie Dobkin; and three grandchildren. In 2015, a photograph of Ms. Dobkin taken by Ms. Cowan wearing a T-shirt that read “The Future Is Female” exploded on social media, thanks to an Instagram post by @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y, an account that documents lesbian imagery. It brought the T-shirt, originally made in the 1970s by Labyris Books, the first feminist bookstore in New York City, back into production — and introduced Ms. Dobkin to a new generation of young women.“I’ve prepared all my life for this job,” Ms. Dobkin told the crowd at a women’s music festival in 1997. “Because being a Jew and being a lesbian are very similar. That’s why I look so much alike. I have so much in common. It’s OK to be a Jew, it’s OK to be a lesbian — as long as you don’t mention it. And what we also have in common is that we were never supposed to survive.” More