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      Robert Sacchi, Who Played Bogart Again and Again, Dies at 89

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      He was a hard-working actor and not merely a doppelgänger. But his claim to fame on film, TV and the stage was that he looked like Bogie.Lon Chaney was immortalized in a 1957 film as the “Man of a Thousand Faces.” Robert Sacchi could capitalize on only one: his conspicuous resemblance to Humphrey Bogart. He played it for all it was worth.That similitude projected him into a circumscribed but lucrative career that included the title role in the 1980 film “The Man With Bogart’s Face” and the part of Bogie himself in touring theatrical companies of Woody Allen’s comedy “Play It Again, Sam.”Mr. Sacchi died on June 23 in a hospital in Sherman Oaks, Calif., his daughter, Trish Sacchi Bertisch said. He was 89.As early as the 1940s, the decade of “The Maltese Falcon,” “Casablanca” and “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” when Mr. Sacchi (pronounced SACK-ee) was attending Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, friends and neighbors noticed that he was a ringer for Bogart.Still, it would take more than two decades for him to receive notice as the irreverent, snarling and brusque actor’s look-alike. That career began in the early 1970s — first on the road in “Play It Again, Sam,” the story of a man who gets romantic advice from an imaginary Bogart, and then as the title character in “The Man With Bogart’s Face,” a comedy about a private eye named Sam Marlow (his first and last names were shared with detectives Bogart had played) who undergoes plastic surgery to look like Bogart.Adapted from Andrew J. Fenady’s 1977 book of the same name, the movie also featured several performers, including Yvonne De Carlo, Mike Mazurki and George Raft (in his final film), who years earlier had co-starred with Bogart himself.Reviewing “The Man With Bogart’s Face” (also known as “Sam Marlow, Private Eye”) in The New York Times, Tom Buckley wrote that Mr. Sacchi, “who has been doing a Bogart look-alike turn on college campuses, shows considerable acting skill in the title role, although his hopes for future employment in films would seem to be limited.”Humphrey Bogart in a publicity photo for the 1945 movie “Conflict.”Warner Bros., via Getty ImagesRobert Sacchi in a 1981 episode of “Fantasy Island.”Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesHe managed nonetheless to find employment as Bogart: in a one-man show called “Bogey’s Back,” in television commercials, in a Phil Collins music video and in a voice-over for an episode of the HBO horror anthology series “Tales From the Crypt” in 1995.Robert Patsy Sacchi was born on March 27, 1932, in Rome and immigrated with his parents, Alberto and Marietta (D’Urbano) Sacchi, to New York when he was a baby. His father was a carpenter.After graduating from high school, he earned a degree in business and finance from Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., and a master’s degree from New York University.In addition to his daughter Ms. Bertisch, he is survived by his wife, Angela de Hererra; a son, the producer John Sacchi; six children from an earlier marriage, Robert Sacchi Jr., Barbara Cohen, Felicia Carroll, Maria Tolstonog, Lisa Osborne and Anthony Sacchi; his brother, Mario Sacchi; and three grandchildren.Mr. Sacchi had some success in parts not related to Bogart, including roles in three 1972 films: “The French Sex Murders,” “Pulp” and “Across 110th Street.” He had some non-acting success as well: In the 1980s, he recorded a rap single, “Jungle Queen,” which was a hit in Germany, and he worked on a book with the boxer Willie Pep about slum children who grew up to achieve fame in the ring.Yet he would remain best known for how he looked. His 5-foot-8 frame, brooding eyes, furrowed brow and craggy face cried out for a famous movie line to be rewritten as “Here’s lookin’ at me, kid.”He accepted that it was his face that gained him attention. But as a teenager, at least, he would have chosen a different one.“I mean, I never thought Bogie was too terrific-looking,” Mr. Sacchi once said. “Like most kids at the time, I wanted to look like Gregory Peck.” More

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      Ellen McIlwaine, Slide Guitarist With a Power Voice, Dies at 75

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      Early in her career she played with Jimi Hendrix. She went on to record several well-regarded albums. But she remained under the radar.In the mid-1960s Ellen McIlwaine spent about a month playing in New York with a fellow guitarist whose musical tastes she shared, an undiscovered talent named Jimi Hendrix. They made an unusual pair — a white woman working on her slide-guitar skills and a Black guy developing his own flamboyant style. It was going pretty well, and she thought about formalizing the partnership.“I talked to my manager about Hendrix,” Ms. McIlwaine recalled almost 30 years later in an interview with The Calgary Herald, “and wanting to get a group together, and he said: ‘Oh, I know who that is. He’s Black. You don’t want him in your group.’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t want you for my manager.’”That was the music scene at the time — bubbling with talent and experimentation, yet also still hindered by misguided ideas about who should be allowed to become a star.“People back then thought like that,” Ms. McIlwaine said. “They’d even say things to me like, ‘Ellen, you can’t play the guitar because nobody will be able to look at your body while you sing.’”Hendrix soon went to England and broke out of that box. Ms. McIlwaine became a dazzling slide guitarist and recorded a string of albums but never quite achieved the fame of female guitarists and singers like Bonnie Raitt and Chrissie Hynde, who were just a few years younger.Ms. McIlwaine died on June 23 in Calgary, Alberta, where she had lived for years. She was 75.The cause was esophageal cancer, her friend Sharron Toews said.An international upbringing grounded Ms. McIlwaine in a wide array of musical influences, and her live shows put them all on display — sometimes she would sing a blues number in Japanese. Music critics and guitar aficionados appreciated her, but hits proved elusive.“Ellen was wasted on the boomers,” Ms. Toews said in a phone interview. “She should have come out 20 years later, because the millennials would have been blown away by someone of her talent.”Ms. McIlwaine said she started playing her signature slide guitar after seeing the guitarist Randy California, later of the band Spirit, at a club in New York and being struck by his unusual technique: He’d break the neck off a wine bottle and use it as a slide.“I thought, Well, I can do that,” she told The Record of Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, in 2006.In the group Fear Itself, which played a brand of psychedelic blues and released a self-titled album in 1968, she was the rare female guitarist fronting an otherwise male band. But the band broke up after a few years, and in 1972 she released the first in a string of solo albums, “Honky Tonk Angel.”Ms. McIlwaine’s “Honky Tonk Angel,” released in 1972, was the first in a string of solo albums.The next year John Rockwell, reviewing her performance at Kenny’s Castaways in Manhattan for The New York Times, conveyed the range of her material, a mix of covers and original songs.“Her voice is a big, well‐trained, controlled pop soprano that seems equally at home in country, blues, gospel, rock, Latin and folk idioms,” he wrote, “and her guitar playing sounds as confidently virtuosic as anyone you might hear.”“What makes Miss McIlwaine so extraordinary,” he added, “is the way she manages to fuse all her influences into something unique.”Her most recent album, “Mystic Bridge,” a collaboration with the tabla virtuoso Cassius Khan, was released in 2006 on her own label, Ellen McIlwaine Music (“just so nobody gets confused about whose music it is,” as she told The Calgary Herald that year).“I’m tired of being on labels,” she said, having been frustrated at times with the limitations placed on what she recorded. “It’s people with temporary jobs making permanent decisions about your career.”Frances Ellen McIlwaine was born on Oct. 1, 1945, in Nashville and adopted as a baby by William and Aurine (Wilkens) McIlwaine. They were Methodist missionaries, and soon the family had relocated to Kobe, Japan, where she attended a Canadian international school.“We had 200 students, kindergarten to grade 12, and 28 nationalities,” she told the Canadian newspaper chain Postmedia in 2019. “So I was exposed to world music before it was called world music.”Her parents got a piano when she was young, and by 5 she was playing it.“They played hymns for prayers on it every morning,” she told The Record, “and I played rock ’n’ roll every afternoon when they were gone.”Ms. McIlwaine would sometimes babysit for younger children at the school.“We’d be riding our tricycles around in the auditorium,” Jane Moorhead, one of those charges, said in a phone interview, “and she’d be banging out ‘Blueberry Hill’ on the piano. She was an awful lot of fun to have as a babysitter.”Ms. McIlwaine earned her high school diploma at the school and returned to the United States in 1963.“When we came back to the United States and I started college in Tennessee, the only piano was in the boys’ dorm,” she said, “so I borrowed a guitar that belonged to somebody, and I liked it.”She dropped out of college and tried art school in Atlanta, playing in clubs while studying. The singer and songwriter Patrick Sky saw her there and advised her to go to Greenwich Village, which she did, meeting Hendrix and others who were part of the music scene there.Richie Havens was something of a mentor as she refined her guitar playing; once when she complained to him that she couldn’t play all the notes he could with his larger hands, he encouraged her to find her own way. She developed unusual tunings for her guitar and a powerhouse vocal style that, as one writer put it, “is strong enough to strip paint at 10 paces.”Ms. McIlwaine lived in Woodstock, N.Y., for a time, as well as in Connecticut, but eventually settled in Canada, where she was better known than she was in the United States. Her other albums included “We the People” (1973); “Everybody Needs It” (1982), on which Jack Bruce of Cream played bass; and “Looking for Trouble” (1987).No immediate family members survive.Though Ms. McIlwaine continued to perform until becoming ill, for the last eight or nine years she had also driven a school bus to support herself, Ms. Toews said, something she enjoyed doing because she loved children. But she might not have needed that money had things been different during her prime.“If I had a nickel for every up-and-coming young, white, male guitar player I’ve opened for over the last 41 years,” Ms. McIlwaine told The Record in 2006, “I’d be really rich.” More

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      in Television

      John Langley, a Creator of the TV Series ‘Cops,’ Dies at 78

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      “You can be entertained by it, you can be disgusted,” he said of the popular reality show that embedded film crews with police officers in the streets for 31 years.John Langley, a creator of “Cops,” the stark-looking reality television crime series that followed police officers on drug busts, domestic disputes and high-speed chases for more than 30 years, died on Saturday in Baja, Mexico. He was 78.Mr. Langley apparently had a heart attack while driving with a navigator in the Ensenada San Felipe 250 Coast to Coast off-road race, said Pam Golum, the spokeswoman for Langley Productions.“Cops,” which made its debut on Fox in 1989 and ran until last year, documented misdemeanors and felonies through the lenses of hand-held video cameras, its stories told without narration or music except for its reggae theme song, “Bad Boys.”From the start the show, created with Malcolm Barbour, was supposed to be an unbiased look at law enforcement, and Mr. Langley later saw it as a truer expression of reality TV than series that followed it, like “Survivor.”“You can be entertained by it, you can be disgusted, but it is what happened,” he told The New York Times in 2007. “It wasn’t staged, it wasn’t scripted. I didn’t put anyone on an island and tell them what to do.”Each episode told a different story shot by a crew embedded with one of various police departments. A drug sting at a pain management clinic. A Taser used to subdue a man called Lion. A woman found in a car with warrants for terroristic threats. A car pursuit into the woods. A man arrested in a car with fake license plates while holding 20 grams of crystal meth.Reviewing the first episode for The Times, John J. O’Connor wrote: “For purposes of the show, however, the court of law is the video camera, which is kept running even when the trapped suspect protests its presence. We are reminded several times that ‘this program shows an unpleasant reality’ and that ‘viewer discretion is advised.’ That should keep them from switching to another channel.”“Cops” began in Broward County, Fla., where in 1986 Mr. Langley and Mr. Barbour got the local police to cooperate in a nationally syndicated documentary, “American Vice: The Doping of a Nation,” hosted by Geraldo Rivera, who was also the executive producer.Mr. Langley recalled in a Television Academy interview in 2009 that the Broward County episodes became part of his successful pitch to other police departments.“We’re not the news,” he said he told them. “We’re not here to expose your department or look for dirt, but to show how difficult your job is on an everyday basis.”A scene from a 1998 episode of “Cops.” “We’re not the news,” Mr. Langley said he would tell local police departments. “We’re not here to expose your department or look for dirt, but to show how difficult your job is on an everyday basis.”FoxNick Navarro, the former sheriff of Broward County, said “Cops” had helped make police departments more transparent by combating negative stereotypes about officers.“I was sick and tired of seeing police officers portrayed in TV shows and movies as Dirty Harry and ‘Miami Vice,’ and just out there killing and maiming and doing extravagant things,” Mr. Navarro told The Miami Herald in 1999.In 2013, after Fox had aired several hundred episodes, a civil rights group, Color of Change, mounted a campaign to cancel “Cops.” The group said that the show’s producers and advertisers had built “a model around distorted and dehumanizing portrayals of Black Americans and the criminal justice system” and had created a reality “where the police are always competent, crime-solving heroes and where the bad boys always get caught.”In the Academy interview four years earlier, Mr. Langley addressed criticism about race in “Cops” by saying that while 60 to 70 percent of street crime was “caused by people of color,” he had made sure that most of the criminals seen on the show were white, to avoid “negative stereotyping,” he said, and because most of the show’s audience was white.Fox did cancel “Cops,” but it was swiftly resuscitated by Spike TV (now the Paramount Network). Last year, however, amid protests over the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and calls for criminal justice reform and police accountability, Paramount dropped the show.John Russell Langley Jr. was born on June 1, 1943, in Oklahoma City and moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was a baby. His father was an oil wildcatter. His mother, Lurleen (Fox) Langley, was a homemaker.After serving in Army intelligence in the early 1960s — he was in Panama during the Cuban missile crisis — Mr. Langley earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature from California State University, Dominguez Hills, and studied for a Ph.D. in the philosophy of aesthetics at the University of California, Irvine, but did not complete his degree.He worked in marketing for Northwest Airlines, wrote short stories and a screenplay, and had a job with a company — where he met Mr. Barbour — that produced press kits and posters for movies. Forming their own company, the two men directed “Cocaine Blues” (1983), a documentary about the perils of cocaine abuse, which led them to make an antidrug music video, “Stop the Madness,” for Ronald Reagan’s White House in 1985. (Mr. Barbour retired from producing in 1994.)Mr. Langley received a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in 2011.Michael Kovac/Getty ImagesMr. Langley produced several other documentaries, some with Mr. Rivera, while trying to pitch “Cops” to NBC, CBS and ABC, all of which rejected the idea. But Fox ordered a pilot.“Barry Diller watched it and said: ‘God, that’s powerful, too powerful,’” Mr. Langley said in the Academy interview, referring to a meeting with the Fox chairman at the time. Another executive worried that Fox’s stations would not accept such a raw program. (Mr. Langley had left in a lot of blood and guts, he said, knowing he could cut it.) But Rupert Murdoch, whose company controls Fox, said, “Order four episodes.”“Cops” spawned several other unscripted crime series by Mr. Langley, including “Las Vegas Jailhouse,” “Jail,” “Street Patrol,” “Undercover Stings” and “Vegas Strip,” which he produced with his son Morgan, the executive vice president of development at Langley Productions.Mr. Langley was a producer of feature films as well, including Antoine Fuqua’s “Brooklyn’s Finest” and Tim Blake Nelson’s “Leaves of Grass,” both released in 2009.In addition to his son, Mr. Langley is survived by his wife, Maggie (Foster) Langley; their daughter, Sarah Langley Dews; another son, Zak, who is the senior vice president of music at Langley Productions; a daughter, Jennifer Blair, from a previous marriage to Judith Knudson, which ended in divorce, and seven grandchildren.Mr. Langley understood the power of a police department’s cooperation when, while shooting “American Vice,” he asked the Broward police if he could shoot a drug raid live.“I said, ‘If you’re going to do this bust anyway, can you do it on this date, and maybe do it in this two-hour window?’” he told the Television Academy. “They said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ and that’s how we did it.” More

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      Frederic Rzewski, Politically Committed Composer and Pianist, Dies at 83

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      Known for his anti-establishment views, Mr. Rzewski created works inspired by the Attica prison uprising and a Chilean protest song.Frederic Rzewski, a formidable composer and pianist who wrote and performed music that was at once stylistically eclectic and politically committed, died on Saturday at his summer home in Montiano, Italy. He was 83.The cause was cardiac arrest, the publicist Josephine Hemsing said in an email.Mr. Rzewski’s anti-establishment thinking stood at the center of his music-making throughout his life. It was evident in the experimental, agitprop improvisations he created in the 1960s with the ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva; in “Coming Together,” the Minimalist classic inspired by the Attica prison uprising; and a vast catalog of solo piano works, several of which have become cornerstones of the modern repertoire.His approach was epitomized in his best-known piece, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!,” an expansive and virtuosic set of 36 variations on a Chilean protest song.Composed for the pianist Ursula Oppens in 1975, the piece, an hour long, is a torrent of inventive and unusual techniques — the pianist whistles, shouts and slams the lid of the instrument — and has been compared to canonic works like Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” and Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.”“Stylistically, it goes through everything,” Ms. Oppens said in a recent interview. “It’s pointillistic and minimalistic and really quite varied.” At the same time, she noted, Mr. Rzewski’s mastery of traditional counterpoint was a major draw for pianists. “There’s a logic to the relationship of the notes to one another,” she added.“The People United” has captured the imagination of virtuosos including Marc-André Hamelin and, more recently, younger pianists like Igor Levit and Conrad Tao. It is the closest thing to a war horse in the contemporary piano repertory.In 2015, Mr. Rzewski performed the entire work at the Pittsburgh fish market Wholey’s, a fabled event in contemporary music circles.Mr. Rzewski’s musical approach favored intuition over cerebral composition. “The one thing that composers in the 20th century don’t do is to simply write down the tunes that are going through their heads,” he told the magazine NewMusicBox in 2002. “I just write down what’s in my head.”Frederic Anthony Rzewski was born on April 13, 1938, in Westfield, Mass., to Anthony Rzewski, a Polish émigré, and Emma Buynicki, who were both pharmacists. He began playing piano and composing from a young age.Following the advice of a teacher, he checked out albums by Shostakovich and Schoenberg at a record store and began to immerse himself in musical modernism.After graduating from Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, Mr. Rzewski studied music at Harvard with the tonal composers Randall Thompson and Walter Piston. He earned his master’s at Princeton.In 1960 and 1961, he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence on a Fulbright scholarship. In Europe, he gained renown performing music by luminaries like Karlheinz Stockhausen and, after a stint in Berlin studying with Elliott Carter, settled in Rome.In a rehearsal for the Atonal Music Festival in 1963, Mr. Rzewski plays a typewriter and squeezes a baby doll that says “Mama.”Allyn Baum/The New York TimesThe European avant-garde had fallen under the sway of John Cage’s experimentalism, and Mr. Rzewski wrote heady music like his “Composition for Two Players,” an unconventional score that he once interpreted by placing sheets of glass on the strings of a Steinway.In 1966, he and the composer Alvin Curran assembled a group of musicians, including the electronic composer Richard Teitelbaum, to perform in the crypt of a church in Rome. The collective became Musica Elettronica Viva, an act that used homemade electronics setups for visceral improvisations. Mr. Rzewski, for instance, scraped and drummed on a piece of glass that had been cut into the shape of a piano, to which he had attached a microphone. (“By the grace of God, we didn’t get electrocuted,” he later said.)Rejecting the dense, modernist scores of his previous academic environs, Mr. Rzewski became preoccupied with spontaneity.“The sublime mingled freely with the base,” he once wrote of “Spacecraft,” one of the sets of trippy instructions that guided Musica Elettronica Viva’s performances. “Climaxes of exhausting intensity alternated with Tibetan drones, ecstatic trances gave way to demonic seizures in rapid succession.”The collective gave more than 100 performances across Europe in the late 1960s, and its raucous concerts drew increasingly politicized listeners. As students agitated, the group joined in, inviting audiences to play with them in anarchic improvisations — a kind of avant-garde Summer of Love. The group also performed in factories and prisons.“The most important thing was the connection of community and the political,” the composer and scholar George E. Lewis, who performed in later iterations of the collective, said in a recent interview. “Music gave people choices and options, and collectively creating music together allowed everyone to rethink their situations.”In 1971, Mr. Rzewski moved to New York and resumed a more routine concert life, playing recitals of new music and joining the downtown improvisation scene.And he began to bring his politics to bear on works he created alone. “It is fairly clear that the storms of the ’60s have momentarily subsided, giving way to a period of reflection,” he wrote that year. First was “Les Moutons de Panurge,” which asks an ensemble to play a tricky, ever-shifting 65-note melody. “Stay together as long as you can, but if you get lost, stay lost,” the score impishly indicates.Then came “Coming Together,” in which a speaker recites a letter written by Sam Melville, a leader of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, over a chugging, minimalist bass line as instrumentalists contribute quasi-improvised interjections. Mr. Rzewski would occasionally perform “Coming Together” himself, playing and speaking simultaneously.The music is at once calculated and urgent; Mr. Rzewski described the Attica rebellion, in which 43 people died, as an “atrocity that demanded of every responsible person that had any power to cry out, that he cry out.” Its many interpreters have included the performance artist Steve Ben Israel, the composer-performer Julius Eastman and Angela Davis, the professor and political activist.During this period Mr. Rzewski became involved in the Musicians Action Collective, a coalition that organized benefit concerts for United Farm Workers, a defense fund for Attica inmates and the Chilean solidarity movement. He was soon drawn to the song “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,” which had become an anthem for the Chilean resistance through performances by the exiled group Inti-Illimani. Written by Sergio Ortega and Quilapayún, the song served as the basis for Mr. Rzewski’s set of variations, commissioned for the United States Bicentennial and first performed by Ms. Oppens at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 1976.“People always say, ‘Well, how can music be political if it has no text?’ Mr. Rzewski told an interviewer that year. “It doesn’t require a text. It does, however, require some kind of consciousness of the active relationship between music and the rest of the world.”Returning to Europe in the late 1970s, Mr. Rzewski split his time between Italy and Liège, where he was a professor at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique until his death, and he made regular visits to the United States to perform and teach.After “The People United,” Mr. Rzewski largely focused on solo piano music, like the “North American Ballads” (1979), which bring together Baroque counterpoint, minimalist improvisation and leftist folk song. Subsequent major solo works include the theatrical “De Profundis,” in which a pianist plays while reciting Oscar Wilde’s infamous prison manifesto; the polystylistic, 10-hour-plus cycle “The Road”; and a sprawling series of miniature “Nanosonatas.”“Opera houses don’t come asking me to write operas,” he told The New York Times in 2008. “Symphony orchestras don’t come asking for symphonies. But there’s this piano player I see every day who keeps asking me for music. So that’s what I do.”Much of the music encourages improvisation, and, in performances of canonic works like Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, Mr. Rzewski would create his own elaborate cadenzas.He remained true to his iconoclastic roots. In 2001 he released his scores as free downloads on the internet, and many are now available on the online Petrucci Music Library.There was, though, a darker side to his ornery personality. Mr. Rzewski could be exceedingly harsh to students in educational settings. After his death was announced, several musicians noted on Twitter that he had a reputation for inappropriate flirtation and sexual innuendo toward younger women.Mr. Rzewski married Nicole Abbeloos in 1963, and they later separated. His partner for many years was Françoise Walot; they separated around 2008. Survivors include six children, Alexis, Daniel, Jan, Noemi, Esther and Noam, and five grandchildren.Wary of the present, Mr. Rzewski also refused to dwell in nostalgia. “Free improvisation was going to change the world,” he told The New York Times in 2016, referring to his early days with Musica Elettronica Viva. “It was going to create an entirely new language, so that people could come together from different parts of the planet and instantly communicate.”After taking a beat, he added, “Well, of course, we were wrong.” More

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      Jon Hassell, Trumpeter and ‘Fourth World’ Composer, Dies at 84

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      Blending modern technology with traditional instruments, Mr. Hassell created a genre he described as “coffee-colored classical music of the future.”Jon Hassell, a composer and trumpeter who blended modern technology with ancient instruments and traditions to create what he called Fourth World music, died on Saturday. He was 84.His death was announced in a statement from his family released by his record label, Ndeya. It did not specify where he died or the immediate cause.Mr. Hassell’s music floated outside the genre boundaries of classical music, electronica, ambient music or jazz. He described Fourth World as “a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques” and, elsewhere, as “coffee-colored classical music of the future.”His music could be contemplative and atmospheric, darkly suspenseful or abstractly funky. On the 20 albums Mr. Hassell made as a leader, his trumpet usually had an eerily disembodied sound, one that was processed through electronics and enfolded in shadowy reverberations, sometimes using harmonizers to multiply each note in parallel lines.He played vocalistic phrases that invoked the bluesy intimacy of Miles Davis along with the Indian classical music that Mr. Hassell studied with the raga singer Pandit Pran Nath. Around his trumpet, as foreground and background coalesced, there might be drone tones, global percussion, wind or string ensembles, washes of synthesizer, samples, distorted guitar, voices and more.He delved into calm and aggression, reflection and propulsion, serenity and suspense. His polymorphous, layered, ambiguous yet sensual music helped shape decades of electronic experimentation from acts like Oneohtrix Point Never, Arca and Matmos.In a tribute in The Guardian in 2007, the musician and producer Brian Eno wrote, “He looks at the world in all its momentary and evanescent moods with respect, and this shows in his music. He sees dignity and beauty in all forms of the dance of life.”Through the years, Mr. Hassell collaborated repeatedly with Mr. Eno and the American musician Ry Cooder. He also recorded with musicians from Africa, Brazil, India and Europe; composed a piece (“Pano da Costa”) for the Kronos Quartet; and played recording sessions with Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, k.d. lang, Baaba Maal, David Sylvian, Tears for Fears, Bono and others.In a 1997 interview with the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever, Mr. Hassell said he wanted to create “music for above and below the waist simultaneously.” He added that Fourth World music was “about heart and head as the same thing. It’s about being transported to some place which is made up of both real and virtual geography.”Mr. Hassell was born on March 22, 1937, in Memphis. He picked up the instrument his father had played in college, a cornet, and studied music and played in big bands as a teenager. He attended the Eastman School of Music, exploring modern classical composition and earning a master’s degree. To avoid being drafted, he joined the Army band in Washington, D.C.Fascinated by the emerging field of electronic music, he made tape collages and won a grant to study with the avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen for two years in Cologne, Germany. His classmates included musicians who would go on to start the German band Can; he took LSD with them.He received a fellowship at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY Buffalo. There, he composed music on one of the early Moog synthesizers. He also met the composer Terry Riley, who first recorded his Minimalist landmark “In C” in 1968 with musicians at SUNY Buffalo, including Mr. Hassell.Mr. Hassell performed in concerts with Mr. Riley and in the drone group Theatre of Eternal Music, which was led by another pioneering Minimalist, La Monte Young. Like them, Mr. Hassell became a student of Mr. Nath, the Indian singer whose subtleties of pitch and inflection would profoundly influence Mr. Hassell’s music; he applied raga singing to his trumpet playing.“It’s about making a beautiful shape in air. I call it calligraphy in sound,” he said in a 2009 interview with All About Jazz.Mr. Hassell’s musical direction was already clear on his 1977 debut album, “Vernal Equinox.” His electronically altered trumpet is joined by African mbira (thumb piano), Indian tabla drums, maracas, tropical bird calls, electronic drones, ocean waves and crickets.“This record fascinated me,” Mr. Eno wrote in 2007. “It was a dreamy, strange, meditative music that was inflected by Indian, African and South American music, but also seemed located in the lineage of tonal Minimalism. It was a music I felt I’d been waiting for.”In New York City, where in the late 1970s art-rock, punk, pop and jazz shared a creative flux, Mr. Eno sought out Mr. Hassell, and they collaborated on “Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics” (1980). As the marketing category “world music” arose, its sounds and ideas strongly influenced musicians like Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel. Mr. Eno was also producing Talking Heads, and Mr. Hassell’s ghostly trumpet is prominent in “Houses in Motion” on Talking Heads’ 1980 album, “Remain in Light.”Mr. Hassell helped conceptualize the 1981 Byrne-Eno album “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” which merged found recordings with studio rhythm tracks and introduced a broad audience to ideas of sonic and cultural collage. But Mr. Hassell later said that he could not afford the airfare to join the recording sessions, and he told Billboard magazine that he considered the results “too poppy.”Writing in 1982 for the science-fiction magazine Heavy Metal, Mr. Hassell championed both preserving and extending local traditions, in order “to understand which music made sorrows bearable and expressed the mystery of creation before the entry date of the first transistor radio into the village.”Through the decades, Mr. Hassell continued to record, experiment and recombine far-flung musical elements.He collaborated with the African percussionists and singers of Farafina, from Burkina Faso, for “Flash of the Spirit” in 1988. He wrote theater music for “Sulla Strada,” an Italian stage adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” He recorded with Mr. Cooder and Indian musicians — Ronu Majumdar on bansuri, a wooden flute, and Abhijit Banerjee on tabla drums — on the 2000 album “Hollow Bamboo.” In 2005 he began touring internationally with a group called Maarifa Street, which he named after a street in Iran; “maarifa” means knowledge or wisdom.Mr. Hassell learned evolving technology and made it speak for him, incorporating samples and complex signal processing. He also held on to the physicality of breath and lips on the trumpet.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Hassell conceived his two final albums, “Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)” (2018) and “Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)” (2020), as “pentimento,” a visual-arts term for the reappearance of images an artist had painted over.He described his approach to the music as “seeing it in terms of a painting with layers and touch-ups and start-overs with new layers that get erased in places that let the underlying pattern come to the top and be seen (or heard).”He had also been working on a book titled “The North and South of You,” he said in a 2018 interview with Billboard.“It’s the analysis of our current situation in terms of our overemphasis on the north of us, the rational and technological, instead of the south of us,” he said. “North is logic, south is the samba — and how much more of each would you rather have when the time comes to depart the planet?” More

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      Jeanne Lamon, Who Led an Early-Music Ensemble, Dies at 71

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      A violinist, she directed Tafelmusik for 33 years, striving not only to present centuries-old music as it was originally heard but also to reach modern audiences.Jeanne Lamon, an accomplished violinist who was music director of the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir for 33 years, helping to build it into one of the world’s most acclaimed baroque ensembles, died on June 20 in Victoria, British Columbia. She was 71.A spokeswoman for the ensemble said the cause was cancer.Ms. Lamon, who lived in Victoria, took the helm of Tafelmusik in 1981, just two years after the group, based in Toronto, was founded by Kenneth Solway and Susan Graves. Under her guidance — and with her often leading from the first-violin chair — the group developed an international reputation, performing all over the world in major concert halls, at universities, in churches, even in pubs.Tafelmusik also became known for its recordings, releasing dozens of albums on Sony Classical and other labels during her tenure.Ms. Lamon and the ensemble pursued a goal of rendering the works they played as their composers would have envisioned them, employing period instruments in the process. One of Tafelmusik’s earliest New York appearances was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Ms. Lamon played the museum’s 17th-century Stradivarius.The results could be striking, as in a 1995 recording of Bach violin concertos.“Beyond its impeccable discipline and luminous textures, the group displays an expressive sensibility that transcends the instruments, whether strung with gut or wire,” Lawrence B. Johnson wrote in a review of that album for The New York Times. “That expressive empathy is most powerfully conveyed in the Adagio of the E major Concerto, where, over a measured tread, Jeanne Lamon spins out a radiant, sad line that might be a wordless aria from a Bach Passion.”Yet Ms. Lamon was not content simply to recreate centuries-old music; she wanted to make it appealing to a modern audience.Never was that more evident than in “The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres,” a multimedia performance piece featuring the music of Vivaldi and others, projections of astronomical and other scenes, an actor providing narration, and an unfettered orchestra. For the piece, conceived and scripted by Alison Mackay, the ensemble’s bassist, and unveiled in Calgary in 2009, which the United Nations had declared the International Year of Astronomy, Ms. Lamon had her players memorize their parts so they could move around the performance space, including into the audience, while playing.“Simply put, this is one of the best, most imaginative shows based on classical music seen here in years,” John Terauds wrote in The Toronto Star when the work was performed in that city later that year. “Including intermission, these two hours pass as if they were 10 minutes. There isn’t a single dull moment or off note.”Ms. Lamon, foreground, performing the multimedia piece “The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres” with Tafelmusik in 2010. “There isn’t a single dull moment or off note,” one reviewer wrote of the two-hour work.Glenn Davidson, via TafelmusikMemorizing a full evening’s worth of music was a tall order for Ms. Lamon and the other players, but she found the experience liberating.“I’m starting to see music stands as a wall between myself and the audience,” she told The Houston Chronicle in 2014, the year she stepped down as music director, when “The Galileo Project” was performed at the Wortham Theater Center in Houston.The piece also traveled to Pennsylvania State University that year. In a video interview pegged to that performance, Ms. Lamon said she thought the work showed a path to broadening the audience for early music and other classical genres.“You don’t just have to play pops concerts, which is what some symphony orchestras resort to when they want to fill the seats,” she said.“I believe dumbing it down is not the way to go,” she added. “I think people just want to feel more a part of it.”Jeanne Lamon was born on Aug. 14, 1949, in Queens and grew up in Larchmont, N.Y. Her father, Isaac, was in real estate, and her mother, Elly, was a teacher. Ms. Lamon said whatever musical genes she had probably came from her mother, who played piano.She was entranced by the violin at an early age.“I remember at the age of 3 seeing Isaac Stern playing on television,” she told The Toronto Star in 1986, “and I wanted to do what he was doing. I told my parents immediately I wanted a violin.”She had to wait until she was 6 before her parents bought her an instrument, and it was a recorder, not a violin. But she kept after them, and at 7 she got the instrument she wanted.“Learning to play an instrument is very much like learning a foreign language,” she said. “If you learn it young, it becomes part of your body.”“I remember at the age of 3 seeing Isaac Stern playing on television,” Ms. Lamon once said, “and I wanted to do what he was doing.” She got her first violin when she was 7.Dean Macdonell, via TafelmusikHer father, though, thought a general education was important, so instead of going to a conservatory she attended Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in music. Then she went to Amsterdam to hone her violin skills, studying under Herman Krebbers, concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. While there she heard a concert by baroque players.“I instantly fell in love,” she said.She began to study with Sigiswald Kuijken, one of the world’s leading baroque violin players.Back in the United States, she was performing with various ensembles when Mr. Solway and Ms. Graves asked her to come to Toronto to direct a guest program with their new group. They made her music director.Among her legacies is the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute, which trains musicians in baroque performance. In 2006 the organization established the Jeanne Lamon Instrument Bank, which loans period instruments to students.Ms. Lamon’s many awards included the Order of Canada. She is survived by her partner of many years, the cellist Christina Mahler; a brother, Ed; and a sister, Dorothy Rubinoff.Ms. Lamon said part of the appeal of playing early music was that it involved a certain amount of detective work and guesswork, since composers of old often left only the sketchiest of scores.“We are expected to do a lot of interpreting, such as adding dynamics, phrasings and ornaments,” she told The Globe and Mail in 2001. “That’s what attracts a lot of us to playing this music. It’s a very creative process. You do a lot of research to figure out what a composer might have done, but in the final analysis you do what you do, because no two people would do it alike.” More

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      John Sacret Young, Creative Force Behind ‘China Beach,’ Dies at 75

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      The series, about a Vietnam War hospital, was just one vehicle for him in his writing career to explore war and its aftershocks.John Sacret Young, a writer and producer who was behind the television series “China Beach,” set at a Vietnam War military hospital, and whose work often explored the psychological wounds of war, died on June 3 at his home in Brentwood, Calif. He was 75.The cause was brain cancer, his wife, Claudia Sloan, said.Mr. Young was the executive producer of “China Beach,” which recounted the experiences of several women at an evacuation hospital on ABC from 1988 to 1991. He created the show with William Broyles Jr., a former editor at Newsweek who had served in Vietnam and went on to write the screenplay for Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13” (1995).Mr. Young was later a writer and producer of the Aaron Sorkin’s series “The West Wing” (1999-2006) and co-executive producer and writer of the Netflix series “Firefly Lane,” which was released in February.“China Beach” drew comparisons to “M*A*S*H,” particularly when it came to their settings: one in a military hospital in Korea, the other in Vietnam. But where “M*A*S*H” was part comedy, part drama in mostly half-hour installments, “China Beach” took a fully dramatic approach in hourlong episodes. It drew praise for its well-drawn characters, particularly that of Colleen McMurphy, an Army nurse played by Dana Delany.With a cast (many headed for stardom) that also included Tom Sizemore, Kathy Bates, Helen Hunt, Don Cheadle and Marg Helgenberger, “China Beach” won the 1990 Golden Globe Award for best drama, beating out contenders like “L.A. Law” and “Murder, She Wrote.” It also launched the careers of Ms. Delany and Ms. Helgenberger, who went on to a leading role in “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”Though the show was not a major ratings hit, “China Beach” earned praise for its writing and period-appropriate score, featuring a theme song by Diana Ross and the Supremes.In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2013, on the occasion of the show’s 25th anniversary, Mr. Young called the Vietnam War “a story of our generation” and said that choosing to focus on women felt “crucial, interesting and relevant.”The New York Times television critic John J. O’Connor wrote in 1991 that “the series sensitively tapped into national terrain that remains difficult.” The year before, he lauded the show for avoiding the clichés of prime time television in favor of something “inventive, imaginative, adventurous.”Much of Mr. Young’s work — in books, television and movies — explore the impact of war. In addition to “China Beach,” he wrote the mini-series “A Rumor of War” (1980), which adapted Philip Caputo’s celebrated memoir of his time in the Marines Corps in Vietnam and the emotional devastation that followed; “Thanks of a Grateful Nation” (1998), a television movie set in the aftermath of the Gulf War; and the theatrical release “Romero” (1989), starring Raul Julia, which addressed the civil and religious upheaval leading to the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero in El Salvador.Vietnam was also a prevailing theme in a memoir by Mr. Young, “Remains: Non-Viewable” (2005), which centered on the death of his cousin Doug Young in combat in Vietnam and its emotional fallout.The memoir focused on a culture of New England stoicism that, he wrote, prevented his family from processing their loss.“There was a shoe to drop,” Mr. Young wrote in the book, “the actuality, the coming of the coffin, and that would happen soon enough; but in the waiting there was a free fall of silence, an odd decorum, and the postponement of a free fall of emotion that could not be measured.”Mr. Young told NPR in 2005 that though his family had actually been able to view his cousin’s remains, the title, read another way, suggested how they had “looked at that war after it was over and said, ‘Remains non-viewable.’”A scene from a 1989 episode of “China Beach.” The series drew comparisons to “M*A*S*H,” without the comedy. Walt Disney Television via Getty ImagesJohn Sacret Young was born on May 24, 1946, in Montclair, N.J., to Bill and Peggy (Klotz) Young. His mother was a homemaker, and his father worked for the Public Service Electric and Gas Company in Newark. John was the youngest of four siblings.He attended College High School in Montclair and earned a bachelor’s degree in religion at Princeton, graduating in 1969. Ms. Sloan said he chose to study religion primarily because the program allowed him to write a novel as his senior thesis.He married Jeannette Penick in 1973. After their divorce, he married Ms. Sloan in 2010. Along with his wife, Mr. Young is survived by two sons, John and Riley; two daughters, Jeannette and Julia; a brother, Mason; and three grandchildren.His first big break came with “Police Story” (1973-1987), a crime drama for which he began as a researcher and eventually wrote three episodes. To add verisimilitude to his scripts, Mr. Young embedded himself in the Los Angeles Police Department, Ms. Sloan said.Mr. Young spoke at a ceremony for the Humanitas Prize for film and television writers in 2020. Much of his work centered on the impact of war on combatants and society.Gregg Deguire/Getty ImagesAmong his other credits was the movie “Testament” (1983), starring Jane Alexander, about a suburban family’s struggles after a nuclear attack.Over his career, Mr. Young received seven Emmy nominations. An avid art collector, he also wrote “Pieces of Glass: An Artoire” (2016). The book functions as a memoir, his life as seen through the lens of art as he considers how artists, from Vermeer to Rothko, had affected him.Mr. Young opened “Remains: Non-Viewable” with a reflection on storytelling, the art form that defined much of his life and career.“Call up a story: a writer makes them up and sets them down,” he wrote, “but it is what we all do to make shape of our days.” More

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      Diego Cortez, a Scene Shaper in Art and Music, Dies at 74

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      In ’70s and ’80s New York, he elevated Jean-Michel Basquiat in a huge show he curated, helped found the Mudd Club and worked with Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson.Diego Cortez, an influential figure in New York City’s Downtown art and music scenes who in 1981 curated a massive exhibition featuring dozens of artists that brought the 20-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat to public renown, died on Monday in Burlington, N.C. He was 74.The cause was kidney failure, his sister, Kathy Hudson, said. He died in hospice care at her house but had been living nearby in Saxapahaw.Mr. Cortez seemed to be everywhere in SoHo, Tribeca and beyond in the late 1970s and early ’80s. He was a founder of the Mudd Club, a gritty, boundary-pushing nightclub that opened in 1978. He performed with Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker; directed music videos for Blondie and the Talking Heads; mounted shows of drawings and photographs by the rock singer-songwriter Patti Smith; and wrote “Private Elvis,” a book with photographs of Presley’s time in the Army that Mr. Cortez found in West Germany.Then came the “New York/New Wave” show in 1981. Held at the cutting-edge P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS 1) in Long Island City, Queens, the exhibition demonstrated Mr. Cortez’s eclectic knowledge of the visual and musical worlds that he’d been immersed in since he moved to New York City.He recruited more than 100 artists for the show, among them Ms. Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, David Byrne, William Burroughs, Futura 2000, Ann Magnuson, Fab 5 Freddy and Basquiat, whom he had met on the dance floor of the Mudd Club.“It was huge — literally 600 to 700 works of art that took three weeks to install, using two installation crews,” Alana Heiss, the founder of P.S. 1, said by phone. “He was very persuasive: we started with one group of galleries on the first floor and ended up on two floors.”“Diego was full of unquenchable passion,” she said.Curt Hoppe, a photorealist painter whose work was in the exhibition, recalled: “He brought uptown and downtown together, graffiti and downtown artists, and he hung it in an unusual way, splattering everything on the walls. It was a riveting show.”He added, “Diego was the epitome of cool.”Mr. Cortez recruited more than 100 artists for “New York/New Wave,” a 1981 show at what is now the exhibition space MoMA PS 1 in Queens. The show brought wide renown to Jean-Michel Basquiat in particular.MoMA PS1 ArchivesIn a maximalist show that Mr. Cortez packed with existing and future stars, Basquiat was introduced to a wider world. Known first for his graffiti art, he had morphed into a painter who incorporated images of angular people and symbols with words and phrases. The show, for which Basquiat created about 20 new works, brought him to the attention of dealers. By the time he died in 1988 at 27, he was a superstar.“What makes this work is the intensity of the line,” Mr. Cortez said in 2017 when the Basquiat portion of “New York/New Wave” was partly restaged at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. “Jean-Michel was really more of a drawer. It keeps that innocent aspect, that childish aspect that’s important, because it’s slightly not adult.”Mr. Cortez remained linked to Basquiat long after the P.S. 1 exhibition. He curated a few more shows of his work; advised his estate and served on its authentication committee; acted as a consultant to Julian Schnabel when Mr. Schnabel made the film “Basquiat” (1996); and played a bit part as what the credits called a “fist-fighter at the Mudd Club” in “Downtown 81,” another film about Basquiat, from 2001.Mr. Cortez stood before a painting of him by the photorealist painter Curt Hoppe. “Diego was full of unquenchable passion,” a colleague said.Curt HoppeJames Allan Curtis was born on Sept. 30, 1946 in Geneva, Ill., and grew up nearby in Wheaton. His father, Allan, was a warehouse manager for a steel company, and his mother, Jean (Ham) Curtis, was a manicurist.After graduating from Illinois State University with a bachelor’s degree, he earned a master’s degree in 1973 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied film, video and performance art. His teachers included the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage and the video artist Nam June Paik.He changed his name to Diego Cortez before moving to New York City in 1973, adopting it as an artistic pseudonym and as a reflection of the Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago where he had lived.Once in New York, he worked as a studio assistant to the conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim and then to the video and performance artist Vito Acconci. Over the next few years, as he became further enmeshed in the Downtown music and art worlds, he held a variety of jobs, including one as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art. The job inspired Ms. Anderson in 1977 to release “Time to Go (For Diego),” a song that tells how Mr. Cortez, working the late shift, would tell people when it was time to leave:Or, as he put it, snap them out of their … art trances.People who had been standing in front of one thing for hours.He would jump in front of them and snap his fingers.And he’d say, “Time to go.”Mr. Cortez’s career after “New York/New Wave” was multifaceted, but he never organized another enormous exhibition like that one. He was an occasional agent and curator; collaborated on projects with his friend Brian Eno, the innovative musician and producer; and served as an art adviser to the Luciano Benetton and Frederik Roos collections. He composed an album, “Traumdetung” (2014), a mix of music and his snoring. And at one point he tried, unsuccessfully, to start a museum in Puerto Rico.Laurie Anderson and Mr. Cortez at a benefit in New York City in 2013. She was inspired to base a song on one of his early jobs in New York, as a museum security guard.Cindy Ord/Getty Images“His main goal was to to support artists by having collectors buy their work or to get their work into museums,” said his sister Ms. Hudson, who organized exhibitions with her brother at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, where she worked.In addition to her, Mr. Cortez is survived by another sister, Carol Baum, and a brother, Daniel Curtis.Patti Smith, in a phone interview, said she first got to know Mr. Cortez in the 1970s. He later urged her to resume working on her visual art, which she had largely stopped pursuing during a long hiatus from public life. “He was a bridge to helping me get my feet back on the ground,” she said.He helped curate a show of her drawings and photos at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2002 and an exhibition of her photos in 2010 at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where he was the curator of photography at the time.“He didn’t like to stand in other people’s light,” Ms. Smith said. “He wanted Basquiat to stand on his own. He wanted me to stand on my own at my exhibition in New Orleans. He was really interested in seeing people he thought had promise flower.” More