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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

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      Joel Chadabe, Explorer of Electronic Music’s Frontier, Dies at 82

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      As both a composer and an advocate, Mr. Chadabe devoted himself to what one music critic called the “marriage between humans and their computers.”Joel Chadabe, a composer who helped pioneer electronic music in the 1960s, later developing compositional software programs and founding the Electronic Music Foundation, an advocacy organization for electronic music, died on May 2 at his home in Albany, N.Y. He was 82.His wife, Françoise Chadabe, said the cause was ampullary cancer, a rare form similar to pancreatic cancer.In 1965, when Mr. Chadabe was 27 and computer music was in its nascence, he was asked by the State University of New York at Albany to run its electronic music studio. He had recently graduated from Yale’s music school, and his sensibilities lay with jazz and opera, but he needed a job, so he accepted. From his perch at the university, Mr. Chadabe began to explore the wonders of making music with machines.“I took to it, I think, because for me it was the frontier,” he said in a 2013 interview with the University of Minnesota. “It was the new frontier of music, and I saw unlimited possibilities.”Early on, Mr. Chadabe (pronounced CHA-da-bee) commissioned Bob Moog, who had just started developing a commercial synthesizer, to build one for the studio. He could initially afford only part of the synthesizer (which he powered with a car battery), but after securing enough funding he asked Mr. Moog to create what he called a “super synthesizer.” The result, known as CEMS (Coordinated Electronic Music Studio), was a system that filled an entire room at the university and offered a vast range of sonic capabilities. Students were soon lining up to experiment with it.Before long, Mr. Chadabe found himself mesmerized by the machine as well. At night, he would wait for the campus to clear out so that he could sequester himself with the synthesizer, twisting its knobs to generate soundscapes. He went on to compose electronic music prolifically and to release several experimental albums, including “After Some Songs” (1995), which featured his abstractions of jazz standards, and “Many Times …” (2004).Mr. Chadabe hosted concerts at the university, to which he invited avant-garde composers like Alvin Lucier and Julius Eastman to perform works. In 1972, John Cage visited the studio to tape “Bird Cage,” a sound collage that featured shrill chirps that he had recorded in aviaries. Mr. Chadabe also acquired an early Synclavier for the school, a digital synthesizer that was later used by artists like Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode and Genesis.Reviewing a 1983 concert performance in The New York Times, Bernard Holland wrote, “Mr. Chadabe seemed everywhere to be asking gentle, unassertive questions about who will lead and who will follow in this new marriage between humans and their computers, about how fully and how well people will cope with the potential riches and intimidating complexities of this newest addition to our family of musical instruments.”In the 1980s, Mr. Chadabe began developing compositional software programs that musicians could use to make electronic music at home. He founded a company called Intelligent Music, which released programs like M, Jam Factory and UpBeat, which the band New Order used in recording its 1989 album, “Technique.”In 1994, he formed the Electronic Music Foundation, a nonprofit organization that sought to increase public awareness of electronic music. The group presented concerts and festivals; had a record label that released work by composers including Cage, Laurie Spiegel and Iannis Xenakis; and maintained an online CD store.“A lot of important people in the electronic scene weren’t exactly high profile in terms of the public, but Joel was incredibly interconnected with the community, and he reached a lot of people with the Electronic Music Foundation,” said Kyle Gann, who was the longtime new-music critic for The Village Voice. “He had a tremendous underground influence.”Mr. Chadabe in 1993, a year before he formed the Electronic Music Foundation, a nonprofit organization that sought to increase public awareness of computerized music.Seth McBrideAs artists like Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers enjoyed mainstream success in the 1990s, Mr. Chadabe felt it was vital to document electronic music’s history while its pioneers were still alive. He published the book “Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music,” which featured more than 150 interviews with figures like Mr. Moog, the composers Milton Babbitt, Pierre Henry and Éliane Radigue, and Ikutaro Kakehashi, the founder of the Roland Corporation and an architect of MIDI. (Inevitably, Mr. Chadabe’s own contributions were also included.)While he interviewed his subjects, Mr. Chadabe tried to divine what precisely it was that had compelled them all to make music with machines.“In writing the book I asked people, ‘Why do you use electronics?’” he recalled in his University of Minnesota interview. “One of the answers that I received mostly was. ‘To make any sound.’”Joel Avon Chadabe was born on Dec. 12, 1938, in the Bronx and grew up in the Throgs Neck neighborhood. His father, Solon, was a lawyer. His mother, Sylvia (Cohen) Chadabe, was a homemaker.Joel attended the private Bentley School in Manhattan and studied classical piano. His parents hoped that he would become a lawyer, but instead he studied music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 1959. At Yale, he studied with the composer Elliott Carter, and after he acquired a master’s in 1962, he continued his studies with Mr. Carter in Italy. He was in Rome when he heard about an unusual job opening at SUNY Albany.In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Benjamin, and a sister, Susan Strzemien.As he grew older, Mr. Chadabe became a passionate environmentalist, and in 2006 he started the Ear to the Earth music festival, which featured performances of electronic music themed around nature. At the festival in New York that year, one composition included the rustling of pine beetles, and another utilized a soundscape of the city’s pigeons.Mr. Chadabe retired from SUNY Albany in the late 1990s but continued to teach electronic music courses at the Manhattan School of Music, New York University and Bennington College, where he had been teaching as an adjunct since the 1970s.Well into his 70s, Mr. Chadabe remained tantalized by the possibilities of electronic music, whose potential he felt was only just being understood.“Electronics has opened up an amazing world of sound, and more than just an amazing world of sound, an amazing way to understand sound,” he said in 2013. “We are really just beginning to get a good handle on how sound works and how we can transform it.” More

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      in Television

      Mark York, Actor on ‘The Office,’ Dies at 55

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      The Ohio native, who advocated greater visibility onscreen for people with disabilities, appeared in early seasons of the NBC sitcom as Billy Merchant.Mark York, the actor best known for playing Billy Merchant on the NBC sitcom “The Office,” died last week in Dayton, Ohio. He was 55.His death was confirmed by the Montgomery County coroner’s office, which said on Tuesday that he had died in a hospital of natural causes. Mr. York’s family said in an obituary that he had died after “a brief and unexpected illness.”Mr. York appeared in four episodes of “The Office” from 2006 to 2009 as the property manager of the office park where Dunder Mifflin, the fictional paper company at the center of the series, made its home. His character, Billy Merchant, who like Mr. York was a paraplegic, was introduced in the second season when Michael Scott, the bumbling branch manager played by Steve Carell, brought him to the office for a cringe-inducing meeting on disability awareness.In the scene, Mr. York’s character gamely answers Michael’s clueless questions about his wheelchair use. But when Michael tries to equate it with burning his foot on a George Foreman grill, Billy interrupts: “You know what, Michael? Let me stop you right there … and leave.”“The letters I get about the character are great,” Mr. York told People magazine in 2010, saying one fan had written that he “shed light on how crazy office politics can be” for workers with disabilities who are just trying to do their jobs.Making wheelchair users more visible onscreen was only one of Mr. York’s goals. He also supported efforts to find a cure for spinal cord injuries, serving as the Southern California representative for SCI Research Advancement, a nonprofit foundation that works to expedite research.“He would constantly come up with ideas for us, and ultimately he came up with an idea to contact the White House,” Will Ambler, the founder of the group, said in an interview.In January 2010, Mr. York, Mr. Ambler and one of the foundation’s board members met in Washington with Kareem Dale, President Barack Obama’s special assistant for disability policy, and other government officials. Mr. York, an avid traveler, drove there from Ohio in his car, a red Dodge Magnum with hand controls that he called Roxanne and had more than 300,000 miles on it.For wheelchair users, driving is a way of regaining freedom, and Mr. York “just took it to the highest level he could,” Mr. Ambler said, adding, “He was liberated, he was free and he could go anywhere he wanted.”Although they didn’t get the changes that they proposed, the group has pressed on and Mr. York had recently suggested approaching the White House again.“He was working on it until the very end,” Mr. Ambler said.Cast members from “The Office” shared their condolences on Twitter.“He was a terrific human, a positive force and a dynamic actor,” said Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight Schrute.Marcus A. York was born on Nov. 27, 1965, in Arcanum, Ohio, and graduated from Arcanum High School. In 1988, a car accident left him disabled. The accident gave him “a new lease on life,” according to a biography on his website, and he graduated from Anderson University in Indiana with majors in psychology, sociology and social work. While he was in college, friends encouraged Mr. York to pursue modeling and acting, and he later moved to California.In addition to television commercials, Mr. York appeared in the shows “8 Simple Rules” and “CSI: NY.” He also had an uncredited role in the 2001 film “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.”According to his obituary, he had been working in recent years as an inventor and had obtained two patents.Mr. York is survived by his parents, Glenn and Becky York, and three brothers, Brian, Jeff and David. More

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      in Music

      Roger Hawkins, Drummer Heard on Numerous Hits, Is Dead at 75

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      An innately soulful musician, he recorded with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and many others and was an architect of what became known as the Muscle Shoals sound.Roger Hawkins in performance in 1973. He was member of the band Traffic at the time, but he was best known as a studio musician.Brian Cooke/RedfernsRoger Hawkins, who played drums on numerous pop and soul hits of the 1960s and ’70s and was among the architects of the funky sound that became identified with Muscle Shoals, Ala., died on Thursday at his home in Sheffield, Ala. He was 75.His death was confirmed by his friend and frequent musical collaborator David Hood, who said Mr. Hawkins had been suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other conditions.An innately soulful musician, Mr. Hawkins initially distinguished himself in the mid-’60s as a member of the house band at the producer Rick Hall’s FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala. (The initials stand for Florence Alabama Music Enterprises.) His colleagues were the keyboardist Barry Beckett, the guitarist Jimmy Johnson and Mr. Hood, who played bass. Mr. Hood is the last surviving member of that rhythm section.Mr. Hawkins’s less-is-more approach to drumming at FAME — often little more than a cymbal and a snare — can be heard on Percy Sledge’s gospel-steeped “When a Man Loves a Woman,” a No. 1 pop single in 1966. He was also a driving force behind Aretha Franklin’s imperious “Respect,” a No. 1 pop hit the next year, as well as her Top 10 singles “Chain of Fools” (1967) and “Think” (1968).Mr. Hawkins was a driving force behind some of Aretha Franklin’s biggest hits. Seen here with Ms. Franklin in a New York studio in 1968 are, from left, the producer Arif Mardin, the guitarist Tommy Cogbill, Mr. Hawkins, the bassist Jerry Jemmott, the keyboardist Spooner Oldham, the guitarist Jimmy Johnson and the producer and arranger Tom Dowd.The Estate of David Gahr/Getty ImagesRemarkably, none of the four members of the FAME rhythm section could read music. They extemporized their parts in response to what was happening in the studio.“Nobody really suggested anything to play; we would interpret it,” Mr. Hawkins said in a 2017 interview with Modern Drummer magazine. “Now that I look back at what we did, in addition to being musicians, we were really arrangers as well. It was up to us to come up with the part.”In his 2015 memoir, “The Man From Muscle Shoals: My Journey From Shame to FAME,” Mr. Hall attributed the transformation of the middle section of Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances,” a Top 10 hit recorded at FAME in 1966, to the genius of Mr. Hawkins.“All the musicians stopped playing except Roger Hawkins, who continued to play with every ounce of strength he had in his body,” Mr. Hall recalled. “I poured the echo into the drums and Pickett started screaming, ‘Nah, nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah, nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah.’”From left, Mr. Johnson, Wilson Pickett, Mr. Oldham, Mr. Hawkins and Junior Lowe at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., in 1966.FAME StudiosMr. Hawkins said that a principal influence on his playing was Al Jackson Jr., the drummer with Booker T. & the MGs, the rhythm section at Stax Records. “Through listening to Al Jackson is how I learned to build a drum part in a soul ballad,” he said in a 2019 interview with Alabama magazine.In 1969 Mr. Hawkins and the other members of the FAME rhythm section parted ways with Mr. Hall over a financial dispute. They soon opened their own studio, Muscle Shoals Sound, in a former coffin warehouse in nearby Sheffield.Renaming themselves the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the four men appeared on many other hits over the next decade, including the Staple Singers’ chart-topping pop-gospel single “I’ll Take You There,” a 1972 recording galvanized by Mr. Hawkins’s skittering Caribbean-style drum figure. They also appeared, along with the gospel quartet the Dixie Hummingbirds, on Paul Simon’s “Loves Me Like a Rock,” a Top 10 single in 1973.Mr. Hawkins and Mr. Hood worked briefly with the British rock band Traffic as well; they are on the band’s 1973 album, “Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory.”Mr. Hawkins and his colleagues became known as the Swampers after the producer Denny Cordell heard the pianist Leon Russell commend them for their “funky, soulful Southern swamp sound.” The Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd mentioned them, by that name, in their 1974 pop hit “Sweet Home Alabama.”Mr. Hawkins also worked as a producer, often in tandem with Mr. Beckett, on records like “Starting All Over Again,” a Top 20 pop hit for the R&B duo Mel and Tim in 1972. The entire rhythm section produced (with Mr. Seger) and played on Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s “Old Time Rock & Roll,” a Top 40 hit perennially cited as among the most played jukebox records of all time.Roger Gail Hawkins was born on Oct. 16, 1945, in Mishawaka, Ind., but was raised in Greenhill, Ala. He was the only child of John Hawkins, who managed a shoe store there, and Merta Rose Haddock Hawkins, who worked in a nearby knitting mill.Roger became enamored of rhythm while attending services at a local Pentecostal church as a youth. His father bought him his first drum kit when he was 13.As an adolescent, he began spending time at FAME, then located above a drugstore in Muscle Shoals, before he joined the Del Rays, a local band, led by Mr. Johnson, that played fraternity parties and other dances. By 1966 he was doing session work at FAME.Early in his career Mr. Hawkins (top right with Mr. Oldham) played in the band Dan Penn and the Pallbearers, along with, from left, Mr. Lowe, Mr. Penn and Donnie Fritts.FAME StudiosHe and the other owners of Muscle Shoals Sound sold the studio in the 1990s. Mr. Hawkins stayed on as the studio’s manager under its new owners.Mr. Hawkins was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 1995, along with the other members of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. Thirteen years later they were enshrined in the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville.He is survived by his wife of 19 years, Brenda Gay Hawkins; a son, Dale; and two grandchildren.Mr. Hawkins’s approach to session work often focused on those moments in a recording when he remained silent, waiting for just the right time and place to strike the next note.“Every musician strives to be the best they can,” he told Modern Drummer. “Not every musician gets the chances I had. Some new studio players have an attitude of ‘Man, I’ve got to play something great here — got to play the fast stuff to be hired again.’“That’s not the way to go,” he continued. “I’ve always said this: I was always a better listener than I was a drummer. I would advise any drummer to become a listener.” More

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      Arthur Pomposello, Impresario for a Cabaret Swan Song, Dies at 85

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      He was the host at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel during an improbable resurgence of cabaret from the 1980s to the early 2000s. He died of complications of Covid-19.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Arthur Pomposello, the host of the Oak Room, the cabaret supper club in the Algonquin Hotel, practiced the arts of theatricality and discretion.A dark-haired former model in a tuxedo, he parted a red curtain to allow guests inside. He glided onstage and introduced Andrea Marcovicci, for decades the Oak Room’s main attraction, as “our songbird.” He gossiped with journalists about what he called “my cabaret,” and in return the papers gave him labels like “a loquacious fixture.”But Mr. Pomposello could also work quietly. “This is cabaret,” he whispered to loud customers. “We don’t talk here.” He rearranged the tables, making light crowds appear livelier and making big crowds fit.Inspectors would check to see if the small-capacity room exceeded legal limits.“He would show them the kitchen or show them the upstairs — ‘Oh, come right this way,’” Ms. Marcovicci recalled. “They’d never see the room when it had 110 people in it. Never.”Mr. Pomposello died on May 6 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 85. The cause was complications of Covid-19, his son Sean said.When Mr. Pomposello started at the Algonquin as a bartender, in 1980, you could still feel transported to the hotel’s famed past as a daily gathering place for writers. He once entered the lobby and noticed Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut sharing a drink. The next instant, Eudora Welty walked in.Cabaret turned a profit for only a select few, but Mr. Pomposello kept his perch at the Oak Room under several different owners of the Algonquin.Jack Manning/The New York TimesIn the middle to late 1980s, as figures like Michael Feinstein and Harry Connick Jr. launched their careers from the Oak Room, Mr. Pomposello’s responsibilities grew. He booked talent and managed the finances, keeping his perch under several different owners of the Algonquin.“I’ve not lost a penny in nine years,” he told The New York Times in 1998.When he saw his son Sean, he raved about visits from faded stars whose glow had never dimmed for Mr. Pomposello. The Nicholas brothers, tap-dancers who rose to fame in the 1930s, turned heads the night they arrived, Mr. Pomposello said.Sean recently looked through his father’s address book to invite people to the wake. “I can’t find too many friends,” Sean said. “I find a lot of cabaret stars, some of whom are no longer alive.”Arthur Pomposello was born on Nov. 19, 1935, in Harlem and grew up in the Bronx. His father, Arthur, played jazz guitar under his nickname, Scotty Bond. His mother, Concetta (Bellafatto) Pomposello, was a homemaker who went to work at the pocketbook counter in Bloomingdale’s after she and Scotty divorced, when their son was a teenager.Arthur dreamed of becoming a movie star and spent summers in Los Angeles. When that didn’t work out, he went to Michigan State University. He graduated with a degree in hotel management.Back in New York, he worked at a succession of hotels, including Hampshire House, and restaurants, including Café des Artistes. He modeled and found modest acting work. He cooked up entrepreneurial schemes like “Pompie’s Pushers,” models selling authentic Italian food from handcarts. Nothing took — until the Oak Room. Mr. Pomposello stayed until a dispute with management in 2002.Mr. Pomposello married Eunice Mahoney, a telephone operator, in 1958. They divorced in 1979. That same year he married Alicia Cirino, a bunny at the New York Playboy Club. She died of heart failure in 2007.In addition to his son Sean, Mr. Pomposello is survived by two more children from his first marriage, Peri Kish-Pomposello and Chris Pomposello, and five grandchildren. A son from his second marriage, Adam, died in an accident in 2008.After he left the Oak Room, Mr. Pomposello worked as a night concierge at the Plaza Hotel until the pandemic last spring, when he was 84. Mr. Pomposello never stopped hoping to find a new venue of his own. In 2015 and 2016, he organized several performances at restaurants of an act he called “Pompie’s Place,” which featured jazz and blues singers and Mr. Pomposello himself as the impresario of an imaginary club.The discovery of a new restaurant or a theater with a large lobby set his gears turning, Sean Pomposello said: “He’d get this wistful look in his face, looking around the place, and thinking about how he’s going to book cabaret.” More

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      in Theater

      Rahul Vohra, Indian Actor and Video Blogger, Dies at 35

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      His YouTube posts dissected issues of Indian life, especially gender inequality. He died of complications of Covid-19 after lamenting his hospital treatment.Rahul Vohra began his acting career in the theater and later worked in low-budget films and television ads. But he was fascinated by the role technology played in shaping conversations about society, so he turned to video blogging.After he and Jyoti Tiwari married in December, she joined him in producing short, scripted videos in Hindi about issues like gender disparity, rising gas prices and the difficulties of working from home during the pandemic. Several have received more than 1 million views, and Mr. Vohra swiftly became one of India’s most popular YouTube stars.In one video, titled “Story of a Woman,” he asks for a cup of tea from his wife, who is played by an actress and is seen lost in thought after a long day of housework.“I am not a robot,” she says.“You only stay at home; what else do you do?” Mr. Vohra asks. She challenges him to do household chores for a day, telling him that then he would understand what she had meant. After accepting the challenge, he’s soon seen struggling and tiring within hours.“Even if I am sick, I had to do this work every day,” the wife says. “In reverse I ask for nothing, just a bit of respect and love.”Mr. Vohra died of complications of Covid-19 on May 9 at a hospital in New Delhi, Ms. Tiwari said. He was 35.He had fallen ill in New Delhi’s second wave of the pandemic, when much of the country’s health care system was overwhelmed. He found himself making desperate calls to his wife from his hospital bed, telling her that he feared he would die. She called the hospital for help but received little attention, she said. He was eventually moved to another hospital and died there.His videos struck a chord with young and middle-class Indians. “There was something about him which touched the lives of people,” a friend, Ankur Seth, said. “He spread positivity around even in dark times.”Rahul Vohra was born into a middle-class family in New Delhi on Jan. 27, 1986. His father, Suresh Vohra, works in a manufacturing firm, and his mother, Bimla Vohra, is a homemaker. Along with his wife and parents, he is survived by a sister, Neeru Vohra.Mr. Vohra received a degree in commerce from Delhi University. A talented performer from a young age, he was then offered a place at the prestigious Asmita Theater Group school in New Delhi.Two days after he died, Ms. Tiwari, 29, a writer for YouTube videos, found on her husband’s phone a video of him struggling to breathe and complaining about the poor quality of medical care at the hospital where he had initially been admitted. She posted it on Instagram with the hashtag #justiceforirahulvohra.“This is extremely valuable right now,” he said in the video, referring to his oxygen mask. “Without it patients get giddy and suffer.”In another post the day before he died, on his Facebook page, he wrote, “I would have lived had I received better treatment.” He tagged Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been severely criticized for his handling of the pandemic.“My Rahul has left us, everyone knows that but, no one knows how he left us,” Ms. Tiwari wrote on Instagram. “I hope my husband will get justice.” More

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      Mary Ahern, Who Produced Early TV and Then Preserved It, Dies at 98

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      Ms. Ahern was a key behind-the-scenes figure in the landmark series “Omnibus” before becoming the Paley Center for Media’s first curator.Mary V. Ahern, who was an important behind-the-scenes figure on the cultural magazine show “Omnibus” and other early television programs, then helped preserve those and similar touchstones of television history as the Paley Center for Media’s first curator, died on May 1 at a care center in Peabody, Mass. She was 98.Her niece Joan Curry said the cause was cancer.Ms. Ahern spent much of her career working with Robert Saudek, an Emmy Award-winning producer whom The New York Times once described as “alchemist in chief of what is often recalled as the golden age of television.” Mr. Saudek, who died in 1997, created “Omnibus” in 1952, when television was new. Ms. Ahern was his valued right hand, as she had been earlier when he worked in radio.“Omnibus” was hosted by Alistair Cooke, who at the time was known primarily from radio, and it cast an incredibly wide net as it explored what could be done on the new medium and whether anyone would watch it.Orson Welles, Yul Brynner, Ethel Barrymore, James Dean and other famous or soon-to-be-famous actors appeared in staged dramas. William Inge and other playwrights unveiled new works. Gene Kelly tap-danced with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. There was a segment that explained what an X-ray was. One particularly inspired episode put children’s toys to the adult test: Professional musicians jammed on kiddie instruments, and a professional chef tried to make a dinner for six using a tiny toy oven.At the time, television job titles and duties were less rigidly defined than they are now, but Ms. Ahern was essentially a producer on some episodes, a script writer on others, lead researcher or editor or supervisor on still others, and sometimes all those at once.She was pivotal in bringing Leonard Bernstein to the program, meeting over lunch with him and Paul Feigay, another “Omnibus” producer, who had worked with Mr. Bernstein on the 1944 musical “On the Town.” She and Mr. Feigay showed Mr. Bernstein some Beethoven sketchbooks that had come their way that were filled with the composer’s notes from his writing of the Fifth Symphony, including an assortment of rejected ideas.“Lenny had never seen these sketches at all,” Ms. Ahern said in an oral history recorded by Ron Simon in 2017 for the Television Academy Foundation. As they were leaving the lunch, she said, he was struck with an idea.“I remember coming out on Fifth Avenue with Lenny,” she recounted, “and he said, ‘You know what I could do?’ — because he knew the score, of course, backwards; he’d conducted the Beethoven Fifth many times. He said, ‘I could look at where he would have put those sketches and why he rejected them.’ And that was the first program we did on Bernstein.”That episode, broadcast in November 1954, is regarded as a classic early example of television that both entertains and enlightens. Mr. Bernstein, Howard Taubman wrote in The Times, “made vividly clear how Beethoven fought his way to the right phrase.”The episode’s success led to a series of appearances on the program by Mr. Bernstein, on subjects including opera, Bach and the art of conducting. A Bernstein episode on musical comedy in 1956 included among the cast an unknown singer named Carol Burnett, making one of her first television appearances.But Mr. Bernstein’s television talks weren’t improvised; one of Ms. Ahern’s tasks was working over his proposed scripts, which were full of musical terms of art, to make them more friendly to the general viewer.“He knew so much,” she said. “What he didn’t realize is — and I was the perfect foil for that — that people did not know what he knew.”Leonard Bernstein on the television program “Omnibus” in 1956. Ms. Ahern played a pivotal role in bringing Mr. Bernstein to the program.Yale Joel/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images“Omnibus,” which began on CBS, moved to ABC and then NBC before finishing its run in 1961 after more than 150 episodes, most of which — these being TV’s early days — were broadcast live. By then Mr. Saudek had formed his own production company and Ms. Ahern had joined him there, where she continued to be a key figure in numerous productions.In the mid-1970s William S. Paley, the chairman of CBS, decided to create the Museum of Broadcasting, dedicated to preserving TV and radio history, and brought in Mr. Saudek to be its first president. Ms. Ahern became curator of the new museum, which opened in 1976 and is now the Paley Center for Media.“That title makes me feel I should have jars with old bones,” she told The Times in 1977, but in fact it made her a foundational figure in documenting and preserving important programs, old TV commercials and assorted broadcasting oddities. Later, from 1986 to 1989, she did similar work as an acquisitions specialist at the Library of Congress.Mary Virginia Ahern was born on Oct. 15, 1922, in Cambridge, Mass. Her father, Thomas, was in real estate and insurance, and her mother, Nora, was a teacher.Ms. Ahern enrolled at Radcliffe College to study anthropology but switched to literature, graduating in 1942. Then, during World War II, she served for three years in the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service.“She supervised the inspection of gas masks and was assigned to the procurement of flame throwers and other deadly weapons,” The Times wrote in a 1959 article about her. “One of her associates has noted that this was an incongruous occupation for a gentle, retiring young woman who had majored in American literature at college. But, he added: ‘I’m sure she was good at it. She knows how to get to the essence of any problem.’”After the war, Ms. Ahern enrolled in a management training course at the Harvard Business School (which was not yet admitting women to its master’s program).“They had internships, which were novel in those days,” she said in the oral history, “and I had an internship to what was the brand-new American Broadcasting Company, in the public affairs department.”The head of that department was Mr. Saudek.Ms. Ahern being interviewed for the Television Academy Foundation in 2017.The Television Academy Foundation InterviewsThey worked together on radio documentaries, taking on weighty subjects like the Marshall Plan and urban slums. In the early 1950s, when the Ford Foundation set itself the task of developing TV programs that would inform and enlighten, it hired Mr. Saudek, by then an ABC vice president, as director of what it called the TV-Radio Workshop. He brought along Ms. Ahern, and she helped him start “Omnibus.” Few women were working as producers at the time.Programs Ms. Ahern worked on after “Omnibus” included the mid-1960s anthology documentary series “Profiles in Courage,” a Saudek production, for which she wrote and edited scripts. In the 1970s she worked with Mr. Bernstein again as one of the producers of his “Norton Lectures” series for PBS. In the 1980s, Ms. Ahern was credited with greatly expanding the Library of Congress’s radio and TV holdings, particularly by acquiring countless programs from the NBC archives.In addition to Ms. Curry, Ms. Ahern is survived by two other nieces, Mary H. Ahern and Sharon A. Ahern.Ms. Ahern’s long association with Mr. Bernstein included traveling to the Soviet Union in 1959 to oversee the filming of “Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in Moscow,” which Mr. Saudek’s company was making for CBS. The Times wrote about her behind-the-scenes role, not only for the Bernstein special, but also for many other programs, saying she “has investigated and become proficient in such diverse subjects as jet aircraft, burlesque and sea horses.”Among the problems she had to solve in Moscow, the article said, was how to translate the title of Aaron Copland’s “Billy the Kid,” which was on the program, into Russian. She consulted a teacher in Kiev.“The closest equivalent the adviser could offer,” the newspaper said, “was ‘Fellow Billy.’” More