Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Freddie Redd, Jazz Pianist and Composer, Is Dead at 92

      by

      He was best known for writing the music for “The Connection,” an Off Broadway play that depicted the lives of heroin-addicted musicians in New York.The pianist Freddie Redd in a scene from the 1961 movie “The Connection.” He composed the music for the play it was based on, which was also used in the film, in addition to appearing in both.Alamy Stock PhotoFreddie Redd, a pianist and composer who released a pair of well-received albums for Blue Note Records in the early 1960s, then spent more than half a century bouncing through different cities as an ambassador of jazz’s golden age, died on March 17 at a care facility in Manhattan. He was 92.His grandson Leslie Clarke said he had died in his sleep, but did not give a cause.Mr. Redd is best known for writing the music for “The Connection” (1959), an Off Broadway play by Jack Gelber that depicted the lives of heroin-addicted musicians in New York, and that two years later became a renowned film directed by Shirley Clarke. Mr. Redd appeared in both.Largely self-taught, Mr. Redd was particularly known for his compositions and for his skill as an accompanist. Even when he was the one soloing, his left hand’s roving chords were often as rich as his right hand’s improvised lines.“The Music From ‘The Connection,’” released in 1960, was Mr. Redd’s first album for Blue Note; it was followed in 1961 by the similarly acclaimed “Shades of Redd,” which featured an all-star band: the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean (who was also in “The Connection”), the tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks, the bassist Paul Chambers and the drummer Louis Hayes.He recorded another album’s worth of material in 1961, but those tapes were shelved after Mr. Redd had a falling-out with one of Blue Note’s founders, Alfred Lion. It was finally released as “Redd’s Blues” in 1988. His studio career slowed down, and by the mid-1960s he had moved to Europe, where for audiences his presence became symbolic of a vanishing halcyon age in small-group jazz.A native New Yorker, Mr. Redd did the inverse of the pilgrimage made by most major jazz musicians: He started his career at the center of the jazz universe, then moved out. And moved, and moved again.From the mid-’60s on, he would spend stretches in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Guadalajara, Baltimore and Carrboro, N.C. In his 80s he returned to New York, where he recorded two albums for the SteepleChase label and spent his final years.Mr. Redd told The New York Times that his peripatetic career had provided him creative satisfaction,  if not always fair pay.“I like to move around,” he said in a 1991 interview. “It’s always refreshing because you don’t know the nuances, the tricks of the new place. Unfortunately, the price I’ve paid for being a maverick is living a lifestyle that hasn’t been particularly supportive. But I don’t have regrets. There’s a lot out there to find out about, and sometimes you can’t do it in a week or a month.”Mr. Redd in performance at Smalls Jazz Club in Manhattan in 2011.Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images/Getty ImagesFreddie Redd Jr. was born in Harlem on May 29, 1928, to Freddie and Helen (Snipes) Redd. His father was a porter who played the piano at home, and his mother was a homemaker. His father died when Freddie was 2, but he left behind the instrument on which Freddie would teach himself to play.In addition to his grandson Mr. Clarke, Mr. Redd is survived by a stepdaughter, Susan Redd; two other grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren. His wife, Valarie (Lyons) Redd, died before him, as did his children, Stephanie Redd and Freddie Redd III.Mr. Redd was drafted into the Army in 1946. He later remembered first hearing bebop while stationed in South Korea, on a record played by a fellow service member. He was hooked.After returning to New York in 1949, he started playing with leaders on the scene like Art Blakey, Gene Ammons, Sonny Rollins and Art Farmer; he recorded his first album, “Freddie Redd Trio,” for Prestige in 1955 and spent time in California performing with Charles Mingus.“During that period, we realized that we were a brotherhood; we were all after the same thing,” Mr. Redd told The Times, remembering his colleagues on the modern jazz scene in the 1950s. “We were drawn to the inspirational aspect of the music. It was a wonderful time.”After being arrested for marijuana possession, he lost his cabaret card, a document issued by law enforcement that was required of anyone performing in nightclubs. Unable to work in clubs, he moved into a loft in Greenwich Village and became part of a scene that included visual artists, poets and other musicians.There Mr. Redd met the actor Garry Goodrow, who had just been cast in “The Connection,” a new play at the Living Theater that put the lives of heroin-addicted musicians on intimate display. That led to an introduction to Mr. Gelber, who hired him to compose the music and perform as a member of the cast.“The Music From ‘The Connection’” was the first of three albums Mr. Redd recorded for Blue Note in the 1960s, although the third was not released until 1988.Blue NoteThough the film version of “The Connection” is now recognized as a classic of indie cinema, its raw and unflinching portrayal came into the cross hairs of censors in the United States, where it was hardly ever screened.A few years later, in one of his few pop studio dates, Mr. Redd was the organist on James Taylor’s debut single, “Carolina in My Mind.”In the liner notes to a Mosaic Records boxed set, “The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Freddie Redd” (1989), Jackie McLean reflected on Mr. Redd’s chimerical career. “You never know what town you’ll see” the pianist in, he wrote. “He’s always been itinerant. Freddie just appears from time to time, like some wonderful spirit.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Jack Bradley, Louis Armstrong Photographer and Devotee, Dies at 87

      by

      His trove of pictures formed the foundation of a vast personal collection that is now part of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens.Jack Bradley at his home on Cape Cod in 2008. For 12 years he was Louis Armstrong’s fan, friend and photographer, as well as a collector of Armstrong memorabilia.Earl Wilson/The New York Times Jack Bradley, an ecstatic fan of Louis Armstrong’s who became his personal photographer, creating an indelible and intimate record of the jazz giant’s last dozen years, died on March 21 in Brewster, Mass., on Cape Cod. He was 87.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Nancy (Eckel) Bradley, said.Mr. Bradley first attended a concert by Armstrong and his band on Cape Cod in the mid-1950s. “I never heard anything like that,” he said in an interview in 2012 for a documentary about Armstrong, “Mr. Jazz,” directed by Michele Cinque. “My life was never the same.”Using a Brownie, Mr. Bradley snapped his first photo of Armstrong at another performance — the first of thousands he would take, first as a devotee and then as part of his inner circle. He took pictures of Armstrong at his home in Corona, Queens; in quiet moments backstage; at rehearsals and concerts; during recording sessions; and in dressing rooms.Mr. Bradley photographed Armstrong in his backyard in Queens in about 1960. In all, he took an estimated 6,000 photos of Armstrong.Louis Armstrong House Museum, Jack Bradley CollectionArmstrong and Mr. Bradley in Framingham, Mass., in 1967. “What we had in common,” Mr. Bradley said, “was this unending love for the music.”Louis Armstrong House Museum, via Associated Press“With that face and his beautiful smile,” Mr. Bradley was quoted as saying in a family-approved obituary, “how could anyone take a bad shot?”Mr. Bradley did more than take photographs. He became a voracious collector of anything related to Armstrong’s life and career: 16-millimeter films, reel-to-reel tapes of recordings and conversations, 78 r.p.m. discs and LPs, magazines, manuscripts, sheet music, telegrams, fan letters, figurines — even Armstrong’s slippers and suits, and a hotel laundry receipt that included “90 hankies,” which he famously used to wipe away perspiration during performances.“One day Jack went into Louis’s study and Louis was ripping up picture and letters into little tiny pieces,” Ms. Bradley said by phone. “Jack said, ‘No, you can’t do that!’ and Louis said, ‘You have to simplify.’ To Jack it was history and shouldn’t be thrown out.”Mr. Bradley’s refusal to simplify brought him renown as an Armstrong maven and led to a deal in 2005 in which the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation awarded Queens College a $480,000 grant to acquire his collection for the Louis Armstrong House Museum, where Armstrong and his wife, Lucille had lived.Mr. Bradley’s vast collection of Armstrong material, including fan mail, was acquired by the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens.Earl Wilson/The New York Times“Our cornerstone is Louis’s stuff,” said Ricky Riccardi, the museum’s director of research collections, referring to the vast trove of material that Armstrong left behind when he died in 1971. “That will always stand on its own. But Jack’s is the perfect complement. Louis was obsessed with documenting his life, and Jack was obsessed with documenting Louis’s life.”The museum’s collections, now housed at Queens College, will be moved to an education center nearing completion across the street from the museum, which has been closed during the Covid-19 pandemic.Mr. Bradley was not a salaried employee of Armstrong but was compensated for each photograph he took by Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser. To earn extra money, Mr. Bradley took some commercial photography jobs as well.“I don’t think he ever made more than $10,000 in any year,” his friend Mike Persico said.Dan Morgenstern, the jazz critic and historian, wrote in a Facebook tribute to Mr. Bradley that he had called him “One Shot” because “he would snap just once, in part to save film but also because he trusted his eye and timing.”Mr. Bradley captured Armstrong and the band leader Guy Lombardo during a rehearsal for a performance at Jones Beach on Long Island in the mid-1960s.Jack Bradley Collection, Louis Armstrong House Museum Mr. Bradley once photographed Armstrong naked from behind, in a dressing room. According to Mr. Morgenstern, Armstrong, when he heard the click of Mr. Bradley’s camera, said, “I want one of those!” An enlarged print of the photo hung in Armstrong’s den.John Bradley III was born on Jan 3, 1934, on Cape Cod, in Cotuit. His mother, Kathryn (Beatty) Bradley, had many jobs, including hairdresser. His father left the family when Jack was 10.A love of the sea inspired Mr. Bradley to attend the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, from which he graduated in 1958. He then left for Manhattan, where he immersed himself in jazz clubs and met Jeann Failows, who worked for Mr. Glaser helping to answer Armstrong’s mail. She and Mr. Bradley began dating, and Armstrong, seeing him with her, became convinced that Mr. Bradley was someone he could trust.“What we had in common,” Mr. Bradley told JazzTimes in 2011, using one of Armstrong’s nicknames, “was this unending love for the music. Pops never sought fame for fame’s sake. He just wanted to play his horn. Louis had a message — a message about excellence.“I’ve never met a man who had more genius for music,” he continued. “He could hear something once, and it was locked in his brain forever.”Mr. Bradley was often by my Armstrong’s side from 1959 to 1971, sometimes driving him to engagements and spending hours at Armstrong’s house. In all, the self-taught Mr. Bradley took an estimated 6,000 photos of Armstrong.Armstrong and the clarinetist Joe Muranyi rehearsing in 1967. Mr. Bradley took numerous photos of other jazz musicians as well. Jack Bradley, via Louis Armstrong House MuseumOne sequence of photos, taken in December 1959, shows Armstrong warming up before a concert at Carnegie Hall and jamming with his band before taking the stage, then performing, greeting friends afterward and signing autographs for fans outside the stage door.Mr. Bradley’s focus was not entirely on Armstrong. He photographed many other jazz artists and is said to have taken one of the last pictures of Billie Holiday in performance — at the Phoenix Theater in Greenwich Village in May 1959. (She died that July.)In the 1960s, he was a merchant marine and managed a jazz club, Bourbon Street, in Manhattan for a year. In the 1970s he was a partner in the New York Jazz Museum, in Midtown Manhattan. He also spent time as the road manager for the pianist Erroll Garner and the trumpeter Bobby Hackett.Mr. Bradley returned to live in Cape Cod after the jazz museum closed in 1977. He became a charter boat captain, lectured locally on jazz and hosted a local radio program on which he interviewed jazz musicians. His wife taught high school Spanish.Mr. Bradley, seated, in 2008 with Michael Cogswell, the executive director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum and Archives. “Louis was obsessed with documenting his life,” the museum’s Ricky Riccardi said, “and Jack was obsessed with documenting Louis’s life.”Earl Wilson/The New York TimesMr. Bradley crammed his massive jazz memorabilia collection — of which the Armstrongiana was only a part — into his modest house on Cape Cod in Harwich.“He had it in closets, the attic, shoe boxes, sea chests, the basement, the attic, everything but in oil drums,” said Mr. Persico, who has helped organize the archive.Mr. Bradley died in a nursing facility in Brewster. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sisters, Emmy Shanley and Bonnie Jordan, and his brother, Bob.Ms. Bradley said she did not mind that her marriage had been, in effect, shared with Armstrong.“That was OK,” she said. “The third guy was a lot of fun.” More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Paul Laubin, 88, Dies; Master of Making Oboes the Old-Fashioned Way

      by

      He learned the craft from his father and continued to make his instruments by hand. Laubin oboes are cherished for their dark and rich tone.Paul Laubin, a revered oboe maker who was one of the few remaining woodwind artisans to build their instruments by hand — he made so few a year that customers might have to wait a decade to play one — died on March 1 at his workshop in Peekskill, N.Y. He was 88. His wife, Meredith Laubin, confirmed the death. She said that Mr. Laubin, who lived in Mahopac, N.Y., had collapsed at his workshop at some point during the day and the police found his body there that night.In the world of oboes, his partisans believe, there are Mr. Laubin’s oboes and then there is everything else.Mr. Laubin was in his early 20s when he began making oboes with his father, Alfred, who founded A. Laubin Inc. and built his first oboe in 1931. He took over the business when his father died in 1976. His son, Alex, began working alongside him in 2003.Oboists in major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the St. Louis Symphony, have played Mr. Laubin’s instruments, cherishing their dark and rich tone.“There is something that strikes a chord deep in your body when you play a Laubin,” said Sherry Sylar, the associate principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic. “It’s a resonance that doesn’t happen with any other oboe. It rings inside your body. You get addicted to making that kind of a sound and nothing else will do.”In a dusty workshop near the Hudson River, lined with machines built as long ago as 1881, Mr. Laubin crafted his oboes and English horns with an almost religious sense of precision. He wore an apron and puffed a cob pipe as he drilled and lathed the grenadilla and rosewood used to make his instruments. (The pipe doubled as a testing device: Mr. Laubin would blow smoke through the instrument’s joints to detect air leaks.)His father taught him instrument-making techniques that date back centuries. As the decades passed and instrument makers began embracing computerized design and factory automation, the younger Mr. Laubin steadfastly resisted change. As far as he was concerned, if it took 10 years to build a good oboe — well, so be it.“What’s the rush?” Mr. Laubin said in an interview with The New York Times in 1991. “I don’t want anything going out of here with my name that I haven’t made and checked and played myself.”Mr. Laubin would store the blocks of his rare hardwoods outdoors for years so they could acclimate to extremes of weather and become more resilient instruments, resistant to the cracks that are the bane of woodwind players. After he drilled a hole that would become the instrument’s bore, the chunk of wood sometimes needed another year to dry out.Mr. Laubin, who was a professional oboist as a young man, constantly played each oboe he worked on in search of imperfections. “Every key is a struggle,” he told News 12 Westchester in 2012.When a Laubin oboe was finally completed, its unveiling became a cause for celebration. One customer arrived at the Peekskill workshop with a bottle of champagne, and as he played his first few notes, Mr. Laubin raised a toast.Mr. Laubin learned oboe-making from his father, who made his first instrument in 1931.via Laubin familyPaul Edward Laubin was born on Dec. 14, 1932, in Hartford, Conn. His father, an oboist and music teacher, started making oboes because he was dissatisfied with the quality of the instruments that were available; he built the first Laubin oboe as an experiment, melting down his wife’s silverware to make its keys. Paul’s mother, Lillian (Ely de Breton) Laubin, was a homemaker.As a boy, Paul was enchanted by the instruments he saw his father making, but Alfred initially did not want his son to pursue music. Paul kept pestering him; when he was 13 his father reluctantly gave him an oboe, a reed and a fingering chart, and Paul taught himself how to play.Mr. Laubin studied auto mechanics and music at Louisiana State University in the 1950s. Before long, his yearning to perform got the better of him, and he landed a spot in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Soon after that, he finally joined the family business and began to build oboes with his father in the garage of their home in Scarsdale, N.Y.In 1958, they moved their workshop to a clarinet factory in Long Island City in Queens, and for a time the business was churning out (relatively speaking) 100 instruments per year.Mr. Laubin married Meredith Van Lynip, a flutist, in 1966. He moved the company to its current location in Peekskill in 1988. As time passed, Mr. Laubin’s team got smaller, and so did his production.By the 1990s, A. Laubin Inc. was producing about 22 instruments a year. By around 2005, the average was down to 15. Over time, the scarcity of Laubin oboes only added to their legend. The company has rarely advertised, relying on word of mouth. A grenadilla oboe costs $13,200, and a rosewood instrument costs $14,000.In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Laubin is survived by a daughter, Michelle; a sister, Vanette Arone; a brother, Carl; and two grandchildren.Mr. Laubin was well aware that selling so few instruments a year, no matter how exquisite, did not necessarily make financial sense. “I chose to follow my father even though I knew I’d never get rich on it,” he told The Times in 1989. “I would have to think twice about starting it today.”The company’s fate is now undetermined. Alex Laubin served as office manager and helped with some aspects of production but did not learn the full process. He often urged his father to modernize their operation — to little avail.“No one sits down anymore and files out keys,” Meredith Laubin said. “No one turns out one oboe joint at a time. This is all automated now, like how robots make cars. But Paul wasn’t endorsing any of these things. To him, there was no cheating the family recipe.”But Mr. Laubin knew the old ways would come to an end. In recent years, he was finding it harder to ignore the stark realities of being an Old World artisan in the modern era.“Paul got to have one part of his dream, which was to be able to work with his son,” Ms. Laubin said. “But the other part of his dream, knowing that his work would continue on in the way he did things, he knew that wasn’t going to happen.”Nevertheless, he hewed to tradition. On his work table the day he died lay the beginnings of Laubin oboe No. 2,600. More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in Television

      Craig muMs Grant, Actor and Slam Poet, Dies at 52

      by

      He was a star of the HBO series “Oz” under the name muMs, which he also used on the poetry circuit both before and after finding success on television.Craig muMs Grant’s biggest success as an actor was the role of Poet on the HBO prison drama “Oz,” but fans of that series were accustomed to seeing him credited simply as muMs. It was a name he adopted as a young man when he was exploring rap and slam poetry, influences that he said changed his life.“Before hip-hop,” as he put it in “A Sucker Emcee,” an autobiographical play he performed in 2014, “I couldn’t speak.”Mr. Grant compiled a respectable career as an actor. He appeared on “Oz” throughout its six-season run, which began in 1997, and turned up in spot roles on series including “Hack,” “Boston Legal” and “Law & Order” and its spinoffs, and in movies like Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” (2000). But before his “Oz” breakthrough he was a familiar presence on the slam poetry circuit in New York and beyond; he was in the 1998 documentary “SlamNation” as part of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s slam team.He returned to his poetry/rap roots often, even after “Oz” gave him a measure of fame — appearing onstage with the Labyrinth Theater Company in New York, where he was a member of the ensemble, and performing at colleges and small theaters all over the country.Mr. Grant, third from left, in an episode of the HBO series “Oz” in 1997. He played Poet, a drug addict who writes verses while incarcerated.HBO“I love words,” he told The Indianapolis Star in 2001. “Anybody ever wanted to buy me anything for Christmas or my birthday, they can buy me a dictionary. The bigger, the better.”Mr. Grant died on Wednesday in Wilmington, N.C., where he was filming the Starz series “Hightown,” in which he had a recurring role. He was 52.His manager, Sekka Scher, said the cause was complications of diabetes.Craig O’Neil Grant was born on Dec. 18, 1968, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a locksmith and carpenter at Montefiore Hospital, and his mother, Theresa (Maxwell) Grant, was a teacher.Mr. Grant graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx and was taking college courses in Virginia when, he said, he started exploring writing, seeking to infuse poetry with the energy of the rap music he enjoyed.“The problem with poetry is, a lot of the audience sometimes has a short attention span,” he told the Indianapolis paper years later. “So poetry has to have rhythm to capture people who can’t listen for so long. They’ll just close their eyes and ride the rhythm of your voice.”He took the name “muMs” when he was around 20. He was in a rap group, he told The Philadelphia Daily News in 2003, and still had a bit of a youthful lisp, so a friend suggested he call himself “Mumbles.”“I thought about that for a week and shortened it to muMs,” he said, and then he turned that into an acronym for “manipulator under Manipulation shhhhhhh!” That phrase, he told the Indianapolis paper, symbolized the notion that “as great as I want to become or as great as I think I am, I can always go to the edge of the ocean, stand there and realize I’m nothing in comparison to the universe.”Back in New York, he didn’t succeed as a rapper. But he began performing spoken-word poetry at places like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which is where someone involved in developing “Oz” saw him and recommended that Tom Fontana, the show’s creator, give him a look. Mr. Grant auditioned by performing one of his poems, and he was cast as Poet, a drug addict who writes verses while incarcerated.Mr. Grant, who lived in the Bronx, joined Labyrinth in 2006 and appeared in various roles in its productions. He also began writing plays, including “A Sucker Emcee,” in which he told his life story largely in rhymed couplets while a D.J. working turntables provided a soundtrack.Mr. Grant is survived by his partner, Jennie West, and a brother, Winston Maxwell.In 2003 Mr. Grant released a spoken-word album called “Strange Fruit,” taking the title from the song about lynchings famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939.“Today, strange fruit means we’re the product of everything Black people have been through in this country — Middle Passage, Jim Crow, segregation,” he told The Baltimore Sun in 2004. “It’s a new way of looking at it. The metaphor of strange fruit means life and birth for me, where it used to mean lynching and death. Blacks have been doing that for years, taking the bad and flipping it, making the best of a bad situation.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Larry McMurtry, Novelist of the American West, Dies at 84

      by

      In “Lonesome Dove,” “The Last Picture Show” and dozens more novels and screenplays, he offered unromantic depictions of a long mythologized region.Larry McMurtry, a prolific novelist and screenwriter who demythologized the American West with his unromantic depictions of life on the 19th-century frontier and in contemporary small-town Texas, died on Thursday at home in Archer City, Texas. He was 84.The cause was congestive heart failure, said Diana Ossana, his friend and writing partner.Over more than five decades, Mr. McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels and many books of essays, memoir and history. He also wrote more than 30 screenplays, including the one for “Brokeback Mountain” (written with Ms. Ossana, based on a short story by Annie Proulx), for which he won an Academy Award in 2006.But he found his greatest commercial and critical success with “Lonesome Dove,” a sweeping 843-page novel about two retired Texas Rangers who drive a herd of stolen cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a popular television mini-series.Mr. McMurtry wrote “Lonesome Dove” as an anti-western, a rebuke of sorts to the romantic notions of dime-store novels and an exorcism of the false ghosts in the work of writers like Louis L’Amour. “I’m a critic of the myth of the cowboy,’’ he told an interviewer in 1988. “I don’t feel that it’s a myth that pertains, and since it’s a part of my heritage I feel it’s a legitimate task to criticize it.’’But readers warmed to the vivid characters in “Lonesome Dove.” Mr. McMurtry himself ultimately likened it, in terms of its sweep, to a Western “Gone With the Wind.”Heath Ledger, left, and Jake Gyllenhaal in a scene from the 2005 film “Brokeback Mountain.” Mr. McMurtry and Diana Ossana won an Academy Award for their screenplay, based on a short story by Annie Proulx.Kimberly French/Focus FeaturesRobert Duvall, left, and Ricky Schroder in a scene from the 1989 mini-series “Lonesome Dove.” Mr. McMurtry found his greatest commercial and critical success with the sweeping novel on which the mini-series was based, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesMr. McMurtry was the son of a rancher, and the realism in his books extended to the Texas he knew as a young man. His first novel, “Horseman, Pass By” (1961), examined the values of the Old West as they came into conflict with the modern world. Reviewing the novel in The New York Times Book Review, the Texas historian Wayne Gard wrote:“The cow hands ride horses less often than pickup trucks or Cadillacs. And in the evening, instead of sitting around a campfire strumming guitars and singing ‘Git along, little dogie,’ they are more likely to have a game at the pool hall, drink beer and try their charms on any girls they can find.”He added that Mr. McMurtry had “not only a sharp ear for dialogue but a gift of expression that easily could blossom in more important works.”From the start of his career, Mr. McMurtry’s books were attractive to filmmakers. “Horseman, Pass By” was made into “Hud,” directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman. Mr. McMurtry’s funny, elegiac and sexually frank coming-of-age novel “The Last Picture Show” (1966) was made into a film of the same title in 1971 starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. The movie of his 1975 novel, “Terms of Endearment,” directed by James L. Brooks and starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson, won the Academy Award for best picture of 1983.Mr. McMurtry with Diana Ossana, his longtime collaborator, in 2006, when they won the Academy Award for “Brokeback Mountain.”Brian Snyder/ReutersMr. McMurtry relished his role as a literary outsider. He lived for much of his life in his hometown, Archer City, Texas, two hours northwest of Dallas. He had the same postal box for nearly 70 years. When he walked onstage to accept his Oscar for “Brokeback Mountain,” he wore bluejeans and cowboy boots below his dinner jacket. He reminded audiences that the screenplay was an adaptation of a short story by Ms. Proulx.Yet Mr. McMurtry was a plugged-in man of American letters. For two years in the early 1990s he was American president of PEN, the august literary and human rights organization. He was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, where he often wrote on topics relating to the American West. His friends included the writer Susan Sontag, whom he once took to a stock car race.Six Buildings, One BookstoreFor some 50 years, Mr. McMurtry was also a serious antiquarian bookseller. His bookstore in Archer City, Booked Up, is one of America’s largest. It once occupied six buildings and contained some 400,000 volumes. In 2012 Mr. McMurtry auctioned off two-thirds of those books and planned to consolidate. About leaving the business to his heirs, he said: “One store is manageable. Four stores would be a burden.”Mr. McMurtry’s private library alone held some 30,000 books and was spread over three houses. He called compiling it a life’s work, “an achievement equal to if not better than my writings themselves.” Mr. McMurtry at his bookstore in 2000. It once occupied six buildings and contained some 400,000 volumes but has since been consolidated into one building.Ralph Lauer/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, via Associated PressLarry Jeff McMurtry was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, on June 3, 1936, to Hazel Ruth and William Jefferson McMurtry. His father was a rancher. The family lived in what Mr. McMurtry called a “bookless ranch house” outside of Archer City, and later in the town itself. Archer City would become the model for Thalia, a town that often appeared in his fiction.He became a serious reader early, and discovered that the ranching life was not for him. “While I was passable on a horse,” he wrote in “Books,” his 2008 memoir, “I entirely lacked manual skills.” He graduated from North Texas State University in 1958 and married Jo Ballard Scott a year later. The couple had a son, James, now a well-regarded singer and songwriter, before divorcing.After receiving an M.A. in English from Rice University in Houston in 1960, Mr. McMurtry went west, to Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in a class that included the future novelist Ken Kesey. Thanks to his friendship with Mr. Kesey, Mr. McMurtry made a memorable cameo appearance in Tom Wolfe’s classic of new journalism, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968). The book details Mr. Kesey’s drug-fueled journey across America, along with a gang of friends collectively known as the Merry Pranksters, in a painted school bus.In the scene, Mr. Kesey’s bus, driven by Neal Cassady, pulls up to Mr. McMurtry’s suburban Houston house, and a naked and wigged-out woman hops out and snatches his son. Mr. Wolfe describes Mr. McMurtry “reaching tentatively toward her stark-naked shoulder and saying, ‘Ma’am! Ma’am! Just a minute, ma’am!’” Mr. McMurtry teaching at Rice University in Houston in 1972. He wrote his first novels while teaching English there and at Texas Christian University, George Mason College and American University.via Rice UniversityMr. McMurtry wrote his first novels while teaching English at Texas Christian University, Rice University, George Mason College and American University. He was not fond of teaching, however, and left it behind as his career went forward. He moved to the Washington area and with a partner opened his first Booked Up store in 1971, dealing in rare books. He opened the much larger Booked Up, in Archer City, in 1988 and owned and operated it until his death. In a 1976 profile of Mr. McMurtry in The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin observed his book-buying skills. “Larry knows which shade of blue cover on a copy of ‘Native Son’ indicates a first printing and which one doesn’t,” Mr. Trillin wrote. “He knows the precise value of poetry books by Robert Lowell that Robert Lowell may now have forgotten writing.”A Knack for Female CharactersWhile much of Mr. McMurtry’s writing dealt with the West or his Texas heritage, he also wrote novels about Washington (“Cadillac Jack”), Hollywood (“Somebody’s Darling”) and Las Vegas (“The Desert Rose”). There was a comic brio in his best books, alongside an ever-present melancholy. He was praised for his ability to create memorable and credible female characters, including the self-centered widow Aurora Greenway in “Terms of Endearment,” played by Shirley MacLaine in the film version.In the novel, Aurora is up front about her appetites. “Only a saint could live with me, and I can’t live with a saint,” she says. “Older men aren’t up to me, and younger men aren’t interested.”“I believe the one gift that led me to a career in fiction was the ability to make up characters that readers connect with,” Mr. McMurtry once wrote. “My characters move them, which is also why those same characters move them when they meet them on the screen.” His early novels were generally well reviewed, although Thomas Lask, writing about “The Last Picture Show” in The Times Book Review, said, “Mr. McMurtry is not exactly a virtuoso at the typewriter.” Other critics would pick up that complaint. Mr. McMurtry wrote too much, some said, and quantity outstripped quality. “I dash off 10 pages a day,” Mr. McMurtry boasted in “Books.”Some felt that Mr. McMurtry clouded the memories of some of his best books, including “The Last Picture Show,” “Lonesome Dove” and “Terms of Endearment,” by writing sequels to them, sequels that sometimes turned into tetralogies or even quintets. It was hard to recall, while reading his “Berrybender Narratives,” a frontier soap opera that ran to four books, the writer who delivered “Lonesome Dove.”Mr. McMurtry near the Royal Theater in Archer City, Texas, a locale in his novel “The Last Picture Show.” His store, Booked Up, is nearby.Mark Graham for The New York TimesMr. McMurtry sometimes felt the sting of critical neglect. “Should I be bitter about the literary establishment’s long disinterest in me?” he wrote in “Literary Life,” a 2009 memoir. “I shouldn’t, and mostly I’m not, though I do admit to the occasional moment of irritation.” In the late 1960s and early ’70s, he liked to tweak his critics by wearing a T-shirt that read “Minor Regional Novelist.” He was open about the shadows that sometimes fell over his life and writing.After completing “Terms of Endearment,” he entered what he described as “a literary gloom that lasted from 1975 until 1983,” a period when he came to dislike his own prose. He had a heart attack in 1991, followed by quadruple-bypass surgery. In the wake of that surgery he fell into a long depression during which, he told a reporter, he did little more than lie on a couch for more than a year.That couch belonged to Ms. Ossana, whom Mr. McMurtry had met in the 1980s at an all-you-can-eat catfish restaurant in Tucson. They began living together, and collaborating shortly afterward — Mr. McMurtry writing on a typewriter, Ms. Ossana entering the work into a computer, often editing and rearranging.“When I first met Larry, he was involved with about five or six different women,” Ms. Ossana told Grantland.com in 2014. “He was quite the ladies’ man. I was always really puzzled. One day I said to him, ‘So all of these women are your girlfriends?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Well, do they know about one another?’ He said, ‘Nooo.’”Mr. McMurtry had reportedly completed a draft of a memoir titled “62 Women,” about some of the women he knew and admired. He had an unusual arrangement in the last years of his life.In 2011 he married Norma Faye Kesey, Ken Kesey’s widow, and she moved in with Mr. McMurtry and Ms. Ossana. “I went up and drug Faye out of Oregon,” he told Grantland.com. “I think I had seen Faye a total of four times over 51 years, and I married her. We never had a date or a conversation. Ken would never let me have conversations with her.”In addition to his wife and son, Mr. McMurtry is survived by two sisters, Sue Deen and Judy McLemore; a brother, Charlie; and a grandson.Mr. McMurtry’s many books included three memoirs and three collections of essays, including “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” published in 1999. “There are days,” Mr. McMurtry wrote, “where I think my own nonfiction will outlive my novels.” In addition to old books, Mr. McMurtry prized antiquated methods of composition. He wrote all of his work on a typewriter, and did not own a computer. He wrote for the same editor, Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster, for more than three decades before moving to Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton, in 2014.“Because of when and where I grew up, on the Great Plains just as the herding tradition was beginning to lose its vitality,” he once said, “I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Bertrand Tavernier, 79, French Director With Wide Appeal, Dies

      by

      He was a regular on the world’s film festival circuit with movies like “Death Watch,” a science-fiction thriller, and “’Round Midnight,” about a jazz musician.Bertrand Tavernier, a French director best known in the United States for “’Round Midnight,” the 1986 film that earned Dexter Gordon an Oscar nomination for his performance as a New York jazz musician trying to get his life and career on track in Paris, died on Thursday in Sainte-Maxime, in southeastern France. He was 79.The Institut Lumiere, a film organization in Lyon of which he was president, posted news of his death on Facebook. The cause was not given.Mr. Tavernier made some 30 features and documentaries and was a regular on the film festival circuit, winning the best director award at Cannes in 1984 for “A Sunday in the Country,” what Roger Ebert called “a graceful and delicate story about the hidden currents in a family” headed by an aging painter living outside Paris.Mr. Tavernier had worked primarily as a film critic and publicist until 1974, when he directed his first feature, “The Clockmaker of St. Paul,” the story of a man whose son is accused of murder. The movie, more character study than crime drama, quickly established him in France and drew praise overseas.“‘The Clockmaker’ is an extraordinary film,” Mr. Ebert wrote, “the more so because it attempts to show us the very complicated workings of the human personality, and to do it with grace, some humor and a great deal of style.”The French actor Philippe Noiret played the father in that movie. The two would work together often, and teamed up again in 1976 in another tale about a murderer, “The Judge and the Assassin,” with Mr. Noiret playing the judge. The cast also included Isabelle Huppert, who would appear in other Tavernier films.Philippe Noiret in Mr. Tavernier’s first feature, “The Clockmaker of St. Paul” (1974). Mr. Tavernier and Mr. Noiret would work together often.Kino VideoMr. Tavernier was soon working with international casts. “Death Watch,” a 1980 science fiction thriller, starred Harvey Keitel as a television reporter who has an eye replaced with a camera so that he could surreptitiously film the last days of a woman — played by Romy Schneider — who seems to have a terminal disease.“’Round Midnight” featured a cast full of musicians — not only Mr. Gordon, a noted saxophonist, but also Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter and others, including Herbie Hancock, who won an Oscar for his original score.“The screenplay, by Mr. Tavernier and David Rayfiel, is both rich and relaxed, with a style that perfectly matches the musicians’,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times. “Some of the talk may well be improvised, but nothing sounds improvised, but nothing sounds forced, and the film remains effortlessly idiosyncratic all the way through.”Dexter Gordon as an expatriate American saxophonist and François Cluzet as a Parisian friend and admirer in Mr. Tavernier’s “’Round Midnight” (1986).Warner Bros. PicturesBertrand Tavernier was born on April 25, 1941, in Lyon to René and Ginette Tavernier. His father was a noted writer and poet. In a 1990 interview with The Times, Mr. Tavernier described an isolated boyhood.“My childhood was marked by loneliness because my parents didn’t get along well,” he said. “And it’s coming out in every movie. I’ve practically never had a couple in my films.”He mentioned the impact of his hometown.“It’s a very secretive city,” he explained. “My father used to say that in Lyon you learn that you must never lie but always dissemble, and it’s part of my films. The characters are often oblique in their relationships. Then there will be brief moments when they reveal themselves.”He was interested in film from a young age, and his early jobs in the film business included press agent for Georges de Beauregard, a noted producer of the French New Wave. He also wrote about film for Les Cahiers du Cinéma and other publications, and he continued to write throughout his career — essays, books and more. As a film historian, he was known for championing movies, directors and screenwriters who had been treated unkindly by others.In the foreword to Stephen Hay’s 2001 biography, “Bertrand Tavernier: The Film-maker of Lyon,” Thelma Schoonmaker, the noted film editor and widow of the director Michael Powell, credited Mr. Tavernier with resurrecting the reputation of Mr. Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” which was condemned when it was released in 1960 but is now highly regarded by many cinephiles.“Bertrand’s desire to right the wrongs of cinema history has a direct connection to the themes of justice that pervade his own films,” she wrote.Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Cannes festival and of the Institut Lumière, said Mr. Tavernier had been tireless in his advocacy.“Bertrand Tavernier has built the body of work that we know, but he built something else: being at the service of the history of cinema, of all cinemas,” Mr. Frémaux said by email. “He wrote books, he edited other people’s books, he did an extraordinary amount of film interviews, tributes to everyone he admired, film presentations.”“I’m not sure there are any other examples in art history of a creator so dedicated to the work of others,” he added.Jacques Gamblin, center, in Mr. Tavernier’s “Safe Conduct” (2002), about French filmmakers who worked during the German occupation in World War II.Empire PicturesMr. Tavernier’s own films sometimes set personal stories amid sweeping moments of history. “Life and Nothing But” (1989), set in 1920, had as a backdrop the search for hundreds of thousands of French soldiers still missing in action from World War I. “Safe Conduct” (2002) was about French filmmakers who worked during the German occupation in World War II.But Mr. Tavernier wasn’t interested in historical spectacle for its own sake.“Often people come to me and say you should do a film about the French Resistance, but I say this is not a subject, this is vague,” he told Variety in 2019. “Tell me about a character who was one of the first members of the Resistance and who did things that people later in 1945 say must be judged as crimes. Then I have a character and an emotion that I can deal with.”His survivors include his wife, Sarah, and two children, Nils and Tiffany Tavernier.Mr. Tavernier slipped humor into his movies, even a serious one like “Life and Nothing But,” which had a scene — with some basis in reality, he said — in which a distraught army captain has to quickly find an “unknown soldier” to be placed below the Arc de Triomphe.“The rush to find the Unknown Soldier is completely true, though we had to guess how it took place,” Mr. Tavernier said. “Just imagine: How do you find a body which is impossible to identify and still be sure he is French?”Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Jessica Walter, ‘Arrested Development’ Matriarch, Dies at 80

      by

      In a six-decade career, the Emmy Award-winning actress gained early fame with “Play Misty for Me” and found a new audience as Lucille Bluth, the matriarch of the dysfunctional family in “Arrested Development,” a cult hit.Jessica Walter, whose six-decade acting career included roles ranging from an obsessed radio fan in Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut, “Play Misty for Me,” to the cutting, martini-swilling matriarch of the dysfunctional Bluth family on “Arrested Development,” died at her home in New York City on Wednesday. She was 80.Ms. Walter’s death was confirmed by her publicist, Kelli Jones, who did not specify a cause.Over a long and wide-ranging career, Ms. Walter found consistent work as a versatile performer with more than 150 credits that included tart-tongued turns in television comedy series and serious roles in dramatic Hollywood movies and New York stage productions. She was often cast as — and relished playing — off-center women capable of silencing men with a withering glance, a piercing remark or the sharp point of a knife.“Lucky me, because those are the fun roles,” she told The A.V. Club in 2012. “They’re juicy, much better than playing the vanilla ingénues, you know.”Jessica Walter and Clint Eastwood in the 1971 film “Play Misty for Me.”Universal PicturesShe began her career with minor parts in 1960s television shows like “Flipper” and “The Fugitive” before gaining notice for her role as an American wife who leaves her husband, an English racecar driver, in the 1966 John Frankenheimer movie “Grand Prix.” The film earned Ms. Walter a Golden Globe nomination in the category “new star of the year” in 1967.Five years later, she was nominated for another Golden Globe for playing Evelyn, a devoted fan with a homicidal streak who becomes obsessed with a disc jockey portrayed by Mr. Eastwood in his 1971 movie “Play Misty for Me.”In 1975, she won an Emmy for her role as the title character, a detective, in the NBC mystery “Amy Prentiss.” She was also nominated for Emmy Awards for “The Streets of San Francisco” in 1977, “Trapper John, M.D.” in 1980 and “Arrested Development” in 2005.Jessica Walter of “Amy Prentice” received a kiss from Peter Falk of “Columbo” after both won Emmys in 1975.Associated PressShe appeared in numerous Broadway productions, including “Advise and Consent,” Neil Simon’s “Rumors,” “A Severed Head,” “Night Life” and “Photo Finish.” In 2011, as her star rose, she played the fur-wrapped dowager Evangeline Harcourt in a Roundabout Theater Company revival of “Anything Goes,” which won several Tony Awards.In recent years, she became a cult figure, beloved for her poisonous put-downs and side-eyed glances as the fabulously wealthy and diabolical mother Lucille Bluth on “Arrested Development.” The zany, self-referential sitcom about a narcissistic family was critically adored when it debuted in 2003, and it introduced Ms. Walter to a new generation. She said she could hardly get on a subway car or a bus without being stopped by a fan.“You know, you look a lot like that woman that plays Lucille Bluth,” they would tell her.“I say, ‘You know, I’ve heard that,’” she told The New York Times in 2018. “You know, Lucille is in my DNA now.”The show was also the source of some anguish for Ms. Walter. In 2018, she revealed that she had been verbally harassed on the set by Jeffrey Tambor, who played her husband and who had been fired that year from the Amazon show “Transparent” amid allegations of sexual harassment and verbal abuse. He denied the allegations of sexual misconduct but admitted that his temper had been an issue, and he conceded that he had blown up at Ms. Walter.“I have to let go of being angry at him,” Ms. Walter said through tears in the 2018 interview with The Times, as Mr. Tambor sat a few feet away. In “almost 60 years of working,” she said, “I’ve never had anybody yell at me like that on a set and it’s hard to deal with, but I’m over it now.”During the interview, another star of the show, Jason Bateman, painted Mr. Tambor’s behavior as typical. His comments drew a blistering reaction online, and Mr. Bateman later apologized, saying he was “incredibly embarrassed and deeply sorry to have done that to Jessica.”Jessica Walter was born in New York City on Jan. 31, 1941. Her father, David Walter, was a musician and a member of the NBC Symphony Orchestra and the New York City Ballet Orchestra. Her mother, Esther Groisser, was a teacher. Ms. Walter attended the High School of Performing Arts.She was married twice, first to Ross Bowman, a Broadway stage manager, and in 1983 to the Tony-winning actor Ron Leibman, who died in 2019.Ms. Walter’s survivors include her daughter, Brooke Bowman, and a grandson.Ms. Walter and Mr. Leibman performed together in a 1986 production of “Tartuffe” at the Los Angeles Theater Center.More recently, they had also voiced characters on the FX animated comedy series “Archer,” about an agency full of misfits who undertake James Bond-like missions but spend an inordinate amount of time drinking, having sex with one another and disparaging people. On the show, Ms. Walter voiced Malory, a ruthless mother with more than a passing resemblance to Lucille Bluth.A full obituary will be published later. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Paul Jackson, Funk Bassist With Herbie Hancock, Dies at 73

      by

      He was an integral member of Mr. Hancock’s jazz-funk band the Headhunters, whose albums reached millions in the 1970s.Paul Jackson, whose springy and grooving electric bass lines drove much of Herbie Hancock’s pioneering jazz-funk in the 1970s, died on Thursday at a hospital in Japan, where he had lived for more than 30 years. He was 73.Mike Clark, a drummer and lifelong Jackson collaborator, said the cause was sepsis brought on by complications of diabetes.In 1973, inspired by the music of Sly Stone and the Pointer Sisters, and frustrated by many jazz musicians’ habit of dismissing groove-based music offhand, Mr. Hancock started the Headhunters, with Mr. Jackson on bass.“I didn’t want to make a record that combined jazz and funk,” Mr. Hancock remembered in “Possibilities,” his 2014 autobiography, written with Lisa Dickey. “I wanted pure funk.”The band’s first album, “Head Hunters,” became a smash. It was the first jazz LP to sell over a million copies, and it hit No. 13 on the Billboard albums chart. Combining the rich acoustic-electric layering of Mr. Hancock’s previous band, Mwandishi, with a brawny backbeat, the group modeled a new brand of slyly sophisticated funk. And Mr. Jackson’s restless bass playing had everything to do with it.“Paul Jackson was an unusual funk bass player, because he never liked to play the same bass line twice, so during improvised solos he responded to what the other guys played,” Mr. Hancock wrote. “I thought I’d hired a funk bassist, but as I found out later, he had actually started as an upright jazz bass player.”Paul Jerome Jackson Jr. was born on March 28, 1947, in Oakland, Calif., one of four siblings raised by two piano-playing parents, Rosa Emanuel and Paul Sr., in a musical household.His father was a heavyweight boxer and later a contractor who sometimes worked as a security guard for music venues. Paul Sr. befriended a number of famous musicians, including James Brown and the trombonist J.J. Johnson, who sometimes hung out at the family house.When he worked security at concerts, Paul Sr. often brought along his son, and later in life Mr. Jackson would treasure the memory of hearing the Miles Davis Quintet perform at the Blackhawk in San Francisco, with Paul Chambers on bass.“As soon as I heard that bass, man, I said, ‘Oh!’” Mr. Jackson said in an interview with ukvibe.org. “I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to go and try that out, man.’ So I went back to my junior high school music teacher and picked one up. And that’s when I found out what was happening!”Mr. Hancock, foreground, and Mr. Jackson performing on the television show “Soul Train” in 1974. Soul Train, via Getty ImagesLetting his devilish sense of humor peek through, he added: “Playing wood bass, the first thing you do is you grab it and you put in between your legs. You play that E string and it vibrates your adolescence! I said, ‘I like this instrument. I really like this instrument. I’m going to play this.’”He is survived by his wife, Akiko Suzuki, and a sister, Denise Perrier. A previous marriage ended in divorce, and a son from that marriage died.Mr. Jackson was early in his career when he became friends with Mr. Clark. When the Headhunters’ original drummer, Harvey Mason, left the band, Mr. Jackson recommended Mr. Clark for the job.With the friends at the center of their four-piece rhythm section, the Headhunters went on to record three more albums with Mr. Hancock in the mid-1970s — the widely influential “Thrust” (1974), “Man-Child” (1975) and “Flood” (1975), recorded live in Tokyo — followed by two without him, “Survival of the Fittest” (1975) and “Straight from the Gate” (1977), both for Arista.With the Headhunters, Mr. Jackson started to show off his homey, gravel-road voice, first on “God Make Me Funky,” the opening track on “Survival of the Fittest.” A from-the-hip soul shuffle, featuring background vocals from the Pointer Sisters, “God Make Me Funky” — like many Headhunters tunes — would be widely sampled by hip-hop producers, including on classic albums by N.W.A., Eric B. & Rakim, De La Soul and the Fugees.In 1978 Mr. Jackson released a venturesome debut album of his own, “Black Octopus,” for the Eastworld label. In its first track alone, his band glides from free improvisation to briskly swinging jazz to funk.Mr. Jackson in 1998. He became an in-demand side musician, heard on albums by the Pointer Sisters, Santana and the saxophonists Stanley Turrentine and Sonny Rollins.Peter Van Breukelen/RedfernsBy then Mr. Jackson was an in-demand side musician, appearing on recordings by, among others, the Pointer Sisters, the Latin rock bands Santana and Azteca, and the jazz saxophonists Stanley Turrentine and Sonny Rollins.The Headhunters reunited in the late 1990s, releasing “Return of the Headhunters” (1998) with Mr. Hancock as a special guest. Four more albums followed.Speaking to ukvibe.org before a concert in 2013 with a quartet he had formed, Mr. Jackson described performing as a process of attuning oneself to the audience. “I look at the audience,” he said. “The first thing I do during the first song is engage. I figure that if I can get 20 percent of the first row to roll their eyes back in their heads, then I’ve got them.” More