Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Danny Ray, James Brown’s ‘Original Hype Man,’ Dies at 85

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDanny Ray, James Brown’s ‘Original Hype Man,’ Dies at 85He opened thousands of concerts for the “Godfather of Soul,” and closed them by draping a sequined velvet over his body just before the encore.Danny Ray, right, with James Brown backstage at the Apollo Theater in Manhattan in 1964. His cape routine helped cement Mr. Brown’s image as the flamboyant “Godfather of Soul.”Credit…Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFeb. 12, 2021, 12:58 p.m. ETDanny Ray, who opened thousands of concerts for James Brown with a stem-winding, hype-filled introduction and ended them by draping a sequined velvet cape over the singer’s sweaty, bent-over body, only to have him burst forth in a paroxysm of soulful funk for one last encore, died on Feb. 2 at his home in Augusta, Ga. He was 85.His death was confirmed by Deanna Brown-Thomas, Mr. Brown’s daughter, who called Mr. Ray “the original hype man.”Mr. Ray’s cape routine, which he started in 1962, helped cement Mr. Brown’s flamboyant image even before he catapulted to worldwide celebrity as the “Godfather of Soul.”At the end of his first set in the small clubs where he performed at the time, Mr. Brown, drenched in perspiration, would leave the stage and Mr. Ray would cover him in a Turkish towel. When he was ready for his encore, Mr. Brown would toss it off with an exuberant flip of his arms — an act that the crowd could see clearly, and that fans came to expect.The routine later moved onstage, and it moved into American musical lore in 1964, when Mr. Brown joined the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye and a long list of other performers at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for a filmed concert called Teenage Awards Music International, better known as T.A.M.I.The Stones were headlining, but Mr. Brown got 18 minutes, much of it taken up by his hit “Please Please Please.” Less than a minute into the song, as the music built up and Mr. Brown’s body contorted with emotion, he collapsed to his knees, perfectly timed to the beat. The crowd gasped.As the band kept playing and the backup singers, the Famous Flames, kept singing, Mr. Ray came from stage left with a cape. He and Bobby Bennett, one of the Flames, helped Mr. Brown to his feet. He began to hobble off, mumbling to himself as the audience yelled, “Don’t go!”Appearing suddenly to regain his strength, Mr. Brown threw off the cape — again, right on the beat — and returned to the microphone. He and Mr. Ray repeated the routine twice. Each time the crowd grew wilder.“The T.A.M.I. Show,” with Mr. Ray’s routine as its climax, was released in theaters at the end of 1964, and it vaulted Mr. Brown from the R&B circuit to sold-out arenas almost overnight. The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards later said that agreeing to follow Mr. Brown onstage that night was the worst decision the band had ever made.Mr. Brown performed almost nonstop for the next four decades, earning the title “the hardest-working man in show business.” Mr. Ray was easily the second: When he wasn’t running the show for the audience, he was managing it backstage, overseeing the sprawling Brown entourage with military precision.He made sure the backup singers were on time, their shoes polished and their pompadours coifed. He tended to the minute details of the band’s tailoring, down to his insistence that their jackets have no pockets, lest they leave unsightly lines in the fabric.“From the moment people look at the stage, they are looking at everything, from head to toe,” he told Mr. Brown’s son Daryl for his book “My Father the Godfather” (2014). “How you bring it, how you present it, it’s all about the look.”Mr. Ray took part in a tribute to Mr. Brown at the 2007 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. He was Mr. Brown’s M.C. for decades and also helped him on a personal level offstage.Credit…M. Caulfield/WireImage, via Getty ImagesDaniel Brown Ray was born on March 22, 1935, in Birmingham, Ala. His father, Willie, was a barber, and his mother, Lucy, was a homemaker.He married in 1957, and the next year he joined the Army. When he left the service in 1961, he and his wife, Rosemarie, settled in New York, where Mr. Ray hoped to find a job behind the scenes in entertainment. He frequented performance halls like the Apollo, trying to get noticed by one of the entourages that trailed behind stars like Johnny Mathis and Sam Cooke.Mr. Ray was an impeccable dresser — even in his 80s, he wore a three-piece suit when he went out, even to the grocery store, Ms. Brown-Thomas said. He soon caught the attention of Mr. Brown, himself immaculate and precise in his wardrobe choices, who hired him as his valet.In early 1962, Mr. Brown was performing a show in Maryland when his regular M.C. didn’t show up. Mr. Brown turned to Mr. Ray.“Tonight’s your night,” he said.Mr. Ray had never been onstage, and he said his knees almost buckled as he walked to the microphone. But once there, he proved a natural, winning over the crowd with his cool, crisp delivery, like a jazz D.J. — in fact, he later hosted a Sunday jazz hour for a radio station in Augusta.Like Mr. Brown, Mr. Ray achieved his onstage confidence through relentless practice and self-discipline. Mr. Ray would record himself speaking, then pore over the tapes, critiquing minute details in his delivery.As Mr. Brown became more flamboyant in his performance through the 1960s, so did Mr. Ray. His introductions grew longer, as did his vowels.“Are you ready to get dooooooown?” he would ask the crowd. “Are you ready for Jaaaaaames Brown? Because right now, it is star time!”By the 1980s, he had added a call and response, leading the crowd in calling for “James Brown! James Brown! James Brown!” until the singer came bursting forth from the wings.Mr. Ray is survived by a brother, Richard, and three sisters, Leila Brumfield, Barbara Jean Ray and Lucy Earth. His wife died in 1986.He took care of Mr. Brown even while offstage, going so far as to move with him from New York to Augusta in the early 1970s. He managed the singer’s rotating cadre of girlfriends and later tried to shield him from tax collectors and nosy friends while he struggled with drug addiction.Mr. Ray struggled as well; along with his own addiction problems, he was forced in the 1980s to sell his house to cover federal and state tax liens. He eventually got clean and worked as an M.C. for other R&B acts, including the Original James Brown Band, which continued to tour after the singer’s death, on Christmas Day 2006.At his funeral, Mr. Ray introduced his old friend the only way he knew how. “Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready for star time?” he asked. Then he draped a cape over Mr. Brown’s open coffin.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Chick Corea, Jazz Keyboardist and Innovator, Dies at 79

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyChick Corea, Jazz Keyboardist and Innovator, Dies at 79When jazz and rock fused in the 1970s, he was at the forefront of the movement. But he never abandoned his love of the acoustic piano.The pianist, composer and bandleader Chick Corea at the Blue Note in Manhattan in 2012. In his long career, he recorded close to 90 albums as a bandleader or co-leader and won 23 Grammys.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York TimesFeb. 11, 2021Chick Corea, an architect of the jazz-rock fusion boom of the 1970s who spent more than a half century as one of the foremost pianists in jazz, died on Tuesday at his home in Tampa, Fla. He was 79.The cause was cancer, said Dan Muse, a spokesman for Mr. Corea’s family.Mr. Corea’s best-known band was Return to Forever, a collective with a rotating membership that nudged the genre of fusion into greater contact with Brazilian, Spanish and other global influences. It also provided Mr. Corea with a palette on which to experiment with a growing arsenal of new technologies.But throughout his career he never abandoned his first love, the acoustic piano, on which his punctilious touch and crisp sense of harmony made his playing immediately distinctive.Mr. Corea in 2006 at the Blue Note, where his performances often combined reunions with longtime associates and collaborations with younger accompanists.Credit…Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesA number of his compositions, including “Spain,” “500 Miles High” and “Tones for Joan’s Bones,” have become jazz standards, marked by his dreamy but brightly illuminated harmonies and ear-grabbing melodies.By the late 1960s, Mr. Corea, still in his 20s, had already established himself as a force to be reckoned with. He gigged and recorded with some of the leading names in straight-ahead and Latin jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Mongo Santamaria and Sarah Vaughan. His first two albums as a leader, “Tones for Joan’s Bones” (1966) and “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs” (1968), earned rave reviews. Both are now thought of as classics.But it was playing in Miles Davis’s ensembles that set Mr. Corea on the path that would most define his role in jazz. He played the electric piano on Davis’s “In a Silent Way” (1969) and “Bitches Brew” (1970), the albums that sounded the opening bell for the fusion era.From left, Dave Holland, Miles Davis and Mr. Corea in 1969. Mr. Corea played electric piano in Davis’s band and on the Davis albums widely considered to have sounded the opening bell for the fusion era.Credit…Tad Hershorn/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesSoon after leaving Davis’s group, he helped found Return to Forever, and he spent much of the 1970s touring and recording with the band, which became one of the most popular instrumental ensembles of its era.Reviewing a performance at the Blue Note in New York in 2006, the critic Nate Chinen, writing in The New York Times, recalled the innovative sound that Mr. Corea had honed with Return to Forever three decades before: “His Fender Rhodes piano chimed and chirruped over Latin American rhythms; female vocals commingled with the soothing flutter of a flute. Then the ensemble muscled up and morphed into a hyperactive fusion band, establishing pop-chart presence and a fan base to match. To the extent that there is a Return to Forever legacy, it encompasses both these dynamic extremes, each a facet of Mr. Corea’s personality.”By the time of that Blue Note show, Mr. Corea’s career was entering a chapter of happy reminiscence, full of reunion concerts and retrospective projects. But he continued to build out from the groundwork he had laid.In 2013, for instance, he released two albums introducing new bands: “The Vigil,” featuring an electrified quintet of younger musicians, and “Trilogy,” an acoustic-trio album on which he was joined by the bassist Christian McBride and the drummer Brian Blade.Return to Forever, one of the most popular instrumental ensembles of its era, in 1976. From left: Lenny White, Stanley Clarke, Al Di Meola and Mr. Corea.Credit…Dick Barnatt/Redferns, via Getty ImagesHe kept up a busy touring schedule well into his late 70s, and his performances at the Blue Note in particular often combined reunions with longtime associates and collaborations with younger accompanists, mixing nostalgia with a will to forge ahead. Those performances often found their way onto albums, including “The Musician” (2017), a three-disc collection drawn from his nearly two-month-long residency at the club in 2011, when he was celebrating his 70th birthday in the company of such fellow luminaries as the pianist Herbie Hancock, the bassist and Return to Forever co-founder Stanley Clarke and the vocalist Bobby McFerrin.By the end of his career Mr. Corea had recorded close to 90 albums as a bandleader or co-leader and raked in 23 Grammys, more than almost any other musician. He also won three Latin Grammys.In 2006 he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, the highest honor available to an American jazz musician.Though he had become symbolic of the fusion movement, Mr. Corea never put much stock in musical categories. “It’s the media that are so interested in categorizing music,” he told The Times in 1983, “the media and the businessmen, who, after all, have a vested interest in keeping marketing clear cut and separate. If critics would ask musicians their views about what is happening, you would find that there is always a fusion of sorts taking place. All this means is a continual development — a continual merging of different streams.”Mr. Corea’s first marriage ended in divorce. He met Gayle Moran, who became his second wife, in the 1970s, when he was in Return to Forever and she was a singer and keyboardist with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, another top-flight fusion band.She survives him, as do a son, Thaddeus Corea; a daughter, Liana Corea; and two grandchildren.In the early 1970s, Mr. Corea converted to Scientology, and the religion’s teachings informed much of his music from then on, including his work with Return to Forever.Mr. Corea in 1978. “If critics would ask musicians their views about what is happening,” he once said, “you would find that there is always a fusion of sorts taking place.” Credit…Chuck FishmanArmando Anthony Corea was born on June 12, 1941, in Chelsea, Mass., near Boston. His father, also named Armando Corea, was a trumpeter and bandleader in Boston, and his mother, Anna (Zaccone) Corea, was a homemaker. He began studying piano when he was 4.He picked up his nickname from an aunt, who often pinched his big cheeks and called him “cheeky.” The name eventually morphed into the pithier “Chick.”He moved to New York City to study at Columbia University and Juilliard, but that lasted only a few months. As Miles Davis had a generation before, when he arrived at Juilliard from East St. Louis, Ill., Mr. Corea quickly found himself lured out of the classroom and into the clubs. Some of his earliest gigs came in the bands of the famed Latin jazz percussionists Mongo Santamaría and Willie Bobo, as well as with the swing-era vocalist and bandleader Cab Calloway.In 1968 he assumed the piano chair in Davis’s influential quintet, replacing Mr. Hancock. The band quickly went into the studio to record the final tracks that would round out “Filles de Kilimanjaro,” Davis’s first album to feature an electric piano. It signaled the trumpeter’s growing embrace of rock and funk music, a move encouraged by his second wife, the vocalist Betty Davis. (One of the two tracks featuring Mr. Corea is a tribute to her, the 16 ½-minute “Mademoiselle Mabry.”)The group gradually expanded in size as Davis wandered deeper into the murky, wriggling sound world of his early fusion albums. He brought a version of the “Bitches Brew” band to the Isle of Wight festival in 1970, the largest gig of his career, before an audience of 600,000.Soon after playing that concert, Mr. Corea and the bassist Dave Holland left Davis’s ensemble and joined with the drummer Barry Altschul and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton to found Circle, a short-lived but influential group that embraced an avant-garde approach.Mr. Corea founded Return to Forever in 1971 with Mr. Clarke, the saxophonist and flutist Joe Farrell, the percussionist Airto Moreira and the vocalist Flora Purim. The following year, the band released its Brazilian-tinged debut album, titled simply “Return to Forever,” on the ECM label.Also in 1972, Mr. Corea teamed up for the first time with the vibraphonist Gary Burton to record another album for the same label, “Crystal Silence.” The two became longtime friends and collaborators. Taken together, the two ECM albums represented something close to the full breadth of Mr. Corea’s identity as a musician — ranging from the serene and meditative to the zesty and driving.“We made that record in three hours; every song but one was a first take,” Mr. Burton said in an interview, recalling the “Crystal Silence” sessions. They would go on to record seven duet albums, and they continued performing together until Mr. Burton’s recent retirement.“I kept thinking, ‘Surely it’s going to run out of steam here at some point,’” Mr. Burton said. “And it never did. Even at the end, we would still come offstage excited and thrilled by what we were doing.”Return to Forever changed personnel frequently, but its most enduring lineup featured Mr. Corea, Mr. Clarke, the guitarist Al Di Meola and the drummer Lenny White. That quartet iteration released a string of popular albums — “Where Have I Known You Before” (1974), “No Mystery” (1975) and “Romantic Warrior” (1976) — that leaned into a blazing, hard-rock-influenced style, and each reached the Top 40 on the Billboard albums chart.Mr. Corea released a number of other influential fusion albums on his own, including “My Spanish Heart” (1976) and a string of recordings with his Elektric Band and his Akoustic Band. Later in his career he also delved deeply into the Western classical tradition, recording works by canonical composers like Mozart and Chopin, and composing an entire concerto for classical orchestra.“His versatility is second to none when it comes to the jazz world,” Mr. Burton said. “He played in so many styles and settings and collaborations.”In 1997, delivering a commencement address at Berklee College of Music, Mr. Corea told the members of the graduating class to insist on blazing their own path. “It’s all right to be yourself,” he said. “In fact, the more yourself you are, the more money you make.”Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Jean-Claude Carrière, 89, Dies; Prolific Writer of Screenplays and More

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJean-Claude Carrière, 89, Dies; Prolific Writer of Screenplays and MoreHe was a favorite of Luis Buñuel and other top filmmakers. He also had a fruitful collaboration with the stage director Peter Brook.Jean-Claude Carrière in 1999. He had more than 150 film and television writing credits and also wrote books and plays.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 11, 2021Jean-Claude Carrière, an author, playwright and screenwriter who collaborated with the director Luis Buñuel on a string of important films and went on to work on scores of other movies, among them Philip Kaufman’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1988), died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 89.The death was confirmed by his daughter Kiara Carrière. No cause was given.Mr. Carrière had barely started in the movie business when he met Buñuel, the Spanish-born director, in 1963 (although he had already won a short-subject Oscar for a 1962 comedy he made with Pierre Étaix, “Happy Anniversary”).“At the time, he was looking for a young French screenwriter who knew the French countryside well,” Mr. Carrière recalled in a 1983 interview with the writer Jason Weiss.“I was a beginner,” he said. “I had gone to Cannes, and he was seeing various screenwriters there. I had lunch with him, we got along well, and three weeks later he chose me and I left for Madrid. Since then I haven’t stopped.”His first project with Buñuel was “Diary of a Chambermaid” (1964), for which the two adapted the Octave Mirbeau novel of the same name. Mr. Carrière continued to work with Buñuel for the rest of the director’s career, including on his last feature, “That Obscure Object of Desire,” in 1977. (Buñuel died in 1983.)Fernando Rey and Carole Bouquet in a scene from the 1977 film “That Obscure Object of Desire,” the last of Mr. Carrière’s many collaborations with Luis Buñuel.“Quite often the screenwriter has to guess what exactly the film is that the director wants to make,” Mr. Carrière told Interview magazine in 2015. “Sometimes the director doesn’t even know himself. You have to help him find the right thing. That was the case with Buñuel. At the beginning, he was looking around in many different directions, and finally when we went the right way, we felt it.”Mr. Carrière also collaborated with other top filmmakers, including Jacques Deray (on the 1969 movie “The Swimming Pool” and more) and Louis Malle (on the 1967 film “The Thief of Paris” and others). In the 1970s one of his greatest successes was as a writer of Volker Schlondorff’s “The Tin Drum” (1979), which was adapted from the Günter Grass novel about a boy who, in the midst of the gathering chaos that led to World War II, decides not to grow up; it won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.In the 1980s he wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Daniel Vigne’s “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1982), Andrzej Wajda’s “Danton” (1983), Milos Forman’s “Valmont” (1989) and numerous other movies. Among the most recent of his more than 150 film and television credits were “The Artist and the Model,” a 2012 drama directed by Fernando Trueba, and “At Eternity’s Gate,” a 2018 film about Vincent van Gogh directed by Julian Schnabel.In 2014 Mr. Carrière received an honorary Oscar for his body of work. The citation said that his “elegantly crafted screenplays elevate the art of screenwriting to the level of literature.”The prolific Mr. Carrière also wrote books and plays, often collaborating with the stage director Peter Brook. His interests knew no bounds.With Mr. Brook he created “The Mahabharata,” a nine-hour stage version of the Sanskrit epic, which was staged at the Avignon Theater Festival in France in 1985 and then made into a film. He once wrote a book with the Dalai Lama (“The Power of Buddhism,” 1996). He wrote a novel called “Please, Mr. Einstein” that, as Dennis Overbye wrote in a 2006 review in The New York Times, “touches down lightly and charmingly on some of the thorniest philosophical consequences of Einstein’s genius and, by extension, the scientific preoccupations of the 20th century — the nature of reality, the fate of causality, the comprehensibility of nature, the limits of the mind.”His was deliberately ever curious.“People say I am very dispersed,” he told The Guardian in 1994. “But I say that to pass from one subject to another, from one country to another, is what keeps me alive, keeps me alert.”A scene from Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), one of three films for which Mr. Carrière was nominated for a writing Oscar.Credit…Rialto Pictures/StudiocanalJean-Claude Carrière was born on Sept. 17, 1931, in Colombières-sur-Orb in southern France, into a family of vintners. As World War II was ending in 1945, his father, who had a heart condition that was making it difficult for him to work the land, took a job at a cousin’s cafe near Paris. There Jean-Claude had access to better schools and could indulge more fully in the passion for writing that had, as he put it, “imposed itself on me” since he was a young boy.In his mid-20s he published a novel, “Le Lézard.” It caught the attention of the comic actor and director Jacques Tati, who provided Mr. Carrière with a sort of backward entry into his career: Mr. Tati hired him to write novels based on some of his movies. He also introduced him to the process of making and editing a film.He and Mr. Étaix jointly wrote and directed “Happy Anniversary,” a comic short about a couple trying to celebrate their anniversary. Mr. Carrière was surprised by the Oscar.“I came to the office and the producer was jumping out of joy: ‘We have the Oscar! We have the Oscar!,’” he told Interview. “I asked, ‘But what is the Oscar?’ I didn’t know.”His family background benefited him in his fateful meeting with Buñuel the next year.“The first question he asked me when we sat down together at the table — and it’s not a light or frivolous question; the way he looked at me I sensed that it was a deep and important question — was, ‘Do you drink wine?’” he told Mr. Weiss.“A negative response would have definitely disqualified me,” he continued. “So I said, ‘Not only do I drink wine, but I produce it. I’m from a family of vintners.’”Their bond thus sealed, Buñuel and Mr. Carrière went on to collaborate not only on “Diary of a Chambermaid” but also on “Belle de Jour” (1967), “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) and other films.In 1971 Mr. Carrière was among the writers on Mr. Forman’s “Taking Off,” a comedy about parents searching for a runaway daughter that received good notices. The same was not true of the next Carrière-Forman partnership, a Broadway production of Mr. Carrière’s two-character play “The Little Black Book,” with Mr. Forman directing. When it opened in April 1972, Clive Barnes, reviewing in The Times, called it “a foolish little play without either wit or humanity.” It closed after seven performances.Mr. Carrière in 2001. He received an honorary Oscar in 2014 for his “elegantly crafted screenplays,” which the citation said “elevate the art of screenwriting to the level of literature.”Credit…Jean-Pierre Muller/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHis only other Broadway effort was better received. It was “La Tragedie de Carmen,” which he, Marius Constant and Mr. Brook adapted from the Bizet opera, with Mr. Brook directing. It opened in November 1983 and ran for 187 performances.Mr. Carrière was nominated for writing Oscars for “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” “That Obscure Object of Desire” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Brook once explained what made Mr. Carrière such an in-demand writer, whether the job was creating original material, adapting a novel or opera, or reining in an epic poem.“Like a great actor, or a great cameraman, he adapts himself to different people he works with,” Mr. Brook told The Times in 1988. “He’s open to all shifts caused by the material changing, and yet he brings to it a very powerful and consistent point of view.”Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Mary Wilson, Co-Founder of the Supremes, Dies at 76

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMary Wilson, Motown Legend and Co-Founder of the Supremes, Dies at 76Ms. Wilson, with the original members Diana Ross and Florence Ballard, was part of one of the biggest musical acts of the 1960s.Mary Wilson, a founder of the Motown group the Supremes, in 2019.Credit…Rozette Rago for The New York TimesFeb. 9, 2021, 3:02 a.m. ETMary Wilson, a founding member of the Supremes, the trailblazing group from the 1960s that spun up 12 No. 1 singles on the musical charts and was key to Motown’s legendary sound, died on Monday at her home in Henderson, Nev. She was 76. Ms. Wilson’s death was confirmed by her publicist, Jay Schwartz. No cause of death was given.From 1964 to 1965, the Supremes, whose original members included Florence Ballard and Diana Ross as the lead singer, released hit songs such as “Where Did Our Love Go?” “Baby Love,” “Come See About Me” and “Stop.”Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown, called Ms. Wilson a “trailblazer” who will be missed. He said in a statement that the Supremes had opened doors for other Motown acts.“I was always proud of Mary,” Mr. Gordy said in the statement. “She was quite a star in her own right, and over the years continued to work hard to boost the legacy of the Supremes.”Funeral services for Ms. Wilson will be private because of Covid-19 restrictions, Mr. Schwartz said, adding that a celebration of her life will take place later this year.A full obituary will be posted soon.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Christopher Plummer, Actor From Shakespeare to ‘The Sound of Music,’ Dies at 91

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Christopher Plummer (1929-2021)Obituary10 Movies to StreamAn Appraisal of the ActorA Look Back at ‘The Sound of Music’Review of His MemoirAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyChristopher Plummer, Actor From Shakespeare to ‘The Sound of Music,’ Dies at 91His performance as Captain von Trapp in one of the most popular movies of all time propelled a steady half-century parade of television and film roles.Christopher Plummer as Capt. Georg von Trapp in “The Sound of Music.” It was his best-known film, but for years he disparaged the role as an “empty carcass.”Credit…Silver Screen Collection/Getty ImagesFeb. 5, 2021Christopher Plummer, the prolific and versatile Canadian-born actor who rose to celebrity as the romantic lead in perhaps the most popular movie musical of all time, was critically lionized as among the pre-eminent Shakespeareans of the past century and won an Oscar, two Tonys and two Emmys, died on Friday at his home in Weston, Conn. He was 91. His wife, Elaine Taylor, said the cause was a blow to the head as a result of a fall.The scion of a once-lofty family whose status had dwindled by the time he was born, Mr. Plummer nonetheless displayed the outward aspects of privilege throughout his life. He had immense and myriad natural gifts: a leading man’s face and figure; a slightly aloof mien that betrayed supreme confidence, if not outright self-regard; an understated athletic grace; a sonorous (not to say plummy) speaking voice; and exquisite diction.He also had charm and arrogance in equal measure, and a streak both bibulous and promiscuous, all of which he acknowledged in later life as his manner softened and his habits waned. In one notorious incident in 1971, he was replaced by Anthony Hopkins in the lead role of “Coriolanus” at the National Theater in London; according to the critic Kenneth Tynan, who at the time was the literary manager of the National, Mr. Plummer was dismissed in a vote by the cast for crude and outrageous behavior.For years, until he came to share the widely held opinion of his best-known film — the beloved 1965 musical “The Sound of Music,” in which he starred as the Austrian naval officer Georg von Trapp opposite Julie Andrews — as a pinnacle of warmhearted family entertainment, Mr. Plummer disparaged it as saccharine claptrap, famously referring to it as “S&M” or “The Sound of Mucus.”In 1964 Mr. Plummer starred in “Hamlet at Elsinore,” a television production filmed at Kronborg Castle in Denmark. He is seen here in rehearsal with Jo Maxwell Muller as Ophelia.Credit…London Daily Herald“That sentimental stuff is the most difficult for me to play, especially because I’m trained vocally and physically for Shakespeare,” Mr. Plummer said in a People magazine interview in 1982. “To do a lousy part like von Trapp, you have to use every trick you know to fill the empty carcass of the role. That damn movie follows me around like an albatross.”Mr. Plummer as Captain von Trapp with Julie Andrews as Maria and their harmonious children in “The Sound of Music.”Credit…20th Century Fox Film CorporationMr. Plummer’s résumé, which stretched over seven decades, was at least colossal, if not nonpareil, encompassing acting opportunities from some of dramatic literature’s greatest works to some of commercial entertainment’s crassest exploitations. He embraced it all with uncanny grace, or at least professional relish, displaying a uniform ease in vanishing into personalities not his own — pious or menacing, benign or malevolent, stern or mellow — and a uniform delight in delivering lines written by Elizabethan geniuses and Hollywood hacks.He played Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Mark Antony and others of Shakespeare’s towering protagonists on prominent stages to consistent acclaim, and he starred in “Hamlet at Elsinore,” a critically praised 1964 television production, directed by Philip Saville and filmed at Kronborg Castle in Denmark, where (under the name Elsinore) the play is set.But he also accepted roles in a fair share of clinkers, in which he made vivid sport of some hoary clichés — as the evil bigot hiding behind religiosity in “Skeletons” (1997), for example, one of his more than 40 television movies, or as the somber emperor of the galaxy who appears as a hologram in “Starcrash,” a 1978 rip-off of “Star Wars.”One measure of his stature was his leading ladies, who included Glenda Jackson as Lady Macbeth and Zoe Caldwell as Cleopatra. And even setting Shakespeare aside, one measure of his range was a list of the well-known characters he played, fictional and non, on television and in the movies: Sherlock Holmes and Mike Wallace, John Barrymore and Leo Tolstoy, Aristotle and F. Lee Bailey, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alfred Stieglitz, Rudyard Kipling and Cyrano de Bergerac.‘Simply Stupendous’Mr. Plummer’s television work began in the 1950s, during the heyday of live drama, and lasted half a century. He starred as the archbishop in the popular 1983 mini-series “The Thorn Birds,” appeared regularly as an industrialist in the 1990s action-adventure series “Counterstrike,” and won Emmy Awards — in 1977 for portraying a conniving banker in the mini-series “Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers,” and in 1994 for narrating “Madeline,” an animated series based on the children’s books.In the movies, his performance in “The Sound of Music” as von Trapp, a severe widower and father whose heart is warmed and won by the woman he hires as a governess, propelled a parade of distinctive roles, more character turns than starring parts, across a formidable spectrum of genres. They included historical drama (“The Last Station,” about Tolstoy, and “The Day That Shook the World” about the onset of World War I); historical adventure (as Kipling in John Huston’s rollicking adaptation of “The Man Who Would Be King,” with Sean Connery and Michael Caine); romantic comedy (“Must Love Dogs,” with John Cusack and Diane Lane); political epic (“Syriana”); science fiction (as Chang, the Klingon general, in “Star Trek VI”); and crime farce (“The Return of the Pink Panther,” in which, opposite Peter Sellers’s inept Inspector Clouseau, he played a retiree version of the debonair jewel thief originally portrayed by David Niven).Mr. Plummer won a belated Oscar in 2012 for the role of Hal, a man who enthusiastically comes out as gay after a decades-long marriage and the death of his wife, in the bittersweet father-son story “Beginners.”“Simply stupendous,” Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote of that performance, in one of many prominent reviews that treated it as a triumphant valedictory. At 82, he was the oldest person ever to win an Academy Award in a competitive category.“You’re only two years older than me, darling,” Mr. Plummer said, addressing the golden statuette during his acceptance speech. “Where have you been all my life?”Mr. Plummer and Ewan McGregor in the film “Beginners.” Mr. Plummer’s performance as a man who enthusiastically comes out as gay after a decades-long marriage and the death of his wife earned him an Oscar in 2012 for best supporting actor.Credit…Focus FeaturesA dozen or more of his roles came after his 75th birthday, among them the thriller “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (2011); “Barrymore” (2011), a screen version of the stage show for which he earned his second Tony Award in 1997 for his tour de force portrayal of the actor John Barrymore; the Rian Johnson whodunit “Knives Out” (2019); and the fact-based drama “The Last Full Measure” (2019), starring William Hurt.In 2017 he starred as J. Paul Getty, the billionaire who refuses to pay a ransom for his kidnapped grandson, in the Ridley Scott movie “All the Money in the World,” a role he stepped into at the last minute to replace Kevin Spacey, who had been accused of sexual misconduct. His formidable performance, described as “so dominating, so magnetic and monstrous” by the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, earned him an Oscar nomination.“I’m not a superstar — thank God,” Mr. Plummer said in an interview with The Times in 1982. “Christ, to be a superstar must be extremely tiring and limiting.“I prefer being half-recognized on the street and getting good tables in restaurants,” he added. “Unfortunately, the really good, smashing parts do not always come my way because they go to the first tier of superstars who are bankable.”As accurate as that self-assessment was, it pertained only to the movies. Onstage, with a fierce intelligence, exemplary control of his body and voice, and a formidable command of language, Mr. Plummer had few equals.“As T.S. Eliot measures his life with coffee spoons, so I measure mine by the plays I’ve been in,” he wrote in his expansive 2008 memoir, “In Spite of Myself.”A Shakespearean ForemostMr. Plummer made notable Broadway appearances in works by Archibald MacLeish (the Devil-like Nickels in “J.B.” in 1958), Bertolt Brecht (the Hitler-like title role in “Arturo Ui” in 1963), Peter Shaffer (the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in “The Royal Hunt of the Sun” in 1965), Neil Simon (the Chekhov-like narrator in “The Good Doctor” in 1973) and Harold Pinter (“No Man’s Land,” opposite Jason Robards, in 1994).He won a Tony in the title role of “Cyrano,” a 1973 musical version of Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” and in 2007 he was nominated for a Tony for the Clarence Darrow-like role of Henry Drummond, opposite Brian Dennehy, in “Inherit the Wind,” his final Broadway appearance.Mr. Plummer with Brian Dennehy in the 2007 Broadway production of “Inherit the Wind.” It was Mr. Plummer’s final Broadway performance.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEven so, that was the second tier of his theatrical portfolio; he was first and foremost a Shakespearean, one who brought febrile intensity and fierce intellect to his preparation.“I disagree with the theory that he is a man of indecision,” Mr. Plummer wrote about Hamlet in an essay for Playbill in 1964. “The truth is that he has made his mind up many times over, and it is only through his self-analytical precision and towering imagination that he finds himself living the deed long before he commits himself to its performance.”In 1955, he played Mark Antony in “Julius Caesar” in the inaugural production of the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford, Conn. The next year he played the title role in “Henry V” at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Ontario — where he became a fixture — and was declared by Brooks Atkinson of The Times to be “a Shakespearean actor of the first rank.”For more than a half century, through 2010 — when, at age 80, he appeared at the Stratford festival as Prospero in “The Tempest” — Mr. Plummer’s performances, including those in New York and in London, where he lived in the 1960s, were more often than not appreciated in extravagant terms.“The performance of a lifetime,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times of Mr. Plummer’s “King Lear,” which arrived on Broadway in 2004 after first being produced at the festival. “He delivers a Lear both deeply personal and universal: a distinctly individual man whose face becomes a mirror for every man’s mortality.”Ms. Taylor, his wife, said that at his death Mr. Plummer had been preparing to appear as Lear on film for the first time, under the direction of Des McAnuff.But it was his portrayal of Iago in a 1981 Connecticut production of “Othello,” which starred James Earl Jones in the title role and came to Broadway in 1982, that defined his reputation as a Shakespearean of profound depth, worthy of comparison to the likes of Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave and John Gielgud. “He gives us evil so pure — and so bottomless — that it can induce tears,” Frank Rich wrote in The Times. “Our tears are not for the dastardly Iago, of course — that would be wrong. No, what Mr. Plummer does is make us weep for a civilization that can produce such a man and allow him to flower.”The praise was amplified by the senior Times critic of the day, Walter Kerr, who wrote, “It is quite possibly the best single Shakespearean performance to have originated on this continent in our time.”A Rebellious BoyhoodMr. Plummer as King Lear on Broadway in 2004, in what Ben Brantley of The New York Times called “the performance of a lifetime.”Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesArthur Christopher Orme Plummer was born in Toronto on Dec. 13, 1929. His parents separated around the time of his birth, and he did not meet his father, John Orme Plummer, until he was 17, when the elder Plummer came to see his son perform in a play.“Our paths would cross once or twice again in our lifetimes and then no more,” Christopher Plummer wrote in his memoir.Mr. Plummer grew up in Montreal with his mother — Isabella Mary Abbott Plummer, a granddaughter of a Canadian prime minister and a railroad president — and her extended family in what he described as a colony of fading social aristocracy, where bird-watching and tennis were frequent recreational pursuits and the after-dinner activity was reading aloud. It was a background, he once said, that “made me want to be bad and rough and find the secrets rather than the gates.”Pampered, gifted and rebellious, he aspired early on to be a concert pianist, though in high school, where his classmates included the future jazzmen Oscar Peterson and Maynard Ferguson, he gravitated to their musical style and a life at night that included heavy drinking.“How often as a mere teenager, tanked to the gills on cheap rye whiskey and Molson chasers, did I stagger home in the blinding cold,” he wrote in his memoir.He gave up the idea of a musical career because, he said, “I realized acting came easier.” He performed in high school shows — including as Mr. Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice,” in which he received a favorable review from The Montreal Gazette that “instantly went to my head” — and made his professional debut at 16 at the Montreal Repertory Theater.Joining a troupe in Ottawa, Mr. Plummer performed in dozens of low-budget productions and, in what amounted to an extended education, took on roles in radio theater for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and spent a season with a professional company in Bermuda. The actor Edward Everett Horton, who had appeared with the company, secured him a role in a touring production of “Nina,” a French comedy, and opportunities accrued quickly.Mr. Plummer appeared in “Medea” in Paris with Judith Anderson and made his Broadway debut in “The Starcross Story,” a drama that opened and closed on one January night in 1954 in spite of the lure of its star, Eva Le Gallienne. He toured in “The Constant Wife” with Katharine Cornell (who nearly had him fired for showing up for a performance late and hung over), and in 1955 appeared in his first commercial hit, as Warwick in “The Lark,” Jean Anouilh’s drama about Joan of Arc, starring an ascendant Julie Harris.His first feature-film role was as a playwright in “Stage Struck,” a 1958 drama about the New York theater world, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda, Susan Strasberg and Herbert Marshall.Mr. Plummer in 2017. “I’m not a superstar — thank God,” he once said. “Christ, to be a superstar must be extremely tiring and limiting.”Credit…Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesBy the early 1960s, Mr. Plummer had become allied with the bad boys of the British acting world — Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole — motivated, he once said, by the cantankerous rage against propriety exhibited in the work of John Osborne.In his memoir, a dishy, rollicking account of a life lived sensually and energetically, he was not shy in detailing his amorous adventures, or his drinking with fellow actors. In a 1967 interview with the CBC, he acknowledged himself to be a drunk — “though not when I’m working, producers take note,” he said — and considered the question of why actors in general drink.“The more you give to an audience, which is a tremendous amount that you give during a night if you care about your work, the more you spill out of yourself with either loathing or loving them and getting loathing and loving back,” he said. “It’s a tremendous letdown when the evening is over. You’ve given an awful lot of your own personality with just the reward of applause at the end, which is a marvelous reward but it isn’t quite enough to fill the rest of the night.”In the same interview he noted that he’d given up trying to be liked. “I’m not a difficult type to get on with,” he said. “I’m only difficult when I’m impatient with people who don’t understand temperament has nothing to do with lack of professionalism.”Mr. Plummer’s first two marriages, to the actress Tammy Grimes and a British journalist, Patricia Lewis, ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Taylor, he is survived by his daughter with Ms. Grimes, the actress Amanda Plummer.By both their accounts, Mr. Plummer and his daughter became friends after she became an adult, though they had rarely seen each other while she was growing up.“I didn’t want anything to do with the upbringing of a child,” he told The Times in 1982. “I am really very bad at responsibility of any kind. Unless it’s my work, I’m hopeless.”It was Ms. Taylor, Mr. Plummer acknowledged many times, who curtailed at last his liquid nights and general profligacy.“My long-suffering wife Elaine,” he called her, in closing his Oscar acceptance speech, “who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for coming to my rescue every day of my life.”Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Sandie Crisp, ‘Goddess Bunny’ of the Underground Scene, Dies at 61

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskVaccine InformationWuhan, One Year LaterAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostSandie Crisp, ‘Goddess Bunny’ of the Underground Scene, Dies at 61She became a muse among the Hollywood avant-garde, appearing in movies, music videos and photographs. She died of Covid-19.Sandie Crisp in 2016. She appeared in music videos, movies and stage shows.Credit…Chuck GrantFeb. 4, 2021Updated 6:20 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Sandie Crisp, a transgender actress and model who, under her stage name the Goddess Bunny, served as a muse to generations of artists, gay punks and other denizens of the West Hollywood avant-garde, died on Jan. 27 at a hospital in Los Angeles. She was 61.Her death was confirmed by Mitchell Sunderland-Jackson, a friend. The cause was Covid-19, he said.For decades, Ms. Crisp was a familiar presence on the sidewalks of Santa Monica Boulevard and in the hustler bars that once lined it, where she dressed like a grungy diva and lip-synced songs by Donny Osmond, Judy Garland and Selena.In the 1980s and ’90s, she became a popular subject for artists who frequented that scene as well as their collaborator. Directors cast her in underground movies, and she appeared in music videos by Dr. Dre and Billy Talent. A nude photograph of her sits in the permanent collection of the Louvre.Her aesthetic, which blended the Hollywood noir of David Lynch with the punk offensiveness of GG Allin and Lydia Lunch, knew few boundaries. For one performance she dressed as Eva Braun alongside a man dressed as Hitler. An audience member leapt to his feet and punched her in the face.“Being able to shock and offend as a way of avoiding co-option by corporate capitalism — she was the muse for people pursuing that sensibility,” said the Canadian filmmaker Bruce La Bruce, the director, most recently, of “Saint-Narcisse” (2020).Ms. Crisp was equally renowned among drag performers, especially those of a rawer sensibility.“If you’re an actual drag queen, you know about the Goddess Bunny,” said Simone Moss, the founder of Bushwig, an annual drag conclave that started in New York and gave Ms. Crisp a lifetime achievement award in 2017. “She’s a part of drag history as much as Divine,” she said, referring to the actress made famous by John Waters in films like “Pink Flamingos.”Sandie Crisp was born on Jan. 13, 1960, in Los Angeles to John Wesley Baima, a lawyer, and Betty Joann (Sherrod) Baima, a secretary.Their child contracted polio, causing limited use of her arms and legs. Doctors prescribed a variety of surgeries and medical devices — Milwaukee braces, Harrington rods — but they caused only further physical damage. She used a wheelchair to get around.After the Baimas divorced, Sandie spent several years in foster homes around Los Angeles, at times subjected to abuse by doctors and at least one foster parent, according to Sandie’s account and that of her half brother, Derryl Dale Piper II.She returned to live with her mother when she was 11, and by 14 she was beginning to present herself as a woman, Mr. Piper said, a turn that brought conflict with their mother, who was deeply religious.Ms. Crisp left home after high school, moving to West Hollywood and joining a small community of punks, artists, homeless teens and hustlers. She made her mark almost immediately. Foulmouthed and dressed in sequined gowns that she often sewed herself, she insisted on being treated like a celebrity. Her penchant for telling wild tales about herself — like how she had appeared in off-Broadway musicals and dated celebrities — only made her more intriguing to her peers.Sandie Crisp was equally renowned among drag performers, especially those who lean toward a raw, edgy sensibility.Credit…Gibson Fox“She was such a visually extreme person,” said the photographer Rick Castro, one of many artists who hired Ms. Crisp to appear in their work in the 1980s and ’90s. “The way she carried herself, like she was a movie star, like old-school Hollywood royalty — she didn’t carry herself like someone who should be ashamed,” he said in an interview.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      Eva Coutaz, a Record Label Force for Quality, Dies at 77

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEva Coutaz, a Record Label Force for Quality, Dies at 77An executive with the respected label Harmonia Mundi, she shaped classical music careers and public tastes in turning out incomparable recordings from a French farmhouse.Eva Coutaz, the driving force behind the record label Harmonia Mundi, rehabilitated forgotten composers and nurtured some of the leading figures in early music.Credit…Josep MolinaFeb. 4, 2021, 3:13 p.m. ETEva Coutaz, who in more than four decades at the highly respected record label Harmonia Mundi shaped musicians’ careers, rehabilitated forgotten composers and expanded the tastes of record collectors, died on Jan. 26 in Arles, France. She was 77.Jean-Marc Berns, the label’s head of marketing, said the cause was complications of renal failure.Ms. Coutaz joined Harmonia Mundi in 1972 at the invitation of its founder, Bernard Coutaz, whom she would go on to marry. Her first job was to oversee publicity and to organize concerts to promote the label’s artists, but she quickly proved her business acumen and artistic sensibility.Ms. Coutaz nurtured long-term relationships with a stable of musicians that included some of the leading figures in early music, among them the countertenor Alfred Deller and the performer-conductors René Jacobs, William Christie and Philippe Herreweghe. Later she brought in another generation of recording stars, including the violinist Isabelle Faust, the pianist Alexandre Tharaud and the baritone Matthias Goerne.She built a catalog of more than 800 recordings as head of production starting in 1975. On the death of her husband in 2010 she became chief executive of the company and remained in that post until 2015, when she sold the label.At its most prolific, Harmonia Mundi released more than 50 new recordings a year. Industry publications frequently crowned it label of the year, and collectors came to trust it as a guide to hidden gems and illuminating interpretations of the classics. With their beautifully designed covers and thoughtful liner notes, Harmonia Mundi albums stood for a listening culture that was both meticulous and meditative.Ms. Coutaz was “the great guiding force” behind the label, Mr. Christie said in a phone interview. As a businesswoman, he said, she could be “tough as old boots.”“She had a strong will and an extraordinary sense of rightness about repertory,” he added. “And she was going to take risks.”In the 1970s and ’80s, those risks paid handsome dividends in a market buoyed by fresh interest in early music and historically informed interpretations. Ms. Coutaz recognized, for example, the market potential of the French baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier at a time when his ilk lagged far behind the popular appeal of their German and Italian counterparts, Mr. Christie said.Costly productions of unknown oratorios and operas remained a gamble, and Ms. Coutaz greenlighted some projects against her own better financial judgment. In a 2018 radio interview with the Belgian station RTBF, she spoke about a recording, led by Mr. Jacobs, of the opera “Croesus” by the northern German baroque composer Reinhard Keiser — a footnote in music history books.“I thought it would be a loss for us,” she said. But she was so taken by the music that she told herself, “I want to record it — it would be a shame if people don’t hear it.” “Croesus” sold more than 25,000 copies, a triumph for classical music.Mr. Jacobs said that Ms. Coutaz had encouraged his conducting career when he was still known mainly as a countertenor. After he had gained fame as a champion of Baroque music, she urged him to record Mozart operas. His Harmonia Mundi recording of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” won a Grammy Award in 2004 and became a best seller.“She pushed me to go further,” he said.Eva Schannath was born in Wuppertal, Germany, on Feb. 26, 1943. Her father was a cabinetmaker. After attending a Roman Catholic school in Düsseldorf, she took on an apprenticeship as a bookseller. Eager to experience France, she went to Marseille in 1964 as an au pair, then stayed on, working first at a book shop in Montpellier and then for a cultural center in Aix-en-Provence.It was there, in 1972, that she met Mr. Coutaz, who was then running Harmonia Mundi from Saint-Michel-l’Observatoire, a remote village in Provence. Mr. Coutaz founded the company in 1958.Jean-Guihen Queyras, a boy studying the cello, was living in a nearby hamlet, and his parents befriended the couple. When he was 10 he received his first taste of a Harmonia Mundi recording session when Ms. Coutaz invited him to work the organ bellows for Mr. Christie in a tiny Romanesque mountain chapel.Years later Mr. Queyras joined the label as a soloist. “What was different to other labels was her vision and her very human and organic way to bring together musicians in a way that really feels like a family,” he said.He recalled her strong emotional reactions to music. “Sometimes she would talk to you after a concert, and you could see there had been tears,” he said. “She really made all this out of pure, intense love for music.”Eva and Bernard Coutaz worked closely together even as they married, divorced and remarried. They had no children. Information on her survivors was not immediately available.The couple moved the label to an old farmhouse in Arles in 1986. It became the creative and logistical hub for a company that at its height employed more than 350 people. Its influence spread through subsidiaries in Spain and the United States, a publishing arm and a network of record boutiques.In the early 2000s, the rise of streaming started to put the recording industry in crisis and forced painful cuts at Harmonia Mundi. In the radio interview, Ms. Coutaz spoke of a 70 percent drop in CD sales over a span of 10 years. She warned that as earnings plummeted, high-quality studio recordings would become a thing of the past. “If digital sales are not monetized, the moment will come when you can no longer produce,” she said.In 2015, she approved the sale of Harmonia Mundi’s catalog to PIAS, a Belgian group of independent labels. She remained involved as a consultant for another year, to help maintain quality. In 2018, Gramophone, a leading classical music publication, named Harmonia Mundi label of the year.Reflecting on Ms. Coutaz, Mr. Christie said his generation had known a recording industry led by “strong-minded and intensely committed individuals who had an extraordinary sense of the rightness of what they were doing and how to create markets.”“And she stood out among them.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Ricky Powell, 59, Dies; Chronicled Early Hip-Hop and Downtown New York

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRicky Powell, 59, Dies; Chronicled Early Hip-Hop and Downtown New YorkProlific with his point-and-shoot camera, he captured essential images of the Beastie Boys, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Run-DMC, Andy Warhol and more.The photographer Ricky Powell in 2012. An inveterate walker, he pounded the New York pavement with his camera and snapped photos of whatever caught his fancy.Credit…Janette BeckmanPublished More