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      Yaphet Kotto, James Bond Villain and ‘Alien’ Star, Dies at 81

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyYaphet Kotto, Bond Villain and ‘Alien’ Star, Dies at 81The actor, who descended from Cameroonian royalty, was known for his roles in movies like “Midnight Run” and the TV show “Homicide: Life on the Street.”Sigourney Weaver and Yaphet Kotto in “Alien.”Credit…20th Century Fox, via Associated PressMarch 16, 2021, 4:47 a.m. ETYaphet Kotto, an imposing actor who descended from African royalty and was known for playing tough characters in a roster of films like “Alien” and “Midnight Run,” died on Monday near Manila in the Philippines. He was 81.His death was confirmed on Tuesday by his agent, Ryan Goldhar. His wife, Thessa Sinahon, announced it in a Facebook post. No other details were immediately available.Mr. Kotto, who said he came from Cameroonian royalty on his father’s side, began studying acting at 16 at the Actors Mobile Theater Studio, according to Variety, and by 19 he had made his professional theater debut in “Othello.”He often played police officers, criminals and other hardened personalities onscreen. He received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for his portrayal of President Idi Amin, the murderous Ugandan strongman, in the 1976 television movie “Raid on Entebbe.”He also starred as a police lieutenant in the 1990s-era TV hit “Homicide: Life on the Street,” an ex-convict in the 1978 film “Blue Collar” and a prison guard in “Brubaker,” a 1980 movie about a prison farm also starring Robert Redford.Mr. Kotto as Lt. Al Giardello in “Homicide: Life on the Street.”Credit…James Sorensen/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesHe even played a pair of Bond villains in the 1973 film “Live and Let Die”: both a corrupt Caribbean dictator and that character’s alter ago, a drug trafficker named Mr. Big.In 1993, Mr. Kotto, who stood 6-foot-3, told The Baltimore Sun that such roles presented a distorted image of what he was really like.“I want to try to play a much more sensitive man. A family man,” he told the newspaper. “There is an aspect of Black people’s lives that is not running or jumping.”Yaphet Frederick Kotto was born on Nov. 15, 1939, in Harlem and grew up in the Bronx. His father was Cameroonian royalty, The Baltimore Sun reported. His mother was of Panamanian and West Indian descent. The couple separated when Mr. Kotto was a child, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents.Mr. Kotto in the 1973 James Bond film “Live and Let Die.”Credit…MGM/UA Entertainment Mr. Kotto married three times; he and Ms. Sinahon, who is from the Philippines, wed in Baltimore in 1998.Mr. Kotto had six children. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.One of Mr. Kotto’s first parts was a supporting role in the 1964 film “Nothing but a Man,” about a Black couple who face discrimination in the Deep South. He would go on to have more than 90 other acting credits, in film, in television and on Broadway.Notably, he played Parker, an engineer tasked with repairing a spaceship in “Alien,” the 1979 blockbuster from Ridley Scott.In the 1988 action-comedy “Midnight Run,” co-starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, he played the F.B.I. agent Alonzo Mosely, whose stolen ID becomes fodder for a running joke. And in “The Running Man,” a dystopian 1987 thriller set in what was then the near future (2019), Mr. Kotto played a resistance fighter alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in a fascist version of America.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Sally Grossman, Immortalized on a Dylan Album Cover, Dies at 81

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySally Grossman, Immortalized on a Dylan Album Cover, Dies at 81She picked out a red outfit and struck a relaxed pose on the cover of “Bringing It All Back Home,” leaving much for fans to guess about.Bob Dylan wanted his manager’s wife, Sally Grossman, to appear on the cover of his 1965 album taken at her home in Woodstock, N.Y. March 15, 2021, 6:53 p.m. ETOne of Bob Dylan’s most important early albums, “Bringing It All Back Home” from 1965, has the kind of cover that can strain eyes and fuel speculation. It is a photograph of Mr. Dylan, in a black jacket, sitting in a room full of bric-a-brac that may or may not mean something, staring into the camera as a woman in a red outfit lounges in the background.“Fans became so fixated on deciphering it,” the music journalist Neil McCormick wrote in The Daily Telegraph of London last year, “that a rumor took hold that the woman was Dylan in drag, representing the feminine side of his psyche.”She wasn’t. She was Sally Grossman, the wife of Mr. Dylan’s manager at the time, Albert Grossman.“The photo was shot in Albert Grossman’s house,” the man who took it, Daniel Kramer, told The Guardian in 2016. “The room was the original kitchen of this house that’s a couple hundred years old.”“Bob contributed to the picture the magazines he was reading and albums he was listening to,” Mr. Kramer added, a reference to the bric-a-brac. “Bob wanted Sally to be in the photo because, well, look at her! She chose the red outfit.”Ms. Grossman died on Thursday at her home in the Bearsville section of Woodstock, N.Y., not far from the house where the photograph was taken. She had long been a fixture in Woodstock, operating a recording studio, a theater and other businesses there after her husband died of a heart attack at 59 in 1986. She was 81.Her niece, Anna Buehler, confirmed her death and said the cause had not been determined.Ms. Grossman in an undated photo, taken in the same room, against the same fireplace, in which the 1965 album cover photo was shot. She and her husband ran recording studios and restaurants in Woodstock, and after his death she created the Bearsville Theater there. Credit…Deborah Feingold/Corbis via Getty ImagesSally Ann Buehler was born on Aug. 22, 1939, in Manhattan to Coleman and Ann (Kauth) Buehler. Her mother was executive director of the Boys Club (now the Variety Boys and Girls Club) of Queens; her father was an actuary.Ms. Grossman studied at Adelphi University on Long Island and Hunter College in Manhattan, but she was more drawn to the arts scene percolating in Greenwich Village.“I figured that what was happening on the street was a lot more interesting than studying 17th-century English literature,” she told Musician magazine in 1987, “so I dropped out of Hunter and began working as a waitress. I worked at the Cafe Wha?, and then the Bitter End, all over.”Along the way she met Mr. Grossman, who was making his name managing folk music acts that played at those types of venues, including Peter, Paul and Mary, whom he helped bring together.“The office was constantly packed with people,” Ms. Grossman recalled in the 1987 interview. “Peter, Paul and Mary, of course, but also Ian and Sylvia, Richie Havens, Gordon Lightfoot, other musicians, artists, poets.”The couple, who married in 1964, settled in Woodstock, where Mr. Grossman had acquired properties and which Mr. Dylan had also discovered about the same time, settling there with his family as well.In due course came the photo shoot for the album cover.“I made 10 exposures,” Mr. Kramer told The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2014. One image, with Mr. Dylan holding a cat, was a keeper. “That was the only time all three subjects were looking at the lens,” Mr. Kramer said.The photo, staged by Mr. Kramer with Mr. Dylan’s input, was an early example of what became a mini-trend of loading covers up with imagery that seemed to invite scrutiny for insights into the music. The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (1967) might be the best-known example.The album itself was a breakthrough for Mr. Dylan, marking his transition from acoustic to electric. Its tracks included “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Maggie’s Farm.”Ms. Grossman and her husband established recording studios and restaurants in Bearsville, and after his death Ms. Grossman renovated a barn to create the Bearsville Theater, bringing to life a vision of her husband’s. It hosted numerous concerts over the years. She sold the businesses in the mid-2000s.Ms. Grossman is survived by a brother, Barry Buehler.Though she knew many American musicians, Ms. Grossman had a special place in her heart for an order of religious singers from Bengal known as the Bauls, whom she encountered in the 1960s. She created a digital archive of Baul music. Deborah Baker, author of “A Blue Hand: The Beats in India” (2008), wrote about Ms. Grossman and her connection to the Bauls in a 2011 essay in the magazine the Caravan.“Despite all the famous musicians and bands who once passed through her life,” Ms. Baker wrote, “she found it was the Bauls she missed the most from those years.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Flory Jagoda, Keeper of Sephardic Music Tradition, Dies at 97

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFlory Jagoda, Keeper of Sephardic Music Tradition, Dies at 97A charismatic musician, she sang and wrote songs that linked her to Jewish ancestors who lived in Spain until their expulsion in 1492.Flory Jagoda, left, performing with Heather Spence in Potomac, Md., in 2012. She sang songs she knew from her childhood in the former Yugoslavia and wrote new ones in the Sephardic tradition.Credit…Dayna Smith/Getty ImagesMarch 14, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETTo Flory Jagoda, the language, rhythms and joys of the Sephardic Jewish music she sang and wrote connected her to her beloved nona — her grandmother — who lived in the small mountain village of Vlasenica in the former Yugoslavia.“I think all the feeling that I have for the Sephardic culture, for stories, for song — it’s really a gift from her to me that I will have for the rest of my life,” Mrs. Jagoda said in an oral history interview for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museumin 1995.They were songs of home and family, of love and Hanukkah, many of them in the diasporic language — Ladino, a form of Castilian Spanish mixed with Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish — spoken by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. Some eventually settled in Vlasenica, where Mrs. Jagoda spent part of her childhood, among her beloved grandparents and extended family.Mrs. Jagoda was a Bosnian. She spoke Ladino with her family in Vlasenica, but she conversed in Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian to outsiders.“Our ancestors were Spanish Jews,” she said in the 2014 documentary “Flory’s Flame.” “You carry that love subconsciously. It’s in you. Everything that was Spanish to us was Jewish.”A charismatic musician who played accordion and guitar and was known for the quavery trills of her singing voice, Mrs. Jagoda recorded five albums; performed in her homeland long after immigrating to the United States; and was named a National Heritage Fellow in 2002 by the National Endowment for the Arts.Mrs. Jagoda died on Jan. 29 in a memory care facility in Alexandria, Va. She was 97.Her daughter Betty Jagoda Murphy confirmed the death.Flory Papo was born on Dec. 21, 1923, in Sarajevo, when it was the capital of Yugoslavia, to Samuel and Rosa (Altarac) Papo. Her father was a musician.When Flory was a baby, her parents divorced and she moved with her mother to Vlasenica, where they lived with her grandparents for several years and where she remained when her mother married Michael Kabilijo. Eventually, at about 10, Flory joined her mother and stepfather in Zagreb. She was close to her nona, Berta Altarac, and unhappy about the move to a big city.But she adjusted. Her stepfather bought her an accordion and adopted her. But the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 forced the family to move.Her stepfather bought train tickets to the Croatian city of Split, using gentile names for the family. Flory went first, charming other travelers on the trip by playing her accordion.“I play it for four hours,” she said in “Flory’s Flame.” “They all came into the compartment. They love it. They love music over there. They sang, we had a party, the conductor came in and sat there and he started singing. Saved my life.”She later wrote a song about the episode, which in English translation says in part:My father tells me,“Don’t speak! Just play your accordion!Play your accordion and sing your songs!”I don’t know why I’m running.What have I done?After Flory and her family had spent several months in Split, the Italian Fascists controlling the city sent hundreds of Jewish refugees, including them, to Korcula, a Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea, where she taught accordion in exchange for food.In 1943, with the Nazis approaching Korcula and other Adriatic islands, Flory and her parents fled on a fishing boat to Bari, an Italian port city on the Adriatic. She spent the rest of the war there.While working as a typist for a U.S. Army salvage depot in Bari, she met Harry Jagoda, a master sergeant. They married in June 1945. She wore a gown made out of a parachute.Mr. Jagoda returned to the United States before her; she arrived in April 1946, on a ship with 300 Italian war brides.Over the next 27 years, Mr. Jagoda built a real estate development business in Northern Virginia. Mrs. Jagoda raised their four children, gave private guitar and piano lessons, and performed traditional Yugoslav folk music with the Washington Balalaika Society and other groups.But she did not sing the Ladino songs her grandmother had taught her. Her mother, who had emigrated with her husband to the United States in 1948, was haunted by the wartime massacre of 42 family members, including her mother, Flory’s nona, and felt that the Ladino language had died when they did.Her stepfather’s death in 1978, five years after her mother’s, let Mrs. Jagoda reset her musical course.With her parents gone, she began writing down the songs she knew from her childhood; she also started to write new ones in the Sephardic tradition. One of them, “Ocho Kandelikas” (“Eight Candles”), a Hanukkah song, has been performed by the United States Army Band and covered by many artists, including Idina Menzel, the band Pink Martini and the Chopped Liver River Band.Mrs. Jagoda sang at synagogues, folk festivals, community centers and universities, sometimes in various combinations with her daughters, Betty and Lori Jagoda Lowell; her son, Elliot; and two of her grandchildren. In 1985, the family gave concerts at several cities in the former Yugoslavia.“In Novi Sad, we gave a concert in a synagogue with no windows and birds flying in,” Ms. Jagoda Murphy said in a phone interview.Mrs. Jagoda taught her Sephardic oeuvre to Susan Gaeta, who became the older woman’s apprentice in 2003 through a program run by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. They performed as a duo and as the Flory Jagoda Trio, with Howard Bass.“Flory embodied her culture,” Ms. Gaeta said by phone. “Singing Sephardic music and talking about her family was like oxygen to her.”In 2003, Mrs. Jagoda sang at Auschwitz at the unveiling of a plaque to honor Sephardic Jews murdered by the Nazis. She sang a Ladino song, “Arvoles Yoran por Luvias” (“Trees Cry for Rain”), which Sephardic inmates had sung there.The words, translated into English, include the lines “I turn and say, what will become of me,/I will die in a strange land.”In addition to her daughters, Mrs. Jagoda is survived by a son, Andy; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Her husband and son Elliot both died in 2014.For Mrs. Jagoda, her grandmother’s influence never waned.“It was her mission,” she said during a concert in 2013 at the Smithsonian Institution, “to carry and to teach her young ones this language of her heritage — and never forget it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Carmel Quinn, Irish Singer and Storyteller, Dies at 95

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCarmel Quinn, Irish Singer and Storyteller, Dies at 95A hit on the television variety-show circuit of the 1950s and ’60s, she also sang to packed crowds for many years at Carnegie Hall for St. Patrick’s DayMarch 14, 2021Updated 1:52 p.m. ETThe Irish-born singer Carmel Quinn gave an annual St. Patrick’s Day benefit concert at Carnegie Hall for a quarter-century.Credit…Carnegie Hall Susan W. Rose ArchivesCarmel Quinn, a blue-eyed, flame-haired Irish singer and storyteller who packed Carnegie Hall on St. Patrick’s Day for a quarter-century and regaled her audiences with tunes and tales from the Old Country, died on March 6 at her home in Leonia, N.J. She was 95. The cause was pneumonia, her family said.Ms. Quinn, who was born and raised in Dublin, came to the United States in 1954 and won an audition on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” the next year. Those auditions were famous for their rigor: Others who passed them included Pat Boone, Tony Bennett and Connie Francis; those who flunked included Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly.Ms. Quinn became a regular on another Godfrey television show, “Arthur Godfrey and His Friends,” for six years while rotating through other popular variety shows of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, including “The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom,” “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Mike Douglas Show” and many more. Much later, she showed up on “Live With Regis and Kathie Lee.”With the gift of gab and a voice that some compared to Judy Garland’s, she performed at the White House, first for John F. Kennedy and then for Lyndon B. Johnson.Ms. Quinn performed at the White House for President John F. Kennedy, right, and for President Lyndon B. Johnson.Credit…UPIThe standard Irish songs in her repertoire included “The Whistling Gypsy,” “Galway Bay” and “Isle of Innisfree.” In later years she filled out her act with a patter of anecdotes about life in general and amusing relatives in particular. One was her Aunt Julia.As Ms. Quinn told the story, Aunt Julia always wore her hat in the house so that if someone came to the door whom she didn’t want to see, she could say, “I was just on me way out.”Ms. Quinn disapproved of bachelors. “Make you sick, they would,” she would say, “out there sowing their wild oats and praying for a crop failure.”And her way of bringing people back down to earth if they got too big for their britches was to call out loudly: “Sorry to hear about the fire in your bathroom. Thank God it didn’t reach the house!”But holding pride of place for Ms. Quinn were her concerts at Carnegie Hall. They began in 1955, when she was approached by a group that wanted to raise money for a hospital in Ireland. Mr. Godfrey built an audience for her that first year, instructing his radio listeners, “Now, you get out there and go to Carmel’s concert.” But after that, she was draw enough on her own. She gave benefit performances each St. Patrick’s Day for more than two decades, and they all sold out.“The night of the concert, you couldn’t get in the place,” she told The New York Times in 1975 on the eve of the 20th anniversary of her first St. Patrick’s Day show. Hers was initially a solo act, but she later included groups like the Clancy Brothers and the Chieftains, their spirited performances turning Manhattan’s prestige concert stage into an old-fashioned Irish music hall.Writing after her St. Patrick’s Day show in 1969, Robert Sherman of The Times called her “a breezy hostess and a totally engaging singer.” Her music, he said, would “warm the cockles of any son, daughter or passing acquaintance of the auld sod.”Carmel Quinn was born on July 31, 1925, and grew up in Phibsborough, a now trendy neighborhood on the north side of Dublin. Her father, Michael, was a violinist and a bookie. Her mother, Elizabeth (McPartlin) Quinn, a homemaker, died when Carmel, the youngest of four siblings, was 7.Carmel sang with local bands and studied for a while at a teachers’ college, but she dropped out when she started winning singing engagements. Then she left for America.She married Bill Fuller, a colorful Irish music impresario, in 1955. As more Irish were coming to America, Mr. Fuller opened ballrooms in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, and she sang in many of those venues.The couple initially lived in the Bronx, but they would take Sunday strolls over the George Washington Bridge and soon found a small brick house in Leonia, just across the Hudson River. They separated in the early 1970s, and she lived in the same house for the rest of her life.Ms. Quinn is survived by two daughters, Jane and Terry Fuller, and a son, Sean Fuller; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Her son Michael died of a heart problem in 1988.Ms. Quinn, second from left, with, from left, the actor Niall Toibin, the cabaret performer Julie Wilson and William Warnock, Ireland’s ambassador to the United States, in 1970 at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway, where Mr. Toibin was appearing in Brendan Behan’s “Borstal Boy.”Credit…Solters-SabinsonHer love of being onstage took her to cabarets, clubs and Off Broadway. She starred in several musicals, on the road and in summer stock, including “The Sound of Music,” “Finian’s Rainbow” and “The Boy Friend.”She also presented revues of her own work at the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan: “Wait ’Til I Tell You” in 1997 and “That and a Cup of Tea” in 2001, in which, Neil Genzlinger of The Times said, she demonstrated “a Jack Benny-like gift for comic timing.”She continued to perform until she was 88. But it wasn’t all laughter and song. One of her final performances was in November 2013, after the death of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Ms. Quinn took the stage at the Irish Rep and recited his “Aye” and “Old Smoothing Iron,” evoking the working women she knew so well. She received standing ovations.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Leon Gast, Director of ‘When We Were Kings,’ Dies at 84

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLeon Gast, Director of ‘When We Were Kings,’ Dies at 84He spent 22 years making an Oscar-winning movie about the 1974 Ali-Foreman boxing match, considered one of the greatest sporting events of all time.Leon Gast at his home in Manhattan in 1997. His film about the heavyweight fight billed as “the Rumble in the Jungle” won the Academy Award that year for best documentary feature. Credit…Librado Romero/The New York TimesMarch 12, 2021Updated 7:38 p.m. ETLeon Gast, a filmmaker whose 22-year quest to make “When We Were Kings,” a documentary about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s epic 1974 boxing match, involved a Liberian shell company, the Hells Angels, a drug deal gone bad, the singer Wyclef Jean and ultimately an Academy Award, died on Monday at his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 84.His wife, Geri Spolan-Gast, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.Mr. Gast was a young filmmaker who had already directed one major documentary, about New York’s Latin music scene, when he learned in 1974 of a plan by the boxing promoter Don King to stage a combination music festival and boxing match in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo).A company in London had agreed to pay for the dozens of performers at the festival, including James Brown, Miriam Makeba and B.B. King, while Mobutu Sese Seko, the president of Zaire, put up $10 million to split between the boxers in the fight’s main event, Foreman and Ali.Mr. Gast, who had boxed in high school, lugged his projector to Mr. King’s offices in Rockefeller Center, where he lobbied for the job of making a film about the music festival, with clips of the fight interspersed. Mr. King wanted a Black director, but he liked Mr. Gast’s work, and he hired Mr. Gast after he agreed to hire Black crew members.Muhammad Ali sending George Foreman to the canvas during their historic 1974 championship fight. Mr. Gast bet his friend the writer Hunter S. Thompson that Ali, the underdog, would win. He won the bet. Credit…Red/Associated PressThe fight, billed as the “Rumble in the Jungle,” was to take place on Sept. 25, 1974, preceded by the three-day music festival. But on Sept. 17, Foreman cut his forehead while sparring; he needed 11 stitches, and the fight was pushed back six weeks.Many of the boxing fans and reporters who had traveled to Zaire left, but Mr. Gast decided to stick around. He had a sense of the drama unfolding: Ali was 32 years old, considered over the hill for a boxer and certainly no match for Foreman, 25, the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, whose 40-0 record included 37 knockouts.“The time may have come to say goodbye to Muhammad Ali,” one of his admirers, the sportscaster Howard Cosell, said on television, “because very honestly I do not think he can beat George Foreman.”But Ali was unfazed. While Foreman — who at the time was reserved to the point of surliness — refused to be interviewed, Ali opened up to Mr. Gast, who over the next several weeks recorded hours and hours of the former heavyweight champion exercising, sparring, meeting locals and indulging in his famed verbal virtuosity.“If you thought the world was surprised when Nixon resigned, wait until I kick Foreman’s behind,” Ali said at one point; another time, he said: “Only last week, I murdered a rock. Injured a stone. Hospitalized a brick. I’m so mean, I make medicine sick!”He even suggested when and how Mr. Gast’s crew should film him.“One day Muhammad told us: ‘In the morning when I run, I come around that corner with the sun and the river behind me,’” Mr. Gast told The New York Times in 1997. “‘Put your camera over there. It’ll be a great shot.’ He was right. It was a great shot.”Foreman was favored to win by 4-to-1 odds, but Mr. Gast had faith in his newfound friend. He bet the writer Hunter S. Thompson $100, at 3 to 1, that Ali would prevail.The fight finally took place on Oct. 30 — at 4 a.m., to accommodate audiences watching it in theaters in the United States — under a giant poster of Mr. Sese Seko. Ali had bragged for weeks about how he was going to “dance” around the ring to avoid Foreman’s powerful fists. But instead he leaned back against the ropes, absorbing blows until Foreman wore out, after which Ali delivered a knockout punch. Ali called it his “rope-a-dope” strategy, and it stunned the estimated one billion people watching around the world.Back in New York to assemble the film, Mr. Gast immediately ran into problems. Ticket sales from the music festival were supposed to have paid his production costs, but after the fight was delayed, Mr. Sese Seko had declared it free as a way to drum up attendance.Ali was the undisputed star of the Gast film, playing to the camera and showing off his verbal virtuosity. “I’m so mean,” he said, “I make medicine sick!”Credit…Anthology Film ArchivesMr. Gast couldn’t even get ahold of the 300,000 feet of footage he had shot. The London-based company that Mr. King said would bankroll the project turned out to be a cover for a shell company based in the Cayman Islands and owned by Stephen Tolbert, the Liberian minister of finance. Mr. Gast flew to Liberia to arrange for more money, but before they could make a deal, Mr. Tolbert died in a plane crash.Mr. Gast’s lawyer, David Sonenberg, sued in a British court, and after a year Mr. Gast had his film, plus hours and hours of audio, piled up in the bedrooms and hallways of his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.What he did not have was money, and so he took on a series of side projects. At one point the Hells Angels hired him to make a film that would counter their reputation as violent criminals — though they undercut their own case when several of them beat up Mr. Gast (without seriously injuring him) for refusing to give them editorial control. (The film, “Hells Angels Forever,” was widely panned.)Not all of Mr. Gast’s moneymaking efforts were film-related, or legal. One night in June 1979 he and at least four other men were waiting by an airport near Charleston, W.Va., for a plane carrying some 10 tons of marijuana, which they were smuggling from Colombia. But the aircraft crashed on landing, spilling its contents down a hillside. Mr. Gast was arrested, pleaded guilty and received a $10,000 fine and five years’ probation.In 1989, after years of struggling, Mr. Gast reconnected with Mr. Sonenberg, who had since become a successful music manager. Mr. Gast persuaded him to underwrite the rest of the production process, and even to let him use a room in his Manhattan townhouse as a studio.Mr. Gast was still intent on centering the film on the festival. But one day one of Mr. Sonenberg’s clients, the hip-hop star Wyclef Jean, was in the studio when Mr. Gast was editing a clip of Ali. Mr. Jean was enraptured, and asked to see more and more of the footage. Mr. Sonenberg and Mr. Gast decided to re-edit the film, this time focusing on the fighters, with the music festival as the background. They brought in the director Taylor Hackford, who helped edit the film and conducted interviews with Spike Lee, George Plimpton and Norman Mailer (the last two had covered the fight as reporters).Mr. Sonenberg suggested calling the film “When We Were Kings” as a nostalgic reference to the musical and sports royalty who gathered for the event. He even got Mr. Jean and his group, the Fugees, to provide music.In 1996, Mr. Gast and Mr. Sonenberg took it to the Sundance Film Festival, where they received a special jury citation and 17 distribution offers. Critics praised the film, which nearly swept the awards for documentary films that season — including, in early 1997, the Academy Award for best documentary feature.At the Oscar ceremony, Ali, who by then had developed Parkinson’s disease, rose from his seat to join Mr. Gast and Mr. Sonenberg in accepting the award. Foreman, his former nemesis, came up behind him. When Ali had trouble mounting the stage, Foreman took his arm and helped him up.Mr. Gast, right, in March 1997 after winning the Oscar for best documentary feature. With him was the executive producer, David Sonenberg, along with Ali and Foreman.Credit…Sam Mircovich/ReutersLeon Jacques Gast was born in Jersey City, N.J., on March 30, 1936. His father, Samuel Gast, worked in real estate; his mother, Madeleine (Baumann) Gast, was a homemaker.Leon played basketball at Seton Hall University and then transferred to Columbia, where he studied film and photography but left without a degree.He found a job at an advertising agency as a still photographer, and his work appeared in Vogue and Esquire. When his company opened a film division, he transferred to making commercials — his first was for Preparation H.Mr. Gast moved away from advertising in the late 1960s as he began to get work in the music industry, designing album covers and making short films. In 1972 he directed “Our Latin Thing,” a cinéma vérité profile of performers like Willie Colón, Jose Feliciano and Johnny Pacheco. Five years later he released “The Grateful Dead Movie,” a concert film co-directed with the band’s lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia.In 1991 Mr. Gast married Geri Spolan, who survives him, along with two sons from a previous marriage, Daniel and Clifford; a stepdaughter, Sara Marricco; and six grandchildren.After “When We Were Kings,” he made two more major documentaries: “Smash His Camera” (2010), about the celebrity photographer Ron Galella, and “Manny” (2015), about the boxer Manny Pacquiao, which Mr. Gast directed with Ryan Moore.Mr. Gast and his wife moved to Woodstock in 2005 and became involved in the Woodstock Film Festival. In 2018 he presented a cut of his latest project, a film about the history of the town.Despite his nearly 60 years in film, Mr. Gast’s career, and most likely his legacy, remains bound to the loquacious boxer he followed around Zaire in 1974 — a fact that he did not seem to regret.“When I started on it, my kids were in grade school,” he told Newsday in 1997. “I’m a grandfather now. I’m 60, and I’ve spent more than a third of my life working on this. I can’t even remember when I wasn’t thinking about it, when I wasn’t thinking about Ali.”Jack Begg contributed research.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Lou Ottens, Father of Countless Mixtapes, Is Dead at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLou Ottens, Father of Countless Mixtapes, Is Dead at 94He led the team at Philips that changed the audio world in 1963 by introducing a small, portable way to play and record: the cassette.Lou Ottens in 1988, 25 years after he led the team that introduced the cassette tape to the world.Credit…Philips Company ArchivesMarch 11, 2021, 6:58 p.m. ETIn these digital days, it may be hard to appreciate how radically Lou Ottens changed the audio world when, in 1963, he and his team at Philips, the Dutch electronics company, introduced the cassette tape.“As the story goes, Lou was home one night trying to listen to a reel-to-reel recording when the loose tape began to unravel from its reel,” Zack Taylor, who directed the 2017 film “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape,” said by email.Mr. Ottens was in charge of product development at the Philips plant in Hasselt, Belgium, at the time.“The next morning,” Mr. Taylor continued, “a frustrated Lou Ottens gathered the engineers and designers from the Philips audio division and insisted that they create something foolproof: The tape had to be enclosed, and the player had to fit in his jacket pocket.”The cassette was a way to play music in a portable fashion, something not easily done with vinyl, and to record it conveniently as well. Artists started using cassettes to record passing ideas. Bootleggers used them to record live concerts for the underground market. Young lovers used them to swap mixtapes of songs that expressed their feelings.Soon record labels began releasing entire albums on cassettes and automakers were installing cassette players on dashboards.Another portable technology, the bulkier 8-track cartridge, was introduced in the same period, but cassettes, smaller and recordable, quickly doomed those devices, and also cut into the vinyl market.The cassette was a way to play music in a portable fashion, and to record it conveniently as well. “It was a big surprise for the market,” Mr. Ottens said in 2013.Credit…Philips Company Archives“It was a big surprise for the market,” Mr. Ottens told Time magazine in 2013, the 50th anniversary of that wallet-size breakthrough. “It was so small in comparison with reel-to-reel recorders that it was at that moment a sensation.”Mr. Ottens died on Saturday in Duizel, in the Netherlands, Tommie Dijstelbloem, a spokesman for Philips, said. He was 94.In the 1970s, after spearheading the development of the cassette, he contributed to the development of the compact disc, a product Philips and Sony jointly unveiled in 1982. The new format soon pushed the cassette aside.“The best thing about the compact cassette story,” the newspaper Nederlands Dagblad wrote in 2011, “is that its inventor also caused its downfall.”Not quite. Cassettes remain popular with some aficionados, in a retro sort of way. Mr. Ottens, though, was not one of them.“Now it’s nostalgia, more or less,” he said in the documentary. “People prefer a worse quality of sound out of nostalgia.”Lodewijk Frederik Ottens was born in Bellingwolde, the Netherlands, on June 21, 1926. He graduated from what is now Delft University of Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering and began working at Philips in 1952.He became head of product development in Hasselt in 1957 and began overseeing the development of a portable reel-to-reel machine in 1960. Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, said that when he conceived the idea of a cassette tape, he carried a wooden block in his coat pocket that was the size and shape of what he envisioned.“His wooden block prototype was lost when Lou used it to prop up his jack while changing a flat tire,” she said by email. “However, we still have the very first cassette recorder he developed on display, a testimony to his foresight and innovation.”The company unveiled the cassette in 1963 at a product exhibition in Berlin. The old saying about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery was quickly proved.“Our cassette was extensively viewed and photographed by the Japanese,” Mr. Ottens told an interviewer in 2013. “A few years later, the first Japanese imitations came, with a different tape format, different dimensions, different playing time. Not shocking, but too many hit the market. Then it becomes a big mess.”Mr. Ottens in 2013. When he conceived of the idea of a cassette tape half a century earlier, he carried a wooden block in his coat pocket that was the size and shape of what he envisioned.Credit…Jerry Lampen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPhilips made its licensing available free, largely at Mr. Ottens’s urging, and its version of the cassette soon became the standard.“That’s the reason that it didn’t become obsolete too early,” Mr. Ottens said in the film, “and it’s taken 50 years to die.”Philips says 100 billion cassettes have been sold worldwide.After the cassette, Mr. Ottens worked on an unsuccessful videodisc project before shifting to the CD. And before that innovation was released, he had shifted his focus to Video 2000, a system intended to compete with VHS; it, too, did not catch on.He retired from Philips in 1986. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.The makers of “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape” took a romanticized view of the cassette and its importance to the countless people who made use of it in myriad ways, but Mr. Taylor said Mr. Ottens had a much more utilitarian view.“Lou was never comfortable taking credit for the cassette, or for the incalculable impact it had on the history of music,” Mr. Taylor said. “What I saw as a deeply personal medium, Lou saw as a pragmatic answer to the cumbersome nature of the reel-to-reel.”In the film, Mr. Ottens and three of the men who worked under him on the cassette project reminisce. Mr. Ottens still seems surprised by the impact of the little gizmo.“We expected it would be a success,” he says, “but not a revolution.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Television

      Roger Mudd, Anchorman Who Stumped a Kennedy, Is Dead at 93

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRoger Mudd, Anchorman Who Stumped a Kennedy, Is Dead at 93A staple of CBS, NBC and PBS, he was best known for his interview with Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 1979, when he asked a simple question: “Why do you want to be president?”Roger Mudd and Tom Brokaw, in the background, after they were named co-anchors of NBC’s “Nightly News.” The pairing, in 1982, was an attempt to reincarnate the Chet Huntley-David Brinkley chemistry of the 1960s. It failed after 17 months.Credit…Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesMarch 9, 2021, 5:09 p.m. ETRoger Mudd, the anchorman who delivered the news and narrated documentaries with an urbane edge for three decades on CBS, NBC and PBS and conducted a 1979 interview that undermined the presidential hopes of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, died on Tuesday at his home in McLean, Va. He was 93. The cause was kidney failure, his son Matthew said.To anyone who regarded anchors as mere celebrities who read the news, Mr. Mudd was an exception: an experienced reporter who covered Congress and politics and delivered award-winning reports in a smooth mid-Atlantic baritone with erudition, authority and touches of sardonic humor.He worked for CBS from 1961 to 1980 as a Washington correspondent and weekend anchor and was being groomed to succeed Walter Cronkite on the “CBS Evening News.” When the network named Dan Rather instead, a surprised and disappointed Mr. Mudd resigned.The CBS News Election Night team in 1974: from left, Mr. Mudd, Lesley Stahl, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Mike Wallace. Credit…CBS, via Getty ImagesHe then joined NBC as chief Washington correspondent and in 1982 became co-anchor with Tom Brokaw on the “Nightly News,” an attempt to reincarnate the Chet Huntley-David Brinkley chemistry of the 1960s. It failed after 17 months, and NBC made Mr. Brokaw the sole anchor. Mr. Mudd resumed political reporting and documentary work for several years before switching networks again, moving to PBS.At PBS he reported for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” from 1987 to 1992. He then taught at Princeton and at his alma mater, Washington and Lee University in Virginia, and hosted documentaries on the History Channel from 1995 until his retirement in 2005.Mr. Mudd is perhaps best remembered for the CBS interview with Senator Kennedy on Nov. 4, 1979, days before the senator began his campaign to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from the incumbent, Jimmy Carter. Mr. Kennedy, heir to the political legacies of his assassinated brothers, had a 2-to-1 lead in the polls when he faced Mr. Mudd and a prime-time national audience.“Why do you want to be president?” Mr. Mudd began.Mr. Kennedy hesitated, apparently caught off guard.“Well, I’m — were I to — to make the, the announcement and to run, the reasons that I would run is because I have a great belief in this country,” he stammered.Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts as he was being interviewed by Mr. Mudd on CBS in February 1980. Mr. Kennedy’s halting performance severely damaged his campaign to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from Jimmy Carter.Credit…CBS NewsIt got worse. He twitched and squirmed, conveying self-doubt and flawed preparation, and stumbled through questions for an hour. His campaign, burdened by many problems, including his conduct in the drowning death of a former campaign aide to Senator Robert F. Kennedy on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts in 1969, was wounded before it began and never recovered.Mr. Mudd, who won a Peabody Award for the interview, also narrated “The Selling of the Pentagon,” a 1971 documentary that exposed a $190 million public relations campaign by the Defense Department that included junkets for industrialists and television propaganda. Roger Harrison Mudd was born in Washington on Feb. 9, 1928, to John and Irma (Harrison) Mudd. His father was a mapmaker for the U.S. Geological Survey, his mother a nurse. An ancestor was Samuel A. Mudd, a doctor who went to prison for treating John Wilkes Booth for the broken leg he suffered jumping to the stage of Ford’s Theater after shooting Abraham Lincoln in 1865.After graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, Mr. Mudd joined the Army in 1945. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Washington and Lee in 1950 and a master’s degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1953. He began in journalism in 1953 as a reporter for The News Leader of Richmond, Va., and soon became news director of the newspaper’s radio station, WRNL.Mr. Mudd, left, and the NBC correspondent Marvin Kalb in October 1984 interviewing Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro of New York, the Democratic candidate for vice president at the time. Credit…Joel Landau/Associated PressMr. Mudd married Emma Jeanne Spears in 1957; she died in 2011. In addition to his son Matthew, he is survived by two other sons, Daniel and Jonathan; a daughter, Maria Ruth; 14 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.In 1956, Mr. Mudd became a reporter for the Washington radio and television station WTOP, and in 1961 he was hired by CBS to cover Congress. He went on to impress audiences and critics in 1964 with marathon coverage of a 60-day Senate filibuster that delayed civil rights legislation. That led to an assignment to co-anchor, with the veteran journalist Robert Trout, the network’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.Mr. Mudd was a natural on camera: tall and tanned, energetic but relaxed, with a long face that conveyed a rugged imperturbability. As his stature rose at CBS, he became the anchor on weekends and as a fill-in when Mr. Cronkite was on vacation or special assignment. He also covered Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, and was on the scene when the senator was assassinated in Los Angeles.Mr. Mudd won Emmys for covering the shooting of Gov. George Wallace of Alabama in 1972 and the resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew in 1973, and two more for CBS specials on the Watergate scandal. He was named CBS national affairs correspondent in 1977, and became the heir apparent as Mr. Cronkite’s 1981 retirement approached.Mr. Mudd in 2001 taping a segment for the History Channel, where he produced documentaries about America’s founders, biblical disasters and other subjects.Credit…Marty Lederhandler/Associated PressBut Mr. Rather, the White House and “60 Minutes” correspondent, had sought Mr. Cronkite’s job and threatened to jump to ABC if he did not get it. After CBS chose Mr. Rather, Mr. Mudd went to NBC, where he was expected to succeed John Chancellor as anchor. Instead, the network named Mr. Mudd and Mr. Brokaw co-anchors, one based in Washington and the other in New York, but that arrangement did not last.Mr. Mudd went on to be an anchor on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in 1984 and ’85 before his move to PBS as a political correspondent and essayist for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.” His documentaries on the History Channel included accounts of America’s founders, biblical disasters and the sinking of the Andrea Doria.Mr. Mudd’s well-received 2008 memoir, “The Place to Be: Washington, CBS and the Glory Days of Television News,” recalled an era of war, assassinations and scandals and news coverage by Eric Sevareid, Harry Reasoner, Marvin Kalb, Daniel Schorr, Ed Bradley and others who shared his spotlight.In 2010, Mr. Mudd donated $4 million to Washington and Lee University to establish the Roger Mudd Center for the Study of Professional Ethics and to endow a Roger Mudd professorship in ethics.Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Music

      Ralph Peterson Jr., Jazz Drummer and Bandleader, Dies at 58

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRalph Peterson Jr., Jazz Drummer and Bandleader, Dies at 58Probably the most prominent drummer of his generation to consistently front his own groups, he was also an insightful educator and mentor.The drummer Ralph Peterson Jr. at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2019. In his more than 30 years as a bandleader, he released roughly two dozen albums with an array of ensembles.Credit…Alan NahigianMarch 7, 2021, 5:34 p.m. ETRalph Peterson, a thunderously swinging drummer who began his career as Art Blakey’s last protégé and finished it as a mentor to a new generation of jazz talent, died on March 1 at his home in North Dartmouth, Mass. He was 58.His publicist, Lydia Liebman, said the cause was complications of cancer, which he had been fighting for six years.Mr. Peterson came to the fore in the 1980s as a member of the so-called Young Lions, a coterie of young improvisers devoted to the core ideals of bebop: swing rhythm, acoustic instrumentation and rigorous improvisational exchange within the constraints of a standard song form. Within that context, he brought a take-no-prisoners style and a bountiful, collaborative spirit.Mr. Peterson was probably the most prominent drummer among the Young Lions to consistently front his own groups, and over the course of more than 30 years as a bandleader he released roughly two dozen albums with an array of ensembles.One particularly successful vehicle was the Fo’tet, an unorthodox group consisting of clarinet, vibraphone, bass and drums. It seemed to prove the joyful flexibility of the straight-ahead jazz format, so long as you defined your own way of playing within it.In a 2011 interview with the pianist George Colligan, Mr. Peterson described his approach to tradition simply: “Take what you need and leave the rest.” When teaching, he said, he told students: “Don’t buy in lock, stock and barrel to any philosophy that is not based in your own experience. Because then you are not living your life.”Mr. Peterson joined the Art Blakey Big Band in his early 20s as the ensemble’s second drummer. He then became only the second person besides Blakey — and the longest-serving — to play in his main band, the Jazz Messengers, on Blakey’s own instrument. As Blakey grew ill, Mr. Peterson increasingly took over drum duties.Mr. Peterson led the band Messenger Legacy, composed of former members of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, at Le Poisson Rouge in New York in 2005. Credit…Lev Radin/Pacific Press, via LightRocket, via Getty ImagesFor decades the Messengers had been the premier finishing school for straight-ahead jazz talent, as Blakey brought in an endless stream of young musicians to fill its ranks. From the drum chair, Mr. Peterson came into contact with a Who’s Who of youthful improvisers, many of whom would hire him for their ensembles or play in his own.After Blakey died in 1990, Mr. Peterson became a guardian of his legacy. The Ralph Peterson Quintet’s 1994 album, “Art,” was devoted to the Jazz Messengers repertoire. He later founded the band Messenger Legacy, composed of former Blakey band members, and in later years he and a group of his students recorded “I Remember Bu,” a big-band tribute to Blakey (who had taken the name Buhaina when he converted to Islam in the 1940s).In the mid-’80s, as he began to move beyond Blakey’s shadow, Mr. Peterson played drums in Out of the Blue, a sextet of young musicians assembled by Blue Note Records. In 1988 he released his own debut album for the label, “V,” featuring his quintet.Praising that album in a feature for The New York Times, the critic Jon Pareles called it an “exception” to the trend of albums by Young Lions who seemed partly suffocated by their fealty to tradition. Mr. Peterson’s record, he wrote, “makes hard bop sound daring again.”Ralph Peterson Jr. was born on May 20, 1962, in Pleasantville, N.J. His father was Pleasantville’s first Black police chief, and then its first Black mayor. His mother, Shirley (Jones) Peterson, was a manager at an aviation research center.Ralph grew up surrounded by drummers: His grandfather had been one, as had four of his uncles. Ralph started drumming at 3, and never stopped.He is survived by his wife, Linea; two sisters, Michelle Armstead and Jennifer Armstead; a daughter, Sonora Slocum; and two stepdaughters, Saydee and Haylee McQuay. He is also survived by Jazz Robertson, a mentee he considered his “spiritual daughter.”Alongside drums, Ralph studied the trumpet, and he entered Rutgers University’s jazz studies program as a trumpet major. But he soon departed to join Blakey’s band, and he didn’t return to school for two decades. In the early 2000s, having overcome an addiction to drugs, he returned to Rutgers to complete his bachelor’s degree.By then he was already teaching at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he later became a full professor, gaining a reputation as an insightful and positive-minded educator. Toward the end of his career, fed by the energy of his pupils, Mr. Peterson assembled the GenNext Big Band, a group of Berklee students modeled after the original Art Blakey Big Band. The ensemble released two albums on Mr. Peterson’s Onyx Music label, “I Remember Bu” (2018) and “Listen Up!” (2019).In the classroom, he shared his deep knowledge of jazz history, the lessons that had come to him by way of elders like Blakey, and his own life struggles.“Congratulations! You guys have accomplished a lot by arriving here. You are the best in your communities, the best where you come from,” he was quoted as saying to a roomful of Black students, all newly arrived on campus, in a 2018 article for DownBeat. “My job is to fuel your hunger, create more questions in your mind. And my goal is for you to leave with a sense of empowerment.”By then Mr. Peterson was battling Stage 4 cancer, but he framed his own resilience as a resource his students could access.“What I serve is the music, not my ego,” he told the class. “I’ve had enough chances to be dead, but I’m grateful to be alive. And the focus and intensity and pace at which I’m now working and living is directly related to the spiritual wake-up call that tomorrow isn’t promised.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More