Deaths (Obituaries)

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      in Music

      Benny Golson, Saxophonist and Composer of Jazz Standards, Dies at 95

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      Benny Golson, a tenor saxophonist and composer who played with some of the biggest names in jazz and was a founder of one of the leading groups of the hard bop era, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.Jason Franklin, his agent for more than 25 years, confirmed the death.Mr. Golson was a rarity in jazz: a highly accomplished musician who was also sought after as a composer. Indeed, he later had a flourishing second career writing and arranging music for television shows.A number of his compositions are regarded as jazz standards, among them “I Remember Clifford” (written in memory of the trumpeter Clifford Brown, shortly after he died in a car accident in 1956), “Whisper Not,” “Blues March” and “Killer Joe.” Quincy Jones recorded a memorable version of “Killer Joe” in 1969, and Miles Davis recorded “Stablemates,” which Mr. Golson wrote after John Coltrane, a close friend, told him that Mr. Davis had been looking for new material.Mr. Golson wrote or co-wrote four of the six tracks on “Moanin’,” a celebrated 1958 album by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. All five of the tunes on the trumpeter Lee Morgan’s 1957 album “Lee Morgan, Vol. 3” were written by Mr. Golson.Asked whether he preferred composing or playing, Mr. Golson once replied: “It’s like having two wives. I’m a musical bigamist. I can’t decide, so I just go on with both of them.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Kathryn Crosby, Actress and Bing Crosby’s Widow, Dies at 90

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      She was a Texas-born starlet when she married the beloved crooner, but put aside her career at his urging.Kathryn Crosby, a Texas-born beauty queen and aspiring actress who put aside her movie career when she married Bing Crosby, the movie star and honey-voiced baritone, died on Friday at her home in Hillsborough, Calif. She was 90.Harlan Boll, a publicist speaking for her family, announced her death. The pair met cute on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles in 1953. Kathryn Grant, as she was then known, was a new contract player rushing to deliver a load of petticoats to the wardrobe department while on her way to a tennis game. Mr. Crosby, the laconic, blue-eyed heart throb, was already an American institution.“What’s your rush, Tex?” Mr. Crosby asked, standing in the door of his dressing room. She stopped short, and down went the petticoats and her tennis racket.They kept colliding, though less dramatically, in the days that followed — Ms. Crosby even tried out for a part in one of Mr. Crosby’s big hits, “White Christmas.” When she asked to interview the star for her column, “Texas Girl in Hollywood,” which was running in several Texas newspapers, he finagled the appointment into a dinner date at Chasen’s, the Hollywood canteen. On the drive home, he took her hand and sang “You’d Be So Easy to Love.” She was 19; he was 49.Kathryn Grant, as she was then known, with Mr. Crosby at the 27th Academy Awards in 1955.Bettmann/Getty ImagesTheir courtship was far from easy, though Mr. Crosby proposed that year. The star, beloved for his public image as a laid-back everyman, was diffident and mercurial. He disappeared for months at a time, set wedding dates and broke them — once because, as he joked, he’d left his toupee at home, and once because another romantic entanglement had threatened suicide. He was also involved with Grace Kelly, his co-star in “The Country Girl” and “High Society.” The couple finally married in a Las Vegas courthouse in 1957.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Billy Edd Wheeler, Songwriter Who Celebrated Rural Life, Dies at 91

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      His plain-spoken songs were recorded by Elvis Presley, Kenny Rogers and many others. The duo of Johnny Cash and June Carter made his “Jackson” a huge country hit.Billy Edd Wheeler, an Appalachian folk singer who wrote vividly about rural life and culture in songs like “Jackson,” a barn-burning duet that was a hit in 1967 for June Carter and Johnny Cash as well as for Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, died on Monday at his home in Swannanoa, N.C., east of Asheville. He was 91.His death was announced on social media by his daughter, Lucy Wheeler.Plain-spoken and colloquial, Mr. Wheeler’s songs have been recorded by some 200 artists, among them Neil Young, Hank Snow, Elvis Presley, and Florence & the Machine. “Jackson” — a series of spirited exchanges between a quarrelsome husband and wife — opens with one of the most evocative couplets in popular music: “We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout/We’ve been talkin’ about Jackson, ever since the fire went out.”From there the husband boasts about the carousing he plans to do in Jackson, as his wife scoffs at his hollow braggadocio. “Go on down to Jackson,” she goads him on, emboldened by the song’s neo-rockabilly backbeat. “Go ahead and wreck your health/Go play your hand, you big-talkin’ man, make a big fool of yourself.”Written with the producer and lyricist Jerry Leiber, with whom Mr. Wheeler had apprenticed as a songwriter at the Brill Building in New York, “Jackson” was a Top 10 country hit for Ms. Carter and Mr. Cash and a Top 20 pop hit for Ms. Sinatra and Mr. Hazlewood. The Carter-Cash version won a Grammy Award in 1968 for best country-and-western performance by a duo, trio or group.The 1967 album “Carryin’ On With Johnny Cash & June Carter” included Mr. Wheeler’s song “Jackson,” which would reach the country Top 10 as a single and win a Grammy.ColumbiaMr. Wheeler’s original pass at the song, though, was anything but auspicious. In fact, when Mr. Leiber first heard it, he advised Mr. Wheeler to jettison most of what he had written and to use the line “We got married in a fever” in the song’s opening and closing choruses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lucine Amara, 99, Dies; Familiar Soprano at the Met Saw Bias There

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      She sang with the Metropolitan Opera for decades, often on short notice, including after lodging a successful age discrimination complaint against the company.Lucine Amara, an American singer who continued a decades-long career at the Metropolitan Opera after she successfully brought the company up on age-discrimination charges in a widely publicized case, died on Sept. 6 at her home in Queens. She was 99. Her daughter, Evelyn La Quaif, a soprano and stage director, who had shared an apartment with her mother in recent weeks, said that the cause was respiratory illness and heart failure and that Ms. Amara also had dementia. She had lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for decades.A lyric soprano known for her clear, supple voice, Ms. Amara sang 748 performances with the Met between 1950 and 1991, an impressively long tenure.Her dozens of roles there included Mimì in Puccini’s “La Bohème,” Nedda in Leoncavallo’s “I Pagliacci,” the title part in Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,” and Donna Elvira in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Pamina in his “Magic Flute.”Appearing in a 1964 Met production of Gounod’s “Faust,” Ms. Amara was described by Theodore Strongin in The New York Times as “a first-rank Marguerite in all respects.”If Ms. Amara was not as well known to the general public as other singers in her cohort — among them Roberta Peters and Victoria de los Angeles — it was partly, her admirers say, because she was damned by her own competence and by her matter-of-fact approach to her craft.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Souther, Who Wrote Hits for the Eagles, Dies at 78

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      JD Souther, who crafted many of the biggest hits to come out of the Southern California country-rock scene of the 1970s, including for the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, and who later played a wizened music industry veteran — in other words, a version of himself — on the hit television show “Nashville,” died on Tuesday at his home in Sandia Park, N.M., in the hills east of Albuquerque. He was 78.His death was announced on his website. A cause was not provided.Beginning in the late 1960s, Mr. Souther was part of a coterie of musicians around Los Angeles who found themselves circling the same sort of peaceful, easy, country-inflected rock sound. They played at the same venues — among them the Troubadour, the famous West Hollywood nightclub — and lived and partied in the same canyons in the Hollywood Hills.Mr. Souther played with or wrote for most of them. Though he was brought up on jazz and classical music, he easily mastered the country-rock vernacular on songs like “Faithless Love” and “White Rhythm and Blues,” for Ms. Ronstadt; “The Heart of the Matter,” which he wrote with Don Henley; and “Her Town Too,” a collaboration with Mr. Taylor that they sang as a duet.He also played a central role in the formation of the Eagles, encouraging Ms. Ronstadt, his girlfriend at the time, to hire his friend Glenn Frey as part of her backup band. After Mr. Henley joined, he and Mr. Frey decided to form their own group, along with two other members of Ms. Ronstadt’s ensemble, Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner.Mr. Souther, third from left, onstage with the Eagles in San Diego in 1979. With him are, from left, Joe Vitale, Timothy B. Schmit, Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Joe Walsh and Don Felder.George Rose/Getty ImagesMr. Souther was almost the fifth Eagle: He joined the quartet for an afternoon tryout at the Troubadour, but he decided that the band was already perfect, and that he’d rather write for them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Valarie D’Elia, Travel Reporter on TV and Radio, Dies at 64

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      She steered vacationers and business travelers to choice destinations, talked about the best deals, and offered up savvy tips on how to avoid vexation.Valarie D’Elia, a travel reporter who visited 102 countries on all seven continents to advise her viewers and listeners on where to go, how to get there, what the best bargains were and what to pack, died on Sept. 10 in Manhattan. She was 64.The death, in a hospital, was caused by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the degenerative neurological disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, her husband, Ron Cucos, said.From 1998 to 2017, Ms. D’Elia appeared regularly in a segment called “Travel With Val” on the local cable TV station now known as Spectrum News NY1. She also hosted a syndicated radio program, “The Travel Show,” and wrote a blog, which included the trademark feature “D’Elia’s Deals.” (Her personal mantra was “Travel with VALue.”)Her viewers, listeners and readers might learn that ski resorts in the Canadian Rockies were opening in early November that year because of snow storms; that a hotel near London was offering complimentary honeymoon accommodations to couples who got married there; or that rare winter discounts were available at a resort in the Florida Keys timed to school vacations the first week of January in several Southern states.Her advice was coveted. (Her favorite was “Pack light, forget the blow-dryer — who wants to worry about all that stuff?”) Her wanderlust was celebrated. Her documentary “The Making of a Maestro: From Castelfranco to Carnegie Hall,” the story of the conductor Sir Antonio Pappano, won first place in the North American Travel Journalists Association’s competition for travel videos in 2018.From 1998 to 2017, Ms. D’Elia appeared regularly in a segment called “Travel With Val” on the cable channel now known as Spectrum News NY1.NY1We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      R. Peter Munves, Master Marketer of Classical Music, Dies at 97

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      As an executive at Columbia and RCA Records, he popularized the classics for mass audiences by applying the same techniques used to sell pop music.R. Peter Munves, a record company executive who revolutionized the marketing of classical music, died on Aug. 19 in Glen Cove, N.Y. He was 97.His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his son Ben.Mr. Munves carved out a moneymaking niche in what for much of its history has been a low-margin, struggling industry, selling classical music to mass audiences by applying the techniques of pop music marketing.In the 1960s, while at Columbia Records, he created a series called “Classical Greatest Hits” that packaged bits of Brahms, Mozart, Bach and other composers onto single LPs. In 1968 he signed the electronic musician Wendy Carlos to record “Switched-On Bach” — pieces by Bach on the Moog synthesizer.Both ideas were big hits, commercially if not with the critics. Time magazine reported in a 1971 profile of Mr. Munves that the “Greatest Hits” series “scored a solid bull’s-eye in the market and rang up $1,000,000” in revenues. The “Switched-On Bach” album, Time said, was Columbia’s “all-time best classical seller.”In 1968, Mr. Munves signed the electronic musician Wendy Carlos to record an album of Bach compositions on the Moog synthesizer. It was said to be Columbia’s best-selling classical album of all time.Columbia/CBSIn 1981 Mr. Munves produced an album that compiled 222 well-known themes from classical music. One critic called it a “marketing masterpiece.”Columbia/CBSMr. Munves went on to produce an album called “Themefinder” — a compilation of 222 well-known themes from classical music that the New York Times music critic Edward Rothstein called a “marketing masterpiece” upon its release in 1981, adding that Mr. Munves was “an inspired producer.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Herbie Flowers, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ Bassist, Dies at 86

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      A celebrated session musician who appeared on a host of classic rock albums, he made his most lasting mark with his contribution to Lou Reed’s most famous song.Herbie Flowers, a prolific British session musician who rode a handful of notes to rock immortality with his indelible bass line on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” — just one of the many landmark recordings on which he supported a constellation of rock stars — died on Sept. 5. He was 86.Family members announced his death on social media. The family did not say where he died or cite a cause.Mr. Flowers, a bassist who also occasionally played tuba, began his career as a session musician in the late 1960s. He carved out his sliver of rock glory by playing on more than 500 hit albums by the end of the 1970s, according to the BBC.The classic albums Mr. Flowers played on could have filled a dorm room shelf in the 1970s and ’80s. Among them were Elton John’s “Madman Across the Water” and Harry Nilsson’s “Nilsson Schmilsson,” both from 1971; Cat Stevens’s “Foreigner” (1973); and David Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” (1974).He joined forces with three-quarters of rock’s equivalent of the royal family, recording with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. He also recorded with Dusty Springfield, Serge Gainsbourg and David Essex, whom he joined on the sinewy 1973 hit “Rock On.”Despite his proximity to fame, Mr. Flowers described himself as little more than a hired hand.As a studio musician, he once told Bass Player magazine, “they play you the song or sling you a chord chart, and you come up with what you think are fancy bass lines.” You “get your job done as quickly as you can,” he added, “and as soon as they say ‘Thanks very much,’ get the hell out of there.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More