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      Norby Walters, 91, Dies; Music and Sports Agent Who Ran Afoul of the Law

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      He ran a highly successful booking agency, but his secret contacts with college athletes led to convictions (later reversed) for racketeering and fraud.Norby Walters, a booking agent for some of the country’s top disco, R&B, funk and hip-hop artists whose aggressive leap in the 1980s into signing college athletes to secret contracts before they turned pro led to legal problems, died on Dec. 10 in Burbank, Calif. He was 91.His son Gary confirmed the death, at an assisted living facility.Mr. Walters found his footing in show business through his ownership of restaurants, pizzerias, mambo joints and nightclubs, including the Norby Walters Supper Club on the East Side of Manhattan, near the Copacabana, which he opened in 1966.He walked away from the club business two years later after a customer at the supper club, shot two mobsters dead in front of about 50 people.“Everybody hit the floor,” Mr. Walters told The New York Times in 2016. “And this guy was very calm about it. He sat down at the bar, put the pistol down and waited to be taken.”Mr. Walters closed the club soon after.He switched to booking musical acts into nightclubs, lounges and hotels, which proved lucrative. Over the next two decades, the client list of Norby Walters Associates (later called General Talent International) included Gloria Gaynor, Dionne Warwick, Patti LaBelle, Parliament-Funkadelic, the Commodores, Luther Vandross, the Four Tops, Run-DMC, Kool & the Gang, Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy.In the early 1980s, Mr. Walters glimpsed a new opportunity in the top tier of college football players. With a partner, Lloyd Bloom, he established World Sports & Entertainment. From 1984 to 1987, the two men signed dozens of athletes to secret contracts that included inducements like cash, loans and cars in exchange for giving their agency exclusive rights to handle their future negotiations with N.F.L. teams, according to the 1988 federal indictment against them.Most of the inducements violated National Collegiate Athletic Association regulations and would have rendered the athletes ineligible to compete had their schools known about them. But Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom said their lawyers had assured them that the contracts were legal even if the players were still with their college teams.The indictment charged Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom with conspiring with the athletes to conceal the payments by having them agree to postdated contracts that appeared to have been signed after their last collegiate games.“The crime alleged that he conspired with students to steal their educations, which was preposterous, since the schools had little concern about whether they got an education,” Gary Walters said in a phone interview. He added, “Norby wasn’t doing anything different in the sports business than he did in the music business: giving fair compensation to players who had been denied it.”The government also charged that the contracts were backed by threats of violence, some involving the mobster Michael Franzese, a member of the Colombo crime family. When most of the athletes decided they did not want Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom to represent them but kept the cars and the money anyway, the indictment accused them of threatened to have their legs broken and threatened their families with physical harm.Gary Walters said his father denied having threatened anyone and also denied that Mr. Franzese had any involvement in his sports business.Mr. Walters and Mr. Bloom were convicted of mail fraud and racketeering in 1989. Mr. Walters was sentenced to five years in prison and Mr. Bloom to three, but neither served a day.An appeals court reversed the racketeering convictions in 1990, ruling that the trial judge had not instructed the jury that the two men’s actions had been guided by their lawyers’ advice that the signings were legal.In 1993, the mail fraud convictions were also overturned.“Walters is by all accounts a nasty and untrustworthy fellow,” Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote in the 1993 ruling, “but the prosecutor did not prove that his efforts to circumvent the N.C.A.A.’s rules amounted to mail fraud.”Mr. Bloom was shot to death at his home in Malibu, Calif., later that year.By then, Mr. Walters had retired from his music and sports businesses, which had been damaged by the federal investigation, and remade himself as the host of celebrity parties and poker games.Norbert Meyer was born on April 20, 1932, in Brooklyn. His father, Yosele Chezchonovitch, a Polish immigrant, served in the Army (where he changed his name to Joseph Meyer) during World War I and later became a diamond courier and the owner of a nightclub in Brooklyn and a sideshow attraction at Coney Island. His mother, Florence (Golub) Meyer, was a homemaker.“I traveled all over the country with my father’s freak shows,” Mr. Walters told The Daily News of New York in 1987. “It was all a scam. There were no freaks, the alligator boy was a poor fellow with a horrible skin condition, the girl with no body was done with mirrors, the turtle girl was a dwarf with a costume.”Norby studied business at Brooklyn College from 1950 to 1951 and served in the Army until 1953. He and his brother, Walter, took over their father’s club that year and renamed it Norby & Walter’s Bel Air.On opening night, when Norby greeted customers by saying, “Hello, I’m Norby,” some responded by asking, “Oh are you Norby Walters?” When the brothers stepped outside, they saw that the neon sign outside the club did not have the necessary ampersand. It said, “Norby Walters Bel Air Club.”“I’ve been Norby Walters ever since,” he told The Atlanta Constitution in 1987. “My brother hated me for it.” His brother, who became known as Walter B. Walters, died in 2004.Norby Walters carried the name — which he eventually changed legally — through his restaurant, club, music and sports careers, and into his final chapter.From 1990 to 2017, he organized an annual Oscar viewing party, which he called Night of 100 Stars, in hotel ballrooms in Beverly Hills. It drew stars like Jon Voight, Shirley Jones, Charles Bronson, Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau. He was also the host of a regular poker party at his condos in Southern California, where the regulars included Milton Berle, Bryan Cranston, Richard Lewis, Jason Alexander, James Woods, Charles Durning, Mimi Rogers and Alex Trebek.The final chapter of Mr. Walters’s life included a regular celebrity poker party. At one such party, the attendees included (standing, from left) his wife, Irene; his son Gary; the actors Dan Lauria, Lou Diamond Phillips and Bruce Davison; and Mr. Walters himself, as well as (seated) the actors Ed Asner, Mimi Rogers, Jason Alexander, James Woods and Kristanna Loken.via Walters Family“It was $2 a hand,” Robert Wuhl, the actor and comedian, said by phone. “So the most anybody lost was $250 and the most anybody won was $300 to $400. It was all about the kibitzing. Buddy Hackett would come to kibitz.”The Oscar party was not as hot a ticket as those hosted by Vanity Fair magazine or Elton John, but it was more accessible. In 2016, for $1,000 a seat or $25,000 for a V.I.P. table package, a civilian without show business credentials could be admitted and hang out with celebrities.In addition to his son Gary, Mr. Walters is survived by two other sons, Steven and Richard. His wife, Irene (Solowitz) Walters, died in 2022.Nearly 30 years after his legal problems caused him to retire, Mr. Walters said he understood his place in the Hollywood pantheon.“As I always say to my wife,” he told The Times in 2016, a few days before his penultimate Oscar party, “‘I used to be important.’” More

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      David Soul, a Star of the Hit Cop Show ‘Starsky & Hutch,’ Dies at 80

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      An actor and singer, he rose to fame in the 1970s as one half of the popular television crime-fighting duo. He also notched a No. 1 hit single in the U.S.David Soul, the doleful-eyed blond actor and singer who rose to fame portraying half of a cagey crime-fighting duo on the hit 1970s television show “Starsky & Hutch,” and who also scored a No. 1 hit single in 1977 with “Don’t Give Up on Us,” died on Thursday. He was 80.His death was confirmed in a statement by his wife, Helen Snell, who did not specify a cause or say where he died. He had been living in Britain since 1995 and became a British citizen in 2004.A Chicago-born son of a Lutheran minister, Mr. Soul had spent nearly a decade appearing on television shows like “Star Trek” and “I Dream of Jeannie”; he also had a regular role on the ABC western comedy series “Here Come the Brides,” before he won his career-defining role of Detective Ken Hutchinson, known as Hutch, also on ABC. The part would make him a regular presence in American living rooms, as well as a recognized heartthrob, from 1975 to 1979.As Hutch, Mr. Soul played the coolheaded Midwestern sidekick to Detective Dave Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser), a savvy Brooklynite given to wearing chunky cardigan sweaters. The two tooled around the fictional Southern California burgh of Bay City in a red Ford Gran Torino emblazoned with a giant Nike-esque swoosh running down each side as they cracked open cases with the help of their streetwise informant, Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas).Mr. Soul had first caught the eye of the show’s creators with an icy performance as a vigilante motorcycle cop in “Magnum Force” (1973), the first of several sequels to the hit 1971 Clint Eastwood film “Dirty Harry.” But he initially had misgivings about the Hutch character, seeing him as nothing more than “bland white-bread,” as he said in the 2004 television documentary “He’s Starsky, I’m Hutch.”“I didn’t like him,” he said. “I wanted to play Starsky.”Even as old-school tough guys with badges, the characters stood out on the 1970s cop-show landscape by sharing an onscreen emotional intimacy that was striking for its day.While being interviewed by the talk show host Merv Griffin, who pointed out that TV Guide had singled out “Starsky & Hutch” as television’s most violent show, Mr. Soul responded: “My opinion of the show is that it’s a love story. It’s a love story between two men who happen to be cops.”In an interview for The New York Post’s Page Six feature in 2021, Mr. Glaser said that he and Mr. Soul had kidded about the show’s homoerotic undertones “all the time.”With his place in the pop-culture firmament cemented, Mr. Soul was able to make good on his long-simmering ambitions to be a pop star.In 1977, the year after releasing his debut album, he shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with the lachrymose ballad “Don’t Give Up on Us.” Many years later, Owen Wilson, as Hutch, parodied the song in none-too-loving fashion in a 2004 feature-film comedy version of the show, which also starred Ben Stiller as Starsky and Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear.Mr. Soul, who often said that music was his priority over acting, released five albums in his career and notched four Top 10 hits in Britain in the 1970s, including “Don’t Give Up on Us,” which climbed to No. 1; “Silver Lady,” which also went to No. 1 although it reached only No. 52 in the United States; and “Going In With My Eyes Open” — No. 2 in Britain and No. 54 on the American chart.He became enough of a singing sensation that, in reviewing a 1977 concert of his at Radio City Music Hall, Robert Palmer of The New York Times described “camera-wielding teenage girls charging the stage, the flicker of hundreds of exploding flash cubes and a continual squealing.”Mr. Soul was born David Richard Solberg on Aug. 28, 1943, to Richard Solberg, a professor of political science and history as well as a theologian, and June (Nelson) Solberg, a teacher.In David’s youth, the family lived in Cold War-era Berlin as well as in South Dakota. He aspired to be a diplomat or a minister before turning his sights on a show business career. In his late teens, he learned that his girlfriend, Mim, was pregnant; under parental pressure, they married.Later, when he was 22, he found his wife another man, a friend of his, and left her and their young son, Christopher, to chase his dreams of stardom in New York.Once there, he whittled his surname down to Soul and, looking for a gimmick to boost his singing career, bought a $1 ski mask and rebranded himself as a mystery-shrouded pop crooner who never showed his face. After appearances on Merv Griffin’s show, he secured a deal with MGM Records and released a single, “The Covered Man,” in 1966.Once he tried to make it without the mask, however, his career faltered. Broke, Mr. Soul started selling himself sexually. “I was green,” he said in the documentary. “I was a kind of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’” a reference to the Oscar-winning 1969 film starring Jon Voight as a Texas dreamer turned Times Square hustler.Discouraged by the fizzling of his music career, Mr. Soul shifted to acting, breaking into Hollywood with an appearance on “Flipper,” the series centered on a pet dolphin.Once he made it big with “Starsky & Hutch,” he said, he spiraled into alcoholism before rediscovering religion in the 1980s. He met Ms. Snell, a public relations executive, in 2002, and they married in 2010.It was his fifth marriage. He had five sons and a daughter. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.After leaving the United States, Mr. Soul appeared in theater productions in London’s West End. In the mid-2000s, he landed the lead role of the outrage-courting talk show host in “Jerry Springer: The Opera.”Although he missed out on a financial windfall by selling his stake in “Starsky & Hutch” years ago for $100,000, according to a 2019 interview with The Sunday Times of London, he expressed few regrets.“I’ve had it all,” he said. “I’ve been a No 1 [star] in the world for a while — not now. I’ve had No 1 records around the world — not now. I have six wonderful children. I’m married to a wonderful woman. I’m happy. I’ve explored, I’ve seen, I’ve done.” More

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      in Music

      Richard Gaddes, Opera Impresario Who Spotted Young Talent, Dies at 81

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      As leader of opera companies in Santa Fe and St. Louis, he welcomed new works as well as new artists.Richard Gaddes, a British-born opera impresario who nurtured young talent as director of companies in Santa Fe, N.M., and St Louis, died on Dec. 12 in Manhattan. He was 81.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Santa Fe Opera, where he served as general director for eight years, and by the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, of which he was a founder. The executor of his estate, Maria Schlafly, said he died after a brief illness.Leading the two companies over several decades, Mr. Gaddes (pronounced GAD-iss) helped spur the careers of younger stars like Thomas Hampson, Christine Brewer and Frank Lopardo, and brought prominent artists well known in Europe, like the soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and the conductor Edo de Waart, to audiences in the United States.His generous, open-minded embrace of an art form he saw as encompassing all others spurred his attempts to open it up — to new artists, new audiences and new works. In Santa Fe, he offered discounted tickets to New Mexico residents and staged a production of “The Beggar’s Opera” at the city’s El Museo Cultural using mostly local performers.“I don’t think I would be doing what I’m doing if it hadn’t been his leap of faith,” said Ms. Brewer, who had been a school music teacher before Mr. Gaddes heard her sing in a competition in St. Louis and decided to take a chance on her. She didn’t win the competition, but Mr. Gaddes sent her a check anyway.“Richard just said, ‘I heard it in your voice.’ He was super supportive,” Ms. Brewer said in a phone interview.Invited to create an opera company in St. Louis at the end of the 1970s, Mr. Gaddes had an idea at odds with local grand-opera expectations: to use the new company to engage young American singers at the beginning of their careers. His idea turned out to be fruitful.From left, Alan Kays, Stephen Dickson and Joseph McKee in a 1979 production of “Three Pintos” at the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, where Mr. Gaddes was general director.Opera Theater of Saint Louis“I recommended to them that rather than doing extravaganzas with elephants and camels and mob scenes in large spaces, what they should do is have an ensemble company presenting the cream of the crop of young American singers,” Mr. Gaddes said in an interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, which honored him in 2008.The conductor Leonard Slatkin wrote in an email that the St. Louis company “became a destination point for those starting careers.” He added that Mr. Gaddes “had an encyclopedic knowledge of the repertoire and knew what could and could not be done.”Mr. Gaddes pursued a similarly democratizing approach toward expanding the audience in Santa Fe. He had already had a long career there before becoming director in 2000, a post he held until 2008.“I felt there was a slight attitude of our being elitist,” he said, noting that the company, located seven miles outside the city, “didn’t have much to do with the locals.”His initiatives, including the reduced-price ticket scheme, transformed the audience, which went from being 38 percent New Mexican to over 50 percent.“What’s marvelous is, Richard has really taken the reins in a new era in which the piece of contemporary opera that everyone feels we are obliged to do does not have to be an act of sufferance,” the director Peter Sellars said in an interview after Mr. Gaddes was honored by the N.E.A. “It’s not like having to go in for invasive surgery. It is in fact, a pleasure.”Richard Gaddes was born on May 23, 1942, in Wallsend, an old coal mining and shipbuilding town near Newcastle in the north of England. His father, Thomas, worked in the local shipyards; his mother, Emily (Rickard) Gaddes, was a homemaker.He showed an early aptitude for music — his parents both sang in local choirs — and his mother, defying his father’s wishes, paid for his train ticket to London to audition at Trinity College of Music (now the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance), where he was immediately accepted. He graduated in 1964.To earn money, he turned pages at Wigmore Hall, then London’s premiere chamber music venue; started a series of lunchtime concerts at the hall, which became immensely popular; and went to work for an artist management company.Mr. Gaddes credited his days at Wigmore Hall with stirring his interest in helping young singers. “I turned pages for many great accompanists, including Gerald Moore,” he said in the 2008 interview. “I sat at the piano during the cycles of singers such as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau, los Ángeles, Hans Hotter. An amazing, amazing exposure to music that you couldn’t buy.”Spotted by the conductor John Crosby, the founder of the Santa Fe Opera, on a trip to London, he was eventually recruited to become the company’s artistic administrator in 1969, at age 25.He became founding general director of the Opera Theater of Saint Louis in 1976, and under his stewardship it became the first American opera company to receive an invitation to the Edinburgh International Festival. He returned to the Santa Fe company in 1994 and became its second general director in 2000.Mr. Gaddes is survived by his brother Harry. Another brother, Simon, died in 2011. More

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      in Theater

      Vinie Burrows, Acclaimed Actress Who Became an Activist, Dies at 99

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      She got her start on Broadway at 15. But after finding a dearth of roles for Black women, she ultimately turned to one-woman shows that addressed racism and sexism.Vinie Burrows, a Harlem-born stage actress who made her mark on Broadway in the 1950s, but who grew frustrated by how few choice roles were available for Black women and turned her focus to one-woman shows exploring the legacies of racism and sexism, died on Dec. 25 in Queens. She was 99.Her death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by her son, Gregory Harrison.Ms. Burrows made the first Broadway appearance of her seven-decade career in 1950 alongside Helen Hayes and Ossie Davis in “The Wisteria Trees,” a reimagining of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” by the writer and director Joshua Logan that shifted the drama from an aristocratic Russian estate to a 19th-century Louisiana plantation.Ms. Burrows in a scene from “The Wisteria Trees” (1950), in which she made her Broadway debut, with Ossie Davis, who is sitting beside her, and Maurice Edwards.Martin Beck Theater, via Performing Arts Legacy ProjectHer Broadway career continued to blossom into the mid-1950s. Among the high-profile productions in which she appeared was a 1951 revival of “The Green Pastures,” Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1930 retelling of Old Testament stories from an African American perspective. In the early 1960s, she appeared with Moses Gunn and Louis Gossett Jr. in a New York production of “The Blacks,” a searing and surrealistic examination of racial stereotypes and Black identity by the subversive white French author and playwright Jean Genet.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?  More

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      in Theater

      Glynis Johns, a Tony Winner and Actress in ‘Mary Poppins,’ Dies at 100

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      In a trans-Atlantic career that endured for more than 60 years, she was also known for her role in the hit 1965 Disney movie “Mary Poppins.”Glynis Johns, the British actress who in a trans-Atlantic career that endured for more than 60 years won a Tony Award for her role in “A Little Night Music,” giving husky, emotion-rich voice to the show’s most memorable number, “Send In the Clowns,” and played an exuberant Edwardian suffragist in the Disney movie classic “Mary Poppins,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 100.The death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her manager, Mitch Clem.Ms. Johns was 49 and on the brink of her fourth divorce when the Stephen Sondheim musical “A Little Night Music” opened at the Shubert Theater in February 1973. The New York Times described her character, Desirée Armfeldt, as “a slightly world‐weary and extremely lovewise actress in turn‐of‐the‐century Sweden.”The critics adored her. To Clive Barnes of The Times, “the misty-voiced and glistening-eyed Glynis Johns was all tremulous understanding.”To Walter Kerr, also writing in The Times, she was “that cousin of bullfrogs and consort of weary gods”; she was “discreet, dangerous … and gratifyingly funny.”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?  More

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      in Television

      Donald Wildmon, Early Crusader in Conservative Culture Wars, Dies at 85

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      He founded the American Family Association, which became a juggernaut in the Christian right’s campaign against sex and gay themes in art, television and pop culture.Donald E. Wildmon, a conservative activist whose alarm over indecency on television spawned a national organization, the American Family Association, a once powerful cog of the Christian right, and who led boycotts over sexuality and gay themes in some of America’s most popular TV shows and in the arts, died in Tupelo, Miss., where he lived, on Dec 28. He was 85.The cause was Lewy body dementia, according to a statement posted by the American Family Association.Mr. Wildmon’s crusades beginning in the 1970s against boundary-pushing trends in popular culture and the arts — including high-profile attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts — were an early thunderclap of the culture wars that have moved from the fringe of the Republican Party to its mainstream.A former pastor in the United Methodist Church, Mr. Wildmon became a lightning rod for liberals, who attacked him for bigotry and stifling free speech. In 1981, the president of NBC, Fred Silverman, a champion of socially conscious television, said that Mr. Wildmon’s threats to boycott advertisers were “a sneak attack on the foundation of democracy.”“A boycott,” Mr. Wildmon responded in an interview with The New York Times that year, “is as legal and as American as apple pie.”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?  More

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      in Movies

      Ana Ofelia Murguía, Mexican Actress and Voice in Coco,’ Dies, 90

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      Her 60-year career in film, television and theater “marked an entire era” and made her one of Mexico’s most acclaimed actresses.Ana Ofelia Murguía, one of Mexico’s most acclaimed actresses, whose voice acting as Mama Coco in the animated movie “Coco” brought her international recognition, died on Sunday. She was 90.Her death was confirmed by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and National Theater Company, which did not specify the cause of death.The National Theater Company described Murguía on social media as “one of Mexico’s greatest actresses.” In a statement, Lucina Jiménez López, the director of the National Institute of Fine Arts, described her career as one that “marked an entire era.” In the 2017 film “Coco,” made by Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios, Murguía plays the key role of Mama Coco, the great-grandmother of a boy, the protagonist Miguel, who finds himself in the land of the dead on a journey to uncover his family’s history. At the emotional climax of the film, Miguel and Mama Coco sing the song “Remember Me” together.The movie, which is built around the Mexican holiday of the Day of the Dead, was celebrated for its portrayal of Mexican culture and its handling of weighty subjects like death in a children’s movie. It won best animated featured and best original song, for “Remember Me,” at the 2018 Oscars.“Coco” introduced Murguía to a global audience, but she was well-known in her home country of Mexico long before.Ana Ofelia Murguía was born on Dec. 8, 1933, in Mexico City. She studied acting at Mexico’s National School of Theater Arts and made her debut in 1954 in the play “Trial By Fire.” Her first screen role was in the 1964 film “Transit.”She would go on to appear in more than 70 plays and 90 films, working with some of Mexico’s best filmmakers. Hailed for her versatility, she often played the role of the villain or antagonist, according to a statement from the Institute of Fine Arts and National Theater Company.At Mexico’s prestigious Ariel awards, Murguía won best supporting actress for her performances in “Cadena Perpetua,” in 1979; “Los Motivos de Luz,” in 1986; and “La Reina de la Noche” (The Queen of the Night), in 1996. She was nominated for best actress five times but never won. In 2011, she was recognized with a Golden Ariel special lifetime achievement award.In April 2023, she was awarded the Ingmar Bergman Medal from the National Autonomous University of Mexico for leaving an “indelible mark” on Mexican film and theater. More

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      in Music

      Les McCann, a Jazz Pianist and Singer, Dies at 88

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      He released more than 50 albums but had his greatest commercial success with “Compared to What,” a recording that came together at the last minute in 1969.Les McCann, a jazz pianist and vocalist who was an early progenitor of the bluesy, crowd-pleasing style that came to be known as soul jazz, and who, although he released more than 50 albums, was best known for a happenstance hit from 1969, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 88.His death, at a hospital where he had been admitted with pneumonia, was confirmed on Monday by Alan Abrahams, his longtime manager and a producer of several of his albums. Mr. McCann had lived for the past four years at a skilled nursing facility in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles.Mr. McCann’s earthy, uplifting approach to music was a product of his upbringing in a churchgoing family. As he came to emphasize his singing more and play electric keyboards, his albums, released from 1960 to 2018, influenced funk and R&B artists and became a rich vein for hip-hop artists to mine.His greatest commercial success, though, came purely by chance, in June 1969 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.Already a recording veteran by then, with albums on Pacific Jazz, Limelight and, most recently, Atlantic, Mr. McCann was appearing at the festival for the first time. After he and the tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris, also an Atlantic artist, played separate sets, they gave an unscheduled performance together, with Mr. Harris as well as the expatriate trumpeter Benny Bailey joining Mr. McCann’s trio.Neither had played with Mr. McCann before, and there was no time for rehearsal. But the performance was to be recorded and filmed for broadcast.Despite the pressure, or perhaps because of it, as Mr. McCann recalled in the liner notes for the 1996 CD reissue of the concert album, which was released in 1969 as “Swiss Movement,” “Just before we went onstage, and for the first time in my life, I smoked some hash.”When he got to the bandstand, he wrote, “I didn’t know where the hell I was. I was totally disoriented. The other guys said, ‘OK, play, man!’ Somehow I got myself together, and after that, everything just took off.”The highlight of the concert was Eugene McDaniels’s protest song “Compared to What.” Stretching past eight minutes and featuring Mr. McCann’s churchy vocals, “Compared to What” would be released as a single and peak at No. 35 on the Billboard R&B chart. “Swiss Movement” was nominated for a Grammy Award and went on to sell a half-million copies.Mr. McCann and Mr. Harris reconvened in 1971 for the Atlantic studio album “Second Movement.” They also returned to Montreux for the 1988 festival, where they performed an obligatory reprise of “Compared to What.”Leslie Coleman McCann was born on Sept. 23, 1935, in Lexington, Ky., to James and Anna McCann. His father was a water maintenance engineer.His family was a musical one; he, his four younger brothers and his sister all sang in the Shiloh Baptist Church choir. Mr. McCann began playing piano at age 3 and a few years later had a music teacher, who charged 35 cents a lesson. (Those lessons did not last long: She died only six weeks after he began studying with her.) While attending Dunbar High School in Lexington, he played drums and sousaphone in the marching band.He left Kentucky at 17 when he enlisted in the Navy and was posted to the San Francisco area.Les McCann performing at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1974. He had been performing in clubs in Los Angeles when he was first offered a record contract.Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archive, via Getty ImagesDuring his time in the Navy, he sang on “The Ed Sullivan Show” after winning a talent contest. On his nights off, he would spend time at the Black Hawk, a San Francisco jazz nightclub.After leaving the Navy, Mr. McCann moved to Los Angeles, where he studied music and journalism at Los Angeles City College and hosted a Monday night jam session at the Hillcrest Club. It was during that time that he first connected with Mr. McDaniels.In a 2017 interview for the magazine Oxford American, Mr. McCann was asked about Mr. McDaniels’s composition “Compared to What.” “When I heard him,” he said, “I hired him in my band — one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. And I found out he was also a writer. We stayed in touch for years after that, and he would always send me songs. I can’t tell you how many songs he sent me, but that one stuck with me.”Mr. McCann was performing in Los Angeles clubs when a representative of Pacific Jazz Records heard him and asked if he had a record contract. When told no, the representative pulled one from his pocket and offered it to him.Mr. McCann recorded more than a dozen albums for the label from 1960 to 1964, usually leading a trio under the businesslike moniker Les McCann Ltd., but sometimes adding guest horns or orchestral accompaniment and sometimes collaborating with the guitarist Joe Pass. He also took part in Pacific Jazz sessions led by the saxophonist Teddy Edwards, the Jazz Crusaders and others. Les McCann Ltd. backed the singer Lou Rawls on his debut album, “Stormy Monday,” released by Capitol in 1962.Mr. McCann then moved to Limelight, a subsidiary of Mercury Records run by Quincy Jones, for which he made six albums from 1964 to 1966. He signed with Atlantic in 1968; on his first album for the label, “Much Les,” he was accompanied by a string section.He would make 11 albums for Atlantic. On two of them, “Invitation to Openness” (1971) and “Layers” (1972), he played a host of keyboards and synthesizers, an avenue he had been inspired to explore after hearing the keyboardist Joe Zawinul’s work with Miles Davis. Those albums have been cited as seminal in popularizing electric keyboards.Later in his Atlantic years, Mr. McCann was featured more as a singer in a slicker, more pop-oriented context. This continued through the 1970s and ’80s on albums for the Impulse!, A&M and Jam labels. But he also remained committed to the piano. In 1989, when he was a guest on the NPR show “Piano Jazz,“ hosted by his fellow pianist Marian McPartland, it was as both a singer and a player. The two closed the broadcast with a duet on “Compared to What.”Mr. McCann had returned to emphasizing his piano playing by 1994, when he released “On the Soul Side,” the first of three albums for the MusicMasters label, which reunited him with Eddie Harris and Lou Rawls. But a stroke later that year forced him to once again focus on singing, which he did through the end of the decade.He later recovered fully and resumed recording. He released albums on a German label in 2002 and on a Japanese label two years later. His last recording was the holiday-themed “A Time Les Christmas,” which he released himself in 2018.In December, Resonance Records released the archival album “Les McCann — Never a Dull Moment! Live From Coast to Coast (1966-1967),” comprising concert recordings from Seattle and New York.Information about his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. McCann’s music has been sampled by nearly 300 hip-hop artists, including Eric B. & Rakim, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Nas, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, the Notorious B.I.G. and Sean Combs.Mr. McCann performing at the 40th Montreux Jazz Festival in 2006. He also painted and was a photographer.Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto AgencyIn 1975, Mr. McCann became the first artist in residence at Harvard University’s Learning From Performers program. He was also a devoted painter and photographer of jazz culture and Black history, and his images have been included with some of his albums. His work was collected in 2015 in the book “Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980.”In an interview for the preface to that book, Mr. McCann was asked how he had achieved intimacy with his photographic subjects. He responded: “I trust my intuition, you see,” adding, “I’m better off when I just do what I do on the piano: play.”Rebecca Carballo More