Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Kaija Saariaho, Pathbreaking Composer, Is Dead at 70

      by

      She brought new colors to modernist music, sometimes using electronics, and became the first female living composer to have two operas staged by the Met.Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer who was brought up in the world of male-dominated high modernism but who broke away to forge an identity of her own, becoming the first woman to have more than one work of hers staged by the Metropolitan Opera, died on Friday at her home in Paris. She was 70.She had been diagnosed with brain cancer in 2021, said her publisher, Chester Music, which confirmed the death.Ms. Saariaho brought new and often mysterious colors to classical music.In Paris, where she had settled permanently, she experimented with tape and live electronics, which she applied to nearly every form in classical music: works for solo instrument and small ensemble, and for symphony orchestra and opera. Over the years she rose to the top of her field, a slow-changing industry that only in recent years has made steps to correct the repertoire’s gender imbalances.Her first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 2000 and came to the Met in 2016, won the Grawemeyer Award for music composition. Her most recent entry into that genre, “Innocence,” debuted at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France in 2021 and will travel to the Met in the 2025-26 season.When the Met joined the work’s list of commissioners, Ms. Saariaho in turn joined a select group of living composers to have a second opera mounted by that house — and the only woman to gain that distinction.Kaija Saariaho was born on Oct. 14, 1952, in Helsinki. She studied at the storied Sibelius Academy there, and was a pioneering impresario of contemporary music, forming the group Open Ears with fellow young artists. She left to continue her education in Freiburg, Germany, with summer courses taken in the modernist hotbed of Darmstadt. She moved to Paris in 1982 to finish her studies at IRCAM, the institute founded by Pierre Boulez.A complete obituary will appear soon. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Juan Carlos Formell, Buoyant Heir of Cuban Musical Legacy, Dies at 59

      by

      The son of Juan Formell, a giant of Cuban music, he found his own voice as a singer-songwriter. He died during a performance in New York.Juan Carlos Formell, an acclaimed singer-songwriter who settled in New York after defecting from Cuba and eventually took over as bassist for his famous father, Juan Formell, in Los Van Van, one of the most influential bands of post-Revolutionary Cuba, died on Saturday during a performance in New York City. He was 59.His death, from a heart attack he suffered onstage at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts in the Bronx, was confirmed by his romantic and musical partner, Danae Blanco. Mr. Formell, she said, had hypertension and arteriosclerosis.Since fleeing Cuba for New York City in 1993, Mr. Formell had charted his own musical course, releasing five solo albums and earning a Grammy nomination in 2000 for best traditional tropical Latin performance for his debut album, “Songs from a Little Blue House.”When his father died in 2014, Mr. Formell agreed to carry on his legacy as the bassist for Los Van Van, the Afro-Cuban dance band co-founded by his father. The band’s current lineup also includes his brother Samuel on drums and his sister Vanessa Formell Medina on vocals.The band was just a few numbers into an energetic set at the Lehman Center when Mr. Formell wandered away from his upright bass, doubled over as if to catch his breath, then lumbered toward the rear of the stage. As the band played on, Abdel Rasalps Sotolongo, the Van Van singer known as Lele, and Javier León Peña, a sound engineer, were helping him offstage when he collapsed near the curtain.After a brief announcement that Mr. Formell was having a health problem, the band took a break of more than a half hour, then returned to finish the set, playing for nearly an hour in an apparent tribute to Mr. Formell, a friend, the musician Ned Sublette, who was present, said in a phone interview.Mr. Formell’s debut album, “Songs from a Little Blue House,” was nominated for a Grammy in 2000 for best traditional tropical Latin performance.Mr. Formell was a fourth-generation member of one of Cuba’s most famous musical families. His great-grandfather, Juan Francisco, was a popular bandleader. His grandfather, Francisco Formell, was a conductor of the Havana Philharmonic and the arranger for the Lecuona Cuban Boys, a popular big band starting in the 1930s.His father, Juan Formell, along with fellow giants of Cuban music, César Pedroso, known as Pupy, and José Luis Quintana, known as Changuito, founded Los Van Van in 1969, fusing traditional Afro-Cuban genres like son cubano with elements of rock, soul and disco.With the blessing of the Cuban government, the band toured the world for decades, developing a global following. It won a Grammy Award in 2000 for best salsa performance for their album “Llego…Van Van/Van Van is Here.”)Despite his family name, Mr. Formell’s path to musical success was not easy.Juan Carlos Formell was born in Havana on Feb. 18, 1964, the eldest of three children of Juan Formell and the cabaret singer Natalia Alfonso.When he was three weeks old, his parents sent him to live on the outskirts of Havana with his paternal grandparents. His grandfather, the conductor, had been ostracized by the Castro government for being part of the old guard. Mr. Formell told The Los Angeles Times in 2000 that he had been teased by other children for having holes in his shoes.Even so, he set his course toward music, studying at the Alejandro García Caturla and Amadeo Roldán conservatories in Havana, and later at Cuba’s National Art School.Influenced by Afrocubanismo, the Cuban artistic movement focused on Black identity, as well as the negrista movement in poetry, particularly the work of Nicolás Guillén, Mr. Formell was already composing by his teens and studying bass with Andres Escalona of the Havana Symphony Orchestra. He went on to play bass with the jazz pianist Emiliano Salvador.He was also a talented guitarist and hoped to carve out a career as a singer-songwriter, but felt unable to express himself freely under the restrictions of the government-controlled Cuban music industry, his former wife, Dita Sullivan, said in a phone interview.“While still in my 20s, at a time when most musicians are full of hope,” he once said, “I was resigned to a future of marginalization.”In 1993, while on tour with the dance band Rumbavana in Mexico, he defected, crossing the Rio Grande near Laredo, Texas, and eventually settling in New York City. The transition was not easy.Los Van Van performing in New York in 2010. Mr. Formell joined the band in 2014, after his father, the band’s bassist and co-founder, died.Brian Harkin for The New York Times“When you leave Cuba, you don’t exist,” Mr. Formell said in a 2005 interview with The Chicago Sun-Times. “You come here, you’re invisible. You come here and no one cares. If you want to defect, you’d better have a support system.”Even so, he built a career performing solo and with various ensembles at New York jazz clubs like the Blue Note and Birdland before releasing his Grammy-nominated debut. Mr. Formell followed with “Las Calles del Paraíso” (“The Streets of Paradise”) in 2002 and “Cemeteries of Desire,” a 2005 rumination on the Latin musical flavorings of New Orleans, along with “Son Radical” (2006) and “Johnny’s Dream Club” (2008), which a Village Voice review said wove “an unforgettable spell.”His music, rooted in filin, a romantic, jazz-inflected genre of Cuban popular music, as well as son cubano, a traditional style mixing Spanish and African influences, celebrated the natural beauty of his homeland as well as its complicated history, including of slavery and revolution.“Although my songs don’t specifically talk about politics,” he said in a 1996 interview, “they reflect the reality of Cuba from my perspective and not from the perspective of the system.”In addition to Samuel and Vanessa, his survivors include his other sisters, Elisa Formell Alfonso and Paloma Formell Delgado, and another brother, Lorenzo Formell González. He and Ms. Sullivan separated in 2012 and divorced in 2021.In a Facebook post announcing his death, Los Van Van said it would continue its tour of the United States, “paying tribute to Juan Carlos in every performance, every musical note, in every Vanvanero choice as Juanca would have wanted.” More

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Robin Wagner, Set Designer Who Won Three Tony Awards, Dies at 89

      by

      He created sets for more than 50 of Broadway’s most celebrated productions, including “Hair,” “A Chorus Line,” “On the Twentieth Century” and “The Producers.”Robin Wagner, the inventive Tony Award-winning set designer of more than 50 Broadway shows, including the 1978 musical “On the Twentieth Century,” in which a locomotive appeared to be racing toward the audience with the actress Imogene Coca strapped to the front of it, died on Monday at his home in New York City. He was 89.His daughter Christie Wagner Lee confirmed the death but said she did not yet know the specific cause. She did not say in what borough he lived.Mr. Wagner designed sets on Broadway, Off Broadway and for regional theater, for operas and ballets, and, in 1975, for the Rolling Stones’ Tour of the Americas. His stage for those concerts was shaped like a six-pointed lotus flower that was raked upward to the back in a delicate curve.On Broadway, his work included the sets for the transcendent 1968 rock musical “Hair” (in The New York Times, Clive Barnes described a “beautiful junk-art setting”) as well as “The Great White Hope,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “42nd Street,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Jelly’s Last Jam,” “Dreamgirls” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” and “Angels in America: Perestroika.”Mr. Wagner’s stage designs could be elaborate or simple, depending on the story and what the director wanted. He viewed scenic design as problem solving.“When I’m reading the script, I can see it, how it fits together and how you get from one scene to another,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1991. “I guess that’s what makes designers designers — they visualize things a certain way.”For the musical “City of Angels,” which opened on Broadway in 1989, he created dual color schemes to match the interconnected stories that the show’s writer, Larry Gelbart, set in a world of mansions, sound stages and solariums in 1940s Los Angeles. In sequences involving an author who was turning his novel into a screenplay, everything was in color, while those involving a private eye movie character were in black and white, befitting the show’s homage to film noir.In his review in The Boston Globe, Kevin Kelly wrote that Mr. Wagner’s set design was “brilliant, with flats moving on and off in a rhythm that is nothing if not movie-ish and with a final pull back to a Hollywood sound stage that is Cecil B. De Mille breathtaking.”Mr. Wagner’s sets for the musical “City of Angels” after it opened in 1989.Martha Swope/The New York Public LibraryMr. Wagner won a Tony Award for “City of Angels,” his second for scenic design following one in 1978 for “On the Twentieth Century.” He won a third in 2001, for “The Producers,” Mel Brooks’s hit about a scheming pair who try to make a financial killing by purposely staging a Broadway flop.One of his most enduring designs, which did not receive a Tony nomination, was his simplest. For “A Chorus Line,” the producer Joseph Papp’s ultimately long-running musical about dancers auditioning for a Broadway musical, Mr. Wagner’s design consisted only of mirrored walls, black velour drapes and a white line on the floor.“That was the result of two years’ work of Michael Bennett and I trying to distill things,” Mr. Wagner told Playbill in 2007, referring to the director and co-choreographer of the show, which opened on Broadway in 1975. “We started with big things for visualizing scenes, and as we went through the show’s workshop period, they got smaller and smaller.”He added, “And then we knew we needed a black box, which represents theater, and that we needed the mirrors, because they represent the dance studio.”Robin Samuel Anton Wagner was born on Aug. 31, 1933, in San Francisco to Jens and Phyllis (Smith-Spurgeon) Wagner. His father, who had immigrated from Denmark, was a maritime engineer and, for a time, the keeper of two lighthouses where the Wagners lived until Robin was 10. His mother had been a pianist in New Zealand before moving to the United States, where she was a homemaker.One of Mr. Wagner’s simplest sets was for the musical “A Chorus Line.” The scene, in 1990, was the finale of the last performance of the show in its original Broadway run.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs a boy, Robin was enamored of Disney films like “Fantasia” and hoped to be an animator, creating the backgrounds of cartoons, not the characters. “I actually thought I was Pinocchio, trying to find my way into some kind of real life, which I still think I sometimes am,” he said in an oral history interview with Columbia University in 1992.He created comic books in junior high school and, after high school, attended the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1953 to 1954. While there, and after, he worked on set design with theater and opera groups, like the Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco; built window displays for a clothing store; and got a paying design job in summer stock with the Sacramento Music Circus.Mr. Wagner moved in 1958 to New York, where he became an assistant to one Broadway designer, Ben Edwards, and then another, Oliver Smith. From 1964 to 1967, he was the set designer for Arena Stage, the renowned regional theater in Washington.Returning to New York, he designed the sets for “Hair,” which Clive Barnes, in The Times, described as “masterly.”A scene from “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” in 1992. Mr. Wagner designed the sets for it and its sequel, “Angels in America: Perestroika.”John Haynes/Bridgeman ImagesGeorge Wolfe, the director who worked with him on several shows, including the “Angels in America” productions, said that Mr. Wagner had a talent for finding the essence of a story. He recalled one of Mr. Wagner’s small, but effective, touches on “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the 1992 musical about the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton.“Jelly was dying in L.A., and Robin created three jagged neon lines that looked like the graphic of an earthquake,” Mr. Wolfe said in a telephone interview. “It was so breathtakingly simple; it was along the lower part of the back wall.”He added, “Just those three lines, you knew it was L.A.”But there was also a complex engineer’s side to Mr. Wagner, which was on view with “Dreamgirls,” Mr. Bennett’s 1981 musical based loosely on the career of the Supremes. Mr. Wagner designed five aluminum, spotlight-studded towers that moved in various configurations to create — with minimal use of props — the illusion that the setting was changing from a nightclub to a recording studio to a Las Vegas show palace.“And all the lighting bars were basically platforms,” Mr. Wagner told Playbill, “so the actors could climb up on those things and fly out, which they did.”Mr. Wagner’s “Dreamgirls” design earned him a Tony nomination and one of his six Drama Desk Awards.His final Broadway credit was for “Leap of Faith,” a musical about a fraudulent evangelist, in 2012.In addition to his daughter Christie, he is survived by his partner, Susan Kowal; another daughter, Leslie Wagner; a son, Kurt; and a granddaughter. His marriages to Joyce Workman and Paula Kauffman ended in divorce. The train that Mr. Wagner designed for “On the Twentieth Century” was one of his great creations, with its long, elegant, streamlined interior consisting of adjoining compartments that were open on one side to let the characters be seen. Train exteriors that slid in front of the compartments let the audience look at the actors from the outside, after they had peered inside at them.“This gesture,” the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in The Times, “aside from notably enhancing the cinematic quality of the show — nothing is more movie-like than quick cuts from inside to outside — is also a gentle and pleasing play on the traditional description of the stage set as a room in which the fourth wall has been removed.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      George Maharis, TV Heartthrob of ‘Route 66,’ Is Dead at 94

      by

      He appeared in Off Broadway roles before starring on CBS as one of two young men who find adventure crossing the country in a Corvette convertible.George Maharis, the ruggedly handsome New York-born stage actor who went on to become a 1960s television heartthrob as a star of the series “Route 66,” died on Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 94.His longtime friend and caretaker, Marc Bahan, confirmed his death.Mr. Maharis’s greatest fame arose from the role of Buz Murdock, one of two young men who traveled the country in a Corvette convertible, finding a new adventure and drama (and usually a new young woman) each week on CBS’s “Route 66.”In a 2012 reappraisal of the show, the New York Times critic and reporter Neil Genzlinger praised the literary quality of the scripts and commented, “This half-century-old black-and-white television series tackled issues that seem very 21st century.”Several actors who went on to greater renown appeared on the show, including Martin Sheen, Robert Redford, Robert Duvall and Barbara Eden.“Route 66” began in 1960, and Mr. Maharis left the show in 1963. His co-star, Martin Milner, got a new partner, played by Glenn Corbett, and the series continued for one more season.Mr. Maharis attributed his departure to health reasons (he was suffering from hepatitis), but Karen Blocher, an author and blogger who interviewed Mr. Maharis and other principal figures on the show, wrote in 2006 that the story was more complex.Herbert B. Leonard, the show’s executive producer, “thought he’d hired a young hunk for the show, a hip, sexy man and good actor that all the girls would go for,” Ms. Blocher wrote. “This was all true of Maharis, but not the whole story, as Leonard discovered to his anger and dismay. George was gay, it turned out.”Ms. Blocher attributed Mr. Maharis’s departure to a number of factors. “The producers felt betrayed and duped when they learned of Maharis’s sexual orientation, and never trusted him again,” she wrote, adding, “Maharis, for his part, started to feel that he was carrying the show and going unappreciated.”Mr. Maharis was arrested in 1967 on charges of “lewd conduct” and in 1974 on charges of “sex perversion” for cruising in men’s bathrooms.He did not discuss his sexuality in interviews, but he proudly described being the July 1973 nude centerfold in Playgirl magazine to Esquire in 2017.“A lot of guys came up to me,” he said, “and asked me to sign it for their ‘wives.’”Mr. Maharis had done well-received work in theater before becoming a television star. In 1958 he played a killer in an Off Broadway production of Jean Genet’s “Deathwatch.” Writing in The New York Times, Louis Calta described Mr. Maharis’s performance as “correctly volatile, harsh, soft and cunning.”Two years later, Mr. Maharis appeared in Edward Albee’s “Zoo Story” in its Off Broadway production at the Provincetown Playhouse. That year he was one of 12 young actors given the Theater World Award. The other winners included Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, Patty Duke and Carol Burnett. In 1962, he received an Emmy Award nomination for his work on “Route 66.”In 1963, Mr. Maharis told a writer for The Times that he treated the TV series like a job in summer stock theater.“The series taught me how to maintain my integrity and not be sucked in by compromise,” he said.George Maharis was born in the Astoria section of Queens on Sept. 1, 1928, the son of a Greek restaurateur. He attended Flushing High School and later served in the Marines.Before succeeding as an actor, he told interviewers, he had worked as a mechanic, a dance instructor and a short-order cook. But he had aspired to a singing career first, and after he became a television star he recorded albums including “George Maharis Sings!,” “Portrait in Music” and “Just Turn Me Loose!” At least one single, “Teach Me Tonight,” became a hit.“The series taught me how to maintain my integrity and not be sucked in by compromise,” Mr. Maharis said of his role on “Route 66.”Silver Screen Collection/Getty ImagesAfter leaving “Route 66,” Mr. Maharis appeared in feature films including “Sylvia,” with Carroll Baker, and “The Satan Bug,” a science-fiction drama (both 1965). He tried series television again in 1970 as the star of an ABC whodunit “The Most Deadly Game,” with Ralph Bellamy and Yvette Mimieux, but the show lasted only three months.In the 1970s and early ’80s, he made guest appearances on other television series, including “Police Story,” “The Bionic Woman” and “Fantasy Island.” He did occasional television films, including a poorly reviewed 1976 “Rosemary’s Baby” sequel. He worked infrequently in the 1980s and made his final screen appearance in a supporting role in “Doppelganger,” a 1993 horror film starring Drew Barrymore.Information about his survivors was not immediately available.Because of his filming schedule when the shows aired, Mr. Maharis did not have a chance to watch “Route 66” until it was rereleased on DVD in 2007, he told the website Route 66 News that year.“I was really surprised how strong they were,” he said. “For the first time, I could see what other people had seen.”In an interview the same year with The Chicago Sun-Times, he reflected on his “Route 66” days and on how the country had changed since then. “You could go from one town to the next, maybe 80 miles away, and it was a totally different world,” he said. “Now you can go 3,000 miles and one town is the same as the next.” More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Ingrid Haebler, Pianist Known for Her Mastery of Mozart, Is Dead

      by

      In concerts and on dozens of recordings, she applied a delicate touch that critics said set her apart from other performers.Ingrid Haebler, a pianist who drew particular acclaim for her performances and recordings of the works of Mozart, impressing critics while still in her 20s with elegant interpretations that set her apart from other musicians of her day, died on May 14. She was believed to be 96.Decca Classics, which last year released “Ingrid Haebler: The Philips Legacy,” a boxed set of dozens of recordings she made for the Philips label, posted news of her death on Facebook. The Austrian newspaper The Salzburger Nachrichten reported her death, attributing the information to her circle of friends, but did not say where she died.Ms. Haebler was born in Vienna, probably on June 20, 1926 (some news reports said 1929). Her father was a baron. Her mother played piano and began teaching Ingrid when she was a young child; she gave her first public performance at 11. They lived in Poland when Ingrid was young but settled in Austria in the late 1930s.As a teenager, she wrote poetry and dabbled in composing. But at 19 she decided to focus fully on piano — “I had to kill a lot of my interests,” she told The Sydney Morning Herald of Australia in 1964. She trained at the Salzburg Mozarteum in Austria and in the early 1950s began earning accolades at European piano competitions. By 1954, recordings she made for Vox with the Pro Musica Symphony of Vienna were drawing notice in the United States.“Ingrid Haebler: The Philips Legacy,” a boxed set of dozens of recordings, was released last year by Decca Classics.“A delicate — but not finicky, to make the distinction — articulation of Mozart that is uncommon today is the way Ingrid Haebler plays the A major (K. 414) and B-flat major (K. 595) Piano Concertos,” Cyrus Durgin, a music critic for The Boston Globe, wrote in August 1954, reviewing one of those records. “You will always find people (including musicians) defending or attacking this manner, but it does meet Mozart’s requirement that his keyboard music ‘flow like oil and water.’”That same year she performed as a soloist in England with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Mozart was her calling card, but she proved an adept interpreter of other composers as well, as she did in 1956 when she played a program of Mozart, Haydn and Schubert at Wigmore Hall in London. She “captured and held spellbound her audience,” The Daily Telegraph of Britain wrote.By 1958, The Bristol Evening Post reported, her stature was such that, at the Bath Festival, she felt free to reject the Steinway that was provided to her during the practice session and sent the organizers scrambling to find another piano.At that festival, she further showed that there was more to her than Mozart. She played Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and impressed The Daily Telegraph of Britain. “Without ever invoking a spurious foresight of the Beethoven that was to come,” the newspaper wrote, “she placed the work in the 18th century, yet across the gulf that already separated him from Mozart.”Ms. Haebler in 1959. “The poise and simplicity of Ms. Haebler’s Mozart,” one critic wrote, “is a rare treat.”The New York TimesIn October 1959 she made her American debut in Minneapolis with the Minneapolis Symphony, playing the Mozart Piano Concerto in B-flat.“The acclaim of the audience brought the pianist back to the stage five times,” Ross Parmenter wrote in a review in The New York Times, “and the members of the orchestra joined in the applause.”Ms. Haebler, who was a baroness but did not use the title, was still impressing audiences with her Mozart interpretations in 1976, when, at Hunter College, she played her first New York recital, augmenting her program with works by Schubert and Debussy but shining as usual on the Mozart selections.“This was cloudless, untroubled Mozart,” Donal Henahan wrote in a review in The Times, “in line with the last century’s view of him as a miraculously blessed child.”Ms. Haebler continued to tour until early in this century. On her numerous recordings, many of them for Philips, she covered a range of composers, but again it was often the Mozart recordings that stood out. Reviewing her recording of Mozart sonatas in 1990 for The Kingston Whig-Standard of Ontario, the critic Richard Perry zeroed in on what made her refreshingly different.“In a concert world rife with pianists of dazzling technique who seemed forced by competition and cavernous concert halls to demonstrate their mettle at every turn,” he wrote, “the poise and simplicity of Ms. Haebler’s Mozart is a rare treat.”Information on Ms. Haebler’s survivors was not immediately available.Christopher F. Schuetze More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Mary Turner Pattiz, Rock D.J. During FM’s Heyday, Dies at 76

      by

      She was known as “the Burner” for her seductive delivery, but off the air she was anything but a wild rock ’n’ roller. She later became an addiction counselor.Mary Turner Pattiz, who as Mary Turner was a silky-voiced disc jockey at KMET, the album-oriented rock station that was the soundtrack of Southern California in the 1970s and early ’80s, before leaving radio to become an addiction counselor and philanthropist, died on May 9 at her home in Beverly Hills. She was 76.The cause was cancer, said Ace Young, a former KMET news director.KMET was a hard-rocking upstart in the early 1970s, with its laid-back jockeys delivering a steady flow of new music from bands like the Who, Pink Floyd and Steely Dan, along with slightly naughty patter — a bit of sexual innuendo, endless stoner jokes — that was a welcome counter to the Top 40 hits churned out by AM stations.They were proud renegades, mixing surf reports with news coverage of events like the Mexican government’s spraying of its illegal marijuana crops with paraquat, a deadly poison. (When Jim Ladd, a late-night D.J., told his listeners to phone the White House to protest the practice, 5,000 callers jammed the White House switchboard.) Their bright yellow billboards were ofteninstalled upside down. They had a signature cheer, “Whooya” (the “w” was silent), that all the jockeys worked into their programs; the neologism was a refinement, Mr. Young said in an interview, “of the coughing sound we made when we smoked too much pot.” Ms. Pattiz — then Mary Turner — was known as “the Burner,” a nickname said to have been given to her by Peter Wolf, the lead singer of the J. Geils Band, for her seductive delivery and good looks, and she had the prime nighttime spot, from 6 to 10 p.m.When major bands came to town to perform or promote a new record, they made a stop at KMET to be interviewed by Ms. Pattiz. She was soft-spoken and conversational, a gentle interlocutor who once teased Bruce Springsteen by asking, “Do you really know a pretty little place in Southern California, down San Diego way, where they play guitar all night and all day?” (She was quoting “Rosalita,” a song from Mr. Springsteen’s second album.) Most important, she let her subjects talk without interruption. For his part, Mr. Springsteen was so taken with her that he asked her on a date, and at his performance at the Forum in Inglewood, Calif., the night after the interview, he dedicated the song “Promised Land” to her.“You guys can’t see what she looks like,” he told the audience. “She’s real pretty.”She was also extremely private, circumspect about her personal life, her background and even her age. If she dated a rock star, her colleagues weren’t aware of it.“The image of a rock ’n’ roll woman on the hippest radio station during those wild years was not the real Mary Turner,” said Michael Harrison, a former host and program director at KMET who is now the publisher of Talkers, a trade publication about the radio industry. “The real Mary Turner wasn’t wild. She was smooth and professional. It was show business.”Mr. Ladd, whose show followed hers, said: “You would listen to her, and you would fall in love with her voice. She was deceptively soft. She would say a joke and two minutes later you would get the punch line. And like all good interviewers, she knew when to keep her mouth shut.”By 1981, two rock interview shows she hosted, “Off the Record” and “Off the Record Specials,” were being syndicated by Westwood One, a company founded by the media entrepreneur Norman Pattiz, whom she married in 1985. They were broadcast in every major market in the United States and 40 countries through the American Forces Radio and Television Service, giving Ms. Pattiz a worldwide audience of more than 20 million. Members of the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury of Queen all opened up during her freewheeling sessions. Mr. Mercury declared that he found his early music disposable, “like a tampon.” Keith Richards was eloquent on the ineffable magic of the Stones’ chemistry, and Mick Jagger admitted to extreme burnout while on tour.On Ms. Pattiz’s 10th anniversary at KMET, she was honored by Tom Bradley, then the mayor of Los Angeles, in a ceremony at City Hall. A few months later she left the station.Her final show, on Aug. 6, 1982, is in the permanent collection of the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan. The hard-driving playlist included “Hang ’Em High” by Van Halen, “Back in the Saddle” by Aerosmith and, appropriately, “Rosalita.”“Well, listen you guys, it has been a lot of fun spending every single weekday night with you for the last 10 years,” she said as she concluded the show, “but the old Burner’s got to be moving on.” And then she played her final tune, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.”Ms. Pattiz in 2005. She worked at KMET in Los Angeles for 10 years before signing off with one last hard-driving playlist in 1982.R. Diamond/WireImage, via Getty ImagesMary Caroline Turner was born on Feb. 4, 1947, in Baltimore. Her father, William Turner, was an aviation representative for an oil company. Her mother, Carol (Steuart) Turner, was a homemaker.She studied communications at Indiana University Bloomington, thinking she might work in television, but instead found a job as a promotions director at KSAN, a progressive radio station in San Francisco. She did a little of everything there: engineering, hosting a weekend talk show and filling in for other disc jockeys. It was the days of free-form FM radio, when the D.J.s played music from their own collections, and to their own taste.“It was an exciting time back then because you didn’t operate under any rules,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1982. “You could play anything you wanted, say anything you wanted, and who cared? FM at that time was a joke, especially to Top 40 people. We were the hippies, and they were the stars.”She worked briefly at KSFX, a competing station in San Francisco, and then auditioned for an opening at KMET in 1972. At the time, she was one of only a handful of women working in radio. (Among the others was Alison Steele, otherwise known as “the Nightbird,” a sultry star on WNEW-FM, KMET’s sister station in New York City.)Ms. Pattiz said she found her gender to be an advantage, despite the overzealous fans who lurked in the parking lot after her show and the stalker who frightened her so much that she never left work without her two German shepherds and a male colleague.“I think being a woman helped more than anything else,” she told The Los Angeles Times. “The time was right for it, and I happened to be in the right place at the right time.”Although Ms. Pattiz continued making her “Off the Record Specials” until the early ’90s, she mostly left the radio world — and her colleagues — behind after her marriage to Mr. Pattiz. The couple then became known for their philanthropy and for their regular appearances courtside at Lakers games.Ms. Pattiz also began working as a drug and alcohol counselor, having confronted her own struggles with substance abuse. In 2006 she earned a master’s degree in psychology from the California Graduate Institute (now the Chicago School of Professional Psychology), and in 2008 she earned a Ph.D. In 2010, she became chairwoman of the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., taking over from Mrs. Ford’s daughter, Susan Ford Bales. Most recently, she served on the boards of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation and its Graduate School of Addiction Studies.“When she left broadcasting she had no interest in discussing the subject whatsoever,” said Elliot Mintz, a longtime media consultant and a friend of the couple. “She became totally committed to improving the lives of people caught in addiction.”Mr. Pattiz died in December. Ms. Pattiz is survived by a brother.“The Mary Turner of the Betty Ford era was the real Mary Turner,” Mr. Harrison of Talkers said “The Mary Turner of KMET was a figment of our rock ’n’ roll fantasy.”Alain Delaquérière More

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Ed Ames, Singing Star Who Became a Familiar Face on TV, Dies at 95

      by

      After more than a decade of hit records with his brothers, he found success as a solo performer and a star of the series “Daniel Boone.”Ed Ames, who first gained fame as the lead singer of the Ames Brothers, a chart-topping group whose success predated the rise of rock ’n’ roll, and who then turned to acting as Fess Parker’s Indian companion on the popular NBC show “Daniel Boone,” died on Sunday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 95.His wife, Jeanne (Arnold) Ames, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Mr. Ames’s introduction to the spotlight was a family affair. With their smooth, clean harmonies, the Ames Brothers — Ed, Gene, Joe and Vic — had hit records from the late 1940s through the late ’50s with material ranging from pre-World War I college songs (“The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi”) to folk songs (“Goodnight Irene”) to love songs (“I Love You for Sentimental Reasons”). The quartet had a two-sided No. 1 hit in 1950 with “Sentimental Me” and “Rag Mop.” Their “You, You, You” held the top spot for eight weeks in 1953 and stayed on the charts for nearly eight months. All told, the Ames Brothers sold more than 20 million records.The Ames Brothers performed at major venues including Ciro’s in Hollywood and the Roxy in New York. They appeared regularly in Las Vegas and on television, as guests of Milton Berle, Perry Como, Jackie Gleason and Ed Sullivan. In 1956, they had their own syndicated TV series. In 1958, Billboard magazine named them the vocal group of the year.But by 1960, Ed Ames had had enough.“I thought I’d go out of my skull if I had to sing the same song again,” he said in 1964. “We were in a comfortable groove, but it was a merry-go-round for me and I was getting bored.” His brothers continued on the nightclub circuit without him.The Ames brothers had a string of hit records from the late 1940s through the late ’50s. Clockwise from bottom left: Gene, Joe, Ed and Vic Ames.Karen Mesterton-Gibbons, via Associated PressMr. Ames, who played the half-Cherokee, half-English Mingo, with Fess Parker, who played the title character, on the set of the TV series “Daniel Boone” in 1964.Associated PressAfter taking acting lessons, Mr. Ames was cast in an Off Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” for $50 a week. He made his Broadway debut as Jerry Orbach’s replacement in the 1961 musical “Carnival!”He also continued recording. As a solo artist, he had hits with “Try to Remember” (1965), “Time, Time” (1967), “My Cup Runneth Over” (1967) and “Who Will Answer?” (1968).Mr. Ames also starred in the 1963 Broadway production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Dale Wasserman’s adaptation of the Ken Kesey novel. He played Chief Bromden, an American Indian patient in a mental hospital who feigns being mute and ends up suffocating the lead character — the rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy, played by Kirk Douglas (and later, on film, by Jack Nicholson) — as an act of mercy.It would not be the last time Mr. Ames played a Native American.His performance in “Cuckoo’s Nest” led to his best-known role: opposite Fess Parker on “Daniel Boone” as Mingo, the Oxford-educated son of a Cherokee woman and an English nobleman who joins Boone in his expeditions on the Tennessee frontier. (Mingo’s father was the Earl of Dunmore, but Mingo chose to remain part of the Cherokee Nation rather than claim the title.)Mr. Ames played Mingo for the first four of the show’s six seasons, from 1964 to 1968. But his most memorable moment during those years did not come on “Daniel Boone.” It happened on April 29, 1965, when he was Johnny Carson’s guest on “The Tonight Show.”In a segment that soon became a staple of “Tonight Show” highlight reels, Mr. Ames set out to teach Mr. Carson how to toss a tomahawk, using a rudimentary drawing of a sheriff on a wooden panel as his target. He threw the tomahawk across the stage. When it embedded precisely in the sheriff’s crotch, the audience reacted with loud, sustained laughter.Mr. Ames tried to retrieve the tomahawk, but Mr. Carson grabbed his arm. As another roar of laughter subsided, Mr. Carson looked at Mr. Ames and said, “I didn’t even know you were Jewish.”He was.Ed Ames in Hollywood in 2010.Chelsea Lauren/Getty ImagesEd Ames was born Edmund Dantes Urick in Malden, Mass., on July 9, 1927, the youngest of nine surviving children born to David and Sarah (Zaslavskaya) Urick, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. In their teens, Ed and his three brothers formed a singing group and won amateur contests in the Boston area.Originally billed as the Urick Brothers, then the Amory Brothers, they became the Ames Brothers when they were signed by Coral Records. They began having hits after moving to RCA Records in 1953.Ed was the last surviving member of the Ames Brothers; Vic died in a car accident in 1978, Gene in 1997 and Joe in 2007. His first marriage, to Sara Cacheiro, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1998, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Ronald and Sonya; a stepson, Stephen Saviano; seven grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. His daughter Marcella Ames died before him.In the 1980s and ’90s, Mr. Ames performed in regional productions of musicals including “South Pacific,” “Man of La Mancha” and “Carousel.” He was also seen occasionally on television, on “Murder, She Wrote,” “In the Heat of the Night” and — as himself — on the sitcom “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show.”Dennis Hevesi, a former reporter for The Times, died in 2017. Shivani Gonzalez contributed reporting, and Kristen Noyes contributed research. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Tina Turner, Magnetic Singer of Explosive Power, Is Dead at 83

      by

      Hailed in the 1960s for her dynamic performances with her first husband, Ike, she became a sensation as a recording artist, often echoing her personal struggles in her songs.Tina Turner, the earthshaking singer whose rasping vocals, sexual magnetism and explosive energy made her an unforgettable live performer and one of the most successful recording artists of all time, died on Wednesday at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, near Zurich. She was 83. Her publicist Bernard Doherty announced the death in a statement but did not provide the cause. She had a stroke in recent years and was known to be struggling with a kidney disease and other illnesses.Ms. Turner embarked on her half-century career in the late 1950s, while still attending high school, when she began singing with Ike Turner and his band, the Kings of Rhythm. At first she was only an occasional performer, but she soon became the group’s star attraction — and Mr. Turner’s wife. With her potent, bluesy voice and her frenetic dancing style, she made an instant impression.Their ensemble, soon renamed the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, became one of the premier touring soul acts in Black venues on the so-called chitlin’ circuit. After the Rolling Stones invited the group to open for them, first on a British tour in 1966 and then on an American tour in 1969, white listeners in both countries began paying attention.Ms. Turner, who insisted on adding rock songs by the Beatles and the Stones to her repertoire, reached an enormous new audience, giving the Ike and Tina Turner Revue its first Top 10 hit with her version of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song “Proud Mary” in 1971 and a Grammy Award for best R&B vocal performance by a group.Ike and Tina Turner in performance in Texas in 1964. Their ensemble became one of the premier touring soul acts on the Black circuit; after the Rolling Stones invited the group to open for them, white listeners began paying attention.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“In the context of today’s show business, Tina Turner must be the most sensational professional onstage,” Ralph J. Gleason, the influential jazz and pop critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in a review of a Rolling Stones concert in Oakland in November 1969. “She comes on like a hurricane. She dances and twists and shakes and sings and the impact is instant and total.”But if the Ike and Tina Turner Revue was a success, the Ike and Tina Turner marriage was not. Mr. Turner was abusive. After she escaped the marriage in her 30s, her career faltered. But her solo album “Private Dancer,” released in 1984, returned her to the spotlight — and lifted her into the pop stratosphere.Working with younger songwriters, and backed by a smooth, synthesized sound that provided a lustrous wrapping for her raw, urgent vocals, she delivered three mammoth hits: the title song, written by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits; “Better Be Good to Me”; and “What’s Love Got to Do With It.”We, TinaHow Tina Turner reclaimed her voice, her image and her spirituality.Ms. Turner in 1969. “In the context of today’s show business,” one critic wrote that year, “Tina Turner must be the most sensational professional onstage.”Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesReferring to its “innovative fusion of old-fashioned soul singing and new wave synth-pop,” Stephen Holden, in a review for The New York Times, called the album “a landmark not only in the career of the 45-year-old singer, who has been recording since the late 1950s, but in the evolution of pop-soul music itself.”At the 1985 Grammy Awards, “What’s Love Got to Do With It” won three awards, for record of the year, song of the year and best female pop vocal performance, and “Better Be Good To Me” won for best female rock vocal performance.The album went on to sell five million copies and ignite a touring career that established Ms. Turner as a worldwide phenomenon. In 1988 she appeared before about 180,000 people at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, breaking a record for the largest paying audience for a solo artist. After her “Twenty Four Seven” tour in 2000 sold more than $100 million in tickets, Guinness World Records announced that she had sold more concert tickets than any other solo performer in history.‘Well-to-Do Farmers’Tina Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on Nov. 26, 1939, in Brownsville, Tenn., northeast of Memphis, and spent her earliest years on the Poindexter farm in Nutbush, an unincorporated area nearby, where she sang in the choir of the Spring Hill Baptist Church.Her father, Floyd, known by his middle name, Richard, worked as the farm’s overseer — “We were well-to-do farmers,” Ms. Turner told Rolling Stone in 1986 — and had a difficult relationship with his wife, Zelma (Currie) Bullock.Ms. Turner in the studio in an undated photo.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images More