Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Amp Fiddler, Versatile Keyboardist, Singer and Mentor, Dies at 65

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      A mainstay of Detroit’s soul, funk and electronic music scenes, he also offered guidance to young hip-hop and electronic music aspirants, notably J Dilla.Amp Fiddler in performance at an electronic music festival in Detroit in 2016. He was a versatile keyboardist, a prolific session player and a mentor to younger musicians.Laura McDermott for The New York TimesAmp Fiddler, a former keyboardist with Parliament-Funkadelic who became a fixture of Detroit’s soul, funk and electronic music scenes, and whose tutelage of the young rapper J Dilla helped alter the trajectory of hip-hop, died on Dec. 18 in Detroit. He was 65.His death, in a hospital after a long battle with cancer, was announced by his wife, Tombi Stewart.Mr. Fiddler was a versatile keyboardist, equally adept at playing warm Fender Rhodes grooves or squiggly synthesizer arpeggios, skills honed during his decade with P-Funk, from 1986 to 1996. He was also a prolific session player, working with artists like Seal, Maxwell and Raphael Saadiq.“The thing that I was always keen on as an artist was to leave my ego at home,” Mr. Fiddler said in a 2003 Red Bull Music Academy lecture. “I think that humility, having that sense of just being there for people and giving, is what got me more into getting more.”Mr. Fiddler had a striking, stylish presence — he favored flamboyantly psychedelic attire and wore his hair either in an expansive Afro or sculpted vertically into a Mohawk — that could make him seem even larger than his 6-foot-2 frame. In the early 2000s he began recording under his own name on neo-soul albums like “Waltz of a Ghetto Fly” and “Afro Strut,” showcasing his raspy but soothing voice. He also played keyboards for numerous electronic music producers in Detroit, including Moodymann, Theo Parrish and Carl Craig.But Mr. Fiddler’s most crucial role may have been as a bridge between generations of Detroit musicians — first as a wide-eyed wunderkind among veteran P-Funk players, then as a beloved mentor to the hip-hop and electronic music aspirants of the 1990s and 2000s. “It’s just so rare, especially in the entertainment business, to see figures who give without the expectation of getting something back,” Dan Charnas, the author of the 2022 book “Dilla Time,” said in an interview. “A generation of folks were blessed by Amp’s generosity.”The most notable of these disciples was James Dewitt Yancey, better known as J Dilla. Mr. Fiddler lived near the high school attended by several members of a fledgling rap collective, one of whom — drawn by the music booming out of his basement studio window — knocked on the door to inquire whether Mr. Fiddler could help produce a demo tape.Mr. Fiddler agreed, and the next day, seven teenagers arrived, including Mr. Yancey. Mr. Fiddler introduced him to the Akai MPC60 sampling drum machine and left him alone to learn by experimenting. Soon Mr. Yancey was skipping school to study in the gear-packed basement studio Mr. Fiddler called “Camp Amp.”“I would teach him something different just about every day until he got it,” Mr. Fiddler said in a 2015 interview with Sam Beaubien, a friend and collaborator. “I knew he was talented. He heard things in a different way.”A few years later, in July 1994, when Mr. Fiddler was on the Lollapalooza tour with the P-Funk All Stars, he introduced Mr. Yancey to Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest, which was also on the tour. Mr. Yancey slipped Q-Tip a demo tape, beginning the chain of events that ultimately catapulted him into the hip-hop pantheon as a major innovator. (Mr. Yancey died at 32 in 2006.) “My happiness about the introduction,” Mr. Fiddler told Mr. Beaubien, “was for him to become successful and put Detroit on the map as once again a force to be reckoned with in the music industry.”Mr. Fiddler was equally adept at playing warm Fender Rhodes grooves or squiggly synthesizer arpeggios, skills honed during his decade with Parliament-Funkadelic.Laura McDermott for The New York TimesMr. Fiddler himself was a protégé of the Parliament-Funkadelic impresario George Clinton. In the mid-1980s, Mr. Clinton heard one of Mr. Fiddler’s demo recordings and offered him the keyboard chair in P-Funk once held by Bernie Worrell. Mr. Fiddler “helped me do amazing things,” Mr. Clinton wrote in his 2014 memoir, “Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You?” “Amp was a jazz musician, and he helped create some of these extended pieces.”Joseph Anthony Fiddler, the youngest of five siblings, was born in Detroit on May 16, 1958, to Cleophas and Christine (Young) Fiddler. The nickname “Amp,” which he used throughout his career, was a playground variant on his middle name. His father, a mill operator for the U.S. Rubber Company, was originally from the Caribbean island St. Vincent; his mother, who was from Virginia, worked as a salesperson at the J.L. Hudson department store.Mr. Fiddler began playing music on the family baby grand piano in his late teens. The pianist Harold McKinney, a founder of the Detroit jazz collective Tribe, lived down the street, and the young Mr. Fiddler began studying with him. After brief stints at two colleges, he started playing with Detroit-based touring acts, including Enchantment, RJ’s Latest Arrival and Was (Not Was).Was (Not Was) brought Mr. Fiddler to Europe for the first time, but the globe-trotting never stopped. Among the experiences he cherished most, he told Mr. Beaubien, were playing at the Shrine in Lagos, Nigeria, with the Afrobeat percussionist Tony Allen, and recording at Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare’s studio in Jamaica (for the three men’s 2008 joint project, “Inspiration Information”).He shared a passion for music with his brother Thomas. In the late 1980s, they formed a group named Mr. Fiddler, conceived as a cross between Cab Calloway’s 1940s swing band and 1980s new jack swing. They signed a deal with Elektra Records; their 1990 album, “With Respect,” wasn’t a commercial success, but Amp Fiddler used his $10,000 advance to build a state-of-the-art home studio.Mr. Fiddler is survived by Ms. Stewart, whom he married this year after a 16-year on-and-off relationship. His siblings all died before him, as did a son, Dorian, from a relationship with Stacey Willoughby.Despite his illness, Mr. Fiddler gigged regularly in Detroit until last year, with up-and-coming groups like Will Sessions, Duality/Detroit and Dames Brown (a female vocal trio whose debut album, for which Mr. Fiddler was executive producer, will be released in 2024).“He was always teaching you stuff,” said Mr. Beaubien, the founder of the band Will Sessions. “Sometimes people don’t want to share their secrets, the things that they’ve learned, but Amp was never afraid to share his lessons. Saying that he taught me a lot is an understatement. I’m forever grateful.” More

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      Mildred Miller, Stalwart of the Metropolitan Opera, Dies at 98

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      In her 23 years at the Met, she sang with the greatest stars of her day. She had a second career as a leading figure in the artistic life of Pittsburgh.Mildred Miller as Octavian in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera, which was said to be her favorite role. Sedge LeBlanc/The Metropolitan OperaThe mezzo-soprano Mildred Miller Posvar sang opera’s so-called trouser roles so many times that one of her daughters once told a friend, “My mommy is a boy.”Ms. Posvar, known in her professional life as Mildred Miller, was Cherubino in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” a record-breaking 61 times at the Metropolitan Opera House. Her warm, even tone and clear diction became associated indelibly with the composer’s amorous page in the way that Kirsten Flagstad was with Isolde and Feodor Chaliapin with Boris Godunov. She “defined that role for a generation of opera lovers,” Opera News said about her. And there were many other roles as well.Ms. Posvar died on Nov. 29 at her home in Pittsburgh. She was 98.Her death was confirmed by her daughter Lisa Posvar Rossi and by the Metropolitan Opera, where she sang in 338 performances, including the title role in “Carmen,” Suzuki in “Madama Butterfly” and Octavian in “Der Rosenkavalier,” which was said to be her favorite.After her debut at the Met on Nov. 17, 1951, the New York Times critic Noel Straus wrote that she had “scored heavily” as Cherubino and that she had “a handsome magnetic stage presence; a fine, fresh voice expertly produced; and pronounced histrionic ability.”Ms. Miller would go on to perform with the company for another 23 years; her final performance was on Dec. 3, 1974, as Lola in “Cavalleria Rusticana.” In Europe as well as the U.S., she sang with the greatest stars of her day: Nicolai Gedda, Leontyne Price, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and others. She was already broadly known in the U.S. by the end of the 1950s, thanks to appearances on television shows like “Voice of Firestone” and “The Bell Telephone Hour.”Ms. Miller and Lawrence Davidson rehearsing the Met’s production of Gounod’s “Faust” in 1953. She was with the Met from 1951 to 1974.Sam Falk/The New York TimesPerhaps the highlight of her career was the recordings she made of Mahler’s great orchestral song cycles with Bruno Walter, the magisterial conductor who had given the premiere of one of them. Walter handpicked the young Ms. Miller for his 1960 recording of “Das Lied von der Erde,” 49 years after giving the first performance in Munich; afterward, according to the 2001 book “Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere,” by Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, he said, “I don’t think we can improve on that.” A 1963 recording she made with Walter of “Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen” won the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque in France.Her reviews were mostly excellent throughout her career, with a few quibbles here and there. “My impression is that she was a really solid singer who sang well and was really important to the company,” said Peter Clark, the former archives director at the Metropolitan Opera. “The kind of solid singer that the Met really depended on. She could sing whatever the Met asked her to.”Ms. Miller also had a second career, as a leading figure in the artistic life of Pittsburgh, which assumed more importance after her retirement from the Met. In 1967 her husband, Wesley Posvar, had become president of the University of Pittsburgh, and 11 years later Ms. Miller founded, with Helen Knox, the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, now known as the Pittsburgh Festival Opera, which has been notable in the development of emerging opera stars. The company established the Mildred Miller International Voice Competition in 2011.Mildred Müller was born on Dec. 16, 1924, in Cleveland, the daughter of immigrants from Germany, Wilhelm and Elsa Müller. Rudolf Bing, the Met’s imperious general manager, later insisted that she Americanize her surname, given the proximity of the war years. Her father owned a household decorating store in Cleveland and was, she later recalled, “very strict” about her piano practicing.She graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1946 and from the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied under the famous midcentury opera conductor and impresario Boris Goldovsky, in 1948. “He taught me to sing and act,” she later said.She made her opera debut at the Tanglewood Music Festival in the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” under Leonard Bernstein, who she later said conducted with his fists. She was beginning to be noticed.When Mr. Bing contacted her for the Met, she turned him down because she wasn’t satisfied with the role he offered. She later turned him down a second time. It wasn’t until the third try that he snagged her, for the role of Cherubino, which she would go on to make her own.Ms. Miller played so many so-called trouser roles in her career that one of her daughters once told a friend, “My mommy is a boy.”Opera VictoriaHer husband died in 2001. In addition to her daughter Lisa, she is survived by another daughter, Marina Posvar; a son, Wesley William Posvar; seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.Ms. Miller also made her mark in the world of lieder. Critics remarked on the naturalness of her diction in German and, as was typical of music criticism at the time, her striking appearance: She “seems to acquire more of the accouterments of glamour with each passing year,” the critic Allen Hughes wrote in The Times in 1966, going on to offer a mild complaint that her lieder recital had “created a hunger for simplicity,” before offering the condescending observation that “one wondered how Miss Miller would sing these songs if she wore a simple sweater and skirt.”All that notwithstanding, he concluded, the “recital was virtually flawless from start to finish.” More

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      Former Dixie Chicks Member Laura Lynch Dies

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      Lynch, who was dismissed from the band in 1995, died in a car crash in Texas on Friday, the authorities said.Laura Lynch, a founding member of the country music group the Dixie Chicks, died in a car crash on Friday, according to the authorities. She was 65.The death and Lynch’s identity were confirmed by Nikol Endres, a justice of the peace in the area.Lynch, of Fort Worth, was driving east on Route 62 near Cornudas, Texas, about 70 miles east of El Paso, when a pickup truck that had been heading west crossed into her lane and struck her pickup truck head on, the Texas Department of Public Safety said. She was pronounced dead at the scene.After being raised on her grandfather’s ranch in Texas, Lynch, a bassist, founded the Dixie Chicks, now known as the Chicks, in Dallas in 1988 with Robin Lynn Macy, and sisters Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire.The original lineup only had two albums together: the debut “Thank Heavens for Dale Evans” in 1990 and “Little Ol’ Cowgirl” in 1992.In an interview with National Public Radio that aired in 1992, Lynch referred to the band’s music as “cowgirl music.”“Our brand of cowgirl music is a mixture of old-time country music, bluegrass music, acoustic,” she said. “We all sing three-part and four-part harmony. We throw in some instrumentals, some country swing. That’s our brand of cowgirl music.”Macy left the band in 1992. The next year, the remaining trio released “Shouldn’t A Told You That,” and began to experience moderate success. In 1993, the band played at an inaugural ball for President Bill Clinton.But in 1995, Lynch was dismissed from the group and replaced by Natalie Maines.“We were facing going on our seventh year, we were starting to re-evaluate things,” Maguire told The Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1996. “We were making a future decision.”Added Maguire: “What do we want to do in the future, where do we want to be in five years? I don’t think Laura really saw herself on the road five years from now.”On social media, the Chicks called Lynch a “bright light” whose “infectious energy and humor gave a spark to the early days of our band.”“Laura had a gift for design, a love of all things Texas and was instrumental in the early success of the band,” the Chicks said. “Her undeniable talents helped propel us beyond busking on street corners to stages all across Texas and the mid-West.”Information about survivors was not immediately available.After leaving the Dixie Chicks, Lynch went on to become a public relations officer with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, according to The Star-Telegram.Lynch told The Associated Press in 2003 that she took up oil painting and spent much of her time raising her daughter.“It was worth it,” Lynch said of her time in the band. “I’d get anemic all over again to do it.” More

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      Carlos Lyra, Composer Who Brought Finesse to Bossa Nova, Dies at 90

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      When Brazilian musicians fused samba with jazz and classical influences in the 1950s and ’60s, he was among the first, and the best.Carlos Lyra, a Brazilian composer, singer and guitarist whose cool, meticulous melodies helped give structure and power to bossa nova, the samba-inflected jazz style that became a worldwide phenomenon in the early 1960s, died on Dec. 16 in Rio de Janeiro. He was 90.His daughter, the singer Kay Lyra, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was sepsis.Alongside Antônio Carlos Jobim, Mr. Lyra was widely considered among the greatest composers of bossa nova. Mr. Jobim once called him “a great melodist, harmonist, king of rhythm, of syncopation, of swing” and “singular, without equal.”Mr. Lyra was part of a loose circle of musicians who in the 1950s began looking for ways to blend the traditional samba sounds of Brazil with American jazz and European classical influences. They often gathered at the Plaza Hotel in Rio, not far from the Copacabana beach, to discuss music and hash out ideas.One of those musicians, the singer and guitarist João Gilberto, included three of Mr. Lyra’s compositions — “Maria Ninguém” (“Maria Nobody”), “Lobo Bobo” (“Foolish Wolf”) and “Saudade Fêz um Samba” (“Saudade Made a Samba”) — on his “Chega de Saudade” (1959), which has often been called the first bossa nova album. Mr. Lyra released his own first album a year later, titled simply “Carlos Lyra: Bossa Nova.”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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      Essra Mohawk, Self-Described Flower Child Singer-Songwriter, Dies at 75

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      She missed a shot at Woodstock glory. But she recorded well-received albums under her own name and worked with Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia and others.Essra Mohawk, a prolific singer-songwriter and self-described flower child whose soulful, dreamlike songs captured the sunny optimism of the Woodstock era, and whose varied career included performing with Frank Zappa and Jerry Garcia and seeing one of her songs turned into a hit single by Cyndi Lauper, died on Dec. 11 at her home in Nashville. She was 75.The cause was cancer, her cousin Jeff Hurvitz said.Over the course of a career that lasted more than a half century, Ms. Mohawk never achieved the fame of contemporaries like Joni Mitchell, Carole King or Laura Nyro (to whom she was often compared). And she missed a chance at hippie immortality when her driver took a wrong turn on the way to the Woodstock festival in 1969.“We got there in time to see the last verse of the last song of the last act of the first night, and then the stage went dark before we got to it from the parking lot,” she recalled in a 2009 video interview.Still, Ms. Mohawk made her mark. Her album “Primordial Lovers,” produced by her husband, Frazier Mohawk, and released shortly after Woodstock, was met with critical praise. In 1977, the rock critic Paul Williams wrote in Rolling Stone that it was “firmly on my list of the top 25 all-time best albums.”While still in her teens, Ms. Mohawk was briefly a member of Frank Zappa’s anarchic band, the Mothers of Invention.via YouTubeShe recorded more than a dozen albums over the years, and, early in her career, served a stint as a member of Frank Zappa’s iconoclastic band, the Mothers of Invention.In the 1970s, Ms. Mohawk sang memorable songs like “Sufferin’ Till Suffrage” and “Interjections!,” for “Schoolhouse Rock!,” the series of animated educational shorts that was a Saturday morning television staple for the children of Generation X.In the early 1980s, she carved out a small place in Grateful Dead lore by touring with one Dead side project, the Jerry Garcia Band, and helping write a song, “Haze,” for another, Bob Weir’s Bobby & the Midnites.Ms. Lauper’s exuberant rendition of her song “Change of Heart” shot to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1987. Two years later, Tina Turner released a version of Ms. Mohawk’s “Stronger Than the Wind.”Ever dogged about finding an audience for her work, Ms. Mohawk even appeared in 1977 on “The Gong Show,” the campy showcase of amateur talent hosted by the colorful Chuck Barris, in which acts deemed flops were dispatched with the strike of a large gong.Some audience members jeered during Ms. Mohawk’s performance of her “Appointment With a Dream,” which involved her own ethereal take on scat singing. Still, she received two scores of 8 (out of 10) and one of 7 from the panel of three celebrity judges.“No, I wasn’t gonged, thank goodness,” Ms. Mohawk wrote in a 2016 post on the blog Rockasteria. “In fact, I scored a 23, my lucky number, but I came in second to a guy who played two saxophones at once.”Essra Mohawk was born Sandra Elayne Hurvitz on April 23, 1948, in Philadelphia, the younger of two children of Henry Hurvitz, a taxi driver, and Anne (Sosnow) Hurvitz, who worked at a beauty shop. She later adopted the name Essra, a twist on Essie, a nickname she picked up early in her career.Ms. Mohawk was married three times. No immediate family members survive. Her brother, Gary, died this year.By her early teens, she was already playing piano and filling notebooks with her songs. After graduating from George Washington High School in Philadelphia in 1966, she briefly attended the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts before moving to New York to start a music career.That career got a jump start when she was 19 and she and a couple of friends were strolling down Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village and met Mr. Zappa. “Frank invited us all in to see his show for free,” she said in a 2003 interview. “We became friends, and it wasn’t long before he had an opportunity to hear me play my music. He asked me join the Mothers right on the spot.”Being a satellite in the Zappa orbit came with its Zappaesque quirks. The band’s lead singer, Ray Collins, “came up with the name ‘Uncle Meat’ at one of our rehearsals, telling Frank that he thought it was a great name for a rock star,” she recalled in an interview with the British site Zappanews. “Frank immediately spun around and, pointing at me, proclaimed, ‘You’re Uncle Meat!’”Displeased with the name, Ms. Mohawk wriggled out of it a few months later, so Mr. Zappa appropriated it as the title for a Mothers album in 1969.Mr. Zappa signed her to his label, Bizarre Records, and, under the name Sandy Hurvitz, she released her first album, “Sandy’s Album Is Here at Last!”She released her last, “The One and Only,” in 2019. But she never forgot the invaluable career boost she missed out on with that wrong turn on the way to Woodstock.“Had I played Woodstock, we all know how that would have changed my life,” she said in 2009. But, she acknowledged, perhaps that was a blessing: “Knowing me, being the feral child that I was, I would have had no restraint, and I would have been long dead.” More

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      Dan Greenburg, Who Poked Fun With His Pen, Dies at 87

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      Women, sex and Jewish mothers were just some of the targets of his popular satirical writing in books, essays, screenplays and more.Dan Greenburg, the prolific humorist, best-selling author, essayist, playwright and screenwriter whose satirical prose examined Jewish angst, women and sex, and who later produced a series of humorous children’s books, died on Monday in the Bronx. He was 87.His death, at a hospice facility, was caused by worsening complications of a stroke he had a year ago, his son, Zack O’Malley Greenburg, said.Mr. Greenburg achieved national fame in 1964 with the publication of his “How to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual,” a tongue-firmly-in-cheek assessment of the unique and often baffling qualities of a stereotypical Jewish mother.“Never accept a compliment,” Mr. Greenburg advised. For example: “Irving, tell me, how is the chopped liver?”“Mmmm! Sylvia, it’s delicious!”“I don’t know. First the chicken livers that the butcher gave me were dry. Then the timer on the oven didn’t work. Then, at the last minute, I ran out of onions. Tell me, how could it be good?”Though his own mother didn’t think it was particularly funny, “How to Be a Jewish Mother” sold more than 270,000 copies in its first year alone and opened the door for the 28-year-old Mr. Greenburg to embark on a long career as a writer.He subsequently published more than a dozen books for adults, including “How to Make Yourself Miserable” (1966), “What Do Women Want” (1982) and “Scoring: A Sexual Memoir” (1972), mostly based on his own neurotic and hilarious attempts at connecting with the opposite sex.He branched into other genres as well — horror, the occult and murder mysteries — and he later began writing humorous children’s fiction, turning out numerous volumes of the popular “The Zack Files” series, for which his son was the inspiration.The versatile Mr. Greenburg also acted, did stand-up comedy and wrote plays and movie scripts, including for the hits “Private Lessons” (1981) and “Private School” (1983).Though he was a native Chicagoan, Mr. Greenburg was among the angst-ridden, carnally obsessed Jewish writers, like Woody Allen, Jules Feiffer and Philip Roth, who emerged in New York during the sexually charged 1960s with shocking, comical and explicit explorations of their neurotic sexual fantasies and behaviors.He wrote more than 150 humor pieces for The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Vanity Fair and other publications. When asked by his Playboy editor over lunch at a Chinese restaurant in 1972 to take part in an orgy in order to write an amusing essay, Mr. Greenburg was flummoxed.Mr. Greenburg’s “How to Be a Jewish Mother” (1964) was an instant success and launched his career. He later wrote a series of children’s books, “The Zack Files,” inspired by his son.“My chopsticks suddenly became too heavy to hold, and I lowered them carefully to the table,” he wrote in Playboy that year. “I should tell you at this point that I am so shy with women that it took me till the age of 23 to lose my virginity, till 30 to get married, and today, at 36, I am still unable to go to an ordinary cocktail party and chitchat with folks like any regular grown-up person. The idea of sending old Greenburg to take part in an orgy was, frankly, tantamount to sending someone with advanced vertigo to do a tap dance on the wing of an airborne 747.”The woman he married at 30, in 1967, was the journalist Nora Ephron, who would find success and fame as a comedy screenwriter and director after their nine-year marriage — the first for both of them — ended in an amicable divorce. They had the friendliest split one could imagine. “When we got the divorce, we kept dating,” Mr. Greenburg said on a podcast in 2021.Mr. Greenburg’s disarming wiseguy prose earned grudging respect from the critics. His examination of the paranormal, “Something’s There” (1976), was praised by John Leonard in The New York Times for its “skeptical, muscular, street-smart in the nether world” look at the occult.“Fans of the author of ‘How to Be a Jewish Mother’ and ‘Scoring’ will be pleased to learn that Mr. Greenburg hasn’t lost his sense of humor, even if he has lost a portion of his mind,” Mr. Leonard wrote. “He is still, like Dean Martin, preoccupied with sex.”Daniel Greenburg was born on June 20, 1936, to Samuel and Leah (Rozalsky) Greenburg. His mother was a Hebrew-school teacher, his father an artist. Intending to follow in his father’s footsteps, Mr. Greenburg enrolled in the fine arts program at the University of Illinois but switched to industrial design. He graduated in 1958.Wanting to abandon Chicago’s cold winters, he packed up his secondhand Chevy and drove to Los Angeles. Knowing no one there and having few options, he applied to graduate school at U.C.L.A., where he earned a master’s degree in fine arts.He soon talked his way into a job as an advertising writer with a small agency. When he read J.D. Salinger’s novel “Catcher in the Rye,” he was so moved by it that he decided he should try his hand at mimicking writers like Mr. Salinger.He wrote a satirical version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and, after selling it to Esquire in 1958 for $350, began to envision himself as a satirist. But, by his account, he knew he had a long way to go to become a successful writer.Splitting his focus between advertising and magazine writing, Mr. Greenburg eventually landed in New York, where in the early 1960s he met the editor and publisher Ralph Ginzburg, who was starting Eros, a magazine about erotica. Mr. Ginzburg recruited Mr. Greenburg to be its managing editor. Mr. Ginzburg went on to earn notoriety when he was convicted of violating federal obscenity laws in 1963.Meeting a book publisher at a party, Mr. Greenburg pitched an idea for what he wanted to title “The Snob’s Guide to Status Cars.” The publisher, Roger Price (who was also a humorist), rejected the pitch but suggested that Mr. Greenburg come back to him with another book idea. Over lunch days later, the two lamented how their Jewish mothers had used guilt to get them to eat. As he recalled on the 2021 podcast, Mr. Greenburg wondered: “How do they do this? Do they have a handbook on how to be Jewish mothers?”A lightbulb flashed on, he recalled, and he thought, “I’ll write that.” Mr. Price liked the idea, offered a $500 advance, and “How to Be a Jewish Mother” was published by Price, Stern, Sloan in late 1964. It became a hit and effectively launched Mr. Greenburg’s writing career. It would go on to be published in 24 countries and was made into a musical, which had a brief run on Broadway beginning in December 1967.After divorcing Ms. Ephron, Mr. Greenburg in 1980 married the writer Suzanne O’Malley, with whom he had his son, Zack, his only child. They divorced in the 1990s. In 1998 he married Judith C. Wilson, a writer. In addition to his son, she survives him, along with a granddaughter. Mr. Greenburg lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.Mr. Greenburg outside his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., in 1998. He published more than a dozen books for adults and scores more for children.Librado Romero/The New York TimesA fearful child, Mr. Greenburg undertook a series of hair-raising adventures as an adult while mining material for his children’s books, which he began writing in the mid-1990s. He rode upside-down in an open-cockpit plane over the Pacific with a stunt pilot; was chased by an elephant in Africa; rode with New York City firefighters to fires and with the city’s police in high-speed chases; and visited a tiger ranch in Texas, where he learned to discipline 200-pound tigers.“I visit schools constantly,” he said in an interview for the website of Harcourt Books (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) in 2006. “I talk to kids. I try out ideas on them, and I ask them what they like to read. Both boys and girls tell me they love scary stories and funny stories the best, and the boys tell me they love to be grossed out. I’ve tried to put all three things in these books.”In a 1998 interview with The Times, Mr. Greenburg admitted to missing some of the ego rewards of writing adult fiction, but insisted that writing children’s books had been deeply gratifying.“It’s the most fun I ever had in my life,” he said. “There’s nothing more fulfilling than hearing that you’ve turned a kid on to books. That’s enough for a career right there.”Alex Traub More

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      Mars Williams, 68, Saxophonist Who Straddled New Wave and Jazz, Dies

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      He made his name in the 1980s with the Waitresses and the Psychedelic Furs, but his roots were in the exploratory jazz of Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman.Weakened by surgery to remove a tumor near his pancreas in January, followed by six months of chemotherapy, the high-wattage saxophonist Mars Williams learned this past summer that his treatment options were nearly exhausted.But rather than resting an ailing body, he chose to return to the road. He joined the Psychedelic Furs, a band he had performed and recorded with since the 1980s, as it toured the United States.“Being on a grueling bus tour would be exhausting for anyone,” Dave Rempis, a friend and fellow saxophonist, said in a phone interview. “By the end, he was sitting in a dressing room with blankets and heaters all around him. He could barely move. But he would still go out onstage and play as hard as ever. He just wanted to be back onstage where he felt most alive.”Mr. Williams died at a hospice facility in Chicago on Nov. 20. He was 68. His brother, Paul R. Williams, said the cause was ampullary cancer.Mr. Williams was angling for a career in jazz in 1981 when the Waitresses, an idiosyncratic New York-based new wave band, came calling, dangling a newly minted record deal with Polydor. The band, marked by the deadpan vocal stylings of Patty Donahue, scored with the indelible cult hits “I Know What Boys Like” and “Christmas Wrapping,” as well as the theme song to the celebrated, if short-lived, 1980s high school sitcom “Square Pegs.”With his explosive horn lines and electric stage presence, Mr. Williams captured the spirit of the band — never mind that his grounding in the exploratory jazz of Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman made him an odd fit in the milieu of MTV in its early days, when acts could find overnight fame on the strength of cotton-candy haircuts and passable synthesizer skills.“He was a goofball, like a lot of reed players,” Chris Butler, the Waitresses’ founder and chief songwriter, said in a phone interview. “I think it has something to do with all that back pressure on their brains when they’re blowing into a brass tube, you know. But he had such massive chops. When we played live, he would improvise, solo, fill the arrangements with this magnificent stuff. And it was different every night.”No instrument, it seemed, was off limits to Mr. Williams, including bells, whistles, and pots and pans. “I had a lot of freedom,” he said in a 2019 interview with the jazz journalist Howard Mandel. “I’m up blowing Tibetan monk horn solos over their rhythms. I’m able to do all these different styles within this pop band.”From left, Tracy Wormworth, Patty Donahue, Dan Klayman and Mr. Williams of the Waitresses at the Peppermint Lounge in New York in 1981, the year Mr. Williams joined the band. Michael Macioce/Getty ImagesHe joined the Psychedelic Furs, a British post-punk band, after the Waitresses fragmented in 1983. His new group was then trading its early Velvet Underground-style rawness for a slicker brand of pop following the success of alternative hits like “Love My Way” (1982).Mr. Williams lent his wailing horn lines to the band’s 1984 album, “Mirror Moves,” although he was not featured on the album’s sleeve or in the heavily aired videos for its songs “Heaven” and “The Ghost in You.” He toured and recorded with the Psychedelic Furs until 1989. After a long hiatus, he rejoined them in 2005.Ever the musical explorer, Mr. Williams performed with many rock and pop acts, including the Killers, Billy Idol and Jerry Garcia, and earned acclaim with several Chicago jazz outfits, including his own long-running ensemble, Liquid Soul, which performed at inauguration festivities for President Bill Clinton in 1997 and earned a Grammy Award nomination for its 2000 album, “Here’s the Deal.”“Mars Williams is one of the true saxophone players — someone who takes pleasure in the sheer act of blowing the horn,” the avant-garde jazz saxophonist and composer John Zorn wrote in the liner notes to “Eftsoons,” Mr. Williams’s 1981 collaboration with the jazz composer and bandleader Hal Russell, “and there are not many saxophone players I can truthfully say this about.”Marc Charles Williams was born on May 29, 1955, in Elmhurst, Ill., the fifth of six children of Jack Williams, who owned several pharmacies and served as an Illinois state representative, and Hilda (Van Outrive) Williams, who managed the Cook County ethics department. He picked up his nickname from a mispronunciation of his first name by his baby brother, Paul.In addition to his brother, his survivors include his mother and two sisters, Michele Williams-Piotrowski and Suzy Williams. His sister Valerie Williams and his brother Jack died.A classically trained clarinetist as a youth, Mr. Williams switched to saxophone after graduating from Holy Cross High School in River Grove, Ill., in 1973 and briefly studied music theory at DePaul University in Chicago.His musical journey led him to New York City, where he worked as a bike messenger and played gigs with punk bands at the nightclub CBGB while trying to build a career in jazz before taking a detour into pop that would last until his final months.Once his pop career took off, life on the road came with familiar perils, including drug addiction, which he wrestled with for years. He spent his last two decades sober, he said in interviews, while counseling other musicians in their struggles.Mr. Rempis said he last saw Mr. Williams on Oct. 25.“He had gotten back from six weeks on the road with the Psychedelic Furs,” he said, “and ended up in the hospital for a few days. When he got out, he said, ‘You know, I might not be able to do these tours in December in Europe.’ That’s where his head was at: Where am I going now? What’s the next thing?” More

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      Michael Stone, Psychiatrist and Scholar Who Studied Evil, Dies at 90

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      He attempted to define evil by plumbing the biographies and motivations of hundreds of violent felons who had committed heinous crimes.Dr. Michael H. Stone, a psychiatrist and scholar who sought to define evil and to differentiate its manifestations from the typical behavior of people who are mentally ill, died on Dec. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.The cause was complications of a stroke he had in January, his son David said.Dr. Stone was best known to the public as the author of the book “The Anatomy of Evil” (2009) and as the host from 2006 to 2008 of the television program “Most Evil,” for which he interviewed people imprisoned for murder to determine what motivated them to engage in an evil criminal act.He ranked the acts on a 22-category scale of his creation. Modeled on Dante’s nine circles of hell, his taxonomic scale ranged from justifiable homicide to murders committed by people whose primary motivation was to torture their victims.Only human beings are capable of evil, Dr. Stone wrote in “The Anatomy of Evil,” although evil is not a characteristic that people are born with. He acknowledged that while acts of evil were difficult to define, the word “evil” was derived from “over” or “beyond,” and could apply to “certain acts done by people who clearly intended to hurt or to kill others in an excruciatingly painful way.”For an act to be evil, he wrote, it must be “breathtakingly horrible” and premeditated, inflict “wildly excessive” suffering and “appear incomprehensible, bewildering, beyond the imagination of ordinary people in the community.”“Mike’s major contribution to psychiatry was sharpening the distinction between mental illness and evil,” Dr. Allen Frances. a former student of Dr. Stone’s who is now chairman emeritus of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C., said in a phone interview.“The problem,” Dr. Frances said, “is that with every mass murderer, every crazy politician, every serial killer, the first tendency in the public mind and the media is that he’s mentally ill.” Dr. Stone, he said, helped to change that default position.Dr. Stone became known for his book “The Anatomy of Evil” and for hosting the TV program “Most Evil.”Prometheus BooksAnalyzing the biographies of more than 600 violent criminals, Dr. Stone identified two predominant personality traits: narcissism, to the point of having little or no ability to care about their victims; and aggression, in terms of exerting power over another person to inflict humiliation, suffering and death.In “The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime” (2019), a sequel to Dr. Stone’s 2009 book, he and Dr. Gary Brucato warned that since the 1960s there had been an “undeniable intensification and diversification” of evil acts committed mostly by criminals who “are not ‘sick’ in the psychiatric and legal sense, as much as psychopathic and morally depraved.”The reasons, they wrote, included greater civilian access to military weaponry; the diminution of both individual and personal responsibility, as preached by fascist and communist governments earlier in the 20th century; sexual liberation, which unleashed other inhibitions; the ease of communication on cellphones and the internet; the rise of moral relativism; and a backlash against feminism.In 2000, Dr. Stone figured in a sensational murder trial that tested the limits of doctor-patient confidentiality. He wanted to testify in the murder trial of Robert Bierenbaum, a plastic surgeon and former patient of his who was accused of killing his wife, Gail Katz-Bierenbaum, in 1985.Dr. Stone had written a letter to his patient’s wife two years before her death, advising her to live apart from her husband for her own safety. He had asked that she sign and return it, but she never did. He had also contacted Dr. Bierenbaum’s parents, with his permission.The judge ultimately excluded Dr. Stone’s testimony from the trial on the basis of professional confidentiality. But the testimony of several other witnesses about the letter contributed to Dr. Bierenbaum’s conviction.Dr. Stone identified two predominant personality traits in those who commit evil acts: narcissism and aggression.Librado Romero/The New York TimesMichael Howard Stone was born on Oct. 27, 1933, in Syracuse, N.Y., the grandson of Eastern European immigrants. His father, Moses Howard Stone, owned a wholesale paper business. His mother, Corinne (Gittleman) Stone, was a homemaker.A prodigy who learned Latin and Greek as a child, he was only 10 years old when he began seventh grade. As the youngest and smallest student in the school, as well as the only Jewish one, he formed an alliance with a 17-year-old classmate who was a boxer, his son David said: Mike would do the classmate’s homework, and the classmate would protect him from local antisemitic bullies.He entered Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., when he was 16, enrolling in a premedical curriculum but double-majoring in classics in case he was rejected by medical schools that had already met their quota of Jewish students. He enrolled in Cornell Medical School in Manhattan after graduating from Cornell in 1954 and received his medical degree in 1958.He originally studied hematology and cancer chemotherapy at Sloan Kettering Institute in Manhattan, but his mother’s chronic pain disorder prompted him to switch to neurology and then, eventually, to psychiatry. He did his residency at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he met Dr. Clarice Kestenbaum, whom he married in 1965.He is survived by two sons, David and John Stone, from that marriage, which ended in divorce in 1978; his wife, Beth Eichstaedt; his stepchildren, Wendy Turner and Thomas Penders; three grandchildren; and one great-grandson.Dr. Stone spoke 16 languages and, like a vestige from another era, customarily wore three-piece suits. He was known for his impish sense of humor: His latest book, “The Funny Bone,” published this year, is a collection of his cartoons, jokes and poems.An amateur carpenter, he built the shelves that housed his library of 11,000 books. His collection included about 60 books on Hitler — further evidence, like his memories of childhood bullying, of his yearning to define evil.As a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst and for many years a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Stone also conducted a long-term study of patients with borderline personality disorders, including those who had contemplated suicide. He concluded that, often as a result of therapy and other treatment, the condition of about two-thirds of them had improved appreciably some 25 years later.In “The New Evil,” Dr. Stone and Dr. Brucato offered a possible explanation for why “particularly heinous and spectacular crimes,” especially those committed in America and by men, had been on the rise since the 1960s. They warned against “the rise of a sort of ‘false compassion,’ in which the most relentless, psychopathic persons are sometimes viewed as ‘victims.’”The two concluded by invoking a familiar metaphor: A frog dropped in a pot of boiling water will immediately try to escape; but, if placed in cold water that is gradually heated, the frog will remain complacent until it’s too late.“It is our ardent hope that, after a period of terrible growing pains, our culture will eventually learn that true power and control come only after a lifelong process of mastering and inhibiting the self,” they wrote. “Perhaps, as a first step, we should admit that the water in our collective pot is growing disquietingly warmer, day by day.” More