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      Polito Vega, Salsa ‘King’ of New York Radio, Dies at 84

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      In a career that began in 1960, the Puerto Rico-born Mr. Vega became, one admirer said, “the architect of Hispanic radio at a global level.”Polito Vega, an exuberant announcer with a booming bass voice and a finely attuned ear whose Spanish-language shows popularized salsa music in New York in the mid-1960s, died on March 9 in North Bergen, N.J. He was 84.His death was announced by his family. No cause was given.After abandoning his dreams of becoming a singer, Mr. Vega began his broadcasting career in 1960, shortly after transplanting himself from Puerto Rico to New York. He quickly distinguished himself on air with his signature voice, his perky epigrams like “Andando, andando, andando” (“Keep going”) and his adventurous playlists. He also distinguished himself in person, at concerts and dances, with his ubiquitous Yankees cap, starched white guayabera shirt, white goatee and fuzzy sideburns.The disc jockey and recording artist Alex Sensation described Mr. Vega on Instagram as “the architect of Hispanic radio at a global level.”In an obituary in Billboard magazine, Leila Cobo, the author of “Decoding ‘Despacito’: An Oral History of Latin Music” (2020), wrote: “Vega’s importance to Latin music cannot be overstated. He was the most influential tastemaker in the country’s top market, dating back to when tropical music first became popular in the city in the 1960s and 1970s and stretching all the way to the 21st century.”He was heard on two New York AM stations, first WEVD and then WBNX, and finally on WSKQ (Mega 97.9 FM) — which began broadcasting as a full-time Spanish-language format in 1989 and has often been rated No. 1 in that market. He also became the station’s program director.When Mr. Vega began broadcasting, he recalled, he was struck by the disconnect between the comparatively temperate bolero music that dominated Latin broadcasting and the feverish salsa he was encountering in nightclubs. He was among the first radio personalities to recognize the market for salsa, identifying promising talent and mentoring gifted musicians.“It was two different worlds in those early days,” Mr. Vega said told The New York Times in 2009. “At the dance halls and up in the Catskills you would hear the Tito Puente and Machito orchestras tearing things up, but on the radio the kind of thing you heard was romantic trios, unless you were tuning in to Symphony Sid” — the prominent jazz D.J. who began playing Afro-Cuban music in the 1960s — “late at night.”The trombonist Willie Colón, who became one of salsa’s biggest stars, recalled that the first time he heard Yomo Toro, the maestro of the 10-string guitar known as the cuatro, with whom he would later collaborate on several recordings, “was on Polito’s show, playing along with listeners who would call in and sing over the telephone.”In the late 1960s, Mr. Colón got a break when he was invited to appear on “Club de la Juventud,” an “American Bandstand”-inspired TV show that Mr. Vega hosted on the Telemundo network from 1967 to 1970.Among the other musicians whose careers Mr. Vega helped promote were Celia Cruz, Tito Puente and Ismael Miranda.Mr. Vega in a photo-booth picture taken in 1957, shortly after he arrived in New York.Tim Knox for The New York TimesHipólito Vega Torres was born on Aug. 3, 1938, in Ponce, on the southern coast of Puerto Rico. His father was a bus driver, and the young Hipólito sold newspapers on the beach to supplement his family’s income.He began calling himself Polito as a teenager after winning an amateur singing competition, only to be told by the contest’s master of ceremonies that he would never become a celebrity with a name like Hipólito.In 1957 he moved to New York City, where he lived with an uncle near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and worked as a shipping clerk while trying to get a break in the music business.“I came to New York as a skinny little kid with a wisp of a mustache, hoping to make it as a singer,” he said in 2009.Johnny Pacheco, the Dominican-born flutist, bandleader, songwriter and producer, knew Mr. Vega in those days. “Even before Polito got a job, he was already an announcer,” Mr. Pacheco, who died in 2021, told The Times. “He used to go to a barbershop owned by a compadre of mine, and I remember how he was always joking and kidding around there, imitating announcers and singers and talking as if he were already on the air.”One night in 1960 he was helping a friend who was hosting “Fiesta Time,” a half-hour show on WEVD; as his friend’s sidekick, he read listeners’ names and record requests on the air. The station’s owner heard his voice and hired him as an announcer.“Radio fever got into my head,” Mr. Vega recalled.When WEVD expanded to 24-hour programming not long after that, he was offered the midnight-to-6 a.m. slot.“The show,” he later said, “was so successful and I felt that liberty to express myself that I’ve maintained to this day.”Mr. Pacheco, who co-founded Fania Records in 1964 as New York was supplanting Cuba as a center for emerging Latin music, described Mr. Vega in 2009 as “part of the whole salsa movement, one of its pillars.”“As we were building the company,” he added, “he was there with us. I’d bring him the LPs, he’d listen and say, ‘I like this song, I’m going to push it,’ and he’d play the hell out of it.”Mr. Vega later moved to WBNX, where he became known as “El Rey de la Radio” — the King of Radio — and where he met Raúl Alarcón, the senior program director. Mr. Alarcón went on to become head of the Spanish Broadcasting System, where Mr. Vega was for many years executive vice president in charge of programming.In 2009, Mr. Vega was honored at two all-star 50th-anniversary concerts at Madison Square Garden. Three years later he was celebrated at Citi Field in Queens by a lineup that included Gloria Estefan and Daddy Yankee.Mr. Vega’s wife, Judith, died last year. His survivors include two sons and a daughter. Two other sons died before him.In a statement, his family asked that his fans not mourn but “celebrate his legacy,” adding: “Polito continues to live in the music that he loved and shared, as well as the impact he left in the Latin community. Polito lived happiness, smiles and love. We would like for all his fans to live life to the fullest, as he did.” More

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      Jim Gordon, Top Rock Drummer With a Troubled Life, Dies at 77

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      He was an elite studio musician who played with A-list artists and helped write the Eric Clapton hit “Layla.” But his life was shattered by mental illness and a murder conviction.Jim Gordon, a talented but troubled drummer who was ubiquitous in the recording studios of the 1960s and ’70s and who, as a member of Eric Clapton’s band Derek and the Dominos, helped write the romantic ballad “Layla” — but who suffered from schizophrenia and spent nearly 40 years in prison, convicted of murdering his mother — died on Monday in a prison medical facility in Vacaville, Calif. He was 77.His death was announced by Robert Merlis, a publicist for Joel Selvin, the author of a forthcoming biography of Mr. Gordon. Mr. Selvin said he did not know the cause.“When people say that Jim Gordon is the greatest rock ’n’ roll drummer who ever lived,” Mr. Clapton wrote in “Clapton: The Autobiography” (2007), “I think it’s true, beyond anybody.”Tall and muscular, with a head full of curly hair, Mr. Gordon first attracted attention in 1963 on an English tour with the Everly Brothers. Over the next 15 years, he worked on studio recordings with A-list artists, including John Lennon (“Imagine”), George Harrison (“All Things Must Pass”), the Beach Boys (“Pet Sounds”), Harry Nilsson (“Nilsson Schmilsson”), Carly Simon (“No Secrets”) and Steely Dan (“Pretzel Logic”).As part of the informal group of elite Los Angeles studio musicians that came to be known as the Wrecking Crew, Mr. Gordon could book several sessions a day around the city. .He backed Joe Cocker on his “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” tour and performed with Alice Cooper and Frank Zappa, who nicknamed him Skippy for his All-American demeanor and his all-American looks. And for several months in 1971 he was a member of the British rock band Traffic.“He had a surgical, scientific skill on the drums,” Mr. Selvin said by phone, “and he had an extraordinary gift of intuition. Every time he played on a record, he brought something special to it.”After Mr. Gordon did a stint with the white soul band Delaney & Bonnie, with whom Mr. Clapton also recorded and toured, Mr. Gordon became a member of Derek and the Dominos, the band Mr. Clapton formed in 1970, along with the singer and keyboardist Bobby Whitlock and the bassist Carl Radle. The band released  only one studio album, “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs,” featuring Duane Allman on second guitar, in 1970.“Layla,” released as a single, rose to No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart the next year.    The credit for writing “Layla” went to Mr. Clapton and Mr. Gordon, but its instrumental second movement, called the “Piano Exit,” was composed by Mr. Gordon and the singer Rita Coolidge, his girlfriend at the time. As she recalled in her autobiography, “Delta Lady” (2016, with Michael Walker), Mr. Gordon created a melody, to which she responded with a countermelody “that answered and resolved the tension of Jim’s chords and built to a dramatic crescendo.”Mr. Gordon and Ms. Coolidge made a cassette demo of what they intended to be a separate song and gave it to Mr. Clapton. Ms. Coolidge did not know what became of it until she heard “Layla” on the radio and learned that she had received no credit.  She was infuriated.“What they’d clearly done,” she wrote, “ was take the song Jim and I had written, jettisoned the lyrics, and tacked it on to the end of Eric’s song.”When Mr. Clapton released the album “Unplugged” in 1992, his acoustic version of “Layla” peaked at No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. When “Layla” received the Grammy Award for best rock song the next year, Mr. Clapton and Mr. Gordon shared the award as songwriters, but Ms. Coolidge’s role received no acknowledgment.Derek and the Dominos around the time they recorded their one and only album, in 1970. From left: Eric Clapton, Bobby Whitlock, Mr. Gordon and Carl Radle.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesJames Beck Gordon was born on July 14, 1945, in Elizabeth, N.J., and grew up in Sherman Oaks, Calif. His father, John, was an accountant. His mother, Osa Marie (Beck) Gordon, was a pediatric nurse.As a boy, Jim made a set of drums from garbage cans and played them until his parents bought him a drum kit. He started performing professionally as a teenager. In 1963, he was playing with Frankie Knight and the Jesters when Joey Paige, the bassist for the Everly Brothers, scouted him at a club on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Soon Jim, at just 17, was off to England with the Everly Brothers for a tour that also included Little Richard and Bo Diddley.At some point during the next 15 years, Mr. Gordon started hearing voices — most menacingly and hauntingly, that of his mother — and displaying erratic behavior. He interrupted a recording session by telling his fellow musicians, “You’re the devil”; he punched Ms. Coolidge in the eye with such force that she was lifted off the floor and slammed into a wall.The sound of his mother’s insistent voice in his head tormented him, causing him pain and leaving his unable to play his drums, according to an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1994. He was treated at hospitals. Work dried up, but he was able to get by on the royalties from “Layla.”“The symptoms were getting so powerful, starting about 1975 and 1976,” said Mr. Selvin, a former pop music critic for The San Francisco Chronicle. “It was an extraordinary battle. Command hallucinations are the most extreme in all of mental illness.”Mr. Gordon was also taking drugs. “I guess I was an alcoholic,” he told Rolling Stone in 1985. “Before, I was drinking every night, but I wasn’t getting up in the morning for a drink; I would put a needle in my arm. When I stopped taking the heroin, I began to drink all day.”On the night of June 3, 1983, he attacked his mother at her home in North Hollywood, first banging her head with a hammer and  then stabbing her with a knife. “When I remember the crime, it’s like a dream,” he told The Inquirer. “I can remember going through what happened in that space and time, and it seems kind of detached, like I was going through it on some other plane. It didn’t seem real.”He told Rolling Stone that he had felt that he was “being guided like a zombie.”He was found guilty of second-degree murder. Despite having been diagnosed as an acute paranoid schizophrenic, he did not qualify for an insanity defense based on California law at the time. He was sentenced in 1984 to 16 years to life and later denied parole several times.“This is not a murder case,” Scott Furstman, Mr. Gordon’s lawyer, told The Los Angeles Times after the verdict. “This case is a tragedy.”Mr. Gordon is survived by his daughter, Amy, and his brother, John Jr. His marriages to Jill Barabe and Renee Armand ended in divorce. More

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      Jerry Samuels, Creator of a Novelty Hit, Is Dead at 84

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      Under the name Napoleon XIV, he recorded “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” and, to almost everyone’s surprise, it stormed the charts in 1966.Jerry Samuels, who under the name Napoleon XIV recorded one of the 1960s’ strangest and most successful novelty songs, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!,” died on March 10 in Phoenixville, Pa. He was 84.His son Jason said the cause was complications of dementia and Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Samuels had had modest success as a songwriter and was working as an engineer at Associated Recording Studios in New York when, in 1966, he and a fellow engineer, Nat Schnapf, set a bit of doggerel that Mr. Samuels had written to — well, “music” may not be quite the right word, since the song consists of Mr. Samuels rhythmically talking over a backing of tambourine, snare and bass drums, and clapping.The narrator laments that he has been left by a loved one and has been driven insane as a result:They’re coming to take me away, ha-haaaThey’re coming to take me awayHo-ho, hee-hee, ha-ha, to the funny farmWhere life is beautiful all the timeAnd I’ll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coatsAnd they’re coming to take me away, ha-ha.Only in the last verse does the listener learn that it wasn’t a woman who left the now crazed gent, but a dog.Through recording studio manipulation that was innovative for the time, Mr. Samuels’s voice morphed into high-pitched lunacy as the choruses went along.In a memoir, Mr. Samuels wrote that he wanted to use a stage name for the record and a drummer friend suggested Napoleon. Someone else suggested adding some kind of appendage.“I picked XIV strictly because I liked how it looked next to Napoleon,” Mr. Samuels wrote. “Rumors were rampant about hidden meanings, but there were none, at least not consciously.”The record was released by Warner Bros. in July 1966 (the flip side was the song played backward), but no station would play it until WABC in New York, one of the nation’s leading Top 40 stations, broadcast an excerpt as a gag, Mr. Samuels wrote. Listeners began calling in wanting to hear the whole thing.After that, stations everywhere picked up on it; news accounts of the day said it sold half a million copies in five days. Britain caught the fever, too.“The Beatles don’t usually find it hard work hanging on to the top spot,” The Derby Evening Telegraph of England wrote in August 1966, when “Yellow Submarine” was No. 1 on the newspaper’s record chart, “but in Derby’s Top Twenty this week they face tough competition from the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ and Napoleon XIV’s incredibly sick ‘They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!’”The record was too sick for some: The influential Detroit-area station CKLW, among others, stopped playing it after receiving many complaints that it mocked mental illness.“Those naysayers kept it up,” Mr. Samuels wrote, “and the record rapidly spiraled off the charts.”But not before peaking at No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100. The song has been covered by various artists, and in the 1980s Mr. Samuels recorded a follow-up, “They’re Coming to Get Me Again, Ha-Haaa!” It drew little attention, but it did yield a funny story that Mr. Samuels recounted in the memoir.When he recorded the original, he had asked friends to show up at the studio to do the clapping part, but only two did. Wanting a bigger clapping sound, he suggested that they drop their pants and slap their thighs, to double the noise. They declined, and he and Mr. Schnapf ended up using overdubbing to beef up the sound. But when he recorded the sequel, a dozen clappers turned out.“Some were in shorts,” he wrote, “others lowered their trousers, but the whole group was slapping their tender thighs in that little studio.”Jerrold Laurence Samuels was born on May 3, 1938, in Manhattan to Joseph and Lillian (Wandler) Samuels. He grew up in the Bronx.His parents had bought a piano for his older brother.“He never took to it, but I did,” Mr. Samuels wrote. “My parents said that I began playing recognizable tunes at around 3 years old.”By his teenage years he had begun writing songs and shopping them to publishers. One in particular had potential, especially after the lyricist Sol Parker helped him polish it: “To Ev’ry Girl — To Ev’ry Boy.” It was recorded in 1954 by Johnnie Ray, a teenage-idol singer.Another of his songs, “The Shelter of Your Arms,” was recorded by Sammy Davis Jr., who made it the title track of a 1964 album.In an interview quoted on Wayne Jancik’s website about one-hit wonders, Mr. Samuels said that nine years before recording “They’re Coming to Take Me Away,” he spent eight months in a psychiatric hospital.“When I did the record, I knew it wouldn’t offend mental patients,” he said. “I would have laughed at it if I had heard it when I was in the hospital.”His first marriage, to Rosemary Djivre, ended in divorce in 1968. He had a relationship with Petra Vesters from 1973 to 1987. In addition to his son Jason, from his relationship with Ms. Vesters (now Petra DeWall), he is survived by his second wife, Bobbie (Simon) Samuels, whom he married in 1996; a son from his first marriage, Scott; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Another son, Eric, died in 1991.Mr. Samuels, who lived in King of Prussia, Pa., outside Philadelphia, said he made one public appearance costumed as Napoleon XIV but found the experience humiliating and didn’t repeat it. He had a long history of playing piano in bars and other venues, his son Jason said, including senior centers.“He knew all the old standards from George Gershwin and Irving Berlin,” Jason Samuels said in a phone interview. “They loved him.”He was getting so many bookings that he saw a business opportunity. In 1984, he formed the Jerry Samuels Agency to book other acts into retirement communities and other small venues. Bobbie Samuels joined him in the enterprise, which, Jason Samuels said, had booked some 30,000 shows in the Philadelphia area by the time they retired in 2021. More

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      Lewis Spratlan, 82, Dies; Took Winding Route to Music Pulitzer

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      His opera sat unproduced for decades. Then a piece of it garnered one of the field’s top prizes. Then it sat some more.Lewis Spratlan won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in music for a chunk of an opera that he had completed in 1978 and that no one had ever staged.Then he waited another decade before someone actually put the full opera in front of an audience.“It was awful, not hearing this piece,” he told The New York Times in 2010, when his long wait was about to come to an end. “It’s like a woman being pregnant forever.”The opera, “Life Is a Dream,” with a libretto by James Maraniss, was finally staged by the Santa Fe Opera in July 2010, 35 years after Mr. Spratlan and Mr. Maraniss had begun writing it.Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the premiere in The Times, called it “an important opera, the rare philosophical work that holds the stage and gives singing actors real characters to grapple with.”Mr. Spratlan, whose long road to the Pulitzer and the premiere also included his self-financing the concert that led to the prize, died on Feb. 9 at a hospice center in Mount Laurel, N.J. He was 82. His wife, Melinda (Kessler) Spratlan, said the cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.Mr. Spratlan, who taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts for 36 years, composed works for large ensembles and small ones, as well as solo pieces. He even invented an instrument, which he called the terpsiptomaton and which incorporated metal coils and rods, piano strings and ball bearings.“When a key is depressed, the ball bearings are released and fall, hitting the rods and the piano strings,” The Boston Globe explained in 1980. Amherst magazine described it as “a cross between a harpsichord and a pinball machine.”Both the instrument and a piece he composed for it, “Coils,” were given their world premiere in a concert in Amherst in 1980. The instrument seems not to have caught on, but the effort showed Mr. Spratlan’s penchant for whimsy in his works.In the chamber piece “When Crows Gather” (1986), which was inspired in part by the arrival of a throng of crows outside his studio window in Massachusetts, he had the musicians approximate wintry winds and end with, as Mr. Tommasini put it in The Times, “what could be called the ‘Crow Squawk Toccata.’” In 2002, Allan Kozinn of The Times described another chamber piece, “Zoom,” this way:“He begins by having the players alternate sharp, loud chordal bursts with all manner of breathy vocalizations, including sighs, heavy breathing, gasping and panting. Eventually the musical content sweeps away the sound effects, only to career between slidey modernist textures and fleeting hints of big-band jazz. A touch of what seems to be the influence of Frank Zappa streams through the last two movements as well, and from there it’s a short step to cartoonish sound effects.”Michael Theodore, a composer who teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder, studied under Mr. Spratlan at Amherst. “Composing music was always an adventure for Lew,” he said by email, “and he was restlessly and relentlessly inventive.“His compositions have a remarkable range,” he added, “filled with humor in one moment and heartbreaking tenderness in the next. Lew’s musical voice was entirely his own but often contained clever, subtle nods to the music of the past.”The Santa Fe Opera’s production of Mr. Spratlan’s “Life is a Dream.”Ken Howard, via Santa Fe OperaMeriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was born on Sept. 5, 1940, in Miami. His father was a salesman, and his mother, Wilma (Howell) Spratlan, taught piano.Mr. Spratlan was still a student at Coral Gables High School in Florida when his oboe playing on a piece by Handel at a 1955 recital caught the ear of Doris Reno of The Miami Herald.“Lewis Spratlan, teenaged oboist, distinguished himself in the Handel work,” she wrote, “which he performed with his teacher, Dominique deLerma, first oboe, and his mother, Wilma Spratlan, piano.”Mr. Spratlan earned a bachelor’s degree in music composition and theory at Yale in 1962 and a master’s in composition there in 1965. Before arriving at Amherst in 1970, he taught at Pennsylvania State University and conducted ensembles there, at Tanglewood and elsewhere.“Life Is a Dream” is based on a 17th-century play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca about a prince banished at birth by his father. The play was brought to his attention by Herta Glaz, a retired mezzo-soprano who was director of the New Haven Opera Theater in Connecticut. In 1975, that company commissioned him to write the opera, and he recruited Mr. Maraniss, a colleague at Amherst who died last year, as librettist. But by the time they finished the opera, the New Haven company had gone out of business, leaving Mr. Spratlan and his music publisher to shop it to opera companies in the United States and abroad, without success.“We blanket-bombed them,” Mr. Spratlan told The Albuquerque Journal in 2010. “I didn’t have a single response.”So he set it aside for some two decades. But then he scraped together $75,000 to have the second of its three acts performed, in Amherst and then at Harvard — and recorded. It was that recording that he submitted to the Pulitzer board. It is not uncommon for composers to nominate themselves for the music prize, but Mr. Spratlan didn’t have high expectations.“I couldn’t imagine awarding the prize to a fragment of an opera,” he told the Albuquerque newspaper. “So I was startled.”In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1966, Mr. Spratlan is survived by two sons, Jacob Young Man Spratlan and Daniel Meriwether Spratlan; a daughter, Lydia Ji Yung DeBona; and two granddaughters.“Lew Spratlan was an American original, a hands-on musician, and an inspiring teacher,” an Amherst colleague and fellow composer, Eric Sawyer, said by email. “His creativity only increased with age, with some of his finest work coming in the past few years.”Professor Theodore said that just last year Mr. Spratlan composed a piano and chamber ensemble work, “Invasion,” in response to the invasion of Ukraine. He recalled unusual Spratlan teaching moments from years before.“We’d be hiking through the woods in Amherst while talking about musical ideas, and Lew would begin improvising with his voice to demonstrate a particular concept,” Professor Theodore said. “Brilliant, intricate, and soulful music would come pouring out. Then he’d finish it off with a silly little flourish because he also had a playful, mischievous sense of humor and loved making people laugh.” More

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      Bobby Caldwell, Silky-Voiced R&B Crooner, Dies at 71

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      His much-covered 1978 hit “What You Won’t Do for Love” launched him on a prolific career that spanned decades and genres.Bobby Caldwell, a singer-songwriter whose sultry R&B hit “What You Won’t Do for Love” propelled his debut album to double-platinum status in 1978 and was later covered by chart-toppers like Boyz II Men and Michael Bolton, died on Tuesday at his home in Great Meadows, N.J. He was 71.The cause was long-term complications of a toxic reaction to the antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones, his wife, Mary Caldwell, wrote on Twitter.Over his four-decade career, Mr. Caldwell swerved freely among genres, exploring R&B, reggae, soft rock and smooth jazz, as well as standards from the Great American Songbook. He recorded more than a dozen albums under his own name.While his skills as an old-school crooner — not to mention his trademark fedora — were convincing enough to land him a gig as Frank Sinatra in a Las Vegas revue called “The Rat Pack Is Back!” in the 1990s, he was best known as a silky-voiced master of so-called blue-eyed soul.“I was in an elevator once and a guy said, ‘Thanks a lot, Bobby, I just lost a bet,’” he recalled in a 2019 interview with Richmond magazine. “Apparently he bet a lot of money that I was Black, and he was wrong.”He was also a highly regarded songwriter. His songs were recorded by Chicago, Boz Scaggs, Neil Diamond and Al Jarreau, among others. “The Next Time I Fall,” which he wrote with Paul Gordon, became a hit for Peter Cetera and Amy Grant, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1986. In 2020, Billboard included the song on a list of the 25 greatest love songs.Success, however, did not come overnight.Robert Hunter Caldwell was born on Aug. 15, 1951, in Manhattan and spent much of his youth in Miami. His parents, Bob and Carolyn Caldwell, were entertainers who hosted two early television variety shows, “42nd Street Review” in New York and “Suppertime” in Pittsburgh, before moving the family to Miami.“I was a show business baby,” he said in a recent video interview. By age 17, he was writing and performing his own material. He soon moved to Las Vegas, where he performed with a group called Katmandu that cut an album in 1971. In the early 1970s, he got a turn in the spotlight as a rhythm guitarist for Little Richard.He spent the next several years trying to make a name for himself, playing in bars and recording demos. He finally found a taste of stardom in his own right with the success of “What You Won’t Do for Love.” That success continued in the early 1980s with albums like “Cat in the Hat” (1980) and “Carry On” (1982).While his star faded later in the ’80s, he continued to record and perform for decades. In 2015, he notched a comeback with his album “Cool Uncle,” which he made with the renowned R&B producer Jack Splash. The album crossed generational lines, featuring the guest artists Deniece Williams, CeeLo Green and Jessie Ware, and it climbed the Billboard contemporary jazz chart. Rolling Stone called the album “2015’s smartest retro-soul revival.”Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Caldwell also got an unlikely career boost with the rise of hip-hop: The rappers Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G. and Common all sampled his songs.Such a crossover might have struck some as unlikely, but not Mr. Caldwell. “This business is constantly in a state of flux,” he said in a 2005 interview with NPR. He added that R&B radio “is not what it was” in his early days, but that rappers were branching into what he called “adult urban, which is more of the R&B that you and I cut our teeth on.”“As it constantly changes,” he said, “you kind of have to keep reinventing yourself.” More

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      Spot, Record Producer Who Captured the Fury of 1980s Punk, Dies at 71

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      A lifelong jazz aficionado, he changed course to produce bands like Black Flag and Hüsker Dü for the influential SST label.Glen Lockett, the influential record producer who, working under the name Spot, helped define the jet-turbine sound of American punk rock in the 1980s, recording groundbreaking albums by Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Minutemen and many others, died on March 4 in Sheboygan, Wis. He was 71.His death, in a nursing home, was announced in a Facebook post by Joe Carducci, a former co-owner of SST Records, the iconoclastic Hermosa Beach, Calif., label where Mr. Lockett made his name. Mr. Lockett had been hoping for a lung transplant in recent years after a long battle with pulmonary fibrosis, and he had spent most of the last three months in a hospital after a stroke.As the in-house producer for SST from 1979 to 1985, Mr. Lockett controlled the mixing board on landmark recordings that helped bring American punk from deafening gigs in garages and basements to the mainstream — the college-radio mainstream, at least.He produced or engineered more than 100 albums for SST, including classics like Black Flag’s “Damaged” (1981), Descendents’ “Milo Goes to College” (1982), Meat Puppets’ first album (1982), Minutemen’s “What Makes a Man Start Fires?” (1982) and Hüsker Dü’s “Zen Arcade” (1984).In part because SST had limited budgets in the early days, but also because of bands’ wishes and Mr. Lockett’s production philosophy, he typically opted to record live in the studio — all members playing at once — with minimal studio effects, instead of the widespread industry practice of recording one instrument at a time and using overdubs and effects like digital delay and outboard reverb.As a result, he was able to translate to vinyl the raw, immediate howl of punk that, in a live setting, sent bodies crashing and elbows flying.“Our first time in the studio with him was for our first Minutemen record, ‘Paranoid Time,’ a seven-song, seven-inch EP, in July of 1980,” Mike Watt, the band’s bassist and co-founder, recalled in an email. “He recorded and mixed us that one night. I think we started at midnight and ended a few hours later.”Mr. Lockett in Hermosa Beach, Calif., in the late 1970s. An avid roller skater, he used to wheel around Los Angeles hanging fliers for gigs by bands he worked with on the SST label.via Pacific Coast Gallery“Spotski,” Mr. Watt added, “always was about trying to capture what was us, like with this record — kind of like a ‘gig in front of the microphones’ trip, where he big-time said he didn’t want to get in the way of us trying to bring what we had that made us what we were.”Mr. Lockett’s sensibility dovetailed with the attitude of SST, which the rock critic Byron Coley once described as “archly xenophobic,” referring to the label’s revulsion for the highly processed sounds being stamped out by the major labels in the hit factories of Los Angeles.“There was a general dismissal of what rock radio had become, so Spot was bent on capturing what the band was putting out, without softening, buffering or tampering with it,” Mr. Carducci said in a phone interview.The label’s storm-the-barricades ethos might not have resulted in chart-topping hits, but SST made waves in the industry, growing from “a cash-strapped, cop-hassled storefront operation to easily the most influential and popular underground indie of the ’80s,” as the music journalist Michael Azerrad wrote a 2001 article for The New York Times.Mr. Lockett with D. Boon of the band Minutemen in the 1980s. In the studio, the band’s Mike Watt said, Mr. Lockett “was about trying to capture what was us.”Naomi PetersenWhile he was committed to the punk cause — an avid roller skater, he used to wheel around Los Angeles hanging fliers for gigs by SST bands — he never let the do-it-yourself minimalism espoused by many in the genre limit his musical scope.He was a skilled guitarist who also played clarinet, banjo, mandolin, drums and even bagpipes; he often joined Minutemen onstage, Mr. Watt said, to play his clarinet during the band’s jams between songs.Before he fell into the nascent Southern California punk-rock scene in the late 1970s, Mr. Lockett had been performing, recording and writing about jazz for a local newspaper in Hermosa Beach, home of the Lighthouse, a nightclub long considered a mecca of West Coast jazz.A musical omnivore, he later developed a fascination for traditional Irish music and started a small label of his own, No Auditions, for which he recorded a number of eclectic, Irish-inflected solo albums after he moved from Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, in 1986. He was also a photographer, and published a book of his work, “Sound of Two Eyes Opening,” in 2014.“It seems that the whole history of punk rock, and especially the stuff that happened in L.A., is based on a lot of myths,” he said in a 2018 interview published on the Red Bull Music Academy website. “There were a lot more influences and ideas about life and culture that most people either don’t have a clue about, or aren’t really all that willing to accept.”Mr. Lockett at a club in Wyoming in 2006.Jan LeonhardtGlenn Michael Lockett, who later dropped an “n” from his first name, was born on July 1, 1951, in Los Angeles, the youngest of two children of Claybourne Lockett (who went by Buddy), a furrier who later worked as a clerk in the post office of the Ambassador Hotel, and Cynthia (Katz) Lockett, an office manager at a local music academy. His father had served in World War II as one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen.He is survived by his sister, Cynthia Cyrus.Growing up in Leimert Park in South Central Los Angeles, Mr. Lockett developed an early love of post-bop jazz.He got his first guitar at 12 and was soon playing along with British Invasion, Motown and surf-rock hits. As his musical vocabulary developed, he eventually became fascinated with the musically ambitious progressive rock of the early 1970s. At one point he also unsuccessfully auditioned for the genre-hopping rock auteur Captain Beefheart.By the mid-’70s, however, Mr. Lockett, like a lot of future punk figures, had grown weary of prog, with its pomposity and self-consciously elaborate compositions and arrangements. After he helped friends build a recording studio called Media Arts in Hermosa Beach, he began recording jazz groups, and was inspired by the direct and unfiltered studio approach of the combos he recorded.Jazz musicians “didn’t want anything fancy,” he said in the Red Bull interview. “They just wanted to get the things down, and they didn’t care if someone played a bad note or not.”That spirit carried over to his next musical chapter, which began when he was working as a waiter at a vegetarian restaurant. It was there that he met Greg Ginn, who would later be a founder of both Black Flag and SST Records.Despite their differing musical influences, Mr. Lockett would occasionally jam with Mr. Ginn and the other members of a band called Panic, which later evolved into Black Flag.When a Black Flag concert at a park in nearby Manhattan Beach erupted into a melee, Mr. Lockett knew he wanted to produce the band. “That show was just so crazy,” he told Red Bull Academy. “I said, ‘I got to record this band before they get killed.’” More

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      in Movies

      Robert Blake, ‘Baretta’ Star Acquitted in Wife’s Murder, Dies at 89

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      His film and TV career began with “Our Gang” comedies and was highlighted by a performance as a mass killer in “In Cold Blood.” But he led a tempestuous life.Robert Blake, an actor whose career portraying gritty characters like the television detective Tony Baretta was eclipsed by his trial and acquittal in the murder of his wife in 2001, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89.The cause was long-term heart disease, a niece, Noreen Austin, said.Mr. Blake began performing at 2, when his father would take him and his brother and sister to New Jersey parks to dance for money. By age 5 he was a regular in the “Our Gang” film comedies.He went on to act in scores of films and on hundreds of television shows, all the while making regular visits to late-night talk shows, where he delighted in spouting flagrantly unorthodox views and savagely mocking his own career. He earned a reputation as a Hollywood enfant terrible. He insulted producers, punched a director, fought with fellow actors, abused alcohol and drugs, and sometimes went for years without work.He nonetheless became a television star in the late 1970s as Baretta, a detective who lived in a run-down hotel, had a pet cockatoo named Fred and used disguises — waiter, wino, janitor, barber — to chase bad guys. His catchphrase, “You can take dat to da bank,” became well known.One of Mr. Blake’s most acclaimed roles was as the mass murderer Perry Smith in “In Cold Blood,” the 1967 film adaptation of Truman Capote’s true-crime book. In an interview with Playboy in 1977, Mr. Blake explained that he had sought the part to explore a question that nagged him.“Everybody knows what a murderer is a millionth of a second after he pulls the trigger,” he said. “But what is he a millionth of a second before he pulls the trigger?”A jury — and a transfixed American public — pondered whether he could answer that question during his trial, from late 2004 to March 2005, in the shooting death of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley.The details of the case could have come from a pulp novel. Witnesses portrayed Mr. Blake as trolling jazz clubs for women, then wooing them in the back seat of his truck. Ms. Bakley was alleged to be a petty criminal who sold nude pictures of herself to lonely men through the mail. She had nine former husbands and a dozen aliases and was on probation for fraud, according to court testimony.By 1999 she was in Los Angeles. She met Mr. Blake at a nightclub and, as both acknowledged, had sex with him in his car that night. At the time, she was having a sexual relationship with Christian Brando, the eldest son of Marlon Brando. When she gave birth to a daughter, tests revealed that the father was Mr. Blake and not Mr. Brando, whom she had first identified.Mr. Blake, whose marriage to the actress Sondra Kerr ended in divorce in 1983 after 22 years, said he had agreed to marry Ms. Bakley for the good of their daughter, Rose. According to trial testimony, the marriage was strained, and Ms. Bakley lived in a separate house on his property. Witnesses said he referred to his wife as a “pig” and spoke of wanting to “snuff” her.Robert Blake during his trial in the murder of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, in 2003. He was acquitted.Pool photo by Al SeibOn May 4, 2001, Ms. Bakley, 44, was found dead from a gunshot to her head in her husband’s Dodge Stealth, parked outside an Italian restaurant in the Studio City section of Los Angeles, where the couple had just dined. Mr. Blake said he was not there when she was shot; he said he had gone back to the restaurant to retrieve a gun he had left in a booth.That gun, it was determined, was not the murder weapon; one found in a nearby dumpster was.By April 2002, the police had nonetheless gathered enough evidence to charge Mr. Blake with “murder with special circumstances,” a capital offense. He was also charged with soliciting movie stuntmen to do the killing for him.After he pleaded not guilty to all charges, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office announced that it would not seek the death penalty. Mr. Blake was initially denied bail and spent 11 months in jail, until March 2003, when he was granted bail, set at $1.5 million, which he posted, allowing him to remain free for almost two years while he awaited trial.On March 16, 2005, after a three-month trial in which the stuntmen testified to having been solicited by Mr. Blake to kill Ms. Bakley, the jury decided that the prosecutors had not proved Mr. Blake’s guilt. In interviews afterward, jurors said the stuntmen had not been credible because they had admitted to being drug addicts. Mr. Blake said three restaurant workers had seen him return to get his gun, but he did not produce them.Ms. Bakley’s family later sued Mr. Blake in civil court for wrongfully causing her death. They won a $30 million judgment, which, after Mr. Blake appealed, was cut in half on the grounds that Ms. Bakley had been earning her living by illegal means. Mr. Blake filed for bankruptcy in 2006.Michael James Vijencio Gubitosi was born on Sept. 18, 1933, in Nutley, N.J. His childhood, as he later described it, was a Dickensian one whose horrors began before he was born. He told CNN in 2012 that his mother had twice tried to abort him with a coat hanger. In a series of interviews in 1992 and 1993, he said his father, who worked for a can manufacturer, had been an alcoholic who forced him to eat from the floor, locked him in closets and sexually abused him.When Michael was 2, his father enlisted him and his two older preschool siblings to dance for money in parks as “the Three Little Hillbillies” while the father played a guitar. “It was either doing that or stealing milk bottles off other people’s porches,” Mr. Blake said in a 1959 interview with The Los Angeles Times.Inspired by the success of child stars like Shirley Temple, his father in 1938 took his family to Hollywood. Michael was hired as an extra for the “Our Gang” shorts, later shown on television as “The Little Rascals.” When another child actor flubbed a line, Michael told the director, “I can do that.”From left, Robert Blake; Billie Thomas, known as Buckwheat; and Carl Switzer, known as Alfalfa, in ”Bubbling Troubles,” an “Our Gang” short made in 1940.MGMHe could, and he was eventually cast as a lead character, Mickey. He was billed as Mickey Gubitosi in most of the “Our Gang” shorts, and as Bobby Blake in the last few. He acquired the stage name Robert Blake in 1956.After the “Our Gang” series ended in 1944, he appeared in more than 70 films over the next decade, establishing himself as a tough, fast-talking young character actor with a mischievous grin. In “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” starring Humphrey Bogart, he was the Mexican boy who sold Bogart the lucky lottery ticket that set the plot in motion.Mr. Blake was thrown out of five schools before finally graduating. He neglected to register for the draft, and the penalty was immediate conscription into the Army. He was stationed in Alaska. After his discharge, he applied to study at the Actors Studio in New York with the acting guru Lee Strasberg. Strasberg, he said, advised against pursuing an acting career.Returning to Hollywood, Mr. Blake found work as a stuntman. He continued to act in movies, including “PT 109” (1962), about John F. Kennedy’s wartime experience in the Pacific; he played one of Kennedy’s fellow sailors.Robert Blake, left, and Scott Wilson in “In Cold Blood” in 1967.Columbia Pictures CorporationHis breakthrough movie was “In Cold Blood,” which received excellent reviews, as did he. But his next few movies struggled at the box office, and after filming “Busting” (1974), a detective drama in which he starred alongside Elliott Gould, he considered suicide, he told Playboy, and checked himself into a hospital for psychiatric treatment.Mr. Blake returned to television in January 1975 to take the title role in the ABC detective series “Baretta,” a retooled version of “Toma,” which had starred Tony Musante. When Mr. Musante quit after the 1973-74 season, the show was taken off the air, but ABC decided to reactivate it as a midseason replacement and asked Mr. Blake to be the star. He accepted, even though he made it clear in interviews that he considered himself above series television. He proceeded to make many suggestions to shape the renamed show to his liking.“I could have my name all over ‘Baretta,’ but I’ve never taken credit for writing or directing any of the shows,” he told Playboy. Mr. Blake won a 1975 Emmy and a 1976 Golden Globe for his performance, and “Baretta” was briefly a Top 10 hit, but it was canceled in 1978.Speaking of Mr. Blake in an interview with People magazine in 2002, Stephen J. Cannell, the creator of “Baretta,” said: “Complex doesn’t even begin to capture his personality. If you were in business with him, you just had to strap in really tight, because you were going to get lurched around a lot.”Mr. Blake claimed to be inspired by daredevils like circus high-wire performers and rodeo riders.“You get on a high wire without a net,” he said in the 2012 CNN interview. “You get on a bull and they open that goddamn chute and there’s nobody in the universe but you and God. And that’s where I’m comfortable, doing something that’s so scary that I can’t sleep at night.”Mr. Blake became a favorite on late-night talk shows, particularly “The Tonight Show,” where be made fun of himself in his tough-guy Baretta voice and gesticulated wildly with an unlit cigarette.Prodded by Johnny Carson, he excitedly shared his positive views on duck-hunting and negative ones on rodents and insulted Orson Welles for being overweight. Welles replied that he could perhaps be thin, but that Mr. Blake would always be stupid.Appearing in a number of television movies, Mr. Blake was praised for his performance as the Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa in “Blood Feud” in 1983. In 1985, he created the NBC series “Hell Town,” in which he starred as a tough-talking slum priest. Though Mr. Blake needed the income from the show to pay for his recent divorce, he walked away from the job, saying he was emotionally exhausted.He sought solace sleeping in his van, parked in the Hollywood Hills, and worked with a therapist on his childhood traumas. He returned to acting in 1993 in the made-for-TV movie “Judgment Day: The John List Story,” about a real-life New Jersey accountant who murdered his wife, mother and three children.To get that part, Mr. Blake had offered to forgo his $250,000 salary until the film was finished. He was paid in full. His last acting job was in “Lost Highway” (1997), a psychological thriller directed by David Lynch.Mr. Blake is survived by two children from his first marriage, Noah and Delinah Blake, and Rose Blake, his daughter with Ms. Bakley.After his trial, Mr. Blake told CNN, he grew a beard, lived on Twinkies and liked to wander into pool halls for a game of nine ball. “I was born lonely, I live lonely, and I’ll die lonely,” he said.April Rubin More

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      in Theater

      Topol, Star of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Onscreen and Onstage, Dies at 87

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      Wide acclaim for his portrayal of Tevye helped make him, according to one newspaper, “Israel’s most famous export since the Jaffa orange.”Topol, the Israeli actor who took on the role of the patriarch Tevye, the soulful shtetl milkman at the center of “Fiddler on the Roof,” in his late 20s and reprised the role for decades, died on Thursday at his home in Tel Aviv. He was 87.His son, Omer Topol, confirmed the death. He said in an email that his father had Alzheimer’s disease, which had caused his health to deteriorate over the last year.Topol — born Chaim Topol, he used only his surname throughout much of his professional life — came to international renown heading the cast of the 1971 film version of “Fiddler.” Its director, Norman Jewison, had chosen Topol, then a little-known stage actor, over Zero Mostel, who had created the part on Broadway.The film, for which Topol earned an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award, made him a star. For much of the late 20th century he would be, in the words of The Jerusalem Post in 2012, “Israel’s most famous export since the Jaffa orange.”Topol reprised Tevye in stage productions worldwide for decades, including a 1990 Broadway revival for which he received a Tony nomination. By 2009, he had, by his own estimate, played the character more than 3,500 times.His other films include “Galileo,” the director Joseph Losey’s 1975 adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s stage play, in which he played the title role; “Flash Gordon” (1980), in which he portrayed the scientist Hans Zarkov; and the James Bond film “For Your Eyes Only” (1981), starring Roger Moore, in which he played the Greek smuggler Milos Columbo.On television, Topol played the Polish Jew Berel Jastrow in the 1983 mini-series “The Winds of War” and reprised the role for its sequel, “War and Remembrance,” broadcast in 1988 and 1989.Topol as Tevye in the movie version of “Fiddler on the Roof.” The character is a weary, tradition-bound Everyman who argues with God, bemoans his lot as the penurious father of five daughters and lives warily amid the pogroms of Czarist Russia. United Archives/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesBut it was indisputably for Tevye — the weary, tradition-bound Everyman who argues with God, bemoans his lot as the penurious father of five daughters and lives increasingly warily amid the pogroms of early-20th-century Czarist Russia — that Topol remained best known.“Like Yul Brynner in ‘The King and I’ and Rex Harrison in ‘My Fair Lady,’ Topol has become almost synonymous with his character,” United Press International said in 1989. Over the years, Topol was asked repeatedly whether he ever tired of playing the role.“Let’s face it, it’s one of the best parts ever written for a male actor in the musical theater,” he told The Boston Globe in 1989, when he had played Tevye a mere 700 times or so. “It takes you to a wide range of emotions, happiness to sadness, anger to love.”Throughout his many Tevyes, some critics taxed Topol’s acting as larger than life to the point of self-parody. But most praised his soulful mien and his resonant bass baritone, heard in enduring numbers like “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Tradition” and “Sunrise, Sunset.”By the time Mr. Jewison began work on the “Fiddler” film, Tevye was one of the most coveted roles in Hollywood. The Broadway show, based on stories by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem — with book by Joseph Stein, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and music by Jerry Bock — had been a smash hit since it opened in 1964. It won nine Tony Awards, including best musical, best direction of a musical (for Jerome Robbins) and, for Mr. Mostel, best actor in a musical.“The casting of it was the most agonizing thing I ever went through,” Mr. Jewison told NPR in 2001.Besides Mr. Mostel, aspirants to the screen role included Rod Steiger, Danny Kaye and — in a scenario that can be contemplated only with difficulty — Frank Sinatra.Mr. Jewison’s casting choice was all the more striking in that Topol had not wanted the part in the first place.Topol as the title character in the 1975 film version of Bertolt Brecht’s biographical play “Galileo.” Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesChaim Topol was born in Tel Aviv on Sept. 9, 1935. His parents, Jacob Topol, a plasterer, and Rel Goldman Topol, a seamstress, had fled shtetlach in Eastern Europe to settle in Palestine in the early 1930s. There, Jacob Topol became a member of the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization.As a youth, Chaim studied commercial art and trained for a career as a printer. But in 1953, while he was serving in the Israeli Army, an officer overheard him regaling fellow recruits with jokes. He was placed in an army entertainment unit and found his calling there.He spent the next few years touring Israel with the group, entertaining soldiers with songs like “Sprinkler Hora,” a hit in that fledgling state, where making the desert bloom was a national imperative.Discharged in 1956, Topol settled with members of his unit on a kibbutz, where they formed a satirical theater group, Batzal Yarok (the name means “Green Onion”). Its members worked on the land two days a week and onstage for four.“It was great training because we had a very difficult, tired audience,” Topol told U.P.I. “Most of them had been out running tractors and such before performances.”He was later a founder of the Haifa Municipal Theater, where his roles included Petruchio in Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” Azdak in Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” and Jean in Eugène Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros,” a role that was originated on Broadway by Mr. Mostel. Topol’s first significant international exposure came in the title role of the 1964 Israeli film “Sallah” (also known as “Sallah Shabati”). One of the first film comedies to come out of Israel, it told the tale of a family of Mizrahi Jews — Jews historically from the Middle East and North Africa — uneasily resettled in Israel.“Sallah” won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film; Topol, then in his late 20s, won the Golden Globe for most promising male newcomer for his portrayal of Sallah Shabati, the family patriarch, a man in his 60s.On the strength of that performance, he was asked to play Tevye in a Hebrew-language production of “Fiddler” in Tel Aviv. Unfamiliar with the show, he went to New York to see Mr. Mostel on Broadway.That, Topol, later said, was where his troubles with “Fiddler” began.“Zero was going wild” — even ad-libbing to the audience — he recalled in a 2008 interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph. “He said things like, ‘Mrs. Finkelstein, are you yawning because I’m boring you or was it because your husband kept you awake all night?’ I didn’t know what to do with myself. I telegrammed back saying there was no way I wanted to be connected to that show.”But on returning to Israel, Topol saw the Tel Aviv production and had a change of heart. He eventually replaced the actor portraying Tevye and played the role for about a year.Topol in a benefit performance in London in 2013. He was recognized for his charitable work, notably helping to found a holiday camp in Israel for ailing children from all ethnic and religious backgrounds. David M. Benett/Getty ImagesAround that time, the first London production of “Fiddler” was being cast. Someone suggested that the old Jewish actor who had played Sallah Shabati might be a worthy Tevye, and they summoned him to England. When Topol, barely 30, walked into the theater, producers thought they had invited the wrong man. But since he had made the long trip, they relented and let him audition anyway.Topol, who at the time knew “about 50 words of English” by his own account, had learned the songs phonetically from the Broadway cast album. He further impressed the producers with his ability to age 25 years simply through the rigorous control of his carriage.“At 29, I knew I had to restrain some muscles to make sure I didn’t suddenly jump in a way that destroyed the image of an elderly man,” he told The Boston Globe in 2009, in the midst of a multicity U.S. tour of the show. “I walked slower, made sure I wasn’t too erect when I danced. It was quite a job. Now, as I pass the age of 55 by 20 years, I feel totally free to jump and dance as much as I feel like.”Topol opened in London in February 1967, to glowing notices. By then he had jettisoned his first name: The English, he discovered, were flummoxed by the guttural consonant of “Chaim” and pronounced his name “Shame” as often as not.In June, with Israel fighting the Six-Day War, he left the production to return home, where he entertained the troops. (He would make a similar decision in 1991, with the outbreak of the Persian Gulf war, leaving the Broadway revival to be with his family in Tel Aviv.)After seeing the London “Fiddler,” Mr. Jewison made the unexpected decision to cast Topol, still a relative unknown in the United States, in the motion picture.“I wanted a third-generation European actor for the role, a third-generation man who understood the background,” Mr. Jewison told The Globe in 1971. “I did not want a Second Avenue version of Tevye” — a barely veiled swipe at Mr. Mostel and his unstoppable shtick.Topol, who underwent two hours of age makeup every day of the shoot — Mr. Jewison did his bit, contributing white hairs from his beard to be glued over his star’s dark eyebrows — made, in the view of many critics, a most persuasive Tevye.Reviewing the film in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote of him: “He’s a rough presence, masculine, with burly, raw strength, but also sensual and warm. He’s a poor man but he’s not a little man, he’s a big man brought low — a man of Old Testament size brought down by the circumstances of oppression.”Topol married Galia Finkelstein, an actress in his army entertainment unit, in 1956. In addition to their son, they had two daughters, Adi Margalith and Anat Barzilai. All four survive him, along with two sisters, Shosh and Tova, and nine grandchildren.Topol was the author of two books, the memoir “Topol by Topol” (1981) and “Topol’s Treasury of Jewish Humor, Wit, and Wisdom” (1994).His laurels included the Israel Prize, the country’s highest cultural honor, which he received in 2015. The recognition came both for his acting and for his charitable work, notably helping to found Jordan River Village, a holiday camp in Israel for seriously ill children from all ethnic and religious backgrounds. Modeled on Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Connecticut, it opened in 2011.Year in and year out, Topol found the role he knew best to be a source of continuing illumination.“I did ‘Fiddler’ a long time thinking that this was a story about the Jewish people,” he said in a 2009 interview. “But now I’ve been performing all over the world. And the fantastic thing is wherever I’ve been — India, Japan, England, Greece, Egypt — people come up to me after the show and say, ‘This is our story as well.’”Alex Traub More