Deaths (Obituaries)

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      in Music

      Otis Redding III, Who Followed His Father Into Music, Dies at 59

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      He was grateful for Otis Redding’s enduring legacy, he said, even if it overshadowed his efforts to make music of his own.Otis Redding III, the son and namesake of the celebrated 1960s soul singer, who made a name for himself as a singer and guitarist, died on Tuesday in Macon, Ga. He was 59.The cause was cancer, his sister, Karla Redding-Andrews, said in a statement posted on the Facebook page of the Otis Redding Foundation, the family’s charity.Mr. Redding was just 3 years old when his father died, along with several members of his band, in a plane crash on Dec. 10, 1967, outside Madison, Wis. Otis Redding III and his brother, Dexter, along with a cousin, Mark Lockett, went on to form the funk band the Reddings, which recorded six albums in the 1980s. Otis was a guitarist with the group; Dexter, who survives him, played bass and handled the vocals; and Mr. Lockett played keyboards.The band had some success on the Billboard charts: “Remote Control” reached No. 6 on the Hot Soul Singles chart and No. 89 on the Hot 100 in 1980. The group’s final album, called simply “The Reddings,” which contained the hit single “Call the Law,” reached No. 88 on the Billboard album chart in 1988.The Redding brothers never came close to matching their father’s success, but Otis Redding III nonetheless continued performing. When the soul singer Eddie Floyd hired him as guitarist for a European tour, Mr. Redding became comfortable singing “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” and other songs made famous by his father, he told WCSH-TV in Portland, Maine, in 2018.“He said, ‘You can play guitar with me, but you’re going to have to sing a few of your dad’s songs,’” Mr. Redding recalled Mr. Floyd saying. “I was like, ‘Huh? I don’t sing,’ you know. And he was like, ‘Well, you’re going to sing “Dock of the Bay” with me tonight.’” He continued to perform his father’s songs live.He said he was grateful for his father’s enduring legacy even if it overshadowed his own music-making efforts.“I go ahead and do what people want, and I live with it,” he said, adding, “I don’t put myself mentally under any pressure to go begging for record deals.”Otis Redding III was born on Dec. 17, 1963, in Macon. His mother was Zelma Atwood.In later years he worked with his family’s foundation to organize summer camps that teach children to play music. He also served as board president of the local chapter of Meals on Wheels.In addition to his sister Ms. Redding-Andrews and his brother, Mr. Redding’s survivors include another sister, Demetria Redding.The New York Times contributed reporting. More

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      in Television

      Blair Tindall, Whose Music Memoir Scandalized, Dies at 63

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      Her 2005 book, “Mozart in the Jungle,” lived up to its subtitle, “Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” and was later made into an Amazon TV series.Blair Tindall, a freelance oboist and journalist who drew on both of those abilities to write “Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” an eyebrow-raising 2005 memoir that became an award-winning television series, died on April 12 in Los Angeles. She was 63.Her fiancé, the photographer Chris Sattlberger, said the cause was cardiovascular disease.Ms. Tindall had played in various ensembles and Broadway pit orchestras and was writing regularly for publications including The New York Times when “Mozart in the Jungle” appeared. Any reader holding a pristine view of the people who make classical music was quickly relieved of it: The book opens with Ms. Tindall’s visit to a cocaine-fueled party of musicians and goes on to detail assorted escapades, among them her own sexual liaisons, including an early one, with a middle-aged instructor, when she was a teenager studying at the North Carolina School of the Arts.“I got hired for most of my gigs in bed,” she wrote.The book set tongues wagging in the classical music world and divided critics.“Written with pop culture-savvy flair — a feat for a musician who, at one point, admits to being ‘proud that I couldn’t identify a pop song from Beatles to Blondie’ — ‘Mozart’ is a delightfully unlikely page-turner,” Ali Marshall wrote in Mountain Xpress, an alternative newspaper in North Carolina. “And, even if it doesn’t encourage readers to listen to classical music, it’s sure to instill in them an unprecedented admiration of this deviant art.”But the music writer Anne Midgette, in The New York Times, was not impressed.“The book’s biggest weakness is that it smacks of sour grapes,” she wrote. “By writing it as an autobiography, Ms. Tindall seems to be saying that everything that went wrong in her life is the fault of the classical music world.”Ms. Tindall’s book set tongues wagging in the classical music world. It also divided critics.In interviews after the book came out, Ms. Tindall was unapologetic about the salacious parts.“I did notice when I became involved in a relationship with someone in the business that my work picked up,” she told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2005. “You need all the friends you can get. The music world is very incestuous.”Speaking with The Daily News of New York the same year, she was matter-of-fact.“People always seem shocked that musicians would have sex,” she said. “I mean, where do little musicians come from?”The sensational content drew much of the attention, but Ms. Tindall said she was making serious points in the book about dysfunction in the classical-music world — pay inequities, for instance, that had a few star conductors and musicians making big money while musicians like her scraped by, and music schools that built up false hopes among students.“If you take all the major orchestras in America together, there are jobs for only 100 full-time oboists,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “Yet there are 300 union oboists in the New York area alone.”And the wild times she chronicled, she said, weren’t quite the same as the better-known excesses of rock ’n’ roll.“Sex and drugs are a show of exuberance in rock,” she said. “In the world of classical music, they are more of an escape from a sense of confinement and depression.”She told The Daily Telegraph that she hoped the book might interest someone in Hollywood. But she said she wasn’t optimistic: No actress would want to play her, since drawing music from an oboe requires puffed-out cheeks and leaves the musician bug-eyed.“Unfortunately, nobody looks good playing the oboe,” she said.Lola Kirke and Gael García Bernal in an episode of “Mozart in the Jungle,” the Amazon TV series based on Ms. Tindall’s book.Amazon StudiosYet nine years later, she got her wish: Amazon, still relatively new to the business of making television shows, used “Mozart in the Jungle” as the basis for a series of the same name that premiered in 2014 and ran for four seasons. Lola Kirke played a young oboist, Gael García Bernal was the sexy conductor of a New York orchestra, and the show became a talking point for musicians everywhere. It won the Golden Globe in 2016 for best television series, comedy or musical.Blair Alston Mercer Tindall was born on Feb. 2, 1960, in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her father, George B. Tindall, was a noted historian who taught at the University of North Carolina, and her mother, Carliss Blossom (McGarrity) Tindall, had a master’s degree and assisted her husband in his research.Her parents made her study piano when she was young, though she wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the instrument. One day, she recalled in her book, someone from a music store brought instruments to her elementary school, and the band teacher allowed each student to choose one, going alphabetically.“By the time he got to Tindall, my options had narrowed to two unfamiliar instruments, oboe and bassoon,” she wrote. She chose the oboe.As she grew increasingly proficient on the instrument, she realized it had its advantages.“Composers wrote juicy solos for oboes that sent band directors into ecstasy,” she wrote. She also got excused from class for band competitions and tours.After finishing high school at the School of the Arts in 1978, Ms. Tindall earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Manhattan School of Music. She played in the pit orchestras of “Miss Saigon” and “Les Misérables” and performed with the ensembles Orpheus and Music Amici, the all-oboe trio Oboe Fusion and various orchestras. In 1991, at Weill Recital Hall in Manhattan, she played “a clever, stylistically varied debut program,” as Allan Kozinn put it in a review in The Times.In 1999, Ms. Tindall, who was becoming disenchanted with the musician’s life, received a fellowship to study journalism at Stanford and relocated to the West Coast. She earned a master’s degree in journalism there and worked for West Coast newspapers, including The Contra Costa Times and The San Francisco Examiner.In 2006, newspapers reported that Ms. Tindall had married Bill Nye, TV’s “Science Guy,” though seven weeks later the license was declared invalid and the union dissolved.Mr. Sattlberger said he and Ms. Tindall had planned to marry on May 1. She leaves no other survivors.Ms. Tindall wrote for numerous publications on a variety of subjects. Her articles for The Times were most often about music.When Broadway musicians went on strike in March 2003 over the efforts of producers to reduce the number of musicians required at shows and replace them with digital music, Ms. Tindall wrote in an essay for The Times about her final night in the pit of “Man of La Mancha” before the walkout.“This night, the music responded to the actors — and the audience,” she wrote. “If virtual orchestras take over, it will be mechanical and unyielding — measured by keyboard velocity, musical software interfaces, and the zeros and ones of digital musical samples.“We looked around the pit, grabbed our instruments, and shut out the lights.” More

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      in Music

      Ahmad Jamal, Jazz Pianist With a Measured Approach, Dies at 92

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      He was known for his laid-back style and for his influence on, among others, Miles Davis, who once said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.”Ahmad Jamal, whose measured, spare piano style was an inspiration to generations of jazz musicians, died on Sunday at his home in Ashley Falls, Mass. He was 92.The cause was prostate cancer, his daughter, Sumayah Jamal, said.In a career that would bring him a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award, a lifetime achievement Grammy and induction into France’s Order of Arts and Letters, Mr. Jamal made his mark with a stately approach that honored what he called the spaces in the music. That approach stood in marked contrast to the challengingly complex music known as bebop, which was sweeping the jazz world when Mr. Jamal began his career as a teenager in the mid-1940s. Bebop pianists, following the lead of Bud Powell, became known for their virtuosic flurries of notes. Mr. Jamal chose a different path, which proved equally influential.The critic Stanley Crouch wrote that bebop’s founding father, Charlie Parker, was the only musician “more important to the development of fresh form in jazz than Ahmad Jamal.”A young Mr. Jamal at the piano, circa 1942. He was only 14 when he joined the musicians’ union.Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris/Carnegie Museum of Art, via Getty ImagesIn his early years, Mr. Jamal listened not just to jazz, which he preferred to call “American classical music,” but also to classical music of the non-American variety. “We didn’t separate the two schools,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “We studied Bach and Ellington, Mozart and Art Tatum. When you start at 3, what you hear you play. I heard all these things.”Mr. Jamal’s laid-back, accessible style, with its dense chords, its wide dynamic range and above all its judicious use of silence, led to more than his share of dismissive reviews in the jazz press early in his career; Martin Williams’s canonical history “The Jazz Tradition” described his music as “chic and shallow.”But it soon became an integral part of the jazz landscape. Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett are among the prominent jazz pianists who looked to Mr. Jamal as an exemplar.Probably the best-known musician to cite Mr. Jamal as an influence was not a pianist but a trumpeter and bandleader: Miles Davis, who became close friends with Mr. Jamal, recorded his compositions and arrangements and would bring his sidemen to see Mr. Jamal perform. He once said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.”Ahmad Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh on July 2, 1930. Fritz, as he was called, began playing piano at age 3 and began studying with Mary Cardwell Dawson, the founder of the National Negro Opera Company, a few years later. By the time he joined the musicians’ union at age 14, the celebrated jazz piano virtuoso Art Tatum had hailed him as “a coming great,” and he began touring with George Hudson’s big band after graduating from high school.In 1950 he moved to Chicago, where he converted to Islam, changed his name to Ahmad Jamal and assembled a piano-guitar-bass trio known as the Three Strings. During an extended stay at the Manhattan nightclub the Embers in 1951, the trio came to the attention of the noted record producer and talent scout John Hammond, who signed them to the Okeh label.Mr. Jamal performing in San Francisco in 1976. He released as many as three albums a year in the late 1960s and early ’70s.Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesIn 1955 Mr. Jamal recorded his first full-length album, “Ahmad Jamal Plays,” with the guitarist Ray Crawford and the bassist Israel Crosby, for the small Parrot label. Tellingly, when the album was acquired and rereleased the next year by Argo, a subsidiary of the seminal blues label Chess, it was retitled “Chamber Music of the New Jazz.”Mr. Jamal received his first major national exposure with the Argo album “At the Pershing: But Not for Me,” recorded at a Chicago nightclub in 1958 with Mr. Crosby and the drummer Vernel Fournier. It spent more than two years on the Billboard album chart, an all but unheard-of stretch for a jazz album.The success of “At the Pershing” stemmed in part from Mr. Jamal’s ambling yet propulsive interpretation of the standard “Poinciana,” still his best-known recording. But he received some criticism for not including any original compositions on the album, which he later said spurred him to focus on writing his own music.Mr. Jamal’s output was as prodigious as his light-fingered style was economical: He released as many as three albums a year in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and more than 60 in his career. He also founded a handful of record labels, a management company and a Chicago nightclub and restaurant called the Alhambra, although that venture lasted less than a year. In keeping with his religious beliefs, the Alhambra did not serve alcohol, which presumably hastened its demise.The Alhambra’s financial difficulties marked the beginning of a dark period of Mr. Jamal’s life, in which he walked away from performing for almost three years. The club closed in December 1961; three months later, he filed for divorce from Maryam Jamal, formerly named Virginia Wilkins, whom he had married when he was 17. Five years of court action followed, during which Mr. Jamal was arrested and charged with nonpayment of child support for their daughter. (He was later cleared.) He was hospitalized in 1963 after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. Not until 1964 did he begin touring and recording again.He married first as a teenager, and that marriage ended in divorce. He married Sharifah Frazier, the mother of Sumayah, in the early 1960s, and they divorced in 1982. He married Laura Hess-Hay, his manager, the same year, and they divorced in 1984, though she continued to represent him until his death. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren.Live recordings often captured Mr. Jamal at his nimblest, and many jazz connoisseurs rank such albums as “Freeflight” (1971), recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and “Chicago Revisited: Live at Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase” (1993) among his best. In 2011, Mosaic Records released a nine-CD boxed set consisting of the 12 albums he recorded for Argo between 1956 and 1962. His album “Blue Moon,” a well-received collection of originals and standards, was released in 2012 and nominated for a Grammy Award. His album “Marseille” was released in 2017 and “Ballades” in 2019.Last year Mr. Jamal released two separate double-disc collections: “Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse (1963-64)” and “(1965-66),” consisting of previously unreleased live recordings made in Seattle. A third set, “(1966-68),” is planned. Mr. Jamal in 2011 at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Rob Verhorst/RedfernsThe reverence with which Mr. Jamal was held stretched well beyond the jazz world. Clint Eastwood used two tracks from “But Not for Me” on the soundtrack of his film of “The Bridges of Madison County.” But the more extensive tributes have come from the world of hip-hop. Tracks like De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High” and Nas’s “The World Is Yours,” along with dozens of other rap songs, have sampled Mr. Jamal’s piano riffs.As infectious as those riffs were, it was ballads that held the strongest appeal to Mr. Jamal. Like many other interpreters of the standard repertoire, he made a point of learning the lyrics to the songs he played. He spoke approvingly to The Times in 2001 about a conversation he once had with a great jazz saxophonist who was also known for his way with a ballad.“I once heard Ben Webster playing his heart out on a ballad,” he said. “All of a sudden he stopped. I asked him, ‘Why did you stop, Ben?’ He said, ‘I forgot the lyrics.’”Alex Traub More

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      in Theater

      Keith Johnstone, Champion of Improvisational Theater, Dies at 90

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      The theatrical games and performance techniques Mr. Johnstone developed became a familiar part of the acting arsenal.Early in what became a career in theater, Keith Johnstone was commissioned to write a play for a new company in England and studied up for the job by watching the troupe’s actors rehearse someone else’s play. What stood out to him was not the rehearsal techniques, but the fact that he found the sessions boring — “until the actors broke for coffee or stagehands began moving sets around the stage.”“It was only at these times that there seemed to be moments of truth on the stage,” he told The Calgary Herald many years later, in 1982. “When they resumed acting, the performers abandoned their kinetic dance and entered separate glass cages.”That realization helped fuel Mr. Johnstone’s determination that theater and the people who practiced it could benefit from more spontaneity and creativity, and from emphasizing the quest for truth over the mastery of actorly techniques.He spent the rest of his career preaching the gospel of improvisation, developing games, exercises and live shows that were the opposite of tightly scripted theater. His 1979 book, “Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre,” is among the most widely used texts in the world of improvisational theater, and the Loose Moose Theater Company, which he created in 1977 after relocating to Canada, became an institution in Calgary.Mr. Johnstone died on March 11 in Calgary. He was 90.Theresa Robbins Dudeck, his literary executor and the author of “Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography” (2013), confirmed the death.Mr. Johnstone didn’t invent improv, and he wasn’t alone in promoting the technique; the actress and educator Viola Spolin published “Improvisation for the Theater” in 1963, and troupes like the Second City in Chicago, founded in 1959, were also working the territory. But his contributions were considerable. Among Mr. Johnstone’s liveliest innovations was Theatresports, an idea he began to develop in England when he and some colleagues at the Royal Court Theater took notice of the liveliness of audiences at professional wrestling matches.“Our Royal Court audiences were like whipped dogs in comparison,” he wrote in an essay about Theatresports, “probably because once an event is categorized as ‘cultural,’ it becomes a minefield in which your opinion can damn you.”So he began honing a sort of competitive event in which teams of improvisers would try to outdo each other, with audience howling and booing encouraged and judges rating the efforts.“The judges award points by holding up cards that range from one to five,” he wrote in another book, “Impro for Storytellers” (1999). “Five means excellent, one means bad, and a honk from a rescue horn means ‘kindly leave the stage.’”He introduced Theatresports once he had relocated to Canada, and the concept caught on; variations of the games were soon being performed all over the world.“If the performance has gone well,” he wrote, “you’ll feel that you’ve been watching a bunch of good-natured people who are wonderfully cooperative, and who aren’t afraid to fail. It’s therapeutic to be in such company, and to yell and cheer, and perhaps even volunteer to improvise with them. With luck you’ll feel as if you’ve been at a wonderful party; great parties don’t depend on the amount of alcohol, but on positive interactions.”Mr. Johnstone in the mid-1960s. Early in his career, he determined that theater and the people who practiced it could benefit from more spontaneity and creativity.Mary Evans/Roger Mayne, via Everett CollectionDonald Keith Johnstone was born on Feb. 21, 1933, in Brixham, on England’s southwestern coast, to Richard and Linda (Carter) Johnstone. When he was 9 or so, he decided to stop taking things at face value.“I began reversing every statement to see if the opposite was also true,” he wrote in his 1979 book. “This is so much a habit with me that I hardly notice I’m doing it anymore. As soon as you put a ‘not’ into an assertion, a whole range of other possibilities opens out.”He trained as a teacher at St. Luke’s College in Exeter and began teaching at a primary school in South London. When he won a prize in a short-story contest, the English Stage Company, a new troupe based at the Royal Court, invited him to write a play for it, which he did: “Brixham Regatta,” which Patrick Gibbs of The Daily Telegraph thought was, for a 25-year-old novice, “a creditable — and ambitious — first play.” More important, he joined a writers’ group at the Royal Court and found himself leading improvisational exercises for the group.Published in 1979, Mr. Johnstone’s “Impro” is among the most widely used texts in the world of improvisational theater.He spent 10 years at the Royal Court, leading classes and workshops, screening scripts and producing plays. In July 1959 Mr. Johnstone and William Gaskill produced a largely improvised one-night show called “Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp,” featuring Black actors ad-libbing scenes about an infamous 1959 massacre of detainees by British troops in Kenya. Alan Brien, reviewing the performance in The Spectator, was not on board with the concept, saying that it “shows the Royal Court in its most militant, inept, radical, ambitious and pretentious mood.”“‘Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp’ was neither good rhetoric nor good theater,” Mr. Brien wrote. “But if it sent the audience home to study the facts, it will have been worthwhile. And if it sent the producers home reconvinced that acting discipline and writing economy are the heart of drama, then it will also have been worth while.”It did not “reconvince” Mr. Johnstone of that. He continued to develop his improvisation exercises and in the mid-1960s formed an improvisational troupe, the Theater Machine, which performed all over England as well as abroad.In 1972 Mr. Johnstone was offered a two-year visiting professorship at the University of Calgary in Alberta. He ended up staying at the university for 23 years, taking emeritus status in 1995.An early performance by his Loose Moose company, in 1977, was a version of “Robinson Crusoe” that, from Louis B. Hobson’s enthusiastic review in The Calgary Albertan, sounds as if it came close to replicating that professional-wrestling excitement Mr. Johnstone had longed for.“The audience, which is seated in a semicircle, becomes everything from shark-infested waters to offstage spirit voices,” he wrote. “It is a stormy, noisy sea that surrounds Crusoe’s island, and one that never calms down for the play’s 40 minutes.”Mr. Johnstone’s marriage to Ingrid Von Darl ended in divorce in 1981. He is survived by a son from that marriage, Benjamin; a son from another relationship, Dan; and a grandson.Mr. Johnstone’s books and methods have been used in high school classrooms and drama clubs, professional acting workshops and anyplace else where creativity needs to be unlocked and spontaneity encouraged. A passage in his 1979 book describes what set him on the improvisational path.“I began to think of children not as immature adults,” he wrote, “but of adults as atrophied children.” More

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      in Movies

      Bill Butler, Cinematographer Best Known for ‘Jaws,’ Dies at 101

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      He came up with a mechanism that allowed Steven Spielberg to film underwater. His work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” earned him an Oscar nomination.Bill Butler, an Oscar-nominated cinematographer who played a prominent role in the American New Wave movement of the 1970s and whose credits included “Jaws,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and three of the “Rocky” sequels, died on Wednesday. He was 101.His death was announced by the American Society of Cinematographers, which did not say where he died.Mr. Butler worked with a number of directors credited with reimagining American filmmaking in the ’70s, including Steven Spielberg, for whom he was the director of photography on “Jaws,” the 1975 blockbuster about a man-eating great white shark that established Mr. Spielberg’s reputation and changed the way Americans looked at both film and the beach.Open-water shooting posed many challenges on what was a notoriously troubled set.The crew faced problems not only with their malfunctioning mechanical shark but also ‌with seasickness, uncooperative tides‌, random boats sailing into the frame and even sets that sank.From left, Mr. Spielberg, the camera operator Michael Chapman and Mr. Butler on the set of “Jaws.” Mr. Butler designed a submersible camera box and a platform that allowed for shooting both below the water and on its surface.Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Butler designed a submersible camera box and a platform that allowed for shooting both below the water and on its surface, to convey the viewpoint of a swimmer. The American Society of Cinematographers, which presented Mr. Butler with a lifetime achievement award in 2003, also credited him in 2012 in its magazine, American Cinematographer, with “heroically” saving footage from a camera that went down in the Atlantic Ocean. His calculation: that seawater would be similar to saline-based developing solutions.“We got on an airplane with the film in a bucket of water, took it to New York and developed it,” Mr. Butler recalled in his commentary for a 2012 release of “Jaws” on Blu-ray. “We didn’t lose a foot.”In a statement, Mr. Spielberg praised Mr. Butler’s work on “Jaws.” “Bill’s outlook on life was pragmatic, philosophical and so very patient,” he said, “and I owe him so much for his steadfast and creative contributions to the entire look of ‘Jaws.’”Over his six-decade career, Mr. Butler also shot several noteworthy television dramas, including “Raid on Entebbe” (1976) and “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1984), both of which won him Emmy Awards for outstanding cinematography; “The Thorn Birds” (1983), which earned him an Emmy nomination; and “The Execution of Private Slovik” (1974).For his work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975), Mr. Butler received an Oscar nomination that he shared with Haskell Wexler, a colleague with whom he had an unusual association: On two of his more influential and well-regarded films — Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974) was the other — Mr. Butler was brought in as the director of photography only after the mercurial Mr. Wexler had been fired.Mr. Butler with Christopher Walken on the set of the 1988 film “Biloxi Blues.”Universal, via Everett CollectionWilmer Cable Butler was born on April 7, 1921, in Cripple Creek, Colo., and raised in a log cabin. His parents, Wilmer and Verca Butler, were farmers. After graduating from the University of Iowa with a degree in engineering, he started his career in broadcasting at WGN-TV in Chicago, where he was a camera operator for live programs and commercials.His first feature-length film, directed by his WGN colleague William Friedkin, was “The People vs. Paul Crump,” a 1962 documentary about an African American prisoner on death row who claimed his murder confession had been coerced through torture. Though the movie never aired — the contents were deemed too incendiary — it made its way to Otto Kerner, the governor of Illinois, who commuted Mr. Crump’s sentence to life without parole.“When you see the power a little piece of 16-millimeter film will bring to you, you are inspired to go ahead and pursue a career in the field,” Mr. Butler said in 2005 at a career retrospective at the Victoria Film Festival in British Columbia. “And that’s exactly what I did.”He was already 40 by the time he started shooting motion pictures. (“He reinvented himself multiple times,” said Michael G. Moyer, who worked alongside Mr. Butler as chief electrician on “Child’s Play” and other films.) But he immediately went to work for some of the period’s more promising young talents: Mr. Friedkin on “The Bold Men” (1965), Philip Kaufman on “Fearless Frank” (1967), Mr. Coppola on “The Rain People” (1969), and Jack Nicholson on “Drive, He Said” (1971), one of only three films he directed.“I did some work with director Phil Kaufman on the Universal Studios lot as a writer while I was still trying to get into the Los Angeles camera guild,” Mr. Butler said in a 2005 Moviemaker magazine interview. “That’s when I met Steven Spielberg. He had just finished his ‘Night Gallery’ projects. I shot ‘Savage’ and ‘Something Evil,’ a couple of one-hour TV movies, with him.”When work began on “Jaws,” it was Mr. Butler who convinced Mr. Spielberg that he could shoot in the water.“Panavision had just introduced a lightweight, smaller camera,” he recalled. “It was also quiet, so you could use it to cover dialogue. Steven thought it would be too shaky; I didn’t try to press the issue. If he hired me, I could show him when we got to Martha’s Vineyard.”Mr. Butler’s later credits included “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings” (1976); “The Sting II” (1983);“Graffiti Bridge,” starring and directed by Prince (1990); “Hot Shots!” (1991); and “The Chauffeur” (2008), as well as the TV series “Brooklyn Bridge” (1991). He remained active professionally well into his 80s, working in a variety of genres and often with fledgling directors.“The harder films are usually the big ones that require controlling a lot of people and a lot of cameras, and over a large area or sometimes many locations,” he said at the Victoria Film Festival. “Keeping that organized is something that some cinematographers are not capable of, so they do smaller films.”But smaller films can be just as difficult for them, he added, “because the pressure of a small film means that they may not have the time to properly gather their footage, and that’s another definite pressure that’s equally challenging.”Mr. Butler is survived by his wife, Iris (Schwimmer) Butler, whom he married in 1984, and their daughters, Genevieve and Chelsea Butler, both actresses, as well as three daughters from his marriage to Alma Smith, which ended in divorce: Judy Rawson, Patricia Pekau and Pam Fraser. He is also survived by a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.Mr. Butler never attended film school; when he started shooting movies, he said, he bought the manual of the American Society of Cinematographers (“the bible of filmmaking”) and would refer to it whenever he needed. But really, he said in 2005, the way he learned to shoot pictures “was to go directly to the movies and see what somebody else was doing onscreen, and then going out and trying to do it myself. And that was it.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      in Music

      Nora Forster, 80, Who Married (and Stayed Married to) a Sex Pistol, Dies

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      A German publishing heiress and music promoter, she settled in London in time for the 1970s punk-rock explosion and became the muse to its baddest boy.Nora Forster, a German-born publishing heiress and music promoter who gained fame as the wife of John Lydon — otherwise known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols — and the mother of Arianna Forster, or Ari Up, the lead singer of the influential all-female punk band the Slits, died on Thursday. She was 80.Her death was announced by Mr. Lydon on Twitter. “Nora had been living with Alzheimer’s for several years,” the announcement said. “In which time John had become her full time career.” He did not say where she died.For more than four decades, music fans knew Ms. Forster as the emotional rock for the ever-volatile Mr. Lydon, who in the late 1970s became Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of British polite society for spitting invective in every direction, including the Queen’s, as the frontman for the incendiary punk progenitors the Sex Pistols.When the band imploded after its brief, explosive career, he scarcely mellowed; he continued on as the creative force of the fiery post-punk band Public Image Ltd., or PiL.Because of her husband’s enduring notoriety, particularly in England, Ms. Forster’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease unfolded as a public drama after he went public about her diagnosis in 2018.“It’s vile to watch someone you love disappear,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times of London in February. “All the things I thought were the ultimate agony seem preposterous now.”Her illness, he said, had “shaped me into what I am.”“I don’t think I’ll ever get over it,” he added. “I don’t see how I can live without her. I wouldn’t want to. There’s no point.”The previous month, he had teared up when taking a more wistful turn in an interview on the television show “Good Morning Britain” about “Hawaii,” a haunting PiL ballad that he had written as a tribute to her and that was the Irish entry in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. (Mr. Lydon was born in England to Irish parents.) “Remember me,” Mr. Lydon sang, “I remember you.”“I can see her personality in her eyes,” he said. “She lets me know that it’s the communication skills that are letting her down.”Nora Maier was born on Nov. 6, 1942, in Munich. After the war, her father, Franz Karl Maier, was a prosecutor who helped bring wartime Nazis to justice. He was later the editor and publisher of the newspaper Tagesspiegel.Ms. Forster went on to work as a model and to marry the singer Frank Forster, who was “kind of a swing pop star, always appearing on TV back in the ’60s,” Arianna Forster said in an interview with the music site Pitchfork in 2009, a year before she died.Nora Forster’s survivors include her husband and three grandchildren.As the 1960s unfolded, Ms. Forster promoted West German tours for acts like Jimi Hendrix and Yes, which gave her prominence on the German rock scene. “People were walking around in the living room back then, like the Bee Gees and all these big groups,” her daughter recalled in the Pitchfork interview.The bohemian lifestyle of her rock friends eventually ran afoul of the local authorities. “In Munich, the police were knocking at the door every night because of the loud acid parties,” her daughter once said. “She was fed up with it. You have to go to London to live that lifestyle.”Ms. Forster did just that in about 1970, and by the middle of the decade she had become enmeshed in the punk-rock scene that was starting to roil Britain and the music industry as a whole. She became “a den mother to all the young punks,” said Arianna, who in 1976, at age 14, would rename herself Ari Up and join with a drummer called Palmolive to found the Slits, which became a leading female punk band of the era.In 1975, Ms. Forster met Mr. Lydon, who was nearly 14 years her junior, at Sex, the boundary-pushing clothing boutique on London’s King’s Road run by the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren.It was anything but love at first sight.“There was no physical attraction at first,” Ms. Forster said in a 2004 interview with The Sunday Mail of Britain. “I didn’t even think to be nice to him. I was at another gig and John passed by my table and said, ‘Drop dead.’”Despite the mutual hostility, Mr. Lydon was intrigued. “Her nose went 10 feet in the air in her ’40s film star outfit,” he said in the same Sunday Mail interview. “Long blond hair, padded shoulders — that entire femme fatale look, which I was a complete ham for.”Eventually she softened. “I fell in love with John because he surprised me,” she said. “He had a sweet attitude. He was more innocent and not like the rest of the group.”The couple married in 1979, to the horror of Ms. Forster’s father. And, to the likely amazement of those who considered Mr. Lydon a human mushroom cloud, the marriage endured.Even so, it might never have happened if Ms. Forster had listened to her friends’ advice in those early days. “One day he came up and asked why I had never invited him to my house,” she later said of Mr. Lydon. “I replied, ‘People told me you would destroy everything.’” More

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      in Television

      Harry Lorayne, Dazzling Master of Total Recall, Is Dead at 96

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      A memory expert and magician who was a favorite guest of Johnny Carson’s, he astonished audiences by reeling off the names of hundreds of people he had only just met.Harry Lorayne, who parlayed a childhood reading disability and the brutal punishment it engendered into an international career as a memory expert, summoning the names of roomfuls of strangers in a single sitting, rattling off entire small-town telephone books and telling astonished audiences what was written on any page of a given issue of Time magazine, died on Friday in Newburyport, Mass. He was 96.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his publicist, Skye Wentworth, who did not specify a cause. He had lived in Newburyport, north of Boston.Fleet of mind and fleet of mouth, Mr. Lorayne was a sought-after guest on television shows and a particular favorite of Johnny Carson’s, appearing on “The Tonight Show” some two dozen times.Mr. Lorayne had begun his professional life as a sleight-of-hand artist and well into old age was considered one of the foremost card magicians in the country. As both magician and mnemonist, he was a direct, gleeful scion of the 19th-century midway pitchman and the 20th-century borscht belt tummler.By the 1960s, Mr. Lorayne was best known for holding audiences rapt with feats of memory that bordered on the elephantine. Such feats were born, he explained in interviews and in his many books, of a system of learned associations — call them surrealist visual puns — that seemed equal parts Ivan Pavlov and Salvador Dalí.Mr. Lorayne demonstrated his act on the night of July 23, 1958, when, in his first big break, he appeared on the TV game show “I’ve Got a Secret.”While the host, Garry Moore, was introducing members of the show’s panel, Mr. Lorayne was at work in the studio audience, soliciting the names of its members.He was then called onstage. Mr. Moore asked the audience members who had given Mr. Lorayne their names to stand. Hundreds did.“That’s Mr. Saar,” Mr. Lorayne began, pointing to a man in the balcony. (The transcriptions here are phonetic.)“Mr. Stinson,” he continued in his rapid-fire New Yorkese, gathering speed. “Miss Graf. Mrs. Graf. Miss Finkelstein. If I can see correctly, I believe that’s the Harpin family: Mr. and Mrs. Harpin; there was Dorothy Harpin and Esther Harpin. Mrs. Pollock. And way in the corner — it’s a little dark there — but I believe that’s Mrs. Stern.”And so it went, through scores of names, each impeccably recalled.How did he do it? “You have to take the name, make it mean something and then associate it to one outstanding feature on the person’s face,” he explained, indicating a man in the audience named Theus.“I thought of the United States: ‘the U.S.,’” Mr. Lorayne continued. “It’s spelled T-H-E-U-S. And I picked out his character lines, from the nose down to the corner of the lip, and just drew a map of the United States there.”Absent the time constraints of television, Mr. Lorayne often said, he could handily memorize the names of 500, or even a thousand, people in a single outing. Over the years, he said, he had met and recalled the names of more than 20 million people.To naysayers who contended that he routinely seeded his audiences with friends, Mr. Lorayne’s reply was unimpeachable: “Who’s got 500 friends?”Nor, as the skeptics sometimes suggested, was Mr. Lorayne a mnemonic freak, endowed with a preternaturally good memory. He was born with quite ordinary powers of recall, he often said, and that was precisely the point. Memory, he maintained, was a faculty akin to a muscle that could be trained and strengthened.Mr. Lorayne did not claim to have invented the mnemonic system that was his stock in trade: As he readily acknowledged, it harked back to classical antiquity. But he was among the first people in the modern era to recognize its use as entertainment, and to parlay it into a highly successful business.Mr. Lorayne ran a memory-training school in New York during the 1960s. via Skye WentworthAt the height of his renown, Mr. Lorayne traveled the country demonstrating his prowess on theater stages, at trade shows and in corporate training seminars. During the 1960s, he ran a memory-training school in New York. In later years, he starred in TV infomercials for his home memory-improvement system. His scores of books were translated into many languages.He was awash in celebrity friends, many of whom were reported to use his techniques. Among them were Anne Bancroft, who spoke of using Mr. Lorayne’s methods to learn lines, and the New York Knicks star — and memory expert in his own right — Jerry Lucas, with whom Mr. Lorayne wrote “The Memory Book” (1974), a New York Times best seller.For many years Mr. Lorayne lived in a gracious townhouse at 62 Jane Street in the West Village of Manhattan. (In sly tribute, his friend Mel Brooks planned to give that address as the home of the playwright Franz Liebkind in his 1967 film, “The Producers.” After Mr. Lorayne’s wife, Renée, objected that the moviegoing public would be banging on their door day and night, Mr. Brooks changed it to the fictional 100 West Jane Street.)Mr. Lorayne’s attainments are all the more noteworthy in light of the fact that he grew up in poverty, struggled academically as a result of undiagnosed dyslexia and concluded his formal education after only a single year of high school.Mr. Lorayne in 1986. As a boy he had an epiphany: If only he could learn to memorize, he realized, his problems with dyslexia would end and he’d avoid his father’s wrath over poor school grades. Stuart William MacGladrie/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesHe was born on May 4, 1926, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Benjamin and Clara (Bendel) Ratzer. His father was a garment cutter.The family was poor — beyond poor, Mr. Lorayne often said.“They were professional poor people,” he told an interviewer, invoking his parents. “I remember having a potato for dinner.”Benjamin Ratzer was a violent man, and whenever young Harry brought home failing grades on an exam — and because of his dyslexia, he often did — his father beat him.One day, Harry had an epiphany. If only he could learn to memorize, he realized, his problems would end. At the library, he found a shelf of dusty books on memory training, some dating to the 18th century. Most were beyond him, but he fought his way through.Using elementary versions of the techniques he would later employ professionally, he began earning perfect marks.“My father stopped hitting me for my grades,” Mr. Lorayne told The Chicago Tribune in 1988. “He hit me for other things.”When Harry was 12, his father, plagued by illness, died by suicide. Soon afterward, Harry left high school to work a series of odd jobs.“I was a Lower East Side ‘dese, dem and dose’ kid with no money, no prospects, no education, no nothing,” Mr. Lorayne wrote in a self-published memoir, “Before I Forget” (2013).He did not yet conceive of memory as a marketable skill: His professional aspirations lay in magic. As a child, he had watched, entranced, as neighborhood men did card tricks in Hamilton Fish Park, on the Lower East Side. He stole milk bottles, recouped the deposits, bought his first deck of cards and began to practice.He embarked on his magic career in the 1940s, adapting his stage name from the middle name of his wife, Renée Lorraine Lefkowitz, whom he married in 1948. He performed on local television in the early 1950s and did close-up magic at Billy Reed’s Little Club on East 55th Street.The actor Victor Jory, a keen amateur magician, visited the club often to catch Mr. Lorayne’s act. One night, performing at Mr. Jory’s table, Mr. Lorayne realized he had exhausted his vast repertoire of card tricks. Seeking to keep Mr. Jory entertained, he idly tossed off a stunt in which he recalled the location of all 52 cards in a shuffled deck.Mr. Jory raved so much about the feat, Mr. Lorayne wrote, that he realized his future lay in memory. He made it his act, beginning at Catskill hotels.Mr. Lorayne wrote a batch of books, including this one as well as “The Memory Book” (with the basketball star Jerry Lucas), “How to Develop a Super Power Memory,” “Miracle Math” and, his last one, “And Finally!”The bizarre visual associations at the heart of Mr. Lorayne’s system were good not only for remembering names and faces but also, he explained, for memorizing numbers, learning foreign-language vocabulary and the like. The more surreal the association, he said, the more tenacious its hold in the mind.“Take the French word for watermelon, which is ‘pastèque,’” he told the Australian newspaper The Sunday Mail in 1986. “When I wanted to learn this I visualized myself playing cards and saying, ‘Pass the deck; pass deck.’”It was essential to note, he added, that “I am playing cards with a watermelon. I ask the watermelon to pass the deck.”Mr. Lorayne’s wife, who assisted in his stage act for two decades, died in 2014. His survivors include a son, Robert, and a granddaughter.Mr. Lorayne in the early 1990s. He continued to perform as a magician throughout his career, but it was for his feats of memorization that he was, fittingly, remembered. via Skye WentworthHis other books include “How to Develop a Super Power Memory,” “Miracle Math” and “Ageless Memory.” In 2018, at the age of 92, he published his last book, “And Finally!”Throughout his career, Mr. Lorayne continued to ply the magician’s trade, for many years publishing Apocalypse, a magic magazine, and producing books and videos on card magic.But it was as a memory expert that he remained, fittingly, remembered, though his most important act of recall was one that audiences never saw.Before every performance, Mr. Lorayne, out of sight in the wings, would discreetly check to make sure his trousers were zipped.It was not merely a question of propriety, but also of credibility. For the man often billed as the world’s foremost memory expert to face an audience with fly unheeded, he explained, would be the poorest professional advertisement of all.Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      in Music

      James Bowman, Who Helped Resurrect the Countertenor, Dies at 81

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      He took up the repertory for the highest male voice at a time when few were performing it. He was particularly known for two roles in Britten operas.James Bowman, a British countertenor who championed repertory for that voice at a time when few singers were attempting it and inspired more composers, including Benjamin Britten, to write for it, died on March 27 at his home in Redhill, south of London. He was 81.Terry Winwood, his civil partner, confirmed the death but said the cause had not yet been determined.When Mr. Bowman started singing professionally in the 1960s, the countertenor — the highest of the male voices, working the same range as female contraltos and mezzo-sopranos — was something of a rarity on opera and concert stages. Alfred Deller, who died in 1979, was the go-to countertenor of the day, but his voice and his acting ability were said to have been limited.“Bowman was a revolutionary talent,” the critic Rupert Christiansen, revisiting one of Mr. Bowman’s 1970s recordings, wrote in The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2019, adding that “his technique brought a new power to the countertenor repertory.”Mr. Bowman’s breakthrough came in 1967, when he was working as a teacher and was doing most of his singing in choirs. He described the moment to The Santa Fe Reporter in 1987.“A friend came up from London and told me that Benjamin Britten was holding auditions for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Mr. Bowman said, referring to Mr. Britten’s 1960 opera, whose Oberon role had originally been written for Mr. Deller. “This is sort of a fairy story — I’d never done anything onstage in my life, but I wrote to Britten and I said, ‘I think I am eminently suited to the role of Oberon.’”He was invited to audition.“I knew that you could barely hear the people who had sung the part before,” he said. “So I went to Covent Garden and I made a big noise and socked them between the eyeballs — and it worked! The next thing I knew I was on tour.”Oberon became one of his signature roles. Mr. Britten wrote other works for him as well, including the part of Apollo in “Death in Venice,” the 1973 Britten opera.“James Bowman’s ringing Apollo sounded authentically unterrestrial,” Martin Cooper wrote in The Daily Telegraph, reviewing the world premiere of the piece at Snape Maltings in Suffolk, England.Mr. Bowman was heard frequently in concert settings as well, and he had a knack for deploying his musical gifts to striking effect in famed performance spaces. Tim Page, writing in The New York Times about a two-hour concert of works by Handel recorded at Westminster Abbey in 1985, called his voice “unusually versatile and pleasing.” Twenty years later, also in The Times, Bernard Holland, after catching him in a “Messiah” at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, said that Mr. Bowman “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”His performances and his dozens of recordings encouraged other singers to explore the countertenor repertory, and Mr. Winwood said he was always generous with advice and support for younger singers.“He would think nothing of hiring a studio and arranging a meeting with young singers who he had never even met,” Mr. Winwood said by email, “and I’m pretty sure he would never charge for his time.”In a tribute on the website of the London-based choir Tenebrae, Nigel Short, the choir’s director, recalled the crucial support Mr. Bowman gave him early in his career. He also shared fond memories of Mr. Bowman’s impish sense of humor.“He was such a brilliant, instinctive singer and musician, a huge character and incredibly kind and generous,” Mr. Short wrote, “but my fondest memories will always be of him giggling and snorting loudly at something totally outrageous he’d just whispered in the ears of anyone standing close by.”Mr. Bowman made for a lively newspaper interview as well. He was always eager to dispel stereotypes about countertenors, especially unflattering ones that branded them as effeminate and made them the target of jokes.“We’re a down-to-earth bunch who just happen to like singing in a high register,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 1996. “When I look around at my colleagues, I’m struck by how normal most of them are.”When Mr. Bowman performed Handel’s “Messiah” with the St. Thomas Choir at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan in 2005, one critic wrote that he “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”Jennifer Taylor for The New York TimesJames Thomas Bowman was born on Nov. 6, 1941, in Oxford, England, to Benjamin and Cecilia (Coote) Bowman. He attended the centuries-old school King’s Ely, beginning in 1951; originally a boy chorister there, he soon became head chorister. According to an obituary published by the school, he gave his first concert as a countertenor in 1959 to a small school group in a chapel at Ely Cathedral. The school now hosts an annual James Bowman Lecture promoting the creative and liberal arts.Mr. Bowman attended New College, Oxford, as an organ scholar and was a member of the New College and Christ Church choirs. In 1965 he met David Munrow, who invited him to join his Early Music Consort of London. He continued performing with that group well into the 1970s, and he was also a member of the early music choral group Pro Cantione Antiqua.Mr. Bowman and Mr. Winwood were together for 48 years. He leaves no other immediate survivors.Producing the countertenor voice, Mr. Bowman told The Sunday Telegraph, involved “using the edge of your vocal cords, and neglecting the central part, which is the bass area.”“I can sing bass,” he added. “I use my bass voice to warm up with, before I sing countertenor. But I can’t keep up a bass voice for long — it feels odd.”Although he was a champion of the countertenor and urged composers to write for it, not all of them hit the mark, he told The Independent of Britain in 1990.“People say, ‘I’ve written you an opera,’ and either the range is too wide or they want you to be something bizarre like a singing corpse,” he said. “I’ve spent my life fighting the idea of being a piece of exquisitery on a table — trying just to be a singer, not a countertenor.” More