Deaths (Obituaries)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Bert I. Gordon, Auteur of Mutant Monster Movies, Dies at 100

      by

      Despite low budgets and years of mostly negative reviews, he gained a cult following for his giant villains, homemade effects and preposterous plotlines.Bert I. Gordon, the professed king of the monster movies whose B pictures featured giant rats, giant spiders, giant grasshoppers, giant chickens, a colossal man and 30-foot teenagers laying waste to everything in sight, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 100.His daughter Patricia Gordon confirmed the death.As anxieties over nuclear testing and the effects of radiation swept postwar America, Mr. Gordon embarked on a low-budget filmmaking odyssey that turned mutated monsters loose on the hapless world. Despite the fact that his movies featured stars like Ida Lupino and Orson Welles, and despite the eye-catching apocalyptic titles and lurid posters, he generated many flops, a few minor hits and largely negative reviews. He also generated a cult following.In the 1950s and early ’60s, his monster movies were perfect for drive-in theaters, where audiences took in wildly improbable plots, silly dialogue and crude special effects: locusts overrunning a miniature city, a gigantic rat hovering over a girl in a negligee, Ms. Lupino being eaten by vast mealworms.Filming a movie in 10 to 15 days, using rear-projection enlargements of creatures with ordinary people in the foreground, Mr. Gordon produced, directed and often wrote about 25 films over six decades starting in 1955, most of them monster movies. Among his best known were “The Cyclops” (1957), “Village of the Giants” (1965), “Necromancy” (1972), “The Food of the Gods” (1976) and “Empire of the Ants” (1977).A scene from “The Cyclops” (1957), one of Mr. Gordon’s best-known films.RKO StudiosNone came close to the quality or popularity of the classic atomic-monster films of the era: “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms” (1953), directed by Eugène Lourié, about a dinosaur freed from Arctic hibernation by a nuclear test and slain amid crowds at Coney Island, and “Them” (1954), directed by Gordon Douglas, about huge radioactive ants that menace Los Angeles and are trapped and firebombed in the city’s water tunnels.Mr. Gordon’s first film, “King Dinosaur” (1955), with four actors, a seven-day shooting schedule and a $15,000 budget, was a template for his later work: When a new planet enters the solar system, four astronauts land and explore it as a possible home for humans. They battle giant insects and a prehistoric dinosaur, and they finally detonate an atomic bomb to destroy the creature.“Bert has never given much thought to social message,” Beverly Gray wrote on the Beverly in Movieland blog in 2014. “He just wants to tell stories on film.”Six months after the release of the popular “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” directed by Jack Arnold, American International Pictures distributed Mr. Gordon’s “The Amazing Colossal Man” (1957). Caught in a nuclear accident, the title character grows to 60 feet and is shot by the police in Las Vegas. Variety said the film’s technical aspects were “well handled,” and other reviews were generally positive.In “Beginning of the End” (1957), a scientist (Peter Graves) uses radiation to make giant fruits and vegetables to end world hunger, but a plague of giant grasshoppers that has eaten the food invades Chicago and starts feasting on people. Lured into Lake Michigan with an electronic mating call, the grasshoppers drown. Mr. Gordon did the special effects in his garage, filming 200 grasshoppers jumping and crawling on photos of the city. Reviewers called the special effects absurdly obvious and the screenplay ludicrous.“The Village of the Giants” was praised by a Los Angeles Times reviewer for its “endless views of healthy young torsos gyrating to the rhythms.”Embassy PicturesElements of the beach-party genre were combined with Mr. Gordon’s usual themes in “Village of the Giants” (1965). A substance called “goo,” produced with a boy’s chemistry set, causes gigantism in a gang of rocking teenagers, who become 30-foot delinquents running amok in a California town. More chemistry-set magic produces an antidote, and all returns to normal. The Los Angeles Times’s reviewer liked the special effects and the “endless views of healthy young torsos gyrating to the rhythms.”Orson Welles, often desperate for money to finance his own films, starred in Mr. Gordon’s “Necromancy,” about a sinister man who wields mystical powers over a small town with rituals seeking to bring back the dead.Ms. Lupino appeared in “The Food of the Gods,” one of three Gordon films loosely based on H.G. Wells tales, which portrayed people on an island fighting overgrown rats, wasps and chickens that have lapped up radioactive stuff that looks like pancake batter oozing from the ground. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film “stunningly ridiculous.”Bert Ira Gordon was born in Kenosha, Wis., on Sept. 24, 1922, the son of Charles Abraham Gordon and Sadeline (Barnett) Gordon. He became interested in film as a boy, when an aunt gave him a 16-millimeter movie camera for his birthday. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison but dropped out to join the Army Air Forces during World War II.In 1945, Mr. Gordon married Flora Lang, who worked with him on many films. They had three daughters, Patricia, Susan and Carol, and divorced in 1979. In 1980, Mr. Gordon married Eva Marie Marklstorfer. They had a daughter, Christina. Susan Gordon, who appeared in her father’s 1960 film “The Boy and the Pirates,” died in 2011.In addition to his daughter Patricia, he is survived by his wife; their daughter, Christina Gordon; another daughter, Carol Gordon; six grandchildren; and 19 great-grandchildren. He died in a hospital after collapsing at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif.Mr. Gordon was a production assistant on the CBS television series “Racket Squad” in the early 1950s, and in 1954 he was the producer, cinematographer and supervising editor for the adventure series “Serpent Island.”After 25 years of mostly making monster pictures, Mr. Gordon produced “Burned at the Stake” (1982), about the Salem witch trials; two sex comedies, “Let’s Do It!” (1982) and “The Big Bet” (1985); “Satan’s Princess” (1989), about a missing woman; and “Secrets of a Psychopath” (2015), about a murderous brother and sister.Called “Mr. B.I.G.,” both for his initials and for his techniques of creating movie monsters, Mr. Gordon wrote “The Amazing Colossal Worlds of Mr. B.I.G.: An Autobiographical Journey,” which was published in 2010.Alex Traub More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      David Lindley, ‘Musician’s Musician’ to the Rock Elite, Dies at 78

      by

      He worked with a wide range of luminaries, most notably Jackson Browne, and there was seemingly no stringed instrument he couldn’t play.David Lindley, the rare Los Angeles session guitarist to find fame in his own right, both as an eclectic solo artist and as a marquee collaborator on landmark recordings by Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Rod Stewart and many others, died on Friday. He was 78.His death was announced on his website. The announcement did not say where he died or cite a cause, although he was said to have been battling kidney trouble, pneumonia, influenza and other ailments.With his head-turning mastery of seemingly any instrument with strings, Mr. Lindley became one of the most sought-after sidemen in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Mixing searing slide guitar work with global stylings on instruments from around the world, he brought depth and richness to recordings by luminaries like Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Warren Zevon, Ry Cooder and Iggy Pop.But he was far more than a supporting player. “One of the most talented musicians there has ever been,” Graham Nash wrote on Instagram after Mr. Lindley’s death. (Mr. Lindley toured with Mr. Nash and David Crosby in the 1970s.) “He was truly a musician’s musician.”On Twitter, Peter Frampton wrote that Mr. Lindley’s “unique sound and style gave him away in one note.”Mr. Lindley, who was known for his blizzard of curly brown hair and an ironic smirk, first made his mark in the late 1960s with the band Kaleidoscope, whose Middle East-inflected acid-pop albums, like “Side Trips” (1967) and “A Beacon From Mars” (1968), have become collector’s items among the cognoscenti.He embarked on a solo career in 1981 with “El Rayo-X,” a party album that mixed rock, blues, reggae, Zydeco and Middle Eastern music and included a memorably snarling cover of K.C. Douglas’s “Mercury Blues.”Mr. Lindley in performance with Jackson Brown in Fremont, Calif., in 1978. Mr. Lindley was heard on every one of Mr. Browne’s albums from “For Everyman” (1973) to “Hold Out” (1980).Richard McCaffrey/Michael Ochs Archive, via Getty ImagesBy that point in his career, Mr. Lindley was already treasured among the rock elite for providing an earthiness and globe-trotting flair to the breezy California soft-rock wafting from the canyons of Los Angeles in the 1970s.He is best known for his work with Mr. Browne, with whom he toured and served as a featured performer on every Browne album from “For Everyman” (1973) to “Hold Out” (1980). His inventive fretwork was a cornerstone of many of Mr. Browne’s biggest hits, including the smash single “Running on Empty,” on which Mr. Lindley’s plaintive yet soaring lap steel guitar work helped capture both the exhaustion and the exhilaration of life on the road, as expressed in Mr. Browne’s lyrics.Mr. Lindley’s guitar and fiddle could also be heard on landmark pop albums like Ms. Ronstadt’s “Heart Like a Wheel” (1974), which included the No. 1 single “You’re No Good,” and Rod Stewart’s “A Night on the Town” (1976), highlighted by the chart-topping single “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright).”Ever on the hunt for new sounds and textures, Mr. Lindley had “no idea” how many instruments he could play, as he told Acoustic Guitar magazine in 2000. But throughout his career he showed a knack for wringing emotion not only from the violin, mandolin, banjo, dulcimer and autoharp, but also from the Indian tanpura, the Middle Eastern oud and the Turkish saz.Despite his position at the center of the Los Angeles rock firmament, he kept a low-key presence both onstage and in life, steering clear of the epic hedonism of the era.“I’m kind of a social misfit when it comes to after-show parties, so I usually went back to the hotel,” Mr. Lindley said in a 2013 interview. “There’s danger at those after-show parties, you know what I mean? I couldn’t do that. And I had no real idea how to schmooze and do any of this stuff.”Mr. Browne in concert in Byron Bay, Australia, in 2006.James Green/Getty ImagesDavid Perry Lindley was born on March 21, 1944, in Los Angeles, the only child of John Lindley, a lawyer, and Margaret (Wells) Lindley. He grew up in San Marino, Calif., an upscale city near Pasadena, where his father, a musical connoisseur, filled the house with sounds from around the world, including masters of the Indian sitar and the Greek bouzouki.Drawing on those influences, by age 6 David had become obsessed with all manner of stringed instruments. “I even opened up the upright piano in the playhouse out in back of my parents’ house to get at the strings,” he recalled in a 2008 interview with the musician Ben Harper for the magazine Fretboard Journal.His parents were less than enthusiastic when he channeled his energies into bluegrass. “I played the five-string banjo in the closet,” he said in a recent video interview, “because it was very, very loud, and my mom and dad were a little disturbed by their son, the hillbilly musician.”Regardless, he found success with the instrument in the Los Angeles area, winning the annual Topanga Banjo-Fiddle Contest five times. After graduating from La Salle High School in Pasadena, he played in a series of folk groups; in one of them, the Dry City Scat Band, he played alongside his fellow multi-instrumentalist Chris Darrow, later a member of Kaleidoscope.Although Kaleidoscope failed to hit the commercial jackpot, it turned heads within the music industry. Tom Donahue, the influential San Francisco disc jockey, called it “one of the best groups in the country.” Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin once called Kaleidoscope “my favorite band of all time, my ideal band; absolutely brilliant.”But Mr. Lindley and his bandmates had little interest in doing what seemed necessary to pursue fame. Once, he recalled in the Acoustic Guitar interview, “we were sitting in the dressing room of the Whiskey a Go Go, and a manager guy comes in and says, ‘We can make you guys stars — huge. But you’ll have to do this, this and this, and you’ll have to dress like this, too.’ And we said, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ and sent the guy packing.”He is survived by his wife, Joan Darrow, the sister of his former bandmate Chris Darrow, and their daughter, Rosanne.Mr. Lindley would eventually find a degree of stardom, with a big boost from Mr. Browne, whom he met in the late 1960s at a Los Angeles rock club called Magic Mushroom. Once they started working together, though, it was the boost that Mr. Lindley gave Mr. Browne that became obvious.In a Rolling Stone interview in 2010, Mr. Browne recalled an early tour, when the audience was clamoring to hear his hit “Doctor My Eyes.” The band, however, lacked the full array of instruments to capture the sound of the recording.“We’re playing at this concert at a college and they were calling for this song,” he said. “And we said, ‘What the hell, let’s just play it.’ And it was a revelation. The piano part is sturdy enough — it’s just playing fours — and it was enough to support Lindley doing this insane grooving, swinging playing. He wasn’t even the guitar player on the record. But he just ripped it up.“And I realized then I didn’t need a band to play with David. It just comes out of him.” More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      Joseph Zucchero, Whose Mr. Beef Sandwich Shop Inspired ‘The Bear,’ Dies at 69

      by

      Mr. Beef, the Chicago restaurant Mr. Zucchero co-founded in the 1970s, specializes in the Italian beef, a classic American sandwich. The acclaimed FX series “The Bear” was partly filmed there.Joseph Zucchero, a co-founder of the popular sandwich shop that inspired the acclaimed FX restaurant drama “The Bear,” and was where much of the series was filmed, died on March 1 at a hospital in Chicago. He was 69.His death was confirmed by his son, Christopher Zucchero, an owner of Mr. Beef, the family’s restaurant in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, who said a cause was not known.The restaurant specializes in the Italian beef sandwich, a Chicago classic made with thin-sliced roast beef and giardiniera or roasted peppers. All of that is typically piled on a sandwich roll, and it is either drizzled with or dipped in beef juice.“He loved being there,” Joseph Zucchero’s son, Christopher, said of his father. “He was there day and night.”To create “The Bear,” a series about a young chef who leaves a career in New York’s high-end restaurant scene to run his family’s sandwich shop, FX shot inside and outside Mr. Beef, fictionalized as the Original Beef of Chicagoland in the show. It also created a replica of the restaurant’s kitchen in a Chicago studio, Mr. Zucchero’s son said.The series, which premiered on Hulu last summer, drew acclaim from food writers and restaurateurs. And in a fine example of life imitating art that imitated life, its success led to a nationwide surge in demand for the Italian beef sandwich, including at Mr. Beef itself.“Mr. Beef’s always going to be attached to that, and we’re very grateful for that,” Christopher Zucchero said of the TV series. “They’re together. It’s symbiotic for sure, but I don’t want it to overshadow what my dad did.”Joseph Zachary Zucchero was born on Feb. 21, 1954. He grew up on Chicago’s northwest side and started his career as a butcher, Christopher Zucchero said.In the late 1970s, Mr. Zucchero and his brother, Dominic, opened Mr. Beef on North Orleans Street in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, a once-gritty area that has since been heavily gentrified.On a visit to the restaurant in the mid-1990s, a New York Times reporter found customers eating $3.50 Italian beef sandwiches at a Formica countertop near an autographed picture of Frank Sinatra. The short menu posted above the grill was not really necessary, because virtually everyone ordered the same thing.“You want a hot dog, you go to a hot-dog stand,” Mr. Zucchero said. “You want a beef sandwich, you come here.”In addition to his son and his brother, Mr. Zucchero is survived by his wife, Camille; his daughter, Lauren; and his sister, Claudine Grippo.Mr. Beef on North Orleans Street in Chicago in October.Aaron M. Sprecher, via Associated PressMr. Zucchero was a movie fan, his son said, and his restaurant had admirers in Hollywood. The actor Joe Mantegna and the comedian Jay Leno “would come in all the time,” Christopher Zucchero said. He said that he has been friends with Christopher Storer, who created “The Bear,” since the two were in kindergarten, and that they spent time at Mr. Beef as children.During filming, the older Mr. Zucchero visited the movie studio on Chicago’s West Side where Mr. Storer’s team had built a replica of his restaurant. What he saw made his jaw drop.“I mean, from the floor to the ceiling to the countertops to the equipment,” he told NPR last year, “you actually walked inside and walked into Mr. Beef.” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Gary Rossington, Lynyrd Skynyrd Guitarist, Dies at 71

      by

      The last surviving original member of the classic Southern rock group, he played the soaring slide guitar solo on “Free Bird” and co-wrote “Sweet Home Alabama.”Gary Rossington, an original member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the quintessential Southern rock band, whose guitar helped define its sound and who was a key figure in the group’s eventual rebirth after a plane crash in 1977 killed three of its members, died on Sunday. He was 71.The band posted news of his death on its Facebook page but did not say where he died. No cause was given, although Mr. Rossington had had heart problems for years. He was the last surviving member of the original band.Growing up in the Jacksonville, Fla., area, Mr. Rossington got the rock-star bug when a friend, Bob Burns, was given a drum kit in the summer of 1964. The two teenagers decided they would become rock drummers.“The practical limitations of forming a band with only two drummers soon became apparent,” Mr. Rossington’s biography on the band’s website notes, “and Gary gravitated toward playing the guitar.”That same summer, according to a portrait of the band written for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted the group in 2006, another teenager, Ronnie Van Zant, was playing in a baseball game when he hit a foul ball that struck a spectator, Mr. Burns. Mr. Van Zant, too, had rock-star aspirations, and the three began playing together, adding other members and trying out group names — the Wildcats and Sons of Satan were among those considered.Eventually they settled on Lynyrd Skynyrd, a bastardization of Leonard Skinner, a gym teacher who had hassled them in high school because of their long hair.The band, playing countless bar dates around Florida and eventually beyond, evolved into a seven-piece with three guitars — Mr. Rossington, Allen Collins and Ed King (later replaced by Steve Gaines) — backing Mr. Van Zant’s vocals. The guitarists would alternate as lead, sometimes in the same song. Mr. Rossington was adept as a lead and also had a knack for adjusting his style to support the other guitarists when one of them was front and center.“Back in the day, we had three guitars and a keyboard, so that’s all strings,” he told the website Premier Guitar in 2017. “It’s hard to get all those strings together, and the hardest part is not playing. Growing up, we learned where not to play. Even though you could play, you leave the space and room.”The band’s breakthrough came in 1973, when the musician and producer Al Kooper caught a show in Atlanta, liked what he heard and signed the group to his Sounds of the South label. Mr. Kooper produced the band’s first album, “Lynyrd Skynyrd (pronounced ‘lĕh-’nérd ‘skin-’nérd),” which was released in 1973 and included “Gimme Three Steps,” “Simple Man” and what became one of rock’s most famous songs, “Free Bird,” with Mr. Rossington’s evocative slide guitar solos.By the fall of 1977, the group had released four more albums, had hits with “Sweet Home Alabama” (which Mr. Rossington wrote with Mr. Van Zant and Mr. King) and other songs, and was one of the best-known bands of the day. Then, on Oct. 20, the band’s chartered plane ran out of fuel and crashed in a thicket in Mississippi, killing Mr. Van Zant; Mr. Gaines; Cassie Gaines, Mr. Gaines’s sister and a backup vocalist; the band’s road manager; the pilot; and the co-pilot. The 20 other passengers were injured, including Mr. Rossington, who sustained numerous broken bones.The crash was the end of Lynyrd Skynyrd, for a time. After a few years to recover physically and psychologically, Mr. Rossington and Mr. Collins formed the Rossington Collins Band, which strove to distinguish itself from Lynyrd Skynyrd, in part by hiring a female vocalist, Dale Krantz, whom Mr. Rossington would later marry.But the new band did play “Free Bird” at its shows.“We do it now as an instrumental,” Mr. Rossington told The Orlando Sentinel in 1980. “We don’t do the vocal on it because that was Ronnie’s. It still gets heavy when we play it. I can hear him singing.”In 1987, the 10th anniversary of the crash, Mr. Rossington helped bring about a tribute tour, reuniting surviving members, with Mr. Van Zant’s younger brother, Johnny, taking over as vocalist.Mr. Rossington, right, duets with Rickey Medlocke in the reconstituted Lynyrd Skynyrd in Fort Hood, Tex., in 2004.Steve Traynor/The Killeen Daily Herald, via Associated Press“We were just going to do a one-show thing,” he told The Los Angeles Times that year, “but it turned into a tribute tour because, 10 years later, the music’s still being played on the radio, and it’s still requested, and it’s still selling real good.”The reconstituted group stuck, and it has been touring as Lynyrd Skynyrd, with various lineups, ever since, as well as releasing albums. Later this year the band is scheduled to tour with ZZ Top. Mr. Rossington, though, had cut back his participation to only occasional appearances, for health reasons.Mr. Rossington was born on Dec. 4, 1951, in Jacksonville. His father died when he was a boy, and his mother was an important force in his life, so much so, he said, that he named his first serious guitar, a Les Paul, “Berniece” after her.In a 1993 interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Rossington recalled some early validation for the fledgling group: winning a battle of the bands in Jacksonville in 1968.“There were 10 bands playing soul music,” he said. “We came in and did Yardbirds and Stones. We were a little over the audience’s heads. Except that the judges went, ‘These cats are cool.’”Mr. Rossington, right, with Lynyrd Skynyrd in 2019. He cut back his participation in the band in recent years because of health problems.Suzanne Cordeiro/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Rossington and other band members were known for a wild lifestyle. In 1976 Mr. Rossington smashed his car, with alcohol and drugs contributing to the accident. The crash inspired the band’s song “That Smell,” a track on its 1977 album, “Street Survivors.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Rossington’s survivors include two daughters.When Mr. Rossington and the others in the tribute group of 1987 gave their first concert, in Nashville, they played “Free Bird” as an instrumental, as Mr. Rossington had in his earlier group. The audience filled in for the absent Ronnie Van Zant.“You could hear 16,000 people singing,” Mr. Rossington said, “and it sounded like a million.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Ricou Browning, Who Made the Black Lagoon Scary, Dies at 93

      by

      He helped bring “Flipper” to the movies and TV but was best known for his plunge in a monster suit in “Creature From the Black Lagoon.”Ricou Browning, who played the title character, or at least the underwater version of it, in one of the most enduring creature features of the 1950s, “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” died on Feb. 27 at his home in Southwest Ranches, Fla., northwest of Miami. He was 93.His daughter Renee Le Feuvre confirmed the death.Mr. Browning was 23 when Newt Perry, a promoter of various Florida attractions for whom he had worked as a teenager, asked him to show some Hollywood visitors around Wakulla Springs, a picturesque spot near Tallahassee. The entourage — which, as Mr. Browning told the story later, included Jack Arnold, the film’s director, and the cameraman Scotty Welbourne — was scouting locations for a planned movie about an underwater monster.“Scotty had his underwater camera,” Mr. Browning recalled in an interview recorded in “The Creature Chronicles: Exploring the Black Lagoon Trilogy,” a 2014 book by Tom Weaver (with David Schecter and Steve Kronenberg), “and he asked me if I would get in the water with him and swim in front of the camera so they could get some perspective.”Mr. Arnold not only liked the location; he also liked Mr. Browning. He called him days later and asked if he would want to play the creature for the underwater scenes to be shot in Florida. (An actor named Ben Chapman portrayed the monster in the scenes on land, which were filmed in California.)“We’ve tested a lot of people for this part,” Mr. Browning recalled Mr. Arnold telling him, “but I’d like to have you play the creature — I like your swimming.”Mr. Browning in a scene from “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” the first of three movies in which he played the title character. “I’d like to have you play the creature,” he recalled the film’s director telling him — “I like your swimming.”Silver Screen Collection/Getty ImagesIn August 1953 he was brought to California to be fitted for the suit that would turn him into the Gill Man, and six months later “Creature From the Black Lagoon” was released. It was the latest in a tradition of monster movies from Universal Studios that included “The Mummy” (1932) and “The Wolf Man” (1941), and it took its place in monster movie lore.In the film, which was released in 3-D, scientists working in the Amazon discover a creature in a lagoon that takes a shine to a female member of the party, Kay (played by Julie Adams). About 28 minutes into the film, Kay decides to go for a swim in the lagoon, and the creature, still undiscovered by the research party, swims beneath her like an underwater stalker, a scene both creepy and oddly poignant.“This scene turned it from a regular old monster movie to a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ thing,” Mr. Weaver said by email, “a big reason for the movie’s ongoing popularity.”Some critics weren’t impressed by the movie.“The proceedings above and under water were filmed in 3-D to impart an illusion of depth when viewed through polarized glasses,” A.H. Weiler wrote in The New York Times. “This adventure has no depth.”Yet the movie did decently at the box office and became a sort of cultural reference point. Mr. Browning, who had the ability to hold his breath underwater for minutes at a time, played the swimming version of the creature in two sequels, “Revenge of the Creature” (1955) and “The Creature Walks Among Us” (1956).He went on to share a story-writing credit on the 1963 film “Flipper,” about a boy who becomes friends with a dolphin, and then, the next year, was a creator of the television series of the same name and directed and helped write a number of its episodes during its three seasons. He also did some of the underwater stunt work.In an introductory essay in Mr. Weaver’s book, Ms. Adams, whose “Black Lagoon” character was played by Ginger Stanley in the underwater scenes, recalled waiting eagerly in California to see the “dailies” — footage from the day’s shooting — coming out of Florida.“The dailies were long, silent takes of him and Ginger Stanley deep in the crystal clear water of Wakulla Springs,” she wrote. “They’d swim for a while, get some air from an air hose, and then go back and resume their action. It was so exciting to see the Gill Man brought to life by Ricou’s unique swimming style, and I was captivated.”Ms. Stanley, Mr. Browning’s underwater partner in that eerie scene that helped define the film, died in January in Orlando, Fla., at 91.Ricou Ren Browning was born on Feb. 16, 1930, in Fort Pierce, Fla. His father, Clement, worked construction in the Navy, and his mother, Inez (Ricou) Browning, was a bookkeeper.He first saw Wakulla Springs as a teenager and earned some money by swimming deep in the water for the benefit of tourists in glass-bottomed boats, who would watch him plunge to depths of 80 feet and leave tips.“Some of us kids would earn 30, 40 dollars a day,” he told Mr. Weaver for his book, “and that was big, big money.”In the 1940s he also got his first taste of the movie business, appearing in several short films made in the area by Grantland Rice, who was better known as a sportswriter. In one, according to Mr. Weaver’s book, Mr. Browning is among the teenagers packed into a Model T Ford that drives into the waters of Wakulla Springs.After serving in the Air Force from 1947 to 1950, Mr. Browning returned to Florida. He was the underwater double for Forrest Tucker in “Crosswinds” (1951), an adventure story about an effort to recover gold from a sunken plane, which was filmed in Florida. He was performing in Mr. Perry’s underwater shows at Weeki Wachee, another Florida attraction, and studying physical education at Florida State University when he was recruited for “Creature From the Black Lagoon.”In his book, Mr. Weaver recounts the hit-or-miss process of coming up with the right creature costume, and the difficulties Mr. Browning had to deal with once the right look was found. One problem was that the costume was made of foam rubber, which floats.“I wore a chest plate that was thin lead,” Mr. Browning told him, as well as thigh and ankle weights.Another problem, Mr. Weaver said, was that Mr. Chapman, the actor playing the on-land version of the creature, was quite tall; in Florida, Mr. Browning had scenes with Ms. Stanley and several other stand-ins.“Ricou was average height,” Mr. Weaver said, “so short people were hired to play the hero-heroine-bad guy so that Ricou would look comparatively king-sized.”Mr. Browning’s later film work included directing the comedy “Salty” (1973), about a sea lion, and the crime drama “Mr. No Legs” (1978), about a mob enforcer who is a double amputee, as well as doing stunt work in several movies, including serving as Jerry Lewis’s underwater double in the 1959 comedy “Don’t Give Up the Ship.”Mr. Browning’s first marriage, to Margaret Kelly in 1951, ended in divorce. His second wife, Fran Ravelo, whom he married in 1977, died in 2020. In addition to his daughter Renee, he is survived by three other children from his first marriage, his sons, Kelly and Ricou Jr., and his daughter Kim Browning; 10 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.Mr. Weaver noted that all of the other actors who portrayed monsters in the classic Universal films died some time ago.“Ricou,” he said, “had the distinction of being the last man standing.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Tom Sizemore, Intense Actor With a Troubled Life, Dies at 61

      by

      He earned praise for his work in films like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Black Hawk Down.” He also served prison time for drug possession and domestic abuse.Tom Sizemore, a tough-guy actor whose career, which included roles in major films like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Black Hawk Down,” was overshadowed at times by his problems with substance abuse and the law, died on Friday in Burbank, Calif. He was 61.The death was announced by his manager, Charles Lago. The cause was not immediately known, but Mr. Sizemore suffered a stroke on Feb. 18, which caused a brain aneurysm. He had been in a coma and on life support since then. Mr. Sizemore could be intense, charismatic and manic in roles as soldiers, thugs, cops, killers and, in a television movie, the baseball player Pete Rose. As Sgt. Mike Horvath in Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (1998), he was the devoted second in command to Captain Miller (played by Tom Hanks) in a small group of Army Rangers whose mission after the D-Day invasion was to locate a soldier whose three brothers had already died in battle.Near the end of the movie, Horvath eloquently lays out the choices facing Miller: Let Private Ryan stay and fight, which he prefers, or send him home, as the unit had been ordered to do.“Part of me thinks the kid’s right — what’s he done to deserve this?” Mr. Sizemore, as Horvath, says. “He wants to stay here? Fine, let’s leave him and go home. But then another part of me thinks, what if by some miracle we stay, and actually make it out of here? Someday we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this.” “That’s what I was thinking, sir,” he concludes. “Like you said, Captain, we do that, we all earn the right to go home.”Mr. Spielberg was not the only A-list director Mr. Sizemore worked with. In Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” (1994), he was an obsessed detective pursuing a young couple on a murder spree. In Michael Mann’s “Heat” (1995), he was a member of a crew of thieves led by Robert De Niro. And in Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” (2002), based on a botched United States military raid in 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia, to capture lieutenants of a brutal warlord, he was the commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment.Mr. Sizemore in a scene from the television series “Robbery Homicide Division.” One critic said Mr. Sizemore was the main reason to watch the show.Tony Esparza/CBSWhen Mr. Sizemore starred on the television series “Robbery Homicide Division,” a police procedural set in Los Angeles and aired in the 2002-3 season, Robert Philpot of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram said he was the main reason to watch.“Using his oversized head, which hangs down slightly as if it were too heavy for his body, and his expressive eyes,” Mr. Philpot wrote, “Sizemore projects complete authority, keeping underlings as well as suspects in line.”Mr. Sizemore at the time was dealing with serious drug problems, which dated to the 1990s. Over the years he used heroin, crystal methamphetamine and cocaine, and he was in and out of rehab.“How long sober now?” Larry King asked him on his CNN show in 2010.“Three hundred twenty-six days,” Mr. Sizemore said.“What was the longest you were ever sober before that?” Mr. King asked.“A couple minutes,” Mr. Sizemore said. “No, that’s not true. I got sober in ’97 and was sober through 2002.”In 2003, he was convicted of physically abusing his former girlfriend, Heidi Fleiss, who in the 1990s ran an upscale prostitution ring and was referred to in the news media as the Hollywood Madam.In a letter to the judge who sentenced him, Mr. Sizemore wrote, “I am convinced that if I had not been under the influence of drugs, I would have controlled my behavior.”He served eight months in prison.In October 2004, he pleaded guilty to a felony count of possessing methamphetamine and was placed on probation. The probation was revoked in 2005 when he was caught using a prosthetic device to fake a drug test. His probation was later reinstated.And in 2007 he served several months in jail for violating his probation after being arrested in a hotel in Bakersfield, Calif., for possessing methamphetamine.“God’s trying to tell me he doesn’t want me using drugs because every time I use them I get caught,” Mr. Sizemore said in a jailhouse interview with The Associated Press.He participated in 10 episodes of the reality series “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew” from 2010 to 2011, along with Ms. Fleiss, the former basketball player Dennis Rodman, the actress Mackenzie Phillips and others.In an article in The New York Times Magazine in 2009 about the series, Chris Norris wrote that Mr. Sizemore had fallen “from an Olympus populated by Pacino, De Niro, Spielberg and Scorsese to this beige-carpeted, cable-only Hades.”Mr. Sizemore played the Mafia boss John Gotti in the two-part 1998 TV movie “Witness to the Mob.”Thomas Edward Sizemore Jr. was born on Nov. 29, 1961, in Detroit. His father was a lawyer. His mother, Judith (Schannault) Sizemore, worked for the City of Detroit’s ombudsman.After graduating from Wayne State University in Detroit with a bachelor’s degree in theater in 1983, he earned a master’s in the same subject from Temple University in 1986. Three years later, he made his debut on television, in the series “Gideon Oliver,” and on film, in “Lock Up,” starring Sylvester Stallone.“Lock Up” was a flop, but United Press International wrote that Mr. Sizemore, as a “whacked-out scheming loser of an inmate,” had emerged “with semi-star potential.”By the time “Lock Up” was released, he had filmed parts in the forthcoming films “Born on the Fourth of July,” directed by Mr. Stone and starring Tom Cruise; “Blue Steel,” with Jamie Lee Curtis; and the dark comedy “Penn & Teller Get Killed.”“Most of the characters I play are losers, like the convict Dallas in ‘Lock Up,’” Mr. Sizemore told U.P.I. “In ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ I’m a quadriplegic. In “Penn & Teller,’ I’m a crazed killer. In ‘Blue Steel,’ I’m a crack maniac.”His role as a mobster in “Witness Protection” (1999) earned him a Golden Globe nomination for best performance by an actor in a made-for-TV movie or mini-series. That year, he and eight other actors from “Saving Private Ryan” were nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding cast.Mr. Sizemore continued to play characters on either side of the law, and despite his substance abuse problems, he remained busy for the rest of his career. He portrayed an internal affairs investigator on five episodes of “Hawaii Five-O” in 2011 and 2012; a C.I.A. agent assigned to rescue three American journalists taken hostage in “Radical” (2017); and a commander in the science fiction film “Battle for Pandora” (2022).And in a preternaturally chilling role, he played a depraved building manager who is tried for kidnapping and killing a little boy in a 2015 episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Mr. Sizemore in 2022. Despite his substance abuse problems, he remained busy until the end. Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty ImagesMr. Sizemore is survived by his mother; his twin sons, Jagger and Jayden; his brother Paul; his half sister, Katherine Sizemore; and his half brother, Charles Sizemore. His brother Aaron died last year. His marriage to Maeve Quinlan ended in divorce.During his 2010 interview with Mr. King, Mr. Sizemore said that soon after he had become successful in Hollywood, he started using cocaine with a famous actor, whom he would not identify.“I didn’t want to do it,” he said, “but there was people in this room and he did it, and I went, ‘If he did it, I’m going to do it.’ And I did it, it took a couple minutes and I went, ‘Wow, that is bomb. Where do you get that? Do you have any more of it?’” More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Steve Mackey, a Mainstay of the Britpop Band Pulp, Dies at 56

      by

      Shortly after he joined that long-running group in 1987, it rose from obscurity to chart-topping success in what came to be called the Cool Britannia era.Steve Mackey, the lauded bassist, songwriter and producer who made his name laying down dance-floor-friendly grooves for the British band Pulp during its 1990s pinnacle, as it transformed itself from a little-known art-rock collective to a festival-headlining Britpop powerhouse, died on Thursday. He was 56.His death was announced on social media by his wife, Katie Grand. She did not say where he died or cite a cause, although she noted that he had died “after three months in hospital, fighting with all his strength and determination.”With Hollywood-worthy looks and an image of tailored cool, Mr. Mackey provided the pulsing bass lines that helped whip audiences into a frenzy as Pulp cycled through glam-rock, acid-house, disco and indie-pop influences on 1990s anthems like “Common People” and “Disco 2000,” two of the five Top 10 singles the band notched in Britain.Pulp also had five Top 10 albums, including the celebrated “Different Class” in 1995.Mr. Mackey recorded five studio albums with Pulp over the course of a decade, starting with “Separations” in 1992. His tenure coincided with the most commercial and critically acclaimed era for this long-running, ever-evolving band, as it emerged from obscurity in Sheffield, England, and, after a series of false starts, took its place in the English pop firmament along with Oasis, Blur and other supernovas of the so-called Cool Britannia era.In 1995, the influential British music magazine Melody Maker anointed Pulp the band of the year — a notable accomplishment in a year that also saw the release of Oasis’s era-defining album “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” That same year, the band headlined the star-studded Glastonbury rock festival after the scheduled headliners, the Stone Roses, dropped out.It was a meteoric rise for a garage-band bassist who had started his association with the band as a mere fan.Stephen Patrick Mackey was born on Nov. 10, 1966, in Sheffield, a historically industrial city in South Yorkshire, England. He was in his late teens when he started catching gigs by Pulp, which was already a respected band on the local scene.Jarvis Cocker, the band’s lead singer, made an immediate impression with his haunted air and chiseled looks. “I was amazed by Jarvis,” Mr. Mackey said in a 2021 video interview. “He was really a striking frontman, and the songs were really powerful; they’re quite dark as well.”It was while he was playing in band called Trolley Dog Shag that Mr. Mackey befriended Mr. Cocker, although he did not entertain thoughts of lobbying to play with Pulp. “They seemed self-contained, quite aloof,” he said in a 1996 interview for the band’s website. “I was into really noisy bands, garage bands, and Pulp were like an art band.”Besides, the band, formed in 1978, hardly seemed on a fast track to stardom. By the time Mr. Mackey joined in 1987, Pulp had cycled through multiple lineups and had failed to generate much of a stir with its first two albums, “It” (1983) and “Freaks” (1986).The band began developing a more pop-friendly sound, and the first single from “Separations,” the ice-cool dance track “My Legendary Girlfriend,” finally gave Pulp a taste of mainstream success. The British music newspaper NME named it a “single of the week.”Pulp would continue to chart for the rest of the decade, but disbanded after its 2001 album, “We Love Life.” In the ensuing years, Mr. Mackey, who had contributed to the writing of the band’s songs along with Mr. Cocker and the other members, kept busy as a producer and songwriter, working with bands like Arcade Fire and Florence + the Machine.He had a cameo role in the 2005 film “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” as the bassist for a wizard supergroup called Weird Sisters, alongside Mr. Cocker, as well as Jonny Greenwood and Philip Selway of Radiohead.Mr. Mackey was an avid photographer, and he spun out a side career in the 2010s shooting fashion campaigns for brands like Armani Exchange and Marc Jacobs while collaborating with his wife, a stylist and fashion journalist, on her fashion magazine, Love.He joined Pulp on a reunion tour in 2011 and 2012, but declined to join one scheduled for this year, explaining on social media last October that he desired “to continue the work I’m engaged in — music, filmmaking and photography projects.”In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Marley; his parents, Kath and Paul; and his sister, Michelle.After Mr. Mackey’s death, Mr. Cocker posted on Instagram a photo of Mr. Mackey trekking up a rocky trail in the Andes in 2012.“We had a day off & Steve suggested we go climbing in the Andes,” Mr. Cocker wrote. Calling it a “magical experience,” he continued: “Steve made things happen. In his life & in the band. & we’d very much like to think that he’s back in those mountains now, on the next stage of his adventure.” More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Wayne Shorter, Innovator During an Era of Change in Jazz, Dies at 89

      by

      His career as an influential tenor saxophonist and composer reached across more than half a century, tracking jazz’s complex evolution during that span.Wayne Shorter, the enigmatic, intrepid saxophonist who shaped the color and contour of modern jazz as one of its most intensely admired composers, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 89.His publicist, Alisse Kingsley, confirmed his death, at a hospital. There was no immediate information on the cause.Mr. Shorter had a sly, confiding style on the tenor saxophone, instantly identifiable by his low-gloss tone and elliptical sense of phrase. His sound was brighter on soprano, an instrument on which he left an incalculable influence; he could be inquisitive, teasing or elusive, but always with a pinpoint intonation and clarity of attack.His career reached across more than half a century, largely inextricable from jazz’s complex evolution during that span. He emerged in the 1960s as a tenor saxophonist and in-house composer for pace-setting editions of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the Miles Davis Quintet, two of the most celebrated small groups in jazz history.He then helped pioneer fusion, with Davis and as a leader of Weather Report, which amassed a legion of fans. He also forged a bond with popular music in marquee collaborations with the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, the guitarist Carlos Santana and the band Steely Dan, whose 1977 song “Aja” reaches a dynamic climax with his hide-and-seek tenor solo.Mr. Shorter wrote his share of compositions that became jazz standards, like “Footprints,” a coolly ethereal waltz, and “Black Nile,” a driving anthem. Beyond his book of tunes, he was revered for developing and endlessly refining a modern harmonic language. His compositions, sleek and insinuating, can convey elegant ambiguities of mood. They adhere to an internal logic even when they break the rules.His recorded output as a leader, especially during a feverishly productive stretch on Blue Note Records in the mid-1960s — when he made “Night Dreamer,” “JuJu,” “Speak No Evil” and several others, all post-bop classics — compares favorably to the best winning streaks in jazz.Mr. Shorter produced “Night Dreamer,” “JuJu,” “Speak No Evil” and several other post-bop classics in the mid-1960s.James Nieves/The New York TimesSince the turn of the 21st century, the Wayne Shorter Quartet — by far Mr. Shorter’s longest-running band, and the one most garlanded with acclaim — set an imposing standard for formal elasticity and cohesive volatility, bringing avant-garde practice into the heart of the jazz mainstream.Mr. Shorter often said he was drawn to music because it has “velocity and mystery.” A lifelong fan of comic books and science fiction, he kept a shelf crowded with action figures and wore T-shirts emblazoned with the Superman “S” logo. In his later years, he cut the figure of a sage with a twinkle in his eye, issuing cryptic or elliptical statements that inevitably came back to a sense of play.“Don’t throw away your childish dreams,” he said in 2012. “You have to be strong enough to protect them.”Throughout his career he refused to hew too closely to any tradition except that of fearless expedition. “The word ‘jazz,’ to me,” he liked to say, “only means ‘I dare you.’”‘The Newark Flash’Wayne Shorter was born in Newark on Aug. 25, 1933. His father, Joseph, worked as a welder for the Singer sewing machine company, and his mother, Louise, sewed for a furrier.Growing up in Newark’s industrial Ironbound district, Wayne and his older brother, Alan, devoured comic books, science fiction, radio serials and movie matinees at the Adams Theater. Wayne won a citywide art contest at age 12, which led to his attending Newark Arts High School, the first public high school in the country specializing in the visual and performing arts.There he encountered several teachers who cultivated his interest in music theory and composition. At the same time, bebop — an insurgent, often frenetic strain of modern jazz, typified by virtuosos like the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and the pianist Bud Powell — was a source of endless fascination for him.Bebop had a strong foothold in Newark: Savoy Records, the label most committed to the young movement, was based there, and local radio carried live broadcasts across the Hudson River from clubs like Birdland and the Royal Roost. Mr. Shorter, who had been taking private lessons on clarinet, switched to the tenor saxophone. Along with his brother, a trumpeter, he joined a local bebop group led by a flashy singer named Jackie Bland.Onstage and off, the Shorter brothers took as much pride in bebop’s stance of iconoclastic rebellion as in the swerving intricacies of the music; they would perform in intentionally rumpled suits and rubber galoshes, propping newspapers on their stands instead of sheet music. The poet Amiri Baraka, a classmate, famously recalled that such outré behavior sparked a local shorthand: “as weird as Wayne.” Mr. Shorter wore that slight as a badge of honor, at one point painting the words “Mr. Weird” on his saxophone case.He acquired a more heroic nickname, the Newark Flash, around the jazz scene of the 1950s, while earning a degree in music education at New York University. After serving two years in the Army — at Fort Dix in New Jersey, where he distinguished himself as a sharpshooter — he re-entered the scene, making a strong impression as a member of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the shining exemplar for the down-to-earth yet combustible style known as hard bop.Mr. Shorter shared the band’s front line with a bravura young trumpeter, Lee Morgan, forming a musical kinship that soon extended to his own albums, and eventually to Morgan’s. But in addition to his saxophone playing, Mr. Shorter brought to the Jazz Messengers a new degree of compositional sophistication, writing tunes, like “Ping Pong” and “Children of the Night,” that spiked a familiar hard-bop formula with dark harmonic elixirs.Mr. Shorter performing with Miles Davis in London in 1967. Davis, in his autobiography, called Mr. Shorter “the conceptualizer of a whole lot of musical ideas we did.”David Redfern/Getty ImagesMr. Shorter joined the second Miles Davis Quintet in 1964, after deflecting Davis’s overtures for several years out of loyalty to Blakey. His arrival cinched a brilliant new edition of the band, with the pianist Herbie Hancock, the bassist Ron Carter and the drummer Tony Williams. Davis, in his autobiography, called Mr. Shorter “the conceptualizer of a whole lot of musical ideas we did.”Once he joined, Mr. Shorter contributed new compositions to every studio album made by the Miles Davis Quintet, beginning with the title track of “E.S.P.” in 1965. During an engagement at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago later that year, his tenor solos were marvels of invention, turning even a songbook standard like “On Green Dolphin Street” into a portal for shadowy intrigue.But on the scale of intrigue, there could be no topping “Nefertiti,” the title track of a Davis quintet album released in 1968. A 16-bar composition with a slithery melody and a shrewdly indeterminate harmonic path, it was so holistic in its effect that Davis decided to record it with no solos, just the melody line played over and over. In Michelle Mercer’s 2004 book “Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter,” Mr. Shorter described “Nefertiti” as “my most sprung-from-me-all-in-one-piece experience of music writing,” like someone recalling a trance.Most of Mr. Shorter’s storied output on Blue Note unfolded while he was working with Davis, often with some of the same musical partners. He chronicled some aspects of his life on these albums: “Speak No Evil,” recorded in 1964, featured his wife, Teruko Nakagami, known as Irene, on the cover, and contained a song (“Infant Eyes”) dedicated to their daughter, Miyako. The marriage ended in divorce in 1966; “Miyako” would be the name of another composition the next year.The Mysterious TravelerUnlike the other members of the Miles Davis Quintet, Mr. Shorter remained through Davis’s push into rock and funk — on the terse 1969 album “In A Silent Way,” featuring the Austrian keyboardist and composer Josef Zawinul, and on the epochal sprawl of “Bitches Brew.”Together with Mr. Zawinul and the Czech bassist Miroslav Vitous, Mr. Shorter then formed Weather Report, which released its debut album, called simply “Weather Report,” in 1971. Over the next 15 years, the band changed personnel several times, with Mr. Zawinul and Mr. Shorter as the only constants. Weather Report also changed styles, tacking away from chamberesque abstraction and toward danceable rhythms. Its most commercially successful edition, featuring the electric bass phenom Jaco Pastorius, became an arena attraction, and one of its albums, “Heavy Weather,” was certified gold (and later platinum).Mr. Shorter was the instrumental voice out front in Weather Report, and second only to Mr. Zawinul as an engine of original material. Among the enduring tunes he wrote for the band are “Tears,” a color-shifting tone poem; “Palladium,” a funk tune with Caribbean flair; and “Mysterious Traveler,” a rhythmic saga named after a popular radio show from his youth.Mr. Shorter and Josef Zawinul, the Austrian keyboardist and a central member of Weather Report, played at a jazz festival in France in 1984.Eric Gaillard/Agence France-PresseWhile in Weather Report, Mr. Shorter made precious few solo albums — but “Native Dancer,” a 1974 collaboration with the Brazilian troubadour Milton Nascimento, inspired more than one generation of admirers, notably the guitarist and composer Pat Metheny and the bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding, who in 2008 recorded a version of the album’s opening track, “Ponta de Areia.”The idea of working with Mr. Nascimento had come from Mr. Shorter’s second wife, Ana Maria (Patricio) Shorter, who spent her childhood in Angola under Portuguese rule. (Mr. Shorter noted her influence in the album notes, and included a wistful ballad called “Ana Maria.”)It took more than a decade for Mr. Shorter to release his next album, “Atlantis,” a complex sonic canvas that met with a tepid response, critically and commercially. One of its most vocal champions at the time was the critic Robert Palmer, who praised it in The New York Times as “an album of tunes in which everything — texture, color, mood, meter, tempo, instrumentation, density, you name it — seems to be in perpetual transformation.”Mr. Shorter held to a similar ideal after Weather Report disbanded in 1986. His next few albums featured a broad range of collaborators and a heavy quotient of synthetic timbres. The ambitious culmination was “High Life,” which met with scathing criticism on its release in 1995, notoriously from Peter Watrous in The Times, who declared it “a pastel failure.”Personal tragedy visited Mr. Shorter soon after, and not for the first time. Iska, his daughter with Ana Maria, had lived with brain damage before dying of a grand mal seizure in 1985 at age 14. The loss had led Wayne and Ana Maria to delve into Nichiren Buddhism. Then, in 1996, Ana Maria and the Shorters’ niece Dalila Lucien were among the 230 people killed when TWA Flight 800 crashed shortly after takeoff from Kennedy International Airport in New York.“We practice in Buddhism that we’re able to have an eternal dialogue with the ones we lose temporarily,” Mr. Shorter told The Guardian several years later. “When my wife left, she was in a state of enlightenment.”In 1999 he married Carolina Dos Santos, a Brazilian dancer and actor whom he had met through Ana Maria. She survives him, along with his daughters, Miyako and Mariana Shorter, and a grandson. Alan Shorter died in 1987.The Rogue PhilosopherAs he entered a phase of late eminence, Mr. Shorter deepened his bond with Mr. Hancock, with whom he shared not only several decades of musical history but also a common foundation in Buddhist practice. Both artists served on the board of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, a nonprofit educational organization (now called the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz) that administers a series of programs, including a long-running international competition.Mr. Shorter and Mr. Hancock released an introspective duo album, “1+1,” in 1997; it won Mr. Shorter a Grammy for best instrumental composition for “Aung San Suu Kyi,” a heraldic theme dedicated to the activist and future leader of Myanmar, who was under house arrest at the time.In total, Mr. Shorter won 12 Grammy Awards, the last bestowed this year for best improvised jazz solo, for “Endangered Species,” a track, written with Ms. Spalding, from the album “Live at the Detroit Jazz Festival,” where he performed in a quartet with her, Terri Lyne Carrington and Leo Genovese.He also received a lifetime achievement honor from the Recording Academy in 2015. He was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and a 1998 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. He received the Polar Music Prize, an international honor recognizing both pop and classical music, in 2017. And he was among the recipients of the 2018 Kennedy Center Honors, in a class that also included the composer Philip Glass.Mr. Shorter ushered in a profound new stage of his career in 2000, when he formed an acoustic quartet with the pianist Danilo Pérez, the bassist John Patitucci and the drummer Brian Blade. These were broad-minded musicians capable of following his every twitch and prompt, and they came from the generation that had grown up with his tunes.The new Wayne Shorter Quartet started out playing versions of those tunes, like “Footprints” and “JuJu,” often modified or abstracted to the point of near unrecognizability. Jon Pareles, reviewing a concert for The Times in 2013, observed that Mr. Shorter “treats bass lines or single phrases as clues and implications, toying on the spot with tempo, crosscurrents, inflection and attack; anything can be up for grabs, yet the composition retains an identity.”Mr. Shorter’s own quartet started off playing versions of his old tunes before he eventually composed new music for the group, including “Scout” and “Pegasus.”Chad Batka for The New York TimesMr. Shorter eventually composed new music for the group, like “Scout,” which had its premiere in 2017, and “Pegasus,” for which he also orchestrated parts for the quintet Imani Winds. The Los Angeles Philharmonic commissioned his “Gaia,” a symphonic tone poem that doubles as a concerto for Ms. Spalding and suggests a classical tradition deftly redrawn in Mr. Shorter’s hand.Together, Mr. Shorter and Ms. Spalding boldly expanded on this promise in “Iphigenia,” an opera loosely based on the Greek myth, featuring his music and her libretto, with set designs by the architect Frank Gehry. It had a series of performances in 2021 and 2022, notably at the Kennedy Center in Washington, with Mr. Shorter in the audience.He was still straining against preconceptions and aesthetic prescriptions when, at 85, he released “Emanon,” a suite that he recorded in two separate versions: one with his quartet and the other also featuring the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, with his soprano saxophone darting through. The album received broad critical acclaim, topping year-end lists in The Times and JazzTimes.Mr. Shorter, who created a hand-drawn 58-page comic book called Other Worlds as a teenager, also fulfilled a lifelong ambition with “Emanon.” The albums came with a comic that he wrote with Monica Sly, illustrated by Randy DuBurke. Set in a sci-fi dystopia, it hinges on the actions of Emanon, a “rogue philosopher” urging resistance to fear and oppression.“There are a myriad of realities in the multiverse,” reads the first panel, setting a familiar theme in a bold new key.Alex Traub contributed reporting. More