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      in Music

      Jerry Blavat, D.J. Who Channeled the Soul of Philadelphia, Dies at 82

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      A live-wire personality and an epic self-promoter, he got a generation of youth in the City of Brotherly Love on its feet with little-known R&B gems.Jerry Blavat, a bookmaker’s son from South Philadelphia who rose from head-turning teenage dancer on a precursor to “American Bandstand” to widespread acclaim as the most influential disc jockey in the Delaware Valley thanks to his third-rail energy, fantastical wordplay and finely honed instincts for the particular rhythms of his native city, died on Jan. 20 in Philadelphia. He was 82.His longtime partner, Keely Stahl, said the cause was myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune neuromuscular disease that weakens the skeletal muscles.With his rat-a-tat patter and crooked Jack-o’-lantern smile, Mr. Blavat (pronounced BLAV-it) displayed otherworldly skills in promoting under-the-radar vinyl — and himself — in a career that began in 1961 with a 10:30 p.m. Thursday slot on tiny WCAM-AM in Camden, N.J., across the Delaware River from Philadelphia.Christening himself the “Geator With the Heater” (“geator” being Blavat-ese for “gator,” an animal as voracious as the disc jockey himself) and the “Boss With the Hot Sauce,” he woofed, howled and rhymed his way to local fame, particularly among a generation of young Philadelphians in the 1960s, whom he affectionately referred to as “yon teens” (“yon” was a twist on “young,” which, in his view, sounded Shakespearean).“It’s hard to explain to an outsider what kind of energy and influence he had,” said the singer, songwriter and syndicated radio host Ben Vaughn, who came of age listening to Mr. Blavat’s show and later became a close friend. “He defined the sound and the sensibility of the city.”Purchasing his on-air time by selling ads himself, Mr. Blavat steered clear of program directors and rigid formats, and as a result he had the freedom to upend the conventions of early-’60s pop radio by spinning little-known singles, some of them several years old and many of them by Black artists who were largely unknown to white audiences.Among the many performers Mr. Blavat presented on his nationally syndicated weekly television show, “The Discophonic Scene,” were the Supremes. Jerry BlavatThroughout the ’60s, Mr. Blavat spun the latest singles by artists like Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick and Smokey Robinson. “Whenever we were in Philly and the Geator was playing our music, we always knew we’d have a hit,” Mr. Robinson wrote in a blurb for “You Only Rock Once,” Mr. Blavat’s 2011 memoir. But Mr. Blavat also made it his trademark to unearth underappreciated gems by R&B groups like the Intruders or Brenda & the Tabulations.His unflagging support of Black artists made an impression on many young white Philadelphians, some of whom would become stars themselves.“I tell people everywhere I go that I’m the product of the Philadelphia music scene,” Todd Rundgren said when he inducted the band the Hooters into the Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame in 2019. “People ask me, what does that mean? I tell them it comes down to one thing: I grew up listening to the Geator. He played the music that would have been called race records at the time, the music that was made south of the Mason-Dixon Line. And that’s why so many white kids in Philly grew up wanting to sing R&B.”For Mr. Blavat, success rested on one set of ears: his own. “If I don’t dig it, it could be my father out there grooving on the record and I won’t play it,” he was quoted as saying in a 1966 profile by the novelist Bruce Jay Friedman in The Saturday Evening Post.He could be stubborn in his refusal to abide by industry trends — for example, he largely ignored the Beatles at the height of Beatlemania. “I sensed that it just didn’t have enough soul for my kids,” he told Mr. Friedman. “The Stones, yes. The Beatles, no. So I’d go up to Fonzo’s restaurant and the upper-class kids would say, ‘How come no Beatles?,’ and I’d say it’s just not my schticklach, not my groove.”Gerald Joseph Blavat was born on July 3, 1940, in South Philadelphia, the youngest of two children of Louis and Lucille (Capuano) Blavat. His father, known on the street as Louis the Gimp, favored sharkskin suits and Stetson hats, had ties to the local Jewish mob and ran an illegal bookmaking operation, according to Mr. Blavat’s memoir. His mother worked in a jewelry store, as well as at Philadelphia’s naval shipyard during World War II.“My mother taught me love,” Mr. Blavat told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2011. “My father taught me the streets, the nightclubs, how to hustle.”An avid dancer from an early age, he used that hustle to talk his way onto “Bandstand,” a local television show featuring teenagers dancing to the latest hits, at age 13, a year shy of the minimum age requirement. (The show, hosted by Bob Horn, later evolved into Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand.”) With his flashy moves and electric personality, he was soon a neighborhood celebrity. His musical ambitions, however, lay far beyond the dance floor.Mr. Blavat at an in-store appearance promoting “The Discophonic Scene.” He didn’t just present acts on that show; he was out on the floor, showing off his moves.Jerry BlavatChasing any opportunity, he did stints as a road manager for Danny & the Juniors, the Philadelphia doo-wop group best known for the No. 1 hit “At the Hop,” while still in high school, and as the comedian Don Rickles’s valet. When he was 20, he used his outsize salesmanship to scrounge up enough sponsors to buy his first $120 hour of airtime on WCAM.Despite the limited reach of the station’s signal, word spread quickly. “Kids would park on the Philadelphia side of the Delaware River, as close to the transmitter as they could, so they could listen to the Geator,” Mr. Vaughn said. “There was a whole scene going — dancing, heavy petting, everything you could think of. Just classic teenage rock ’n’ roll passion.”Before long, Mr. Blavat was hosting record hops drawing up to 2,000 teenagers in ballrooms around the city. In the mid-1960s, he produced and hosted a nationally syndicated weekly television show, “The Discophonic Scene,” similar to “American Bandstand” but with Mr. Blavat actually out on the floor, showing off his moves, and with the artists performing live and not lip-syncing.As the decades rolled by, Mr. Blavat remained a cherished and ubiquitous figure on the Philadelphia cultural scene, hosting radio shows on WXPN and other stations in the region as well as an annual celebrity-dotted revue at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, the city’s marquee performance hall.His reputation would not remain entirely unsullied. His friendships with Philadelphia organized crime bosses like Angelo Bruno and Nicodemo Scarfo brought various allegations of mob-related activity over the years.In 1992, the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation called Mr. Blavat to testify in a hearing about mob influence in the state’s liquor business, including allegations that Mr. Blavat had paid a “street tax” to Mr. Scarfo to keep union organizers away from Mr. Blavat’s popular Memories in Margate disco on the Jersey Shore, and that he had served as a front for a yacht purchase by Mr. Scarfo.Mr. Blavat at a parade in Philadelphia on Thanksgiving Day 2021.Gilbert Carrasquillo/GC Images, via Getty ImagesMr. Blavat cited the Fifth Amendment, and in later interviews described his relationship with local crime figures as merely personal. “I’m a performer,” he said about his mob associations in a 1995 television interview. “I’m friends with everyone.”Such controversies did little to slow his momentum. Ms. Stahl said he continued to spin his oldies on local stations seven nights a week, and to drive all over the region to perform at record hops for his old fans, and in many cases, their grandchildren.In addition to Ms. Stahl, Mr. Blavat is survived by his sister, Roberta Lawit; his daughters, Kathi Furia, Stacy Braglia, Deserie Downey and Geraldine Blavat; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.Despite achieving nationwide exposure in the 1960s with “The Discophonic Scene” and appearances on “The Monkees” and “The Mike Douglas Show,” Mr. Blavat was never interested in making the compromises it would take to abandon his roots in Philadelphia, Mr. Vaughn said.“He had offers to go national,” he said, “but they told him that they needed him to be less Geator, because what he does doesn’t make sense outside of Philadelphia. Everything he says rhymes, and he makes up words that don’t even exist. In Philly, we didn’t even question it.”“To his credit,” he added, “he passed on every one, because he didn’t want to lose us.” More

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      in Theater

      Everett Quinton, a Force in Downtown Theater, Dies at 71

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      He took over the Ridiculous Theatrical Company after the death of his partner, Charles Ludlam, in 1987. His specialty was playing women, but his range was wide.Everett Quinton, a versatile mainstay of the downtown theater scene in New York as an actor, director and, for decades, leader of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, died on Monday in Brooklyn. He was 71.The cause was glioblastoma, a fast-moving cancer, Mr. Quinton’s friend Julia Campanelli said, speaking on behalf of his sister Mary Ann Quinton.Mr. Quinton was especially adept at playing women, including the nasty stepmother in “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” which toured the country early in this century. But he took on a range of roles male and female, onstage and occasionally on television or in films — in Oliver Stone’s prison drama “Natural Born Killers” (1994), he was an unpleasant deputy warden.It was a career he had not been expecting in 1975 when he met Charles Ludlam, a playwright, actor and director who had founded the Ridiculous company (one of several in the era that worked the campy, gender-bending genre known as Theater of the Ridiculous) in 1967 in Greenwich Village, and who was a dynamic part of the avant-garde theater world.“I was just cruising Christopher Street on a cold February night,” Mr. Quinton recalled in a 2001 interview with The New York Times. “He gave me his phone number but I lost it. I thought his name was Steven. Six months later, that August, I was back on Christopher Street and he walked out of a restaurant and said to me, ‘You do exist.’ From then on we were together.”The two became partners in life and in the theater, where Mr. Quinton designed costumes, served as assistant stage manager and, in a 1976 show called “Caprice,” took to the stage.“I was the ballerina who got kidnapped,” he told The Daily News of New York in 1993, remembering that first role. “I knew I’d found my niche.”Mr. Quinton, right, in 1986 with Charles Ludlam, his partner both onstage and off. Mr. Quinton took over the Ridiculous Theatrical Company after Mr. Ludlam died in 1987.Patrick McMullan/Getty ImagesHe played all sorts of roles in Ridiculous productions, including the title character in Mr. Ludlam’s “Beauty and the Beast”-like fairy tale “The Enchanted Pig,” which ran for months in 1979 at the Ridiculous theater on Sheridan Square.“Everett Quinton personates the oinker as a most sympathetic fellow,” Don Nelsen wrote in a review in The Daily News.The two had a sensational success in 1984 with Mr. Ludlam’s “The Mystery of Irma Vep” (the name is an anagram for “vampire”), a parody of Victorian penny dreadfuls in which they played all the roles, male and female, switching deftly and rapidly. (Mr. Quinton held down four — a maid, an aristocrat named Lord Edgar, a monster/vampire and a woman hidden in the manor house.)“Each character is such a complete, precise comic creation that it often takes one’s breath away to watch the actors move from one role to the next (and back again) with nary a pause,” Frank Rich wrote in his review in The Times. “In ‘Irma Vep,’ Mr. Ludlam and Mr. Quinton have raised the Ridiculous to the sublime.”Mr. Ludlam and Mr. Quinton performed the show more than 330 times. But it turned out to be the peak of Mr. Ludlam’s career — he died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. Mr. Quinton soldiered on with the Ridiculous theater, restaging some of Mr. Ludlam’s works while gradually expanding the offerings. By 1994, Mel Gussow, writing in The Times, found that Mr. Quinton had put his own stamp on the company.“While respecting the theatrical legacy of his mentor and longtime companion,” Mr. Gussow wrote, “Mr. Quinton has given the company his own irreverent signature: Ludlamania has been Quintonized.”He kept Ridiculous Theatrical going until 1997, by which time it had lost its Sheridan Square space and was, like other small theater companies, done in by high costs in an increasingly gentrifying part of town. Mr. Quinton, though, continued to direct and perform, including in “Drop Dead Perfect,” which played at the Theater at St. Clement’s in Manhattan in 2014 (and returned for an encore the next year).“In a sweet 1950s peach crocheted dress and matching bolero, Everett Quinton has never looked lovelier,” Anita Gates began her review in The Times.Sometimes Mr. Quinton would try roles first played by Mr. Ludlam. In 1998, at the West Side Theater in Midtown Manhattan, he directed a revival of “Irma Vep” and starred, this time taking the roles Mr. Ludlam had played (while Stephen DeRosa played the parts Mr. Quinton had originated). In 1990 he staged Mr. Ludlam’s “Camille,” a play loosely based on an Alexandre Dumas novel, taking on the role of Marguerite, which Mr. Ludlam had played in the 1973 premiere.Cheryl Reeves-Hayes was also part of the 1990 cast. “Whenever he was onstage as Marguerite,” she said by email, “I would hurry up and change so I could sit in the wings and watch him perform. He was mesmerizing to watch, and I learned so much from him as an actor.”Mr. Quinton during a dress rehearsal for the 1998 production of “The Mystery of Irma Vep.” Before Mr. Ludlam’s death, the two had performed a version of the show more than 330 times.James Estrin/The New York TimesRamona Ponce started designing costumes for Ridiculous productions in 1991. Her first assignment was for a 10-minute entertainment Mr. Quinton was staging for a trade council that was meeting at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. The audience was not appreciative.“As soon as they saw the men in drag onstage they started throwing rolls,” she said by email. “Right there in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel ballroom. Rolls!!“Everett was furious, humiliated, traumatized. He turned on his heel and stalked out through the kitchen, head held high, topped by a giant mobcap, in Victorian drag. After that we couldn’t even mention the show, or the name of the hotel, for a decade after. But the show was magical and strange and daring and fun, all the things I wanted in life.”Everett James Quinton Jr. was born on Dec. 18, 1951, in Brooklyn. His father was a postal worker, and his mother, Elizabeth Frances Reardon Quinton, was a homemaker.After serving in the Air Force in Thailand, Mr. Quinton attended Hunter College for two years, but he had no thought of a theater career.“My only experience with the theater was playing Rip Van Winkle in the Cub Scouts,” he told The Daily News in 1993.Meeting Mr. Ludlam introduced him to a whole new world of possibilities. “I ran away and joined the circus” was how he put it in the 2001 interview with The Times.Although the Ridiculous troupe was known for parodies, cross-dressing and the occasional pig costume, Mr. Quinton said he gradually learned that outlandishness didn’t preclude the need for finding a character and making her, him or it real.“Even grotesques have feelings,” he told The Times in 1994.After Mr. Ludlam’s death, Mr. Quinton, who lived in the West Village, had a long-term relationship with Michael Van Meter, a member of the Ridiculous company who died in 2007 of complications of AIDS. In addition to his sister Mary, he is survived by another sister, Elizabeth Frances Quinton, and four brothers, Matthew, John Paul, Thomas and Timothy.Ms. Ponce said Mr. Quinton was well versed in and wary of theatrical superstitions, including the one that forbids whistling in a theater and the one that warns against mentioning the play “Macbeth” for fear of incurring a curse — neither of which she was aware of before working for him.“When I started whistling backstage, he came flying out from the dressing room and demanded that I leave the theater, walk around the park outside and say a line from Shakespeare before I could come back in,” she said. “He didn’t wait for me to mention the Scottish play — he decided he’d better tell me about that one before something really bad happened.”Mr. Quinton’s friend William Engel, an artist, noted that Mr. Quinton had a deeply spiritual side. He said the two of them worked together on many pageants for Grace & St. Paul’s Church on the Upper West Side.“No one could be more welcoming at the Lord’s table than Everett Quinton,” he said by email. “Especially the L.G.B.T.Q. community.”Ms. Reeves-Hayes said Mr. Quinton introduced her to that same church. When they took their production of “Camille” to London in 1991, she said, “Ev would be my church buddy, and we visited a couple of churches in the city.”On other walkabouts, they indulged a different tradition. They both admired old cartoon and comic strip characters, especially Krazy Kat, who loved a mouse, Ignatz. The mouse would constantly hurl bricks at Krazy, which she interpreted as a sign of affection.“So,” Ms. Reeves-Hayes said, “whenever we would see a cute guy, one of us would ask, ‘Got a brick?’” More

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      in Television

      Lance Kerwin, ‘James at 15’ and ‘Salem’s Lot’ Star, Dies at 62

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      “James,” which followed the adventures of a sandy-haired teenager who moves with his family to Boston from Oregon, made him a teenage idol.Lance Kerwin, a former child actor who played the title role in the 1970s coming-of-age drama “James at 15” and a vampire hunter in a mini-series based on the Stephen King novel “Salem’s Lot,” died on Tuesday at his home in San Clemente, Calif. He was 62.His death was confirmed by his daughter Savanah Kerwin, who said that a cause had not been determined and that the family was awaiting the results of an autopsy.In 1977, when Mr. Kerwin was 16, he was cast in a television movie, “James at 15,” that served as the pilot episode for the NBC series of the same name. The show, which ran for 21 episodes, followed the adolescent adventures of a sandy-haired budding photographer, James Hunter, who has moved with his family to Boston from Oregon.The show tackled serious themes like sex, alcoholism and pregnancy. It also made Mr. Kerwin a teenage idol.Writing in The Washington Post a few weeks into the show’s run, the critic Tom Shales said that while “James at 15” was “not perfect, not revolutionary, not always deliriously urgent,” it was “still the most respectable new entertainment series of the season.”“And if it romanticizes adolescence through the weekly trials and triumphs of its teenage hero,” he continued, “at least it does so in more ambitious, inquisitive and authentic ways than the average TV teeny-bop.”The show ran into trouble with NBC’s censors over a script that called for James to lose his virginity, to a Swedish exchange student, on his 16th birthday (when the program would be retitled “James at 16”). The network objected to the script’s use of the word “responsible” as a euphemism for birth control, and agreed to air the episode only “if the boy suffers for it and is somehow punished,” the novelist Dan Wakefield, the show’s creator, told The New York Times in 1978.The disagreement led to Mr. Wakefield’s resignation before the episode was broadcast, on Feb. 9, 1978. “James at 16” was canceled in May of that year.Lance Michael Kerwin was born on Nov. 6, 1960, in Newport Beach, Calif., to Don and Lois Kerwin. When he was growing up, he told The Times in 1982, he was so addicted to television that he could not read when he reached the fourth grade.After his parents divorced, his mother and stepfather “unplugged the television,” he said.“Every day after school I would come home and read out loud with my mother and stepfather — stories, plays and scripts that they would bring home from work,” he said.In addition to his daughter Savanah, Mr. Kerwin’s survivors include his wife, Yvonne Kerwin, and four other children: Fox, Terah, Kailani and Justus. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Kerwin’s acting career began in the early 1970s with small roles on popular TV shows like “Little House on the Prairie,” “Gunsmoke” and “Wonder Woman.” From 1974 to 1976, he appeared in five installments of “ABC Afterschool Special,” the daytime educational anthology series aimed at young people.Mr. Kerwin in 2022. After dealing with a drug problem for many years, he helped run a rehabilitation program and was a youth pastor.AFF/AlamyIn 1979, he starred in the mini-series adaptation of “Salem’s Lot.” The series followed a novelist who returns to his New England hometown to write a book and encounters vampires who have invaded the town. Mr. Kerwin played Mark Petrie, a teenager who helps the author stop the vampires.Mr. Kerwin continued acting through the 1980s and into 1990s. He appeared in the 1985 science fiction movie “Enemy Mine” and the 1995 thriller “Outbreak,” about a deadly plague.By the time he was making “Outbreak,” Mr. Kerwin “was actively struggling with sobriety,” Savanah Kerwin said, which may have played a role in his decision to walk away from acting.In 2010, Mr. Kerwin pleaded guilty to a charge of second-degree theft for falsifying documents to obtain state medical assistance and food stamps in Hawaii, The Associated Press reported. He was sentenced to five years of probation and was ordered to perform 300 hours of community service.“I’ve been struggling with the sin of drug use for a long time,” Mr. Kerwin told The Los Angeles Daily News in 1999, in an interview conducted while he was in a rehabilitation center in Perris, Calif. “I’ve gotten in years of abstinence. The last time I found myself turning to drugs again, I came here to restore my walk with the Lord.”Later, his daughter said, he helped run the rehabilitation program U-Turn for Christ and was a youth pastor there for several years.“He was constantly trying to help people who were struggling to find God or become sober,” she said. “That was his focus for the rest of his life.”Sheelagh McNeill More

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      in Television

      Lloyd Morrisett, a Founder of ‘Sesame Street,’ Dies at 93

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      His observations about his 3-year-old daughter’s viewing habits led him to join Joan Ganz Cooney in creating a program that revolutionized children’s television.Lloyd Morrisett, a psychologist whose young daughter’s viewing habits inspired the creation of the revolutionary children’s educational television program “Sesame Street,” and whose fund-raising helped get it off the ground, died on Jan. 15 at his home in San Diego. He was 93.His daughter Julie Morrisett confirmed the death.Mr. Morrisett was a vice president of the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation in 1966 when he attended a dinner party in Manhattan hosted by his friends Joan Ganz Cooney and her husband, Tim. During the evening, Mr. Morrisett told the guests that his daughter Sarah was so mesmerized by TV that she would watch the test pattern on weekend mornings until cartoons began.Sarah had also memorized advertising jingles, which suggested to Mr. Morrisett that youngsters might more easily learn reading, writing and arithmetic if they were delivered in an entertaining way.“I said at one point in the conversation, ‘Joan, do you think television can be used to teach young children?’” he said in an interview on “BackStory,” a podcast about history, in 2019, “and her answer was, “I don’t know, but I’d like to talk about it.’”The idea was intriguing enough for Mr. Morrisett, along with Ms. Ganz Cooney, then a producer of public affairs television programming, and others to begin brainstorming about creating a program for preschoolers, particularly poor children who were likely to fall behind in the early grades, that would educate and amuse them.“‘What if?’ became their operative phrase,” Michael Davis wrote in “Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street” (2008). “What if you could create content for television that was both entertaining and instructive? What if it went down more like ice cream than spinach?”At Mr. Morrisett’s request, and with money from the Carnegie Corporation, Ms. Ganz Cooney traveled the country interviewing educators, animators, puppeteers, psychologists, filmmakers and television producers to produce a study, “The Potential Uses of Television for Pre-School Education.” That study became the blueprint for “Sesame Street.”Mr. Morrisett focused on raising $8 million to start “Sesame Street,” with about half coming from the United States Office of Education and the rest in the form of grants from Carnegie, the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.Mr. Morrisett had “magnificent political skills” that helped him raise money, Mr. Davis said in a phone interview. “He lived in that rarefied world and had connections. He was so believable and so clear and made so much damn sense.”In a statement, Ms. Ganz Cooney said, “Without Lloyd Morrisett, there is no ‘Sesame Street.’”The series made its debut on public television on Nov. 10, 1969, introducing children to a fantasy world where they could learn numbers and letters with help from a multiracial cast and a corps of Jim Henson’s Muppets that would include Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Kermit the Frog, Cookie Monster and Elmo.Mr. Morrisett recalled that “Sesame Street” had a curriculum based on continuing research, designed to help children who watched the show succeed in school.“We were spending maybe a third of our budget on that research,” he told WBUR Radio in 2019, “and that was something that commercial television just couldn’t do.”Mr. Morrisett in 2009 with Joan Ganz Cooney at a benefit in New York for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit company that produces “Sesame Street.”Bryan Bedder/Getty ImagesMr. Morrisett was born on Nov. 2, 1929, in Oklahoma City, and grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., and Los Angeles. His father, also named Lloyd, was an assistant schools superintendent in Yonkers, N.Y., and later a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles. His mother, Jessie (Watson) Morrisett, was a homemaker.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1951, Mr. Morrisett studied for two years at U.C.L.A, then earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Yale in 1956. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, but left after two years to work at the Social Science Research Council. He then joined the Carnegie Corporation as the executive assistant to its president, John Gardner. He later became a vice president.Mr. Morrisett never took an operational role at the Children’s Television Workshop, now Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that produces “Sesame Street” and other programs, but he was an active chairman of its board until 2000. During that time he was instrumental in the creation and funding of “The Electric Company,” a series that taught language skills to children ages 6 to 10, which was broadcast in the 1970s and rebooted from 2009 to 2011.“He had this wonderful combination of being a child psychologist who was also a champion of media and technology and was research-based, which is the DNA of the company,” Sherrie Westin, the president of Sesame Workshop, said in a phone interview. She added, “He was a pioneer who believed that television could be an educational force.”When “Sesame Street” received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2019, a gaggle of Muppets onstage shouted “We love you” to Mr. Morrisett and Ms. Ganz Cooney, who were seated in the balcony.In addition to his daughters, Julie Morrisett and Sarah Morrisett Otley, Mr. Morrisett is survived by his wife, Mary (Pierre) Morrisett, and two grandchildren.Julie Morrisett said that, unlike her sister, she didn’t like television. “There’d be no ‘Sesame Street,’” she joked, “if I were the older daughter.”While chairman of Sesame Workshop, Mr. Morrisett was also president from 1969 to 1998 of the Markle Foundation and shifted its focus from medical research and education to supporting the study of mass communication and information technology.In an essay published in Markle’s annual report in 1981, Mr. Morrisett looked at the state of children’s television and advocated for a cable TV network devoted to younger viewers. (He did not mention Nickelodeon, which had started in 1979.)He argued that such a channel had to compete effectively for viewers’ attention, but that “the key for a new children’s television service will be to provide cultural and educational values widely believed necessary for leading a productive and satisfying life in our society.” More

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      in Music

      Ginny Redington Dawes, Composer of Memorable Ad Jingles, Dies at 77

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      She collaborated on the melodies for signature commercials that sang the praises of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and other brands.Ginny Redington Dawes, a songwriter whose compositions included memorable advertising jingles like the chipper McDonald’s declaration “You, You’re the One” and Coca-Cola’s boast that “Coke Is It,” died on Dec. 31 in Manhattan. She was 77.Her companion and only immediate survivor, James McCullar, said the cause was complications of hepatic cirrhosis.Ms. Dawes never became well known herself, but she helped maintain or boost the popularity of the products she promoted. And she insinuated infectious tunes into the nation’s repertoire that Americans whistled and hummed as much as the songs played on Top 40 radio.She hooked listeners with melodically and rhythmically catchy jingles that accompanied slogans for everything from Tide detergent to Hartz’s tick and flea-fighting pet collars, Kit Kat candy bars and Johnson’s baby powder.“When I’ve got a really great lyric,” she told Charles Osgood of CBS in a 1977 television interview, “I put a very simple melody to it.”Ms. Dawes started writing the music and lyrics for commercials in 1975 after the firm of Sidney E. Woloshin — who composed the original McDonald’s “You Deserve a Break Today” jingle in 1971 — was commissioned to do one for the chain’s new “You, You’re the One” advertising campaign.Mr. Woloshin invited about 20 jingle writers to submit proposals. Ms. Dawes produced the winning tune. Adopted by the ad agency Needham, Harper & Steers, it was suddenly everywhere.In 1979, she married a jingle-writing competitor, Thomas W. Dawes, whose credits included Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz” and “7Up, the Uncola.”They later collaborated on the music for, among other campaigns, American Airlines’ “Something Special in the Air” and the familiar “Coke Is It.” Mr. Dawes died in 2007.The jingle that underscored Coke’s claim to be “It,” introduced in 1982, was described as a “piece of dynamite” by John F. Bergin, the worldwide director of the Coke account at the McCann-Erickson agency.While David Ogilvy, a founder of the Ogilvy & Mather agency, was credited with the credo “If you don’t have anything to say, sing it,” Mr. Bergin argued that the musical accompaniment to the Coke commercial was anything but an afterthought. If soda drinkers paused to parse the ambiguity of what “It” was, the tune was intended to define the term and embellish it.“It’s like a football fight song,” Mr. Bergin told The New York Times. “Usually you get a languid ballad. We were looking for a big, bold sound, and a big, bold statement. This isn’t an ipsy-pipsy drink, and the music says that loud and clear.”The song, composed by Ms. Dawes and arranged by her husband, was one of 18 jingles and 36 proposed slogans presented to Coca-Cola executives to succeed “Have a Coke and a Smile.”The music and copy were tested separately in consumer focus groups and individual interviews until the agency and company reached a consensus that “Coke is it” was, indeed, it.Ms. Dawes also wrote pop songs, including “Hurtin’ Song,” recorded by Eddy Arnold, and “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” (written with Rose Marie McCoy), recorded by Sarah Vaughan.She began her musical career as a singer, to glowing reviews.When she appeared in 1975 at the Coriander, a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, John S. Wilson of The Times called her a “startling performer” who sang “in a deep, strong, beautifully controlled voice that is filled with vivid colors, as she moves from low, sexy passages to an open, lusty shout.”Virginia Mary Redington was born on May 13, 1945, in Brooklyn and raised in the Bay Ridge section of the borough. Her father, Joseph, was a naval architect. Her mother, May (O’Brien) Redington, was a teacher.Virginia attended Fontbonne Hall Academy in Brooklyn and graduated from St. Josephs College, also in Brooklyn, with a degree in English in 1966.She and Mr. Dawes — a founder of the folk-pop group the Cyrkle, best known for its 1966 hit single “Red Rubber Ball,” written by Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley of the Seekers — married in 1979 and, merging their talents, formed TwinStar Music to produce jinglesThe couple also wrote the book, music and lyrics for “The Talk of the Town,” a show about the fabled literary round table at the Algonquin Hotel, whose members included Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and George S. Kaufman. First produced in 2004, it ran nearly two years at the Bank Street Theater before it moved as a cabaret show to the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room.Reviewing the show for Bloomberg News, John Simon wrote that its music and wit matched “the infectious energy and sophistication of the real-life luminaries it is based on.”Ms. Dawes was also a collector of antique jewelry and the author, with her husband (who took the photographs) and others, of several books on the subject, including “The Bakelite Jewelry Book” (1988), with Corinne Davidov, and “Georgian Jewellery 1714-1830” (2007), with Ms. Dawes’s fellow collector Olivia Collings. More

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      Edward R. Pressman, Film Producer Who Boosted Many Careers, Dies at 79

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      Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, Kathryn Bigelow and other directors were just starting when he took on their projects.Edward R. Pressman, a prolific film producer who guided some of the earliest movies by Brian De Palma, Terrence Malick, Oliver Stone, Kathryn Bigelow and other leading directors, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 79.The cause was respiratory failure, his family said.Mr. Pressman was producer or executive producer on almost 100 movies across a range of genres. His career began in the late 1960s and by 1988 had already resulted in enough acclaimed films that he was the subject of an 11-movie retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.The New York Times said then that he “has been distinguished by his dedication to both highly literate and decidedly quirky movie projects during the last two decades.” And he still had some three decades and more than 60 movies ahead of him.Jack Nicholson as the labor leader Jimmy Hoffa in the 1992 film “Hoffa.” Mr. Pressman persuaded David Mamet to write a screenplay, recruited Mr. Nicholson to star and made an unconventional choice for director: the comic actor Danny DeVito.Liaison/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMr. Pressman’s name is on films about intriguing real-life figures — “Hoffa” (1992), with Jack Nicholson as the Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa; “The Man Who Knew Infinity” (2015), which starred Dev Patel as the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan; “Paterno” (2018), the HBO film in which Al Pacino portrayed the football coach Joe Paterno. It is on action fantasies like “Conan the Barbarian” (1982), the movie that brought Arnold Schwarzenegger to stardom. It is on scalding crime dramas like “Bad Lieutenant” (1992) and “American Psycho” (2000).His biggest claim to fame, especially early in his career, may have been his willingness to take a chance on unproven talent.One of his first forays as a producer was a movie about a murder that may or may not have been committed by one of two formerly conjoined twins, “Sisters” (1972) — Mr. De Palma’s breakthrough in the creepy crime genre. (Mr. Pressman was also a producer on a 2006 remake, directed by Douglas Buck.) Two years later, he produced Mr. De Palma’s comic drama about a disfigured composer who sells his soul, “Phantom of the Paradise,” which has become a cult favorite.Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in “Badlands” (1973), the first feature directed by Terrence Malick. Mr. Pressman said he was partial, especially early in his career, to movies like this one that were “the expression of a single vision.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn between those two he produced the first feature directed by Mr. Malick, “Badlands” (1973), which starred Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, both still early in their careers, as criminals on the run. In 1981 he produced the horror film “The Hand,” the first studio feature directed by Mr. Stone.In 1990 he and Mr. Stone were producers on the crime drama “Blue Steel,” a film by another relative newcomer, Ms. Bigelow; 30 years later she became the first woman to win the directing Oscar, for “The Hurt Locker.” Mr. Pressman also took a chance on David Byrne, the lead singer of Talking Heads, producing Mr. Byrne’s feature debut as a director, the offbeat comedy “True Stories” (1986).Whatever project he was involved in, Mr. Pressman generally avoided the hands-on approach some other producers favor.“The hardest thing I’ve learned over the years is that I’m getting paid a lot of money to produce a movie, but sometimes the best thing to do is nothing,” he told The New York Times in 1992, when he was making “Hoffa.” “I don’t need to impose myself.”Nonetheless, he knew he played a vital role.“It’s the creative urge that makes me work,” he told American Film magazine for a 1988 article. “The pleasure is, to some extent, vicarious, but it’s no less creative for that. It is creating a world by bringing together creative financing with creative filmmakers. In a sense, producing can be compared to conceptual art.”Although Mr. Pressman and his company, Pressman Film, worked with major studios, he was partial, especially early in his career, to independent films — movies that were “the expression of a single vision,” as he put it in a 1989 interview with SBS of Australia, like “Badlands,” which was both directed and written by Mr. Malick.Other times, he viewed his job as bringing together the right director, writer and actor, as with “Hoffa” — he persuaded David Mamet to write a screenplay, recruited Mr. Nicholson to star and, after a few other candidates proved not to be a good fit, made an unconventional choice for director: the comic actor Danny DeVito.“I think of myself as a catalyst in attracting the key elements,” he told The Times.And sometimes he was the person who validated a director’s vision, as he was for Ms. Bigelow on “Blue Steel,” which, in addition to directing, she wrote with Eric Red.“The script for ‘Blue Steel’ was rejected multiple times; the general response was, ‘Could the NYC police officer be a man instead of a woman?’” Ms. Bigelow said by email. “I said, no. Then Ed Pressman agreed. Jaimie Lee Curtis played the officer. Ed offered a lifeline.”Charlie Sheen, left, and Michael Douglas on the set of “Wall Street” (1987), one of many movies on which Mr. Pressman worked with the director Oliver Stone.Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty ImagesEdward Rambach Pressman was born on April 11, 1943, in Manhattan. His parents, Jack and Lynn (Rambach) Pressman, founded the Pressman Toy Corporation, and, especially after his father died when he was a teenager, there was some expectation that Edward would go into the family business, but his interests veered to other things.At Stanford University, he studied philosophy, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1965, and he first started thinking about a career in the movie business.“I had a roommate my senior year whose father was a director,” he told American Film in 1991, “and we’d talk about making films.”The prospect of actually doing so seemed remote, he said, but it became a reality when, studying for a year at the London School of Economics, he met Paul Williams, a fellow American who was going to Cambridge and who shared his growing interest in films.“I thought he was, you know, Cecil B. De Mille,” Mr. Pressman said, “and he thought I was Louis Mayer.”They jointly produced a short that Mr. Williams wrote and directed, “Girl” (1967). Two years later they combined again on a feature, “Out of It,” again written and directed by Mr. Williams; Jon Voigt was in the cast, as he was for Mr. Pressman’s next project with Mr. Williams, “The Revolutionary” (1970).Mr. Williams had only a limited career after that, but Mr. Pressman was on his way.His later movies included Mr. Stone’s “Wall Street” (1987), a defining movie of the 1980s. It was while making Mr. Stone’s “The Hand” that Mr. Pressman met Annie McEncroe, who was in the cast (for most of her movie career she was billed as Annie McEnroe); they married in 1983. She survives him, along with their son, Sam Pressman, an executive at Pressman Film; a sister, Ann Markelson; and a brother, Jim. Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Conan the Barbarian” (1982), directed by John Milius and produced by Mr. Pressman. In addition to producing prestige films, Mr. Pressman liked making movies based on pulp magazine and comic book characters.Universal Pictures-Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty ImagesIn addition to advancing the careers of directors and actors, Mr. Pressman advanced a genre: He was big on making movies based on pulp magazine and comic book characters, something that was not as common when he began doing it in the early 1980s as it is today, in the age of digital effects.“Conan the Barbarian” and its sequel, “Conan the Destroyer” (1984), were based on the pulp character created in the 1930s by Robert E. Howard, and Mr. Pressman’s comics-inspired films included “The Crow” (1994) and several sequels, as well as “Judge Dredd” (1995).“Comic books, video games, interactive software — these are all areas where artists can create with great freedom and imagination,” he told Business Wire, prophetically, in 1993. “They will be a major part of the motion picture industry’s future.” More

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      David Crosby, Folk-Rock Voice of the 1960s, Dies at 81

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      He was an original member of the Byrds and a founder of Crosby, Stills & Nash. But he was almost as well known for his troubled personal life as for his music.David Crosby, the outspoken and often troubled singer, songwriter and guitarist who helped create two of the most influential and beloved American bands of the classic-rock era of the 1960s and ’70s, the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, has died. He was 81.Patricia Dance, a sister of Mr. Crosby’s wife, Jan Dance, said in a text message on Thursday evening that Mr. Crosby died “last night.” She provided no other details.Mr. Crosby was inducted twice into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, as a founding member of the Byrds and as a founder of CSN&Y. He brought jazz influences to both groups, in the process broadening the possibilities of vocally driven folk-rock. And his reach extended to later generations: His alternate tunings became an inspiration for the innovative “freak folk” movement of the early 21st century while influencing scores of other musicians eager to give acoustic music a progressive spin.If Mr. Crosby’s music expanded boundaries, his persona fixed him in a specific era — and proudly so. In 1968, he wrote “Triad,” an ode to free love, recorded in distinct versions by the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. His song “Almost Cut My Hair,” which he recorded with CSN&Y for their acclaimed 1970 album, “Déjà Vu,” was a virtual loyalty oath to the counterculture.Mr. Crosby’s image as the twinkle-eyed stoner and sardonic hedonist of the cosmic age was said to have been a model for the obstinate free spirit played by Dennis Hopper in the 1969 movie “Easy Rider.”His impish indulgences turned potentially lethal many times. He became nearly as well known for his drug offenses, weapons charges and prison stints as for his music. By the mid-1970s, he was addicted to both cocaine and heroin.“You don’t sit down and say, ‘Gee, I think I’ll become a junkie,’” Mr. Crosby told People magazine in 1990. “When I started out doing drugs, it was marijuana and psychedelics, and it was fun. It was the ’60s, and we thought we were expanding our consciousnesses.”But later, he continued, “drugs became more for blurring pain.” He added: “You don’t realize you’re getting as strung out as you are. And I had the money to get more and more addicted.”Mr. Crosby’s drug abuse may have exacerbated his medical problems, including a long battle with hepatitis C, which necessitated a liver transplant in 1994. He also suffered from type 2 diabetes and, in 2014, had to cancel a tour to endure a cardiac catheterization and angiogram.Despite his health issues, his voice remained robust enough in those years for him to tour. And in his best moments while performing with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, he could recreate some of the most famous harmonies of the rock era. His voice remained strong as well when touring with his solo band in later years.A Prominent LineageDavid Van Cortlandt Crosby was born on Aug. 14, 1941, in Los Angeles into families with deep roots in American history dating back to Dutch rule in New York in the 17th century. His mother, who was born Aliph Van Cortlandt Whitehead, descended from the prominent Van Cortlandt family. His father, Floyd Crosby, an Academy Award-winning cinematographer whose credits included the classic western “High Noon,” was a member of the Van Rensselaer clan.David attended Crane Country Day School in Montecito, Calif., where he starred in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “H.M.S. Pinafore” and other musical productions, but he flunked out. He completed his high school studies by correspondence at the Cate School in nearby Carpinteria. He studied drama at Santa Barbara City College, but he dropped out before graduating to pursue a music career.He was 16 when he received his first guitar, from his older brother, Ethan, who had begun playing years earlier. David started out, like so many others in the early ’60s, performing folk music.“I would learn two chords and go back and forth between them,” Mr. Crosby told the British music magazine Mojo. “What took it to the next level was, my brother started listening to 1950s jazz: Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, people like that. Listening to jazz really widens your world.”Mr. Crosby also absorbed the music of the Everly Brothers, which taught him how to layer harmonies into diaphanous patterns. He first performed with his brother, but he soon went solo and drifted through coffee houses around the country until landing in New York, in the epicenter of the 1960s folk movement, Greenwich Village. In 1963, he cut his first demos, produced by Jim Dickson, who would later manage the Byrds.Mr. Crosby, front row left, as a member of the folk group Les Baxter’s Balladeers in the early 1960s. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Crosby, who briefly played with the folk group Les Baxter’s Balladeers in Los Angeles, got to know Jim McGuinn (who later changed his name to Roger) and Gene Clark while they were performing as a duo at the Troubadour. He soon began adding his harmonies to theirs onstage, fitting in so smoothly that they became a trio, known as the Jet Set.Mr. Crosby brought in Mr. Dickson to become the group’s manager. Mr. Dickson encouraged them to advance the new sound they had already been exploring, which combined their earlier folk influences with the electrified sound of the British Invasion bands, particularly the Beatles. To that end the band added a drummer, the inexperienced but handsome Michael Clarke, and Mr. Crosby took up the electric guitar. Together, the revolutionary style they honed became known as folk-rock.That hybrid found its first recorded expression after Mr. Dickson acquired an acetate of a new Bob Dylan song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” in August 1964. The band’s own demo of the piece, with the new recruit Chris Hillman on bass, helped land them a contract with Columbia Records that November. Two weeks later, the Jet Set changed its name to the Byrds.Writing Songs, and HitsColumbia, however, felt that the group hadn’t yet jelled musically, so only Mr. McGuinn was allowed to play an instrument on the single, which came out in April 1965, with studio musicians accompanying him. Mr. Crosby and Mr. Clark did provide impeccable harmonies on the song, which helped it reach No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart. The song was the title track of their debut album, released in June 1965, and the full band played on the rest of the tracks.The Byrds performed at Yankee Stadium in 1966 on an all-star bill that also included Stevie Wonder, the Beach Boys and others. From left: Mike Clarke (partly hidden), Chris Hillman, Mr. Crosby and Roger (then known as Jim) McGuinn.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Crosby didn’t contribute compositions to the Byrds’ first two albums. But on their third, “Fifth Dimension” (1966), he and Mr. Hillman helped fill a writing void left by the departure of the band’s most prolific songwriter, Mr. Clark. Mr. Crosby contributed to the composition of several songs on the album and wrote one himself, “What’s Happening?!?!” Its lyric introduced a Crosbyesque motif: posing questions that had no answer. More famously, Mr. Crosby wrote the band’s smash hit “Eight Miles High” with Mr. McGuinn and Mr. Clark.For the Byrds’ next album, “Younger Than Yesterday,” Mr. Crosby contributed “Everybody’s Been Burned,” which idealized the key strategy of his emerging style: to contrast a dreamy melody with dazed lyrics.A more daring number helped seal Mr. Crosby’s fate with the band. He had written “Triad” for the fifth Byrds album, and the band recorded it. But the other members were reluctant to release it, preferring instead “Goin’ Back,” written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Mr. Crosby vigorously argued against using outside writers for a band that already had three, and tension in the band grew. There was anger, too, over political speeches he had made between songs when the band played the Monterey Pop Festival the summer before. All of it led to his firing.Mr. McGuinn and Mr. Hillman delivered the crushing news. They “said I was impossible to work with, and I wasn’t very good anyway, and they’d do better without me,” Mr. Crosby told the British music magazine Uncut. “It hurt like hell. I didn’t try to reason with them. I just said, ‘It’s a shameful waste. … Goodbye.’”By this time Mr. Crosby had already started casually jamming with Mr. Stills, the guitarist and singer whose group Buffalo Springfield had recently disbanded. Mr. Crosby wrote his first song with Mr. Stills (along with Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane) while sailing on a 74-foot boat he had acquired a year earlier. The song, “Wooden Ships,” also recorded by the Airplane, tested out the vocal blend that would become Crosby, Stills & Nash’s signature.Mr. Crosby and Mr. Stills connected with Mr. Nash in July 1968 at a party at Joni Mitchell’s house in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles. Mr. Nash was eager to leave his slick British pop act, the Hollies, to join the hot folk-rock scene. The three began meeting on their own to perfect their sound, and when Ahmet Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records, heard their elegant three-way vocal braiding, he signed them to his label.A Grammy, Then a DeathThe group’s debut album, titled simply “Crosby, Stills & Nash,” was released in May 1969 and shot into the Top 10. It earned them a Grammy as best new artist. Besides “Wooden Ships,” the album included two other songs by Mr. Crosby, the shimmering “Guinevere” and the elegiac “Long Time Gone,” which he wrote after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.From left, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Mr. Crosby in a photo taken at the shoot for the cover of the album “Crosby, Stills & Nash,” their first as a group. Henry DiltzThat same year, his longtime girlfriend, Christine Hinton, was killed in a car accident while running a routine errand. Mr. Crosby later saw this as the tipping point that sent him into depression and serious drug use.“I was unable to handle it,” he told People magazine. “I was very much in love with her and she just never came back. That was when I got more into hard drugs.”His increasing recreational drug use made it harder for him to create music, he said, but he nevertheless managed to write two classic songs for the band’s follow-up album, “Déjà Vu,” released in 1970, which officially expanded the group’s lineup to include Neil Young: “Almost Cut My Hair” and the title track, a rhythmically daring number with complex harmonies.Fueled by drugs and egos, the group quickly began to fracture. Over the next year, all four members released solo albums. Mr. Crosby’s, “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” released in 1971, sold well, but it was the least well received in its day. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called it a “disgraceful performance.” Mr. Crosby would not record another solo album for 18 years. But in later years it received a critical overhaul; in his 1994 book, “All Time Top 1,000 Albums,” Colin Larkin called it “miraculous.”Starting in 1972, Mr. Crosby released a series of successful albums with Mr. Nash, his closest ally in the band. All three of their first joint albums went gold, buoyed by Mr. Nash’s more commercial tunes.In 1973, Mr. Crosby reunited with the four other original Byrds for one album, but it was poorly received. For much of the ’70s, he also worked as a session singer, backing up star friends like Jackson Browne and James Taylor. In the ’80s and ’90s, he did similar work with Phil Collins.Mr. Crosby, Mr. Stills and Mr. Nash, and sometimes Mr. Young, reunited from time to time. But by the 1980s Mr. Crosby was increasingly running afoul of the law.Mr. Crosby was arrested by Dallas police in April 1982 and charged with drug and gun possession. He spent nine months in prison.Bureau of Prisons/Getty ImagesHe spent nine months in a Texas prison in 1982 on drug and weapons charges. In 1985, he was arrested on charges of drunken driving, hit and run, and possession of a concealed pistol and imprisoned for a year. By his account he quit hard drugs in 1986. But in March 2004, he was charged with criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, as well as illegal possession of a hunting knife, ammunition and marijuana. He pleaded guilty and got off with a fine.Mr. Crosby detailed his travails in two harrowing autobiographies, “Long Time Gone” (1988) and “Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It” (2006), both written with Carl Gottlieb.Surging Late in LifeHe earned less fraught tabloid headlines in 2000, when he was revealed to be the biological father, via sperm donation, of the two children of the singer Melissa Etheridge and her partner at the time, Julie Cypher.Mr. Crosby had first become a father in 1962, with Celia Crawford Ferguson, but as young parents they put their son up for adoption. He had three other children: Erika, by his former girlfriend Jackie Gutherie; Donovan, by another partner, Debbie Donovan; and Django, with Ms. Dance, his wife of 35 years. His brother killed himself in the late 1990s. His survivors include his wife and four children.In 1997, Mr. Crosby reunited with the son he had put up for adoption, James Raymond, who had grown up to become an accomplished pianist. With the session guitarist Jeff Pevar, they formed a jazz-rock band, which they cheekily called CPR.Mr. Crosby in concert in Los Angeles in 2012. Two years later he released his first solo album in 21 years, ushering in one of the most prolific periods in his career.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersIn 2014, Mr. Crosby released his first solo album in 21 years, “Croz,” which debuted in the Billboard Top 40. It ushered in one of the most prolific periods in his career, in which he released five solo albums, most recently “For Free” in 2021.Mr. Crosby told The Orange County Register in 2019 that his late-in-life resurgence was sparked by his realization that “at this stage, you don’t know if you’ve got two weeks or 10 years,” adding, “Really what matters is what you do with whatever time you have.”Mr. Crosby announced in 2022 that although he planned to continue making records, he would no longer tour. “I’m too old to do it anymore,” he said. “I don’t have the stamina; I don’t have the strength.” (He recently said that he had reconsidered.)In 2019 he was the subject of an uncommonly frank documentary, “David Crosby: Remember My Name,” directed by A.J. Eaton and produced by Cameron Crowe. In the film, the famously cantankerous Mr. Crosby talks about how he had alienated nearly all of his old musical associates, even his longtime ally Mr. Nash. “All the guys I made music with won’t even talk to me,” he said. “I don’t know quite how to undo it.”Adapting a more appreciative tone, Mr. Crosby looked back at his life with wonder in his second memoir. “I was tremendously lucky, surviving injury, illness and stupidity,” he wrote. “As for the music, I was blessed early and often, from the Byrds to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, singing with Graham, meeting my son and creating CPR” and experiencing “the wonderful, exploratory forward motion of new music.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Yukihiro Takahashi, Pioneer of Electronic Pop Music, Dies at 70

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      A drummer and singer, he was best known as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, one of Japan’s most successful bands and a major influence on hip-hop, techno and New Wave.Yukihiro Takahashi, a drummer and vocalist whose wide artistic range and gleeful embrace of music technology made him a leading figure in Japan’s pop scene for nearly 50 years, most prominently with the Yellow Magic Orchestra, one of his country’s most successful musical acts, died on Jan. 11 in Karuizawa, Japan. He was 70.The cause was aspiration pneumonia, a complication of a brain tumor, his management company said in a statement.Mr. Takahashi and Yellow Magic Orchestra, which he founded in 1978 with the musicians Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono, were often ranked alongside the German electronic group Kraftwerk as pioneers in electronic music and significant influences on emergent genres like hip-hop, New Wave and techno.Yellow Magic Orchestra was among the first bands to employ in live shows devices like the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer and the Moog II-C synthesizer, which they used to complement Mr. Hosono’s funky guitar and Mr. Takahashi’s tight, driving drums.Unlike their German counterparts, who leaned into the avant-garde nature of electronic sound and referred to themselves as automatons, Yellow Magic Orchestra found ways to bend it toward pop music, blending in elements of Motown, disco and synth-pop.In a 1980 appearance on the television show “Soul Train,” the band performed a souped-up version of Archie Bell and the Drells’ “Tighten Up,” after which a bemused Don Cornelius, the show’s host, interviewed Mr. Takahashi. Kraftwerk, it might go without saying, never appeared on “Soul Train.”Mr. Takahashi “was remarkably skilled at taking what were obviously artificial, technologically mediated sounds and using them to build songs that sound fully and organically human,” Michael K. Bourdaghs, a professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Chicago, said in a phone interview.The band and its tech-inflected sound arrived at just the right time. Japan had long since remade itself as a postwar economic engine, but by the late 1970s it was becoming something else: a global emblem of techno-utopianism and futuristic cool. Sony released the Walkman in 1979, just as Kenzo Takada and Issey Miyake were taking over Paris fashion runways with their playful, visionary designs.Yellow Magic Orchestra’s eponymous debut album, released in 1978, sold more than 250,000 copies; its 1980 sophomore release, “Solid State Survivor,” sold some one million. Six of the band’s seven studio albums reached the top five in the Japanese pop charts, and all of them provided fodder for covers and samples far beyond Japan.Afrika Bambaataa, 2 Live Crew, J Dilla and De La Soul were among the many acts who borrowed liberally from Yellow Magic Orchestra’s archive. Michael Jackson remade its song “Behind the Mask,” though his version was not released until 2010, after his death.The band’s music also inspired composers of early video game soundtracks who were looking for electronic sounds that could remain compelling even after hours of play. Yellow Magic Orchestra titled the first track on its debut album “Computer Game ‘Theme from The Circus,’” and Mr. Takahashi later wrote music for several games.He and his bandmates were already established musicians when they formed Yellow Magic Orchestra, and they continued to release solo projects during the group’s six-year run. Mr. Takahashi released some 20 albums during his career, not counting numerous remastered reissues and live recordings.Neither he nor the band ever sat still artistically. His first group, the Sadistic Mika Band, brought glam and prog rock to Japan in the early 1970s and was among the first Japanese acts to achieve success outside the country — it toured Britain with Roxy Music and played on the BBC.Mr. Takahashi’s 1978 solo album, “Saravah!,” produced by Mr. Sakamoto, drew on bossa nova and reggae influences, while the album “Yellow Magic Orchestra” later that year tweaked Orientalist stereotypes, most notably in a cheeky cover of Martin Denny’s tiki-inspired “Firecracker.”Yukihiro Takahashi, in hat and shades, performing with Yellow Magic Orchestra in New York City in 1979.Ebet RobertsBoth before and after Yellow Magic Orchestra, Mr. Takahashi was a frequent and eager collaborator, forming bands on the fly and bringing in friends to play on individual tracks. He often worked with the British guitarist and singer Bill Nelson, as well as Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music.Mr. Takahashi wrote much of the music played by Yellow Magic Orchestra; he also played drums and sang lead vocals, though many of their songs were instrumentals.His voice was rich and louche, strikingly similar to that of Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, especially on early hits like “Drip Dry Eyes” (1984). He sported a pencil mustache and, in later years, a fedora and thick-rimmed eyeglasses. Like Mr. Ferry, he came across as effortlessly cool and ever-so-slightly world-weary, a hipster who believed in better days to come.“We had hope for the future, unlike now,” Mr. Takahashi said in a 2009 interview, seated between Mr. Sakamoto and Mr. Hosono. “We used to say we will make music that’ll be a bridge to the future.”Yukihiro Takahashi was born on June 6, 1952, in Tokyo. He began his music career early, playing drums with college bands while still in junior high school and starting as a session musician at 16.He is survived by his wife, Kiyomi Takahashi; his brother, Nobuyuki Takahashi, a music producer; and his sister, Mie Ito.He studied design at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, but did not graduate. During the 1970s, he developed his own clothing line, Bricks; he often designed the outfits worn by Yellow Magic Orchestra, including a striking trio of bright red Mao suits.Yellow Magic Orchestra broke up in 1984, its members citing musical differences. All three went on to successful solo careers — Mr. Sakamoto won an Academy Award for his soundtrack to Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” (1987) — but they remained close, and occasionally reunited. They released an album in 1993, “Technodon,” and appeared at a 2012 benefit concert to oppose nuclear power.“We followed a rock band path, so we stopped” playing as Yellow Magic Orchestra, Mr. Takahashi said in 2009. “But on second thought,” he added, nodding toward his bandmates on either side of him, “I couldn’t think of anybody I respect more.”Miharu Nishiyama More