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      André Watts, Pioneering Piano Virtuoso, Dies at 77

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      One of the first Black superstars in classical music, he awed audiences with his charisma and his technical powers.André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm awed audiences and made him one of the first Black superstars in classical music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77.The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Brand Watts.Mr. Watts was an old-world virtuoso — his idol was the composer and showman Franz Liszt — with a knack for electricity and emotion. He sometimes hummed, stomped his feet and bobbed his head while he played, and some critics faulted him for excess. But his charisma and his technical powers were unquestioned, which helped fuel his rise to the world’s top concert halls.“My greatest satisfaction is performing,” Mr. Watts told The New York Times in 1971, when he was 25. “The ego is a big part of it, but far from all. Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”“There’s something beautiful,” he added, “about having an entire audience hanging on a single note.”Mr. Watts, whose father was Black and whose mother was white, was a rarity in a field where musicians of color have long been underrepresented. While he preferred not to speak about race, he was celebrated as a pioneer who defied stereotypes about classical music and helped open doors for aspiring artists of color.His own arrival in the spotlight was auspicious. In 1963, when he was 16, he won an audition to appear with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic as part of the maestro’s nationally televised series of Young People’s Concerts.Mr. Bernstein was effusive as he introduced the young pianist to the crowd at Philharmonic Hall. “He sat down at the piano and tore into the opening bars of a Liszt concerto in such a way that we simply flipped,” Mr. Bernstein said, recounting the young pianist’s audition.Mr. Watts was then living in relative obscurity in Philadelphia, practicing on a beat-up piano with 26 missing strings. But he emerged from his performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 a bona fide star.A couple weeks later, Mr. Bernstein invited him to make his formal Philharmonic debut, substituting for the eminent pianist Glenn Gould. He later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”“It was like being God Almighty at 16,” he told The Times.André Watts was born on June 20, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of Herman Watts, a noncommissioned officer stationed overseas for the U.S. Army, and Maria (Gusmits) Watts, an amateur pianist from Hungary.His mother, who was fond of playing Strauss waltzes on the family’s Blüthner piano, encouraged André’s musical studies, and as a 6-year-old he took up the piano after a flirtation with the violin.“I liked the sound,” he recalled in a 1993 television appearance. “I would hold the pedal down for pages and pages of music and just let this mushroom sound go.”When he was 8, the family moved to the United States for his father’s work, ultimately settling in Philadelphia. But his parents’ relationship grew strained, and they divorced when he was 13. He rarely saw his father in the following decades.His mother, who worked as a receptionist at an art gallery to help pay for his piano lessons, became a dominant influence. When he was young, she served as teacher, coach and manager, and she enforced a strict practice regimen.Mr. Watts with Leonard Bernstein in 1963 after he performed a Liszt piano concerto with the New York Philharmonic as a last-minute substitute for Glenn Gould. Mr. Watts later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”Associated PressAndré struggled to fit in at school, quarreling with teachers and classmates (he taught himself judo to deter bullies). He sometimes felt isolated, he recalled in interviews, because he identified as neither Black nor white.When he went to Florida as a teenager to perform, his manager, invoking the state’s history of discrimination against interracial couples, warned that he could be viewed suspiciously.But his mother told him that he should not blame racism for his troubles. “If someone is not nice to you,” Mr. Watts recalled her saying when he was interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor in 1982, “it doesn’t have to be automatically because of your color.”“These kinds of advice have taught me that when I’m in a complex personal situation, I don’t have to conclude it is a racial thing,” he said. “The more subtle things in interpersonal exchange are, first of all, never provable as racist anyway. So it’s a waste of time.”He later credited Mr. Bernstein with helping him gain acceptance in the classical music industry, which had long been seen as the dominion of the white and wealthy. In introducing Mr. Watts at the Young People’s Concert, Mr. Bernstein described his international heritage and said, “I love that kind of story.”In 1964, the year after his debut with Mr. Bernstein, Mr. Watts won a Grammy Award for most promising new classical recording artist. Despite his early success, he tried to remain grounded, adopting a motto, “Even this shall pass away,” taken from a poem by the 19th-century poet and abolitionist Theodore Tilton. (His mother had the phrase inscribed on a gold medallion that he wore around his neck.)He graduated in 1972 from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he studied with the pedagogue and performer Leon Fleisher. He was already a regular on the global concert circuit by the time he graduated, playing the Liszt concerto for which he was known, as well as works by Chopin, Franck, Saint-Saëns and others, before sold-out crowds in Boston, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere.Mr. Watts in performance with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 2005.Richard Termine for The New York TimesMr. Watts earned mixed reviews early in his career; critics said that while he had flair and confidence, he could sometimes get carried away. But they agreed that he possessed a special ability to communicate from the keyboard.“He has that kind of personal magic that makes an Event of a concert, and Philharmonic Hall had the electric feeling that occurs only when an important artist is at work,” Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote in 1970. “It cannot be taught, this mysterious transmission from stage to audience, and Mr. Watts has it in very large measure.”While Mr. Watts thrived on the stage, recording was more of a challenge; he said he was prone to clam up without an audience. And at times he suffered financial and management difficulties, including in 1992, when he was ordered by a New York State appellate court to pay Columbia Artists Management nearly $300,000 in disputed commissions.But he maintained his popularity, performing at White House state dinners, making frequent appearances on television and becoming one of classical music’s most bankable stars. His success brought new luxuries and curiosities. He grew fond of Montecristo cigars, fine wines and caviar, and he began to study Zen Buddhism.In 1987, Mr. Watts was featured in an episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” about learning from mistakes.“When I’m feeling unhappy,” he said on the program, “going to the piano and just playing gently and listening to sounds makes everything slowly seem all right.”His collaborators described him as a musician of preternatural talent who was always looking to improve. The conductor Robert Spano said that Mr. Watts never performed a piece the same way twice, intent on finding fresh meaning each time.“Every night was a new adventure,” Mr. Spano said. “He radiated love to people and to the music, and it was unmistakable. That’s why he was so loved as a performer, because of the generosity of his music making.”He was also a role model for many Black musicians. The conductor Thomas Wilkins, a colleague of Mr. Watts’s at Indiana University, where Mr. Watts had taught since 2004, recalled him as a devoted teacher who was eager to “hand down this ferociousness about trying to become better.”“Whenever we were onstage together, there was this unspoken acknowledgment that we were in a world where a lot of people think we shouldn’t be,” said Mr. Wilkins, who is Black. “It was an affirmation.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Watts is survived by a stepson, William Dalton; a stepdaughter, Amanda Rees; and seven step-grandchildren.At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Mr. Watts, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer in 2016, had been planning a feat: He would play Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in a version that he had reworked for the right hand (his left was recovering from a nerve injury). As he practiced on his twin Yamaha pianos, he got daily inspiration from a one-legged starling that emerged outside his home in Bloomington.Ultimately, Mr. Watts was unable to perform the concerto because of health problems and the pandemic. He mostly stopped playing the piano after the concerts were canceled, instead spending time with students.His wife said that music had sustained him throughout his life, beginning with his demanding childhood and through his health struggles.“Music was how he endured and how he survived,” she said. “When he actually played, then he was happy. It just really lifted up his soul.”He described music as a sacred space in which he felt he could breathe and flourish.“Your relationship with your music is the most important thing that you have, and it is, in the sense of private and sacred, something that you need to protect,” he said before a concert in Baltimore in 2012. “The dross of everyday life is very, very powerful and very strong. So you need to protect your special relationship with your music.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      Rick Froberg, Singer of Artful Intensity, Is Dead at 55

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      A longtime linchpin of a 1990s underground music scene, he built a devoted and enthusiastic following and was also a prolific visual artist.Rick Froberg, the vocalist and guitarist best known for his work with the influential 1990s post-hardcore band Drive Like Jehu, whose urgent howl was one of rock’s most distinctive voices, died on June 30 in San Diego. He was 55.His partner, Britton Neubacher, said the cause was an undiagnosed heart condition.Mr. Froberg, a beloved linchpin of the San Diego underground music scene that flourished in the 1980s and ’90s, sang in a raspy roar that segued smoothly between snarl and scream. “He always wanted to effortlessly sound kick-ass,” said John Reis, Mr. Froberg’s longtime bandmate and songwriting partner in the bands Pitchfork, Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes.Mr. Froberg particularly loved the gnarled growls of the Australian vocalists Bon Scott of AC/DC — his favorite band — and Chris Bailey of the proto-punk Saints, and he strived to follow them, Mr. Reis said. “I would tell him, ‘Dude, you have that in spades, and you actually have another gear those people don’t have.’”Mr. Froberg and Mr. Reis met as teenagers in 1986, at a picnic organized by a local anarchist publication at a San Diego park. They bonded immediately and soon joined up in Pitchfork, with Mr. Froberg on vocals. The band was inspired, Mr. Reis said, by the noisy music being issued at the time on independent labels like Dischord, Touch & Go and SST. By the time Pitchfork’s debut album was released in 1990, however, the band had broken up.Mr. Froberg and Mr. Reis quickly regrouped in Drive Like Jehu, where Mr. Froberg also began playing guitar, inspired by Sonic Youth’s atonal, unorthodox guitar tunings — which “made it seem like you could just do anything you wanted to do,” Mr. Froberg said in a recent web interview.Drive Like Jehu’s two albums featured dissonant, tightly coiled compositions with off-kilter rhythms and cathartic explosions. The group built a small but fervent following, with the enthusiasm it inspired far outstripping its record sales. The band’s single “Bullet Train to Vegas”/“Hand Over Fist,” a marvel of feral intensity and relentless locomotive force released by Merge Records in 1992, was described by the author Nabil Ayers in a recent Substack post as “arguably the best 7-inch single ever to be released.” A tribute to Mr. Froberg on the Merge website called it “one of the most revered in our catalog.”Mr. Reis soon became busy touring with another of his bands, Rocket From the Crypt, and Drive Like Jehu fizzled out after its second album, “Yank Crime.” Released on Interscope, it was Mr. Froberg’s only recording for a major label.Mr. Froberg was also a prolific visual artist. His artwork gradually evolved from fliers, posters and album covers into silk-screened graphics, linocut etchings and gouache paintings. He had three solo exhibitions, most recently at Trash Lamb Gallery in San Diego in 2022, and his work was included in over a dozen group shows.He moved to Brooklyn in 1998 and pursued a career as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer; he also had a stint doing animation with the artist Gary Panter. His illustrations were published in The New Yorker and The New York Times; Matt Dorfman, a Times art director who worked with Mr. Froberg, described his style as “a hysterical pastiche of 1920s surrealism and Tex Avery cartoons.”Eric Gerald Froberg was born on Jan. 19, 1968, in Santa Monica, Calif., to Eric and Sylvia (Phillips) Froberg. His father, a business consultant and entrepreneur, legally changed the Swedish family name from Froberg to Farr in 1979; Mr. Froberg used the ancestral surname professionally, though he sometimes signed his artwork “Rick Farr” or “Rick Fork.”His parents divorced soon after his birth, and he never had a relationship with his birth mother, who died in 1992. His father married Lynne Wacker, a sales training manager for Hooked on Phonics, in 1973. The family lived in Glendale and Playa del Rey before moving to Carlsbad when Mr. Froberg was 8. He lived primarily in the North County area of San Diego until he moved to Brooklyn.He married Amelia Halverson in 2003. They divorced in 2015. In addition to Ms. Neubacher, he is survived by his father, his stepmother and three younger brothers, Christopher, Justin and Gregory.In 1999 Mr. Reis formed a new band, Hot Snakes. Dissatisfied with his own vocals, he sent a cassette to Mr. Froberg, who agreed to join even though they lived on different coasts. In contrast to Drive Like Jehu’s distortion, Hot Snakes favored a clean guitar sound and short, efficient tunes, Mr. Reis said, “letting Rick’s voice and the attack of the pick carry the power.”Mr. Froberg also sang and played guitar from 2006 to 2015 in the Brooklyn band Obits, which released three albums on Sub Pop. The name was Mr. Froberg’s idea, said Sohrab Habibion, Obits’ other guitarist, a comment on ageism in music.Painters, photographers and filmmakers can grow old, Mr. Habibion said, “and jazz musicians and classical players are allowed to get long in the tooth. But rock ’n’ roll is stuck in this youth culture rut, so we wanted to put a stake in the ground and say that middle-aged people could make rock music that was relevant, vital and worthy of being part of the cultural conversation.”Drive Like Jehu reunited in 2014 for an outdoor concert at Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park in San Diego, attracting a crowd estimated to be the biggest since Theodore Roosevelt delivered an address there in 1915. “Intoxicated by the high of that day,” Mr. Reis said, the band later reconvened to tour.After moving back to San Diego in 2021, Mr. Froberg collaborated with Ms. Neubacher, a botanical artist, on large-scale installations at the San Diego Museum of Art and at Mothership, a space-themed tiki bar. “Watching him get lost in the secret places of his imagination was a daily pleasure of mine,” Ms. Neubacher said.Mr. Froberg had recently been working on what would have been Hot Snakes’ fifth studio album. “He was really firing on all cylinders,” Mr. Reis said. “His voice gave me a lot of freedom as a songwriter, because I didn’t have to worry about where the chorus or the melody was. I could go wildly off into what I considered uncharted territory for myself, and always knew that he would make sense of it and turn it into something beautiful.“I’m just lost without him,” he added. “I don’t know what to do now.” More

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      in Movies

      Ellen Hovde, ‘Grey Gardens’ Documentarian, Dies at 97

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      She worked with the Maysles brothers on the groundbreaking film about two Long Island recluses, and she later shared an Emmy for a mini-series about Ben Franklin.Ellen Hovde, a documentarian who was one of the directors of “Grey Gardens,” the groundbreaking 1975 movie that examined the lives of two reclusive women living in a deteriorating mansion on Long Island and inspired both a Broadway musical and an HBO film, died on Feb. 16 at her home in Brooklyn. She was 97.Her death, which had not been widely reported, was confirmed last week by her children, Tessa Huxley and Mark Trevenen Huxley, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Hovde (pronounced HUV-dee) worked on several films with the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, in the late 1960s and ’70s, when they were expanding the documentary form with cinéma vérité techniques, eschewing sit-in-a-chair interviews in favor of recording life and events as they happened.In 1969 she was a contributing editor on “Salesman,” a documentary by the Maysleses and Charlotte Zwerin that followed four salesmen as they peddled $49.95 Bibles door to door in New England and Florida. The next year she was an editor on “Gimme Shelter,” the documentary by the Maysleses and Ms. Zwerin that captured a Rolling Stones tour, including the concert at Altamont Speedway in Northern California in late 1969 at which a concertgoer was killed by a Hells Angel.In 1974 she was credited as a director, along with the Maysleses, on “Christo’s Valley Curtain,” which was about an environmental art project the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude erected in Colorado in 1972. That film was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary short.The mother and daughter known as Big Edie and Little Edie Beale in a scene from the documentary “Grey Gardens,” directed by Alfred and David Maysles, Ms. Hovde and Muffie Meyer.Criterion CollectionThe next year came “Grey Gardens.” That film, which garnered considerable attention at the time and in 2010 was named to the National Film Registry of culturally significant movies, took a close-up, often uncomfortable look at the lives of Edie Beale and her mother, Edith Beale, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who had dropped out of high society and were living in East Hampton, N.Y., in a crumbling mansion along with assorted cats and raccoons.The film came about somewhat by accident when Lee Radziwill, Ms. Onassis’ sister, suggested that the Maysleses and Ms. Hovde make a documentary about her childhood. Among the people she suggested they talk to were the Beales — Little Edie and Big Edie, as they were known. The documentary Ms. Radziwill had suggested fell through, but the Maysleses and Ms. Hovde were intrigued by the Beales and proposed a film to them.“Big Edie didn’t really want to do it at first,” Ms. Hovde said in a 1978 interview with Film Quarterly. “Little Edie did.”Soon Muffie Meyer, who would partner with Ms. Hovde on numerous films in the ensuing years, joined the project. Ms. Hovde and Ms. Meyer received directing credits on the film along with the Maysles brothers, but they, in addition to Susan Froemke, were also its editors, which to Ms. Hovde was the pivotal role.“The person who is doing the editing is doing something very like a mix of writing and stage directing,” she told Film Quarterly. “That person is shaping, forming and structuring the material, and making the decisions about what is really going to be there on the screen — what the ideas are, what the order of events will be, where the emphasis will be.”For “Grey Gardens,” that involved going through dozens of hours of film and shaping a portrait that revealed the codependent relationship between the two eccentric women. Ms. Meyer said that, if portable cameras and tape recorders made the type of filmmaking used in “Grey Gardens” possible, the other crucial element was the editing.“Essentially, massive amounts of footage (usually upwards of 60 hours), unscripted and with little or no direction, was dumped in the editing room,” she said by email. “The editor’s job was to screen it, organize it, take careful notes, and then find the story and the structure. Ellen was a master at all of this, and there are not many masters (Charlotte Zwerin was another).”The team behind “Grey Gardens,” clockwise from top left: David Maysles, Ms. Hovde, Albert Maysles, Susan Froemke and Ms. Meyer. Ms. Hovde, Ms. Froemke and Ms. Meyer were the film’s editors, which to Ms. Hovde was the pivotal role.Marianne Barcellona“Grey Gardens” drew both acclaim and disapproval from critics. The film critic Roger Ebert called it “one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time.” But in The New York Times, Richard Eder, while acknowledging that there was “no doubt about the artistry and devotion” involved in making the film, said that “the moviegoer will still feel like an exploiter.”The debate over whether “Grey Gardens” and other films in the same style exploit their subjects or invade their privacy has been an ongoing one, and there was a chorus of such complaints when the movie was released. But Ms. Hovde, in the Film Quarterly interview, said the Beales themselves disputed that interpretation.“In the months when there was a lot of controversy about it,” she said, “it was Mrs. Beale and Edie who called us and said: ‘You know there has been this criticism — don’t worry. It’s all right. We know that it is an honest picture. We believe in it. We don’t want you to feel upset.’ That was their attitude, and they never wavered from that.”A musical based on the documentary opened on Broadway in 2006 and won three Tony Awards, and in 2009 HBO’s “Grey Gardens” movie, with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the Beales, won six Emmy Awards.In 1978 Ms. Hovde and Ms. Meyer formed Middlemarch Films, which went on to make scores of documentary features and videos in various styles and on a wide range of subjects. Some explored subjects from the age before film and photography and used actors to re-create scenes. One of those, a television mini-series about Benjamin Franklin directed jointly by Ms. Meyer and Ms. Hovde in 2002, won an Emmy for outstanding nonfiction special.Ms. Meyer said that in those types of projects, Ms. Hovde was a stickler for accuracy.“One example was her insistence on the accuracy of the bird tweets and frog sounds in our colonial-period films,” she said. “She drove the sound editors to distraction (and in one late-night session, to tears): ‘Was this frog endemic to the Northeast and did it croak in late fall?’ ‘Was this bird tweet that was added to the soundtrack really a bird that could be found in Virginia in the 18th century?’”Richard Easton was one of two actors who played the title role in “Benjamin Franklin,” an Emmy-winning PBS mini-series directed by Ms. Hovde and Muffie Meyer that used actors to re-create historical scenes.PBS, via Associated PressEllen Margerethe Hovde was born on March 9, 1925, in Meadville, Pa. Her father, Brynjolf (known as Bryn), was president of the New School for Social Research from 1945 to 1950, and her mother, Theresse (Arneson) Hovde, was a nurse.Ms. Hovde grew up in Pittsburgh and earned a degree in theater in 1947 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, after which she studied for a time at the University of Oslo. In 1950 she married Matthew Huxley, son of the author Aldous L. Huxley. The marriage ended in divorce, but Ms. Hovde’s son said that she and Aldous Huxley remained close until his death in 1963, and that as his eyesight began to fail, she would sometimes read books into a tape recorder for him.Ms. Hovde had hoped for a career as a stage director, but, after not finding work, she took a job as an administrative assistant at a film school. By the early 1950s she was learning editing. Her credits before she began working with the Maysles brothers included editing “Margaret Mead’s New Guinea Journal” (1968) for the New York public television station WNET and a Simon and Garfunkel television special broadcast on CBS in 1969.Ms. Hovde’s second marriage, to Adam Edward Giffard in 1963, also ended in divorce. In addition to her children, she is survived by two grandchildren.Ms. Meyer said Ms. Hovde’s homes were gathering places for documentarians in the 1970s, and she once helped organize a filmmakers’ cookbook, a photocopied collection of everyone’s favorite recipes.“Most of us still use it,” she said. More

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      in Theater

      Jack Goldstein, a Savior of Broadway Theaters, Dies at 74

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      He helped secure landmark status for more than two dozen theaters in the 1980s, then initiated the design competition that led to a new TKTS booth.Jack Goldstein, a preservationist who in the 1980s reacted to the razing of several venerable Broadway theaters under a Times Square redevelopment plan by helping to organize a successful campaign to give landmark status to more than two dozen other theaters, died on June 16 in Cold Spring, N.Y., in Putnam County. He was 74.The cause was a heart attack, said Tom Miller, his executor.Over 30 years, Mr. Goldstein established himself as an effective behind-the-scenes player on Broadway.He was the executive director of the nonprofit Save the Theaters, which was formed to prevent the future destruction of playhouses. He was an executive at Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union, and with the Theater Development Fund, where he initiated the design competition that led to the creation of a new TKTS discount ticket booth in Duffy Square, topped with a dramatic cascade of 27 ruby-red structural glass steps that rises above West 47th Street.“Jack had a great artistic eye and a deep commitment to good government,” Gretchen Dykstra, the former president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, said in a phone interview.Mr. Goldstein arrived in Manhattan in the spring of 1982, during a difficult financial period for Broadway andaround the time of the wrenching demolition of the Helen Hayes and Morosco Theaters — the most distinctive of the five theaters between West 45th and 46th Streets on Broadway that were leveled to make way for the towering New York Marriott Marquis Hotel.The sites of the Hayes and Morosco Theaters had become the center of protests by actors, playwrights and others until the wrecking balls began swinging that March.The actor Jason Robards speaking at a rally in 1982 in an unsuccessful effort to preserve the Morosco Theater. Others on the platform included the actor Christopher Reeve, second from left. Mr. Goldstein joined the Broadway preservation effort that year. Marilyn K. Yee/The New York TimesMr. Goldstein told a conference at the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan in 2014, “The destruction in the center of Broadway of beloved, important and, from the actors’ point of view, irreplaceable instruments of their art form and communication, was an affront.”Mr. Goldstein, who had a background in historic preservation, was initially a volunteer with the Committee to Save the Theaters, which had been formed by Actors’ Equity. He soon shifted to join and then run its spinoff organization, Save the Theaters.“Since it was clear that the city no longer recognized the value of the Broadway theaters,” he told Metropolis, an architecture and design magazine, in 2004, “No. 1 on the agenda was to bring to bear whatever legal disincentives to demolition were available and apply them to the historic theaters.”For six years, Mr. Goldstein and other preservationists focused on getting protection for theaters from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.Part of the process was examining theaters’ interiors and exteriors to determine which might be designated landmarks. He brought actors to the commission’s hearings to impart their knowledge of the theaters. And he collaborated on a report with an architect, Hugh Hardy, that stressed the full geometry of the theaters — their shape, layout and acoustical properties — rather than just their decorative detail, as standards for landmark designation.Speaking to the Skyscraper conference, Mr. Goldstein cited, for example, the “spatial relationships and building techniques behind the walls” that allowed actors to speak without a microphone, or in a whisper, and be heard by 600 to 1,400 theatergoers.Workmen cutting away steel from the roof of the Helen Hayes Theater in 1982.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“He was well spoken and enormously energetic,” Kent Barwick, a former chairman of the landmarks commission, said in an interview. “He was doing what needed to be done at the time. Was he always right in his judgment? No. Was he always fair? No. Was he dramatic? Of course — he was coming out of Actors’ Equity.”In 1987, the commission designated 28 theaters as landmarks — some for their exteriors, some for their interiors, some for both. (The sale of the Mark Hellinger Theater to a church in 1991 brought the group to 27.) The city’s Board of Estimate, a powerful governing body at the time, approved the designations in March 1988.Theater owners objected to the landmarking “as a confiscation of the value of the building because it limited its use to live theater,” Rocco Landesman, a former president of Jujamcyn Theaters, said by phone. He said of the buildings: “You couldn’t tear them down, and it was difficult to build above them if you didn’t have the rights. Value was taken without compensation.”The owners sued to overturn the landmarking of 22 of the theaters, but in 1992 the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case after the State Supreme Court and the Appellate Division had upheld the designations.Mr. Goldstein in 1997. Looking back with satisfaction in 2014, he said he thought he had made an impact on Broadway. “I feel, ‘job done,’” he said.TDFJack Lewis Goldstein was born on March 5, 1949, in Jersey City, N.J. His father, Joseph, was an Army officer and a physician whose work took him and his family to Maryland, Germany and other postings. His mother, Thelma (Ginsberg) Goldstein, was a homemaker, potter and political activist. The couple eventually divorced.Jack’s maternal grandmother took him to his first Broadway show, Lionel Bart’s musical “Oliver!,” which opened at the Imperial Theater in 1963.“‘Oliver!’ was the first time I experienced that suspension of disbelief,” Mr. Goldstein told Crain’s New York Business in 1998. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Goldstein graduated from George Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1972. He worked in Manhattan at the National Design Center, which exhibited home furnishings, before moving to Washington, where he was an assistant to the director of programs at the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a small federal agency that would play a role in persuading him to go to Broadway.While he was in Washington, the Interior Department, responding to a petition from preservationists, determined that the Morosco was eligible to be included on the National Register of Historic Places, and that if the developer of the Marriott Marquis wanted to tear it down, the company would need a waiver from the advisory council. Mr. Goldstein contended in an affidavit that Lyn Nofziger, an aide to President Ronald Reagan, had told the council to grant the waiver or lose its government funding — an assertion Mr. Nofziger denied.Frustrated, Mr. Goldstein soon left Washington to join the Broadway preservationists, whose efforts to save the Morosco were by then doomed to fail.After leaving Save the Theaters in 1988, Mr. Goldstein was a special assistant for government affairs to Ron Silver, the actor and president of Actors’ Equity, and the project director of the Broadway Initiatives Working Group, which was formed to evaluate Broadway’s future. He was the executive director of the nonprofit Theater Development Fund, which makes theater more affordable and accessible, from 1998 to 2001.When he announced the competition to design a new TKTS booth in 1999, Mr. Goldstein recognized how beloved and important the slapdash, pipe-and-canvas structure had become to theatergoers over 26 years. But, as he told The New York Times, “time and weather have taken their toll.”The new TKTS booth was not completed until 2008, a year before Mr. Goldstein returned to Actors’ Equity as its national director of governance policy and support.In 2012, he became an antiques dealer in Cold Spring. He previously owned a seasonal antiques store in Rehoboth, Del.He is survived by a brother, Leonard.Mr. Goldstein acknowledged that he had made an impact on Broadway.“I think I’ve made a contribution when I walk through Times Square and see theaters filled — many would have been swept away,” he told The Highlands Current of Cold Spring in 2014. “I feel, ‘job done.’” More

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      Peter Nero, Pianist Who Straddled Genres, Is Dead at 89

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      He soared to popularity with a swinging hybrid of classics and jazz. He later conducted the Philly Pops, often with one hand while the other played piano. Peter Nero, the concert pianist who soared to popularity in the 1960s with a swinging hybrid of classics and jazz and kept the beat for nearly six decades with albums, club and television dates, and segues into conducting pops orchestras, died on Thursday in Eustis, Fla. He was 89.His daughter, Beverly Nero, said he died at the At Home Care Assisted Living Facility, where he had lived in recent months.It was not quite accurate to say, as a New York newspaper, The World-Telegram and Sun, did in 1962, that Mr. Nero played classical music with his left hand and pop-jazz with his right. But that was only a paraphrase of his own primer for audiences.“We shall play ‘Tea for Two,’” he would say. “Since our arrangement is complex, we’d like to explain what we’ll be doing. My right hand will be playing ‘Tea for Two,’ while my left hand will play Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. My left foot will be fiercely tapping out the traditional rhythm to the Tahitian fertility dance. My right foot will not be doing too much. It will just be excited.”To generations of fans, Mr. Nero was a national treasure. He appeared with Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé, Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis and other headliners; released 72 albums; conducted the Philly Pops for 34 years, often with one hand while the other played a piano; and delivered a nostalgic mix of jazz and classics that let listeners reconnect with the soundtracks of their youth.A remarkable interpreter of Gershwin, he was also a natural showman — bantering with audiences, making up the program as he went along, tearing through medleys of Liszt, Prokofiev, the American songbook and mesmerizing variations of “I Got Rhythm,” and pounding home with a blowout finale of “An American in Paris.”In midcareer, Mr. Nero quit smoky piano lounges for the concert stage and reinvented himself as a player-conductor of the Philly Pops and other orchestras. He wrote a cantata based on the diary of Anne Frank, marked national holidays with patriotic musicales in Philadelphia, and for decades packed them in at symphony halls, college unions and small-town community centers.Mr. Nero rehearsing before a BBC telecast in 1965.Central Press, via Getty Images“Still touring the country at 80, Nero presented a dazzling display of talent and showmanship,” The Times-Enterprise of Thomasville, Ga. (population 18,000), said in a 2015 review. “Nero’s stamina was incredible, his nimble fingers dancing gracefully, then racing madly, then dancing gracefully again across the keys to sublime effect.”A child prodigy from Brooklyn, he mastered the classical keyboard at 7 and at 11 performed Haydn concertos. He won a talent contest run by the New York radio station WQXR, impressing Vladimir Horowitz, one of the judges. He made his national television debut at 17, playing “Rhapsody in Blue” on a special hosted by the bandleader Paul Whiteman.In 1955, uncertain if he wanted to be a classical pianist, he heard recordings by the great jazz pianist Art Tatum. Hooked, he began performing at nightclubs in New York and Las Vegas, and gradually evolved the fluid Nero métier of classical and jazz.His name was still Bernie Nierow at the time. But when he signed a recording contract in 1960, it was as Peter Nero.He had a hit with his first RCA album, “Piano Forte” (1961), which showcased his stylistic range. “One was Mozartean, the next one was in the style of Rachmaninoff, the next was a straight ballad and another was a jazz approach,” he told The Daily Oklahoman of the selections on the album. “The idea was to see what came out of this, and the response was that everybody liked something different.”He won Grammys in 1961 (best new artist) and 1962 (best performance with an orchestra, for “The Colorful Peter Nero”) and was nominated for eight more. He appeared often on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” In 1963, he wrote the score for the film “Sunday in New York,” a romantic comedy starring Jane Fonda, Rod Taylor and Cliff Robertson. (Mr. Nero appeared briefly as himself.)His career took off. He had a million-selling single on Columbia Records with an instrumental version of the theme from “Summer of ’42,” the 1971 blockbuster film, with a score by Michel Legrand, about the end of one young man’s adolescence as America plunged into World War II. His album of the same name also sold a million copies.In the 1970s Mr. Nero quit nightclubs and turned to composing for, and conducting, orchestras.Anne Frank’s posthumously published “The Diary of a Young Girl,” which told of two years of hiding during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, provided lyrics and scenario for Mr. Nero’s first composition for a full orchestra. He used her words for 15 songs and vividly recalled his collaboration with a girl who had died in a concentration camp a quarter of a century earlier.“Writing ‘Anne Frank’ was perhaps the most emotional experience of my musical life,” Mr. Nero said in a 2018 interview for this obituary. “I was so moved by the diary, I wanted to do something almost biblical. I wrote the bulk of it in just three weeks. Once I got on a roll, I couldn’t stop. Everything just fell into place.“Anne was way advanced for her years,” he continued. “She was not just religious or spiritual. What came through was her faith in the goodness of man.”Mr. Nero’s was the first musical treatment of a story widely known from film, television and theatrical dramas, and from books in many languages. A blend of rock, symphonic and traditional Jewish music, it had its debut at a synagogue in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island, in 1971, and was performed under his baton in several cities. In 1973, he conducted the Greater Trenton Symphony in a version that featured his 15-year-old daughter, Beverly, in the title role.In 1979, Mr. Nero was named musical director and player-conductor of the Philly Pops. He moved to Media, Pa., near Philadelphia, and for 34 years was the Pops’ star attraction. Audiences marveled at his ability, standing up, to play the piano with one hand while seamlessly conducting the orchestra with the other. He also conducted orchestras in Tulsa, Washington, South Florida, St. Louis and other cities, often performing 100 concerts a year.Mr. Nero conducting the Philly Pops at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 2005. He was the orchestra’s musical director for 34 years.Marc Andrew Deley/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesHe had his detractors. Some deplored the liberties he took in blurring the lines between classical and jazz, although what he did was hardly new; the Gershwins had done it, as had, among others, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. Mr. Nero made light of his critics.“I did an arrangement that mixed the ‘1812’ Overture and ‘Over the Rainbow,’” he recalled. “Somebody called and said, ‘How can you do that to “Over the Rainbow”?’”He was born Bernard Nierow in Brooklyn on May 22, 1934, one of two sons of Julius and Mary (Menasche) Nierow. His father was a deputy commissioner of the New York City Youth Board. His mother taught Spanish at James Madison High School in Brooklyn.Bernard began piano lessons at 7 and showed extraordinary ability. His parents bought him a used Steinway. “It was $1,100, which was a lot of money back then,” he recalled. “It was the only time they borrowed money.”He attended the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), studied part time at the Juilliard School of Music and took private lessons from the esteemed pedagogues Abram Chasins and Constance Keene. He attended Brooklyn College — he studied psychology but not music, he said, because he didn’t need to — and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956.That year he married Marcia Dunner. They had two children, Jedd and Beverly, and were later divorced. His 1977 marriage to Peggy Altman and his later marriage to Rebecca Edie, a Philly Pops pianist, also ended in divorce.Besides his daughter, Mr. Nero is survived by his son, Jedd; three grandchildren; and his brother, Alan.Mr. Nero left the Philly Pops in 2013 in an acrimonious dispute over his $500,000-a-year salary. The orchestra, whose fading audiences prompted it to file for bankruptcy, asked him to take a big pay cut, but he refused. Despite its shaky finances, the orchestra has survived, although it was recently evicted from its longtime home and its future looks uncertain.Mr. Nero returned to the concert circuit with his longtime bassist, Michael Barnett. They played their last gig on Valentine’s Day 2016 at a Central Florida retirement community, the Villages. Mr. Nero had lived there since 2018. More

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      Coco Lee, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ and ‘Mulan’ Singer, Dies at 48

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      A pop star across Asia by her early 20s, Ms. Lee reached international recognition with an Oscar-nominated song in 2001.Coco Lee, a Chinese American singer and songwriter best known for performing an Oscar-nominated song in the film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” died on Wednesday. She was 48.The cause was suicide, according to a statement from her sisters, Carol and Nancy Lee, who did not say where she died. Ms. Lee was taken to a hospital on Sunday after she attempted suicide at her home, they said.“Coco had been suffering from depression for a few years but her condition deteriorated drastically over the last few months,” her sisters wrote. “Although Coco sought professional help and did her best to fight depression, sadly that demon inside of her took the better of her.”Ms. Lee had built a successful career as a pop singer in Asia, but she was best known to American audiences for singing the song “A Love Before Time” in the 2000 film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” The song was nominated for an Oscar in the best new original song category, and she performed it in front of a television audience of millions at the Academy Awards ceremony in March 2001.“Combining the flavor and texture of Eastern music with the orchestral color and sensitive lyrics of Western culture, the magic of this stunningly beautiful film is truly realized in this evocative love ballad,” the actress Julia Stiles said as she introduced Ms. Lee’s performance.Her career as a recording artist began after she finished as the runner-up in a singing competition hosted by the television broadcaster TVB in Hong Kong in 1993, shortly after she graduated from high school. Ms. Lee entered the competition on a whim, she told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2000, and stumbled upon success.“I was timid as a kid,” she said. “I would hide in the bathroom and sing in the shower. I always predicted my older sister Nancy would be the singer. She’s beautiful, talented and she’s got nice legs. I had no idea it would be me.”But being selected as runner-up in the TVB contest led to the release of her debut album with a Taiwanese record label in 1994. “My goal in the singing business is not to stay in one place,” she told a reporter for The South China Morning Post in 1997, saying that she wanted to work in Asia and the U.S.In 1999, Ms. Lee released her first full English language album, “Just No Other Way,” which featured pop and R&B songs. One track, “Before I Fall In Love,” was included on the soundtrack for the Julia Roberts film “Runaway Bride.”Ms. Lee’s career also expanded beyond music. She voiced the lead character in the Mandarin version of Disney’s 1998 animated film “Mulan,” in addition to singing the movie’s theme song, “Reflection.”Ms. Lee, who was born on Jan. 17, 1975, in Hong Kong, moved to the United States and attended middle and high school in San Francisco, where she was crowned Miss Teen Chinatown in 1991. She briefly attended the University of California at Irvine, intending to study biology and become a doctor, but dropped out after her freshman year, she told The Chronicle.In their statement, Ms. Lee’s sisters noted that this year marked the 30th anniversary of the launch of her accomplished singing career. Ms. Lee was “known to have worked tirelessly to open up a new world for Chinese singers in the international music scene,” they wrote, highlighting her “excellent live performances.”In addition to her sisters, Ms. Lee’s survivors include her husband, Bruce Rockowitz, and two stepdaughters. A complete list was not immediately available.Her last single, called “Tragic,” was released in February. In a post to her social media at the end of 2022, Ms. Lee acknowledged having had an “incredibly difficult year” but encouraged her followers to spread positivity and “be an influential figure to inspire people.”If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources. More

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      Paul Justman, Who Shed Light on Motown’s Unsung Heroes, Dies at 74

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      After establishing himself as a leading music video director in the 1980s, he found acclaim with his 2002 documentary about session musicians.During the filming of a climactic scene in his critically acclaimed documentary, “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” a celebration of the unheralded session musicians behind countless 1960s hits, Paul Justman could have found himself foiled by Detroit’s harsh winter.Arriving at the city’s MacArthur Bridge one morning to interview the guitarist Eddie Willis about Motown’s fateful move to Los Angeles in 1972, Mr. Justman and his crew found the bridge blanketed with fresh snow, seemingly impenetrable. But the director was undeterred.“To Paul, this was an opportunity,” his brother, the musician Seth Justman, said by phone. “The glistening snow helped accentuate the feeling of loss.”Throughout his career, Mr. Justman blended a photographer’s eye with a musician’s feel for the pulse of pop as a prominent director of music documentaries and videos.He died on March 7 at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 74. His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by his brother.While Mr. Justman enjoyed a long and varied career, he is best known for “Standing in the Shadows of Motown.” That film, released in 2002, brought to light the lasting contributions made to pop music by the session musicians, known as the Funk Brothers, who fueled countless era-defining Motown hits despite working in obscurity.“This salute to the literally unsung and underrecognized studio heroes of Motown is so good because it is one of those rare documentaries that combine information with smashing entertainment,” Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times wrote in a review. “And it is one of the few nonfiction films that will have you walking out humming the score, if you’re not running to the nearest store to buy Motown CDs.”Among Mr. Justman’s other documentaries were “The Doors: Live in Europe 1968” (1990) and “Deep Purple: Heavy Metal Pioneers” (1991). He also made features, including the 1983 battle-of-the-bands tale “Rock ’n’ Roll Hotel,” which he directed with Richard Baskin, and “Gimme an ‘F,’” a romp about cheerleaders, released the next year.Still, none of his films could match the ubiquity of the music videos he made in the 1980s, capturing the era’s Day-Glo look and Pop Art sensibility as MTV reshaped the pop landscape.Mr. Justman brought a quirky sense of deadpan to videos like the Cars’ “Since You’re Gone,” Diana Ross’s “Muscles” and Rick Springfield’s “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” as well as the MTV staple “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band — for which his brother happened to play keyboards.Some of the studio musicians behind the Motown sound got back together for “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” among them, from left, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina. Joe Hunter and Bob Babbitt.Entertainment Pictures/Alamy Stock PhotoPaul Evans Justman was born on Aug. 27, 1948, in Washington, the second of three children of Simon Justman, a government systems analyst, and Helen (Rebhan) Justman, a school drama teacher.Growing up in Washington, in Newton, Mass., and in Margate City, N.J., Mr. Justman was drawn to music (he played drums and guitar in rock bands as a teenager) and dance (at 9, he choreographed his own routines for courses at the Boston Conservatory). He also fell in love with photography.After graduating from Earlham College in Indiana in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, he moved to New York City and took a job with a team making short films about American culture for Swedish television.He soon started working as an assistant to Robert Frank, the lauded documentary photographer and filmmaker. He eventually served as an editor on Mr. Frank’s notorious warts-and-all documentary about the Rolling Stones’ raucous 1972 North American tour, which became famous, in part for its obscene name, although it was never officially released.Mr. Justman, who moved to Los Angeles in 1980, was also a fixture behind the scenes with the J. Geils Band as it was climbing from the clubs of Boston toward fame. In the mid-1970s, he made a short documentary, “Postcards,” about the high-energy blues-rock band’s frenzied life on the road. That film, which featured appearances by the rock critic Lester Bangs, was broadcast on PBS.In addition to his brother, Mr. Justman is survived by his wife, Saundra Jordan, and his sister, Peggy Suttle Kligerman.Not all Mr. Justman’s work with the J. Geils Band was behind the camera. He often collaborated on songs with his brother, and he contributed lyrics for all the songs on the band’s final studio album, “You’re Gettin’ Even While I’m Gettin’ Odd” (1984), recorded after the kinetic frontman, Peter Wolf, left the band. (Seth Justman handled most of the lead vocals.)But, his brother said, it was Mr. Justman’s ever-present videos that helped break the band into the pop stratosphere. His “Freeze Frame” video, featuring band members dressed in white and splattering one another in paint as if they were human Jackson Pollock canvases, received heavy airplay on MTV. The song hit No. 4 on the Billboard singles chart in 1982.But it could not match “Centerfold,” from the previous year, in ubiquity. The video for that song, featuring models marching around a high school classroom in teddies and, famously, a snare drum filled with milk, become a token of Generation X pop culture, and the song became the band’s first and only No. 1 hit.“MTV was really starting to cook,” Seth Justman said of “Centerfold,” “and that cinematic and energetic approach, along with splashes of humor, resonated and lit the fuse. The song, and the video, shot like a rocket.” More

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      Peter Brötzmann, 82, Dies; His Thunderous Saxophone Shook Jazz Traditions

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      One of Europe’s most influential free-jazz musicians, he played with “a kind of scream” to exorcise his demons, and those of German history.Peter Brötzmann, an avant-garde saxophonist whose ferocious playing and uncompromising independence made him one of Europe’s most influential free-jazz musicians, died on June 22 at his home in Wuppertal, Germany. He was 82.His death was confirmed by Michael Ehlers, the director of Eremite Records, who served as Mr. Brötzmann’s longtime North American tour manager and business partner.No cause was given, but Mr. Brötzmann had suffered from respiratory issues for the last decade. A self-taught musician — best known for his tenor saxophone work, he also played various clarinets and the tarogato, a Hungarian woodwind instrument — he said that his practice of pushing too much air through his horn might have caused his health problems, which he likened to the lung damage suffered by glassblowers.“I wanted to sound like four tenor saxophonists,” he told the British music magazine The Wire in 2012. “That’s what I’m still chasing.”The force of Mr. Brötzmann’s abrasive squall felt tectonic. “I can’t think of anyone that played with more power than Peter,” the British saxophonist Evan Parker, who appeared on several of Mr. Brötzmann’s early records, said in a phone interview. “I don’t think it can be done, to get more out of a saxophone than that. Sometimes his nose would bleed because he was blowing so hard. He gave everything.”Mr. Brötzmann in performance at the Vision Festival in New York in 2011. He said he “wanted to sound like four tenor saxophonists.”Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesMr. Brötzmann described his style as a means of exorcising demons — particularly those of Germany’s crimes against humanity in World War II.“Younger people don’t understand, but what has happened to us in Germany is a kind of trauma of our generation,” he told The Wire. “There is a great shame there and a terrible kind of trauma. And that’s why maybe the German way of playing this kind of music sounds always a bit different than the music from the other parts of Europe, at least. It’s always more a kind of scream. More brutal, more aggressive.”Hans Peter Hermann Brötzmann was born on March 6, 1941, in Remscheid, an industrial city in western Germany. The city was almost destroyed by Allied bombardment in 1943, and Mr. Brötzmann’s earliest memory was of running through the streets holding his mother’s hand to escape the firestorm.His father, Johannes, a tax officer, had been conscripted into the Nazi Army. Captured by the Russians on the Eastern Front, he didn’t return until 1948, after escaping from a P.O.W. camp in Siberia. Mr. Brötzmann grew up in Remscheid with his family — his father, his mother, Frida (Schröder) Brötzmann, and his sister Mariane — but moved to Wuppertal for school and remained there the rest of his life.He studied graphic design and visual art in the late 1950s at the School of Applied Arts in Wuppertal, where he created his own fonts: striking, blocky alphabets that he later used on the covers of many of his albums. He had his first gallery show in 1959 and participated in early performances staged by the experimental, interdisciplinary art movement Fluxus. In 1963 he collaborated on the first major exhibition by Nam June Paik, the Korean American artist who would become known for his video work, but who at that point was building musically oriented installations and interactive sculptural objects.Mr. Brötzmann continued making artwork prolifically even as music assumed a place of priority in his life.“From the very start, he didn’t love the art-world milieu,” said John Corbett, co-owner of the Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery in Chicago, who began curating exhibitions of Mr. Brötzmann’s artwork in 2003. “But he continued privately making visual art. He was interested in beauty, but it had to be accompanied by a certain kind of honesty and forthrightness.“He really could not deal with people who were false, with art that was false, and with music that he felt was false, Mr. Corbett added. “He was quite intolerant of all those things.”In 1967, Mr. Brötzmann released his first album as a bandleader on his own label, BRÖ. If its title, “For Adolphe Sax,” read like a provocation aimed at the 19th-century inventor of the saxophone, then his next BRÖ album, “Machine Gun,” released in 1968 and credited to the Peter Brötzmann Octet, announced all-out war on everything that had come before.“Machine Gun” was a nickname the trumpeter Don Cherry had given him, as well as a reference to the carnage of the war in Vietnam. A milestone of collective improvisation, the album boasted three tenor saxophonists who would become titans of European free music: Mr. Parker, Willem Breuker of the Netherlands and Mr. Brötzmann.Mr. Brötzmann’s violently expressive sounds, combined with confrontational album titles like “Nipples” (1969) and “Balls” (1970), “was something to get used to,” Mr. Parker said. “It wasn’t the gentle school of English ‘after you, sir’ kind of improvising.”In 1969, Mr. Brötzmann co-founded a new label, FMP (the initials stood for “free music production”), for which his poster and album designs helped create a distinctive visual aesthetic. His trio with the Dutch drummer Han Bennink and the Belgian pianist Fred Van Hove — both veterans of “Machine Gun” — lasted a dozen years before Mr. Van Hove, struggling to be heard above the din, departed; Mr. Brötzmann and Mr. Bennink continued collaborating as a duo.But Mr. Brötzmann’s reputation was largely confined to Europe until the mid-1980s, when he joined with the guitarist Sonny Sharrock, the bassist Bill Laswell and the drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson to form Last Exit, a group whose amplified cacophony flirted with heavy metal and raised his profile in North America.Beginning in the late 1990s, reissues on Mr. Corbett’s label Unheard Music Series made Mr. Brötzmann’s early music readily available to a new generation of listeners, while collaborations with younger musicians like the Chicago Tentet (which featured the saxophonist and composer Ken Vandermark) established him as a revered figure in that city.Throughout, Mr. Brötzmann toured relentlessly, earning the nickname Soldier of the Road, which was later the title of a 2011 documentary about him.He almost never turned down a booking invitation, regardless of the money involved or the distance to be traveled; he even performed in Beirut in 2005 during the chaotic aftermath of the Cedar Revolution. That concert, like most of his travels, resulted in yet another album.By Mr. Ehlers’s count, Mr. Brötzmann appeared on more than 350 records, including 180 as leader or co-leader.Into his 70s, Mr. Brötzmann was traveling in minivans across North America with Mr. Ehlers, playing at theaters, clubs, do-it-yourself art spaces, community centers and occasionally even squats. He paid his audience back in kind, Mr. Ehlers said, through “the little gesture of playing every concert until he almost collapsed from the effort.”In recent years, he toured in a duo with the pedal steel guitarist Heather Leigh and played frequently with the bassist William Parker and the drummer Hamid Drake, whom he considered his favorite rhythm section.“Peter had his own relationship with sound,” William Parker said in a phone interview, “and every time he played, he tried to, as we call it, go to the moon.”Mr. Brötzmann married Krista Bolland in 1962. They eventually separated, but remained close. She died in 2006.Mr. Brötzmann is survived by a son, Caspar, a free-form rock guitarist with whom he recorded “Last Home,” a 1990 album of incendiary duets; a daughter, Wendela Brötzmann; and a grandson. His sister died before him.Mr. Brötzmann’s restless creativity sometimes found unlikely admirers. In a 2001 interview with Oxford American magazine, former President Bill Clinton was asked to name a musician readers would be surprised he listened to.His response: “Brötzmann, the tenor sax player, one of the greatest alive.” More