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    Bridgette Wimberly, Playwright and Librettist, Dies at 68

    She had success with a play about abortion in 2001, and in 2015 wrote the libretto for the opera “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”Bridgette A. Wimberly, a playwright whose first staged work, a drama about abortion, was an Off Broadway hit in 2001 with Ruby Dee in the lead role, and who later made a mark in opera, writing the libretto for the widely produced “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird,” died on Dec. 1 at a care center in the Bronx. She was 68.Her family said the cause was complications of strokes.Ms. Wimberly took up playwriting relatively late. In an interview with The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2003, when one of her plays was being staged by the Cleveland Play House, she confessed that had someone told her a decade earlier that she would be a playwright, “I would have said that someday I’d be going to Mars, too.”Yet her first produced play, “Saint Lucy’s Eyes,” staged at the Women’s Project Theater in Manhattan in April 2001, was so well received — The New York Times called her “one of the country’s most powerful chroniclers of the Black underclass” — that after its initial run ended it was brought back for an eight-week summer run at the Cherry Lane Theater in the West Village.The play was developed through the Cherry Lane Alternative mentorship project, in which Ms. Wimberly worked with the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein.Ms. Dee, then 76, played a character known only as Grandma who, as the story opens in a scene set in Memphis in 1968, is preparing to perform an illegal abortion on a teenager. The action later shifts to 1980, with Ms. Wimberly’s script exploring the consequences of that abortion and another one that Grandma is preparing to perform.“The play is smart enough to realize that there are many truths,” Anita Gates wrote in a review in The New York Times, “some of them contradictory.” In Newsday, Gordon Cox wrote, “‘Saint Lucy’s Eyes’ doesn’t boast much narrative momentum, but Wimberly shows an admirable talent for the unhurried development of her characters and for dialogue that consistently rings true.”Several more of Ms. Wimberly’s plays were produced over the next dozen years, and then, in 2014, she was offered the chance to take her writing in a different direction.Daniel Schnyder, a Swiss-born saxophonist and composer, had been commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and Gotham Chamber Opera to write an opera, and had landed on the pioneering jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker as a subject. He knew Ms. Wimberly through her brother, Michael, a percussionist with whom he had performed, and asked her to write the libretto of what would become “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”First, though, Ms. Wimberly had to overcome some personal reservations. An uncle had been a jazz saxophonist and had been somewhat obsessed with Parker. He had also begun using heroin, the drug that contributed to Parker’s death in 1955 at 34. Her uncle, 14 years younger than Parker, died at 35.“My grandmother hated Charlie Parker because she thought he got my uncle hooked on heroin,” Ms. Wimberly told The Times in 2015. “All my life, he was just a bad name.”Lawrence Brownlee, right, as Charlie Parker and Will Liverman as Dizzy Gillespie in Opera Philadelphia’s 2015 production of “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.”Dominic M. MercierBut she took the assignment and developed a certain respect for Parker. “Yardbird” was commissioned as a showcase for the tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who portrayed Parker when the opera had its premiere in Philadelphia in 2015. The work imagined the period immediately after Parker’s death in 1955, with the jazz great pondering, among other things, his wives and other people from his past as well as the large orchestral work that he was never able to write.“In the end, he didn’t write an orchestra piece, and we weren’t going to have him write a false one,” Ms. Wimberly told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2015. “But I feel that what he passed on was that he inspired so many people to create, he opened up the doors, he set the birds free, the people free, the music free, like with what he did with the blues. What he did for jazz itself was allow others to do what he was not able to do in his lifetime.”Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the Philadelphia premiere for The Times, called the work “a 90-minute, swift-paced chamber opera with a pulsing, jazz-infused score.” The next year the opera had its New York premiere at the Apollo Theater, where Parker himself had played. It has since been staged by Seattle Opera, Arizona Opera and other companies, and will be performed in January by the New Orleans Opera.Mr. Schnyder, in a phone interview, said that, because it had a white, male, European composer, the piece needed a librettist who could bring an African American and a female sensibility.“It was a perfect match because she looked at the story of Charlie Parker from a really different perspective, focusing on his relationships with different women in his life,” he said. “That proved to be much more interesting than just focusing on the music.”Bridgette Angela Wimberly was born on Jan. 7, 1954, in Cleveland to John and Conchita (Smith) Wimberly. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Columbia University in 1978 and later did graduate studies at Columbia.Ms. Wimberly, third from right, and other former members of the Cherry Lane Theater’s mentorship project at a 2014 event celebrating the project’s 16th anniversary.Walter McBride/Getty ImagesShe was trained as a medical researcher and worked for a time at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center; later several of her plays, including “Saint Lucy’s Eyes” and “Forest City,” about Cleveland’s first integrated hospital, would touch on medical issues.She was interested in poetry and began sharing some of hers in a reading group that met in a Harlem theater where the conditions were not always ideal.“When it was cold, we froze,” she told The Times in 2001. “When it rained, we had to use our umbrellas inside. When it was hot, we burned up.”The poetry led her to dabble in theater. In 1997 she participated in a directing workshop at Lincoln Center. She wrote a scene for one exercise; others in the class, she recalled, told her, “You should finish this”; and the eventual result was “Saint Lucy’s Eyes.”Ms. Wimberly is survived by her mother; her brother; and a sister, Bernadette Scruggs.Seth Gordon, who teaches at the Helmerich School of Drama at the University of Oklahoma, directed the premiere of “Forest City” for the Cleveland Play House in 2003.“Bridgette gave voice to the stories of people who struggled quietly and with dignity, and to chapters of African American history that deserve attention,” he said by email. “She wrote with a striking poetic flair, and with a sense of grace that also defined her very generous spirit.” More

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    Ian Tyson, Revered Canadian Folk Singer, Dies at 89

    A rancher for most of his life, he began his music career as half of the folk-era duo Ian and Sylvia and was also celebrated for his commitment to the culture of Canada’s ranch country.Before Canadian musicians like Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, there was Ian Tyson.Mr. Tyson, who began his music career as half of the folk-era duo Ian and Sylvia and went on to become a revered figure in his home country, celebrated both for his music and his commitment to the culture of Canada’s ranch country, died on Thursday at age 89 at his ranch in southern Alberta.His family said in a statement that he died from “ongoing health complications,” but did not specify further.Mr. Tyson, whose song “Four Strong Winds” in 2005 was voted the most essential Canadian piece of music by the listeners of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation public radio network, lived most of his life as both a rancher and a musician.Performances of his songs like “Four Strong Winds” by Mr. Young, Johnny Cash and others, and “Someday Soon,” particularly by Judy Collins, made his music, if not always his name, well-known in the United States.But his persona as a weathered rancher-musician, who performed and ran the Tyson ranch south of Calgary well into his 80s, stubbornly keeping on despite the ravages of time, changing tastes, economic hardship and, for a time, the loss of his voice, made him emblematic in Canada, much as Mr. Cash was on the other side of the border.Mr. Young, in the 2006 Jonathan Demme concert film “Heart of Gold,” recalled being 16 or 17 and spending all his money playing the Ian and Sylvia version of “Four Strong Winds” over and over on the jukebox at a restaurant near Winnipeg. “It was the most beautiful record that I’ve heard in my life, and I just could not get enough of it,” he said.Ian Dawson Tyson was born Sept. 25, 1933, in Victoria, British Columbia, the second child of George and Margaret Tyson. Mr. Tyson learned to ride horses on a small farm owned by his father, an insurance salesman and polo enthusiast who had emigrated from England in 1906. Mr. Tyson grew up entranced by horses, and beginning in his teens, he competed on the rodeo circuit. He learned to play guitar while in a Calgary hospital recovering from a broken ankle sustained in a fall.He began performing folk and rock in the late 1950s, but then graduated from the Vancouver School of Art in 1958 and moved to Toronto to work as a commercial artist.There, he performed in local clubs, and in 1959 began singing with a dark-haired young woman named Sylvia Fricker. They became a full-time folk act in 1961, performing as Ian and Sylvia, and were married four years later.In 1962, they moved to New York and became mainstays in the emergent American folk scene, and friends with Bob Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who described Mr. Tyson as “movie-star handsome” and “the best looking of all the cowboy dudes in Greenwich Village” in her 2008 memoir, “A Freewheelin’ Time.” The high-powered manager Albert Grossman, who managed Mr. Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary and others, signed them to Vanguard Records. Their first record, “Ian & Sylvia,” consisted of mostly traditional British and Canadian folk songs.Ian and Sylvia in 1970. They became a full-time folk act in 1961 and were married four years later.Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
    Their second, “Four Strong Winds,” was more eclectic. It included Mr. Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” and the title track, Mr. Tyson’s first song, which he said he wrote in about a half-hour, spurred on by Mr. Dylan’s emergence as a songwriter.It was, he said, about “a lovely Greek girl, I was always leaving and regretting it,” in Vernon, British Columbia. (Her name was Evinia Pulos and, as it turned out they carried on an on-again-off-again love affair over six decades). A tale of lost love and itinerant farm and ranch work set against the Canadian West and the implacable forces of nature (“Four strong winds that blow lonely/Seven seas that run high/All those things that don’t change come what may”), it set the tone for how his work would evolve over time.In 1968, before the Byrds’ seminal country-rock album, “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” the two relocated to Nashville where they recorded two country-influenced albums and formed the country rock group Great Speckled Bird. The couple recorded 13 albums before they stopped performing and then divorced in 1975.Mr. Tyson returned to western Canada, where he resumed ranching, and focused on his solo career. And after hosting a show on Canada’s national television network, between 1970 and 1975, he had almost dropped out of music when he reinvented himself less as a folk act than as a cowboy and Western one.First came his well-received 1983 album, “Old Corrals and Sagebrush,” which combined traditional cowboy music and songs of the West he wrote himself. In 1986, his “Cowboyography” earned platinum status in Canada. Over time, he became a familiar Canadian presence in his trademark cowboy hat and stiff-legged gait, ranching, recording and performing at concerts and events like the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev.And he recorded a series of evocative, stubbornly unfashionable albums like “Songs from the Gravel Road,” about the allure and frustrations of the lonely ranching life. His own life remained complicated, too, including both an endless array of honors and awards and a 1986 marriage to a teenager, Twylla Biblow, less than half his age, that ended in divorce in 2008.A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Tyson badly strained his voice in 2006 at the Havelock Country Jamboree in Ontario, and a virus a year later caused further and irreversible damage.He returned two years later, his smooth baritone reduced to a hoarse whisper, but his popularity remained intact with the album “From Yellowhead to Yellowstone and Other Love Stories.”Throughout, his music reflected the solitary ranching life, the lure of the outdoors, the pains of heartbreak and lost love.A 2008 profile in The Globe and Mail when he was nearing 75 captured some of the details of it at his T-Bar-Y ranch: The 6 a.m.-to-6 p.m. work schedule. The Monday washing (five pairs of Wranglers to get him through the week). The “mean, garlicky” buffalo he cooked. The place filled with cowboy hats and books — “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a Georgia O’Keeffe biography, a dictionary, “The Western Buckle: History, Art, Culture, Function,” Michael Ondaatje’s “Divisadero.” The magnet on his refrigerator reading: “Life is tough. Life is tougher if you’re stupid. — John Wayne.”“I became a historian, a chronicler of this way of life,” he told the reporter Marsha Lederman, “and this way of life is just about over. The cowboys are all gone.”It was a theme he often came back to. “People tell me, ‘Tyson, you’re always longing for the old days,’” he once said. “And they’re right, that’s true — I live in the past. And it was way better.”Eduardo Medina More

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    Terry Hall, a Face of Britain’s Ska Revival, Is Dead at 63

    The son of Coventry factory workers, he overcame a traumatic childhood to find fame in the Thatcher years as the frontman of the Specials.Terry Hall, the frontman of the Specials, the British ska band that blended pub-fight energy with socially conscious lyrics that explored the political and racial tensions of Britain in the late 1970s and early ’80s, died on Dec. 18. He was 63.The cause was pancreatic cancer, his former bandmate Horace Panter announced on Facebook. The announcement did not say where he died.After enduring a traumatic childhood, Mr. Hall went on to enjoy a chart-topping music career.He forged his most lasting legacy as a face of the revival of ska — the pop genre that emerged in Jamaica in the 1960s, blending Caribbean styles like calypso with rhythm and blues — that shook the British music scene during the early, convulsive Margaret Thatcher years.The Specials were key figures in the movement, along with Madness, the Selecter, Bad Manners and the Beat (or the English Beat, as they were known in the United States to distinguish them from the American band of the same name).Clad in the fashions of Jamaica’s slickly attired rude boys — often with tapered suits, skinny ties and porkpie hats — the Specials sounded off about racial injustice, soaring unemployment and ultra-right-wing violence over a rave-up party sound that left sweaty audiences in a frenzy.Hollow-eyed and phlegmatic, Mr. Hall channeled outrage with a vocal style that often made it sound as if he were spitting weary invective as much as singing.The band released its debut album, produced by Elvis Costello, in 1979, two years before racial unrest rocked cities throughout Britain. With five white members and two Black ones, the Specials “were a celebration of how British culture was invigorated by Caribbean immigration,” Billy Bragg, the British singer-songwriter known for his leftist politics, wrote in a social media post after Mr. Hall’s death.“But the onstage demeanor of their lead singer was a reminder that they were in the serious business of challenging our perception of who we were in the late 1970s,” Mr. Bragg added.Mr. Hall performing with the Specials in London in 1980. He channeled outrage with a vocal style that often made it sound as if he were spitting weary invective as much as singing.David Corio/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Hall believed that England needed a band to vocalize the country’s unease at the time. “What I didn’t realize,” he said in a 2020 interview with the music writer Pete Paphides, “was that it might be us.”The Specials scored seven straight Top 10 singles on the British pop charts, starting in July 1979 with “Gangsters,” which reached No. 6, and concluding in June 1981 with the No. 1 hit “Ghost Town,” a mournful rumination about a lack of opportunity for British youth in a sinking economy against a backdrop of perceived government apathy. Their other hits included “A Message to You Rudy” (No. 10) and “Too Much Too Young” (No. 1).The Specials in Los Angeles in 1980. From left: Horace Panter, Mr. Hall, John Bradbury and Neville Staple.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesEven when topping the charts, Mr. Hall and the band showed little interest in becoming part of the London entertainment machine.Proudly based in Coventry, a rough-and-tumble industrial city in the West Midlands known for its automobile factories and its sizable West Indian population, the Specials scarcely paid lip service to the frothy trends bubbling up from the banks of the Thames.“We’ve got everything we want here,” Mr. Hall said in a television interview in 1980, when he was at the peak of his fame but still living with his parents. “There’s a studio here, there’s a train station, that’s all we need.”As for London, he said: “There’s nothing for me, or for any of us; there’s no point in hanging around trendy London clubs until 4 in the morning. I’d rather stay in and watch telly.”In addition to his star turn with the Specials, Mr. Hall scored four Top 10 hits in Britain with Fun Boy Three, a deadpan and oddly experimental new wave group he formed in 1981 with the Specials’ other vocalists, Lynval Golding and Neville Staple. In 1983, the band hit No. 7 with its cover of “Our Lips Are Sealed,” a 1981 hit for the Go-Go’s that Mr. Hall wrote with that band’s Jane Wiedlin, whom he briefly dated.Terence Edward Hall was born in Coventry on March 19, 1959. His father, Terry Hall, Sr., worked at a Rolls-Royce aeronautics plant, and his mother, Joan, worked at a Chrysler factory.Growing up, Mr. Hall was a standout student and soccer player, but he spent his youth fighting inner demons. In 2019, he revealed a childhood trauma that he said sent him into a spiral of depression and substance abuse that lasted years.In an interview with the British magazine The Spectator, Mr. Hall said that “Well Fancy That!” — a 1983 song by Fun Boy Three about a harrowing sexual encounter — was about the time he was kidnapped and abused by a teacher.“It was about an episode where I was abducted, taken to France and sexually abused for four days,” he said. “And then punched in the face and left on the roadside. At 12, that’s life-changing. I still have that illness today and I will still have it in 10 years’ time, and it’s important for me to talk about that.”Prescribed Valium to deal with the emotional fallout, he soon became addicted. “Which meant I didn’t go to school, I didn’t do anything,” he recalled. “I just sat on my bed rocking for eight months.”Music was an escape. In the late 1970s, Mr. Hall joined a Coventry punk band called Squad, which brought him to the attention of Jerry Dammers, a songwriter and keyboardist who was in a band called the Automatics. That band would evolve into the Specials, with Mr. Hall taking lead vocals.“We didn’t even know who was going to play what,” he later said. “We passed around all the instruments until we found what we were comfortable with. I wasn’t comfortable with any of them, so I became the singer.”The Specials, an unstable collection of members with different backgrounds and agendas, unraveled after “Ghost Town.” The remaining members regrouped without Mr. Hall as the Special AKA and scored a Top 10 hit in 1984 with the up-tempo protest song “Nelson Mandela.”But Mr. Hall’s career was far from over. After Fun Boy Three disbanded, he helped form Colourfield, a pop band based in Manchester, in 1984. The Colourfield’s sunny love song “Thinking of You” hit No. 12 in Britain the next year.In 1990 he formed another band, Terry, Blair & Anouchka, which released one album, “Ultra Modern Nursery Rhymes.” He later formed a band called Vegas, with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, and also collaborated with the Lightning Seeds, Gorillaz and other acts.Mr. Hall eventually drifted back to his roots with a new incarnation of the Specials, including Mr. Golding and Mr. Panter, that released an album, “Encore,” in 2019, that dealt with contemporary racial issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement. The pandemic interrupted plans for a reggae follow-up in 2020.In 2021, the band detoured from its ska roots with an album of covers called “Protest Songs: 1924-2012,” which included a honky-tonk cover of the Staple Singers’ 1965 civil rights ode “Freedom Highway” and a country-inflected version of Malvina Reynolds’s “I Don’t Mind Failing in This World.”By that year, the band was set to proceed with its delayed reggae album. But in October, The Guardian reported, Steve Blackwell, the band’s manager, disclosed that Mr. Hall had pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver. Treatment failed to stem the disease.Mr. Hall is survived by his second wife, Lindy Heymann; their son, Orson; and two sons, Theo and Felix, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.By the end of his life Mr. Hall had not entirely escaped his demons, but he had made a certain peace with himself, and with his role as half-willing pop star.When asked by The Spectator if he derived any pleasure from performing, he responded: “Absolutely none. That’s why I do it.”He quickly amended that. “I actually do enjoy that thing onstage where I turn round and I’ve got Horace and Lynval, who I’ve known most of my life, and we’re sharing something. That’s my night out. Don’t get out much.” More

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    Thom Bell, a Force Behind the Philadelphia Soul Sound, Dies at 79

    As a songwriter, arranger and producer, he brought sophistication and melodic inventiveness to hits by the Delfonics, the Spinners and others.Thom Bell, the prolific producer, songwriter and arranger who, as an architect of the lush Philadelphia sound of the late 1960s and ’70s, was a driving force behind landmark R&B recordings by the Spinners, the Delfonics and the Stylistics, died on Thursday at his home in Bellingham, Wash. He was 79.His death was confirmed by his manager and attorney, Michael Silver, who did not cite a cause.Along with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Mr. Bell was a member of the songwriting and production team — the Mighty Three, as they were called (and as they branded their publishing company) — that gave birth to what became known as the Sound of Philadelphia. Renowned for its groove-rich bass lines, cascading string choruses and gospel-steeped vocal arrangements, the Sound of Philadelphia rivaled the music being made by the Motown and Stax labels in popularity and influence.A classically trained pianist, Mr. Bell brought an uptown sophistication and melodic inventiveness to Top 10 pop hits like the Delfonics’ “La-La (Means I Love You)” (1968) and the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” (1972). He was particularly adept as an arranger: On records like “Delfonics Theme (How Could You),” strings, horns and timpani build, like waves crashing on a beach, to stirring emotional effect.He also wrote the arrangement for the O’Jays’ propulsive Afro-Latin tour de force, “Back Stabbers,” a No. 3 pop hit in 1972.Mr. Bell had a knack for incorporating instrumentation into his arrangements that was not typically heard on R&B recordings. He employed French horn and sitar on the Delfonics’ “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” (1970) and oboe on the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow” (1972). Both records were Top 10 pop singles, and “Didn’t I,” which was later covered by New Kids on the Block, won a Grammy Award for best R&B vocal performance by a duo or group in 1971.“The musicians looked at me like I was crazy. Violin? Timpani?” Mr. Bell said of his first session with the Delfonics in a 2020 interview with Record Collector magazine. “But that’s the world I came from. I had a three-manual harpsichord, and I played that. I played electric piano and zither, or something wild like that.”“Every session,” he went on, “there was always one experiment.”Mr. Bell, who typically collaborated with a lyricist, said that his chief influences as a songwriter were Teddy Randazzo, who wrote tearful ballads like “Hurts So Bad” for Little Anthony and the Imperials, and Burt Bacharach.“Randazzo and Bacharach, those are my leaders,” Mr. Bell told Record Collector. “They tuned me in to what I was listening to in a more modernistic way.”Mr. Bacharach “was classically trained also,” Mr. Bell said in the same interview. “He was doing things in strange times, in strange keys. He was doing things with Dionne Warwick that were unheard-of.”The recording engineer Joe Tarsia, the founder of Sigma Sound Studios, where most of the hits associated with the Sound of Philadelphia were made, was fond of calling Mr. Bell the “Black Burt Bacharach.” (Mr. Tarsia died in November.)Coincidentally, Mr. Bell’s first No. 1 hit single as a producer was Ms. Warwick’s “Then Came You,” a 1974 collaboration with the Spinners. (He also won the 1974 Grammy for producer of the year.)His other No. 1. pop single as a producer was James Ingram’s Grammy-winning 1990 hit, “I Don’t Have a Heart,” co-produced by Mr. Ingram.Mr. Bell produced dozens of Top 40 singles, many of which were certified gold or platinum. His influence on subsequent generations of musicians was deep and wide; numerous contemporary R&B and hip-hop artists, among them Tupac, Nicki Minaj and Mary J. Blige, have sampled or interpolated his work.Thomas Randolph Bell was born on Jan. 27, 1943, in Philadelphia. His father, Leroy, a businessman, played guitar and accordion. His mother, Anna (Burke) Bell, a stenographer, played piano and organ and encouraged young Tom (he only later started spelling his name Thom) and his nine brothers and sisters to pursue music and other arts — in Tom’s case, the piano.He was in his early teens when he first gave thought to pop music. The precipitating event was overhearing Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Tears on My Pillow” on the radio while working at his father’s fish market.“I fell in love with the whole production,” he said of the epiphany he experienced in a 2018 interview with The Seattle Times. “I listened to the background, the bass, a lot more than just the lyrics.”Mr. Bell, center, with his fellow songwriters Leon Huff, left, and Kenny Gamble in 1973, when Mr. Gamble and Mr. Huff announced that he would be joining them in a production partnership.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Bell and his friend Kenny Gamble teamed up and made a go of it as a singing duo called Kenny and Tommy. They met with little success, but the experience confirmed Mr. Bell’s desire to pursue a career in pop music. He soon found work playing piano in the house band at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and at the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia, and he was eventually invited to play on the soul singer Chuck Jackson’s 1962 hit, “Any Day Now.”But he got his big break — coming while he was working at Cameo-Parkway Records in Philadelphia as, among other things, the touring conductor for Chubby Checker — when he wrote “La-La (Means I Love You)” with William Hart, the lead singer of the Delfonics.In the late 1960s, while continuing to collaborate with the Delfonics, Mr. Bell re-established ties with Mr. Gamble and his creative partner Leon Huff. He became part of their team at Sigma Sound Studios and, ultimately, the Sigma Sound house band, MFSB (the initials stood for “Mother Father Sister Brother”).By the early 1970s, Mr. Bell had started working as producer, arranger and songwriter (most often with the lyricist Linda Creed), first for the Stylistics and later for the Spinners, whose career he helped revitalize after it had stalled at Motown.He remained active as the ’70s progressed, even as the Sound of Philadelphia was being eclipsed by disco and rap. But apart from successful collaborations with Johnny Mathis, Elton John, Deniece Williams and Mr. Ingram, the hits quit coming.Mr. Bell had moved to Tacoma, Wash., in 1976 with his first wife, Sylvia, who suffered from health issues that her doctors believed might be alleviated by a change of climate. The couple divorced in 1984, and shortly afterward Mr. Bell remarried and moved to the Seattle area. He settled in Bellingham in 1998, having by then retired from the music business.Mr. Bell at a concert honoring the recipients of lifetime achievement Grammy Awards at the Beacon Theater in New York in 2017. He had been given a Grammy Trustees Award the year before.Michael Kovac/Getty Images for NARASHe was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006 and the Musicians Hall of Fame 10 years later. In 2016, he received a Grammy Trustees Award, an honor that recognizes nonperformers who have made significant contributions to the field of recording. (Mr. Gamble and Mr. Huff received the award in 1999.)Mr. Bell is survived by his wife of almost 50 years, Vanessa Bell; four sons, Troy, Mark, Royal and Christopher; two daughters, Tia and Cybell; a sister, Barbara; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.Early in his career, Mr. Bell was met with questions about his often unconventional production and arrangements, particularly his extensive use of European orchestral conventions on R&B records.“Nobody else is in my brain but me, which is why some of the things I think about are crazy,” he told Record Collector magazine. “I hear oboes and bassoons and English horns.“An arranger told me, ‘Thom Bell, Black people don’t listen to that.’ I said, ‘Why limit yourself to Black people? I make music for people.’” More

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    Tshala Muana, Congolese Singer With Danceable Messages, Dies at 64

    A superstar in Africa, she sang in the language of her tribe and often addressed social concerns, insisting on women’s strength and decrying abuse. Tshala Muana, a Congolese singer who brought a supple voice and sensual dance moves to songs about women’s dignity and social issues, died on Dec. 10 in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was 64.Her death, in a hospital, was announced on Facebook by her producer and companion, Claude Mashala. He did not cite a cause, but Ms. Muana had a stroke in 2020 and had diabetes and hypertension.Unlike other internationally successful Congolese performers, Ms. Muana sang most of her songs in Tshiluba, the native language of her Kasai tribe, rather than in French or Lingala, the Congolese lingua franca. Her songs often addressed social concerns, insisting on women’s strength and decrying abuse; she also promoted condom use to fight the spread of AIDS in Africa.She was praised as the “queen” of mutuashi, a traditional Kasai rhythm and hip-pumping dance which she updated in her hits and carried to concert stages worldwide. In the early 2000s, Ms. Muana was elected to Congo’s parliament along with another top musician, Tabu Ley. She championed issues involving women, children and the poor and became widely known as Mamu Nationale, “Mother of the Nation.”Elisabeth Tshala Muana Muidikay was born on March 13, 1958, in Élisabethville, in what was then the Belgian Congo; the city is now Lubumbashi, the second largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was the second of 10 children of Amadeus Muidikayi and Alphonsine Bambiwa Tumba. Her father, a soldier, died during civil warfare in Congo when she was 6 years old.Ms. Muana had an arranged marriage as a teenager, but she left it after the death of an infant daughter. She moved to Kinshasa, where she became a dancer and backup singer in the band led by the singer M’Pongo Love.In 1980 she left her homeland, which by then had been renamed Zaire, and traveled through West Africa. She settled in Ivory Coast, where she started her solo career, and recorded her first single, “Amina,” in Paris in 1982. She moved to Paris around the time she recorded her first album, “Kami,” there in 1984.By the time she returned to Zaire in the mid-1980s, she had established herself as a hitmaker in Africa. In 1987, she had a pan-African hit with “Karibou Yangu,” whose lyrics were in Swahili.She moved to Paris again in 1990 and remained there until the end of the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997 before returning to what was now the Democratic Republic of Congo.Ms. Muana maintained a long and prolific career, releasing nearly two dozen albums and performing in Africa, Europe and the United States. The percolating grooves of her songs fused mutuashi rhythms with salsa, Congolese soukous and other African and Caribbean rhythms, deploying synthesizers and horns alongside traditional percussion. One of her most highly regarded albums, “Mutuashi,” was released in the United States in 1996.Her songs often carried messages of ethical uplift and social criticism, at times veiled in metaphor. At her concerts, which brought her to stadiums across Africa, she was renowned for dancing that fans considered sexy and detractors considered vulgar. In 2003 she shared the Kora All Africa Music Award for best female central African artist with another Congolese singer, M’bilia Bel.In November 2020, Ms. Muana released her last single, “Ingratitude,” a song chiding someone for disloyalty to a mentor. She was arrested and imprisoned, apparently because Congo’s president, Félix Tshisekedi, believed the song was criticizing him for breaking away from Joseph Kabila, Congo’s former president, whom Ms. Muana had supported. She was released within a day, and Mr. Mashala, her producer and companion, said at the time that the song was aimed more generally at a lifetime of betrayals by people and corporations. Ms. Muana had no children. Information on survivors other than Mr. Mashala was not immediately available.Although Ms. Muana championed her Kasai roots, she strongly supported multicultural unity for her strife-torn country.“In Congo there is no love for each other, no one has the country at heart,” she told The Observer, a Ugandan newspaper, in 2009. “We were elected to Parliament to represent our cultures and musicians, but the primary assignment was teaching love.” More

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    Mike Hodges, Director Acclaimed for ‘Get Carter,’ Dies at 90

    He was best known for complex crime dramas like “Croupier.” But he also made the big-budget 1980 science-fiction yarn “Flash Gordon.”Mike Hodges, a director whose visceral feature-film debut, “Get Carter” (1971), is regarded as one of Britain’s best gangster movies, died on Saturday at his home in Dorset, England. He was 90.Mike Kaplan, a longtime friend and a producer of Mr. Hodges’s 2004 film, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Hodges wasn’t prolific — writing about him in The New York Times in 2004, the critic Terrence Rafferty said, “The English director Mike Hodges has made so few films he should be legendary,” like Stanley Kubrick and other limited-output directors. But he had successes, none bigger than his feature debut.Mr. Hodges had directed for a handful of British television series when he stepped up in class with “Get Carter,” a movie he wrote based on a novel by Ted Lewis. Michael Caine starred as a criminal out to avenge his brother, who had died under suspicious circumstances.“Its violence is so ghastly and unremitting and its view of the human condition is so perfectly vile that one would almost rather wash one’s mouth out with soap than recommend it,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The Times when the movie came out. “Yet it is so finely acted and crafted — and is so spectacularly better than the run of its genre — that as a lover of movies one feels practically duty‐bound to sing its praises.”After “Pulp” (1972), a crime comedy that also starred Mr. Caine, and “The Terminal Man” (1974), a blend of science fiction and horror based on a Michael Crichton novel, Mr. Hodges took on a high-profile assignment, the big-budget sci-fi yarn “Flash Gordon.” Released in 1980, the movie divided critics.“It means to be escapist entertainment,” Vincent Canby of The Times wrote, “but it’s all so extravagantly witless that it stirs the social conscience, if not too deeply. It reminds you that there are people in India who would be glad to eat the spinach you leave on your plate.”But Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times admired Mr. Hodges’s campy take on the story, which was based on the popular comic strip of the same name.“At a time when ‘Star Wars’ and its spinoffs have inspired special effects men to bust a gut making their interplanetary adventures look real, ‘Flash Gordon’ is cheerfully willing to look as phony as it is,” he wrote. “I don’t mean that as a criticism.”Michael Caine in “Get Carter” (1971). “As a lover of movies one feels practically duty‐bound to sing its praises,” the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New York Times.Everett CollectionLater in the 1980s Mr. Hodges made some flops, including the sci-fi comedy “Morons From Outer Space” (1985) and the crime drama “A Prayer for the Dying” (1987), which he disowned because he objected to the editing. But “Croupier” (1998), a crime drama about a writer (Clive Owen) who goes to work in a casino, brought him a burst of new attention.The movie didn’t get much notice when it had a limited release in Europe, but then a friend found an American distributor willing to give it a two-week run in some markets in the United States, and critics hailed a comeback.“‘Croupier,’ filmed by Mr. Hodges from a screenplay by Paul Mayersberg, shows that the director hasn’t lost his knack for whip-smart, tongue-in-cheek suspense,” Stephen Holden wrote in The Times in 2000.Mr. Hodges said that until those American reviews, his disappointment over the original lack of attention to “Croupier” had him considering quitting the business.“I was sitting at home in Dorset, getting over a hip replacement,” he told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2001, “and these amazing notices from America started pouring from my fax machine. I couldn’t believe it. It was like some crazy fairy tale.”Yet he directed only one more feature, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” which also starred Mr. Owen, as a gangster who investigates his brother’s suicide. With a plot not unlike that of “Get Carter,” it seemed like completing a circle.“It’s hard not to see ‘I’ll Sleep’ as a kind of unofficial sequel to ‘Get Carter,’” Xan Brooks wrote in The Guardian in 2003. “The film plays as a wearied elegy to the gangster life, full of characters slightly past their sell-by dates, angry and outmoded as they nurse their ancient feuds and clamber in and out of their E-type Jags. Hodges watches their decline with a cool, clinical eye.”Mr. Hodges, center, directing “Flash Gordon” (1980). The movie “is cheerfully willing to look as phony as it is,” Roger Ebert wrote. “I don’t mean that as a criticism.”Universal/courtesy Everett CollectionMichael Tommy Hodges was born on July 29, 1932, in Bristol, England, to Sandy and Norah Hodges. His father was a cigarette salesman, his mother a homemaker. He grew up watching the westerns and musicals of the 1940s and set his sights on becoming a director, though at his father’s urging he studied accounting for a time.He had grown up in Salisbury and Bath — “cities with soft centers,” as he put it — but in the mid-1950s, two years of national service in the Royal Navy, which sent him to “every fishing port in the U.K,” opened his eyes to a rugged, saltier side of life, an experience later reflected in his films.After the Navy he got a job as a teleprompter operator for the BBC in London, which introduced him to television. He began writing advertising copy and was eventually producing and directing.In 1999, when a retrospective of Mr. Hodges’s movies was showing in Los Angeles, Kevin Thomas of The Los Angeles Times said that the crime films stood out for their complexity and ambiguity.“Just when you think Hodges is building to a payoff that will clear everything up,” he wrote, “he may leave you to sort things out for yourself.”Mr. Hodges’s first marriage, to Jean Alexandrov, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Carol Laws; two sons from his first marriage, Ben and Jake; and five grandchildren.Mr. Hodges reflected on his career in an interview with The Evening Standard of Britain in 1999.“I’m always astonished that my messages in bottles, as I think of my films, ever got off the ground at all,” he said. “Astonished, but very happy too.” More

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    Sonya Eddy, ‘General Hospital’ Actress, Dies at 55

    Ms. Eddy played Epiphany Johnson, the head nurse on the long-running ABC daytime series, for 16 years.Sonya Eddy, who played the no-nonsense head nurse Epiphany Johnson in more than 500 episodes of the enduring ABC soap opera “General Hospital,” died on Monday at a hospital in Burbank, Calif. She was 55.The cause was an infection following nonemergency surgery, said Tyler Ford, her producing partner.Ms. Eddy joined the cast of “General Hospital” in 2006 and quickly established herself as a fan favorite as the head nurse of the hospital where much of the show is set. “General Hospital,” a fixture of ABC’s daytime lineup for nearly six decades, follows the adventures of characters who live in the fictional town of Port Charles, N.Y.Ms. Eddy, right, as the head nurse Epiphany Johnson with the actors Jason Thompson and Kimberly McCullough in a scene from “General Hospital.”Ron Tom/ABC, via Associated PressFrank Valentini, the executive producer of “General Hospital,” said in a statement, “The lights in the hub of the nurse’s station will now be a little dimmer, but her spirit and light will live on in both the show and our set.”Ms. Eddy appeared in 543 episodes in 16 years on the show, the most recent of which aired on Oct. 20. She also played Epiphany in 25 episodes in the spinoff “General Hospital: Night Shift” in 2007 and 2008. The character was the mother of Stan Johnson, who was killed in a mob hit.Sonya Eddy was born on June 17, 1967, in Concord, Calif. She was a theater and dance major at the University of California, Davis, where she received her bachelor’s degree in 1992, according to IMDb.com. While she was a student there, she made her acting debut onstage in a production of “Zora Is My Name!”Ms. Eddy recalled the experience in an interview with the website stonecoldandthejackal.com. “I loved the sense of being able to influence the audience, to open a door in their mind that they otherwise may not have opened,” she said.She later performed in stage productions of “Comedy of Errors,” “The Crucible,” “Into the Woods” and “South Pacific.”Ms. Eddy’s is survived by her mother, Robbie Jean Eddy, and a brother, Lee Eddy.Ms. Eddy made her first television appearance, as “Woman No. 2,” in an episode of “The Drew Carey Show” in 1995, and went on to find steady work with roles on “ER,” “Seinfeld,” “Glee” and other hit programs. Her film credits include “Barbershop,” “Coach Carter” and “Matchstick Men.”But her most enduring role was as Epiphany on “General Hospital.” She must have appeared credible as a nurse because she played one several times throughout her career, including in the film “Seven Pounds,” from 2008, starring Will Smith, and “Year of the Dog,” from 2007. She also appeared as a nurse in the thriller “Frank and Penelope,” which was released this year.She was a supporter of real-life nurses, and led a campaign this year to raise money for scholarships for nursing students.Ms. Eddy was also a singer. On “General Hospital,” she showcased her singing skills during memorial services and nurses’ balls. On Tuesday, the “General Hospital” Instagram account shared a clip of Ms. Eddy’s character leading other nurses on the show as they sang “Hallelujah” in a 2017 episode.Sheelagh McNeill More

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    Elayne Jones, Pioneering Percussionist, Is Dead at 94

    She challenged racial barriers when she joined the San Francisco Symphony in 1972. But she became embroiled in a legal battle when she was denied tenure two years later.Elayne Jones, a timpanist who was said to be the first Black principal player in a major American orchestra when she joined the San Francisco Symphony in 1972, and who mounted a legal battle over racial and sexual discrimination when she was denied tenure two years later, died on Saturday at her home in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 94.Her daughter Cheryl Stanley said the cause was dementia.The charismatic, Juilliard-trained Ms. Jones was not only a rare woman among the orchestral percussionists of her time; she also helped lead a generation of Black musicians in confronting the pervasive — and enduring — racism of the classical music industry. Her appointment in San Francisco, under that ensemble’s modish music director, Seiji Ozawa, “projected a forward-looking vision of classical music,” the scholar Grace Wang has written.Admired for her lyricism and finesse, Ms. Jones was an instant hit in San Francisco. “Her playing is so outlandish in quality, one gets the titters just thinking of it,” the critic Heuwell Tircuit wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle of her debut. Arthur Bloomfield of The San Francisco Examiner wrote that her work in a seemingly straightforward passage of “Norma,” at the San Francisco Opera, was “so rounded and suave I just about fell out of my seat.”Once described in a headline as “the groovy tympanist,” Ms. Jones had seen the San Francisco auditions as a last chance to win a permanent post, a success that had been denied her during the two decades she spent toiling to challenge the color line as a freelancer in New York City.“I had to prove that music could be played by anyone who loves it,” she said in 1973. “It’s been a terrible burden because I always felt I had to do better, that I wouldn’t be allowed the lapses other musicians have. It’s true even now.”Orchestral musicians typically serve probationary periods before being granted tenure. Approval seemed a formality in Ms. Jones’s case, but a seven-man committee of the San Francisco players voted against her — and a bassoonist, Ryohei Nakagawa — in May 1974, despite Mr. Ozawa’s advice to the contrary; two rated her competence at 1 out of 100.As audience members launched pickets and petitions, many white critics portrayed the incident primarily as a challenge to Mr. Ozawa’s authority; though the conductor denied any link, he soon quit. Ms. Jones saw things differently.“I’ve had good vibes everywhere. Now I wonder what the hell is wrong and what do I do that’s so wrong?” she said that June, announcing her intention to sue the orchestra and the musicians’ union. “Was it because I was a woman or a Black? Or both?”Ms. Jones played on for a season while her lawsuit made its way through the courts. But when a judge ordered a second, supervised vote in August 1975, a new committee of players turned her down again, citing concerns about her intonation. Although she performed, tenured, in the pit of the San Francisco Opera until 1998, her effective firing at the symphony stayed with her.“It has been quite difficult,” she said in a television interview in 1977, “not only playing but trying to live through all this, and living with myself too, which is kind of hard because you begin to question, well, am I really a good performer, am I worthy person?”But, she went on, “I listen to other people, and I have more confidence in myself.”Ms. Jones looked on as the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the conductor Seiji Ozawa acknowledged the audience’s applause after a performance by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in 1973.Bruce Beron, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony ArchivesElayne Viola Jones was born on Jan. 30, 1928, in Harlem, the only child of immigrants from Barbados. Her father, Cecil, was a porter and then a subway conductor; her mother, Ometa, dreamed of becoming a professional pianist, but had to enter domestic service. They had a piano in their apartment, and Elayne used it to play along with the big-band jazz she heard on the radio. She was 6 when her mother introduced her to classical music.“At first, I thought it was strange to have music that people didn’t dance to, because we all loved dancing to swing music,” Ms. Jones wrote in her autobiography, “Little Lady With a Big Drum” (2019). “However, I didn’t reject this different kind of music and practiced it every day, growing to enjoy its irregularities.”She qualified for the High School of Music & Arts (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts), and she hoped to add the violin to her studies on the piano; she was given drumsticks instead. “We all know that Negroes have rhythm,” she recalled a teacher saying.Ms. Jones was sufficiently talented to win a scholarship to the Juilliard School in 1945, under the sponsorship of Duke Ellington. Her tutor was Saul Goodman, the storied timpanist of the New York Philharmonic, and after she graduated, in 1949, he persuaded New York City Opera to hire her as its timpanist.But the City Opera season was limited, and she had to scrounge for jobs for much of the year; on tour with the company, she was forced to sleep in separate hotels from the other musicians, stopped at stage doors as white colleagues walked through, and told to perform hidden from view.Politically a leftist, Ms. Jones became an insistent activist. When the critic Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times in 1956 that “if there are capable Negro musicians” they would deserve major-ensemble jobs, she visited him to demonstrate that such musicians did, in fact, exist. She worked on an Urban League report about racism in the music world; within weeks of its publication in 1958, she found herself filling in at the New York Philharmonic. Although the Philharmonic’s records of substitute players are sparse, archival documents name her as the first Black musician to perform as part of the orchestra.Ms. Jones left City Opera in 1960 at the request of her husband, the doctor and civil rights activist George Kaufman, who asked that she spend more evenings with him and their three children. But Leopold Stokowski, long a fan, quickly tapped her for his American Symphony Orchestra, for which she performed until 1972. She was one of the driving forces behind the founding of the integrated Symphony of the New World in 1965, and she joined other Black musicians to urge that the initial rounds of auditions be held blind, with the musicians behind a screen, to reduce bias. The San Francisco Symphony was an early adopter of that approach.“I wouldn’t have gotten the job if the screen wasn’t in play,” she later told Dr. Wang. “I’m the recipient of a thing that I worked on.”Ms. Jones’s marriage to Dr. Kaufman ended in divorce in 1964. In addition to her daughter Ms. Stanley, she is survived by her son, Stephen Kaufman, a violinist and performance artist also known as Thoth; another daughter, Harriet Kaufman Douglas; and three grandchildren.As a single mother, Ms. Jones often had to take her children to rehearsals, she told The Times in 1965. She hoped, she said, that she offered them an example.“All youngsters need an image to project to, Negro youngsters even more than white,” she said. “When they can see Negroes playing in the orchestra, they may feel that they can get there someday, too.” More