Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Leif Segerstam, Provocative Finnish Conductor and Composer, Dies at 80

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      He led his country’s principal orchestras and major orchestras elsewhere in Europe. He also mystified his countrymen with an unstoppable flow of symphonies.Leif Segerstam, a Finnish conductor and composer whose hundreds of symphonies were as mysterious as his pronouncements about them, died on Oct. 9 in Helsinki. He was 80.His son Jan said he died in a hospital after a brief bout of pneumonia.In a small country with a unique musical culture, Mr. Segerstam occupied a singular place: He was the “king of our country’s cultural industry,” the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat wrote after his death. He himself said he was “the Jesus of music,” explaining, “In the world of music I have truths that are just as valuable as the teachings of Jesus.”He led Finland’s principal orchestras as well as other major orchestras in Europe; he shaped his country’s world-leading crop of conductors; and he was an unequaled interpreter of its greatest musician, Jean Sibelius, bringing a composer’s creativity to his uncompromising, barren scores.“The conductor was at the summit of the art of rubato” — the practice of expanding and contracting rhythm — “which made absolutely exquisite the slightest melodic curve,” Pierre Gervasoni of Le Monde wrote in a review of Mr. Segerstam’s 1998 Paris performance of Sibelius works with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. That was typical of the way critics reacted to Mr. Segerstam’s instinctive accounts of Sibelius.“Music is in time, but you shouldn’t stop and find out, because then you lose the time, because time doesn’t exist,” Mr. Segerstam said, mysteriously, to the music journalist Bruce Duffie in 1997.Mr. Segerstam “is an alarming person to interview,” James Jolly, the editor in chief of Gramophone magazine, wrote in 2002. “He doesn’t speak in sentences or even paragraphs: instead his ‘thoughts’ come streaming out in torrential pages.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ka Made Rap on His Own Terms. Hear How in 7 Songs.

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      Remembering the hip-hop artist (and New York City firefighter), who died over the weekend at 52.Ka onstage in 2014.Brecheisen/WireImage, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,One of the great joys of being a pop music critic is being able to ingest an artist’s whole body of work, find the throughlines and themes and meaningful resonances, and then be a bullhorn, sharing them with the world. And perhaps the job’s greatest grimness is to do the very same, but in service of memorial.That’s what I’ll be doing below, about the unfailingly and perspective-shiftingly great Brooklyn rapper Ka, who died this weekend, at a far-too-young 52.Ka’s music was a frame of mind as much as a sound — beginning in the late 2000s, when he was in his mid-30s, he made rap music as if by ancient, tattered blueprint. His raw material was the hip-hop of the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, but he didn’t seek to faithfully remake it. Instead, he distilled it, burned off its excesses, and created a thing of extreme concentration, thick poetry and icy tone.He was an inheritor of the woozily intricate narrative work of MF Doom, of the cocksure twistiness of his childhood friend Smoothe Da Hustler, and the more esoteric members of the Wu-Tang Clan, like GZA and Killah Priest.Ka produced most of his own music, though words were always his primary concern. Sometimes, he went drumless, or something very close to it — a negative-space perversion that served to outline his words in hard chalk.“They’re not for the radio, the club or the masses,” Ka wrote of his songs, in an early biographical statement on his website. “My music is for those who miss early ’90s hip-hop when pain and struggle were the dominant themes.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ka, Lone Soldier of New York’s Underground Rap Scene, Dies at 52

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      The rapper, whose name was Kaseem Ryan, was known for self-producing 11 albums while also a maintaining a career with the New York Fire Department.Kaseem Ryan, who built a small but fervent following as an underground Brooklyn rapper known as Ka while maintaining a career as a New York City firefighter, died in the city on Saturday. He was 52.His death was announced by his wife, Mimi Valdés, on Instagram, as well as in a statement posted on his Instagram page. No cause was given, though the statement said that he had “died unexpectedly.”First with the mid-1990s underground group Natural Elements, and then on 11 solo albums he produced himself and released over nearly two decades, Ka gripped hard-core hip-hop listeners with gloomy beats and vivid descriptions of street life and struggle.In a 2012 review of his second album “Grief Pedigree”, The New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica described Ka as “a striking rapper largely for what he forgoes: flash, filigree, any sense that the hard work is already done.”Kaseem Ryan was born in 1972 and raised in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York. During his teen years, he dealt crack and sold firearms.He spent much of the 1990s trying to make a name for himself as a rapper, but then quit music altogether, only to come back a decade later.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Allan Blye, 87, Dies; ‘Smothers Brothers’ Writer and ‘Super Dave’ Creator

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      In his wide-ranging career, he also helped write Elvis Presley’s comeback special and appeared on an early version of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”Allan Blye, a television comedy writer and producer who helped cement the Smothers Brothers’ reputation for irreverence in the late 1960s and later collaborated with Bob Einstein to create the hapless daredevil character Super Dave Osborne, died on Oct. 4 at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 87.His wife, Rita Blye, confirmed the death. She said he had been in hospice care for Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Blye was a writer and singer on variety shows in Canada when he received a surprise call in 1967 from Tom Smothers asking him to join the writing staff of the series that he and his and his brother, Dick, would be hosting on CBS.“I couldn’t believe it was Tom Smothers,” Mr. Blye said in an interview with the Television Academy in 2019. “I thought it was Rich Little doing an impression of Tom Smothers.”Tom, left, and Dick Smothers on the set of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1967. Mr. Blye helped establish the show’s outspoken tone. CBS, via Getty Images“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” was unlike any other variety show. The brothers were renowned as a comical folk-singing duo: Tom played the naïve, guitar-playing buffoon, and Dick, who played the double bass, was the wise straight man. They had creative control of the series, which emboldened them and their writers to be more outspoken as they addressed politics, the Vietnam War, religion and civil rights — and their forthrightness during a divisive era increasingly angered some viewers, CBS censors, some of the network’s affiliates and conservative groups.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nobuyo Oyama, the Japanese Voice of Doraemon, Dies at 90

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      Her alto timbre, which led to teasing as a child, and radiant laughter shaped how millions experienced the blue cartoon robot in the quintessential children’s anime of the same name.Nobuyo Oyama, the voice actress whose alto timbre and radiant laughter shaped how millions in Japan experienced Doraemon, the blue cartoon robot in the quintessential children’s anime of the same name, died at a hospital in Tokyo on Sept. 29. She was 90.Her death was confirmed by phone on Friday by Yozo Morita, the chief executive of her agency, Actors 7, who said that she had suffered a stroke in 2008 and been living with dementia for years.For about 25 years, Ms. Oyama was the voice of Doraemon, a character that first appeared in a manga created in 1969. Doraemon is a robot from the future, sent by its owner to the present day to help his great-great-grandfather solve his childhood problems and change his family’s fortunes.The plump, earless, catlike robot typically helped the boy, Nobita Nobi, using gadgets from the future that he kept in his magical pocket. His deepening friendship with Nobita and his family was part of what made “Doraemon” one of the longest-running shows in Japan and beyond.Ms. Oyama found her talent while coping with being bullied for her voice as a child, she told Kakugo TV, an online interview series. She was often told by her classmates that she had a “boy’s voice,” she said. The students, laughing whenever she spoke, discouraged her from speaking in public.When her mother saw her withdrawing socially, she gave her a piece of advice that would shape her career: She should not hide her voice but find a way to use it. So she joined a broadcasting club in high school, where she hosted radio shows and performed in radio dramas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cissy Houston Dies at 91; Gospel Star Guided Daughter Whitney’s Rise

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      Hailing from a musical family, she won Grammys, sang backup to Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin and helped shepherd Whitney Houston to superstardom.Cissy Houston, a Grammy Award-winning soul and gospel star who helped shepherd her daughter Whitney Houston to superstardom, died on Monday at her home in Newark. She was 91.Her family announced her death in a statement, which said she had been in hospice care for Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Houston was a gifted stylist whose powerful voice and deep faith made her an influential figure in gospel circles for decades. She won Grammy Awards in the traditional soul gospel category for the albums “Face to Face” in 1997 and “He Leadeth Me” in 1999.Before then, she had been among the busiest backup singers in the record business, providing vocal support for Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley and many others. And for more than a half-century she was the choir director for the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, where she got her start as a singer in the 1930s.Ms. Houston was the matriarch of a singing dynasty that included her daughter, her nieces Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick and a cousin, the opera star Leontyne Price. She endured the deaths of her daughter, who drowned in a hotel bathtub in 2012, and of Whitney Houston’s daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown, who, in an eerily similar tragedy, was found unresponsive in a bathtub in her Georgia home in January 2015 and died six months later. Whitney Houston had struggled with addiction for many years despite her mother’s intervention.Ms. Houston with her daughter Whitney, right, and her niece Dionne Warwick during the annual American Music Awards ceremony in 1987. The opera star Leontyne Price is a cousin.Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marvin Schlachter, Record Executive Who Championed Disco, Dies at 90

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      In the 1960s, he helped get wide exposure for Black artists like Dionne Warwick. A decade later, he brought dance music from the clubs to radio success.Marvin Schlachter, a music executive who helped launch Dionne Warwick and the Shirelles in the 1960s and who a decade later created one of the world’s most influential disco labels, bringing acts like Musique and France Joli to the masses, died on Sept. 19 in Manhattan. He was 90.His son Brad said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was intestinal cancer.Beginning in the early 1960s, Mr. Schlachter played a crucial role in the emergence of Black musicians from genre-based appeal to become a force in the American music mainstream.Mr. Schlachter in 1962, a year after he became executive vice president of Scepter Records.Record World magazine, via Schlachter familyHe spent nine years as an executive with Scepter Records, a New York label comparable in some ways to Motown in Detroit (although much smaller). The label brought in Black songwriters, producers and musicians and promoted their albums among white audiences — still an unusual idea at the time.Among Scepter’s biggest successes was Ms. Warwick, whom the label paired with the songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The Bacharach-David team wrote many of Ms. Warwick’s early signature hits, including “Don’t Make Me Over,” “Walk On By” and “Alfie.”Dionne Warwick’s first album was released by Scepter Records in 1963, early in her long association with the songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David.Scepter RecordsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jay J. Armes, Private Eye With a Superhero Story, Dies at 92

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      With steel hooks for hands and a flamboyant personality, Mr. Armes captured the attention — and scrutiny — of reporters across the nation.Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator who lived on an estate with miniature Tibetan horses, traveled in a bulletproof Cadillac limousine with rotating license plates and had steel hooks for hands — including one fitted to fire a .22 caliber revolver — died on Sept. 18 in El Paso. He was 92.His death, at a hospital, was caused by respiratory failure, his son Jay J. Armes III said.Described as “armless but deadly” by People magazine, Mr. Armes appeared to live the life of a superhero. In the 1970s, the Ideal Toy Corporation even reproduced him as a plastic action figure, with hooks like those he began wearing in adolescence after an accident in which railroad dynamite exploded in his hands.In the 1970s, the Ideal Toy Corporation reproduced Mr. Armes as a plastic action figure, complete with hooks for hands.Associated PressMr. Armes (pronounced arms) catapulted to investigatory stardom in 1972 after Marlon Brando hired him to find his 13-year-old son, Christian, who had been abducted in Mexico. Working with Mexican federal agents, Mr. Armes said he found the boy in a cave with a gang of hippies.He told other daring tales of triumph: flying on a glider into Cuba to recover $2 million for a client; helping another client escape from a Mexican prison by sending him a helicopter, which he said inspired the 1975 Charles Bronson movie “Breakout.”The national media was enthralled by his detective skills.“He is an expert on bugging, a skilled pilot, a deadly marksman and karate fighter and, perhaps, the best private eye in the country,” Newsweek wrote in 1975. “All he lacks is a pair of hands.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More