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      Alain Tanner, Leading Director in Swiss New Wave, Dies at 92

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      With his brainy works of neorealism, he made films that helped establish Switzerland as a film center in the 1970s.Alain Tanner, a pioneering director in the Swiss New Wave movement that took off in the 1970s, known for his cerebral, left-leaning films that challenged bourgeois complacency, died on Thursday in Geneva. He was 92.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Association Alain Tanner, a Geneva-based group that preserves and promotes his work.Growing up in Switzerland, surrounded by France, Germany, and Italy with their rich cinema traditions, Mr. Tanner went on to be a founder of the so-called Group of 5, norm-shattering Swiss directors who helped drive a new form of national cinema. His best-known films tended toward a stark neorealism, laced with incisive dialogue and an arid wit, and often centered on characters struggling against conformity.Looking back on his career in his later years, Mr. Tanner said he was proud to have been part of a generation that strove to shake the social order.“During the second half of the last century,” he said, “I lived through what was probably the most engaging for cinema, with the questioning of the old styles, the break with old structures and the arrival of modernity.”A sharp-eyed observer of discontent, both emotional and social, he never achieved the name recognition of the French New Wave masters like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who died on Tuesday at 91. He acknowledged both as influences.Regardless, critics considered him an important voice. In a 1990 review of Mr. Tanner’s film “A Flame in My Heart,” Vincent Canby described him in The New York Times as a “first-class director” and “one of the most securely cerebral of European filmmakers.”Bulle Ogier in Mr. Tanner’s 1971 film “The Salamander.”Filmo – Verein CH.Film“The Salamander” (1971), which Mr. Tanner shot in 16-millimeter, established his reputation worldwide and had a yearlong run at the Cinéma Saint-André des Arts in Paris. “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976) was an art-house hit in Europe and the United States.Mr. Tanner, a native of French-speaking Geneva, made his early films in French, but his first English-language film, “Light Years Away,” which starred Trevor Howard as a junkyard-dwelling spiritual guide to a rebellious young drifter, won the jury’s special grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981.By that point Mr. Tanner’s reputation in film circles was already cemented based on his groundbreaking films that grappled with the spirit of revolution and personal reinvention of the 1960s.His first feature film, “Charles, Dead or Alive” (1969), conceived in the wake of the 1968 student protests that swept Europe, involved a prosperous middle-aged Swiss watchmaker who abandons a thriving family business, adopts an assumed name and embarks on an ill-fated journey of self-discovery as he settles into a life on the fringes of society with a young couple.Mr. Tanner’s best known films of the 1970s, written with the English novelist, critic and Marxist theorist John Berger, concern the legacies of the tumultuous ’60s.“The Middle of the World” (1974), explores a love affair between an Italian waitress at a railroad cafe and a married engineer who is running for the Swiss Parliament, but also the class tensions between them.Mr. Tanner’s film “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976), with the actors Myriam Mézières and Jean-Luc Bideau.Citel Films“Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976), focuses on a group of disillusioned friends in Geneva — including an activist-turned-proofreader, an itinerant history professor and a trade unionist — who are prone to extemporizing on topics as diverse as capitalism, revolution, train travel and sex.“Each of the characters is, in his or her own way, as surrounded as Switzerland, hemmed in,” Mr. Canby wrote in The Times in 1976. But, he added, “they have not been anesthetized by mediocrity into dreamless boredom.”Alain Tanner was born on Dec. 6, 1929, in Geneva. His father was a publicist, writer and poet; his mother was a painter.Growing up in Romandy, the French-speaking region in western Switzerland, Mr. Tanner felt alienated from the country’s German-speaking majority. “Switzerland exists much more for the German Swiss than for us,” he was quoted as saying in a 1976 interview with the film critic James Monaco. “They have a real identity, while we don’t.”A lover of movies since childhood, he experienced an epiphany as a teenager when he discovered Italian neorealist directors like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. At the University of Geneva, Mr. Tanner studied economics, but his real passion was for film. He started a campus film club with Claude Goretta, who would help found the Group of 5. Seeking adventure beyond his native country, he joined the merchant navy after graduation.In the mid-1950s, Mr. Tanner and Mr. Goretta settled in London, where they found work curating archives and subtitling films for the British Film Institute. They befriended the young directors Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, who were involved with a budding school of documentary filmmaking called Free Cinema. In 1957, Mr. Tanner and Mr. Goretta joined the movement with “Nice Time,” a 17-minute documentary rumination about Piccadilly Circus at night. It won the prize for experimental film at the Venice Film Festival.Returning to Switzerland a few years later, Mr. Tanner directed for television before forming the Group of 5 in 1968; besides Mr. Goretta, the others were Michel Soutter, Jean-Louis Roy and Jean-Jacques Lagrange. His first feature, “Charles Dead or Alive,” won the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Mr. Tanner is survived by his wife, Janine; two daughters, Nathalie and Cécile; and three grandchildren.By the end of his career he had made 21 feature films, including the erotic psychological dramas “A Flame in My Heart” (1987) and “The Diary of Lady M” (1993), along with numerous documentaries for Swiss television.A director once invigorated by the spirit of revolution had long ago mellowed in his political passions.“I believe that neither capitalism nor Communism does anybody any good,” Mr. Tanner said in a 1976 Times interview. “I’m not so much politically minded; I think more about the individual and peoples’ lives.” More

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      Henry Silva, Actor Who Specialized in Menace, Dies at 95

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      He was forever cast as a thug, a hit man or some other nefarious character. But he took pride in his ability to play each bad guy differently.Henry Silva, who for decades was high on the call list of any Hollywood casting director in search of a particularly menacing villain, died on Wednesday in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 95. His son Scott Silva confirmed the death, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital.Mr. Silva appeared in more than 130 movies and television shows, scowling through many of them as a thug, a hit man or some other nefarious character. He was an assassin sent by a mob boss to wreak vengeance in “Johnny Cool” in 1963. He was a drug addict with a tendency to shoot people in the 1981 Burt Reynolds movie “Sharky’s Machine.” He was a corrupt C.I.A. operative in “Above the Law,” a 1998 Steven Segal film. He was even reprehensible as a cartoon: He voiced the supervillain Bane in animated TV shows involving both Batman and Superman.Yet Mr. Silva was a serious actor, with training at the Actors Studio in New York and appearances on Broadway and in well-regarded movies like “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962). He prided himself on not letting the typecasting make him lazy.“I see a lot of actors who play heavies, but they always play the same heavies,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2000. “I have a seven-minute reel of clips from my movies, and none of the guys are the same. I don’t always go to the same place, because that would be boring.”Henry Silva was born on Sept. 23, 1926, in Brooklyn (not, as most sources have it, in 1928). He grew up in Spanish Harlem, raised by his mother, Angelina Martinez, after his father, Jesus Silva, left when Henry was young.“It was the kind of place,” he told Knight Ridder in 1985, “where if you lived on one block and you wanted to go a few blocks away, you had to take a couple of guys with you, or else you would get your ass kicked. I mean, that’s the only way to put it; I can’t say that you would get ‘beat up.’”“So you were always tense, and you were always on guard,” he continued. “You were never relaxed.” He said he often tapped into those memories when playing characters who were full of jittery, bottled-up anger.By the time he was 8 he had determined that he wanted to be an actor; he said that the Andy Hardy movies of Mickey Rooney, with their idyllic small-town life so different from his own, were an inspiration of sorts. He left school at 13 and worked odd jobs. Years later, he would sometimes be complimented by real gangsters.“They say, ‘My God, where did you learn how to play us?’” Mr. Silva told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2000. “I say, ‘I lived with “us.” I grew up with “us” in New York.’ I used to know the guys who used to run the whole areas, the prostitution rings. I used to shine their shoes.”His mother hoped he would become a postal carrier, but instead he tried the acting life. He occasionally landed a bit part, including one on Broadway in the Tennessee Williams flop “Camino Real,” which ran for two months in 1953.In 1955 Mr. Silva was one of hundreds who auditioned for the Actors Studio, then being run by Lee Strasberg. He was one of five selected for membership. He was soon part of the cast when the group staged “A Hatful of Rain,” Michael V. Gazzo’s play about a morphine addict named Johnny Pope (played by Ben Gazzara). The play was picked up for a Broadway run and opened in November of that year with a cast that also included Shelley Winters and Anthony Franciosa.Mr. Silva earned good notices for his portrayal in the production of, yes, a bad guy: a drug pusher known as Mother. He reprised the role in the 1957 film version.“A Hatful of Rain” would be Mr. Silva’s last Broadway appearance, but television and film offers were beginning to pile up. In the late 1950s he appeared in TV series like “Suspicion” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and in movies, including “The Tall T” (1957), with Randolph Scott, and “The Law and Jake Wade” (1958), with Robert Taylor.The roles were big enough to catch the attention of one particularly influential person.“One day, many years ago,” he recalled in 2000, “I was driving down Sunset Boulevard in the first car I ever owned, a Chevy convertible. I pulled up at a stoplight and heard someone say, ‘Henry, I like you in movies.’”It was Frank Sinatra, who invited Mr. Silva to visit him on the set of “Some Came Running.” When Mr. Silva showed up, Sinatra recruited him to be in a film with him — the original “Ocean’s Eleven” (1960). Mr. Silva played one of the gang that Danny Ocean (Sinatra) brought together for a spectacular multi-casino robbery scheme. Forty-one years later, Mr. Silva would record his last movie credit by appearing in a small part in Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Eleven” remake.Mr. Silva was cast in the 1960 movie “Ocean’s Eleven” after a chance meeting with Frank Sinatra while at a stoplight on Sunset Boulevard. Clockwise from left: Akim Tamiroff, Richard Conte, Buddy Lester, Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr., Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, Mr. Silva, Richard Benedict, Norman Fell and Clem Harvey.United Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Silva became a secondary member of the Rat Pack, a circle of Sinatra pals that also included Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop, and he would appear in two more movies with Sinatra in 1962, “Sergeants 3” and “The Manchurian Candidate.” Both demonstrated a quality that served Mr. Silva well for years: At least by the standards of the day, he could pass as a variety of races and nationalities.He described himself as being of Italian and Hispanic descent, but in “The Manchurian Candidate” he played a Korean heavy who engages in a memorable karate fight with Sinatra’s character. In “Sergeants 3” he was an American Indian, and not for the last time; he played a number of Indians, including one in a 1965 episode of the TV series “Daniel Boone.” In the 1982 comedy “Wrong Is Right” he was a Middle Eastern fanatic.Some roles, though, reflected his actual heritage. He played a number of Hispanic characters of various nationalities. In “Johnny Cool,” one of his few leading roles (he played the title character), he was Sicilian.He also went to Italy for a time in the 1970s to make crime films when that genre was the rage among Italian directors, a stretch of his career he apparently enjoyed.“If they didn’t pay me, I wouldn’t care, because it was so joyous,” he said in Mike Malloy’s 2012 documentary “Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s.”Mr. Silva’s marriage to Ruth Earl in 1966 ended in divorce in 1987. His previous marriages, to Cindy Conroy and Mary Ramus, also ended in divorce. Besides his son Scott, he is survived by another son, Michael. Mr. Silva had an explanation for his ability to play sinister characters decade after decade.“I think the reason that I haven’t disappeared,” he said in 1985, “is that the heavies I play are all leaders. I never play a wishy-washy anything. They’re interesting roles, because when you leave the theater, you remember these kinds of guys.”Vimal Patel More

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      Jorja Fleezanis, Violinist and Pioneering Concertmaster, Dies at 70

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      “Being a concertmaster is terribly demanding,” she once said, “but women can handle the job as well as men can. I know that.”Jorja Fleezanis, a dynamic violinist and dedicated teacher who was one of the first women to serve as concertmaster of a major symphony orchestra in the United States, died on Sept. 9 at her home in Lake Leelanau, Mich. She was 70.The Minnesota Orchestra, in which Ms. Fleezanis played from the first chair for two decades, said the cause was “a cardiovascular event.”The concertmaster holds a key position with an orchestra, with considerable responsibility for defining its sound. Ms. Fleezanis was “a cornerstone player” in the Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vanska, its music director from 2003 to 2022, said in a phone interview.“You need to be hearing the whole score and acting as second in command to the conductor,” Ms. Fleezanis explained to The Boston Globe this year. “You need to understand all the possible interpretive ways the conductor can go at that moment, so you’re prepared to make a sharp left, or a gentle left. And you create that unification, that sense of ensemble, almost instantaneously.”Concertmasters often take solo turns, too, playing concertos with their own orchestras. Ms. Fleezanis used those opportunities to advocate for works that audiences were otherwise unlikely to hear from guest violinists — by Benjamin Britten, say, or Roger Sessions — and to promote new scores. She gave the premiere of John Adams’s Violin Concerto, in St. Paul in 1994, collaborating on a pathbreaking piece that won the Grawemeyer Award for composition a year later.For much of the history of the professional orchestra, the post of concertmaster had been reserved for men. Ms. Fleezanis, a “rebel with a violin,” as The Pioneer Press of St. Paul called her, sought to change that from early in her career.“Being a concertmaster is terribly demanding,” she told The Cincinnati Post in 1976, “but women can handle the job as well as men can. I know that.”Ms. Fleezanis at first looked likely to break barriers at the San Francisco Symphony, which she joined as a second violinist in 1980, becoming its associate concertmaster in 1981. Sharing the first stand with Raymond Kobler, she played so “splendidly,” the critic Robert Commanday wrote in The San Francisco Examiner in 1988, that she struck observers “as the stronger of the two, and often the real leader of the section.”In a decision that Mr. Commanday described as “not very defensible,” the San Francisco Symphony’s music director, Herbert Blomstedt, stuck with his man, even after it became clear that the cost would be Ms. Fleezanis’s departure. She accepted the overtures of Mr. Blomstedt’s predecessor, Edo de Waart, who was eager to bring her to his new ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra.Hired as acting concertmaster in 1988, she was technically not the first woman to hold the full title of concertmaster at a major orchestra; by the time her position was made permanent early in 1989, Emmanuelle Boisvert had begun work as the concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony. But Ms. Fleezanis was a trailblazer at a time when the gender composition of American orchestras was starting to become more equitable.With her frank personality and her palpable intensity onstage, she was in large part responsible for the resurgence of the Minnesota Orchestra, which came to be widely regarded as one of the finest in the nation early in Mr. Vanska’s tenure, not least for the crisp precision and risk-taking sensibility of its strings. Like its concertmaster, the orchestra performed “with the kind of furious finesse that every composer prays for,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2005.“Early in my career I was told, ‘If you play like that in every concert, you’ll burn out,’ but I knew that wasn’t right,” Ms. Fleezanis said when she left the orchestra to become a professor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in 2009. “Playing with full commitment gives back: It revitalizes me.”Ms. Fleezanis during a rehearsal for a weeklong Minnesota Orchestra program in 2006 presenting the work of then-emerging composers. Missy Mazzoli, left, was one of them. Greg Helgeson for The New York TimesJorja Kay Fleezanis was born on March 19, 1952, in Detroit. She was the younger of Parios and Kay Fleezanis’s two children. Her parents, who were Greek immigrants, were not musicians but loved music.She began learning violin at age 8, studying in Detroit with Ara Zerounian and Mischa Mischakoff, the former concertmaster of Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony. She later attended the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she played for the young James Levine in his University Circle Orchestra, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.It was still rare for women to be admitted to major orchestras when Ms. Fleezanis finished her studies. The Chicago Symphony’s music director, Georg Solti, required her to win three separate auditions and to play concerts right under his eye before he was willing to hire a “girl,” as he called her, for his second violin section in 1975. Her kinetic style did not match the staid demeanor of her colleagues, though, and she was all but alone among men. She left after a single season.“A solid musician with a big sound and surprising reserves of energy,” as The Cincinnati Enquirer described her in 1976, Ms. Fleezanis returned to Ohio to lead the newly formed Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra. There she founded the Trio d’Accordo, a string trio. She later started the FOG Trio with the cellist Michael Grebanier and the pianist Garrick Ohlsson. An inspirational pedagogue, she held posts at the San Francisco Conservatory, the University of Minnesota and a variety of other institutions. She retired from the Jacobs School in 2020.While at the San Francisco Symphony, Ms. Fleezanis met Michael Steinberg, a former critic for The Boston Globe who was that orchestra’s publications director and artistic adviser. They married in 1983; he died in 2009. She is survived by her brother, Nickolas.In a 2009 conversation with Sam Bergman, a Minnesota Orchestra violist, Ms. Fleezanis said her husband had stoked her interest in unusual and new works. She recorded Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas, but she also recorded pieces by Stefan Wolpe and Aaron Jay Kernis. Nicholas Maw wrote a sonata for her, and John Tavener made her the “Divine Eros” in his vast, mystical “Ikon of Eros,” written for the Minnesota Orchestra’s centennial in 2002. After her husband’s death, she started a commissioning fund in their joint names.“There is a huge body of genius out there,” Ms. Fleezanis told Mr. Bergman, reflecting on the repertoire as she found it. “It’s just a question of how limited you want to choose to be.” More

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      Overlooked No More: Sylvia Rexach, Puerto Rican Singer and Composer

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      She was especially known for reinventing boleros — songs of stringent, abiding love — amid Puerto Rico’s sexist and militaristic society in the mid-20th century.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.A woman positioned close to a microphone announces a title into the silence, as if preparing to read a poem: “En Mis Sueños” (“In My Dreams”). A guitarist plays a precise and dramatic introduction to a bolero.At modest volume, the woman, Sylvia Rexach, begins to sing, with a smoky voice and non-virtuosic authority. She describes a fantasy loop in which an ex-lover briefly visits her in her dreams, leaving behind a “wake of love” (“estela de amor”). The dream will return again when she wants it to, which she will. She may not want more than the fantasy. (She may even want less: to be free of repetitive desire.) There is no sense of possession nor, really, of loss. There will be no reciprocity in this relationship, and she seems not only to accept the situation but to be an adept within it, a powerful expert.This description could pertain to more or less every track on “Sylvia Rexach Canta a Sylvia Rexach,” a luminous, séance-like record made in a San Juan studio in July 1958 by the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter, then 36, and her friend the guitarist Tutti Umpierre. The tempos remain similar, as do the images and themes: moons, night and oblivion; celestial flashes; troublesome desire; waves and what they leave behind.The album, after it was released in the mid-1960s by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña — a government-funded operation and the island’s equivalent to the Smithsonian Institution — was barely distributed outside Puerto Rico and has only recently appeared on streaming services. It is the only commercially issued recording of Rexach performing her own songs, and it was not even intended as such: It was a reference document for posterity attesting to how her songs should sound, made at the behest of the studio’s owner. It includes “Olas y Arenas” (“Waves and Sands”), “Alma Adentro” (“Inner Soul”) and “Y Entonces” (“And So”), which over the years have been taken up by other performers in many styles.Rexach (pronounced reck-SAHTCH) was a gifted composer of boleros — songs of stringent, abiding love in slow 2/4 time. The bolero began in Cuba at the end of the 19th century and gained popularity across Latin America in the late 1920s. But by the ’40s and ’50s it could reflect a more modern sensibility, one in tune with the wild subconscious. It could just about accommodate someone like Rexach, an artist to the core, “una bohemia” — not a casual description but a committed identity.“It meant that she liked the nightlife, and sang with her friends in groups, and saw the sun come up,” her daughter, the actor and singer Sharon Riley, said in an interview.There had been important female bolero composers before Rexach, most famously María Grever of Mexico. But Puerto Rico’s sexist and militaristic society in the mid-20th century created particularly difficult circumstances that forced women artists like Rexach and the poet Julia de Burgos to invent their own tradition.The eminent musicologist Cristóbal Díaz Ayala described Rexach as virtually unclassifiable within the Latin American music of her time. Her lyrics projected a frank sexuality and a near-indifference to shame. They could look like passionate resignation, or calm defiance. “I am the sand that the wave never touches,” she laments in “Olas y Arenas.”She could destabilize and diffuse what the scholar Elaine Enid Vázquez González has called “the boleristic ‘I’”: In her songs, the narrator’s desire doesn’t entirely travel outward toward its object, as had been common in bolero lyrics. It travels inward, more toward her own memory and the senses. The listener follows it there.Rexach was 36 when she recorded an album with the guitarist Tutti Umpierre. The songs on that record have been performed by many other musicians, including Linda Ronstadt and Tito Rodríguez.Archivo General de Puerto RicoSylvia Regina Rexach González was born on Jan. 22, 1922, one of seven children of Julio Rexach, who was of Catalan descent and ran Farmacia Rexach, a drugstore next door to the family’s home, and María Teresa González, a society woman and organizer of annual carnival activities. Her well-to-do family lived in Santurce, the district east of San Juan’s Old City known for its density of musicians and artists.At Central High School in Santurce, Sylvia proved an indifferent student but one who was indispensable to the school’s performing-arts programs. One afternoon in the mid-1930s, while on a school outing, she played her song “Di Corazon” (“Tell Me, Heart”) on a piano at the Escambrón Beach Club. The bandleader Rafael Muñoz, who was on a break from rehearsing for an evening performance, heard it and asked her who wrote it. Her father signed a contract on her behalf with the publishing company Peer International, and Muñoz recorded the song before Rexach finished her junior year.In 1943 she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps for three months, working as a desk clerk. Around this time, while publicizing a brand of rum outside a grocery store, she met Bill Riley, an Army cook from Connecticut. They fell in love, quickly married, had three children and were legally joined for 13 years, mostly unhappily, with a long separation toward the end. According to Sharon Riley, her father was often violent with her mother, especially when both had been drinking.In the 1940s and ’50s, Rexach worked in clubs as the leader of the vocal group el Combo Las Damiselas (later known as el Combo de Sylvia Rexach) and with musical-theater revues, both on the island and occasionally in New York City. She helped form a publishing organization through which she advocated for composers’ rights; wrote scripts for radio and television comedy shows, as well as advertising jingles for aspirin and detergent; and wrote a cultural criticism column for El Diario de Puerto Rico, praising the unsung and the local while reacting against exploitative business practices.She also raised her children as a single mother, and she wrote songs. About 50 have been published, though a friend, the singer José Luis Torregrosa, believed that many more “were left on the tabletops of the cafes where we were drinking.” Several were recognized during her life through versions by well-known singers — particularly Lucho Gatica’s “Y Entonces,” released in 1959 — but many more came later, as performed by Tito Rodríguez, La Lupe, Cheo Feliciano and others. The song “Alma Adentro” alone has passed through many sensibilities: Linda Ronstadt covered it on her Grammy Award-winning 1992 album, “Frenesí,” as did the New York-based jazz saxophonist Miguel Zenón in 2011. on a record named after the song. Miramar, the bolero revivalist band with roots in Puerto Rico, researched her life before creating their own subtle version, included on their album “Dedication to Sylvia Rexach,” released in 2016, which drew some attention to the composer in the United States. And the Spanish singer Angela Cervantes and the Cuban jazz pianist Pepe Rivero recently released their own version, spreading her work to audiences that barely knew her music.Aspects of Rexach’s life have created around her an aura of tragedy. But those who knew her spoke of a different set of qualities, including hilarity, bravery and loyalty.Archivo General de Puerto RicoRexach died on Oct. 20, 1961, of stomach cancer. She was 39.Her position in history remains unfixed — somewhere between institution and cult, often rediscovered and sometimes not discovered at all. A Telemundo mini-series about Rexach’s life, broadcast in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s and starring Sharon Riley, told her story in dramatic tones. There have been two theaters named for her in San Juan; the current one, inside the Centro de Bellas Artes, Puerto Rico’s major arts center, is built roughly on the site of her family’s old house. A well-researched Spanish-language biography, “Sylvia Rexach: Pasión Adentro,” by Virianai Rodríguez Santaliz, was published in Puerto Rico in 2008, but it has not been translated into other languages and has gone out of print.Rexach was a woman of integrity who continues to resist easy definition and enshrinement. She was melancholic, and aspects of her life have created around her an aura of tragedy: her troubled marriage and divorce; her long illness; her son Billy’s opiate addiction and prison time in New York City; her early death at the Women’s Hospital of Santurce.Yet those who knew her well, as detailed in Santaliz’s biography, have stressed a different set of qualities: hilarity, bravery, generosity, loyalty, perfectionism. Marta Romero, one of her bandmates in el Combo Sylvia Rexach, once called her “a volcano of mercy in constant eruption.” The great songwriter Tite Curet Alonso also compared her to nature, calling her “a true cultural bruma.” The word “bruma,” which she used in “Olas y Arenas,” means mist, and implies that she has become part of the atmosphere. More

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      Paul T. Kwami, Fisk Jubilee Singers’ Longtime Director, Dies at 70

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      He took the storied Black musical group to new heights, including its first Grammy win and a National Medal of Arts.Paul T. Kwami, the longtime director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who cemented the ensemble’s reputation as one of the country’s premier interpreters of African American spiritual music, died on Saturday in Nashville. He was 70.His wife, Susanna Kwami, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but did not provide a cause.The Fisk Jubilee Singers put Nashville on the musical map long before the city became famous for its honky-tonks and slide guitars.The group, based at Fisk University, a historically Black institution that was founded a year after the Civil War, was originally intended as a fund-raising tool; it toured the country in the 1870s to bring in money for the struggling college.The group, many of whose members were formerly enslaved people, was among the first to perform spirituals like “Go Down Moses” and “Wade in the Water,” songs that many white audiences had never heard, especially in the North.Their first tour, in 1871, earned enough money to retire the school’s debt, pay for a 40-acre parcel of land north of downtown Nashville and erect the school’s first permanent building, Jubilee Hall. They sang for President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House and performed for six weeks in New York City.“They used the power and beauty of their music, and the beauty of their singing, to win the love of people,” Dr. Kwami said in a radio interview in February.A native of Ghana and a Fisk graduate, Dr. Kwami continued that tradition when he took over as the group’s music director in 1994.The Jubilee Singers performing at Fisk University in Nashville this June. Under Dr. Kwami’s direction, the group recently won its first Grammy Award.Jason Davis/Getty ImagesHe insisted that the singers — eight men and eight women, all Fisk undergraduates — keep to a rigorous rehearsal and touring schedule. He also made sure that they understood not just the history of Fisk and its musical heritage, but the roots of the songs they sang.Spirituals, he told them, played many roles in slave communities. They could be lamentations or celebrations; at the same time, they could serve as a means of stealthy communication, spreading news outside the ken of white slavers.“He made us understand the language of love that was in the middle of those spirituals,” Michangelo Scruggs, who was a Jubilee Singer from 1993 to 1996, said in a phone interview. “A spiritual is not just a song. It’s a communication. It talks about the struggles and how slaves were able to overcome their struggles, whether it was through the end of slavery or whether it was even through death.”Dr. Kwami also impressed upon his students the African roots of the music they sang. In 2007, he took the Fisk Jubilee Singers to Ghana to perform during the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence; while there, they visited the grave of the Black sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who was also a Fisk graduate.Under Dr. Kwami’s direction, the Jubilee Singers recorded several albums and also appeared on albums by other artists, some of them outside the group’s usual gospel and spiritual fare. They were featured alongside Neil Young in “Heart of Gold,” a 2006 concert documentary directed by Jonathan Demme and recorded at the renowned Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville, where the singers performed regularly.“Reverence was a huge thing for him, but in that reverence he was open to going into places that the group had never gone before,” Ruby Amanfu, a Nashville-based singer and Dr. Kwami’s niece, said in an interview.In 2000, the Fisk Jubilee Singers were inducted into the Gospel Hall of Fame. In 2008, Dr. Kwami appeared on the group’s behalf at the White House to receive the National Medal of Arts, the country’s highest award for cultural achievement.In 2020, the Fisk Jubilee Singers released “Celebrating Fisk!,” an album of 12 songs recorded at the Ryman featuring guest appearances by musicians like Ms. Amanfu, Keb’ Mo’ and Lee Ann Womack. It won the group its first Grammy Award, for best roots gospel album.That year, Dr. Kwami told NPR: “When I remember the life stories of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers, some of whom were slaves, some who did not know their parents and yet left this rich legacy for us, if they were to come back today, I am sure they will be very happy that we are still singing the Negro spirituals and also still talking about them.”Dr. Kwami inside Jubilee Hall at Fisk University, named after the Jubilee Singers, last year.William DeShazer for The New York TimesPaul Theophilus Kwami was born on March 14, 1952, in Amedzofe, a small Ghanaian mountain town about 100 miles northeast of the country’s capital, Accra. His father, Theophilus Kwami, was a music teacher and a farmer; his mother, Monica Rosaline (Dikro) Kwami, raised him and his six siblings.When Paul wasn’t picking coffee on his family plantation, he was sitting with his father at his piano, learning the basics of music theory. He decided to follow his father into music education, studying for two years at a teachers college; in 1982, he received a bachelor’s degree in music education at the National Academy of Music in Ghana.He returned home to teach and play the organ at his local church, but a chance encounter with a missionary from the United States introduced him to the idea of continuing his education at Fisk. Although he had grown up listening to gospel music on the radio, he had never heard of the university or its heralded singing group.He left his job and family in Ghana and moved to Nashville, with the intention of rounding out his education and then returning home. Instead, a friend persuaded him to join the Jubilee Singers, who were under the direction of his mentor at the time, McCoy Ransom.He stayed in the United States after graduating from Fisk with a second bachelor’s degree, also in musical education, in 1985. He received a master’s degree in the same subject from Western Michigan University in 1987, then worked for a music publishing company in Nashville before returning to Fisk, and the Jubilee Singers, in 1994. He received a doctorate from the American Conservatory of Music in 2009.Along with his wife, Dr. Kwami is survived by his daughter, Rachel Kwami; his sons, Paul E. Kwami and Delali Kwami; his sisters, Ruby F. Kwami, Patricia S. Kwami and Joan A. Kwami; and his brother, Dickson K. Kwami. More

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      Art Rosenbaum, Painter and Preserver of Folk Music, Dies at 83

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      As an artist and exponent of American traditional songs, he sought to blur the lines between outsider and insider art, and became a guiding force in the Athens, Ga., scene.ATLANTA — Art Rosenbaum, a painter and folk musician acclaimed for a half-century of field recordings of American vernacular music, including old-time Appalachian fiddle tunes and ritual music imported from Africa by enslaved people, died on Sept. 4 at a hospital in Athens, Ga., his adopted hometown. He was 83.His son, Neil Rosenbaum, said the cause was complications of cancer.Art Rosenbaum’s passion for documenting a broad range of American musical traditions as they were passed down and performed at work camps, church gatherings and rural living rooms expanded upon the famous field recording work of the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. An important inspiration was Pete Seeger, another high-profile 20th-century champion of folk music. Mr. Rosenbaum wrote that Mr. Seeger had once told him, “Don’t learn from me, learn from the folks I learned from.”Mr. Rosenbaum called it “good advice, and the kick in the rear that got me going.”“Outside Carnesville,” oil on linen, 1983-84. Mr. Rosenbaum’s paintings often depicted the musicians he recorded, as he did here, with Mabel Cawthorn on the banjo.Art RosenbaumIn 2007, the Atlanta-based label Dust-to-Digital released the first of two box sets of compilations from Mr. Rosenbaum’s trove, “Art of Field Recording Volume I: Fifty Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum,” which won a Grammy Award for best historical album.The pop music website Pitchfork called the release “revelatory” and “an indispensable counterpoint to Harry Smith’s ‘Anthology of American Folk Music,’” a reference to the 1952 song compilation that remains a canonical touchstone for folk musicians.Like Mr. Smith, the bohemian polymath who compiled the “Anthology,” Mr. Rosenbaum was an accomplished visual artist. As an art teacher, he spent the bulk of his career at the University of Georgia, in Athens, where his energetic paintings, often depicting the musicians he recorded, and his ideas about the democratization of culture had an influence that resonated far beyond the classroom.Michael Stipe, the visual artist and singer with the Athens rock band R.E.M., who was a student of Mr. Rosenbaum’s in the early 1980s, said Mr. Rosenbaum’s goal “was to blur the lines between what is outsider and insider, and to bring together this untrained music and art with trained music and art, and acknowledge that each have immense power, and that they’re not that far apart.”A portrait of Michael Stipe, the R.E.M. singer, a student of Mr. Rosenbaum’s, as well as a subject of his paintings.Art Rosenbaum, Collection of the Peasant CorporationArthur Spark Rosenbaum was born on Dec. 6, 1938, in Ogdensburg, N.Y., in St. Lawrence County. His mother, Della Spark Rosenbaum, was a medical illustrator who encouraged her children’s artistic inclinations. His father, David Rosenbaum, was an Army pathologist who sometimes sang what his son described as “Northern street songs.” Arthur later recorded one of these songs, his father’s a cappella version of the ribald 18th-century Child ballad “Our Goodman,” and included it in the 2007 box set.The family eventually moved to Indianapolis, where Mr. Rosenbaum, entranced by traditional music, absorbed the Harry Smith anthology and the contemporary folk stars of the day. In high school he won an art contest at the Indiana State Fair and spent the $25 prize money on a five-string banjo. He went on to become a pre-eminent expert on traditional banjo playing and tunings and to record several albums.In the mid-1950s Mr. Rosenbaum moved to New York City, then the epicenter of the burgeoning folk revival, earning an undergraduate degree in art history and a master’s degree in fine arts from Columbia University. In the summers he worked at a resort hotel on Lake Michigan, where he began making recordings of nearby field workers from Mexico and the American South.In 1958, Mr. Rosenbaum tracked down and recorded in Indianapolis a musician named Scrapper Blackwell, whom he described as “one of the best and most influential blues guitarists of the 1920s and ’30s.” Back in New York, as Mr. Rosenbaum was fond of recalling, a fellow roots music obsessive named Bob Dylan would pester him for any details he could muster about Mr. Blackwell’s life and playing style.“Shady Grove,” 2009. Mr. Rosenbaum sought out traditional Black and white musicians, revealing a shared cultural history.Art RosenbaumIt was in New York that Mr. Rosenbaum met the artist Margo Newmark, who became his wife and lifelong collaborator. She survives him.In addition to her and his son, Neil, a filmmaker and musician, he is survived by a sister, Jenny Rosenbaum, a writer; and a brother, Victor Rosenbaum, a concert pianist.After eight years of teaching studio art at the University of Iowa, Mr. Rosenbaum in 1976 took a similar job at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. With Athens as a home base, he and Ms. Newmark Rosenbaum continued making field recordings, many of them in and around Georgia, and giving the musicians they met opportunities to play before new audiences.“As these traditional musicians were identified and then brought out,” said Judith McWillie, an emerita art professor at the university, “and as there were more festivals and opportunities for them to play, people began to envision an identity for Georgia that was somewhat different from the one that it had. This was the 1970s, and coming off some extremely difficult times in the South.”Folk music, she said, revealed a shared cultural history: “The musicians Art brought out were Black and white.”In 1984, Mr. Rosenbaum recorded an album of stories and songs by Howard Finster, the self-taught artist, preacher and self-proclaimed “man of visions” whose work has become indelibly associated with 20th-century Georgia after its use on album covers by R.E.M. and the band Talking Heads.Untitled Diptych, 2014. Many of Mr. Rosenbaum’s paintings are allegorical works in which the old and the new cohabitate, with traditional musicians sharing space with modern-day hipsters.Art RosenbaumHe also recorded the McIntosh County Shouters, an African American group from coastal Georgia who performed the “ring shout,” which Mr. Rosenbaum described as “an impressive fusion of call-and-response singing, polyrhythmic percussion and expressive and formalized dancelike movements.” The ring shout, he asserted, was “the oldest African American performance tradition on the North American continent.”Brenton Jordan, a member of the group, said of the Rosenbaums, “It’s their legwork that actually kind of introduced the McIntosh County Shouters to the world.” He noted that the ring shout, once on the verge of extinction, has in recent years been performed by his group in Washington at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.The Rosenbaums published a book on the ring shout in 1998. With drawings of the performers by Mr. Rosenbaum and photos of them by Ms. Newmark Rosenbaum, it depicts a place and a culture that seems beguilingly out of phase with modern life.Many of Mr. Rosenbaum’s other paintings and drawings are loose allegorical works in which the old and the new clash and cohabitate, with traditional musicians sharing space on the canvas with modern-day hipsters, skateboarders and documentarians (often Mr. Rosenbaum himself).As a painter, he was inspired by Cezanne and Max Beckmann, the German Expressionist. At times his work recalls the painting of Thomas Hart Benton, the American regionalist. Some of Mr. Rosenbaum’s works are large murals on historical themes.Pete Seeger once told Mr. Rosenbaum, “Don’t learn from me, learn from the folks I learned from.” That advice set him on a decades-long project of seeking out unrecorded musicians.via Rosenbaum familyBeginning in the late 1970s, Athens saw an explosion of forward-thinking rock musicians, many of whom, like Mr. Stipe, had ties to the Georgia art school. Mr. Rosenbaum’s passions always ran to traditional music, but he remained an inspiration for contemporary musicians.Lance Ledbetter, the founder and co-director of the Dust-to-Digital label, recalled Vic Chesnutt, the brilliant, idiosyncratic Athens-based songwriter who died in 2009, speaking of Mr. Rosenbaum, quoting him as saying:“When you move to Athens, and you hear about this guy who plays banjo and knows all of these songs, you just follow him around like a puppy dog. And I’m not the only one who did that.” More

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      Irene Papas, Actress in ‘Zorba the Greek’ and Greek Tragedies, Dies at 96

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      She was best known for commanding movie roles in the 1960s but received the greatest plaudits for playing heroines of the ancient stage.Irene Papas, a Greek actress who starred in films like “Z,” “Zorba the Greek” and “The Guns of Navarone” but won the greatest acclaim of her career playing the heroines of Greek tragedy, died on Wednesday. She was 96.The death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Greek Culture Ministry in an email. He did not know the cause of death, but in 2018, it was announced that Ms. Papas had been living with Alzheimer’s disease for five years.Ms. Papas was best known by American moviegoers for her intensely serious and sultry-strong roles in the 1960s. In “The Guns of Navarone” (1961), filmed partly on the island of Rhodes, she played a World War II resistance fighter who dared to do what a team of Allied saboteurs (among them Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn) would not: shoot an unarmed woman because she was a traitor.In “Zorba the Greek” (1964), with Mr. Quinn, she was a Greek widow who is stoned by her fellow villagers because of her choice of lover. In Costa-Gavras’s Oscar-winning political thriller “Z” (1969), set in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, she played Yves Montand’s widow, who evoked the film’s meaning with one final grief-ridden look out to sea.But in the same decade, she was making her name in Greek film versions of classical plays, often directed by her countryman Michael Cacoyannis, who also directed “Zorba.” She played the title characters in “Antigone” (1961), Sophocles’s tale of a woman who pays dearly after fighting for her brother’s right to an honorable burial; and in “Electra” (1962), in which she and her brother plot matricide. She was also Electra’s mother, Clytemnestra, in “Iphigenia” (1977), the drama of a daughter offered as human sacrifice.In 1971, she received the National Board of Review’s best actress award for her role as Helen of Troy in “The Trojan Women.” Her co-stars were Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave.Ms. Papas was born Eirini Lelekou on Sept. 3, 1926, in Chiliomodi, Greece, a small village near Corinth, and grew up in Athens. She was one of four daughters of two schoolteachers and entered drama school at age 12. By the time she was 18, she had already played both Electra and Lady Macbeth. But her first professional stage role, in 1948, was as a party-hopping society girl in a musical.She made her film debut the same year, in Nikos Tsiforos’s drama “Hamenoi Angeloi” (“Fallen Angels”), and appeared in 14 films during the 1950s — some American, some European — before her breakout role in “The Guns of Navarone.”Ms. Papas with James Darren, center, and Anthony Quinn in “The Guns of Navarone” (1961). Everett CollectionThe director Elia Kazan is often credited with discovering Ms. Papas. On a 1954 trip to the United States, she read a scene from “The Country Girl” for him. The following year, she was given a seven-year contract by MGM, although she made only one film under it: “Tribute to a Bad Man” (1956), a western starring James Cagney.Ms. Papas’s other films included “Bouboulina” (1959), in which she played an 18th-century Greek revolutionary heroine; “The Brotherhood” (1968), as a Mafia wife (to Kirk Douglas); “Anne of the Thousand Days” (1969), as the discarded Catherine of Aragon opposite Richard Burton’s Henry VIII; and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” (1987), based on the novel by Gabriel García Márquez.The Greek tragedies were the focus of her New York stage career as well. She made her Broadway debut in 1967 in “That Summer — That Fall,” based on “Phèdre,” playing a passionate second wife in love with her stepson (Jon Voight), but the production closed after only 12 performances. The following year, she was Clytemnestra in a Circle in the Square production of “Iphigenia in Aulis.” She returned to Circle in the Square as the title character, a woman who kills her own children, in “Medea” (1973) and as Agave, who mistakenly kills her own son during an orgy of drugs, drink and violence, in “The Bacchae” (1980).She was also a singer. She made two albums of Greek folk songs and hymns, “Odes” (1979) and “Rapsodies” (1986), and created something of a scandal with vocals that were condemned by some as lewd on “666,” the 1971 album by the rock group Aphrodite’s Child.Ms. Papas had strong political feelings about her country and made them public. In 1967, she risked her citizenship by calling for a “cultural boycott” of Greece after a military junta took control, saying “Nazism is back in Greece” and describing the country’s new leaders as “no more than a band of blackmailers.” Although Ms. Papas spoke in interviews about a desire to give up acting and a regrettable tendency to be too obedient to directors, she continued film acting well into her 70s. Her final screen appearances included “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (2001), in which she played Drosoula, the formidable mother of Mandras (Christian Bale), and “Um Filme Falado” (“A Talking Picture”), Manoel de Oliveira’s 2003 meditation on civilization, in which she portrayed a privileged actress sailing the Mediterranean.She married Alkis Papas, a director and actor, in 1947, and they divorced four years later. A brief 1957 marriage to José Kohn, a producer, was annulled. She never married again.She is survived by her nephews, the spokesman for the Greek Culture Ministry said.Having played all those characters from ancient Greece, Ms. Papas had a worldview that took thousands of years of history and philosophy into account. “Plato made the first mistake,” she told Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times in 1969, lamenting an unnecessary delay in the scientific revolution. “He began to talk about the soul and morality, and he prevented the Epicureans from searching the nature of man.” More

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      Ramsey Lewis, Jazz Pianist Who Became a Pop Star, Dies at 87

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      His 1965 recording of “The ‘In’ Crowd” brought him to a place few jazz musicians reached in that era: the Top 10.Ramsey Lewis, a jazz pianist who unexpectedly became a pop star when his recording of “The ‘In’ Crowd” reached the Top 10 in 1965 — and who remained musically active for more than a half century after that — died on Monday at his home in Chicago. He was 87.His death was announced on his website. No cause was given.Mr. Lewis, who had been leading his own group since 1956, had recorded with the revered drummer Max Roach and was well known in jazz circles but little known elsewhere when he and his trio (Eldee Young on bass and Redd Holt on drums) recorded a live album at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington in May 1965. The album included a version of “The ‘In’ Crowd,” which had been a hit for the R&B singer Dobie Gray just a few months earlier, and which was released as a single.Instrumental records were a rarity on the pop charts at the time, jazz records even more so. But its infectious groove, Mr. Lewis’s bluesy piano work and the ecstatic crowd reaction helped make the Ramsey Lewis Trio’s rendition of “The ‘In’ Crowd” a staple on radio stations and jukeboxes across the country. It reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 — eight points higher than the Dobie Gray original had reached.Two more singles in a similar vein quickly followed: covers of “Hang On Sloopy,” which had been a No. 1 hit for the McCoys in 1965, and the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” “The ‘In’ Crowd” won Mr. Lewis the first of his three Grammy Awards. (The others were for the 1966 album track “Hold It Right There” and a 1973 rerecording of “Hang On Sloopy.”)Mr. Young and Mr. Holt left in 1966 to form their own group and had hit singles of their own. Mr. Lewis carried on with Cleveland Eaton on bass and Maurice White, later a founder of Earth, Wind & Fire, on drums. That trio had a Top 40 hit in 1966 with a version of the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”That record proved to be the end of Mr. Lewis’s career as a purveyor of Top 40 singles, but it was far from the end of his career as a jazz musician. Over the years he would record scores of albums, in contexts ranging from trios to orchestras to collaborations with his fellow pianist Billy Taylor and the singer Nancy Wilson, and he was a constant presence on the Billboard jazz chart.There was always more to Mr. Lewis than his soulful hits suggested; he was a virtuoso with a thorough grasp of the harmonic complexity of modern jazz and a smooth touch reminiscent of earlier jazz pianists like Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson. But his success on the pop and R&B charts — where he returned in 1974 with “Sun Goddess,” an album partly written and produced by Mr. White and featuring members of Earth, Wind & Fire, on which Mr. Lewis played electric keyboards — led some jazz purists to view him with skepticism.That skepticism was long gone by 2007, when the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, the nation’s highest honor for a jazz musician.Mr. Lewis in an undated photo. He once said he had “always had a broad outlook. If it was good music, I could dig it.” Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesCommenting on the perceived conflict between “jazz as entertainment and jazz as art” in a 2007 interview with DownBeat magazine, Mr. Lewis noted, “Count Basie and Duke Ellington’s playing was for dancers, but something happened where jazz entertainment came to be looked down upon by musicians.” He himself, he said in another interview, had “always had a broad outlook. If it was good music, I could dig it.”In announcing his Jazz Master honor, the N.E.A. pointed to Mr. Lewis’s eclecticism, praising him for a style “that springs from his early gospel experience, his classical training and a deep love of jazz.” It also acknowledged him as “an ambassador for jazz,” citing his work both in academia (he had taught jazz studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago) and in the media: In the 1990s he began hosting a syndicated weekly radio program, “Legends of Jazz With Ramsey Lewis,” and in 2006 he hosted a public television series of the same name, which featured live performances by Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Tony Bennett and many others.At around this time he also began composing large-scale orchestral works. His “Proclamation of Hope,” written to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, where he was artistic director of the jazz series, and performed there by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2009.Mr. Lewis found the challenge of composing that work daunting, he told The Associated Press, until he “threw away the thought of Tchaikovsky and others and sat at the piano and started improvising.” As a result, he said, “I was able to compose from my spirit rather than from my intellect.”In 1995, Mr. Lewis formed Urban Knights, an all-star ensemble with an ever-changing lineup of musicians who, as he himself had long done, straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B. The group, whose lineup at various times included the saxophonists Grover Washington Jr., Gerald Albright and Dave Koz, released seven albums, the most recent in 2019.Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. was born on May 27, 1935, in Chicago, one of three children of Pauline and Ramsey Lewis. His father worked as a maintenance man.Ramsey began taking piano lessons when he was 4 — he recalled his teacher telling him, “Listen with your inner ear” and “Make the piano sing” — and was soon playing piano at the church where his father, who encouraged his interest in jazz, was choir director.He attended DePaul University in Chicago but did not graduate; his career as a professional musician had already begun before he enrolled. While still a student at Wells High School, he had joined a local seven-piece jazz band, the Clefs. When four members of the band were drafted, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Holt and Mr. Young became the Ramsey Lewis Trio.The trio signed with Argo Records, a subsidiary of the Chicago-based blues label Chess, and released their first album, “Ramsey Lewis and His Gentle-Men of Swing,” in 1956. The trio became a fixture on the Chicago nightclub scene, and many other albums followed, as did engagements at Birdland and the Village Vanguard in New York City and at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. But the group remained relatively unheralded beyond Chicago.That changed with “The ‘In’ Crowd.”Mr. Lewis is survived by his wife, Janet; his daughters, Denise Jeffries and Dawn Allain; his sons, Kendall, Frayne and Bobby Lewis; 17 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His sons Ramsey Lewis III and Kevyn Lewis died before him.During the pandemic, Mr. Lewis presented a monthly series of livestream performances. An album drawn from those performances, “The Beatles Songbook,” is slated for release in November.While in lockdown he also wrote a memoir, “Gentleman of Jazz,” in collaboration with Aaron Cohen. It is scheduled for publication next year. More