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      Jaimie Branch, Trumpeter Who Crossed Genre Lines, Dies at 39

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      One of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, she forged a direct emotional, and even spiritual, connection with her listeners.Jaimie Branch, an innovative avant-garde trumpet player and composer whose punk-rock intensity and commitment to experimentation and to dissolving the distinctions between genres invigorated the music scenes of New York and Chicago, died on Aug. 22 at her home in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She was 39.Her death was announced by International Anthem, the Chicago-based label that released albums by her groups Fly or Die and Anteloper. No cause was given.Over the last decade, Ms. Branch emerged as one of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, coaxing a remarkable range of sounds from her horn. She used electronic effects and toy noisemakers (including a Fisher Price Happy Apple from the 1970s) to further extend her sonic spectrum. She would often play a complicated passage, step back and scream, and then plunge back into playing without missing a beat.“I mean every note that I play,” she told the online music journal Aquarium Drunkard in 2019. “When I’m up there, I’m putting it all out on the table. It’s like high risk, high reward.”Ms. Branch forged an emotional, even spiritual, connection with listeners. Her energy could barely be constrained by the stage, filling a room not just with the sound of her trumpet but also with the force of her presence.Offstage, she was just as magnetic. Known to friends as Breezy, she was a gregarious figure, as averse to formality and affectation as she was to capital letters (she preferred her name and song titles lowercase).Ms. Branch was conservatory-trained, but her stage attire was unconventional for jazz circles: an Adidas track suit, a kimono draped over a “Young Latin & Proud” T-shirt, a baggy Outkast “ATLiens” baseball jersey. Her head was always covered, whether by a hoodie, a jauntily askew baseball cap or a knit toque, and her forearms were festooned with colorful tattoos.“She was the quintessential example of ‘honest music,’” Scott McNiece, International Anthem’s co-founder and director of artists and repertoire, said in an interview. “Music that has the capacity to change people’s lives and change the world, which everyone needs now more than ever.”Ms. Branch composed most of the music with Fly or Die, a quartet whose other members were Chad Taylor on drums, Jason Ajemian on bass and Lester St. Louis on cello (who replaced Tomeka Reid after the group’s first album, called simply “Fly or Die”). She favored improvisation for Anteloper, a dub-influenced duo with the drummer Jason Nazary, both of whom also doubled on synthesizers and other electronic gear.While she regularly performed concerts for cultural programmers like Roulette (where she was a 2020 resident artist) and Arts for Art, Ms. Branch was equally at home creating dissonant synthesizer squiggles on a noise-rock bill at Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, or playing an impromptu jam session at the San Pedro Inn in Red Hook with her most recent trio, c’est trois, with the bassist Luke Stewart and the drummer Tcheser Holmes.In a 2017 article on women in jazz, the New York Times critic Giovanni Russonello described “Fly or Die” as one of “the most startling debut albums in jazz this year,” adding that “Ms. Branch uses extended technique and blustery abstraction to a dizzying effect.” In DownBeat magazine’s 2020 critics poll, Ms. Branch was voted “rising star” on trumpet.Ms. Branch in action with her group Fly or Die at the Winter Jazzfest in New York in 2018.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesOn the 2019 album “Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise,” she revealed her impressive singing voice on two songs, one of which, “prayer for amerikkka pt. 1 & 2,” recounts the story of a young Central American woman detained after crossing the Southern border. (The song was based on the actual case of an El Salvadoran teenager whom Ms. Branch’s mother had assisted.)Despite the power of her trumpet playing, Jaimie felt very vulnerable, her sister, Kate Branch said in an interview, and she felt even more so when singing, adding, “She really cared about the message.”Jaimie Rebecca Branch was born on June 17, 1983, in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. Her father, Kenneth, was a mechanical engineer; her mother, Soledad (Barbour) Branch, known as Sally, is a psychotherapist and social worker. “Jaimie” is spelled the way it is, her sister said, because the girls’ Colombian maternal grandmother couldn’t understand why their mother would call her daughter Jaime, a boy’s name, “so my mom added another ‘i’ so my grandmother could properly pronounce it.”Jaimie started playing piano at age 3 and wrote her first song, “My Dreams End in the Sky,” at 6. A small orchestra at the family’s church in Long Island performed it, and Jaimie sang it and dedicated it to a retiring minister.When she was 9, the family moved to Kenilworth, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, where she began playing trumpet in the school band. After playing extensively at New Trier High School in Winnetka (including a stint in a ska-punk group, the Indecisives), she moved to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied jazz performance.After graduation Ms. Branch moved to Chicago, where she became a fixture of the jazz scene. “You could hear her all-encompassing sound just by looking her straight in the eyes,” the trumpeter Rob Mazurek, a frequent Chicago collaborator, said in an email.She left Chicago in 2012 to attend graduate school at Towson University in Baltimore, but departed a few credits short of a master’s degree in jazz performance. She told The Chicago Reader in 2017 that she had begun using heroin in 2008, and she struggled with opioids for years, enrolling in multiple inpatient treatment programs, most recently on Long Island in 2015.Following her time in that program, Ms. Branch moved to Red Hook. She gigged constantly, whether as the leader of her own groups or as a guest in the ensembles of the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and the vocalist Fay Victor.“She was a true collaborator, and that’s why she was so damn good at playing this music,” said the Brooklyn composer and vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, who began improvising with Ms. Branch soon after she arrived in Brooklyn. “She could listen, give and receive in equal measure with an unparalleled generosity. She had so many extremely close friends who also were collaborators, and because of that she wanted each individual to be really strong and strengthen the community as a whole.”In addition to her sister, Ms. Branch is survived by her mother and two half brothers, Clark and Russell. Her father died in 2017; the first Fly or Die album was dedicated to him.Ms. Branch had recently finished mixing Fly or Die’s third studio album. Ever seeking new sounds, she was also discussing potential projects like dub remixes of Anteloper and exploring her interest in the Chicago electronic dance music genre known as footwork.“A lot of her collaborators were jazz musicians,” said Piotr Orlov, a friend and supporter who wrote the liner notes for the 2021 album “Fly or Die Live,” “but ‘the music’ for her was much broader, always filled with rhythm for moving, improvisation for keeping it interesting or unexpected, and camaraderie. Which is why the connections she made between so-called jazz and contemporary classical, beats and electronic music, rappers and dancers, standards and the hard-core songbook, were completely organic, and always fascinating.”On Wednesday night, as news of Ms. Branch’s death spread, about 75 of her friends and fellow musicians gathered on Valentino Pier in Red Hook, a few blocks from her apartment. As “Fly or Die Live” played through a phone propped up against a small, tinny-sounding megaphone, some in the crowd tapped out beats on drums or on the concrete, others banged tambourines and sleigh bells, and the young saxophonist Zoh Amba played melancholic funereal blasts.From across the Red Hook Channel the distant sound of another trumpet could be heard, most likely from a mariachi band in a waterfront bar, joining the music in a phantom collaboration. More

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      Joey DeFrancesco, Reigning King of the Jazz Organ, Dies at 51

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      A prodigy whose playing had drawn raves since he was a teenager, he helped bring the Hammond B3 back into the jazz lineup.Joey DeFrancesco, who was widely credited with bringing the organ back into vogue in jazz circles in recent decades, has died. He was 51.His wife, Gloria, posted news of his death on Facebook on Friday. She did not say where or when he died or cite the cause.Mr. DeFrancesco had musicianship in his genes: His father, John DeFrancesco, has been playing jazz organ since the 1950s. He was dazzling listeners when he was a teenager.“DeFrancesco — whose infectious, imp-of-the-perverse expressions make him as much fun to watch as listen to — can stride, flatten fifths and string together quotes from Bird, Diz, Monk and Miles with the polished resourcefulness of the eight-year veteran that he is,” Gene Seymour of The Philadelphia Daily News wrote in 1986 after observing the Settlement Jazz Ensemble at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, where the young Mr. DeFrancesco was then a student.“And all the while you watch and listen,” Mr. Seymour added, “you find a little voice inside yourself chanting: ‘He’s 15 years old!’”Within two years Mr. DeFrancesco had toured with Miles Davis and opened for Bobby McFerrin and Grover Washington Jr. In 1989, at 17, he played at Duke University with well-known musicians like the trumpeter Clark Terry in a concert that announced the forthcoming Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, which would open soon after.“As Mr. DeFrancesco played Duke Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady,’ the elder musicians beamed and whispered encouragement,” Jonathan Probber wrote of that show in The New York Times. “The distinct impression was that Mr. DeFrancesco was an example of hopes on the way to realization.”Certainly he was on the way to a formidable career, one that included more than 30 recordings as a bandleader, numerous others as a sideman and countless concerts. Along the way he brought the organ back into fashion in jazz.The Hammond B3 organ became a favorite in jazz circles in the 1950s, with Jimmy Smith, who had numerous hit albums on the Blue Note label, leading the way. But in 1975 the Hammond company stopped making the instrument, and the trend of organ-based trios in jazz clubs faded.Mr. DeFrancesco was a multi-instrumentalist; he also played trumpet, saxophone, piano and synthesizer. But he built his career playing an old-school B3.“I love the synthesizers and play all that stuff, but you can’t beat the sound of the B3,” he told The Associated Press in 1991. “The instrument has a very warm tone. It’s got the contrasts. It just has all those emotions in it. It’s got little bits of every instrument in it. It’s like having a whole orchestra at your fingertips.”Mr. DeFrancesco’s first album, “All of Me,” was released in 1989, and dozens more followed, with his musical interests ranging far and wide. He recorded his own original music. A 2004 album was called “Joey DeFrancesco Plays Sinatra His Way.” His “Never Can Say Goodbye” in 2010 reimagined the music of Michael Jackson. And he collaborated on albums with Van Morrison, the guitarist Danny Gatton and others.The bassist Christian McBride had known Mr. DeFrancesco since they were students at the Settlement School.“Joey DeFrancesco was hands down the most creative and influential organist since Jimmy Smith,” he said in a statement. “In terms of taking the organ to the next level and making it popular again for a younger generation, no one did it like Joey.”Mr. Seymour, who decades ago wrote about the teenage Mr. DeFrancesco in Philadelphia and later became a critic at Newsday, remembered Mr. DeFrancesco in a Facebook post on Friday.“His meteoric rise to fame didn’t surprise me at all,” he wrote. “What did, over time, was how deeply and consummately he mastered the jazz organ tradition at all ends of the musical spectrum, from blues and funk to post-bop and avant incantations. He fulfilled the obligations of his calling by never standing still, never being complacent.”Mr. DeFrancesco in performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island in 2011.Erik Jacobs for The New York TimesMr. DeFrancesco was born on April 10, 1971, in Springfield, near Philadelphia. He didn’t wait long to pick his career path.“When I was 4, my father brought in this monstrous thing, a B3, and he turned it on,” he told The Boston Herald in 1994. “It has a motor and a generator. I started playing it and the sound just moved me. Being a 4-year-old and making up your mind about what you want to do for the rest of your life — I was very fortunate.”He of course credited his father with being his first influence.“You can’t be better off than having a dad who plays the same instrument that you do,” he said. “The music that I heard from the time I was born was jazz.”Happenstance helped propel his career: As a teenager he was performing on a local television show in Philadelphia when Miles Davis was the featured guest. The veteran jazzman was impressed, and Mr. DeFrancesco ended up touring with him for six months.He released a steady stream of albums, five of which received Grammy Award nominations, including, most recently, “In the Key of the Universe” (2019). On his latest album, “More Music” (2021), which features 10 original compositions, he played six different instruments and threw in some vocals well.A full list of survivors was not immediately available.Mr. DeFrancesco was something of a showman, even when he was a sideman. In 2010, for instance, he played with a trio led by the saxophonist David Sanborn. Mr. Sanborn was the headliner, but, as Nate Chinen wrote in The Times of the trio’s gigs, “It’s often as much Mr. DeFrancesco’s show, and sometimes more so.”If he was more flamboyant than some of his contemporaries, that was deliberate, Mr. DeFrancesco told The Buffalo News in 2004.“I think these new players are too damn serious,” he said. “The joy of it, the fun of it, is something that jazz has lost. I mean, we are entertainers, after all. If you don’t look like you’re having fun onstage, how is anyone in the audience supposed to?” More

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      Virginia Patton Moss, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ Actress, Dies at 97

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      The last surviving adult member of the film’s cast, she played the sister-in-law to James Stewart’s George Bailey. Three years later, she quit Hollywood.Virginia Patton Moss, the last surviving adult member of the cast of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” who, three years after that film was released, left Hollywood to find her own wonderful life raising a family in Ann Arbor, Mich., died on Aug. 18 in Albany, Ga. She was 97.The death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her son, Michael Cruse Moss.As Virginia Patton, she began her movie career at 18. She had appeared in 10 films, mostly in uncredited roles, when she was cast in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946), which stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a frustrated banker in the town of Bedford Falls who, when he faces financial ruin, contemplates suicide, but who is saved by a guardian angel who shows him what the lives of everybody in town would have been like without him.Miss Patton appears in the film when her character, Ruth Dakin, steps off a train with George’s younger brother, Harry (Todd Karns), at the railroad station in Bedford Falls, bearing news that they had married. Harry introduces her as Ruth Dakin, but she adds confidently, “Ruth Dakin Bailey, if you don’t mind.”“What’s a pretty girl like you doing marrying this two-headed brother of mine?” George asks.“Well, I’ll tell you,” Ruth says. “It’s purely mercenary. My father offered him a job.”George is shaken, realizing that if Harry takes the job, he can’t flee Bedford Falls and leave his family’s building-and-loan association to his brother to run, as he had long hoped. Then, when a still dazed George catches up to Ruth, who has walked ahead of him eating popcorn, she tells him, “George, George, George … that’s all Harry ever talks about.”Before that scene was filmed, Miss Patton was worried that she would be eating buttered popcorn and that the camera would zoom in and show butter on her white gloves.“We rehearsed it,” she recalled in 2013 when the St. Nicholas Institute, which promotes the ideals of Santa Claus, gave her its first Spirit of Christmases Past, Present & Future Award. Mr. Capra, she recalled, “didn’t say anything about it. His assistant didn’t say anything about it. His cameraman didn’t say anything about it.” So, she decided, “I’ll just pretend everybody eats buttered popcorn with gloves.”Virginia Ann Marie Patton was born on June 25, 1925, in Cleveland and grew up in Portland, Ore. Her father, Donald, was an aeronautical engineer, and her mother, Marie (Cain) Patton, was a homemaker. Virginia was a great-niece of General George S. Patton, the bold World War II Army commanderAfter her family moved to Los Angeles, she attended classes at the University of Southern California and appeared in a play written by William C. deMille (the older brother of the director Cecil B. DeMille, who capitalized the “D” in his family’s last name). That performance led her to Hollywood.At 18 she appeared in a musical number with Ann Sheridan in her first film, the Warner Bros. musical “Thank Your Lucky Stars” (1943); she was in a string of other Warner Bros. films before Mr. Capra signed her for “It’s a Wonderful Life.”She appeared in four more films — including starring roles in “The Burning Cross” (1947) and “Black Eagle” (1948)— but left Hollywood for good after marrying Cruse Watson Moss, who became an automotive executive, in 1949, when she was 24.“It’s Tinsel Town,” she said of Hollywood when she was interviewed in 2010 by Lucy Ann Lance on WLBY, a radio station in Ann Arbor, where Mrs. Patton Moss lived for most of her life. “And that’s not the life that I wanted. I got what I wanted in Ann Arbor.”In that university town, she raised her three children and was a Boy Scout and Girl Scout leader; studied art history and archaeology at the University of Michigan; served on the boards of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments, both at the university; was a docent at the school’s Museum of Art; and raised funds for various organizations. She was also president of the Patton Company, her family’s real estate investment firm.Joseph Lam, a former director of the Stearns collection, said in an email that Mrs. Patton Moss “was very creative in setting the scenes of fund-raising activities,” adding, “Her flower decorations, and other artistic details, contributed much to the artistic and jovial atmosphere of the parties.”In addition to her son, Mrs. Patton Moss is survived by a daughter, Carol Moss Loop; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 2018. Another son, Stephen, died in 1997.When reminiscing about “It’s a Wonderful Life,” she spoke extensively about Mr. Capra and his message, delivered through the life of George Bailey, about the impact a single person’s life can have on his community.“Capra knew we were coming out of a war, we were in terrible shape and there needed to be some type of stimulus,” she told the St. Nicholas Institute. She then rang a bell, which, in the film, signified that an angel had gotten its wings.She added, “Go get ’em, Capra.” More

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      in Television

      Joe E. Tata, Peach Pit Owner in ‘Beverly Hills, 90210,’ Dies at 85

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      As Nat Bussichio, Mr. Tata doled out fatherly advice to the students who frequented his diner on the hit series, which ran for 10 seasons on Fox.Joe E. Tata, a character actor whose roles in a long television career included henchmen on the original “Batman” series and bit parts on “The Rockford Files,” but who was best known as the good-natured owner of the Peach Pit diner on the hit 1990s teenage drama “Beverly Hills, 90210,” died on Thursday in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 85.His death, at a care facility, was confirmed by his lawyer, Richard W. Sharpe, who did not specify a cause.Mr. Tata’s daughter Kelly Tata also shared the news of his death in a statement on a GoFundMe page that she had started to help cover the cost of his care. She said he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2018.From 1990 to 2000, Mr. Tata played Nat Bussichio, the friendly owner of the fictional Peach Pit, in 238 episodes of “Beverly Hills, 90210.” As Nat, he was a father figure and role model to the characters on the show, which followed a group of high school friends in the affluent 90210 ZIP code.Although the show, which made its debut on the Fox network in 1990, got off to a sluggish start, it became a hit and a pop-culture phenomenon, known for intercutting romantic themes with serious issues, including racism and teenage pregnancy. The show’s popularity also made celebrities of its telegenic young cast, which included Jason Priestley, Shannen Doherty, Luke Perry, Jennie Garth, Ian Ziering, Brian Austin Green and Tori Spelling (whose father, Aaron Spelling, produced the show).Joseph Evan Tata was born on Sept. 13, 1936, in the Bronx. His father was a vaudevillian, known as John Lucas, and sometimes also known as Rosey the Singing Barber.Complete information abut Mr. Tata’s survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Tata landed his first television role in 1960, on an episode of the detective series “Peter Gunn.” He went on to have a prolific career as a character actor, with bit parts on dozens of shows.Science fiction was a specialty: He provided the voice of several robots on “Lost in Space” and played an alien on “The Outer Limits.” He also played several henchmen on the 1960s “Batman” series, which starred Adam West.He was a familiar face on police and detective shows in the 1960s and ’70s, including “Police Story” and “The Rockford Files,” and appeared on three episodes of “Mission: Impossible” as three different characters.But Mr. Tata’s most enduring role was on “Beverly Hills, 90120.” The students of West Beverly High were often shown hanging out after school at the Peach Pit, where Mr. Tata’s Nat would listen to their problems and dole out advice.In an Instagram post on Thursday, Mr. Ziering said that while Mr. Tata “may have been in the back of many scenes,” he was “a leading force, especially to us guys, on how to appreciate the gift that 90210 was.”The series ended in 2000 after almost 300 episodes. It gave rise to the spinoff “Melrose Place” and the 2008 reboot “90210,” in which Mr. Tata reprised his role.His most recent acting credit, from 2014, was as a high school principal in the ABC Family comedy series “Mystery Girls,” which starred Ms. Garth and Ms. Spelling. More

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      Sy Johnson, Arranger Who Worked Closely With Mingus, Dies at 92

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      A jazz Renaissance man, he arranged many of the bassist’s later works and also wrote reviews, took photographs and composed his own music.Sy Johnson, a Renaissance jazz master — pianist, composer, journalist, photographer — who made his biggest impact as a frequent arranger, orchestrator and all-around right-hand man for the celebrated bassist Charles Mingus, died on July 26 in Manhattan. He was 92.His wife, Lois Mirviss, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of Covid-19.The jazz critic Gary Giddins called Mr. Johnson “one of those indispensable people you never heard much about,” and few in the jazz world would disagree. He started out in the late 1950s playing piano, first in Los Angeles and then in New York. He soon branched out to arranging, working not just with Mingus but also with a host of musical luminaries including the saxophonist Lee Konitz and the arranger and bandleader Quincy Jones.He also wrote words: He conducted a seminal interview with Miles Davis and contributed record reviews to the short-lived quarterly Jazz magazine in the 1970s. He worked on Broadway and even composed his own musical, based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. And all along, he toted a 35-millimeter Leica camera, crafting spontaneous, intimate portraits of the jazz scene of the 1960s and ’70s. Many of his photographs were collected in a 2014 book, “Jazz: Personal Encounters.”Yet for all that, Mr. Johnson remained just outside the limelight, onstage but in a dark corner.“Gifted as he was, Sy seemed quite content to function as an invisible man making a slew of celebrated musical figures sound better than they might have without him,” Mr. Giddins said in an email.Mr. Johnson’s work with Mingus covered the last decade of the bassist’s life, before he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1979. Mr. Johnson understood how to arrange Mingus’s compositions to fit the big-band formats that he preferred later in his career, without pushing them into a standard big-band sound or losing the lush texture of Mingus’s work.Just as important, Mr. Johnson knew how to navigate around Mingus’s famously exacting, often explosive personality, where other collaborators often feared to tread. Mingus trusted Mr. Johnson to write melodies and organize his sometimes chaotic flow of musical insights into a workable piece of music.Mr. Johnson “often accompanied our family in our home and retreats, regularly providing a photographic chronicle to Mingus’s private moments,” Roberto Ungaro, the president of the Charles Mingus Institute and the son of Mingus’s widow, Sue, said in an email. “In a world of struggle and populated with adversaries, Sy was one of the people Mingus truly trusted.”Their relationship did not end with Mingus’s death. Sue Mingus created a series of bands — the Mingus Big Band, the Mingus Orchestra and Mingus Dynasty — to play his music, and once again Mr. Johnson often provided arrangements.“He knew how to capture on paper exactly what Mingus wanted,” Mr. Giddins said, “and seemed to have stoked his ambition instead of trying to reduce it.”Charles Mingus and his wife, Sue, at their home in Manhattan in 1978, as photographed by Mr. Johnson. In addition to working in music, Mr. Johnson documented the jazz scene of the 1960s and ’70s with his 35-millimeter Leica camera.Sy JohnsonSivert Bertil Johnson Jr. was born on April 15, 1930, in New Haven, Conn. His parents were both immigrants: His father, a homebuilder, came from Sweden, and his mother, Elizabeth (Werning) Johnson, from Lithuania.Along with his wife, he is survived by his sister, Elizabeth Keppel.Young Sy admired jazz long before he mastered it. He later recalled the first time he heard Charlie Parker play, on a recording one of his teenage friends brought home.“At that age I wasn’t capable of analyzing it,” he said in a 2018 interview. “All I knew was that suddenly, the winds had changed.”After high school he joined the Air Force, where his friends included John Williams, who would go on to achieve fame as a composer of film scores. Following his discharge he settled in Los Angeles and studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, with plans to become a lawyer. He studied English and graduated in 1958, but by then he had fallen in with the city’s jazz scene and set his plans for a legal career aside.His first encounter with Mingus was promising. Soon after he arrived in New York, in 1960, the bassist invited him to play with his band at the Showplace, a club in Greenwich Village.Things soured quickly. At one point during a performance, Mingus ordered Mr. Johnson to play “pedal tones, just pedal tones” — sustained low notes — but Mr. Johnson struggled to find the right pattern.Mingus got angry. He threw down his bass, ran to the piano and put his face up to Mr. Johnson’s.“I see these maniacal eyes an inch away,” Mr. Johnson recalled. “And he’s just glaring and making these funny breathing noises.”Mingus hammered four times on the bass end of the piano, then ran back to his instrument and resumed playing, furiously.At other times, though, Mingus seemed to appreciate Mr. Johnson; he once told the audience, “This white boy can play!”Then one evening Mr. Johnson arrived to prepare for a show, only to find the piano closed and the renowned saxophonist and flutist Yusef Lateef standing beside it.“If you were me and had the chance to hire Yusef Lateef or you,” Mingus said by way of apology, “who would you hire?”Mr. Johnson went on to play with other groups and eventually found a career as an arranger with Emil Charlap, a jazz musician who ran an arranging and copying company.One day in 1971 Mingus came to the office, looking for someone to arrange music for an upcoming album. He had someone specific in mind, but that person wasn’t there — so he thrust the sheet music into Mr. Johnson’s hands, apparently not remembering their earlier collaboration.His first arrangements for Mingus were for two pieces on his album “Let My Children Hear Music,” released by Columbia in early 1972: “The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jiveass Slippers” and “Don’t Be Afraid, the Clown’s Afraid Too.” In his liner notes, Mingus called it “the best album I have ever made.”Mr. Johnson also helped pull off a concert at Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) in New York, which was recorded and released that same year as “Mingus and Friends Live in Concert.” Taken together, the two recordings showed that, thanks in part to Mr. Johnson’s arrangements, Mingus had mastered the big-band sound he had been seeking for so long.Mingus would later also record two of Mr. Johnson’s compositions, “Wee” and “For Harry Carney.”Mr. Johnson’s work went beyond his collaboration with Mingus. Before and after the bassist’s death, he worked with a number of leading musicians as an accompanist, arranger and composer. He did the arrangements for two Broadway musicals, “Blues in the Night” (1982) and “Black and Blue” (1989). He also wrote a little-seen musical, “Hobbit, Hobbit,” based on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.“He was just a master,” Tom Stites, who was Mr. Johnson’s editor at Jazz magazine, said in a phone interview. “He was a master jazz writer. The master photographer. He was just a master of everything he touched.” More

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      Creed Taylor, Producer Who Shaped Jazz for Decades, Dies at 93

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      He made scores of albums with artists who were well known and others who soon would be. He also founded two important record labels.Creed Taylor, one of the most influential and prolific jazz producers of the second half of the last century, best known for the distinctive work he did for his CTI label in the 1970s, died on Monday in Nuremberg, Germany. He was 93.Donna Taylor, his daughter-in-law, said he had been visiting family there when he had a stroke on Aug. 2. He never recovered, she said.Mr. Taylor began his career as a jazz producer in the 1950s, and in 1960 he founded the Impulse! label, which would become the home of John Coltrane and other stars. He did not stay there long, though, and most of the label’s best-known records were produced later.He moved to another jazz label, Verve. He made a lasting mark there by producing recordings by the saxophonist Stan Getz that popularized bossa nova, including “Getz/Gilberto,” the celebrated 1964 album by Getz and the guitarist João Gilberto that included “The Girl From Ipanema,” with Mr. Gilberto’s wife, Astrud. Both the album and the single, a crossover hit, won Grammy Awards.Mr. Taylor made a lasting mark at Verve Records with recordings by the saxophonist Stan Getz that popularized bossa nova, most notably “Getz/Gilberto.”In 1967, Mr. Taylor was at A&M, where he founded another label, Creed Taylor Inc., better known as CTI. Three years later it became an independent label, which over the next decade became known for stylish albums by George Benson, Stanley Turrentine, Grover Washington Jr. and others — and for a degree of commercial success that was unusual for jazz.“In many ways the sound of the 1970s was defined by CTI,” the musician and producer Leo Sidran said in introducing a 2015 podcast featuring an interview with Mr. Taylor.The records Mr. Taylor released on the label often emphasized rhythm and favored accessibility over esoteric exploration. As J.D. Considine wrote in The New York Times in 2002 when some of these recordings were rereleased, Mr. Taylor “believed that jazz, having started out as popular music, ought to maintain a connection to a broader audience.”Some purists might have scowled at the time, but the effect was undeniable.“The true measure of his impact was that at the height of the 1970s when so many musical styles were jostling for attention, more people were listening to jazz than ever before,” Ashley Kahn, a music historian, said by email. “For most, CTI wasn’t thought of as a jazz label; it was a sound, a musical identity like Motown. When you bought a CTI album you knew it was going to be top-quality on all levels, with at least two or three tracks you’d be grooving to for a long time to come.”Impulse!, still a force in jazz, memorialized Mr. Taylor on Twitter.“He was a genius when it came to finding new and special music that would stay with listeners forever,” the company’s post said.Creed Bane Taylor V was born on May 13, 1929, in Lynchburg, Va. His father was, as Donna Taylor described him, a “gentleman farmer,” and his mother, Nina (Harrison) Taylor, was a personnel director.Mr. Taylor grew up in Bedford, Va., and in a bucolic area known as White Gate, west of Roanoke, where his family had owned land for generations. He played trumpet in high school, inspired by Harry James. He was surrounded by bluegrass and country music, he said in a 2008 interview with JazzWax, but much preferred jazz.“It was cooler music,” he said. “It made you feel hip, not corny.”He enrolled at Duke University, where he studied psychology until the Korean War interrupted his schooling. After finishing his service with the Marines, he completed his psychology degree in 1954 but quickly made his way to New York to pursue his real interest, music. An earlier one-week visit to the city, he said on Mr. Sidran’s podcast, had whetted his appetite.“Fifty-second Street was on fire,” he said. “You could walk into any little club at the base of any brownstone in that whole section and at no charge you could hear Basie, Ellington, Getz, you name it. I could hardly wait to get back again.”Mr. Taylor at the Institute of Audio Research in New York in 2005. With the revival of vinyl in recent years, collectors are valuing the records he made for his CTI label in the 1970s.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesHe was inspired, in a manner of speaking, to go into producing by “Jazz at the Philharmonic,” the long-running series of concerts and recordings organized by Norman Granz, whom he would later succeed at Verve: He didn’t like it.“The long bass solos, the tenor solos, you name it,” he said on the podcast. “Drum solos, and the crowd, and all the excitement — what happens to the music in all that? ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’ was, for me, a circus.”In 1954 he landed a job at Bethlehem Records, where he produced albums for the vocalist Chris Connor and others. It was an era when producers did everything for a record, from lining up musicians to trying to get radio stations to play it. Mr. Taylor enjoyed being Mr. Do-It-All.“I was fascinated by the record business,” he told JazzWax, “from how to put a record’s cover and liner notes together to getting the records into stores and selling them.”And sometimes, it meant discovering the artist. He told JazzWax that in late 1954 he moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village and became intrigued by a flute player he could hear practicing as he sat in his backyard garden.“He’d play scales and then launch into amazing jazz lines,” Mr. Taylor recalled. “I decided I had to find out who the devil was playing.”He followed the sound and knocked on the musician’s door. It was Herbie Mann, then still largely unknown; Mr. Mann recorded some of his first albums for Bethlehem.In 1956 Mr. Taylor moved to ABC-Paramount, where he produced all sorts of albums (one was a collection of speeches and other highlights from the career of Dwight D. Eisenhower) but concentrated on jazz, making records with the trumpeter Kenny Dorham, the singer Bobby Scott and countless others before forming Impulse! as a subsidiary label.There and at his later stops, he encouraged his artists to try new things, and not to shy away from other genres. One of his George Benson albums, for instance, was “The Other Side of Abbey Road” (1970), featuring Mr. Benson’s guitar interpretations of songs from that Beatles album.At CTI in the early 1970s, he also packaged artists together in star-studded stage shows. “A real jazz festival has finally come to Atlanta,” The Atlanta Voice wrote in 1973 when the CTI tour played that city with a lineup that included the vibraphonist Milt Jackson, the guitarist Eric Gale and the singer Esther Phillips.Whatever the project, Mr. Taylor’s stamp was distinctive.“The through line to the labels Creed worked for or started — including Impulse, Verve and CTI — was an auteur-like, 360-degree approach to creating high-quality recorded product,” Mr. Kahn, the music historian, said, “recruiting A-list jazz players and being open to familiar pop melodies — like bossa nova, soul and R&B tunes, even the Beatles. He used top studios — Rudy Van Gelder’s most often — arrangers like Don Sebesky, and placed museum-quality photography on the album covers.“He thought and acted like a one-man record company, and then became one: CTI. Think Phil Spector, but with a deep feeling for jazz and soul, and without the guns.”Mr. Taylor’s first marriage, to Marian Wendes in 1956, ended in divorce in 1984. In 1988 he married Harriet Schmidt. She survives him, along with three sons from his first marriage, Creed Bane Taylor VI, Blakelock Harrison Taylor and John Wendes Taylor; a daughter from his second marriage, Courtney Taylor Prince; and five grandchildren.The CTI label, though successful early, ran into financial trouble — Mr. Taylor said he made some ill-advised decisions on distribution matters — and filed for bankruptcy in 1978.He also got into a protracted legal dispute with Warner Bros. over the rights to Mr. Benson’s music. After a jury found in Mr. Taylor’s favor in 1988 and awarded him more than $3 million, he was able to revive the label for a time. By then, 1970s CTI records had begun to be reissued by CBS Records, which had acquired the catalog. Rappers were sampling his records, and, with the revival of vinyl in recent years, collectors were valuing them.In 2012 Mr. Taylor spoke to a jazz studies class at North Carolina Central University, recounting stories of how he got the guitarist Wes Montgomery to try new things, how he talked Nina Simone through the recording of her album “Baltimore,” and more. He encouraged any would-be producers among the class to remain ever curious.“You have to keep your eyes and your ears open the whole time,” he said. More

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      Morgan Taylor, Inventive Children’s Performer, Dies at 52

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      His popular character Gustafer Yellowgold was aimed at youngsters and, more generally, “people who enjoy humor and absurdity and good pop music.”Morgan Taylor, a children’s performer who with fanciful songs and hand-drawn animation drew youngsters into the world of Gustafer Yellowgold, a saffron-colored explorer from the sun who shared a house with an eel and enjoyed music by a rock band made up of bees, died on Aug. 11 in Miamisburg, Ohio, near Dayton. He was 52.His death, in a hospital, was caused by sepsis, said his wife, Rachel Loshak. Mr. Taylor, who lived in Chatham, N.Y., was visiting family and friends in Ohio when he became ill.First in his native Ohio and then, beginning in 1999, in New York City, Mr. Taylor toiled for years in relative obscurity as a guitarist in minor rock bands and a sound engineer. Occasionally, for his own amusement, he would record nutty songs he’d written. About 20 years ago, his wife, a singer-songwriter, suggested he try writing a children’s book, and he went back and gave those nutty, just-for-him songs another listen.“I had accidentally built this entire universe in these scattered pieces that all fit together as I wrote song after song over the years,” he told The Philadelphia Daily News in 2011. “All I had to do was shake the sieve.”One ditty in particular, “I’m From the Sun,” inspired him to create Gustafer Yellowgold, whom Mr. Taylor introduced in 2005 in a CD and DVD, both called “Gustafer Yellowgold’s Wide Wild World.” He developed a stage show to go with that release, singing songs from the record while animated videos he had made played on a screen.Mr. Taylor said his Gustafer songs and stories — two of his albums received Grammy nominations — were “about the roller coaster childhood can be.”The target audience was younger children, but Mr. Taylor was nothing at all like Raffi or the Wiggles. His songs had a rock sensibility and, he hoped, wouldn’t make parents cringe.“It’s really for adults,” he said in 2011, “and it’s really for people who enjoy humor and absurdity and good pop music.”He performed his Gustafer shows all over the country, including at Symphony Space in Manhattan, where Darren Critz, the director of performing arts programs, was always glad to book him.“Morgan’s music, through Gustafer Yellowgold, reflected everything a parent could dream to see in their kids’ lives: joy, a love for life, creativity, wonder, and even a touch of rebellion,” Mr. Critz said by email. “All of it encouraged kids just to be who they were, and to never stop growing into who they wanted to become. What a great gift for parents to be able to share these ideals with their kids through music, rather than a pep talk that would inevitably bring about toddler-style eye-rolls.”Mr. Taylor released a series of Gustafer CDs and DVDs over the years, and they grew more ambitious as they went along. “Gustafer Yellowgold’s Infinity Sock” (2011), his fourth release, was the first to have a narrative thread (Gustafer searches for the toe end of the longest sock in the universe), which carried through all 10 songs.“For me it’s easy to make up stuff that’s freaky and funny,” he told The Dayton Daily News of Ohio that year. “The challenge is to pull it into some semblance of organization, so I thought it was important to have a plot. It was a good challenge for me because it’s easy to be absurd, but I wanted it to be absurd and linear.”Mr. Taylor’s songs were full of colorful word juxtapositions — one was called “Wisconsin Poncho,” another “Melter Swelter” — and the kind of absurd plotting that makes perfect sense to a child. The song and video “Gravy Insane,” for instance, told the story of a family of bats that was adept at making gravy and had to establish an impromptu gravy store on the roadside when its gravy-laden truck jackknifed (“’cause bats can’t drive,” the lyric explained) and the spilled cargo drew a crowd.“Gravy Insane” appeared on “Dark Pie Concerns,” a 2015 Gustafer release that was nominated for a Grammy Award for best children’s album. “Brighter Side,” released in 2017, was also nominated.Morgan Andrew Taylor was born on Sept. 5, 1969, in Kettering, Ohio, near Dayton, to Gordon and Elizabeth (Young) Taylor. At his memorial service on Aug. 18 at Southminster Presbyterian Church in Dayton, among the stories told about him was one that noted his ability, as a child, to imitate an assortment of sounds convincingly. His version of the end-of-the-period school bell was so accurate that he would sometimes get his class dismissed early by employing it, leaving whichever teacher he victimized baffled as to why no other classes were funneling into the hallways as Mr. Taylor and his classmates were sent on their way.He graduated from Kettering High School and attended a local college for a time, though he never completed a degree. More formative than classroom learning, he said, was his discovery in 1988 of the Minnesota rock band Trip Shakespeare.“I was completely blown away and became obsessed with their music,” he told The Pioneer Press of St. Paul, Minn., in 2011. The infatuation is why, when he developed Gustafer’s origin story years later, he had the creature arrive on Earth by landing in a Minnesota lake.After playing in bands in Ohio, Mr. Taylor moved to New York in 1999. He found a job as a sound engineer at the Living Room, a Lower East Side club that showcased local musicians. Ms. Loshak sometimes performed there, and, as Mr. Taylor recounted to The New York Times in 2006, one night “she stayed after her gig, and we talked, and all of a sudden the sun was coming up and we were kissing on a street corner.”They married in 2004. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their two sons, Harvey and Ridley; his mother; a brother, Grant; and a sister, Ann Wiseman.Mr. Taylor built Gustafer Yellowgold into a modest franchise, which included plush toys he designed. He also had a radio show on WKNY in Kingston, N.Y., and had recently created a podcast about Trip Shakespeare.John Munson, that group’s bassist, memorialized Mr. Taylor in a statement.“He made the realities of growing up less scary for all of us,” he said, “parents and children alike.” More

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      Gary Gaines, Coach of ‘Friday Night Lights’ Fame, Dies at 73

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      He coached the Permian High School Panthers in Odessa, Texas, for four seasons in the 1980s, including the one that became the subject of a best-selling book.Gary Gaines, who coached the high school football team in West Texas that was the subject of “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream,” the best-selling book that inspired a feature film and a television series, died on Monday in Lubbock, Texas. He was 73.The death, at a memory care facility, was confirmed by his wife, Sharon (Hicks) Gaines, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.The Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas, were a powerhouse team that had won four state championships by the time Mr. Gaines was hired as its head coach in 1986. He had already coached four other high school teams in Texas and had become renowned for his teaching skills.“He was a quiet leader who trusted his coaches to do their jobs and saw the game from all perspectives, not just one side or the ball or the other,” Don Billingsley, a running back for Permian in the 1980s, said in a phone interview. “He was a great coach and a great mentor.”Permian’s high profile in Texas and its prospects for success in 1988 lured the writer Buzz Bissinger to move temporarily to Odessa, follow the team and write what became “Friday Night Lights,” published in 1990. Mr. Bissinger was fascinated to learn that the team played before as many as 20,000 fans on Friday nights.“Twenty thousand,” he wrote. “I had to go there.”He portrayed Mr. Gaines as a man under great pressure to win, in a state obsessed with high school football and a city whose fans demanded success. When the Panthers lost a game by one point late in the season, Mr. Gaines arrived home to find several “For Sale” signs planted in his lawn — “a not-so subtle hint that maybe it was best for everyone if he just got the hell out of town,” Mr. Bissinger wrote.A knee injury wrecked the season for the team’s star running back, James Miles, known as Boobie, and the Panthers did not win a fifth title, losing in a semifinal game of the state playoffs. After the game, Mr. Gaines gathered his tearful players in a circle and led them in prayer.“Father,” Mr. Bissinger quoted him as saying, “it hurts so much because we did so many things good and came up short.”After “Friday Night Lights” was published, Mr. Gaines said he felt betrayed by Mr. Bissinger, because he had not produced a more positive account of how football brought the Odessa community together. Mr. Gaines admitted that he had not read the book, but based on what he had been told, he said he objected most to its description of racism in Odessa, in particular toward Mr. Miles, who is Black and whom an assistant coach at Permian referred to with a racial slur.Mr. Gaines told The Marshall News Messenger of Marshall, Texas, in 2009 that his wife called him sobbing after she read the book, saying it made the community look like a “bunch of racists.” He added: “There’s rednecks all around here just like there is in Lubbock. You can go anywhere you want and hear the N-word.”Mr. Bissinger, in a phone interview, said, “He thought I had betrayed him because it wasn’t a puff piece, but I’m not the one who said what was said about Boobie.” He added, “It’s a tough place to be a coach, and he handled it with great dignity.”Billy Bob Thornton portrayed Mr. Gaines in the 2004 film “Friday Night Lights,” based on Buzz Bissinger’s 1990 book of the same name.Ralph Nelson/UniversalWhen “Friday Night Lights” was turned into a film in 2004 by the director Peter Berg, Billy Bob Thornton was cast as Mr. Gaines. In his review in The New York Times, the critic A.O. Scott wrote that Mr. Thornton, in a “sly and thorough performance,” portrayed Mr. Gaines “as “neither a my-way-or-the-highway autocrat nor a rah-rah motivator.”Two years later, when “Friday Night Lights” was adapted as a television series, it was set in a fictional town — Dillon, Texas — and the high school team was coached by a fictional character, Eric Taylor (played by Kyle Chandler). Connie Britton played the coach’s wife in both the film and the series.Gary Alan Gaines was born on May 4, 1949, in Crane, Texas. His father, Durwood, was a superintendent at a Gulf Oil plant; his mother, Dorothy (Burnett) Gaines, was a homemaker. After playing quarterback in high school, Gary moved to wingback at Angelo State University, in San Angelo, Texas, graduating in 1971.He began his long Texas coaching journey as an assistant at high schools in Fort Stockton and Monahans. He became the head coach at high schools in Petersburg and Denver City before moving to Permian, as an assistant, in time to help the Panthers win a state title in 1980. He was subsequently the head coach at Tascosa High School in Amarillo, Monahans High School and Permian.In 1989, Mr. Gaines led the undefeated Panthers to a state championship. In all, he had a 46-7-1 record as head coach at Permian. But he soon left to join Texas Tech University as an assistant coach.“He loved coaching and he loved the kids,” Ms. Gaines, his wife, said in a phone interview, explaining his peripatetic movements. “When we got out of college, he went after his first job. But after that, everybody came after him.”After four seasons at Texas Tech, he returned to coaching high school in Abilene and San Angelo before being named the head coach at Abilene Christian University. Following a subpar 21-30 record, he resigned and spent two years as the athletic director of the school district in Ector, which includes Odessa, and another two as the athletic director of the district in Lubbock.In 2009, he returned to Permian as head coach, but that run was not as successful as the first had been; over four seasons, the Panthers had a 23-21 record, including one playoff victory. Mr. Gaines resigned in 2012 from what would be his final coaching job.“We’re going to give it to someone else and, hopefully, they can make more out of it than we did,” Mr. Gaines told The Associated Press. “We came here to make some deep playoff runs, and we weren’t able to do that.”In 2017, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Nicole Strader; his son, Bradley; his sisters, Dana Howland and Tamra Reidhead; and five grandchildren.Mr. Bissinger said that he visited Mr. Gaines at Abilene Christian University about 20 years after the publication of “Friday Night Light.”“I went into his office and he looked like he’d seen a ghost,” Mr. Bissinger said. “We had a nice 15-minute conversation, and he couldn’t have been nicer.”But, he added: “He kept saying I had betrayed him. He has the right to think what he wants.” More