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      Anne Parsons, Who Revived the Detroit Symphony, Dies at 64

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      She shepherded the orchestra through a bitter six-month strike and then worked to ensure that it flourished after what many considered a near-death moment.Anne Parsons, who as president and chief executive revitalized the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in the aftermath of a bitter strike, using education and technology to attract new audiences, died on March 28 in Detroit. She was 64.Her husband, Donald Dietz, said the cause was complications of lung cancer.Ms. Parsons, who led the Detroit Symphony from 2004 until December 2021, shepherded the orchestra through a six-month strike that began in 2010, one of its most challenging periods. She worked to ensure that the orchestra emerged from what many considered a near-death moment, reassuring donors and civic leaders as tensions between musicians and management escalated.Determined to avoid another labor dispute and eager to make the orchestra a pillar of Detroit’s civic revival, she spent the next decade rebuilding the ensemble, investing in live-streaming technology, expanding community programs and luring unconventional stars like Kid Rock to perform. At a time when many American orchestras were struggling amid declining ticket sales, the Detroit Symphony, digitally connected and agile, became a model modern ensemble.“They hit a financial wall and went through a very brutal strike,” said Mark Volpe, who was president and chief executive of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 23 years. “Instead of conceding and leaving like others have done in that context, she had the stomach, the persistence, the tenacity and, frankly, the vision to do something very special.”Ms. Parsons in an undated photo. She initially pursued a career in finance but found herself drawn to the arts.Detroit Symphony OrchestraAnne Hyatt Parsons was born on Nov. 4, 1957, in Schenectady, N.Y., to Jane (Walter) Parsons, a schoolteacher, and Gerald Parsons, who worked in finance.She initially pursued a career in finance to please her father, working as a bank teller during her summers at Smith College.But Ms. Parsons, who began studying the flute as a child, found herself drawn to the arts. She became manager of the student orchestra at Smith, helping to keep it together during a time of discord about its role on campus.She graduated from Smith in 1980 with a degree in English, promising her father that she would return to banking if, within one year, her career in the arts did not work out. Before long she had begun to ascend in the arts industry.Ms. Parsons was among the first class of fellows chosen by the American Symphony Orchestra League (now known as the League of American Orchestras). As a young employee at the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, she was an aide to the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, who was the music director at the time.She went on to hold a variety of prestigious posts, including orchestra manager of the Boston Symphony from 1983 to 1991; general manager of the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles from 1991 to 1998; and general manager of New York City Ballet from 1998 to 2004.When she arrived in Detroit in the summer of 2004, she faced immediate challenges, including a sharp decline in ticket sales and dwindling support from corporations. She worked to overhaul the orchestra’s offerings, and in 2008, in a coup, she lured Leonard Slatkin, then the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, to take the podium in Detroit.As Detroit’s economy worsened amid the Great Recession and the orchestra’s financial picture grew bleaker, tensions at the orchestra deepened. A strike erupted in October 2010 after the orchestra, citing the difficult economic environment, proposed steep reductions in pay and benefits. The musicians said the cuts would destroy the ensemble’s high caliber, and they led a spirited campaign to oppose them.Ms. Parsons with Kenneth Thompkins, the principal trombonist, and other members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 2021.Detroit Symphony OrchestraMs. Parsons maintained a tough stance throughout the ordeal. “The board was telling her, ‘You’re going to be the bad guy,’” Mr. Slatkin said in an interview. “But that’s the role, that’s the job. And there were days when I don’t know how she managed it. It became very, very vicious. But she stuck it out and kept a positive attitude the whole time.”After six months of heated talks, a deal was reached. In the end, the players accepted large salary reductions but preserved their health insurance and pensions.In the aftermath of the strike, Ms. Parsons set out to find ways to elevate the orchestra’s profile and bring in more revenue. She began a streaming service, one of the first orchestras to do so, and organized tours abroad, including to China and Japan. Vowing to make the Detroit Symphony the “most accessible orchestra on the planet,” she also oversaw efforts to expand music education in the city, bringing orchestra players into public schools that served large numbers of poor families. And she increased the orchestra’s presence in the suburbs, where many of its patrons live, holding concerts in churches, high schools and community centers.Donations rose, and ticket sales began to bounce back. After running deficits for years, the orchestra reported operating surpluses from 2013 to 2021.“What I really felt was this incredible responsibility to find a way forward regardless of the challenge that was facing us,” Ms. Parsons told The Detroit News last year. “The alternative for an institution as storied as the D.S.O. was unacceptable to me.”Even some of the musicians who clashed with Ms. Parsons during the strike said she had been vital to the orchestra’s turnaround.“After the strike, she said: ‘We’re never going to do that again. We have to maintain the artistic quality of the organization,’” said Haden McKay, a former cellist in the orchestra who served on the negotiating committee during the strike. “It was a stake in the ground. It put the institution on good footing, both financially and psychologically.”Ms. Parsons called her move to Detroit with her family the “best decision we ever made.” In 2021, the city named a street just south of Orchestra Hall in her honor.In addition to her husband, a photographer, Ms. Parsons is survived by a brother, Lance Parsons, and a daughter, Cara Dietz.Ms. Parsons learned she had lung cancer in 2018, but despite her illness she kept a busy schedule. She stepped down two months after returning from an extended medical leave.“She wanted to be able to say she’d given everything she could give,” Mr. Dietz said. “And that’s what she said to me after she couldn’t do it anymore. She said, ‘I have nothing else to give.’”Ms. Parsons said last year that her illness had brought into focus the “fragility of our world.”“We just take for granted that we’re going to be healthy and one day we’re not,” she said in an interview last year with Crain’s Detroit Business. “We take for granted someone is going to be a strong leader. When that doesn’t happen, it causes you to wake up every day and be grateful for the positive things.” More

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      Inside Eminem's Restaurant Mom’s Spaghetti

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      Eminem opened a restaurant in Detroit. We checked it out.DETROIT — On Sept. 27, a strange 30-second film appeared on Eminem’s YouTube channel: not a music video teaser, or the first few verses of a new rap single, but a quick-moving advertisement.In the video, cartons brimming with marinara sauce spin hypnotically on checkered tablecloths. A voice-over rattles off vaguely Italian dishes: spaghetti, spaghetti and meatballs, and a “‘sghetti sandwich” — a scoop of pasta squeezed between two pieces of buttery white bread. Eminem, dressed in a thin gold chain and an eggplant-colored flight jacket, holds up what the viewer can only assume are two middle fingers, their message censored by twin takeout containers bearing the phrase “Mom’s Spaghetti.”Marshall Mathers, the man who brought white working-class angst to the top of the charts, was opening a restaurant.Two days later, the rapper surprised fans at the grand opening in downtown Detroit, where he served heaping ladlefuls of pasta to a queue of customers that snaked around the block. A photo of the rapper standing behind the order window — flipping the bird, of course — quickly shot to the top of Reddit’s front page.Mom’s Spaghetti is named for the famed first verse of “Lose Yourself,” a single written for the movie “8 Mile” that sold more than 10 million copies and earned Eminem a pair of Grammys in 2004. The lyrics are imbued with nauseating, do-or-die dread: Our protagonist is locked in a bathroom, drenched with sweat, washing off a regurgitated wad of pasta clinging to his hoodie. “Knees weak, arms are heavy, there’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti.” It was only a matter of time before the lyric became a meme.Nearly two decades later, the restaurant appears to be Eminem’s way of embracing — or one-upping — the joke.On a visit to Mom’s Spaghetti in December, three months after the initial fanfare, the place did not immediately register as a shrine to a rapper’s career. Instead, I found myself at a small counter-service restaurant, tucked in an alley next to the Little Caesars World Headquarters. (Yes, the pizza chain.) I perused the abbreviated menu and placed my order at an outdoor cashier. Almost as soon as my credit card cleared, a steaming, carb-laden paper bag was handed to me through the window.The restaurant’s abbreviated menu includes spaghetti and meatballs, served in an oyster pail, and a ‘sghetti sandwich.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesAfterward, I was escorted inside a gastropub called Union Assembly, where all of the food served at Mom’s Spaghetti is prepared, to a tiny suite of tables and bar stools where customers can eat.Here is where the Slim Shady aesthetic becomes apparent: Most of the “E’s” on the menu and packaging have been turned backward, and the kitchen is made to look like a street corner bodega. I tucked into a booth, already overwhelmed, preparing for a long night in the afterlife of Eminem’s cultural empire.Curt Catallo, 54, is the owner of Union Joints, which operates several restaurants around Detroit, including this one. He described Mom’s Spaghetti as a “true joint venture” between his business and Eminem. The restaurant first appeared as a pop-up shop in 2017 and has been a fixture at the rapper’s various festival performances since. (During the pandemic, Union Joints and Eminem’s Shady Records delivered the pasta to frontline medical workers.)Mr. Catallo said the restaurant’s busiest periods occur “postgame and pregame,” where the staff harvests customers from the foot traffic pouring through Detroit’s pro sports district. Spaghetti is not typically deployed as a takeout food — noodles take a while to cook — but Mr. Catallo’s staff makes all the pasta a day ahead, then reheats the product in a pair of woks. He believes that method blesses the spaghetti with a delectable down-home texture.“Today’s spaghetti is better tomorrow,” Mr. Catallo said.I’d ordered the spaghetti and meatballs, which was served in an oyster pail and covered with a snowy dusting of Parmesan, as well as a ‘sghetti sandwich. This is not Italian cooking, nor does it try to be. Instead, it might be best described as … well, downright motherly. The greasy slop of the pasta, the sugary tang of the red sauce; it’s the spaghetti that emerges from your pantry on the last night before a grocery trip. Mr. Catallo said the noodles possess an inscrutable leftover chemistry. He means that as an endorsement, and he should.Emily Davenport prepares an order of spaghetti.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesIan McManus, the general manager of the Trailer.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesEminem is not here, nor should he be expected anytime soon. Ian McManus, 22, who manages the Trailer — a merchandise shop above the dining area — told me the rapper has dropped by the restaurant a “handful” of times since it opened. “He only lets a few of us know when he’s coming,” Mr. McManus said. “And he only lets us know day-of. If he’s coming through, I’ll find out when I’m on my way downtown.”A smattering of Eminem-themed pint glasses, T-shirts and sneakers filled the room, but the real pièce de résistance was at the back: the Robin costume from the music video for “Without Me,” encased in glass. The sound was the soundtrack to the year I turned 10; seeing a relic of it up close felt like being in the Louvre.Eminem has been famous, and will remain famous, for a long time, but it has also been eight years since his last No. 1 hit. Perhaps that’s why he’s preserved himself in a mini-museum. The rapper is entering that vexing post-prime era that inevitably hunts down every enormously successful person. How should Eminem structure his third and fourth acts? Ideally with some humor and some grace. If Paul Newman could sell salad dressing and enjoy his golden years, maybe Marshall Mathers can do the same with spaghetti.After all, the Eminem brand is still strong, even now. Misty Jesse, 49, and her 15-year-old son, Romeo Jesse, who were dining at Mom’s Spaghetti that December night, told me they grew up with Eminem, which sounds confusing but is honestly quite plausible if you do the math. “I saw him live at the old Detroit Tigers stadium,” said Ms. Jesse, who made the trip to the restaurant from the Dearborn Heights suburbs so that Romeo could shop for some Eminem gear. “It’s crazy how it all circles back around.”Eminem’s Robin costume from the music video for “Without Me” is kept in a glass case inside the Trailer.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesFans will also find notes and lyrics written by Eminem on display.Elaine Cromie for The New York Times“She was surprised that he was one of the first people I started listening to,” Romeo said. “She’s happy that we could bond over his music and sing along to it in the car.”The Jesses are locals, which makes them outliers here. Almost everyone else inside the restaurant, save for the employees, was visiting Detroit for business, pleasure, or a combination of both. A trio of auditors from Atlanta crowded around a table glazed with spaghetti sauce; they were only in town for a few days, and they’d arrived at Mom’s Spaghetti out of passive curiosity — the same gravitational force that pulls New York City sightseers into the Times Square Madame Tussauds.Morgan Martin, 28, said that Eminem’s 2010 album “Recovery” got stuck in her car’s CD player when she was in high school. For 10 years, she exclusively listened to that record as she drove around Georgia. Her friends claim that the experience endowed her with the ability to rap with a near-perfect Eminem cadence.“I’ve since gotten a new car that connects to Bluetooth,” Ms. Martin said, “so now I’m learning more of his work.”For her, Mom’s Spaghetti was a destination. “When I learned we were coming to Detroit, I knew where we were eating,” she said.An illuminated sign above the order window outside Mom’s Spaghetti.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesHer friend and dinner date, Caylen Hemme, 27, was not apprised of that plan. “I didn’t know this was Eminem’s restaurant,” she said from across the table. “I just saw that they had vegan meatballs.”John Farran, a 32-year old service engineer from Orlando, had dined at a high-end Italian restaurant the previous night. The experience, he said, paled in comparison what Mom’s Spaghetti had to offer. “Their sauce was like a soup,” Mr. Farran said, “plus they didn’t give you bread.” He then gestured toward the caramelized chunk of starch half-submerged in the noodles. “It made the whole trip for us, pretty much,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have had anything to look forward to.”“No offense to Detroit,” Mr. Farran said. “Great city.”Mr. Catallo, the restaurant operator, said Mom’s Spaghetti is planning on expanding its menu. Soon there will be Bolognese sauce, from a recipe Mr. Mathers has taste tested. I imagined the rapper, whose career was once defined by rage and controversy, letting a meat sauce linger on his palate for a moment before giving it his stamp of approval. Could Eminem become a latter-day Jimmy Buffett, bringing Mom’s Spaghetti to tourist districts around the country? He declined to be interviewed for this article, so I can’t say for sure.But I can tell you with certainty that on a cold night in Detroit, after scarfing down a pound of pasta, I felt changed. Knees weak, arms heavy. More

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      Rosalie Trombley, Who Picked Hits and Made Stars, Dies at 82

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      As music director for CKLW, a major radio station in the Detroit market, she furthered the careers of Alice Cooper, Bob Seger, the Temptations and many others.Whatever story you have about the high point of your junior high school years, Tim Trombley has a better one. The rocker Alice Cooper once picked him up at his school in a limousine to take him to lunch.That was one of the perks of having Rosalie Trombley for a mother.From 1967 into the early 1980s, Ms. Trombley was the music director for CKLW-AM, a radio station based in Windsor, Ontario, with a signal so powerful that it was heard in dozens of states in the U.S., dominating the markets of Detroit and other Midwestern cities in the days before the emergence of FM. A 1971 headline in The Detroit Free Press called her “The Most Powerful Lady in Pop Music,” because her tastes went a long way toward determining what was played on the station, which in turn went a long way toward determining what was played in the rest of North America.Sometimes, Mr. Trombley related in a phone interview, his mother would bring demo records home, and he would be allowed to play them. She noticed that he was playing one quite a lot: Mr. Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen.”“She made it known to the label, to Warner Bros., ‘Tim has been playing this song over and over,’” Mr. Trombley said, and she slipped it into CKLW’s rotation. In late 1970 it became Mr. Cooper’s breakout hit. And so Mr. Cooper, a Detroit native, took young Tim to lunch one day as a thank-you.“I knew that mom had a really cool job,” Mr. Trombley said.Ms. Trombley died on Nov. 23 at a long-term care center in Leamington, Ontario, where she had been living for some time. She was 82. Mr. Trombley said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Trombley seemed an unlikely starmaker. She was a single mother of three when she started at CKLW as a part-time switchboard operator. The Free Press once wrote that she “looks like Doris Day’s next-door neighbor.” But she was, as newspapers often described her, “the lady with the golden ear” who, with her no-nonsense demeanor, could hold her own in the male-dominated music business of the day.The list of stars who owed her a debt of gratitude was long.“You’d come in in the morning,” Keith Radford, a former newsman at the station, said in an interview for a video series produced by Radio Trailblazers, an organization promoting women in Canadian radio, “and there’d be big bouquets of flowers at the front desk, from Elton John or the Rolling Stones.”Ms. Trombley would hold court on Thursdays for record promoters who hoped to get their new songs onto CKLW’s “Big 30” playlist.“If they wanted the record really bad, they would bring the act with them,” Johnny Williams, a former D.J., said in the video. “So it wasn’t unusual every Thursday to see the Four Tops, the Temptations, Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder, Sammy Davis Jr.”One artist who made such a pilgrimage was Tony Orlando, who in the video recalled that Ms. Trombley had heard him out that day and offered him an invitation.“Rosalie said, ‘I’ll tell you what: If your next record comes within the ballpark of a commercial record, a playable Top 40 record, because you took the time to come here — but only if it has the goods — I’ll give it consideration big time,’” he said. “And that next record was ‘Yellow Ribbon’” — that is, Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Ole Oak Tree,” the top-selling record of 1973. “And she was the first to put it on the air.”Ms. Trombley with the singer-songwriter Bob Seger holding gold record plaques for his 1978 album, “Stranger in Town.” “Seger never had any problem getting on CKLW,” she said. Detroit Free PressRosalie Helen Gillan was born on Sept. 18, 1939, in Leamington. Her father, Shell, was a general foreman at the Ford Motor Company of Canada, and her mother, Katherine Piper, was a switchboard operator.After graduating from high school, she worked at Bell Canada for a time. She married Clayton Trombley in 1958. She took the switchboard job at CKLW in late 1962, working in that capacity for several years and, as The Vancouver Sun put it in a 1973 article about her, “inadvertently picking up the politics of the music business simply by learning to handle sometimes troublesome record-promotion people who arrived at the station to ply their wares.”Around 1968, Ms. Trombley and her husband separated (they later divorced), and at about the same time she was offered the chance to take over for the station’s record librarian, who was going on maternity leave. The station’s program director soon took note of her ear for hits and made her music director, a job she held, Tim Trombley said, until she was laid off in the early 1980s in a downsizing effort.Ms. Trombley didn’t rely only on her own tastes; she would call R&B stations in the area to see what they were playing, which led her to give CKLW’s 50,000 watts of exposure to Black artists. She similarly boosted the careers of Canadian artists like Gordon Lightfoot and the Guess Who, as well as a number of Detroit-area stars, including Bob Seger.“Seger never had any problem getting on CKLW,” she told The Detroit Free Press in 2004 when Mr. Seger was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “Look at the songs. Listen to the lyrics. I’m a lyric freak. When someone is saying something in a song, I can’t be the only person interested in it.”Well, Mr. Seger almost never had any problem getting on the station. Some of his new material came her way in the early 1970s, and she panned it. He sat down and wrote a song about her, called “Rosalie,” that had a winking snide streak.“He was pissed off when he wrote that song about me,” she said. “He told me!”Payola — offering payoffs to get a song played — was part of the radio business during Ms. Trombley’s reign, and her son said it was common knowledge in the industry that she was a single mother, so some promoters would make it subtly known to her that there was money available.“She made it less subtly known,” he said, “that if they wanted to continue to meet with her every week, that was not something that was going to get their record on the radio.”She had her musical favorites, especially Neil Diamond. But that didn’t necessarily win him radio time.“I’m not playing his current release,” she told The Sun in 1973, tactfully not naming it, “because it looks like a midchart record, and I won’t go with it when I know out front that it’s only midchart.”In addition to her son Tim, she is survived by another son, Todd; a daughter, Diane Lauzon; and a grandson.In 2016 Ms. Trombley received a special Juno Award, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy. Radio Trailblazers has an annual award recognizing women who have “blazed new trails in radio.” She received the first, in 2005, and it is now called simply the Rosalie Award. More

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      Barry Harris, Pianist and Devoted Scholar of Bebop, Dies at 91

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      For decades, he performed, taught and toured with unflagging devotion. He also helped to lay the foundation for the widespread academic study of jazz.Barry Harris, a pianist and educator who was the resident scholar of the bebop movement — and ultimately, one of its last original ambassadors — died on Wednesday in North Bergen, N.J. He was 91.His death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of the coronavirus, which exacerbated a number of underlying health problems, said Howard Rees, his longtime business partner and collaborator.[Those We’ve Lost: Read about other people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic here.]Starting in his teens and continuing beyond his 90th year, Mr. Harris performed, taught and toured with unflagging devotion, evangelizing for bebop’s stature as a form of high American modernism and helping to lay the foundation for the widespread academic study of jazz. Yet throughout his career he remained an independent educator: He never joined the faculty of a major institution, instead choosing to embed himself within New York’s music community, reaching students of all ages.For almost half a century, Mr. Harris led a weekly series of low-cost classes in the city, while also playing at prominent clubs around town and jetting off to perform and teach overseas. He was known for his acerbic tongue and his demanding nature, evidence of his passion for teaching.Writing in 1986, the New York Times critic Robert Palmer described Mr. Harris as a “one-man jazz academy.”He came up in the late 1940s and ’50s in Detroit, where a thriving scene fostered some of the greatest improvisers in jazz. Many of the hometown musicians he grew up around — the vibraphonist Milt Jackson; the guitarist Kenny Burrell; the Jones brothers (the drummer Elvin, the pianist Hank and the trumpeter Thad); the saxophonist Yusef Lateef; the pianist Tommy Flanagan — would soon become leading figures, and their contributions would help define the hard-bop sound: a sizzling, blues-drenched style that boiled down some of bebop’s scattered intensity.But Mr. Harris never eschewed bebop’s high temperatures, clattering rhythms and dashing melodies. He remained an evangelist for what he considered the apex of American music making.“We believe in Bird, Diz, Bud. We believe in Art Tatum. We believe in Cole Hawkins,” Mr. Harris told his students later in life, name-checking bebop’s founding fathers. “These are the people we believe in. Nothing has swayed us.”Mr. Harris was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1989. He received multiple honorary doctorates, and was often referred to by friends and students as “doctor.”Mr. Harris in performance in San Francisco in the early 1980s.Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesHe recorded more than two dozen albums, including a string of celebrated releases in the 1960s for the Prestige and Riverside labels. All those LPs featured him either in small ensembles or alone at the piano, demonstrating his wily, wandering harmonic sense and his unshakable feel for bebop rhythm.A stroke in 1993 slightly limited his mobility at the keyboard, but it did little to slow him down. As he aged, he developed a stooped posture, but when he sat at the piano, bent lovingly over the keys with a look of enamored study, his hunch became impossible to notice.He is survived by a daughter, Carol Geyer.Barry Doyle Harris was born on Dec. 15, 1929, in Detroit, the fourth of Melvin and Bessie Harris’s five children. His mother was the pianist at their Baptist church, and when he was 4, she began teaching him to play.As an adolescent, he set himself up at the elbow of some of the more experienced pianists around town. Almost immediately upon learning the fundamentals of bebop, he became a kind of junior scholar of the movement, building a pedagogy around the music that Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and their comrades had invented together in Harlem just a few years earlier.He started hosting informal lessons at his mother’s house, and musicians with considerably more experience often sought out his off-the-cuff symposiums, hoping to seep up what he called his “rules”: exercises and frameworks that could help them unpack the complex — but often unwritten — structures of bebop.“Trane took all my rules,” he told The Daily News of New York in 2012, referring to John Coltrane. “I made up rules for cats to practice.”His process as an instructor was just as improvisational as his performances. “To watch him in action is to witness the oral tradition at its most profound,” the critic Mark Stryker wrote of Mr. Harris in his book “Jazz From Detroit.”In demand as both a bandleader and a side musician throughout the 1950s, Mr. Harris backed some of the era’s leading musicians when they performed in Detroit, including Miles Davis. He sometimes sat in with Parker, bebop’s leading man, when he was in town.Mr. Harris went on tour with the pioneering drummer Max Roach in 1956, and began traveling to New York frequently to record with the likes of Thad Jones, the saxophonist Hank Mobley and the trumpeter Art Farmer. But he had started a family in Detroit and was happily ensconced as a pillar of the scene there.In 1960, at 30, he was finally persuaded by the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley to join the tide of Detroit musicians who had moved to New York. He continued living in the metropolitan area for the rest of his life, teaching and performing almost nonstop and appearing on albums like the trumpeter Lee Morgan’s 1964 hit “The Sidewinder.”Not long after arriving, he became friends with Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the heiress and musicians’ advocate known as the jazz baroness, and she invited him to take up residence at her sprawling home in Weehawken, N.J., overlooking Manhattan and teeming with scores of cats. (Ms. de Koenigswarter arranged for Mr. Harris to stay in the house after she died; he continued living there for the rest of his life.)In 1972, Thelonious Monk moved in, and he stayed until his death 10 years later. So Mr. Harris carried on at the elbow of a fellow master, trading information and further soaking up his language. The Monk songbook remained a pillar of Mr. Harris’s repertoire throughout his life; perhaps thanks in part to his time spent living with Monk, his playing grew both more lyrical and more tautly rhythmic as he got older.Starting in 1974, Mr. Harris held intensive weekly workshops in New York, open to adult students of all ages for a relatively low fee. Students could buy single-evening passes or pay for an entire year. He never stopped teaching the classes, continuing until the pandemic shut things down in March 2020, and then conducting them via Zoom into this year.Mr. Harris teaching a class in Midtown Manhattan in 2020. He held intensive weekly workshops from 1974 until the pandemic shut things down, then continued to teach via Zoom.Jonno Rattman for The New York TimesIn 1982, Mr. Harris opened the Jazz Cultural Theater, a multipurpose space in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where he taught classes seven days a week and hosted performances at night. At some of those performances, he featured a choir made up of children from the neighborhood.Ms. de Koenigswarter helped to finance the establishment, but Mr. Harris declined to sell liquor, favoring a community orientation that would allow for children to be there at all times. As a result, he didn’t turn a steady profit.The theater closed after five years when the rent jumped, but Mr. Harris just moved his operation elsewhere and kept on teaching: at public schools, community centers and abroad.He never really stopped performing either, gigging regularly at venues around New York into his 90s, including a more-or-less annual run at the Village Vanguard.His last performance was in November, in a concert featuring recipients of the Jazz Masters award. He did not play the piano, but he sang a rendition of his own ballad, “The Bird of Red and Gold,” a tale of inspiration and triumph he had first recorded, in a rare vocal performance, in 1979.Over time, Mr. Harris’s students fanned back out across the globe and committed to carrying on his work. With his blessing, one former student set up a venue in Spain called the Jazz Cultural Theater of Bilbao.Interviewed by The Times shortly before the pandemic, Mr. Harris had lost none of his passion for teaching. Contemplating the experience of hearing a student improve, he said, “It’s the most beautiful thing you want to hear in your life.” More

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      Kelli Hand, Detroit D.J. and Music Industry Trailblazer, Dies at 56

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      In 2017, the Detroit City Council honored Ms. Hand as the “first lady of Detroit” for her contributions to the techno music scene.Kelli Hand, a longtime disc jockey known as K-Hand who was named the “first lady of Detroit” for her musical accomplishments, was found dead on Aug. 3 at her home in Detroit. She was 56.Her death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Wayne County medical examiner, who said that the cause was related to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease.Paramount Artists, which represented Ms. Hand, paid tribute to her on social media.“Kelli was undoubtedly the first lady of Detroit, and a trailblazer for women in the music industry,” the company said on Instagram.Ms. Hand was one of the first female D.J.s in Detroit’s music scene and became known for her catalog of albums and extended plays of house and techno with the start of her own label, Acacia Records, in 1990.In 2017, the Detroit City Council honored Ms. Hand with a resolution that called her the “first lady of Detroit” for being a pioneer in the city’s techno music scene and for being “an international legend” who toured clubs and electronic music festivals.The certificate highlighted some of her accomplishments in the male-dominated industry of electronic music in the 1990s, including being the first woman to release house and techno music.“Such an Honor and exciting,” Ms. Hand wrote on Instagram at the time.YouTube videos captured Ms. Hand wearing a headset and smiling and dancing in place as she entertained crowds with her mixes of bouncy beats at nightclubs and events while touring the world.Ms. Hand, whose legal given name was Kelley, was born on Sept. 15, 1964, and raised in Detroit, where her childhood revolved around music, particularly the drums, according to her website.Her passion for rhythm led her to study music theory in college in New York. She also enhanced her music education in the 1980s by frequenting the Paradise Garage nightclub, where, her site says, she soaked up the sounds of the emergent genre of music that would become known as house.In a 2015 interview with The Detroit Metro Times, she reflected on her interest in spinning records after visiting the club in New York City and others in Chicago.“After frequenting Paradise Garage so many times I wanted to buy the records because I loved the music,” she told The Metro Times. “So the next step was, I got to play these records in order to hear them! That led to purchasing a couple turntables, which also led me to D.J.ing in my own bedroom,” she said, adding that doing so led her to do a residence at Zipper’s Nightclub in Detroit.Ms. Hand also talked about how the D.J. scene was dominated by men when she was starting out and how that played a role in using the gender-neutral name K-Hand for her own music.“I wanted to come out with something that was kind of catchy,” she recalled. “At the same time, I didn’t want people to know that I was a girl, because I was just minding the music business. I’m like, OK, what’s going to happen if my name comes out, and I’m a girl, because mostly it’s a lot of guys? This was back in the day. So the label suggested ‘K-HAND.’”On her website, she said that music was not about how someone looks or about the D.J.’s skills but about “being ‘true’ to yourself, and having the ability to express yourself creatively through your own self-confidence that is within you.”Some of her better-known songs include “Think About It,” “Flash Back” and her 1994 breakout single, “Global Warning,” on the British label Warp Records. Billboard said those songs “put her in league” with Detroit’s other top disc jockeys.In a 2000 review in The New York Times about female disc jockeys and rappers taking part in a music festival, Ms. Hand talked about independent record production. When she took over the dance floor, the writer said, “a sense of freedom was thick in the air.”Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Neil Vigdor More