Nineteen Hundred Sixties

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Ken Knowlton, a Father of Computer Art and Animation, Dies at 91

      by

      His work at Bell Labs in the 1960s laid the groundwork for today’s computer-generated imagery in film and on TV.Ken Knowlton, an engineer, computer scientist and artist who helped pioneer the science and art of computer graphics and made many of the first computer-generated pictures, portraits and movies, died on June 16 in Sarasota, Florida. He was 91.His son, Rick Knowlton, said the cause of death, at a hospice facility, was unclear.In 1962, after finishing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Dr. Knowlton joined Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., a future-focused division of the Bell telephone conglomerate that was among the world’s leading research labs. After learning that the lab had installed a new machine that could print images onto film, he resolved to make movies using computer-generated graphics.“You could make pictures with letters on the screen or spots on the screen or lines on the screen,” he said in a 2016 interview, recalling his arrival at Bell Labs. “How about a movie?”Over the next several months, he developed what he believed to be the first computer programming language for computer animation, called BEFLIX (short for “Bell Labs Flicks”). The following year, he used this language to make an animated movie. Called “A Computer Technique for the Production of Animated Movies,” this 10-minute film described the technology used to make it.Though Dr. Knowlton was the only person to ever use the BEFLIX language —he and his colleagues quickly replaced it with other tools and techniques — the ideas behind this technology would eventually overhaul the movie business.By the mid-1980s, computer graphics were an integral part of feature films like “Tron” and “The Last Starfighter.” In 1995, a studio in Northern California, Pixar, released “Toy Story,” a feature film whose images were generated entirely by computer. Today, computer-generated imagery, or CGI, plays a role in practically every movie and television show.“He was the first man to fill a movie screen with pixels,” said Ted Nelson, a computer science pioneer and philosopher who wrote about Dr. Knowlton’s early work. “Now, every movie you see was created on a digital machine.”Kenneth Charles Knowlton was born on June 6, 1931, in Springville, N.Y. His parents, Frank and Eva (Reith) Knowlton, owned a farm in that small community, about 30 miles south of Buffalo, where they grew corn and raised chickens.After graduating a year early from high school as class valedictorian, Dr. Knowlton enrolled in a five-year engineering and physics program at Cornell University, where his parents had first met while studying agriculture before deciding to buy a farm. He stayed at Cornell for a master’s degree, which involved building an X-ray camera using parts from an electron microscope.At Cornell, he met his future wife, Roberta Behrens, and together they joined the Quakers. After he finished his master’s degree, they traveled to Quaker work camps that helped build housing infrastructure for the poor in El Salvador and Mexico, where he contracted polio. He walked with a leg brace or a cane for the rest of his life.It was at Cornell in the mid-1950s that Dr. Knowlton developed his interest in computers — room-size machines operated via punched cards and magnetic tape reels that were just beginning to arrive in government labs, academia and industry. After reading about a group at the Massachusetts Institute Technology that aimed to build computer technology that could translate between languages, like English and French, he joined the project as a Ph.D. student. His thesis advisers included the linguist Noam Chomsky and Marvin Minsky, a founding father of artificial intelligence.At Bell Labs, Dr. Knowlton realized that he could create detailed images by stringing together dots, letters, numbers and other symbols generated by a computer. Each symbol was chosen solely for its brightness — how bright or how dark it appeared at a distance. His computer programs, by carefully changing brightness as they placed each symbol, could then build familiar images, like flowers or faces.Dr. Knowlton and Dr. Harmon’s 12-foot-long computer-generated mosaic of a nude woman was hung on the wall of their boss’s office as a joke. This remastered version was recreated under Dr. Knowlton’s supervision in 2016. Jim Boulton, Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton; remastered from Jim Boulton’s backward-analyzed digital files of Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton’s “Studies in Perception I, 1966.”After experimenting with movies, he applied similar techniques to portraits and other still images. In the mid-1960s, he and a collaborator named Leon Harmon created a 12-foot-long computer-generated mosaic of a nude woman and, as a joke, hung it on the wall of their boss’s office.Their boss, Edward E. David, Jr., the Bell Labs executive director of communications research, who would later serve as science adviser to President Richard M. Nixon, was not amused. But the portrait later caught the attention of the pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, who put it on display in his New York City loft when he launched a project called Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T., in the fall of 1967, aiming to develop new collaborations between artists and engineers.The New York Times published an article about the event the next day, including a picture of Dr. Knowlton’s image of the nude woman, titled “Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I).” It was believed to be the first full-frontal nude printed in the pages of The New York Times. A year later, the picture was part of a landmark exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.”Dr. Knowlton remained at Bell Labs until 1982, experimenting with everything from computer-generated music to technologies that allowed deaf people to read sign language over the telephone. He later joined Wang Laboratories, where, in the late-1980s, he helped develop a personal computer that let users annotate documents with synchronized voice messages and digital pen strokes.In 2008, after retiring from tech research, he joined a magician and inventor named Mark Setteducati in creating a jigsaw puzzle called Ji Ga Zo, which could be arranged to resemble anyone’s face. “He had a mathematical mind combined with a great sense of aesthetics,” Mr. Setteducati said in a phone interview.In addition to his son Rick, Dr. Knowlton is survived by two other sons, Kenneth and David, all from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; a brother, Fredrick Knowlton; and a sister, Marie Knowlton. Two daughters, Melinda and Suzanne Knowlton, also from his first marriage, and his second wife, Barbara Bean-Knowlton, have died.While at Bell Labs, Mr. Knowlton collaborated with several well-known artists, including the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, the computer artist Lillian Schwartz and the electronic-music composer Laurie Spiegel. He saw himself as an engineer who helped others create art, as prescribed by Mr. Rauschenberg’s E.A.T. project.But later in life he began creating, showing and selling art of his own, building traditional analog images with dominoes, dice, seashells and other materials. He belatedly realized that when engineers collaborate with artists, they become more than engineers.“In the best cases, they become more complete humans, in part from understanding that all behavior comes not from logic but, at the bottommost level, from intrinsically indefensible emotions, values and drives,” he wrote in 2001. “Some ultimately become artists.” More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Grachan Moncur III, Trombonist Whose Star Shone Briefly, Dies at 85

      by

      He mixed free jazz and post-bop in notable 1960s and ’70s recordings. But he withdrew from the jazz scene, in part because of a dispute over publishing rights.Grachan Moncur III, a trombonist and composer who came to renown in the 1960s and early ’70s for his deft playing of a hybrid of post-bop and free jazz, but who later receded from the spotlight, died on June 3 — his 85th birthday — in a hospital in Newark.His son Kenya said the cause was cardiac arrest.“Whenever I have a conversation about what’s wrong with the jazz business, I always start out by saying, ‘Where is Grachan Moncur?’” the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, one of Mr. Moncur’s most important collaborators, told The New York Times in 2003.Long before Mr. McLean asked that question, Mr. Moncur (pronounced mon-KUR) had started his jazz career as a teenager, jamming at the New York nightclub Birdland and sitting in with the drummer Art Blakey’s band, the Jazz Messengers. In 1959, he went on the road with Ray Charles.But after about two years, feeling a need to perform with a smaller ensemble based in New York City, he was recruited to join the Jazztet, a sextet formed by the trumpeter Art Farmer and the saxophonist Benny Golson. He played with that group until it disbanded in 1962, then took that summer off to study the challenging and unconventional music of Thelonious Monk. His goal was to learn how to write his own.“I just wanted to get the sound of his music inside of my body,” Mr. Moncur said in an interview with the website All About Jazz in 2003.On a night when he had written two compositions, he said, he got a call from Mr. McLean, whom he had known since Mr. Moncur was a teenager, asking him to join his ensemble for rehearsals and club dates in advance of recording an album for Blue Note Records.That album, “One Step Beyond,” and “Destination … Out!,”both released in 1963, were critically praised documents of a transitional period in jazz when musicians like Mr. McLean and Mr. Moncur were blending the harmonic advances of the bebop era with the more adventurous spirit of the avant-garde. They contained five of Mr. Moncur’s compositions, among them “Ghost Town,” which conjures up desolation in long passages where little is heard except reverberations on vibes and cymbals.Mr. Moncur then recorded two albums for Blue Note as a leader, “Evolution” (1963) and “Some Other Stuff” (1964), with stellar accompaniment. Both albums featured Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone and Tony Williams on drums; “Evolution” also featured Lee Morgan on trumpet and Mr. McLean, while the “Some Other Stuff” lineup included Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone.Reviewing “Evolution” in The Pittsburgh Courier, the critic Phyl Garland praised Mr. Moncur’s technique and the album’s title number, which, she wrote, evoked images of “mankind emerging from one murky, primeval mire into another, undergoing one subtle change after another, as does the music.”What might have been a longer relationship with Blue Note ended after two albums in a dispute over publishing rights. In the end, he managed to retain his rights to the music from “Evolution,” but he sensed that he would not last long at the label.“They were very disappointed with that, and they kind of dropped me like a hot potato,” Mr. Moncur told All About Jazz. He believed he was blackballed over his position — a position he later came to regret. In retrospect, he said, he wished he had found a way to compromise with Alfred Lion, Blue Note’s founder.“I think my mind was really going to a revolutionary attitude more on the business trip than it was on a musical trip,” he said, “because I was kind of determined on trying to own my own music.”Grachan Moncur III was born on June 3, 1937, in Manhattan. His father, Grachan II, played bass with the Savoy Sultans, a swing ensemble, at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. His mother, Ella (Wright) Moncur, was a beautician whose clients — and friends — included the singer Sarah Vaughan.Although enamored of the trombone from age 5, Grachan nonetheless received a cello from his father. But the cello did not inspire him, so his father gave him a trombone. Lessons followed. He also had a role model for the trombone: his father, who played the instrument.“I have never, up until today, heard anybody with a sound like my father,” Mr. Moncur told All About Jazz. “He had a timbre that was very dark and clear. That sound, it just kind of stayed with me, and I always wanted to produce that same type of — project that same type of sound that my father had.”He graduated from the Laurinburg Institute, a historically Black prep school in North Carolina that Dizzy Gillespie had attended in the 1930s. Back in New York, he attended the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School, then kick-started his career in nightclubs before joining Ray Charles’s orchestra.In 1964, Mr. Moncur learned that the Actors Studio was looking to cast a musician for its Broadway production of James Baldwin’s civil rights drama “Blues for Mister Charlie.” Mr. Moncur played two roles, one of them a trombonist, and contributed a piece of music.He recorded “Some Other Stuff” three months after the play opened; two of the cuts on the album, “Gnostic” and “Nomadic,” were reflections on his breakup with a girlfriend and his departure from his $27-a-week apartment.“I was a nomad after losing my room, and I was a gnostic because I had to survive by my wits,” he told The Times.He continued to record, releasing two albums in 1969 on the French label BYG Actuel, “New Africa” and “Aco del de Madrugada” (“One Morning I Waked Up Very Early”), and another, “Echoes of Prayer,” with the Jazz Composers Orchestra, in 1974. But he was entering a long, relatively quiet period during which he made almost no records but ran jazz workshops in Harlem in a studio called Space Station; performed in Europe; and taught jazz at the Newark Community School of the Arts.In 1994, Mr. Moncur adapted his four-movement “New Africa” suite into a theatrical piece for the Alternative Museum in Manhattan. The poet Amiri Baraka, a friend, was the producer.In addition to his son Kenya, Mr. Moncur is survived by his wife, Tamam Tracy (Sims) Moncur; two other sons, Grachan IV and Adrien; his daughters, Ella and Vera Moncur; his twin brothers, Lofton and Lonnie; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His son Toih died in 2016, and his daughter Hilda died in 1992. He lived in Newark.In 2004, the composer and arranger Mark Masters brought together Mr. Moncur and seven other musicians to reprise, with new charts, eight of Mr. Moncur’s pieces for an album, “Exploration,” released on the Capri label.“As a composer, he was original and singular,” Mr. Masters said in a phone interview. “He wasn’t derivative of anyone. I see the Monk influence, but Monk wasn’t hovering over him. His music doesn’t sound like anyone else’s.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Catherine Spaak, Darling of Italian Cinema in the ’60s, Dies at 77

      by

      Born in France, she moved to Italy as a teenager and began a long acting career, which extended to Hollywood in the movie “Hotel.”Catherine Spaak, a French-born actress who made her name crossing genres in Italian, French and occasionally American films, acting alongside stars like Jane Fonda and Rod Taylor, died on April 17 in Rome. She was 77.Her son, Gabriele Guidi, confirmed her death.Born outside Paris, Ms. Spaak went to Italy as a teenager and began a long film career there. Her first major role in a feature film was as a 17-year-old student who has an affair with a middle-aged man in “Sweet Deceptions,” from 1960 (originally “Dolci Inganni”).Four years later she appeared as a Parisian shopgirl in “La Ronde,” a French drama about marital infidelity directed by Roger Vadim, in which she acted alongside Ms. Fonda (who went on to marry Mr. Vadim). The film, a remake of Max Ophuls’ 1950 version based on an 1897 Arthur Schnitzler play, was released and dubbed in the United States as “Circle of Love.”Ms. Spaak became an onscreen sex symbol as a young actress, winning the attention of many international magazines, including Playboy. With her long, straight hair and blunt-cut bangs, she also became something of a style-setter in the 1960s.Her first film role in the United States came in “Hotel” (1967), an adaptation of the Arthur Hailey novel, starring Mr. Taylor. She played the mistress of an investor (Kevin McCarthy) who wants to buy a landmark New Orleans hotel. Variety called her performance “charming and sexy.”In 1968 she had top billing, alongside Jean-Louis Trintignant, in “The Libertine” (originally “La Matriarca”) playing “a restless young widow” who “skips in and out of various sexual encounters,” as Howard Thompson wrote in an unenthusiastic review in The New York Times.She had another leading role in 1971, in Dario Argento’s murder mystery thriller “The Cat O’Nine Tails,” performing alongside Karl Malden and the television star James Franciscus. In 1975 she took on a different genre playing a prostitute in “Take a Hard Ride,” an Italian-American “spaghetti western” that also starred Jim Brown and Lee Van Cleef.Ms. Spaak pursued a parallel singing career in the 1960s and ’70s, recording a handful of albums. She was often likened to the French chanteuse Françoise Hardy, some of whose songs Ms. Spaak covered.Later in her career she hosted a popular Italian talk show called “Harem.”Catherine Spaak was born on April 3, 1945, in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the Paris area, to Charles Spaak, a screenwriter, and Claudie Clèves, an actress. After moving to Italy as a teenager, she remained there for the rest of her life and became a naturalized citizen.She was married four times. Her first husband was the Italian actor and producer Fabrizio Capucci; her second, Johnny Dorelli, was also an actor, and he and Ms. Spaak recorded music together, including the album “Promesse … Promesse …” (1970). She later married Daniel Rey, an architect, and, in 2013, Vladimiro Tuselli.In addition to Mr. Guidi, she is survived by a daughter, Sabrina Capucci, and her sister, Agnes Spaak. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Bobby Rydell, Teenage Idol With Enduring Appeal, Dies at 79

      by

      He had his first hit in 1959. Six decades later, teamed with his fellow singers Frankie Avalon and Fabian, he was still drawing crowds.Bobby Rydell, a Philadelphia-born singer who became a teenage idol in the late 1950s and, with his pleasant voice, stage presence and nice-guy demeanor, maintained a loyal following on tours even after both he and his original fans were well past retirement age, died on Tuesday in Abington, Pa. He was 79.The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Maria Novey, a spokeswoman.Mr. Rydell and two other affable performers who became stars in those years, Frankie Avalon and Fabian, grew up within about two blocks of one another in South Philadelphia. Long after their days on the pop chart were past them, they enjoyed great success on the oldies circuit. The three had toured extensively together since 1985, billed as the Golden Boys.Mr. Rydell did not just have staying power; he also made a comeback after years of alcohol abuse, which he chronicled in his autobiography, “Bobby Rydell: Teen Idol on the Rocks” (2016), written with the guitarist and producer Allan Slutsky. Near death, he had a kidney and liver transplant in July 2012. By that October he was back, singing on a cruise ship with Mr. Avalon. But five months later, he underwent cardiac bypass surgery. Some of his later appearances were charity promotions for organ donation.By 2014, his schedule was heavy again, including 11 concerts in Australia that February. He continued to perform for the rest of his life.Mr. Rydell performing with the City Rhythm Orchestra In Concert at Lincoln Center in New York City, in 2016.Bobby Bank/WireImage, via Getty ImagesMr. Rydell’s recording prime encompassed the era roughly between 1959, when Elvis Presley was in the Army and Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, and 1964, when Beatlemania hit America. It didn’t hurt that Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” was broadcast in those years from Philadelphia, the home of Mr. Rydell’s label, Cameo Records.Mr. Rydell’s repertoire included plaintive love ballads; slow, danceable tunes; occasional frenetic rockers like “Wild One” and “Swingin’ School”; and ageless songs like Domenico Modugno’s 1958 hit “Volare,” which became Mr. Rydell’s signature song in his later touring years.Mr. Rydell was a pop phenomenon but hardly a cutting-edge rock star. Still, he sold a lot more records than some of those who were. Over the course of his recording career he placed 19 singles in the Billboard Top 40 and 34 in the Hot 100. His name alone could conjure up an entire era: The 1970s rock musical “Grease,” in both its Broadway and movie versions, was set in 1959 at the fictional Rydell High School.Mr. Rydell was born Robert Louis Ridarelli on April 26, 1942. His father, Adrio, was a machine shop foreman, and in 1995 the city of Philadelphia honored South 11th Street, where he grew up, as Bobby Rydell Boulevard. Mr. Rydell’s 1963 song “Wildwood Days” paid homage to Wildwood, the New Jersey beach town where his grandmother had a boardinghouse and he spent his early summers; like Philadelphia, Wildwood later held an honorary street-naming for Mr. Rydell.Unlike some of the other pretty faces of his era, Mr. Rydell was a real musician. His father, a fan of the big bands, would take him as a child to see Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw at the Earle Theater in Philadelphia. At age 6, he told his father he wanted to play the drums like Gene Krupa, and he was singing in local nightclubs a year or two later.The bandleader Paul Whiteman had an amateur talent show, “TV Teen Club,” on Philadelphia television in the early 1950s. Young Bobby entered the contest when he was 9; he soon became a regular on the show, remaining for three years. Bobby’s father shortened the boy’s name to Rydell for the show.After a brief period as the drummer for a local group, Rocco and the Saints, which included Frankie Avalon on trumpet, Mr. Rydell went solo as a singer. His first three songs on the Cameo label were flops, but he scored in 1959 with “Kissin’ Time,” which Dick Clark, whose show had succeeded Paul Whiteman’s, immediately liked. It reached No. 11 on the Billboard chart.Mr. Rydell’s romantic voice, cute face and regular-guy personality drew screaming girls, but he also had enough adult appeal to be booked at the Copacabana in New York at 19.Reviewing his Copacabana performance in 1961, Variety complimented him on his “sense of career.” “Right now, he’s a teenager’s teenager,” the Variety critic said. “His style is packed with rhythm and bounce and his ‘nice boy next door’ demeanor is quite winning. Even the adults realize this, and it works to his advantage.”By his 21st birthday, Mr. Rydell had made three trips to perform in Europe and three others to Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Japan. In a 2011 interview, he recalled the reaction in Australia: “They stormed the stage, thousands and thousands of kids. The Australian police had to make a wedge to get us out of Sydney Stadium. It was scary, but all in all it was absolutely tremendous.” (Mr. Rydell went on to tour in Australia more than 20 times.)He also recalled that in 1963, in England, the Beatles climbed onto his tour bus to meet him. He didn’t know them, but they knew him. In the 2000 book “The Beatles Anthology,” Paul McCartney was quoted as saying that he and John Lennon based “She Loves You” on a Bobby Rydell song. He didn’t name the song, but his 1960 hit “Swingin’ School” includes a “Yeah, yeah, yeah” refrain. (Some sources say the song was “Forget Him,” which is somewhat similar lyrically.)Ann-Margret and Bobby Rydell in a scene from “Bye Bye Birdie” on the movie set in Hollywood in 1962.Associated PressColumbia Pictures signed him to a contract in 1961. But the only movie in which he made much of an impact was “Bye Bye Birdie,” released in 1963 and based on the hit Broadway musical of the same name, which poked fun at show business in general and rock ’n’ roll frenzy in particular. Mr. Rydell played Hugo Peabody, the meek high school steady of Kim McAfee, played by Ann-Margret, the small-town girl chosen to give the Elvis-like Conrad Birdie a kiss on national television. Dick Van Dyke and Janet Leigh were the film’s stars, but the parts of Hugo and Kim were considerably beefed up in the transition from stage to screen.In a radio interview in 2013 with Ted Yates of CKOC in Hamilton, Ontario, Mr. Rydell explained why he hadn’t stayed in Hollywood to make more movies: “I couldn’t. There was something about the lifestyle in California that I really wasn’t used to. I was basically a South Philadelphia kid, and I was an East Coast guy, and I really couldn’t stay out in California.” (Mr. Rydell also played a nightclub singer in the 1975 film “That Lady From Peking,” which was shot in Australia.)Underscoring his ties to his family and his city, and going against recommendations that he live on the West Coast, Mr. Rydell bought a house in 1963 in Penn Valley, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, and moved in with his parents and grandparents. He raised his children there, and moved in 2013 only because the house had grown too big for him and his wife. “I had the good fortune to spend my peak years as a recording artist during the golden age of the TV variety show,” Mr. Rydell wrote in his autobiography. “Throughout the early ’60s, I appeared on almost all of them.” Those included shows hosted by, among others, Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, Perry Como, Jack Benny, Milton Berle and, most notably, Red Skelton.After making two appearances on “The Red Skelton Hour” on which he just sang, he appeared in sketches intermittently from 1961 to 1969 as various characters, including Zeke Kadiddlehopper, cousin to Skelton’s country-bumpkin character Clem Kadiddlehopper.“Mr. Skelton fell in love with Bobby,” Mr. Rydell’s personal assistant, Linda F. Hoffman, said in 2013. “His son had passed away, and Bobby always felt he was looked upon by Mr. Skelton as a son. They were very close.”New York Times reviews of two rock ’n’ roll revival shows at Madison Square Garden suggested reasons for both his lesser place in the rock firmament and his future career longevity. In 1975, Ian Dove wrote: “Mr. Rydell is not your hard rocker — his era was in the late 1950s, when rock was being softened and made less frightening. With such songs as ‘Volare,’ he emerges more like a crooner than a rocker.” Reviewing a 1977 show, Robert Palmer wrote that Mr. Rydell “seemed uncomfortable with his rock ’n’ roll hits and would probably have become an Italian crooner had he not grown up in the rock ’n’ roll era.”After his television appearances dwindled, he continued to perform in nightclubs and nostalgia shows, and to tour Australia, until the promoter Dick Fox put the Golden Boys together in 1985, initially for a PBS special. Mr. Rydell, Mr. Avalon and Fabian would perform their own songs and then sing together; there would also be tributes to Frank Sinatra and to Mr. Rydell’s favorite singer, Bobby Darin.“When the three of us are onstage, we’re having fun,” Mr. Rydell said in a 2012 interview with the writer Pat Gallagher. “We’re not trying to fool anybody. Everybody has known us for the better part of 50 years. We just go out there and have fun and the audience can see that.”Mr. Rydell married his high-school sweetheart, Camille Quattrone, in 1968. She died in 2003. He is survived by his wife, Linda J. Hoffman (who is not related to Linda F. Hoffman); two children from his first marriage, Robert Ridarelli and Jennifer Dulin; and five grandchildren.In 2011, Mr. Rydell was characteristically modest. He praised Red Skelton and other show-business veterans for helping him along, recalled that in 1985 the touring trio didn’t think their act would last more than two years, and joked that the “G” sometimes fell off marquees where they performed, making their name “the Olden Boys.”He also said he felt odd that he was one of the first 10 people inducted into the Philadelphia Music Foundation’s Hall of Fame. “Leopold Stokowski, Dizzy Gillespie and Bobby Rydell,” he mused. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”Vimal Patel contributed reporting. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      A Hallowed London Jazz Club Comes to Life Onscreen

      by

      The new documentary “Ronnie’s” tells the story of a venue that reshaped the city’s jazz scene, and the mysterious musician who lent it his name.Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club has been an enduring beacon of musical genius in London. Any self-respecting jazzhead had to make the pilgrimage to the venue during its 1960s heyday. Musicians, too: Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald played it, along with Buddy Rich and Dizzy Gillespie.Scott, one of its benevolent owners, was as hallowed as the establishment itself, but remained a somewhat mysterious figure throughout his life. A charming tenor saxophonist with a warm demeanor and great comedic timing, he also had a gambling addiction and endured bouts of depression. Even those closest to him didn’t feel like they connected with him.“He was a very hard person to know,” Paul Pace, the club’s current music bookings coordinator, said in an interview. “He was a very quiet, private man.”Scott died in 1996 at the age of 69. The venue he opened with a fellow saxophonist, Pete King, is still holy ground among jazz supper clubs in the United Kingdom, and “Ronnie’s,” a new documentary getting a wider release in the United States this week, offers a multidimensional view of Scott and the nightclub through the perspective of journalists, friends and musicians who knew him — and a host of live performance footage. The film celebrates how the spot with narrow hallways and a tiny stage housed all sorts of grand performances, including Jimi Hendrix’s last gig before his 1970 death. And it reveals that the secret of the venue’s success largely was Scott, himself, who drew in patrons like he was an old friend who just happened to know the best players of his era.The tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins first went to Ronnie Scott’s in the 1960s as part of a deal that allowed American musicians to play British venues and vice versa. That partnership was brokered by King, who served as the club’s manager and saw the need to book established jazz artists to draw bigger crowds. His work paved the way for other notable artists, like the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster and the multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk, to play there.The club is still active today, drawing a range of artists from different scenes.Greenwich Entertainment“A lot of people hadn’t seen me in Europe,” Rollins said in a phone interview. “It was my first time in London, so I had a good time just looking at the scene. Every club has its own demeanor, and playing there was a wonderful experience. That was the place to go — Ronnie Scott’s club.”Scott, whose jazz career started in his teens, helped open the club in 1959 after a trip to New York City, where he heard Charlie Parker and Davis play at the Three Deuces along East 52nd Street. He was so taken by the jazz emanating from the New York scene that he wanted to replicate the feeling at home. “To walk in this little place and hear this band with this American sound we’d never really heard in person before — amazing,” Scott says in the film.With assistance from a £1,000 loan from Scott’s stepfather, he and King opened the club as a basement venue on Gerrard Street in Soho, a neighborhood with coffee shops and after-hour venues that catered to British counterculture. Before then, the space had been used as a tea bar and restroom for taxi drivers. Scott and King saw it as a place where British jazz musicians could work out material in a safe space — all strains of jazz were welcome — and get paid fairly, not a small thing in that era. The club, which moved to a bigger space on Firth Street in 1968, is known as the birthplace of British jazz.Yet the narrative wasn’t all sunny: Ronnie Scott’s had good and bad times financially, and sometimes teetered on the verge of closing until some last-minute lifeline kept the lights on. Then there was the issue of Scott’s gambling. “When things were really desperate,” King says in the film, “I used to come to work and there were guys in suits with notebooks there in the afternoon, making notes of how much the piano was worth, and how much the tables and chairs were worth. We were very close to just having to forget it all.”The film’s director, Oliver Murray, heard many similar stories about Scott while making his documentary. “Multiple people said to me that if he was able to gamble the club on certain occasions, he would’ve gambled away the club and then been absolutely devastated,” he said in an interview. “But that’s the complexity of the guy, just a true jazz man in that sense. He does live up to the stereotype of the musician with demons.”Ella Fitzgerald onstage at the club in a scene from “Ronnie’s.”Greenwich EntertainmentMurray was brought into the project by one of its producers, Eric Woollard-White, who frequented the club. One of Murray’s goals was to humanize Scott for a younger audience less familiar with the club’s golden era. “I wanted to make something that was like a passing of the torch from one generation to the next,” Murray said. The story felt especially ripe for this moment, when venues are in jeopardy because of ongoing pandemic challenges.Ronnie Scott’s remains vital, and “cultivates so much talent,” he explained. “It’s not necessarily even just the people that play, but it’s giving people in London a platform to see the very, very best, and that in itself raises the caliber of what’s going on in the city.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Michael Lang, a Force Behind the Woodstock Festival, Dies at 77

      by

      He and his partners hoped their weekend of “peace and music” would draw 50,000 attendees. It ended up drawing more than 400,000 — and making history.Michael Lang, one of the creators of the Woodstock festival, which drew more than 400,000 people to an upstate New York farm in 1969 for a weekend of “peace and music” — plus plenty of drugs, skinny-dipping, mud-soaked revelry and highway traffic jams — resulting in one of the great tableaus of 20th-century pop culture, died on Saturday in a hospital in Manhattan. He was 77.Michael Pagnotta, a spokesman for Mr. Lang’s family, said the cause was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.In August 1969, Mr. Lang was a baby-faced 24-year-old with limited experience as a concert promoter when he and three partners, Artie Kornfeld, John P. Roberts and Joel Rosenman, put on the Woodstock Music and Art Fair on land leased from a dairy farmer, Max Yasgur, in bucolic Bethel, N.Y., about 100 miles northwest of New York City.Since Monterey Pop in California two years before, rock festivals had been sprouting around the country, and the Woodstock partners, all in their 20s, were ambitious enough to hope for 50,000 attendees. Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld, a record executive, booked a solid lineup, with, among others, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and a new group called Crosby, Stills & Nash (they would be joined at the festival by Neil Young). The show was set for Aug. 15-17.They sold 186,000 tickets in advance, at $8 a day. On the opening day, traffic snarled much of the New York State Thruway, and many ticket holders did not make it. Others simply entered the field without paying.In an interview, Mr. Rosenman said that days before the show, workmen had said that they could build a stage or ticket booths but not both; the partners chose a stage.The event became a defining moment for the baby boomer generation, as a celebration of rock as a communal force and a manifestation of hippie ideals. Despite the presence of nearly half a million people, and the breakdown of most health and crowd-control measures, no violence was reported.Mr. Lang — described in The New York Times Magazine in 1969 as a “groovy kid from Brooklyn” — became the public face of the powers behind the festival. He was seen in Michael Wadleigh’s hit documentary “Woodstock” (1970) roaming the grounds in cherubic curls and a vest. Despite the festival’s inception as a moneymaking endeavor, Mr. Lang always insisted that its aims were to bring out the best in humanity.“From the beginning, I believed that if we did our job right and from the heart, prepared the ground and set the right tone, people would reveal their higher selves and create something amazing,” Mr. Lang said in his memoir, “The Road to Woodstock” (2009), written with the music journalist Holly George-Warren.Mr. Lang with an associate, Lee Blumer, at the site of the Woodstock festival in August 1989, its 20th anniversary. Mr. Lang would later be involved in anniversary versions of Woodstock in 1994 and 1999 and an unsuccessful attempt to stage a 50th-anniversary concert in 2019.Suzanne DeChillo/The New York TimesMichael Scott Lang was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 11, 1944, and grew up in middle-class surroundings in Bensonhurst. His father, Harry, ran a business that installed heating systems, and his mother, Sylvia, kept the books.Michael attended New York University and the University of Tampa, and in 1966 he opened a head shop in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami. He soon became involved in the music scene there, and in May 1968 he was one of the promoters of the Miami Pop Festival, with Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Blue Cheer and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention.Later that year Mr. Lang moved to Woodstock, N.Y. — then known as a prime bohemian outpost thanks to the residency of Bob Dylan — and he soon met Mr. Kornfeld. Around the same time, Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rosenman, two young businessmen who were roommates on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, placed a classified ad in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal introducing themselves, half in jest, as “young men with unlimited capital” in search of investment ideas.Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld always maintained that they never saw that ad. But the four men met through one of Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rosenman’s investments, a recording studio in New York, and Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld suggested a studio in Woodstock, which they said was swarming with talent. The four set up a partnership, Woodstock Ventures, and agreed to work together.In his memoir, Mr. Lang said that Mr. Roberts, who had a large inheritance, had agreed to finance both the studio and the festival. Mr. Rosenman, in an interview, said the plan had been for profits from the festival to pay for the studio.When the Woodstock festival took place, it was initially portrayed in the news media as a catastrophe. The Daily News’s front page declared, “Traffic Uptight at Hippie Fest,” and a Times editorial bore the headline “Nightmare in the Catskills.”But images of endless fields of longhaired fans idling peacefully, and of stars like Hendrix, the Who and Santana commanding thousands of fans, ricocheted around the world and established a new template for the rock festival — even though many local governments around the country quickly took action to keep other such hippie fests out of their backyards.Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld quit the partnership. To settle more than $1 million in debts from Woodstock, Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rosenman sold film and soundtrack rights to Warner Bros.; according to Mr. Rosenman, it took about a decade for Woodstock Ventures to break even. Mr. Roberts died in 2001, and in 2006 a performing arts center and museum, the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, was opened on the site of the 1969 festival.Mr. Lang in 2018, when the ill-fated 2019 Woodstock concert was in the planning stages.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesIn 1971, Mr. Lang formed a record label, Just Sunshine, which signed artists including the folk singer Karen Dalton and the funk singer Betty Davis. He also managed Joe Cocker, whose memorable performance at Woodstock helped build his fame. Mr. Lang was also involved in anniversary versions of Woodstock in 1994 and 1999 — the latter marred by fires, rioting and allegations of sexual assault — and he eventually rejoined Woodstock Ventures as a minority partner.That company holds the trademark and other intellectual property rights for the Woodstock festival, including the image of a dove on a guitar that was part of its first poster. Among its many licensing deals was one for Woodstock Cannabis.Mr. Lang is survived by his wife, Tamara Pajic Lang; two sons, Harry and Laszlo; his daughters Molly Lang, LariAnn Lang and Shala Lang Moll; a grandson; and his sister, Iris Brest.In 2019, Mr. Lang attempted to revive Woodstock for a 50th-anniversary concert in Watkins Glen, N.Y., that would feature Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, the Killers, Chance the Rapper, Santana and Imagine Dragons. But the event collapsed amid a legal battle with its financial backer, an arm of the Japanese advertising conglomerate Dentsu.To make the 50th-anniversary show stand out in a market that had become crowded with large-scale festivals like Coachella, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, Mr. Lang envisioned the new event as one that would make social and environmental activism central to its experience, and hark back to its roots.“It just seems like it’s a perfect time,” he said in an interview with The Times, “for a Woodstock kind of reminder.” More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Graeme Edge, Drummer and Co-Founder of the Moody Blues, Dies at 80

      by

      Many of their songs incorporated his spoken-word poetry, making them pioneers in the prog-rock movement of the late-1960s and ’70s.Graeme Edge, the drummer and co-founder of the British band the Moody Blues, for whom he wrote many of the spoken-word poems that, appended to songs like “Nights in White Satin,” made the group a pioneer in the progressive rock movement of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Thursday at his home in Bradenton, Fla. He was 80.Rilla Fleming, his partner, said the cause was metastatic cancer.The Moody Blues first gained attention as part of the British Invasion that dominated the American rock scene in the mid-1960s. Their repertoire originally consisted largely of R&B covers, but by their second album, “Days of Future Passed” (1967), they had developed the blend of orchestral and rock music that would make them famous.“In the late 1960s we became the group that Graeme always wanted it to be, and he was called upon to be a poet as well as a drummer,” Justin Hayward, the band’s lead singer, wrote in a statement on the Moody Blues website after Mr. Edge’s death. “He delivered that beautifully and brilliantly, while creating an atmosphere and setting that the music would never have achieved without his words.”Mr. Edge’s mesmerizing drumming and introspective poetry were a big part of the group’s success. The Moody Blues are probably best remembered for “Nights in White Satin” (1967), a darkly ruminative song that ends, in the original album version, with “Late Lament,” written by Mr. Edge and read by the keyboardist Mike Pinder. (It was missing from the shorter version released for radio.)Though Mr. Pinder’s sonorous baritone and the poem’s opening lines — “Breathe deep the gathering gloom” — make the poem sound melancholy, even foreboding, it was meant to be uplifting, Mr. Edge said.“I think it’s the joy, the spirit that makes it,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2018. “It’s a young boy discovering that he loves somebody for the first time, and he just wants to shout it out from the hills — and shout it out again!”“Nights in White Satin” was not originally a hit, but it reached the Top 10 when it was rereleased in 1972. (Their only other Top 10 singles were their first hit, “Go Now!,” in 1964, and the up-tempo “Your Wildest Dreams” in 1986.) It came to be regarded as a musical landmark — one of the first to emerge from the burgeoning prog-rock movement, which also included bands like Pink Floyd, Genesis and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.The Moody Blues had other hits in the late 1960s and early ’70s, including “Tuesday Afternoon,” “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band)” and “Ride My See-Saw,” before going on hiatus from 1974 to 1977. During that time, Mr. Edge sailed around the world in his 70-foot yacht and released several solo albums.The band found a second wind in the 1980s, when it set aside its prog-rock past and embraced a synthesizer-driven pop sound. They released their last album, “December,” in 2003, but continued to tour regularly afterward.“I never get tired of playing the hits,” Mr. Edge told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2008. “You have a duty. You play ‘Nights in White Satin’ for them. You’ve got to play ‘I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band),’ and you’ve got to play ‘Tuesday Afternoon’ and you’ve got to play ‘Question.’ It’s your duty, and their right.”Mr. Edge at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in 2018, when the Moody Blues were inducted. David Richard/Associated PressGraeme Charles Edge was born on March 30, 1941, in Rochester, a city in southeastern England. When he was 3 his family moved to Birmingham, where he grew up.He came from a musical family: His mother, a classically trained pianist, worked in a movie theater playing the accompaniment to silent films, and his father was a music-hall singer, as were his paternal grandfather and great-grandfather.Mr. Edge’s two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Fleming, he is survived by his daughter, Samantha Edge; his son, Matthew; and five grandchildren.When he was about 10, he heard Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Ten Little Indians” on the radio and immediately fell in love with rock ’n’ roll. Though he trained to be a draftsman, his first job was managing an R&B band in Birmingham.When that band’s drummer quit unexpectedly, Mr. Edge was hired as a temporary replacement. He had never played drums before, but he learned quickly, and when the band hired another drummer, he bought his own kit and decided to become a musician.He founded and played in several bands before he and four other musicians — Denny Laine, Ray Thomas, Clint Warwick and Mr. Pinder — formed the MB Five in 1964. They soon renamed themselves the Moody Blues.Their first hit was “Go Now!” a cover of an R&B song originally recorded by Bessie Banks. But Mr. Edge worried that playing other people’s songs would take them only so far. After Mr. Laine and Mr. Warwick left and Mr. Hayward and John Lodge joined, the band decided to take a new approach.They were big admirers of the Beatles’ use of an orchestra on some of their songs, and they decided to develop a sound that blended rock with classical instrumentation. Though they later recorded and toured with an orchestra, their first efforts employed a mellotron, an analog antecedent to the electronic synthesizer.The resulting sweep of strings and horns that played through their songs, along with Mr. Edge’s poetry, gave the Moody Blues a reputation as a thinking person’s rock band, among the earliest exponents of what came to be called art-rock.“We used to think that we were aiming at the head and the heart, rather than the groin,” Mr. Edge told The South Bend Tribune in Indiana in 2006.The Moody Blues have sold more than 70 million albums and in 2018 were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Fittingly for a song from a band once known for its covers, “Nights in White Satin” has been covered more than 140 times.Clint Warwick died in 2004. Ray Thomas died in 2018.Mr. Edge suffered a stroke in 2016 and retired from touring in 2019, but he remained an official member of the band until his death — the only remaining member of the original quintet, formed almost 60 years earlier. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      Mort Sahl, Whose Biting Commentary Redefined Stand-Up, Dies at 94

      by

      A self-appointed warrior against hypocrisy, he revolutionized comedy in the 1950s by addressing political and social issues.Mort Sahl, who confronted Eisenhower-era cultural complacency with acid stage monologues, delivering biting social commentary in the guise of a stand-up comedian and thus changing the nature of both stand-up comedy and social commentary, died on Tuesday at his home in Mill Valley, Calif., near San Francisco. He was 94.The death was confirmed by Lucy Mercer, a friend helping to oversee his affairs.Gregarious and contentious — he was once described as “a very likable guy who makes ex-friends easily” — Mr. Sahl had a long, up-and-down career. He faded out of popularity in the mid-1960s, when he devoted his time to ridiculing the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; then, over the following decades, he occasionally faded back in. But before that he was a star and a cult hero of the intelligentsia.He had regular club dates in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, with audiences full of celebrities. He recorded what the Library of Congress has cited as “the earliest example of modern stand-up comedy on record,” the album “At Sunset.” (Though recorded in 1955, it was not released until 1958, shortly after the release of his official first album, “The Future Lies Ahead.”) By 1960, he had starred in a Broadway revue, written jokes for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, hosted the Academy Awards, appeared on the cover of Time and been cast in two movies (he would later make a handful of others).An inveterate contrarian and a wide-ranging skeptic, Mr. Sahl was a self-appointed warrior against hypocrisy who cast a jaundiced eye on social trends, gender relations and conventional wisdom of all sorts. Conformity infuriated him: In one early routine he declared that Brooks Brothers stores didn’t have mirrors; customers just stood in front of one another to see how they looked. Sanctimony infuriated him: “Liberals are people who do the right things for the wrong reasons so they can feel good for 10 minutes.”“The Future Lies Ahead,” released in 1958, was Mr. Sahl’s first official album, although he had previously recorded what the Library of Congress has cited as “the earliest example of modern stand-up comedy on record.”J.P. Roth CollectionBut more than anything else, it was politicians who were the fuel for his anger. For that reason he was often compared to Will Rogers, whose death in 1935 had left the field of political humor essentially barren, though Mr. Sahl had none of Rogers’s homeyness and detested the comparison.“I never met a man I didn’t like until I met Will Rogers,” he once said, turning the famous Rogers line against him, despite never having met him. He described Rogers as a man who pretended to be “a yokel criticizing the intellectuals who ran the government,” whereas Mr. Sahl himself pretended to be “an intellectual making fun of the yokels running the government.”In December 1953, when Mr. Sahl first took the stage at the hungry i — the hip nightclub in San Francisco that he helped make hip, where he would routinely be introduced as “the next president of the United States” — American comedy was largely defined by an unadventurous joke-book mentality. Bob Hope, Milton Berle and Henny Youngman may have been indisputably funny, but the rimshot gag was the prevailing form, the punch line was king, and mother-in-law insults were legion. It was humor for a self-satisfied postwar society.“Nobody saw Mort Sahl coming,” Gerald Nachman wrote in “Seriously Funny,” his book-length 2003 study of comedy in the 1950s and ’60s. “When he arrived, the revolution had not yet begun. Sahl was the revolution.”Blazing a TrailMr. Sahl was a shock to the comedy system. Other groundbreaking comedians — Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, George Carlin and Richard Pryor among them — would pour into his wake, seizing on the awareness that audiences were hungry for challenge rather than palliation. And for social commentators who took to the airwaves in the half-century after he began to speak his mind — from Dick Cavett to Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher and Jon Stewart — Mr. Sahl was their flag bearer as well.(If a younger generation of comedians considered Mr. Sahl an inspiration, he did not return their love. He said in a 2010 interview that he found their comedy “kind of soft” and urged them to “take more chances.”)“He just doesn’t bring to mind any other performer in the history of show business,” Mr. Cavett said after watching Mr. Sahl perform in 2004.In 1973 Mr. Sahl, left, visited the New York radio talk-show host Don Imus, one of many people who considered him an influence, to promote his album “Sing a Song of Watergate.”Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFor one thing, he looked different from other comics of the time, eschewing the expected jacket and tie in favor of a more collegiate, informal look in an open-necked shirt and a V-neck sweater. And he peppered his routines with the language of youth and jazz — he was bugged, he dug this or that, he dated a lot of chicks. He took the stage carrying a rolled-up newspaper, a prop that was also a prompt; in Mr. Sahl’s performances, he talked about, anguished over and ranted at the news, spinning it with sardonic digressions, cryptic asides and blistering zingers.“I’m for capital punishment,” he declared. “You’ve got to execute people — how else are they going to learn?”In a vitriolic riff on the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the United States — Mr. Sahl was virulently anti-Soviet — he spoke of an encounter between Mr. Khrushchev and Adlai Stevenson: “Khrushchev said to Stevenson, ‘If you want to be president, I want to tell you how to seize power,’ and Stevenson admonished him and said to him, ‘You know, that’s not the way we do things in this country,’ but several members of the Democratic advisory council who were present admonished Stevenson to keep quiet and listen to this man!”Over the years he directed a venomous wit against Democrats and Republicans alike, famously supporting Kennedy in his presidential campaign against Richard Nixon and then lampooning him after his election: In choosing Kennedy, he said, the country was “searching for a son figure.”His own political leanings were difficult to track. The left wanted to claim him, especially early in his career, but they couldn’t quite do so. Among other things, he could be crudely sexist and, though he supported civil rights, he was acerbic in confrontation with knee-jerk liberal dogma on the subject. Over the course of his life he kept company with politicians of varying stripes, from Stevenson, Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to Alexander Haig and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. He said he had voted for Ross Perot; he praised Ron Paul and defended Sarah Palin; he cast a skeptical eye on Barack Obama’s presidency and was as scathing about Hillary Clinton as he was about Donald Trump.“Are there any groups I haven’t offended?” he was wont to ask from the stage. If nothing else he was a pure iconoclast.“If you were the only person left on the planet, I would have to attack you,” he once said. “That’s my job.”The Barbs BeginMorton Lyon Sahl was born in Montreal on May 11, 1927. His father, Harry, ran a tobacco shop, though he had grown up in New York as an aspiring playwright, and by the time Mort was 7, Harry Sahl had moved the family to Los Angeles and found work as a clerk for the Department of Justice. At 15, Mort joined the R.O.T.C. and left high school, lying about his age to join the Army; after two weeks, his mother, Dorothy, got him out.After high school, he enlisted again and served in the Army Air Forces in Alaska, where his anti-authoritarian impulse first flowered. He edited a base newspaper called Poop From the Group, which needled military structure and routine and which earned him, he said, 83 straight days of mess-hall duty.Following his discharge, he attended Compton Junior College and the University of Southern California, earning a degree in city management, and then followed a young woman — Sue Babior, whom he would eventually marry — to Berkeley. Prompted by Ms. Babior, he approached the owner of the hungry i, Enrico Banducci, for a performing gig, though it was mostly a music club. He got a tryout.“I didn’t tell anyone, but I didn’t think he was so great,” Mr. Banducci recalled in “Seriously Funny.” He added: “I really looked at him and said, ‘Poor kid, he looks so skinny.’ I thought for 75 bucks a week he can’t hurt the place.”Mr. Sahl’s early performances stayed away from politics. But within weeks he was commenting on the national scene, and that’s when his audience began to build.He twitted Dwight D. Eisenhower for his dullness. Senator Joseph McCarthy became a favorite target: “Joe McCarthy doesn’t question what you say so much as your right to say it.” Lines from his act began appearing in newspaper columns, and when Herb Caen, the powerful San Francisco Chronicle columnist, gave Mr. Sahl’s act his imprimatur, his popularity took off.He made record albums. He played college concerts. He appeared on television with Steve Allen and Jack Paar.Mr. Sahl in costume for a sketch in the 1962 television special “The Good Years.”United Press InternationalIt was after Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 election that Mr. Sahl’s career first veered off track. He wrote barbed political one-liners for Kennedy the candidate, but when he turned his wit on the president-elect, tweaking him for his youth and for his family’s money and power, liberals who had loved his criticism of conservatism became notably cool.On the occasion of Kennedy’s presidential nomination acceptance speech at the Los Angeles Coliseum, Mr. Sahl remarked slyly to a crowd estimated at 100,000 that Nixon had sent a congratulatory telegram to Joseph P. Kennedy, the president’s father: “You haven’t lost a son, you’ve gained a country.”Whether Mr. Sahl was the victim of Kennedy family wrath or a blackball from liberal Hollywood, as he sometimes claimed, or whether his own thorniness was to blame — he bickered with producers and missed a number of engagements, and he was fired from a starring role in a 1964 Broadway play, Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” — gigs were fewer and farther between in the 1960s. In 1966, his attempt to open his own nightclub in Los Angeles failed when, he said, backers vanished after press previews.“My so-called liberal supporters have all moved in with the establishment,” he said from the stage at one preview. “The same people who like jokes about John Foster Dulles and Goldwater suddenly freeze when they hear satirical humor about Vietnam or the war on poverty.”Sahl the ‘Disturber’Mr. Sahl worked on radio and on local television in Los Angeles, but he didn’t help his cause with what some felt was an obsession with the Kennedy assassination. His performances began to include reading scornfully from the Warren Commission report. And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who claimed to have uncovered secret evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin, and who accused a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, of conspiring to murder the president. No convincing evidence, secret or otherwise, was produced at Mr. Shaw’s trial, and the jury acquitted him in less than an hour.“I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination,” Mr. Sahl wrote in “Heartland,” a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, “and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad company. I don’t think Gene McCarthy is bad company. I don’t think that Jack Kennedy is bad company. I don’t think that Garrison is bad company.“I learned something, though. The people that I went to Hollywood parties with are not my comrades. The men I was in the trenches with in New Orleans are my comrades.” He concluded, “I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for justice.”Mr. Sahl in performance at the Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley, Calif., in 2014. He continued to perform there regularly until last year.Josh Edelson/ReutersMr. Sahl was married and divorced four times, first to Ms. Babior; then to China Lee, the first Asian American model to be a Playboy centerfold, from whom he was divorced for the second time in 1991; and finally to Kenslea Motter, from whom he was divorced in 2009. Mr. Sahl and his second wife had a son, Mort Jr., who died in 1996 of a drug overdose. No immediate family members survive.Though he never reclaimed his central place in the entertainment firmament, Mr. Sahl was somewhat resurgent in the 1970s, partly because Watergate had reinvigorated the public appetite for derision aimed at politicians. He recorded an album, “Sing a Song of Watergate”; was booked by television hosts like Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and David Frost; and continued to do college concerts.“I’m not 18 anymore,” he lamented in “Heartland,” “but I’m the angriest man on any campus I visit.”Indeed, Mr. Sahl never lost his fervor for pointing out life’s ironies and the hypocrisies of public figures. In 1987, in the wake of Jackie Mason’s successful one-man show, “The World According to Me!” he reappeared on Broadway in one of his own, “Mort Sahl on Broadway,” and he continued to perform in clubs long after that.In recent years, feisty as ever despite deteriorating health, he had been performing one night a week in Mill Valley, where he had moved after four decades in Beverly Hills. His performances, at the Throckmorton Theater, were also streamed online and continued until the onset of the pandemic.Mr. Sahl with his fellow comedian Robin Williams backstage at the Throckmorton Theater in an undated photo.Reuters“I work as a disturber,” Mr. Sahl said in a Times interview after a 2004 performance, a reminder of lines from other decades and how little he had changed.Even at the height of his fame, in 1960, he was sardonic, bitterly ironic, unsparing.“I’m the intellectual voice of the era,” he said to Time magazine, “which is a good measure of the era.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More