Ben E. King, Soulful Singer of ‘Stand by Me’

Ben E. King, the smooth, soulful baritone who led the Drifters on “There Goes My Baby,” “Save the Last Dance for Me” and other hits in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and as a solo artist recorded the classic singles “Spanish Harlem” and “Stand by Me,” died on Thursday in Hackensack, N.J. He was 76.

His lawyer, Judy Tint, said Mr. King, who lived in Teaneck, N.J., died at Hackensack University Medical Center after a brief illness, offering no further details.

Mr. King was working in his father’s Harlem luncheonette in 1956 when a local impresario, Lover Patterson, overheard him singing to himself and persuaded him to join a group he managed, the Five Crowns.

Lightning struck when the group, then known as the Crowns, performed at the Apollo Theater on a bill with the original Drifters in 1958 and attracted the attention of George Treadwell, who managed the Drifters and owned the name.

Stand by me, Ben E. King, 1961

Video by BlackAsWhite1

Mr. Treadwell had been feuding with his group, which had entered a lean period after Clyde McPhatter, its lead singer, was drafted into the Army in late 1954. He fired the Drifters en masse and replaced them with Mr. King and three of his fellow singers.

“There Goes My Baby,” released in 1959, reached No. 2 on the pop charts. It was followed by “Dance With Me,” “This Magic Moment,” “I Count the Tears,” “Lonely Winds” and “Save the Last Dance for Me,” a No. 1 hit.

Mr. King left the Drifters in 1960 and embarked on a successful solo career. “Spanish Harlem,” written by Mr. Leiber with Phil Spector, reached the Top 10 that year. “Stand by Me,” which Mr. King helped write, reached the Top 10 in 1961 and again in 1986, when it was used in the soundtrack of the Rob Reiner film of the same name.

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Gerald Wilson, Versatile Jazz Arranger

“Even if you were chronologically decades or maybe generations younger than Gerald, you always felt like he was the youngest person in the room,” Loren Schoenberg, a saxophonist and conductor who is the artistic director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, said in an interview on Tuesday. “He had none of that feeling that you were hanging out with a guy from the 1930s or 1940s.”

Mr. Wilson was often a behind-the-scenes influence; even if you had never heard of him, you were often hearing him. Usually he was given credit. Sometimes his work was brazenly borrowed.

The memorable melody from “Yard Dog Mazurka,” the stomping hit he wrote for Lunceford (and among Mr. Wilson’s favorites of his own compositions), resurfaced as “Intermission Riff,” a hit for the Stan Kenton band for which Ray Wetzel was credited as the composer. Mr. Wilson considered suing but decided against it. Years later, he wrote for Mr. Kenton — and received credit.

Horace Silver, 85, Master of Earthy Jazz

Heard his music last night, Wednesday 18 June 2014, on my ride home (in my new Subaru). I didn't know of his death. I supposed it was his birthday.

Horace Silver, a pianist, composer and bandleader who was one of the most popular and influential jazz musicians of the 1950s and ’60s, died on Wednesday at his home in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was 85. His death was announced by Blue Note Records, the company for which he recorded from 1952 to 1979.

After a high-profile apprenticeship with some of the biggest names in jazz, Mr. Silver began leading his own group in the mid-1950s and quickly became a big name himself, celebrated for his clever compositions and his infectious, bluesy playing. At a time when the refined, quiet and, to some, bloodless style known as cool jazz was all the rage, he was hailed as a leader of the back-to-basics movement that came to be called hard bop.

Hard bop and cool jazz shared a pedigree: They were both variations on bebop, the challenging, harmonically intricate music that changed the face of jazz in the 1940s. But hard bop was simpler and more rhythmically driven, with more emphasis on jazz’s blues and gospel roots. The jazz press tended to portray the adherents of cool jazz (most of them West Coast-based and white) and hard bop (most of them East Coast-based and black) as warring factions. But Mr. Silver made an unlikely warrior.

His albums included “Song for My Father,” which featured his father on the cover.  

Credit Blue Note Records 

 

His piano playing, like his compositions, was not that easily characterized. Deftly improvising ingenious figures with his right hand while punching out rumbling bass lines with his left, he managed to evoke boogie-woogie pianists like Meade Lux Lewis and beboppers like Bud Powell simultaneously. Unlike many bebop pianists, however, Mr. Silver emphasized melodic simplicity over harmonic complexity; his improvisations, while sophisticated, were never so intricate as to be inaccessible.

Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver was born on Sept. 2, 1928, in Norwalk, Conn. His father, who was born John Silva but changed the family name to the more American-sounding Silver after immigrating to the United States, worked in a rubber factory. His mother, Gertrude, was a maid and sang in a church choir.

“I had the house rhythm section at a club called the Sundown in Hartford,” Mr. Silver told The New York Times in 1981. “Stan Getz came up and played with us. He said he was going to call us, but we didn’t take him seriously. But a couple of weeks later he called and said he wanted the whole trio to join him.”

Mr. Silver worked briefly with Getz before moving to New York in 1951. He was soon in demand as an accompanist, working with leading jazz musicians like the saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. In 1953, Mr. Silver and the drummer Art Blakey formed a cooperative group, the Jazz Messengers, whose aggressive style helped define hard bop and whose lineup of trumpet, tenor saxophone, piano, bass and drums became the standard hard-bop instrumentation.

He's in the Great Day in Harlem picture.

 

Like Blakey, Miles Davis (with whom he recorded) and a few others, Mr. Silver was known for discovering and nurturing young talent, including the saxophonists Hank Mobley, Joe Henderson and Michael Brecker; the trumpeters Art Farmer, Woody Shaw, Tom Harrell and Dave Douglas; and the drummers Louis Hayes and Billy Cobham. His longest-lived ensemble, which lasted about five years in the late 1950s and early ’60s, featured Blue Mitchell on trumpet and Junior Cook on tenor saxophone. 

Herb Jeffries, ‘Bronze Buckaroo’ of Song and Screen, Dies at 100 (or So)

Herb Jeffries, who sang with Duke Ellington and starred in early black westerns as a singing cowboy known as “the Bronze Buckaroo” — a nickname that evoked his malleable racial identity — died on Sunday in West Hills, Calif. He was believed to be 100.

The cause was heart failure, said Raymond Strait, a writer who had worked on Mr. Jeffries’s autobiography with him.

Mr. Jeffries used to say: “I’m a chameleon.” The label applied on many levels.

Over the course of his century, he changed his name, altered his age, married five women and stretched his vocal range from near falsetto to something closer to a Bing Crosby baritone. He shifted from jazz to country and back again, and from concert stages to movie theaters to television sets and back again.

He sang with Earl Hines and his orchestra in the early 1930s. He starred in “Harlem on the Prairie,” a black western released in 1937, and its several sequels. By 1940, he was singing with the Ellington orchestra and soon had a hit single, “Flamingo,” released in 1941, which sold more than 14 million copies. (His name had been Herbert Jeffrey, but the credits on the record mistakenly called him Jeffries, so he renamed himself to match the typo.)

Mr. Jeffries’s racial and ethnic identity was itself something of a performance — and a moving target. His mother was white, his father more of a mystery. He told some people that his father was African-American, others that he was mixed race and still others that he was Ethiopian or Sicilian.

In the crude social math of his era, many people told Mr. Jeffries he could have “passed” for white. He told people he chose to be black — to the extent that a mixed-race person had a choice at the time.

Cheo Feliciano, Debonair Salsa Singer

Cheo Feliciano at Madison Square Garden in 2008. That year he was honored at the Latin Grammys for lifetime achievement. Credit Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times 

 

He was fabulous in the salsa film, https://www.google.com/#q=fania+allstars+film

 

A handsome and debonair baritone, Mr. Feliciano overcame drug addiction and became a celebrity in Puerto Rico and in the larger community of Latin music. He was equally impressive as a sonero — a singer who can improvise rhymes and melodies over Afro-Caribbean dance rhythms — and a romantic crooner, delivering suave, smoldering boleros.  

During the 1970s he became a major star of salsa (the name was used by American marketers as a catchall for various Latin rhythms) when he recorded for the New York label Fania. His first solo album, “Cheo,” included songs that became his signatures: “Anacaona” and “Mi Triste Problema.”

“He was an icon, beloved by the females,” Joe Conzo Sr., a music historian and a longtime friend of Mr. Feliciano, said in an interview on Thursday. “His boleros, they had the women swooning.”

Mr. Feliciano spent several years in the late ’50s and early ’60s singing, in both Spanish and English, with the Joe Cuba Sextet, a popular ensemble that helped introduce Latin music to a mainstream American audience.  He also recorded with top Latin bandleaders including Eddie Palmieri and Tito Puente, and he was a longtime member of the Fania All-Stars, the group organized by Fania Records that included virtually all the major figures of salsa’s ’70s heyday.  

In 1973, Mr. Feliciano was with the Fania All-Stars when they performed at Yankee Stadium. A 1975 album of that concert, “Live at Yankee Stadium,” was inducted into the Library of Congress’s national registry of recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically important.”

Cheo Feliciano was born José Luis Feliciano Vega in Ponce, P.R., on July 3, 1935. His father was a carpenter, and the family was poor but musical. Young Cheo (a common nickname for José), who received some rudimentary musical education in a government-sponsored school, was initially a percussionist and established his first group before he was 10, calling it El Combo Las Latas — the Can Combo — because they made their instruments out of tin cans.

“Everything happening around us had to do in some way with music,” Mr. Feliciano said in an interview in 2000 with the website descarga.com. El Combo Las Latas, he added, “was all kids, but at that very early age we understood about percussion, melody and singing.”

When Cheo was a teenager his family moved to New York City, where he played congas and would sing when a group needed a vocalist. He met well-known musicians after he registered as a percussionist at the musician’s union, and he served as a band boy — a kind of errand boy and valet — to several of them, including the bandleader Tito Rodríguez, who gave young Cheo his first chance to perform in public.

In the 2000 interview, Mr. Feliciano remembered the youthful hubris that led him to take the stage as a singer for the first time. Someone, he said, had told Tito Rodríguez that a young man named Cheo could sing a little bit.

“Tito knew me as Cheo but he didn’t know they were talking about me,” Mr. Feliciano recalled. “ ‘What Cheo?’ ‘Cheo, Cheo, your valet, your band boy.’ He said, ‘Cheo, you sing?’ And I had the nerve to say, ‘I’m the world’s greatest singer.’ And he laughed. He said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to prove it now.’ ”

One night shortly thereafter, onstage with his big band at the Palladium in New York, Mr. Rodríguez introduced him to the crowd.

“He gave me the maracas and said: ‘Sing. Show me you’re the greatest,’ ” Mr. Feliciano said. “And I sang.”

Paul Colby, Owner of Club That Helped the Rise of Greenwich Village

Paul Colby outside the Bitter End in 1992. The club is still standing years after most others from its heyday have closed. Keith Meyers/The New York Times

Paul Colby, the owner since 1974 of the Bitter End, a celebrated coffeehouse-cum-nightclub that helped make Greenwich Village a legendary place by showcasing young performers like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Billy Crystal and countless others, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 96.

The Bitter End announced his death.

“On behalf of all of us in the business of moving the emotions with our imaginations, special thanks to Paul Colby for being one of us,” Kris Kristofferson wrote in his foreword to Mr. Colby’s 2002 memoir (written with Martin Fitzpatrick), “The Bitter End: Hanging Out at America’s Nightclub.”

Mr. Colby bought the club, at 147 Bleecker Street near La Guardia Place, about a decade after he began managing it. It provided him with a lifetime of memories: watching Van Morrison kick over tables for dramatic effect; hearing Allen Ginsberg read poetry; seeing Woody Allen so nervous that he tried to crawl out a window just before he was due onstage to do his stand-up routine. James Taylor, in one of his early appearances, bombed. Mr. Crystal did six shows in 1976 for a total of $500. 

Among the many other performers who played at the club — which seats only 150 people and holds 80 more — were Stevie Wonder, Jackson Browne and Neil Diamond.

In 1992, the folk singer Tom Paxton told The New York Times that the Bitter End was a “place to learn, to be bad, a place where you could clock your hours, learn what worked and didn’t.” Mr. Kristofferson told The Times that it was the place where “people like me and Bob Dylan didn’t just perform, we came to hang out.”

Other Greenwich Village clubs, including the Village Gate, Cafe Wha? and the Village Vanguard, were integral parts of the same scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, that scene began well before then: In the late 1950s, a club called the Cock and Bull occupied the space that would become the Bitter End and offered a similar format. But the Bitter End acquired cachet — not least because of its distinctive brick walls — and is still standing years after most other clubs from its heyday have closed.

The club was started in 1961 by Fred Weintraub, who named it for its nocturnal appearance. A graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, he had abandoned marriage and children and a successful baby-carriage business in search of a “more authentic way of life,” he said in a biographical sketch on his website. He played the piano in a bordello and operated a fishing boat in Cuba and roamed Europe before deciding the Greenwich Village music scene was where he wanted to be.

One of the first acts to perform at the Bitter End was a new group called Peter, Paul and Mary; they used the brick walls as the backdrop for the cover of their first album.

Mr. Weintraub hired Mr. Colby to manage the club and book acts in 1965. It did not have a license to serve alcohol at the time but did offer coffee-and-ice-cream drinks with names like Frosty Freud and Zen Sundae.

He entered the music business when he was hired by a publisher to deliver sheet music, then worked his way up to music promoter. Frank Sinatra often used him for personal errands, like picking up Ava Gardner at the airport.

In recent years Mr. Colby had two partners in the club, Paul Rizzo and Ken Gorka. In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Rizzo noted that although fewer stars appear in small clubs these days, the Bitter End still has its share of stars-to-be: Stefani Germanotta, for example, appeared there in 2006. She later took the name Lady Gaga. 

Jim Hall, Jazz Guitarist, Dies at 83

A modern American master.

Jim Hall, a jazz guitarist who for more than 50 years was admired by critics, aficionados and especially his fellow musicians for his impeccable technique and the warmth and subtlety of his playing, died on Tuesday at his home in Greenwich Village. He was 83. The cause was heart failure, his wife, Jane, said.

Jim and Jane. Cute.

The list of important musicians with whom Mr. Hall worked was enough to earn him a place in jazz history. It includes the pianist Bill Evans, with whom he recorded two acclaimed duet albums, and the singer Ella Fitzgerald, as well as the saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Paul Desmond, the drummer Chico Hamilton and the bassist Ron Carter, his frequent partner in a duo. 

But with his distinctive touch, his inviting sound and his finely developed sense of melody, Mr. Hall made it clear early in his career that he was an important musician in his own right. 

He was an influential one as well. Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell and John Scofield are among the numerous younger guitarists who acknowledge him as an inspiration. Mr. Hall, who never stopped being open to new ideas and new challenges, worked at various times with all three.

What an impressive catalogue of musicians.

Like most of his guitar-playing peers, he was influenced by the first two great jazz guitar soloists: Charlie Christian, best known for his work with Benny Goodman, and the Belgian Gypsy Django Reinhardt. But he derived as much inspiration from saxophone players as he did from other guitarists. 

He was from Cleveland.


Moving to Los Angeles, where he studied classical guitar, he became a charter member of the Chico Hamilton Quintet, one of the first and most successful exemplars of the soft-spoken style known as cool jazz. (Mr. Hamilton died last month.) He then worked with the clarinetist, saxophonist and composer Jimmy Giuffre, whose adventurous approach to both composition and improvisation had a lasting impact on Mr. Hall’s own music.

Lou Reed, Velvet Underground Leader and Rock Pioneer

Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today. The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May.

Look back at Lou Reed's remarkable career in photos

With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example. "One chord is fine," he once said, alluding to his bare-bones guitar style. "Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz."

Cedar Walton, Pianist and Composer, 79

Cedar Walton, a pianist who distinguished himself as both an accompanist and a soloist, and who wrote some of the most enduring compositions in modern jazz while a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the early 1960s, died on Monday at his home in Brooklyn. Mr. Walton sat in with Charlie Parker, spent a year accompanying the singer Abbey Lincoln, and recorded with both John Coltrane and, much later, the saxophonist Joshua Redman. He led a series of successful small groups, including a trio and a quartet that both featured his longtime collaborator, the drummer Billy Higgins. Yet he probably remained best known for his early work with one of the most influential incarnations of the Jazz Messengers, the group that the drummer Art Blakey ran as a kind of postgraduate performance academy for rising jazz stars.

 Rachel Papo for The New York Times - Cedar Walton performing with his quartet in 2009.

 

Mulgrew Miller

Mulgrew Miller, a jazz pianist whose soulful erudition, clarity of touch and rhythmic aplomb made him a fixture in the postbop mainstream for more than 30 years, died on Wednesday in Allentown, Pa.

I saw him at an Ellington Society concert.

Ray Manzarek

Keyboardist and a Founder of the Doors

Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images

“We knew what the people wanted: the same thing the Doors wanted. Freedom.” The Doors around 1970. From left: Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore and Jim Morrison. 

 Listening to Light my Fire while walking up to Country Village and Herbie Lee — must have been the summer of 1967, for I knew them in junior high school, and the Doors website lists 1967 as when it was first performed — is a very fond memory.

Richie Havens

NY Times obit — others

Mr. Havens played many songs written by Mr. Dylan, and he spent three days learning his epic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” A man who heard him practicing it stopped him on the stairs as he headed for the dressing room of a nightclub, and told him it was the best he’d ever heard the song sung.“That’s how I first met Bob Dylan,” Mr. Havens said.

Marvin Hamlisch

From a NY Times Arts article: In a career that spanned film, television, theater and recorded music, Marvin Hamlisch won seemingly every award available in each medium. He died on Monday in Los Angeles. An obituary is here. He was only 68.


(A video gallery of trailers and excerpts from some of the films and musicals featuring Mr. Hamlisch’s music is here.)

This is my music: Marvin Hamlisch

Mr. Hamlisch, bespectacled and somewhat gawky, could often appear as the stereotypical music school nerd — in fact, at 7, he was the youngest student to be accepted at the Juilliard School — but his appearance belied his intelligence and easy banter with the likes of Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin. And his melodies were sure-footed and sometimes swashbuckling. “One,” from “A Chorus Line,” with its punchy, brassy lines, distills the essence of the Broadway showstopper. The show started as a series of taped workshops with Broadway dancers, then evolved into a show that opened at the Public Theater in 1975 and moved to Broadway later that year. It ran for 6,137 performances, the most of any Broadway musical until it was surpassed by “Cats."

In more recent years, Mr. Hamlisch also became an ambassador for music, traveling around the country and performing and giving talks at schools. He often criticized the cuts in arts education.

“I don’t think the American government gets it,” he said during an interview at the Orange County High School of the Arts in Santa Ana, Calif. “I don’t think they understand it’s as important as math and science. It rounds you out as a person. I think it gives you a love of certain things. You don’t have to become the next great composer. It’s just nice to have heard certain things or to have seen certain things. It’s part of being a human being.”

Despite all the awards he received over the years, Ms. Blair said Mr. Hamlisch was always most focused, and most excited about, whatever current project he had going. And, she said, he was always appreciative of his gift: “He used to say, ‘It’s easy to write things that are so self-conscious that they become pretentious, that have a lot of noise. It’s very hard to write a simple melody.’ ”

Abram Wilson

Laura told me about this musician, and of seeing his obit while sitting at our favorite restaurant in Kingston, the Canard Enchaine. As she described him, he was indeed a fascinating person.

Mr. Wilson, who was raised in New Orleans and steeped in its hybrid musical traditions, was known for combining musical forms — melding quicksilver bebop with cloudbursts of hip-hop or passages of Stevie Wonder sung in his modest Sunday chorister’s voice.

He wove story lines into some of his most ambitious music. The autobiographical 2007 concept album, “Ride! Ferris Wheel to the Modern Day Delta,” for example, was a kind of jazz opera about a trumpeter who tries to escape his jazz roots to become a hip-hop megastar, but who returns to the fold in the end. 

While earning a clutch of British awards for his work, including a BBC Jazz Award for best new CD in 2007, Mr. Wilson demonstrated a commitment to his American jazz roots that often surfaced with almost missionary fervor, music critics said. Onstage, between numbers, he sometimes gave extemporaneous history lessons about the many musical currents that flowed into New Orleans jazz. 

Mr. Wilson attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. also studied there), and graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University before earning a master’s degree in performance and composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester.

 In New York he formed his own quartet and played with the trumpeter Roy Hargrove’s big band, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the rhythm and blues singer Ruth Brown. After moving to London in 2002, Mr. Wilson made three albums for Dune Records, a British jazz label: “Jazz Warrior” (2004), “Ride! Ferris Wheel to the Modern Day Delta” (2007) and “Life Paintings” (2009).

His survivors include his wife, his parents, four brothers, a sister and his grandmother, Oradell Barker.

He had recently finished and begun performing a jazz suite about the life of Philippa Schuyler, an American piano prodigy, born to a black father and white mother, who toured the country in the 1930s and ’40s, became disillusioned by American racism and died in 1967 on a charitable mission in Vietnam at age 35.

In a review in April, John Fordham, a jazz critic for The Guardian, described the piece as a poignant portrait of an artist undone by the American racial divide. Mr. Wilson, he wrote, hoped to stage it as a play soon, adding, “It is a work in progress that will be fascinating to follow.”

Grammy-Winning Disco Legend

Donna Summer, the five-time Grammy Award–winning singer and songwriter known as “The Queen of Disco,” died this morning at the age of 63 after a battle with breast cancer.

Read Donna Summer’s and others’ recollections of the disco era in V.F.’s oral history, “Boogie Nights.”

Levon Helm

Levon Helm, who helped forge a deep-rooted American music as the drummer and singer for the Band, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71 and lived in Woodstock, N.Y. (Times obit)

Released on July 1, 1968, the year after “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,“ “Music From Big Pink“ was “rebelling against the rebellion,” Mr. Helm wrote. There were no elaborate studio confections, no psychedelic jams, no gimmicks; the music was stately and homespun, with a deliberately old-time tone behind the enigmatic lyrics. Sales were modest but the album’s influence was huge, leading musicians like Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead back toward concision.

(Rolling Stone obit)

A website for the Band.

Photos: Levon Helm Through the Years