Jack Bruce, Former Cream Frontman is the headline of a small NY Times piece. Jack Bruce, who formed influential British rock band Cream in the 1960s with guitarist Eric Clapton, has died aged 71, his family said on Saturday. Bruce co-wrote some of Cream's biggest hits including "Sunshine of Your Love" and "I Feel Free" before the band broke up after only two years in 1968. Bruce, who was born in Glasgow, began playing bass as a teenager and dropped out of music school because he was not allowed to play jazz.
Jack Bruce, former Cream man is the headline in the obit in the Guardian. Bruce played bass, sang and was the principal songwriter in Cream, but even leaving aside that group, in which he played with Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker, his CV reads like a comprehensive guide to the British blues boom, with spells in Alexis Korner’s Blues Inc, the Graham Bond Organisation, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Manfred Mann.
Embedded, it has video of Cream playing White Room live in 1968. That led me to finding a film made about the end of the group in 1968.
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.
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.”
Alice Herz-Sommer in her London apartment in 2012.Credit
Yuri Dojc
Throughout
her two years in Theresienstadt, through the hunger and cold and death
all around her, through the loss of her mother and husband, Alice
Herz-Sommer was sustained by a Polish man who had died long before. His
name was Frédéric Chopin.
It
was Chopin, Mrs. Herz-Sommer averred to the end of her long life, who
let her and her young son survive in the camp, also known as Terezin, which the Nazis operated in what was then Czechoslovakia from 1941 until the end of the war in Europe.
Mrs.
Herz-Sommer, who died in London on Sunday at 110, and who was widely
described as the oldest known Holocaust survivor, had been a
distinguished pianist in Europe before the war. But it was only after
the Nazi occupation of her homeland, Czechoslovakia, in 1939 that she
began a deep study of Chopin’s Études, the set of 27 solo pieces that
are some of the most technically demanding and emotionally impassioned
works in the piano repertory.
For
Mrs. Herz-Sommer, the Études offered a consuming distraction at a time
of constant peril. But they ultimately gave her far more than that — far
more, even, than spiritual sustenance.
“They
are very difficult,” Mrs. Herz-Sommer told The Sydney Morning Herald in
2010. “I thought if I learned to play them, they would save my life.”
And so they did.
In
recent years, because of her great age; her indomitability; her
continued, ardent involvement with music (she practiced for hours each
day until shortly before she died); and her recollections of her
youthful friendships with titans like Franz Kafka and Gustav Mahler;
Mrs. Herz-Sommer became a beacon for writers, filmmakers and members of
the public eager to learn her story.
She
was the subject of biographies, including “A Century of Wisdom: Lessons
From the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World’s Oldest Living Holocaust
Survivor” (2012), by Caroline Stoessinger, who confirmed her death.
Mrs. Herz-Sommer was also profiled in documentary films, one of which, “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life,” a 38-minute portrait directed by Malcolm Clarke, is a 2014 Oscar nominee for documentary short subject. The awards take place on Sunday.
It won the Oscar, and the director gave a moving speech about her.
Alice
Herz was born in Prague on Nov. 26, 1903, one of five children of a
cultured, German-speaking, secular Jewish family. Her father was a
prosperous businessman; her mother moved in the city’s shimmering
artistic circles and numbered Kafka and Mahler among her friends. As a child, Alice knew both men; Kafka (“a slightly strange man,” she recalled) attended one of the family’s Passover seders.
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.
“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.
Kermit Moore, a cellist, conductor and composer who in all three
capacities was concerned with music rooted in the black experience, died
on Nov. 2 in Manhattan. He was 84.
Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos — Kermit Moore leading an ensemble with James Moody on alto sax in 1999.
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.
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.
At the Woodstock music festival in 1969, the British blues-rock band Ten Years After burst onto the U.S. music scene with a searing rendition of "I'm Going Home" featuring the fleet-fingered Alvin Lee whaling away on guitar.
When the "Woodstock" documentary was released the next year, the band's 11-minute version of the song — and Lee's guitar virtuosity — were regarded as a highlight. His speedy, taut playing would earn him the unofficial title of "the fastest guitar in the West."
Allyn Baum/New York Times -The Scene nightclub in 1965. It first drew artists and stagehands, then rockers like Jimi Hendrix.
You first encountered Teddy, the sharkskin-suited maître d’hôtel, on the
sidewalk. If you got past him, Steve Paul was at the door to insult
you. The insult, usually devilishly clever, was the cover charge to one of
New York City’s hottest, most intriguing clubs in the 1960s. It was
called the Scene, and it was the brainchild of the dashing,
idiosyncratic Mr. Paul, who was 23 when he opened it in 1964. It became
famous for brilliant moments in the history of rock music, as the place
where Jimi Hendrix and the Doors shaped the music of the ’60s in inspired jam sessions. Mr. Paul, who went on to manage Johnny Winter and other rock stars and
record them for his own label, died at 71 on Sunday at a hospital in
Queens. His friend Tariq Abdus-Sabur said the cause was not yet known.
Mr. Paul may not have been a guru with all the answers, but he had no quarrel with being treated as one.
“I know I could become president of the United States,” he told Newsweek, “but I really don’t need it.”
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.)
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.’ ”
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.”
From WBGO's website, a tribute to this magnificent pianist.
Soulful, boogie-woogie-blues
stylist Ray Bryant passed away on Thursday, June 2nd at New York
Hospital in Queens. He was 79. Here's the New York Times obituary.
WBGO's Becca Pulliam recently interviewed pianist Randy Weston
regarding Bryant's legacy. Listen to Weston's take on his close
friend's unique style and favorite recordings.
There are several sound clips on the page.
From the Times obit: Mr. Bryant had a firm touch and an unshakable sense of time, notably in his left hand, which he often used to build a bedrock vamp. Even in a bebop setting, he favored the ringing tonalities of the gospel church. And he was sumptuously at home with the blues, as a style and a sensibility but never as an affectation.
Along with his wife, Mr. Bryant is survived by a son, Raphael Bryant
Jr.; a daughter, Gina; three grandchildren; and two brothers, Leonard
and Lynwood. Mr. Bryant’s sister, Vera Eubanks, is the mother of several
prominent jazz musicians: Robin Eubanks, a trombonist; Kevin Eubanks,
the guitarist and former bandleader on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno”;
and Duane Eubanks, a trumpeter.
Pete Fornatale,
a disc jockey who helped usher in a musical alternative to Top 40 AM
radio in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, presenting
progressive rock and long album tracks that AM stations wouldn’t touch
and helping to give WNEW a major presence on the still-young FM dial,
died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 66.
Mr. Fornatale was at the forefront of the FM revolution, along with
WNEW-FM colleagues like Scott Muni, Rosko, Vin Scelsa, Dennis Elsas,
Jonathan Schwartz and Alison Steele (who called herself “the
Nightbird”). They played long versions of songs, and sometimes entire
albums, and talked to their audiences in a conversational tone very
different from the hard-sell approach of their AM counterparts.
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.
Billy Strange, a prolific Los Angeles session guitarist who recorded with Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole and the Beach Boys, wrote a No. 1 single for Chubby Checker and arranged Nancy Sinatra’s No. 1 pop hit “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” died on Wednesday in Franklin, Tenn. He was 81. A mainstay of the celebrated team of Hollywood studio musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, Mr. Strange played on psychedelic touchstones like the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” and Love’s “Forever Changes.” In 1962 he arranged and played on Cole’s hit “Ramblin’ Rose.”
Joy was the word that resurfaced again and again when musicians and friends remembered Sam Rivers, a saxophonist, flutist and composer whose long list of credits included work with the legendary Miles Davis. Rivers, an internationally known jazz icon and fixture on the Orlando music scene for roughly two decades, died Monday night from pneumonia, his daughter confirmed Tuesday. He was 88. Until September, Rivers had continued his weekly open rehearsals with his powerful big band, the Rivbea Orchestra, at the Orlando musician's union hall.
Edgar Villchur, who went from repairing radios in his New York City shop to inventing ground-breaking audio equipment and hearing aids, has died, his family said Tuesday. He was 94.Villchur's daughter, Miriam Villchur Berg, said her father died of natural causes Monday at his Woodstock home.
After serving as an Army electronics officer in World War II, the Manhattan native opened a radio repair shop in Greenwich Village, where he built custom home high-fidelity sets. He moved to Woodstock in 1952, and it was while living there and teaching an acoustics class at New York University that he came up with the idea for the acoustic suspension loudspeaker, said Berg, of Woodstock. The closed-cabinet device was much smaller than the audio equipment of the era, and Villchur's invention was credited with bringing hi-fi into people's homes. His AR-3 speaker is on display in the Smithsonian Institute.
"He found that loudspeakers didn't need to be six feet tall. They could sit on a book shelf," his daughter told The Associated Press.
Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos — Kermit Moore leading an ensemble with James Moody on alto sax in 1999. 
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.