Tag: Dies

Categories
Entertainment

Tina Ramirez, Founding father of a Main Hispanic Dance Troupe, Dies at 92

Tina Ramirez, Founder of a Leading Hispanic Dance Troupe, Dies at 92

Tina Ramirez, who founded Ballet Hispánico in New York on a small budget more than 50 years ago and grew it into the nation’s premier Hispanic dance performance and education troupe, died Tuesday at her home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She was 92.

Verdery Roosevelt, longtime executive director of the Ballet Hispánico, announced the death.

Ms. Ramirez, who came to New York from Venezuela as a child, was a dancer herself when, in 1963, she took over the studio of one of her teachers, flamenco dancer Lola Bravo, and turned to teaching. Many of her students came from low-income Latino households, and she saw dance transform them.

“The kids started concentrating better and collaborating better with other people,” she told The Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester, NY in 1981. “You just need to feel better.”

Hoping to reach more students, she arranged some money from the city’s Office of Economic Opportunity and in 1967 started a summer program called Operation High Hopes to introduce children to dance and other arts. The program’s dance performances proved popular, and in 1970, when some of these youth were in their teens, Ms. Ramirez founded Ballet Hispánico with a $20,000 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts.

“I wanted to give Hispanic dancers employment,” she told The Democrat and Chronicle. “I didn’t want them to have to dance in nightclubs. They were serious dancers and deserved the opportunity to be treated as such.”

She also wanted to make the cultural influences she was familiar with accessible to a broader public.

“In the early days, I just wanted Hispanics to have a voice in the dance and for people to get to know us as people,” she told The New York Times in a 2008 article marking her retirement. “Because, you know, you went to a ballet and there was someone squatting in a sombrero, and that’s not us.”

The “ballet” in the troupe’s name sometimes threw off people expecting classical ballet. Mixing styles and influences, her company leaned more towards Latin folk and modern dance.

“Ballet means everything with action and music,” she once said. “That doesn’t mean pointe shoes and tutus.”

In the beginning, the troupe had limited resources and performed wherever they could – in prisons, hospitals and often outdoors, in parks and on the streets.

“Those were the days when the streets were burning,” Ms. Ramirez said. “It was so bad that if you looked the wrong way, you could start a riot. But we toured everywhere.”

The company grew in prestige and reach, eventually touring the country and Europe and South America.

Ms. Ramirez “was very proud of her heritage and her community,” Ms. Roosevelt, the company’s longtime executive director, said via email. “She had a great eye for choreographers who could combine dance forms, music and aesthetics from the Spanish-speaking world with contemporary dance techniques. When she started, there was nothing like it.”

Just as important as the company’s achievements were its educational efforts. It had its own school and also sent its dancers to schools in New York City or wherever it stopped on tour. Joan Finkelstein, former director of dance education for the New York City Department of Education, witnessed the impact of Ms. Ramirez firsthand.

“Tina understood that Ballet Hispánico could not only edify general audiences, but also instill pride and appreciation for Latin dance and cultural heritage, and empower all of our children for future success,” Ms. Finkelstein said via email.

Ernestina Ramirez was born on November 7, 1929 in Caracas, Venezuela. Her father, José Ramirez, was a well-known Mexican bullfighter by the name of Gaonita. Her mother, Gloria, who was from Puerto Rico, was a homemaker and community leader.

Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother took the family to New York, where she remarried and became known as Gloria Cestero Diaz for her advocacy for the city’s Puerto Rican people.

Beginning in 1947, Ms. Ramirez toured for several years with dancers Federico Rey and Lolita Gomez, whose show was often dubbed the “Rhythms of Spain.” From 1949 to 1951 she lived and studied in Spain.

When she returned to the United States, she began performing with her sister, Coco. In 1954, the pair took the stage at a St. Louis club with comedian Joey Bishop and singer Dorothy Dandridge and performed a flamenco routine. In 1956, a headline in the Louisville, Kentucky Courier Journal of a touring theatrical production proclaimed, “Two Daughters of Famous Matador Will Play Princesses in ‘Kismet,'” and they did so for years.

When that show was playing at the Meadowbrook in Cedar Grove, NJ, in 1960, Carole Cleaver wrote in a review for The Wyckoff News, “Tiny Tina and Coco Ramirez dance themselves to exhaustion as the difficult Ababu princesses and bring the house down.”

Mrs. Ramirez is survived by her sister, Coco Ramirez Morris.

Alongside her studies with Ms. Bravo, Ms. Ramirez studied with classical ballerina Alexandra Danilova and modern dance pioneer Anna Sokolow. She was able to bring these influences to the Ballet Hispánico, which presented new works and interpreted older ones through the lens of Latin American culture. In the beginning it was an identity yet to be formed.

“When I started Ballet Hispánico in 1970, there was no dance company that represented the Hispanic people,” she told the Times in 1984. “Back then, people didn’t know what Hispanic meant — not even Hispanics.

“I’ve been criticized for naming the company Ballet Hispánico,” she continued. “People said I should name it after a country or a city or a place. But I said no because we are 21 nations, all Spanish speaking – and we should all belong.”

Among the myriad of dancers who studied with Ms. Ramirez early in her career was Nelida Tirado, who has enjoyed an acclaimed career as a flamenco dancer.

“Tina Ramirez taught us to be proud and to commit to excellence regardless of our line of work,” Ms. Tirado said via email. “She taught us the importance of preparation, discipline, hard work and living bravely from the mundane to the stage. Because opportunities don’t come easily to us – but if they do, they should be seized.”

Ms. Ramirez’s company has garnered good attention from the start.

“Tina Ramirez’s Ballet Hispánico of New York is a company of 13 dancers from the city’s barrios,” Jennifer Dunning wrote in a 1974 Times review, “and on Saturday night they brought the Clark Center for the Performing Arts their very youthful Vibrant energy and charm.”

Ms. Ramirez was an energetic woman who, after a day working with dancers and taking care of administrative matters, often spent her evenings in the audience of dance shows scouting new choreographic talent.

“It’s very important to me to connect to what’s happening right now,” she told the Times in 1999. “I think that’s why audiences everywhere are so drawn to us. We reflect on what they know about life – the difficulties and the joys.”

Categories
Health

Marc Lewitinn, Covid Affected person, Dies at 76 After 850 Days on a Ventilator

Marc Lewitinn, Covid Patient, Dies at 76 After 850 Days on a Ventilator

None of them come close to Mr Levitinn’s streak, a combination, doctors say, of his physical and mental strength and the speed with which the medical establishment has developed protocols for long-term care for Covid.

“He had a long and difficult road,” wrote Dr. Abraham Sanders, one of his doctors at Weill Cornell, in an email. “He was a strong man and benefited from sophisticated medical care.”

Murad Albert Lewitinn was born on March 12, 1946 into a Jewish family in Cairo. (As a child, he anglicized his first name to Marco and later dropped the O.) His father, Albert Lewitinn, was a medical technician and his mother, Sarah (Amiga) Lewitinn, was a homemaker. He grew up speaking Arabic and later learned English, French and Spanish.

Egypt had a thriving Jewish community of 75,000, but after the Arab nationalist revolution in 1952 and the Suez Crisis in 1956, which pitted the country against Israel, France and Britain, they faced deteriorating conditions. The government took over the elderly Mr. Lewitinn’s business, and after a brief imprisonment, he and his family were expelled in 1958.

They settled in Baltimore, where Albert Lewitinn was hired by Johns Hopkins University to work on organ transplant technology.

As a young man, Marc lived in New York City and Los Angeles, where he briefly attended college, then in Paris, where he met Ondine Green, the sister of a childhood friend from Cairo. They married in 1968.

Categories
Entertainment

Jean-Paul Belmondo, Magnetic Star of the French New Wave, Dies at 88

Jean-Paul Belmondo, Magnetic Star of the French New Wave, Dies at 88

Jean-Paul Belmondo, the rugged actor whose disdainful eyes, boxer’s nose, sensual lips and cynical outlook made him the idolized personification of youthful alienation in the French New Wave, most notably in his classic performance as an existential killer in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by the office of his lawyer, Michel Godest. No cause was given.

Like Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando and James Dean — three American actors to whom he was frequently compared — Mr. Belmondo established his reputation playing tough, unsentimental, even antisocial characters who were cut adrift from bourgeois society. Later, as one of France’s leading stars, he took more crowd-pleasing roles, but without entirely surrendering his magnetic brashness.

Like Bogart, Mr. Belmondo brought craggy features and sometimes seething anger to the screen, a realistic counterpoint to more conventionally handsome romantic stars. Like Dean, he became one of the most widely imitated pop culture figures of his era. And like Brando, he was often dismissive of pretentiousness and self-importance among filmmakers.

“No actor since James Dean has inspired quite such intense identification,” Eugene Archer wrote in The New York Times in 1965. “Dean evoked the rebellious adolescent impulse, as fierce as it was gratuitous, a violent outgrowth of the frustrations of the modern world. Belmondo is a later manifestation of youthful rejection — and more disturbing. His disengagement from a society his parents made is total. He accepts corruption with a cynical smile, not even bothering to struggle. He is out entirely for himself, to get whatever he can, while he can. The Belmondo type is capable of anything.”

His leading role in “À bout de souffle” — released in the United States in 1961 as “Breathless” — was instantly recognized as trendsetting; subsequent imitators only cemented its importance. Mr. Belmondo’s mop of unruly hair, the way he peered at the world through a twisting web of cigarette smoke, and the way he obsessively massaged his thick, feminine lips with his thumb were so vivid and evocative that they quickly became global signposts of rebellion.

Mr. Belmondo was 26 and Mr. Godard was 28 when “Breathless” was being made. The film was based on an idea by François Truffaut, another icon of the nouvelle vague, and began shooting in Paris without a script. Mr. Godard used a hand-held camera — except in the street scenes, when he would sometimes mount the camera on a borrowed wheelchair — and let everyone improvise. The resulting film was rough and ill-shaped, but it had a sense of emotional honesty and verisimilitude that made it electric. Many mainstream critics seemed unsure what to make of it.

Bosley Crowther wrote in The Times: “It goes at its unattractive subject in an eccentric photographed style that sharply conveys the nervous tempo and the emotional erraticalness of the story it tells. And through the American actress, Jean Seberg, and a hypnotically ugly new young man by the name of Jean-Paul Belmondo, it projects two downright fearsome characters.”

Many critics found Mr. Belmondo’s amoral antihero a little too strong. But others found in the role a raw truthfulness and a thematic boldness at odds with the bulk of what was coming out of Hollywood studios.

Mr. Belmondo followed up “Breathless” with a series of celebrated turns for other New Wave directors and was soon widely seen as the movement’s leading interpreter — although in later years he told interviewers that some of the most intellectually ambitious efforts he had been involved in had bored him.

When he starred as a steelworker opposite Jeanne Moreau in Peter Brooks’ “Moderato Cantabile” (1960), he said the script, by the French novelist Marguerite Duras, was too intellectual for his taste. He frequently expressed ambivalence about working for esoteric directors like Mr. Brooks, Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni.

In other roles Mr. Belmondo was a Hungarian who gets romantically involved with a Provençal family in Claude Chabrol’s “À double tour” (1959) and a young country priest in “Léon Morin, Priest” (1962). He also helped his co-star, Sophia Loren, win an Academy Award in Vittorio De Sica’s “Two Women” (1961), a drama set during World War II in which he played a young Communist intellectual in mountainous central Italy.

By the mid ’60s, though, he was chafing at playing the young antihero in film after film.

“Lots of times, I’d be out with a chick and some kid would want to give me a bad time,” Mr. Belmondo told an interviewer. “I used to fight it out with them. It’s the same now. Everyone wants to say he’s flattened Belmondo.”

The turning point for him came in Philippe De Broca’s “That Man From Rio,” a 1964 over-the-top spy thriller that played like a parody of James Bond. Audiences loved it, and they loved Mr. Belmondo in it. More important, Mr. Belmondo loved doing it. Although some critics who revered the more difficult work of the French New Wave derided Mr. Belmondo as a sell out, he told interviewers that this film remained his favorite.

Later in his career Mr. Belmondo professed an unpretentious modesty, shrugging off his success, but at his box-office height in the 1960s, he was anything but modest. In an interview with the film critic Rex Reed in 1966, he all but sneered at American fans who were lining up to see his movies.

“I do not blame them,” he said, puffing on a cigar and stretching out his long legs underneath a table at Harry’s Bar in Venice. “I am worth standing in line to see.”

By this time there were rumors that despite having been married since 1955 to Elodie Constantin, a former ballerina, Mr. Belmondo was involved with other women. When Mr. Reed asked him about this, he shrugged that off, too.

“Listen, I am only 32 years old,” he said. “I’m not dead. And please remember, I am French. I am happily married this year, but next year? Who knows?”

A year later the marriage had ended in divorce. Mr. Belmondo had three children with Ms. Constantin. The eldest, Patricia, died in a fire in 1994, but their younger daughter, Florence, and a son, Paul, survive him.

The divorce was rumored to have resulted from a romance by Mr. Belmondo with one of his co-stars, Ursula Andress. He and Ms. Andress did have a long-term public relationship after the divorce. He was later romantically involved with another actress, Laura Antonelli. But not until 2002, when he was 70 years old, did he marry again, to 24-year-old Nathalie Tardivel. That marriage ended in divorce six years later. They had a daughter, Stella, who also survives him.

Jean-Paul Belmondo was born on April 9, 1933, in the middle-class Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. His family moved to the city’s Left Bank when he was a boy, and he grew up in the neighborhoods around Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. His father, Paul Belmondo, who was born in Algiers to a family of Italian origin, was a highly regarded sculptor. He later told interviewers that his son had been a tempestuous boy who had gotten into frequent scraps and did poorly in school.

The boy’s mother, Madeline Rainaud-Richard, pushed him to do better, but he resisted, Mr. Belmondo later recalled. Finally, he dropped out of school altogether as a teenager. At 16, he became an enthusiastic amateur boxer (although his famous smashed nose came not from an organized bout but from a playground dust-up), giving it up only when he turned to acting.

“I stopped when the face I saw in the mirror began to change,” he said.

For several years, until he was 20, his parents paid for acting lessons at a private conservatory. After a six-month military tour in Algeria, he returned to Paris in 1953 and was accepted into the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique, where he studied for three years. The school, a conservative one, didn’t know what to do with the insolent young man who sauntered onto the stage in a Molière play with his hands in his pockets.

When, at his graduation, in 1956, Mr. Belmondo was awarded only an honorable mention by his teachers, the other students hoisted him on their shoulders and carried him from the theater as he flashed an obscene gesture at the judges.

For all his flamboyance and occasional fistfights, Mr. Belmondo was said to be a consummate professional on the set. Although in later years he continued to work now and then with the great directors of the New Wave — most notably with Truffaut in “Mississippi Mermaid” (1969) — most of his energies went into mainstream favorites. Many of his films after the mid-1960s were made by his own production company.

More and more Mr. Belmondo became known for popular adventures, usually comic thrillers. And he became famous for elaborate stunts in which he took great pride in performing himself. He hung from skyscrapers, leapt across speeding trains, drove cars off hillsides. Co-stars said he seemed all but fearless. While shooting one scene in South America, he was warned that a river, into which he was about to plunge for a scene, was filled with poisonous snakes and piranha. Mr. Belmondo grabbed a chunk of corned beef and slung it into the murky water. When nothing happened, he jumped in and filmed the scene.

He said he had decided, “What the hell, if they’re not going to chew on that, they’re not going to eat me.”

Finally, an injury during the filming of “Hold-Up” in 1985, when he was 52, forced him to leave the stunts to the stunt men.

Throughout, the Belmondo cult endured, though more in France than around the world. His French fans knew him by his nickname, Bébel (pronounced bay-BELL).

No matter the scene, no matter the co-stars, whatever mayhem was breaking out onscreen, Mr. Belmondo was always able to affect a calm, cool remove, as though he was more amused than aroused by the activity swirling around him. He brought a touch of comedy to his action roles and a hint of danger to his comic roles; one could well imagine him playing the reluctant, wisecracking hero in American action series of the 1980s like “Die Hard.”

Mr. Belmondo never made the transition to Hollywood, largely because he didn’t want to. “Why complicate my life?” he said. “I am too stupid to learn the language and it would only be a disaster.”

In 1989 he was awarded the Cesar Award for best actor, the French equivalent of the Oscar, for his performance in Claude Lelouch’s “Itinéraire d’un enfant gâté,” playing a middle-aged industrialist who fakes his death and then sails the world.

By this time he had slowed his frenetic pace, making only nine movies in the 1980s, compared to 41 in 1960s and 16 in the 1970s. He cut back even more in the ’90s, when he made only six films, but this was due in part to a belated career shift. Mr. Belmondo had not appeared in a live production since 1959 when he returned to the theater in 1987. Particularly well-regarded was his sold-out run as “Cyrano de Bergerac” in Paris in 1990.

A stroke in 2001, however, forced him to stop working. Not until eight years later was he back before the cameras, shooting “Un homme et son chien” (“A Man and His Dog).” Released in 2009, it tells the story of an older gentleman who, accompanied by his loyal dog, suddenly finds himself without a home.

Late in life, when he was a little thicker and much grayer, Mr. Belmondo liked to affect some of the self-effacing modesty that was noticeably absent when he was at his peak in the 1960s.

When an interviewers asked him to explain his enduring popularity, especially with women, Mr. Belmondo responded with his usual casual shrug.

“Hell, everyone knows that an ugly guy with a good line gets the chicks,” he said.

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.

Categories
Entertainment

Mikis Theodorakis, ‘Zorba’ Composer and Marxist Insurgent, Dies at 96

Mikis Theodorakis, ‘Zorba’ Composer and Marxist Rebel, Dies at 96

As Greece’s most illustrious composer, Mr. Theodorakis wrote symphonies, operas, ballets, film scores, music for the stage, marches for protests and songs without borders — an oeuvre of hundreds of classical and popular pieces that poured from his pen in good times and bad, even in the confines of drafty prison cells, squalid concentration camps and years of exile in a remote mountain hamlet.

He also wrote anthems of wartime resistance and socialist tone poems about the plight of workers and oppressed peoples. His most famous work on political persecution was the haunting “Mauthausen Trilogy,” named for a World War II Nazi concentration camp used mainly to exterminate the intelligentsia of Europe’s conquered lands. It has been described as the most beautiful music ever written on the Holocaust.

Mr. Theodorakis’s music made him a wealthy Communist. Having paid his dues to society, he did not apologize for his privileged life as a member of Parliament, with homes in Paris, Athens and the Greek Peloponnesus; for being feted at premieres of his work in New York, London and Berlin; or for counting cultural and political leaders in Europe, America and the Middle East as friends.

During World War II, he joined a Communist youth group that fought fascist occupation forces in Greece. After the war, his name appeared on a police list of wartime resisters, and he was rounded up with thousands of suspected Communists and sent for three years to the island of Makronisos, the site of a notorious prison camp. There he contracted tuberculosis, and he was tortured and subjected to mock executions by being buried alive.

Mr. Theodorakis studied at music conservatories in Athens and Paris in the 1950s, writing symphonies, chamber music, ballets and assorted rhapsodies, marches and adagios. He set to music the verses of eminent Greek poets, many of them Communists. He also deepened his ties to Communism: When Greece became a Cold War battleground, he blamed not Stalin but the C.I.A.

He was profoundly affected by the assassination in 1963 of Grigoris Lambrakis, a prominent antiwar activist, who was run down by right-wing zealots on a motorcycle at a peace rally in Thessaloniki. His murder — a pivotal event in modern Greek history that was portrayed in thinly fictionalized form in the Costa-Gavras film as the work of leaders of the subsequent junta — provoked mass protests and a national political crisis.

Categories
Entertainment

Charlie Watts, Bedrock Drummer for the Rolling Stones, Dies at 80

Charlie Watts, Bedrock Drummer for the Rolling Stones, Dies at 80

Charlie Watts, whose strong but unremarkable drums drove the Rolling Stones for over 50 years, died in London on Tuesday. He was 80.

His death in a hospital was announced by his publicist Bernard Doherty. Further details were not immediately disclosed.

The Rolling Stones announced earlier this month that Mr. Watts would not be participating in the band’s upcoming “No Filter” tour of the United States after undergoing unspecified emergency medical treatment that the band officials said was successful .

Restrained, dignified and elegant, Mr. Watts was never as extravagant, either on stage or outside, as most of his rock star colleagues, let alone the singer of the Stones, Mick Jagger. Contented himself with being one of the best rock drummers of his generation, he played with a jazzy swing that made the band’s gigantic success possible. As the Stones guitarist Keith Richards said in his 2010 autobiography “Life”, “Charlie Watts was always the bed I lay on musically.”

While some rock drummers hunted for volume and bombast, Mr. Watts defined his game with subtlety, swing and solid groove.

“As much as Mick’s voice and Keith’s guitar, Charlie Watts’ snare sound is the Rolling Stones,” wrote Bruce Springsteen in an introduction to drummer Max Weinberg’s 1991 edition of The Big Beat. “When Mick sings, ‘It’s only rock’ n ‘roll but I like it’, Charlie is in the back and shows you why!”

Charles Robert Watts was born in London on June 2, 1941. His mother, the former Lillian Charlotte Eaves, was a housewife; his father, Charles Richard Watts, was with the Royal Air Force and became a truck driver for British Railways after World War II.

Charlie’s first instrument was a banjo, but puzzled by the fingering required to play it, he removed his neck and transformed his body into a snare drum. He discovered jazz at the age of 12 and soon became a fan of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus.

In 1960 Mr. Watts graduated from the Harrow School of Art and found employment as a graphic designer with a London advertising agency. He wrote and illustrated “Ode to a Highflying Bird,” a children’s book about jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (although it wasn’t published until 1965). In the evenings he played drums with various groups.

Most of them were jazz combos, but he was also invited to join Alexis Korner’s raw rhythm-and-blues collective Blues Incorporated. Mr Watts declined the invitation because he was leaving England to work as a graphic designer in Scandinavia, but he joined the group when he returned a few months later.

The newly formed Rolling Stones (then Rollin ‘Stones) knew they needed a good drummer but couldn’t afford Mr. Watts, who was already getting a regular salary from his various gigs. “We starved ourselves to pay for him!” Mr. Richards wrote. “Literally. We went shoplifting to get Charlie Watts.”

In early 1963, when they could finally guarantee five pounds a week, Mr. Watts joined the band, completing the canonical line-up of Mr. Richards, Mr. Jagger, guitarist Brian Jones, bassist Bill Wyman and pianist Ian Stewart. He moved in with his bandmates and immersed himself in Chicago blues records.

After the success of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones quickly rose from being an electro blues special to one of the biggest bands of the British invasion of the 1960s. While Mr. Richards ‘guitar riff defined the band’s most famous single, the 1965 chart-topping “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” Mr. Watts’ drum pattern was just as important. He was tireless on “Paint It Black” (No. 1 in 1966), lithe on “Ruby Tuesday” (No. 1 in 1967) and the master of a funky groove on “Honky Tonk Women” (No. 1 in 1969).

Mr. Watts was ambivalent about the fame he gained as a member of the group often referred to as “the greatest rock ‘n’ roll in the world”. As he said in the 2003 book According to the Rolling Stones, “I loved playing with Keith and the band – I still do – but I wasn’t interested in being a pop idol, Sitting there with screaming girls It’s not the world I’m from. It’s not what I wanted to be and I still think it’s silly. “

As the Stones ran over the years, Mr. Watts drew on his graphic background to help design the band’s sets, merchandise and album covers – he even put a comic strip on the back of their 1967 album “Between” for the band Buttons. “While the Stones cultivated bad boy images and indulged a collective appetite for debauchery, Mr. Watts avoided mostly sex and drugs. In 1964, he secretly married Shirley Ann Shepherd, an art student and sculptor.

On tour he went back to his hotel room alone; every night he sketched his accommodation. “Since 1967 I’ve drawn every bed I’ve slept in on tour,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1996. “It’s a fantastic non-book.”

While other members of the Stones battled for control of the band, Mr. Watts stayed largely out of internal politics. As he told The Weekend Australian in 2014, “I usually mumble in the background.”

Considering himself a leader, Mr. Jones was fired from the Stones in 1969 (and found dead in his swimming pool shortly afterwards). Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards spent decades arguing, sometimes making albums without being in the studio at the same time. Mr. Watts was happy to work with one or both of them.

However, there was a time when Mr. Watts is known to be annoyed at being treated like a wage worker rather than an equal member of the group. In 1984, Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards went out drinking for one night in Amsterdam. When they got back to their hotel around 5am, Mr. Jagger called Mr. Watts, woke him up and asked, “Where’s my drummer?” Twenty minutes later, Mr. Watts appeared in Mr. Jagger’s room, coldly angry but shaved and smartly dressed in a Savile Row suit and tie.

“Never call me your drummer again,” he said to Mr. Jagger before grabbing his lapel and hooking it up properly. Mr. Richards said he just barely saved Mr. Jagger from falling out a window into an Amsterdam canal.

“It’s not something I’m proud of and if I hadn’t been drinking I never would have,” said Watts in 2003. “The bottom line is, don’t piss me off.”

At the time, Mr. Watts was in the early stages of a midlife crisis that manifested itself as a two year tamer. Just as the other Stones got into moderation in their 40s, he became addicted to amphetamines and heroin, which nearly destroyed his marriage. After passing out in a recording studio and breaking his ankle while falling down a flight of stairs, he quit, Cold Turkey.

Mr Watts and his wife had a daughter, Seraphina, in 1968 and, after spending some time as tax exiles in France, moved to a farm in south-west England. There they bred award-winning Arabian horses and gradually expanded their stud to over 250 horses on 700 hectares of land. Information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr Doherty, the publicist, said Mr Watts “died peacefully” in the hospital “surrounded by his family”.

The Rolling Stones made 30 studio albums, nine of them at the top of the American charts and 10 at the top of the UK charts. The band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1989 – a ceremony Mr. Watts skipped.

Eventually the Stones agreed to release an album every four years, followed by an extremely lucrative world tour. (They grossed over half a billion dollars on their Bigger Bang tour between 2005 and 2007.)

But Mr. Watts’ true love remained jazz, and he filled the time between those tours with jazz groups of various sizes – the Charlie Watts Quintet, the Charlie Watts Tentet, the Charlie Watts Orchestra. But soon he would be back on the road with the Stones, playing in sold-out arenas and sketching beds in empty hotel rooms.

He wasn’t slowed by age or throat cancer in 2004. In 2016, Metallica Billboard’s drummer Lars Ulrich said that since he wanted to play until his 70s, he saw Mr. Watts as his model. “The only roadmap is Charlie Watts,” he said.

Meanwhile, Mr. Watts kept the beat with a simple four-piece drum kit and anchored the Rolling Stones spectacle.

“I’ve always wanted to be a drummer,” he told Rolling Stone in 1996, adding that he envisioned a more intimate environment at arena rock shows. “I always had this illusion that I was in Blue Note or Birdland with Charlie Parker in front of me. It didn’t sound like it, but that was the illusion I had. “

Categories
Entertainment

R. Murray Schafer, Composer Who Heard Nature’s Music, Dies at 88

R. Murray Schafer, Composer Who Heard Nature’s Music, Dies at 88

On his return to Toronto, Mr. Schafer in 1962 co-founded the innovative concert series Ten Centuries, which presented new and rarely heard music.

As his career picked up, he answered requests for new works with irreverence, composing “Son of Heldenleben,” a parodic riff on the tone poem by Richard Strauss, and “No Longer Than Ten (10) Minutes,” in which an orchestra tunes up, a conductor walks on and offstage, and the players crescendo each time the audience tries to applaud. His 1966 “Requiems for the Party-Girl,” written for the mezzo-soprano Phyllis Mailing, is a darkly virtuosic monodrama in which a woman sings of her impending suicide.

Mr. Schafer married Ms. Mailing in 1960, and they divorced in 1971. His second marriage, to Jean Reed, from 1975 to about 1999, also ended in divorce. He married Ms. James in 2011 after a long partnership. Along with her, he is survived by his brother, Paul.

Mr. Schafer began his research on soundscapes after joining the faculty at Simon Fraser University in 1965. He also invented a radical approach to teaching, calling it “creative music education.” In a series of influential booklets, he provided exercises to encourage children’s creativity, asking them to “bring an interesting sound to school” or hum along with a tune that they had heard on a street corner.

Alongside the mythic theater of “Patria,” Mr. Schafer composed more conventional scores, among them 13 string quartets and “Letters from Mignon,” a neo-Romantic song setting of love letters written to him by Ms. James. His genre-spanning oratorio “Apocalypsis” was first performed with a cast of more than 500 in 1980; it received a triumphant, career-capping revival at the Luminato Festival in Toronto in 2015.

In a 2009 short film directed by David New, Mr. Schafer offers philosophical musings on listening amid the snowy soundscape outside his home, a remote farmhouse in the Indian River area in southern Ontario.

Categories
Politics

Lucille Occasions, Who Impressed the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dies at 100

Lucille Times, Who Inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dies at 100

Mrs. Times drove away angrily. “My blood was almost boiling,” she said. “I didn’t even take my clothes to the dry cleaner.”

At home, her husband Charlie had heard of the incident. Together they called ED Nixon, head of the local NAACP chapter, and asked what they could do. He came over that night.

As a child, she had participated in a boycott of a butcher shop in Detroit where she was visiting relatives and suggested to Mr. Nixon that the city’s black community could do the same. He agreed, but said the time was not right – they would need money, cars, and other supplies to make this happen. He asked her to be patient.

She called the city bus company to complain, but no one answered. She sent letters to The Montgomery Advertiser and The Atlanta Journal, but they refused to print them. She decided not to wait.

Over the next six months, she conducted her own boycott, driving to bus stops and offering free rides to black passengers waiting to board. Charlie, who runs a cafe across from her house, raised money for gasoline, and they used the cafe as a planning hub – people could call Charlie to arrange a ride and he would put together a timetable for his wife.

“Lucille was called in for bears and she wouldn’t stop at nothing,” said Mr. Nichols. “She was full steam ahead.”

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and activist with the Montgomery NAACP, boarded Mr Blake’s bus and sat in the front area reserved for white drivers. When he ordered her to go back, she refused and was arrested. Four days later, the Montgomery Improvement Association, formed in coordination with the NAACP and led by a 26-year-old preacher, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., headed a city-wide boycott.

Categories
Politics

Gary B. Nash, 88, Dies; Drew Ire for Attempting to Replace Historical past Schooling

Gary B. Nash, 88, Dies; Drew Ire for Trying to Update History Education

Before he became famous as Mr. Limbaughs bête noire, Dr. Nash widely recognized as a leading figure in so-called New Left History who rejected the discipline’s traditional focus on elites as movers of history in favor of everyday life.

His book “Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America” ​​(1974), for example, looked at the colonial era through the eyes of Indians, working class whites, and free and enslaved blacks.

Although he spent the rest of his life in Los Angeles, Dr. Nash was fond of Philadelphia and often used his hometown to illustrate his man-on-the-street approach. In “The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution” (1979), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, he examined how political ideas among sailors, dockworkers and other workers in Philadelphia – including Boston and New York – played a crucial role in the independence movement.

“It changed the focus of what people were doing from the standard study of ideology and ideas to the actions of ordinary people on the ground,” said Mary Beth Norton, a historian at Cornell University, in an interview.

Dr. Nash saw a continuation between his approach to history and his commitment to contemporary education and grassroots politics. After the Watts Riots in 1965, he joined an organization that supported black entrepreneurs. He was working to liquidate Pacific Palisades, the affluent area of ​​Los Angeles where he lived. And after the university’s Board of Regents fired black activist Angela Davis from her post as professor of sociology, Dr. Nash set up a faculty committee to reinstate her.

Although his critics often labeled him anti-American – or worse – Dr. Nash insisted he was optimistic about the country.

“If you were a radical left historian in the United States, you would not have written what he did. He’s always been optimistic about the United States, ”said Carla Pestana, a PhD student with Dr. Nash studied and is now the chairman of UCLA’s history department. “He thought the real story was about common people trying to make the country better.”

Categories
Health

Barbara Kannapell, Activist Who Empowered Deaf Individuals, Dies at 83

Barbara Kannapell, Activist Who Empowered Deaf People, Dies at 83

Her parents attended Gallaudet, and Barbara, known as Kanny, followed in their footsteps and earned her bachelor’s degree in Deaf Education in 1961. In 1970 she received a master’s degree in educational technology from the Catholic University of America in Washington. For her dissertation in Georgetown, where she completed her PhD in 1985, she examined the attitudes of 200 Gallaudet students and found that 62 percent of them considered themselves bilingual in ASL and English.

After graduating from Gallaudet, she began four decades at the university, starting in 1962 as a research assistant. Her last position there was from 1987 to 2003 as an associate professor. She also taught at the Community College of Baltimore County, where she began as an adjunct professor in 1997 and retired as an adjunct professor in 2014.

She met Ms. Paul, who was a writer and editor and advisor on women’s leadership (she is now retired), in 1971 at a gay bar in Washington, Ms. Paul said in an interview. The bar had phones on the tables so people could call other tables. Ms. Paul listening was with a friend who was Dr. Kannapell’s desk called, but everyone there was deaf and couldn’t hear the phone. So Mrs. Paul and her friend went and introduced themselves personally.

“The next day I ran to the library and looked for anything I could find about the deaf,” said Ms. Paul. She then met with Dr. Kannapell for lunch, where they agreed in writing.

Their relationship blossomed. When same-sex marriage was illegal, they held an engagement ceremony; they married in 2013 in the District of Columbia. Paul is the only immediate survivor of Dr. Kannapell.

Among the many interests of Dr. Kannapell, she was fascinated by the experiences of deaf Americans during World War II. Over the decades, she gathered a wealth of data, including interviews with deaf people who had worked in war factories and material she received from deaf people and their descendants. She published an early summary of her research in 2002 in the journal of the National Association of the Deaf, entitled “Forgotten Americans: Deaf War Plant Workers in World War II”.

Ms. Paul and various colleagues plan to complete their project and publish it in the near future.

Categories
Entertainment

Nanci Griffith, Singer Who Blended People and Nation, Dies at 68

Nanci Griffith, Singer Who Blended Folk and Country, Dies at 68

Nanci Griffith, a Grammy-winning singer and songwriter with one foot in folk and the other in country and blessed with an aspiring voice who was equally at home in both genres, died Friday. She was 68.

Her death was announced by her management company, Gold Mountain Entertainment. The statement did not specify where she died or the cause of death, only: “It was Nanci’s wish that no further formal statement or press release be made a week after her death.”

While Ms. Griffith often wrote political and denominational material, her most popular songs were closely watched stories of small town life, sometimes with painful detail in the lyrics but typically sung with a deceptive beauty. Her song “Love at the Five and Dime”, for example, traces a couple’s romance from its teenage origins when “Rita was 16 / hazel eyes and auburn hair / she made the Woolworth counter shine” to old age when “Eddie traveled”. with the pub ribbons / until arthritis took his hands / Now he’s selling insurance on the side. “

The song was a country hit in 1986 – but for Kathy Mattea, not Ms. Griffith. While Ms. Griffith was the first person to record “From a Distance” by Julie Gold, the song later became a huge hit for Bette Midler.

Ms. Griffith sometimes displayed a folky nonchalance towards mainstream success. She told Rolling Stone in 1993 that she didn’t mind that Ms. Mattea had the hit version of “Love at the Five and Dime”: “It feels great that Kathy has to sing this for the rest of her life and I not T. “

Nanci Caroline Griffith was born on July 6, 1953 in Seguin, Texas, about 35 miles northeast of San Antonio, to Marlin Griffith, a book publisher and singer in barbershop quartets, and Ruelen Strawser, a real estate agent and amateur actress. “I come from a basically very dysfunctional family,” she told Texas Monthly in 1999. “I had very, very irresponsible parents.”

When she was a child, her family moved to Austin; her parents divorced in 1960.

When she was 12, Ms. Griffith wrote songs and played in Austin clubs. A formative experience was when, as a teenager, she saw a performance by the melancholy Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt; She particularly identified with his song Tecumseh Valley, about a doomed young woman named Caroline, and it became an integral part of her songbook.

In 1988 she told the New York Times, “When I was young, I listened to Odetta records for hours. Then when I started high school, Loretta Lynn came with me. Before that, country music hadn’t had a guitar-playing woman who wrote her own songs. “

After attending the University of Texas, Ms. Griffith stayed in Austin. She worked as a kindergarten teacher while devoting herself to music and performing alongside artists such as Lucinda Williams, Lyle Lovett and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. She put aside finger paints when she won a songwriting award at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas; In 1978 she released her first album “There’s a Light Beyond These Woods”. It was the first of four folk albums that she released for tiny labels in eight years, during which she also toured continuously.

In 1985 she moved to Nashville, where she was rewarded with a major label contract. Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times in 1987 praising her signing with MCA Nashville as a positive harbinger for the country music industry, calling her “one of the most gifted writers to carry on a southern country version of denominational singer-songwriter mode.” that dominated Los Angeles rock in the early and mid-1970s. “

She put together a band, the Blue Moon Orchestra, that stayed together for over a decade, and spiced up their finely crafted songs with country pop muscles, a mix she called “folkabilly”.

However, her record label was confused by her. She told Rolling Stone in 1993 that “the radio person at MCA Nashville told me I would never be on the radio because my voice hurt people’s ears.” After two albums targeting the country market received positive reviews but only sold mediocre sales, she made two albums trying to reach pop fans, an effort that was successful in Ireland but not in the United States States. Her breakthrough came when she switched the label to Elektra and returned to her folk roots.

Her 1993 album “Other Voices, Other Rooms” (named after Truman Capote’s debut novel) included 17 versions of songs by her folk ancestors, including Malvina Reynolds and Woody Guthrie. Hailed by critics as a homely delight, it won the 1994 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album and was awarded gold for sales of more than 500,000 copies.

Ms. Griffith followed in 1998 with the album “Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful)” and the book “Nanci Griffith’s Other Voices: A Personal History of Folk Music”, which was less successful, however.

Ms. Griffith was a living link not only with previous songwriters, but also with the music of Ireland (she played with the Chieftains) and Texas (she toured with the surviving members of Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets).

She repeatedly played through two cancer attacks and a painful case of Dupuyten’s contracture, an abnormal thickening of the skin on the hand that severely restricted the mobility of her fingers.

In 2008 the Americana Music Association presented her with the Lifetime Americana Trailblazer Award. In 2012, the year in which she released her 18th and final studio album “Intersection”, she explained her motivation to the New York Times: “I put things into music and words that have annoyed and hurt me. Suddenly they were there and ready to come out. “

Mrs. Griffith was married to the Texan singer-songwriter Eric Taylor from 1976 to 1982. Complete information on the survivors was not immediately available.

In 1993, at the age of 39, before she had won a Grammy and her commercial prospects were uncertain, Ms. Griffith told Rolling Stone what motivated her:

“Longevity – that’s probably the brass ring for me. I still want to hear my music come back to me at 65. “

Jordan Allen contributed to the coverage.