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Tuesday, July 29, 2008
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About Jewish composers and performers....
Category: Music
Jewish Composers and Performers
(By George Jochnowitz, 2004)
Is there a Jewish instrument? It would have to be the shofar, sounded during the month of Elul, during Rosh Hashanah services, and at the end of Yom Kippur. Is there a modern instrument that is a descendant of the shofar? The trumpet comes to mind, or perhaps the trombone or the tuba.
Are Jews famous for playing brasses? Not particularly, although when we consider the world of Klezmer music, we have trumpeter Frank London. When we get to woodwinds, the clarinet seems to be a candidate, both in classical and Klezmer music, although the clarinet is a relatively recent instrument, attributed to Johann Christopher Denner and invented in Nuremberg in about 1690 (1). The most famous clarinetist, noted for both swing and classical music, is probably Benny Goodman.
The voice is a universal instrument, and there certainly is a tradition of cantorial singing. Back in the 20th century, there were quite a few Jewish opera stars at the Metropolitan Opera, Jan Peerce, Robert Merrill, Roberta Peters, and Beverly Sills among them. One tenor, Richard Tucker, also had a career as a cantor (2).
But it is among violinists that Jews are particularly numerous: Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Isaac Stern, Yitzhak Perlman, Gil Shaham, Leonid Kogan, Nathan Millstein, David Oistrakh, Lord Yehudi Menuhin, Maxim Vengerov — to name only a few.
Erica Morini, perhaps the most famous woman violinist of the first half of the 20th century, was Jewish. My father saw her perform in Cracow when he was a young man. I saw her perform at Carnegie Hall when I was a young man. For most of the 20th century, Jews seemed to dominate the ranks of top violinists. My wife has told me about a riddle she heard some decades ago:
What is the world's shortest book? Answer: The Book of Non-Jewish Violinists.
Times have changed. In recent years, Asians have joined the ranks of violinists: Cho-Liang Lin, born in Taiwan and an American citizen; Sarah Chang, born in Philadelphia to Korean parents; Midori, born in Japan but now a resident of New York City. There is no longer a clear Jewish majority of renowned violinists, but Yitzhak Perlman seems to be the most respected and loved violinist performing today.
Why should Jews be especially prominent among violinists? There is no clear answer. Perhaps string instruments are most capable of changes in tone, most like the voice. Perhaps violins reflect emotion, especially grief, more easily. We should remember, however, that those who play and love different instruments will argue that their own favorite instrument can convey the greatest range of emotion. Are violins popular among a wandering people because they are portable? Probably not. Most wind instruments are equally portable.
Even more numerous among Jews than famous violinists are famous pianists: Artur Schnabel, Artur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Wanda Landowska (a harpsichordist but also a pianist), Rudolf Serkin, Andras Schiff, Evgeny Kissin, Yefim Bronfman, Murray Perahia, Richard Goode, Emanuel Ax, Bennett Lerner — I have named only a few.
Despite their numbers, Jewish pianists seem to be a proportionately smaller group than Jewish violinists. The world recognizes the names of more pianists than of violinists. As is the case with violinists, in recent years Asian pianists have become famous as well: Helen Huang, born in Japan to Chinese parents; Lang Lang, born in Shenyang, China.
What about composers? Jews are less prominent. When I was growing up, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was always considered the most important Jewish composer. Whether he should be counted as Jewish is a debatable point, since his parents decided that the family should convert to Lutheranism when Felix was a child. Mendelssohn's music is well known and generally well liked, but he is rarely if ever listed among the top five or even top ten composers of history.
Nowadays, things are a bit different. Gustav Mahler has replaced Mendelssohn-Bartholdy as the most admired Jewish composer. Every year, radio station WQXR asks its listeners to vote for their favorite compositions.
In the 2001-2002 poll, compositions by Beethoven won five of the top ten places. Mahler's second symphony was number 9 on the list. Vivaldi, Bach, and Dvorak were ahead of Mahler, who, amazingly, outranked Rachmaninoff (10) and even Mozart (11), to say nothing of Verdi (14), Puccini (16) and Brahms (17).
A year later, Mahler did not do quite so well. In the 2002-2003 poll, Mahler's second had dropped to number 11 on the list, although there were two other Mahler symphonies in the top 40, his first and fifth. Despite this slight drop, Mahler's long and complex compositions remain strikingly popular, much more so than the more accessible music of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.
Mahler too was a convert to Christianity; he had to become a Catholic to secure the position of director of the Vienna Court Opera (3). Composers, it seems, are more likely to be integrated into the societies of the countries where they grow up. Performers, a peripatetic lot, may be at home everwhere or nowhere.
The best-known Jewish composer of the 17th century is Salamone de'Rossi of Mantua, now in Italy. The dukes of Mantua had allowed a number of Jewish musicians to perform and create in the 16th century, and Rossi was part of a tradition, which ended when the Austrian army sacked Mantua in 1628-30 (4). It makes sense that Rossi came from a community where Jewish musicians were at home.
The countries where Jews were most integrated in the early 19th century were probably first France and then Germany. Giacomo Meyerbeer and Jacques Offenbach were born in Germany but lived in France. Jacques Hale'vy was born and lived in France.
If the populous Jewish communities of eastern Europe were producing composers at this time, we haven't heard of them. Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894) was the first Russian Jewish composer to become world famous, although nowhere as famous as Mendelssohn (1809-1847) or even Meyerbeer (1791-1864).
Incidentally, Rubinstein was the model for the assimilationist German Jewish musician Klesmer (what an appropriate name) in George Eliot's novel "Daniel Deronda" (5). When we get to the 20th century, Jewish composers are likely to be Americans: George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein. Paul Ben-Haim is Israeli; perhaps Israel will produce great composers in the 21st century.
What is greatness? It is easier to agree about fame than about genius. I find Mozart the greatest composer. Almost everyone feels that Mozart is great, but nobody can explain how. Critics talk about originality, complexity, and profundity. This doesn't explain Mozart. Music may be wonderful because it plumbs emotional depths. But emotional heights can be as thrilling as emotional depths. It is perhaps harder to write great happy music than great tragic music. As for originality, Mozart was one of the least innovative composers who ever lived. His music was significantly less experimental than Haydn's, for example. Mozart was original in only one way: his greatness.
My own candidate for the greatest Jewish composer is Offenbach. I find the cancan music in "Orpheus in the Underworld" thrilling, although it is neither deep nor complex nor particularly original. "Orpheus in the Underworld", a comic opera with lots of spoken dialogue and lots of jokes that may have been funny once but are now incomprehenible, does not stand up as a dramatic work.
As for the version of the cancan found in the ballet "Gaîté parisienne", arranged by Manuel Rosenthal, it lacks the spark and excitement of the original Offenbach score. To others, it may not be great, but "Orpheus in the Underworld" sweeps me off my feet. What else can greatness mean?
The French movie composer Michel Legrand agrees with me: "I have always loved Offenbach, so inventive, so droll, with splendid harmonies" (6). Legrand's play "Amour" opened on Broadway on October 20, 2002, and has since closed.
Tragedy can be understood in every generation; comedy is linked to a particular time and place. Music, however, can last longer than comedy. Offenbach's cancan has a liveliness also found in Rossini — especially the "Lone Ranger" theme from the "William Tell" overture — and in Klezmer music. Whatever greatness may be, it includes music that lifts the spirits.
Light opera, operetta, musical comedy — are they the same thing? Jewish composers have stood out in this genre. Richard Rodgers, whether half of the pair Rodgers and Hart or the later team Rodgers and Hammerstein, is a champion composer of musical comedy. So is Frederick Loewe, who worked with his librettist Alan Jay Lerner to write "My Fair Lady" and other distinguished musical comedies. I don't know whether Leonard Bernstein's "Candide" should be considered an opera or a Broadway show, but whatever it is, it is a work of genius. Jewish composers have excelled as composers of operetta.
In the first half of the 20th century, Irving Berlin was perhaps the best known composer of American popular music. Then came rock 'n' roll, an inspired and powerful form of popular music that was played everywhere and respected nowhere.
American Jews, as integrated as any Jewish community in history has ever been, might have been expected to produce big names in rock 'n' roll, especially since rock 'n' roll, which combines elements of rhythm 'n' blues with country 'n' western, is the most integrated form of popular music in America.
Jewish composers are underrepresented when it comes to rock 'n' roll, although we do have Paul Simon, among others. Bob Dylan's music is sometimes called "folk rock", but it has little in common with traditional rock 'n' roll.
Minimalist music is the classical analog of rock 'n' roll. It shares with rock 'n' roll a strict regularity of rhythm and, as its name suggests, the repetition and exploration of a small - minimal - number of melodies. Philip Glass and Steve Reich are two Jewish composers whose careers are built on minimalism. The Jewish creative energy that did not go into rock and roll found its home in minimalism.
Why are there famous English composers of the 18th century but not of the 19th?
Why did opera begin in Italy and thrive there as nowhere else?
Why haven't German composers since 1955 dominated classical music the way they did for the previous three centuries? We don't know the answer.
And we don't know why Jews are so numerous among the world's great violinists.
Notes
(1). Grove's "Dictionary of Music and Musicians", 3rd edition, vol. 1, p. 656.
(2). For further discussion, see Leonard J. Leff, "A Question of Identity", Opera News, December 2002, pp. 34-39.
(3). Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 11, column 726.
(4). Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 14, column 318.
(5). Edmund White, "The Great Issues: George Eliot, Zionism and the Novel", TLS, January 18, 2002, p. 6.
(6). Cited by Alan Riding, "The Real Paradox: Musical Comedy Made in France", "Arts and Leisure", The New York Times, October 20, 2002.
(George Jochnowitz / www.jochnowitz.net)
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Saturday, August 16, 2008
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Jerry WEXLER, a behind-the-scenes force in Black Music, dies at 91
Category: Music
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/jerry_wexler/index.html August 16, 2008
Jerry Wexler, R&B Impresario and Record Producer, Dies at 91
Jerry Wexler, center, with Ahmet Ertegun and Big Joe Turner
(photo: Ochs Archives/Getty Images).
Jerry Wexler, who as a reporter for Billboard magazine in the late 1940's christened black popular music rhythm and blues, and who as a record producer helped lead the genre to mainstream popularity, propelling the careers of Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin and other performers, died on Friday at his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 91.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Paul.
Mr. Wexler was already in his 30's when he entered the music business, but his impact was immediate and enduring. In 1987, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recognized his contributions to American music by inducting him in only its second year of conferring such honors.
Mr. Wexler actually didn't care for rock 'n' roll, at least as it evolved in the 1960's and 70's. Though he signed a British band called Led Zeppelin and eventually produced records by the likes of Bob Dylan, Carlos Santana, Dire Straits and George Michael, his main influence came in the 1950's and 60's as a vice president of Atlantic Records, working largely with black artists who were forging a new musical style, which came to be called soul music, from elements of gospel, swing and blues.
"He played a major role in bringing black music to the masses, and in the evolution of rhythm and blues to soul music", Jim Henke, vice president and chief curator for the Hall of Fame, said in an interview.
"Beyond that, he really developed the role of the record producer. Jerry did a lot more than just turn on a tape recorder. He left his stamp on a lot of great music. He had a commercial ear as well as a critical ear."
Mr. Wexler was something of a paradox. A businessman with tireless energy, a ruthless streak and a volatile temper, he was also a hopeless music fan. A New York Jew and a vehement atheist, he found his musical home in the Deep South, in studios in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Ala., among Baptists and Methodists, blacks and good old boys.
"He was a bundle of contradictions", said Tom Thurman, who produced and directed a documentary about Mr. Wexler in 2000. "He was incredibly abrasive and incredibly generous, very abrupt and very, very patient, seemingly a pure, sharklike businessman and also a cerebral and creative genius."
The title of Mr. Thurman's documentary, "Immaculate Funk", was Mr. Wexler's phrase for the Atlantic sound, characterized by a heavy backbeat and a gospel influence. "It's funky, it's deep, it's very emotional, but it's clean", Mr. Wexler once said.
Though not a musician himself, Mr. Wexler had a natural rapport with musicians, who seemed to recognize his instinct for how best to employ their gifts.
In 1950, while he was still at Billboard, he encountered the young singer Patti Page and hummed for her a 1947 song he liked, "The Tennessee Waltz". Her subsequent recording of it sold three million copies in eight months.
A few years later he was a partner at Atlantic, presiding over the 1954 recording session of Ray Charles's breakout hit, "I've Got a Woman". He said later that the best thing he had done for Charles was to let him do as he pleased.
"He had an extraordinary insight into talent", Charles, who died in 2004, said in "Immaculate Funk."
Mr. Wexler wasn't always a mere listener. In the mid-1960's, at a recording session with Wilson Pickett, Mr. Wexler wanted more of a backbeat in the song "In the Midnight Hour" but couldn't explain in words what he wanted, so he illustrated it by doing a new dance, the jerk.
In the late 1960's and 70's, he made 14 Atlantic albums with Ms. Franklin, whose musical instincts had been less than fully exploited at her previous label, Columbia. Mr. Wexler gave her more control over her songs and her sound, a blend of churchlike spirituality and raw sexuality, which can be heard in hits like "Respect", "Dr. Feelgood" and "Chain of Fools".
"How could he understand what was inside of black people like that?" Pickett asked in the documentary. "But Jerry Wexler did".
Gerald Wexler was born in New York City on Jan. 10, 1917, and grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan at a time before the building of the George Washington Bridge, when swimming in the Hudson River was a summer pastime.
His parents were mismatched. His father, Harry Wexler, was a Polish-Jewish immigrant who spent his entire working life as a window washer. His headstrong mother, Elsa, had higher aspirations for herself and especially for Jerry, the older of her two sons: she wanted him to be a writer.
Young Jerry didn't care for school much, however; he frequented pool halls and record stores instead, and he went to Harlem jazz clubs at night. In 1936, as something of a last-ditch effort to straighten out her wayward son, Elsa Wexler enrolled him at Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science (known today as Kansas State University) in Manhattan, Kan. There he first encountered a rural musical sensibility, and 100 or so miles away, in the lively musical scene of Kansas City, Mo., he could immerse himself in the blues.
Mr. Wexler left college after two years, joined the Army, served stateside during World War II, then returned to Kansas State and finished his degree. By 1949 he was back in New York, married and working as a cub reporter for Billboard. At the time the black popular-music charts in the magazine were gathered under the rubric Race Records.
"We used to close the book on a Friday and come back to work on a Tuesday", Mr. Wexler recalled in an interview last fall with the Web site PopEntertainment.com. "One Friday the editor got us together and said, 'Listen, let's change this from Race Records'. A lot of people were beginning to find it inappropriate. 'Come back with some ideas on Tuesday'.
"There were four guys on the staff", he continued. "One guy said this and one guy said that, and I said, 'Rhythm and blues', and they said: 'Oh, that sounds pretty good. Let's do that.' In the next issue, that section came out as Rhythm and Blues instead of Race".
His work at Billboard attracted the attention of Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records, then a small independent label focusing on black music. When his partner, Herb Abramson, went into the Army, Mr. Ertegun asked Mr. Wexler to join the company in 1953.
Over the next decade Mr. Wexler's drive, his sales and promotion skills, and, according to the business practices of the day, his indulging in payola — the bribery of disc jockeys to play a company's records — helped make Atlantic a leader in the recording industry.
In the 1950's the company produced records by the Drifters, the Clovers, Joe Turner, Ruth Brown and, in partnership with the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the Coasters.
In the 1960's, however, Mr. Wexler and Mr. Ertegun began to take different paths. Mr. Ertegun gravitated toward rock 'n' roll, while Mr. Wexler — though he signed Led Zeppelin to Atlantic — was drawn to the niche sounds he found in places like Memphis, where a small label, Stax Records, its principal studio, located in a former movie palace, had gathered a mix of black and white musicians and produced a sound based on spontaneity and improvisation.
Mr. Wexler brought Otis Redding and Dusty Springfield, among others, to Memphis (Eventually, Springfield chose to record her vocals in New York). Later, after hearing a recording Percy Sledge had made at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, he began producing records there as well, bringing singers like Pickett and Ms. Franklin to work with local musicians.
In his autobiography, "Rhythm and the Blues" (Knopf, 1993), written with David Ritz, Mr. Wexler wrote candidly and self-critically about a personal life that he acknowledged had been intemperate, replete with adulterous liaisons and profligate drug use.
Mr. Wexler's first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his son, who lives in High Bridge, N.J., he is survived by his wife, Jean Arnold, and a daughter, Lisa Wexler of Kingston, N.Y. Another daughter, Anita, died of AIDS in 1989.
In the early 1970's Mr. Wexler helped resurrect the career of Willie Nelson with two albums for Atlantic, but he left the label in 1975 (It had been bought by Warner Brothers in 1967).
Later he produced Bob Dylan's 1979 album "Slow Train Coming", a celebration of the singer's embrace of Christianity, for Columbia. When Mr. Dylan accepted his first Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal performance, for the song "Gotta Serve Somebody," he first thanked God and then Jerry Wexler.
In the 1980's Mr. Wexler helped Linda Ronstadt with her career-changing album of Sinatraesque standards, "What's New", a project begun when she spent an afternoon with Mr. Wexler listening to records and for the first time heard the 1930's singer Mildred Bailey.
"When I said I wanted to sing like that, Jerry said the best way was to get a pianist and learn how those songs are done", Ms. Ronstadt told The New York Times in 1983.
She added, "One thing Jerry Wexler taught me was that if you've got a sexy or torchy song, you mustn't attitudinize on top of it, because it sounds redundant."
Given the chance, Mr. Wexler would have produced to the end and beyond.
"I asked him once", said Mr. Thurman, the filmmaker, " 'What do you want written on your tombstone, Jerry?' He said, 'Two words: More bass'. "
(Bruce Weber / The NY Times)
__________________
August 15, 2008
Jerry Wexler, Pioneer of Postwar
Pop, dies at 91
American record producer and music executive helped to start Atlantic Records and coined term 'rhythm and blues'.
Jerry Wexler (photo: Atlantic Records)
Few of the pioneers of the postwar pop music industry more effectively exploited the art of connoisseurship than Jerry Wexler, the American record producer and music industry executive, who has died of congestive heart failure aged 91.
It was his good luck that along with two similarly endowed members of that small band, the Turkish brothers Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, he developed the Atlantic label into a significant creative force in the fields of rhythm and blues, soul, jazz and rock.
By supervising the recordings of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Joe Turner, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Dusty Springfield, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and many others during a studio career lasting almost 50 years, Wexler left a discreet but indelible mark on the popular culture of the second half of the 20th century.
It was in 1947, as a young reporter with Billboard magazine, that he coined the term "rhythm and blues" to replace "race records" as the title of the weekly charts listing the best-selling 78rpm discs among America's black population. Having given it a name that became universally accepted, he helped define the genre after switching to record production.
He had loved black music from childhood, developed a strong empathy with its exponents and knew how to encourage the finest expression of their art usually by the simple yet often overlooked expedient of setting their instincts free in a sympathetic environment.
As influential as the individual recordings he supervised was his migration, in the mid-60's, from his New York base to a working environment below the Mason-Dixon line. First at the Stax and American studios in Memphis, then at Muscle Shoals in Alabama, and finally at Criteria in Miami, he popularised an ambience that put the emphasis on relaxation and a good groove, allowing a mixture of black and white musicians and singers to blend gospel, blues and country music with a minimum of extraneous decoration or polish. Wexler believed in an organic approach, and in his best recordings he made it sound like the only way to function.
Location and environment became Wexler's secret: he took Pickett to Memphis, Franklin and Dylan to Muscle Shoals, Dire Straits to Nassau, and Mac Rebennack (better known as Dr John) back to his roots in New Orleans. By encouraging his artists to relax in the surroundings in which they made their records (when inspiration faded or energy flagged, he would take them fishing), he established a modus operandi that was eagerly copied by young white rock musicians. He was also meticulous in his choice of collaborators. After Ahmet Ertegun came the arranger Arif Mardin, the engineer Tom Dowd and the keyboard player Barry Beckett.
Unlike most of their rivals in the somewhat primitive music business of the early 1950's, Wexler and the Erteguns were at ease with all levels of culture. Wexler's appetite for great literature, instilled by his mother who hoped he would become a writer, gave him an extensive knowledge of authors from Plato, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Dante, Molière, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Balzac to Havelock Ellis, Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner and John O'Hara. Their influence was blended with Harlem vernacular in the sometimes recondite mots justes that studded his conversation and the occasional album sleeve note.
Describing an early Ray Charles recording, for example, he wrote: "Losing Hand is a blues masterpiece, and the conversation between Ray's piano and Mickey Baker's guitar is now and always afterhours balm in excelsis".
Born to a German-Jewish father who struggled to make a living from a window-cleaning business and a doting Russian-Jewish mother whose socialist inclinations led her to sell the Daily Worker on the streets of Harlem, he was brought up in the Washington Heights district of the Bronx.
There he spent more of his early life in a notorious pool hall than at school. At night he would steal off with his friends to hear the big bands of Fletcher Henderson or Jimmie Lunceford at the Savoy ballroom.
"I loved the Harlem of the 30's", he wrote in his autobiography, "loved its look and feel, its dance halls and nightclubs and especially its sounds." He was already combing junk shops for discarded 78s by Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins or Fats Waller. Down in Washington DC, where their father was the Turkish ambassador, the Erteguns were doing the same.
Eventually Elsa Wexler secured her son a place to study journalism at Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science (now Kansas State University) in Manhattan, Kansas, but he lasted only two of the scheduled three years before returning home, where attempts at various careers — delivery boy, liquor store clerk, waiter — foundered until he began working for his father, "the only employer who woudn't turn me down".
Washing the windows of office blocks and brownstone houses was an ordeal alleviated by jazz and blues, the films of Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné, at the Museum of Modern Art, and a meeting with Shirley Kampf, who would become the first of his three wives (the others were Renee Pappas and Jean Arnold) and the mother of his three children.
Their wedding delayed his call-up by a year, and he worked as a customs officer. In 1942 he was drafted into the army, where he took a psychology course and gave personality tests to trainee pilots, bombardiers and navigators in the Army Air Corps. After demobilisation, he went back to Kansas in 1946 to complete his degree, and the following year secured a job at Billboard, one of the two major trade papers serving the music industry. For the next four years he deepened his knowledge and developing a range of contacts in a community that quickly recognised his energy and perception.
A brief interlude in music publishing was followed in 1953 by Ahmet Ertegun's invitation to become a partner in the fledgling Atlantic concern, an investment of $2,000 securing him a salary of $300 a week and a 13% stake, rising to 30% as other shareholders departed. Ertegun spent the stake money on a green Cadillac which became Wexler's company car.
Immediately he was thrown into an environment where doing whatever was necessary to keep an influential disc jockey such as Alan Freed playing Atlantic's records alternated with supervising sessions that produced such classics as the Drifters' "Money Honey" (with a lead vocal by the superlative Clyde McPhatter), Big Joe Turner's original version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" and LaVern Baker's "Tweedlee Dee". Within months Wexler and Ertegun were also involved with a 23-year-old singer and pianist from Florida named Ray Charles, with whom they would lay the foundations of soul music.
"I realised that the best thing I could do with Ray was leave him alone", Wexler wrote 40 years later, although Charles's own memory of their early collaborations was somewhat different, and involved the singer responding to the producer's stream of musical suggestions with a caustic ultimatum. "If I'm gonna do a session", Charles told Wexler, "I'm gonna do it my way, or I ain't gonna do it at all."
Wexler was shrewd enough to step back and allow Charles's extraordinary talent to express itself in a stream of hits that included "It Should Have Been Me", "This Little Girl of Mine", "Lonely Avenue", and the two records in which Charles created the formula for the fusion of gospel and R&B that became soul music: "I Got a Woman" and "What'd I Say".
By the time Charles left Atlantic, in 1959, the company was well established. "I dig cross-cultural collaborations and craved success," Wexler wrote, "which is maybe why Ahmet and I got on so well."
He went on to produce Solomon Burke, another fine singer adept at bringing gospel fervour to the cadences of a blues or a country song, resulting in a string of hits that included "Goodnight Baby", "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love" and a magnificent version of Jim Reeves's country ballad "He'll Have to Go".
It was his recordings with Pickett, including "In the Midnight Hour" and "634-5789", that immersed Wexler in the specialmusical culture of Memphis, where he negotiated Atlantic's distribution deal with the Stax label, thereby ensuring his company's participation in the profits from hits by Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Rufus and Carla Thomas, and Booker T and the MGs.
Aretha Franklin, however, was his greatest success, even though the Muscle Shoals session that produced her first Atlantic single, "I Never Loved a Man", featured a near-catastrophic row between the session musicians and Franklin's volatile husband and manager, Ted White.
As soon as the record was released, however, it became apparent that Wexler, Dowd and Mardin had succeeded where other labels had failed in capturing the essence of the singer's artistry. Her hits with Wexler would include "Respect", "Chain of Fools", "I Say a Little Prayer" and many others.
Two decades of producing classic R&B and soul records had made Atlantic a legend to young British rock musicians, and towards the end of the 1960's Ahmet Ertegun was able to add the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin to the label's roster, their recordings boosting the company's profits at a time when it was being taken over by Warner-Seven Arts.
Eventually Wexler and his old partner went their separate ways, Ertegun retaining his stature as the label's public face while Wexler relocated to Florida and eventually left the company altogether.
His taste, experience and gifts as a raconteur made him a magnet for a younger generation, meaning there was no shortage of work as an independent producer, including Dusty Springfield's "Dusty in Memphis" (with its hit single, "Son of a Preacher Man"), Cher's "3614 Jackson Highway", Willie Nelson's "Phases and Stages", Etta James's "Deep in the Night" and "The Right Time", Dire Straits' "Communiqué", Carlos Santana's "Havana Moon", and the two albums with which Bob Dylan celebrated his conversion to Christianity, "Slow Train Coming" and "Saved".
By the time he stepped down from the front line in the 1990's, just about the only significant name missing from Wexler's CV was that of Elvis Presley, whom he had narrowly failed to capture for Atlantic in 1956 and whose subsequent recordings, it is fair to say, he would have improved immeasurably.
He is survived by his wife Jean, and his son Paul and daughter, Lisa . His daughter Anita, predeceased him.
· Gerald "Jerry" Wexler,
record producer and music industry executive,
born January 10 1917;
died August 15 2008
(Richard Williams / The Guardian)
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Monday, August 11, 2008
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Howard G. Minsky, film producer, dies at 94
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
August 11, 2008
Howard G. Minsky, Film Producer, Dies at 94
West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP) -- Howard G. Minsky, a former Hollywood talent agent and producer of the movie "Love Story", died Sunday. He was 94.
His family said Minsky died of natural causes at a hospital in West Palm Beach.
Minsky's daughter, Marcia Halperin, said her father began his career during the silent film era, and sold reels of film door-to-door before breaking into the Hollywood scene.
Minksy worked as an executive for 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures, and as a talent agent for the William Morris Agency.
In the 1960's, Minsky quit the agency to produce the romantic drama "Love Story," written by one his clients, Erich Segal.
The 1970 film became a blockbuster, winning five Golden Globes, including best picture, and an Academy Award for music
(AP / The Washington Post)
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Friday, July 18, 2008
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Jo Stafford, wistful voice of WW II era, dies at 90
Category: Music
July 18, 2008
Jo Stafford, Wistful Voice of WW II Era, Dies at 90
Jo Stafford, a singer who was a favorite
of American servicemen during World War II
(photo: AP)
Jo Stafford, the wistful singing voice of the American home front during World War II and the Korean War, died on Wednesday at her home in Century City, Calif. She was 90.
The cause of death was congestive heart failure, her son, Tim Weston, said Friday.
A favorite of American servicemen, Ms. Stafford earned the nickname G.I. Jo for her recordings in which her pure, nearly vibrato-less voice, with perfect intonation, conveyed steadfast devotion and reassurance with delicate understatement.
She was the vocal embodiment of every serviceman's dream girl faithfully tending the home fires while he was overseas. First as a member of the Pied Pipers, who sang with Tommy Dorsey and accompanied the young Frank Sinatra, and later as a soloist, Ms. Stafford enjoyed a stream of hits from the late 1930's to the mid-1950's. Her biggest hit, "You Belong to Me", in 1952, sold two million copies.
Ms. Stafford sang everything from folk songs to novelties to hymns. Her gift for hilarious musical parody was first revealed in the 1947 novelty sensation "Temptation" ("Tim-Tayshun"), a hillbilly spoof recorded under the name of Cinderella G. Stump with Red Ingle and the Natural Seven. It reached No. 1 on the music charts.
A decade later, a party act with which she and her husband, the composer, arranger and conductor Paul Weston (born Paul Wetstein, 1912-1996), had amused their friends became a secondary comedy career, in which they impersonated Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, an excruciatingly bad New Jersey lounge act "presented by Jo Stafford and Paul Weston".
While Mr. Weston played the wrong chords and fudged the rhythm, Ms. Stafford sang a half-tone sharp. Mr. Stafford won her only Grammy, for best comedy album ("Jonathan and Darlene Edwards in Paris"), in 1961.
The Edwardses records, the last of which was a hilariously inept 1977 single of "Stayin' Alive", with their version of "I Am Woman" on the flip side, rank as classic pop spoofs alongside those of Spike Jones and Weird Al Yankovic.
But it was as a balladeer interpreting standards like "I'll Be Seeing You", "Haunted Heart", "All the Things You Are" and "The Nearness of You" that Ms. Stafford distilled as pure a vocal essence of romantic nostalgia as any pop singer of the 1940's and 50's.
Jo Elizabeth Stafford was born on Nov. 12, 1917, in Coalinga, Calif., near Fresno and brought up in Long Beach.
As a child she studied voice and hoped to become an opera singer, but because of hard times decided to join her older sisters Christine and Pauline in a country-and-western singing group, the Stafford Sisters, who performed on the radio in Los Angeles.
After the Stafford Sisters broke up, Ms. Stafford, with seven male singers from two other groups, formed the Pied Pipers, an octet that caught the attention of Mr. Weston and Axel Stordahl, arrangers for the Dorsey band. Reduced to a quartet, the group joined Dorsey and quickly gained fame as the backup singers for Sinatra.
In 1940, the No. 1 hit "I'll Never Smile Again" established the creamy Dorsey-Sinatra-Pied Pipers sound.
Ms. Stafford recorded her first solo record with Dorsey, "Little Man With a Candy Cigar", in 1942. Her first husband, John Huddleston, whom she later divorced, was a singer in the group.
Two years later, she left the band to sign with Capitol Records, the new label established by Johnny Mercer. Along with Margaret Whiting and Peggy Lee, Ms. Stafford became one of Capitol's three female pop mainstays. Mr. Weston became Capitol's musical director and Ms. Stafford's arranger and conductor. They married in 1952. Weston died in 1996.
Besides their son, Tim, of Topanga, Calif., Ms. Stafford is survived by their daughter, Amy Wells of Calabasas, Calif.; a younger sister, Betty Jane; and four grandchildren.
During the early Capitol years, Ms. Stafford's U.S.O. tours and V-Discs (recordings specially made for servicemen) earned her the nickname G.I. Jo. In 1945, "Candy", in which she and Pied Pipers accompanied Mr. Mercer, went to No. 1.
From the mid-40's on, Ms. Stafford was a major radio star, who sometimes used her show, "The Chesterfield Supper Club", to acquaint the public with Southern Appalachian folk music. She recorded a groundbreaking album, "Jo Stafford Sings American Folk Songs" and followed it with "Songs of Scotland".
The folk-pop singer Judy Collins has credited Ms. Stafford's version of "Barbara Allen" as an important inspiration for her early folk career.
In the late 1940's and early 50's, Ms. Stafford and Gordon McRae teamed for a series of hit duets, including "My Darling, My Darling", from the Broadway musical "Where's Charley?" and the devotional song "Whispering Hope". When Mr. Weston left Capitol Records for Columbia, Ms. Stafford followed him.
Her Columbia albums, like "Swingin' Down Broadway", "Ski Trails", "Ballad of the Blues" and "Jo + Jazz" (with the arranger Johnny Mandel) foreshadowed the modern concept album. Her biggest hits for the label included "Make Love to Me," a pop version of Hank Williams's "Jambalaya", and "Shrimp Boats".
On several hits she was teamed with Frankie Laine, the most popular of which was their duet of another Williams song, "Hey, Good Lookin' ". After a falling out with Columbia in the late 1950's, Ms. Stafford returned to Capitol, then joined Sinatra's label Reprise.
In 1966, Ms. Stafford went into semiretirement, and after "Stayin' Alive", she retired completely. She re-appeared once, in 1990, at an event honoring Sinatra. Many of her hits have been reissued on Corinthian Records, a record company Mr. Weston founded as a religious label.
Many years after her retirement, Ms. Stafford looked back happily on her musical life with Weston. "Our talents — his and mine — fit the music of the time", she said. "And the music fit us. We were very fortunate, because if both of us were starting out today, we'd starve to death!"
(Stephen Holden / The NY Times)
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Tuesday, August 12, 2008
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George Furth, an actor and playwright, dies at 75
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
August 12, 2008
George Furth, an Actor, Librettist and Playwright, Dies at 75
From left, Stephen Sondheim, George Furth and Harold Prince
(photo: Barlow-Hartman, via AP)
George Furth, a playwright who collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on the Tony Award-winning musical "Company" and who was a ubiquitous character actor whose distinct profile enlivened dozens of popular television series as well as movies like "Blazing Saddles", "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "Shampoo", died on Monday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 75.
Dennis Aspland, his friend and agent, confirmed his death. Mr. Aspland said that he did not know the precise cause, but that Mr. Furth had been in the hospital for a lung infection.
A lanky man with a seemingly natural kinetic nervousness and a perpetual expression of worry, Mr. Furth was often cast as an odd duck, a milquetoast or a stammery, uneasy type with something to hide.
A list of his television credits describes a history of popular series from the 1960's to the 90's, from "The Defenders", "The Farmer's Daughter", "Honey West", "F Troop", "The Monkees" and "McHale's Navy" to "All in the Family", "Little House on the Prairie", "Murder, She Wrote", "Wings", "Murphy Brown", "L.A. Law" and "The Nanny".
Perhaps his most memorable role was as Woodcock, the loyal railway employee who allows himself to be blown up not once, but twice, by Paul Newman's Butch Cassidy, rather than let the train he is riding be robbed.
"Butch, you know if it were my money, there's nobody I'd rather have steal it than you", Woodcock calls memorably through a locked door, moments before it explodes in his face for a second time.
"But you see, I am still in the employment of E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad".
As a playwright, Mr. Furth reached Broadway several times, both on his own and as a collaborator. "Twigs", his play about four women from the same family, all played by Sada Thompson, received mixed reviews when it opened on Broadway in 1971, though Mr. Furth's script had a fan in Walter Kerr of The New York Times, who called its four interconnected pieces "funny and touching and freshly conceived".
A short-lived comedy, "The Supporting Cast", appeared in 1981; and a more serious play, "Precious Sons", a family drama with conscious echoes of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and William Inge, received serious critical treatment when it appeared in 1986, but the prevailing judgment was that Mr. Furth's noble ambition for his play outstripped his achievement.
He also wrote the book for the Kander and Ebb musical "The Act", a 1977 vehicle for Liza Minnelli.
In his best-known works, however, he was overshadowed by his writing partner, Mr. Sondheim, with whom he wrote three shows: two musicals, "Company" and "Merrily We Roll Along"; and a nonmusical mystery, "Getting Away With Murder".
"Merrily We Roll Along" and "Getting Away With Murder" were famous failures, though "Merrily", which closed after 16 performances in 1981, would be revised more than once and become a favorite among Sondheim devotees.
But "Company", a wry, cynical, sometimes bitter look at marriage through the trepidatious eyes of a bachelor, was a hit, not just for Mr. Sondheim's score (with songs like "Barcelona", "Sorry-Grateful" and "The Ladies Who Lunch") but also for Mr. Furth's book, an adaptation of a play he had written, comprising 11 loosely connected episodes about couples in which one actress was to play all the wives.
"Company" won a Tony for best musical in 1971, and Mr. Furth won a Tony of his own for his book. The show had two full Broadway revivals, the latest in 2006.
Mr. Furth, who leaves no immediate survivors, was born George Schweinfurth in Chicago, Illinois, on Dec. 14, 1932; the son of George Schweinfurth, Sr. and his wife, Evelyn Tuelk.
He graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in speech, and did graduate work at Columbia.
He made his Broadway stage debut in 1961 and his movie debut in 1964 in Gore Vidal's political drama "The Best Man". His long show business career took place as much behind the scenes as in public view.
"Nobody had a larger group of completely devoted friends than George", Warren Beatty, the actor and director who first met Mr. Furth at Northwestern in the 1950's, said in a telephone interview on Monday.
They worked together on the films "Shampoo" and "Bulworth", but Mr. Furth was an adviser to him as well, Mr. Beatty said:
"His intelligence was of inestimable value to me in the work I've done."
(Bruce Weber / The NY Times)
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Monday, August 04, 2008
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Lou Teicher, of Ferrante & Teicher, popular piano duo of 60’s, dies at 83
Category: Music
August 4, 2008
Lou Teicher, of Ferrante & Teicher, Popular Piano Duo of the 60's, Dies at 83
Lou Teicher, at right, with Arthur Ferrante in 1964.
Their florid arrangements made them reigning princes of easy listening
(photo: Scott W. Smith Collection).
Lou Teicher, half of the piano duo Ferrante & Teicher, whose florid and sentimental versions of movie themes and love songs made them gods of easy listening and earned them wide popularity beginning in the 1960's, died on Sunday in Highlands, N.C. He was 83 and lived in Sarasota, Fla.
The cause was heart failure, said Scott W. Smith, Ferrante & Teicher's manager.
A classically trained pianist who was something of a prodigy, Mr. Teicher was a musician of extraordinary dexterity, the speed and clarity of his and his partner's playing being among their crowd-pleasing qualities.
The two met as children at the Juilliard School of Music, and their friendship became a professional team in the mid-1940's.
Eventually, with their hit recordings of the themes from the films "The Apartment" and "Exodus", and "Tonight", from "West Side Story," among others, they became known as "the movie theme team." And for their appearances onstage or on television in matching flashy outfits and at the keyboards of imposing instruments, they were called "the grand twins of the twin grands".
Louis Milton Teicher was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Aug. 24, 1924. By the time he was 6, his family was living in New York City, and young Lou was enrolled at Juilliard.
His future partner, Arthur Ferrante, then 9, was already there. Mr. Teicher graduated in 1940 and received an advanced degree in 1943. Both he and Mr. Ferrante joined the faculty. They began performing together in 1947, initially as a purely classical duo.
Eventually, of course, they became famous for a kind of virtuosic kitsch: grandiose, emotional playing, embellished with glissandi, spectacular arpeggios and a back-and-forth communication that often made it seem as if the pianos themselves were conversing.
"Although we were two individuals, at the twin pianos our brains worked as one", Mr. Ferrante, now 86, said in a statement after Mr. Teicher's death.
Playing alone or with orchestras, with a wide repertory of pop tunes, show music, movie themes and modernized classical scores, the two men performed more than 5,200 concerts; made more than 200 television appearances; entertained Presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan; and from 1951 to 2001 recorded about 150 albums, the last dozen or so for their own recording company, somewhat paradoxically called Avant-Garde Records.
Actually, in the early days of their partnership, they did have experimental tendencies. Influenced by John Cage, they made several recordings with "prepared pianos", that is, pianos with objects like cardboard wedges, rubber stops and sandpaper inserted among the strings to create a variety of unexpected sounds.
This was in the 1950's, when, in addition to making what they called their gimmick recordings, they were playing 100 or so concert dates a year. At the time, they appeared in small community halls where the programming was strictly classical and they performed two-piano arrangements of works by composers from Bach to Rachmaninoff.
Mr. Teicher is survived by his wife, Betty; three children, Richard, of Linden, N.J., Susan, of Urbana Ill., and David, of Westport, Conn.; and four grandchildren.
It was in 1959 that the producer Don Costa moved from ABC Records to United Artists, taking Ferrante and Teicher with him.
There the two capitalized on the record company's affiliation with a movie company; Mr. Costa was being sent the scores from United Artists films, and when he received the theme from "The Apartment", he brought it to the two pianists; it became their first big hit.
"All of a sudden", said Mr. Smith, their manager, "they'd show up at some small theater, or a church or wherever they were supposed to play, and people would be lined up outside the doors to get in, and they'd be saying, 'Are you going to play 'The Apartment'?' "
Mr. Smith added: "And they'd say, 'No, we're going to play Bach and Tchaikovsky.' And the people would say, 'But we came to hear 'The Apartment!' Literally overnight, they had to come up with a whole new two-hour program. They said, 'People think we're pop stars!' "
(Bruce Weber / The NY Times)
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Friday, August 08, 2008
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Bernie Brillstein, film producer, dies at 77
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
August 8, 2008
Bernie Brillstein, Film Producer, Dies at 77
Bernie Brillstein in his Beverly Hills, Calif., office in 1999
(photo: Edward Carreon)
Los Angeles — Bernie J. Brillstein, a Hollywood manager and producer who helped the shape of television with his contributions to series like "Saturday Night Live" and "The Muppet Show," died on Thursday night here. He was 77.
He died of chronic pulmonary disease, according to a publicist for his company, Nicole Caruso.
In a 52-year show-business career, Mr. Brillstein represented entertainers who ranged from the stand-up comedian Norm Crosby and the singer Frankie Laine to a later generation of comic rebels that included John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Lorne Michaels (b. L. David Lipowitz), Martin Short and others.
Beginning in 1985, Mr. Brillstein worked closely with Brad Grey, a protégé who is now chairman of the Paramount Motion Picture Group.
The two were allied in what evolved into one of the most influential management and production companies in Hollywood, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment.
Mr. Brillstein remained associated with the company after Mr. Grey bought out his interest in 1996, before selling his stake in what is now known as Brillstein Entertainment Partners on joining Paramount in 2005.
A garrulous raconteur, Mr. Brillstein told of his triumphs, self-doubts and industry feuds in an unabashed memoir, "Where Did I Go Right?: You're No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead".
Co-written with David Rensin and published by Little, Brown and Company in 1999, the book repeated what Mr. Brillstein said was an often-expressed wish: That his tombstone should read, "Bernie Brillstein: From 'Hee Haw' to 'Dangerous Liaisons' ".
The first was a reference to the lowbrow, hillbilly-themed variety show that Mr. Brillstein helped create for CBS in 1969.
The second was a film that nearly 20 years later received Oscar nominations, including for best picture, after Mr. Brillstein, then in charge of the Lorimar-Telepictures movie unit, put it into production even as the company was about to be shut down by Warner Communications, which had acquired it.
Both reflected Mr. Brillstein's voracious appetite for a business to which he was drawn a child while living with his parents, Moe and Tillie, in the Manhattan home of an uncle, the vaudeville and radio performer Jack Pearl.
In his memoir, Mr. Brillstein — whose full name was Bernard J. Brillstein, though he was virtually always known as Bernie talked of his yearning to be part of the action that connected his uncle with better-known stars like Bing Crosby, Jack Benny and Chico Marx.
After graduating from New York University with an advertising degree followed by two years in the Army, Mr. Brillstein talked his way into a mailroom job at the William Morris Agency in New York, and soon clambered into jobs as an assistant in the agency's publicity department, and then as an agent booking talent for television commercials.
Unhappy with his lot at Morris, Mr. Brillstein left to join a fledgling management business in which he was to become a partner with Marty Kummer and Jerry Weintraub. Known as Management III, the company sent Mr. Brillstein to Los Angeles in 1967.
A year later he left to form the Brillstein Company, having joined the West Coast show-business fray.
Mr. Brillstein counted the puppeteer Jim Henson among his closest friends, and helped to turn Mr. Henson's Muppets into a cultural presence, through "Sesame Street", and into a thriving industry, through the syndicated "Muppet Show", movies and myriad products based on the characters.
Through his association with Mr. Michaels, the writer-producer behind "Saturday Night Live", and many of its comic stars, Mr. Brillstein helped to broker a transition that took television comedy into a hipper, more daring zone from which it never retreated.
Several clients, including Mr. Henson, Ms. Radner and Mr. Belushi, met an early death. Mr. Brillstein, in his book, challenged the notion that he and others in Hollywood turned a blind eye to Mr. Belushi's eventually fatal drug abuse to continue benefiting from his career.
"When I pushed him too hard to straighten up, he'd tell me to back off", Mr. Brillstein said.
Among his survivors are his wife, Carrie Brillstein; two daughters, Leigh and Kate Brillstein; and three sons, Michael Brillstein, David Koskoff and Nick Koskoff.
His most enduring antagonism Mr. Brillstein reserved for Michael S. Ovitz, the former power agent with whom he shared clients and traded heavily in the 1980's, only to become convinced that Mr. Ovitz, then a leading partner at the Creative Artists Agency, was bent on undercutting him.
"I guess I should have felt honored", Mr. Brillstein wrote of the conflict, "because you're no one in this business unless someone wants you dead."
(Michael Cieply / The NY Times)
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Wednesday, August 06, 2008
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Peter Kass, bold teacher of acting, dies at 85
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
August 6, 2008
Peter Kass, Bold Teacher of Acting, Dies at 85
Peter Meyer Kass (photo: NY Times)
Peter M. Kass, a theater actor and director whose influence as a teacher was felt in several generations of performers, died in Manhattan on Monday. He was 85 and lived in Brooklyn.
The cause was heart failure, said his son, Robbie Kass.
In the 1940's Mr. Kass was a protégé of Clifford Odets, who asked him to direct the first incarnation of his show-business drama, "The Country Girl", at the Lakes Region Playhouse in New Hampshire.
In 1950 Odets took over the directing chores for the Broadway production of the play, about a love triangle involving a play's director, its lead actor and the actor's wife (played by Uta Hagen), but he cast Mr. Kass in the supporting role of the playwright. A Broadway revival closed last month.
Before his appearance in "The Country Girl," Mr. Kass had been on Broadway several times. His roles included the bellboy in the American premiere of Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit", in a production with an English translation by Paul Bowles and directed by John Huston.
Mr. Kass went on to direct four Broadway plays, including a short-lived revival of Odets's "Night Music" and, in 1964, "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window", Lorraine Hansberry's follow-up to "A Raisin in the Sun."
He also directed many Off Broadway shows (including two, "Side Street Scenes" and "Family Snapshots", written by his son Sam Henry Kass) and an early television series, "Assignment: Manhunt".
He wrote and directed the 1962 film "Time of the Heathen", a dense morality tale about the rape and murder of a woman and about a witness to the crime, who had been involved in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
But Mr. Kass's main notoriety was as a fervid and prolific preparer of actors. As a teacher at Boston University in the 1950's, at New York University in the 1960's and 1970's, as a private instructor and in tandem with the vocal coach Kristin Linklater, now the chairwoman of Columbia University's graduate theater program, he became known for his belief that the actor was always bigger and more important than the character he played.
He was "a holy madman of the theater", Ms. Linklater once said, "whose whole point was that there is no limit to what the actor can do."
As a classroom provocateur, Mr. Kass would rail at, deride and even physically engage with his students. He imbued hundreds of actors — including Olympia Dukakis, Faye Dunaway, John Cazale, Maureen Stapleton and, more recently, Val Kilmer — with the sense that they need to be psychologically astute, emotionally courageous, brutally honest and self-examining even to the point of self-immolating.
"He was brilliant in the way he saw human behavior", said J. Michael Miller, president of the Actors Center, a nonprofit educational and support organization for actors, who was a co-founder of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 1966.
He believed, Mr. Miller said, that the student should make the work "absolutely spontaneous and absolutely personal."
He emphasized "that if you're going to take ownership of a character, you have to give yourself to it totally", without being "confined by what might seem appropriate or civilized."
Peter Meyer Kass was born in Brooklyn on April 28, 1923. His parents were Russian immigrants; his father was a tailor in the Brownsville section.
He never attended college, but joined the Army after high school, serving in Europe during World War II.
Mr. Kass is survived by his wife of 59 years, the former Nance Robbins; two sons, both in Santa Monica, Calif.; and five grandchildren.
"He never even raised his voice to his children", Robbie Kass said. "If he raised his voice to his students, it was out of passion, to get a performance."
(Bruce Weber / The NY Times)
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Monday, July 28, 2008
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Michael Berniker, record producer, dies at 73
Category: Music
July 28, 2008
Michael Berniker, Record Producer, Dies at 73
Michael Berniker in 1992 (photo: NY Times)
Michael Berniker, a prolific record producer whose diverse projects won nine Grammy Awards over four decades, died on Friday in Great Barrington, Mass. He was 73.
The cause was complications from kidney disease, said his wife, Heather.
Best known for producing the first three Barbra Streisand albums on Columbia as well as numerous Broadway cast albums, Mr. Berniker also produced Latin jazz, spoken word, comedy and classical records.
Other pop artists he produced included Eydie Gorme, Johnny Mathis and Perry Como. Ben Webster, Charlie Rouse and Paquito D'Rivera were among the jazz musicians he produced. "Irakere", his recording of the Cuban fusion band of the same name (produced with Bert DeCoteaux), won a 1979 Grammy for Best Latin Recording.
His Broadway show albums included original-cast recordings of five musicals — "Barnum", "City of Angels", a revival of "Sweet Charity", "The Will Rogers Follies" and "The Life" — all with music by Cy Coleman.
"The Will Rogers Follies" won a 1991 Grammy for Best Musical Show Album. Other cast albums included "My One and Only" and "Side Show".
Born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1935, Mr. Berniker studied music and philosophy at Columbia, then served in the Army for two years at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, where he had a local radio program and organized a jazz festival.
In 1960, he enrolled in an in-house A&R (artists and repertory) training program at CBS Records. One of his first projects was a jazz series on Epic.
Mr. Berniker had a special creative empathy with pop divas. The songs on the Streisand albums, the first of which won a Grammy for Album of the Year in 1963, were impeccably chosen to illustrate the breadth of her talent, and their arrangements, by Peter Matz, demonstrated an artistic rapport between singer and arranger comparable to that of Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle. These albums stand among the most expressively uninhibited of Ms. Streisand's career.
A similar dramatic electricity infused his recordings with Ms. Gorme, whose version of "If He Walked Into My Life" from "Mame" won a 1966 Grammy for Best Female Vocal Performance.
After leaving CBS in 1968, Mr. Berniker worked as an executive with several major record companies, including RCA, where he signed Daryl Hall and John Oates, Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band and Juice Newton.
Returning to CBS in 1977, he originated the Columbia Jazz Masterpieces series. During a brief stint at Angel Records he produced "American Dreamer", a recording of Stephen Foster songs sung by Thomas Hampson.
Besides his wife, Mr. Berniker is survived by a son, Mark, of New York; a daughter, Judy Powell of Boulder, Colo.; and two grandchildren.
(Stephen Holden / The NY Times)
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Monday, July 21, 2008
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Artie Traum, stalwart of 60’s Folk music scene, dies at 65
Category: Music
July 21, 2008
Artie Traum, Stalwart of 60's Folk Music Scene, Dies at 65
Artie Traum in 2006. He recorded albums and film scores (photo: Dion Ogust)
Artie Traum, a guitarist, songwriter and producer who helped carry the spirit of the 1960's Greenwich Village folk scene to Woodstock, N.Y., died on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Bearsville, N.Y., near Woodstock.
His brother, the musician Happy Traum, who sometimes performed with him, said the cause was liver cancer.
In a long and varied career, Mr. Traum played fol | | |
