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Russ Solomon at the original Tower Records store in Sacramento in 1987. Terrence McCarthy
Russ Solomon, who pioneered the superstore hangout for music lovers by founding Tower Records and expanded it worldwide before internet pirates and crushing debts rendered the chain obsolete and bankrupt, died on Sunday night at his home in Sacramento. He was 92.
His son Michael confirmed the death.
A high school dropout who sold used jukebox records at 16 in his father’s drugstore in Sacramento, Mr. Solomon was the driving force behind a sprawling enterprise that began with one store in that city in 1960 and grew into a dominant competitor in music retailing with nearly 200 stores in 15 countries. Sales of recorded music, videos and books eventually topped $1 billion a year.
With marketing instincts that even rivals and critics called ingenious, Mr. Solomon built megastores, some bigger than football fields, and stocked them with as many as 125,000 titles, virtually all of the popular and classical recordings on the market.
Yet many patrons said there was a clublike intimacy about the stores, where, as Bruce Springsteen once put it, “everyone is your friend for 20 minutes.”
Open all year from 9 a.m. to midnight, staffed by hip salespeople who could answer almost any question about recordings, the stores became the haunts of music aficionados scouring endless racks for rock, heavy metal, jazz, blues, standards, classicals, country-westerns and myriad other offerings. Sometimes popular bands and singers performed in the stores.
Mr. Springsteen, Bette Midler, Lou Reed and Michael Jackson were regular patrons. So was David Chiu, a Brooklyn journalist.
“When you walked into the Tower Records store in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood back in the day, you just didn’t go in there to buy an album and then rush off to leave,” he wrote in Cuepoint, an online publication, in 2016. “To me, going into Tower was like visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art or attending a baseball game — it required a certain investment of time.”
Mr. Solomon told Billboard magazine in 2015: “Our favorite regular was Elton John. He probably was the best customer we ever had. He was in one of our stores every week, literally, wherever he was — in L.A., in Atlanta when he lived in Atlanta, and in New York.”
In an interview for this obituary last September, Mr. Solomon recalled that he opened the first Tower Records store in what had been his father’s drugstore with $5,000 in borrowed capital. He called it “a neighborhood business,” which he named after the Tower Theater, a local landmark that was built in 1938 and topped by a neon-bathed, 100-foot Art Deco pillar.
He soon opened a second Sacramento outlet, but the business did not take off until 1968, when he opened Tower Records in San Francisco. It was an instant sensation in the heart of the hippie and music scene, capitalizing on the 1967 Summer of Love. At 5,000 square feet, the store was small by later company standards, but it set a formula for the future: wide selections and discounted prices.
“I stole ideas from supermarket merchandising,” Mr. Solomon recalled. The store, he said, stacked hot-selling items on the floor, to encourage impulse buying and to suggest plentiful supplies, reinforcing the impression that Tower would be well stocked when competitors’ supplies had run out. The store also set late-night closing hours.
But the most important innovation, he said, was hiring a staff so well versed in the local music scene that the store could order its own inventory. It was a task that music chains typically assigned to a central office to achieve economies of scale for their outlets. But Mr. Solomon found that local judgments were more profitable, and decentralized ordering became a pattern for all his stores.
“We wanted people in the store to run the store — they’re your strength,” Mr. Solomon said. “Central buying is just a bad idea. You can’t make decisions on what to do in Phoenix if you’re sitting in New York or London.”
While staff wages were relatively low, the workers were given unusual fringe benefits, including parties with live bands and opportunities to mingle with musicians, promoters, record company executives and radio and television personalities, Mr. Solomon said. And in the 1960s and ′70s, he said, employees were given time off to attend protests against the Vietnam War.
“It was the right thing to do,” he said. “We had to be with the scene. It was important to us and to them.”
As business boomed in the ′70s and ′80s, he established Tower Records outlets in major cities across the United States, many with 20,000 to 40,000 square feet of space. The New York flagship, in Greenwich Village, opened in 1983.
Tower began opening stores abroad in the 1980s, starting in Japan and spreading in Asia, Europe and Latin America. In the 1990s, it became the nation’s largest privately held music retailer, with nearly 200 stores in the United States and 14 other countries.
But it never went public. “That was the dumbest thing I ever did,” Mr. Solomon conceded. Selling stock might have paid for further expansion. Instead, he borrowed to finance more stores, and his debt swelled to $300 million. In 1999, Tower sales topped $1 billion, but its financial tailspin had already begun. The company lost $10 million in 2000 and $90 million in 2001.
Mr. Solomon sold and closed stores and converted others to franchises. At the same time, the music business went into a slump. Tower declared bankruptcy in 2004, and in 2006 it was forced to liquidate and close.

 
Tower Records in downtown Manhattan in 2006, shortly before the company closed. Mary Altaffer/Associated Press
Mr. Solomon acknowledged that he had underestimated the internet’s threat to store retailing. Pirates downloaded music without paying for it, and paying customers turned to online vendors and price-cutters like Wal-Mart and Best Buy. The owner blamed himself.
“I was overextended,” Mr. Solomon said. “I was swamped by the debt.”
Russell Malcolm Solomon was born on Sept. 22, 1925, in San Francisco to Clayton Solomon and the former Annette Sockolov. The boy and his sister, Shirley, grew up mostly in Sacramento, the state capital, where their father established his business, Tower Cut Rate Drugs, in the late 1930s.
Russell, an indifferent student, was expelled for repeated truancy from C. K. McClatchy High School at 16 and went to work for his father. He served stateside in the Army Air Forces from 1944 to 1946.
In 1946, he married Doris Epstein, from whom he was divorced. In 2010, he married Patricia Drosins, who survives him. Besides his son Michael, he is also survived by another son, David; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Michael Solomon said his father died, apparently of a heart attack, while watching the Academy Awards ceremony on television.
Mr. Solomon attempted a comeback in 2007, opening a store called R5 Records at the location of his first Sacramento store. He no longer had the rights to the Tower Records name, but used its red and yellow color scheme for his logo. After three relatively unsuccessful years, R5 Records was sold to a local music chain.
A nostalgic documentary, “All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records,” directed by the actor Colin Hanks, was released in 2015. It featured Mr. Solomon and many of his former employees and patrons, including Elton John, who called the shuttering of Tower Records “one of the great tragedies of my life.”
 
 
All Things Must Pass The Rise and Fall of Tower Records

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The Associated Press
FILE – In this May 6, 2012, file photo, Ben Jaffe, tuba player and director of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band hugs George Wein, founder of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, as well as the Newport Jazz Festival, after Wein performed a song on the piano at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans. Someone has stolen Preservation Hall’s signature sousaphone, and there’s a reward offered for its return. Jaffe posted a message about the theft on the jazz venue’s Facebook page, saying it was stolen after a performance Saturday, Feb. 24, 2018. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)more +
Be on the lookout for a wraparound tuba: Someone has stolen the signature sousaphone belonging to Preservation Hall in New Orleans.
Creative director and musician Ben Jaffe wrote about it on the traditional jazz venue’s Facebook page, saying he bought it after Hurricane Katrina to replace one lost to the 2005 storm.
A photo shows him playing the brass sousaphone, which has “Preservation Hall, New Orleans” painted on the bell.
He says it was taken Saturday, after a performance at New Orleans Airlift .
Jeanette Jaffe said Thursday they’ve received multiple calls since the message was posted Wednesday, but none led to recovery of the instrument. She says some callers even offered their own instruments.
There’s a reward.
Sousaphones can cost up to $13,000.
 

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Obituary
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RAPP Funeral and Cremation Services Obituary
 
Heiner Stadler, a record producer and composer who worked with highly regarded improvisers to advance the interplay of jazz and contemporary compositional elements, died in Silver Spring, Maryland on February 18, 2018, less than two months before his 76th birthday. The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his wife Dida Stadler. Stadler’s best known works include A Tribute to Bird and Monk (1973), a set of reharmonized works by Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk which received a five-star review in DownBeat; Brains on Fire (sessions recorded 1964 – 1974); Retrospection (1996); and Jazz Alchemy (2000). Among the musicians performing on these recordings were George Adams, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Joe Chambers, Stanley Cowell, Thad Jones, George Lewis, Jimmy Owens, Reggie Workman, Lennie White, and Germany’s NDR Big Band conducted by Dieter Glawishnig (featuring Wolfgang Dauner, Alberg Mangelsdorf and Manfred Schoof, among otheres). Stadler received four grants from the National Endowment of the Arts to support his compositions, originally released on his own Labor Records and later on Tomato Records, for which he served as head of Artist and Repertoire from 1978-1981, and as Director of Operations/Executive producer from 1987-1991. For Tomato, he supervised the initial release on four LPs the opera Einstein on the Beach, by Philip Glass. Stadler is also recognized for his productions of works by John Cage (including “Etudes Australes” written by the composer for pianist Grete Sultan, who recorded it in 1978); those of J.S. Bach and Carlos Barbosa-Lima; the opera Civilization and its Discontents (1978) by Eric Salzman and Michael Sahl, and albums by bluesmen Lightnin’ Hopkins, Johnny Shines, Roosevelt Sykes, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Heiner Stadler was born on April 9, 1942 in the town of Lessen, Poland, to a family rich in musical pedigree. His great-grandmother was Josephine Amann-Weinlich, who founded and conducted Europe’s first all-women orchestra, the Wiener Damen-Orchester (later the Erste Europäische Damenorchester), which toured extensively, appearing at New York’s Steinway Hall in 1871. At a very young age, Stadler moved with his mother and brother to Hamburg, Germany and was accepted at the Hamburger Konservatorium for piano studies. He also studied composition privately with Walter Steffens, with whom he collaborated on Ecstasy (1973). He immigrated to the United States in 1965, and quickly became immersed in jazz. His arrangement of Duke Ellington’s “Main Stem” was recorded in 1969 by saxophonist James Moody on The Blues and Other Colors (Milestone), with Kenny Barron, Ron Carter, Johnny Coles, Joe Farrrell, Tom McIntosh, Cecil Payne and Freddie Waits. In 1988, Stadler contributed atmospheric incidental music to a score by Pierre Henry performed by Diamanda Galas, together with Kirk Nurock’s Natural Sounds Ensemble, for “Seraphim,” performed by the dancer and choreographer Sin Cha Hong’s Laughing Stone Company at the Joyce Theater. From the 1990s until shortly before his death, Stadler focused on music from other lands, traveling most frequently to Bulgaria but also to North Korea in 1991 to record Fanfare & Memorial by Isang Yun, and in 2001 to Tirana to record Albanian Lament by Aleksandër Peçi. In 2016, he recorded Ukraine – Journey to Freedom performed by violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv and pianist Angelina Gadeliya. The Labor Records catalogue, which his wife will continue to manage along with his compositions and recordings, includes much of Stadler’s work as well as music by rock, punk and spoken-word artists. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughters Julia and Felice Stadler of Maryland, Julia’s wife Miriam Leenders, and Felice’s children Ramy Stadler Logan and Ava Joanne Logan. Stadler is also survived by a brother and sister-in-law, Knud and Uta Stadler of Durban, South Africa.
 

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Noted blues musician Little Sammy Davis dies in Middletown at 89
Matthew Nanci 
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Renowned blues musician Little Sammy Davis died Friday at a Middletown nursing home. He was 89.
His nearly 60-year career spanned Mississippi, Chicago and the Hudson Valley. Davis often jammed with drummer Levon Helm in Woodstock.
Highlights of his career include playing for millions on “Imus in the Morning,” winning a W.C. Handy award and having a full-page portrait in the coffee-table book “State of the Blues.”
Davis began playing harmonica as a boy in Winona, Miss.
He was raised by his grandmother in a one-room shack and learned to play the instrument that would become his livelihood from listening to Sonny Boy Williamson tunes on a crank-up Victrola.
In 2011, Davis was inducted into the New York State Blues Hall of Fame.
Fellow hall of famer Fred Scribner, a former member of the Levon Helm Band and a driving force behind Davis, remembers his longtime friend as funny and inspiring.
Scribner said Davis had a “magical” personality, and there was a charm to him that brought positivity and good luck wherever he went.
“He was a very precious treasure to the community and to the blues world and to the world in general,” Scribner said. “He made the world a better place.”
Scribner called Davis’ death a huge loss for music.
“He was just an incredibly creative human being,” Scribner said. “I watched him create things on the spot that were just pure art.”
Funeral arrangements were not immediately available.
mnanci@th-record.com

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• Akropolis Quintet Inc. (aka Akropolis Reed Quintet) $10,000 Northville, MI To support “Together We Sound,” a festival of contemporary music by the Akropolis Reed Quintet.
• Albany Symphony Orchestra, Inc. (aka Albany Symphony) $15,000 Albany, NY To support the American Music Festival.
• Alcorn State University $10,000 Lorman, MS To support musical performances and an educational workshop at the Alcorn State University Jazz Festival.
• Bang on a Can, Inc. (aka Bang on a Can) $50,000 Brooklyn, NY To support the Summer Festival of Music, a performance series and residency program for emerging composers and contemporary music performers.
• Berklee College of Music, Inc. $25,000 Boston, MA To support musical performances and related educational and outreach activities at the Berklee BeanTown Jazz Festival.
• Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (aka Cabrillo Music Festival) $25,000 Santa Cruz, CA To support the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.
• Carnegie Hall Corporation (aka Carnegie Hall (CH)) $85,000 New York, NY To support a concert series celebrating the works of composer Philip Glass (see also Pacific Symphony).
• Chicago Jazz Orchestra Association (aka Chicago Jazz Orchestra) $10,000 Skokie, IL To support a tribute concert to NEA Jazz Master Nancy Wilson.
• Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra $40,000 Cincinnati, OH To support Classical Roots, a series of concerts and recitals in celebration of African-American musical heritage.
• Columbia University in the City of New York (on behalf of Miller Theatre) $30,000 New York, NY To support artist fees and production expenses for the Composer Portraits and Pop-up Concerts at Miller Theatre.
• Creative Music Foundation, Inc. (aka Creative Music Studio) $10,000 Woodstock, NY To support a series of concert performances featuring jazz and poetry.
• Cuyahoga Community College Foundation (on behalf of Tri-C JazzFest Cleveland) $20,000 Cleveland, OH To support musical performances and educational activities at the Tri-C JazzFest jazz festival.
• Da Camera Society of Texas (aka Da Camera of Houston) $25,000 Houston, TX To support presentations of chamber music and jazz with related educational activities.
• DC Jazz Festival $35,000 Washington, DC To support musical performances as well as educational activities and audience engagement events at the DC Jazz Festival.
• Earshot Jazz Society of Seattle (aka Earshot Jazz) $25,000 Seattle, WA To support musical performances and other activities at the Earshot Jazz Festival.
• East Bay Performing Arts (aka Oakland Symphony) $10,000 Oakland, CA To support Notes from the African Diaspora, a concert performed by the Oakland Symphony.
• Eighth Blackbird Performing Arts Association (aka Eighth Blackbird) $25,000 Chicago, IL To support the Blackbird Creative Lab, a training program for instrumentalists and composers.
• Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center-Lucy Moses School for Music and Dance (aka Kaufman Music Center) (on behalf of Merkin Concert Hall) $15,000 New York, NY To support the Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Concert Hall.
• Festival of New Trumpet Music, Inc. (aka FONT Music) $10,000. New York, NY To support the Festival of New Trumpet Music.
• Healdsburg Jazz Festival, Inc. (aka Healdsburg Jazz) $20,000 Healdsburg, CA To support musical performances at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival 20th anniversary celebration.
• Hear Now Music Festival $10,000 Los Angeles, CA To support the Hear Now Music Festival.
• Hot Summer Jazz Festival (aka Twin Cities Jazz Festival) $10,000 Saint Paul, MN To support free musical performances at the Twin Cities Jazz Festival.
• Hyde Park Jazz Festival $15,000 Chicago, IL To support concert performances, commissions, and other activities at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival.
• Jazz Bakery Performance Space (aka The Jazz Bakery) $25,000 Beverly Hills, CA To support concerts and educational activities featuring NEA Jazz Masters.
• Jazz Foundation of America, Inc. (aka Jazz Foundation of America) $15,000 New York, NY To support curated musical performances as part of the Gig Fund program.
• Jazz Gallery $25,000 New York, NY To support performance opportunities and a professional development program for emerging jazz artists.
• Jazz House Kids, Inc. $45,000 Montclair, NJ To support free musical performances and related family-oriented activities at the Montclair Jazz Festival.
• John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (aka The Kennedy Center) $65,000 Washington, DC To support a series of concerts featuring NEA Jazz Masters and other legendary musicians.
• Juneau Jazz & Classics, Inc. (aka Juneau Jazz & Classics) $15,000 Juneau, AK To support musical performances and educational activities at the Juneau Jazz & Classics Festival.
• Kerrytown Concert House, Inc. (aka Kerrytown Concert House) $12,500 Ann Arbor, MI To support the Edgefest experimental music festival.
• Kuumbwa Jazz Society (aka Kuumbwa Jazz aka KJ) $15,000 Santa Cruz, CA To support a jazz concert series.
• Living Jazz $10,000 Oakland, CA To support a musical tribute honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Louisville Orchestra $15,000 Louisville, KY To support guest artist fees and travel for the Festival of American Music.
• Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild (aka MCG Youth & Arts) $12,500 Pittsburgh, PA To support a jazz concert series featuring artists and orchestras of various styles.
• Monterey Jazz Festival $35,000 Monterey, CA To support performances, commissions, and related educational and audience engagement activities at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
• Music at the Anthology, Inc. (aka MATA) $10,000 New York, NY To support the 20th anniversary MATA Festival of new music.
• Music From China, Inc. (aka Music From China) $10,000 New York, NY To support a commissioning and performance project of contemporary Chinese music.
• Musical Instrument Museum (aka MIM) $12,500 Phoenix, AZ To support a program for foster children and foster families that offers access to the Musical Instrument Museum along with attendance at musical performances and participation in workshops and other educational activities.
• Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks (aka The Wild Center) $10,000 Tupper Lake, NY To support The Wild Center’s commissioning of an outdoor music installation by composer Pete M. Wyer.
• New Music USA Inc (aka New Music USA) $60,000 New York, NY To support new music through online resources at NewMusicBox.org and newmusicusa.org.
• Outpost Productions, Inc. (aka Outpost) $25,000 Albuquerque, NM To support musical performances, educational and related audience engagement activities at the New Mexico Jazz Festival.
• Post-Classical Ensemble, Inc. (aka PostClassical Ensemble) $30,000 Washington, DC To support a vocal and choral performance project celebrating the contributions of African-American composer, arranger, and baritone Henry Thacker “Harry” Burleigh (1866-1949).
• San Diego Symphony Orchestra Association (aka SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY) $20,000 San Diego, CA To support a music festival exploring the connection of rhythm and beat in the human experience.
• Savannah Music Festival, Inc. (aka Savannah Music Festival) $40,000 Savannah, GA To support the annual Savannah Music Festival.
• South Dakota Symphony Orchestra (aka SDSO) $12,500 Sioux Falls, SD To support Phase III of the Lakota Music Project.
• Third Coast Percussion NFP (aka Third Coast Percussion) $10,000 Chicago, IL To support a pilot program of cross-genre collaborations with underrepresented artistic voices.
• Toledo Orchestra Association, Inc. (aka Toledo Symphony Orchestra) $10,000 Toledo, OH To support the orchestra’s music festival celebrating the contributions of African-American musicians.
• University of Chicago (aka University of Chicago, UChicago, UofC) $25,000 Chicago, IL To support the presentation of a performance project highlighting the music, influences, and legacy of Hungarian-born composer Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006).
• University of Northern Colorado $20,000 Greeley, CO To support musical performances and educational workshops at the UNC/Greeley Jazz Festival.
• VocalEssence $35,000 Minneapolis, MN To support the annual WITNESS choral performance project celebrating the contributions of African Americans.

I hasten to repeat — this is a selection out of hundreds of NEA supported programs. Jazz, new and unusual music are also funded, if indirectly, in grants categorized as going to dance, folk and traditional arts, local arts agencies, media arts, museums, presenting and multi-disciplinary works. Every state from Alabama to Wyoming as well as the District of Columbia got funds. Support continued funding for the NEA.
howardmandel.com
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My column in City Arts highlights the 40-event Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival, taking place throughout April “from Flatbush up Fulton Avenue through the neighborhoods of Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Ocean Hill to Bushwick . . . the area that gave birth to Max Roach and Randy Weston some 80…
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[Photo by: feminagoradialicious/Instagram]
First, there was the Oreo cookie vinyl. Now a chocolate vinyl record? We’re hungry—and hoping to listen to our favorite tunes in the coolest way.
Read more: There’s a company that’ll press your ashes into a vinyl record
As Digital Music News reports, French artist Julia Drouhin made a vinyl record out of chocolate—and it can play actual music.
To create the chocolate record, Drouhin told the South China Morning Post that she constructs a mold of the record.
Once the mold is made, the melted chocolate is poured into the mold, refrigerated and ta-da: You have a chocolate vinyl record.
Digital Music News explains that the record can only be played about 10 times. (Because, as chocolate lovers know, chocolate will not last forever…)
And what are you supposed to do once it’s worn out? Eat it, of course!
See how it works below:
What song would you hope to hear in chocolate? Sound off below!
Watch more: Tonight Alive share which songs they just can’t listen to anymore

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• Cassettes were the format showing the most substantial growth at 29.54%
• CDs were not far behind, up 28.39% 

Indie music marketplace Bandcamp showed similar increases in physical goods sales, and the trend should accelerate online as brick and mortar retailers like Best Buy and others abandon the format. 

The most collected genre trends include:

• Classical up 42.36% 
• Latin up 38.33%

The two most expensive releases sold on the platform last year were both 7″ singles with The Beatles ‘Love Me Do’ selling for $14,757.00 followed by Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’ selling for $14,690.00.

New CEO
Discogs COO Chad Dahlstrom has been named the company’s new CEO. Founder and president Kevin Lewandowski will  now focus on broadening the company’s focus beyond music to include film, comics, posters and books. 
Find more stats in the Discogs 2017 Year End Report.
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Farewell to Tom Rapp, a great psychedelic adventurer and craftsman. 

A true cult icon died today. Tom Rapp, leader of Pearls Before Swine, the pioneering psychedelic folk outift who recorded for the experimental ESP-Disk’ label. Debut One Nation Underground was released in 1967, including mesmerizing songs like I Shall Not Care, it became an unexpected success, selling more than 250.00 copies. But it is follow-up album Balaklava which widely is regarded as the band’s finest work. Lovely melodies on Images Of April and Translucent Carriages, enhanced by mystic lyrics, and wrapped in a nightmarish record sleeve of Breughel’s ‘The Triumph of Death’. 
Normalizing their sound somewhat, Pearls Before Swine continued into the early 1970s, basically as a vehicle for Rapp’s songs, until he ditched the PBS name and started releasing records under his own name. 

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Vid Damone during a rehearsal in Columbus, Ohio, in 1978. NBC/NBC Universal Photo Bank, via Getty Images
Vic Damone, the postwar crooner whose intimate, rhapsodic voice captivated bobby soxers, middle-age dreamers and silver-haired romantics in a five-decade medley of America’s love songs and popular standards, died on Sunday in Miami Beach. He was 89.
Ed Henry, a family friend, said the cause was complications of respiratory failure.
Mr. Damone suffered a mild stroke in 2000 but recovered and retired in 2001 after a farewell tour that included appearances at the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall. He came out of retirement a decade later to give one last performance in Palm Beach, Fla., where he lived.
For anyone old enough to remember the age of phonograph records, the velvet baritone of Vic Damone was an unforgettable groove in a soundtrack that also included Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Tony Bennett, singers who arose in the big band era and reached peaks of popularity in the 1950s.
Mr. Damone, a decade younger than Sinatra, never quite became the pop music institution that the others did. Critics said he did not possess Sinatra’s vivid personality or Bennett’s range and sheer energy, although his smooth, unruffled delivery was similar to Como’s.
But many critics and colleagues said he had the best natural gifts in the business: a voice and style that made emotional connections with an audience, especially in nightclubs, with sensitive renditions of songs like “In the Still of the Night,” “You’d Be So Easy to Love,” “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You” and “Come Rain or Come Shine.”
And he proved durable. After winning on the radio show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” in 1947, he recorded some 2,500 songs over 54 years. He had his own radio and television programs, made movies, survived rock ′n’ roll and its noisy offspring and became a mainstay of the Las Vegas Strip, and nightclubs where audiences were so close he could almost reach out and touch them with his voice.
Along the way, he made millions, entertained presidents and royalty, refused a part in “The Godfather,” married five times, had four children and underwent analysis. He also survived a brush with the mob, four divorces, a custody fight over his only son and the suicides of two former wives. And he was still working as the millennium turned, with a voice that critics said had not lost its mellow subtleties.

 
Mr. Damone in 1965. After a stormy personal life, he titled his autobiography “Singing Was the Easy Part.”
“Vic Damone is the kind of performer who comes along once in a lifetime,” Alex Dreyfoos, chairman of the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, told the crowd at one of his last performances. “Fortunately, he came along in our lifetime.”
He was born Vito Farinola on June 12, 1928, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the only son among the five children of Rocco Farinola and the former Mamie Damone. His father was an electrician, and his mother taught piano. He loved singing and was spellbound by Sinatra.
When his father was disabled on the job, he quit Lafayette High School to help support the family. He became an usher at the Paramount Theater in Manhattan, where teenagers were squealing for Sinatra. Encountering Como there in an elevator, he performed a spontaneous audition for him and asked for an evaluation. That led to an endorsement and a lifelong friendship. (Mr. Damone named his only son Perry.)

 
Mr. Damone on the CBS radio show ”Saturday Night Serenade” in 1947. CBS
The comedian Milton Berle heard Mr. Damone on Arthur Godfrey’s show and arranged a New York nightclub engagement. He was a hit, and he was soon back at the Paramount, singing with Stan Kenton’s orchestra. Taking his mother’s former surname, he became a headliner at the Copacabana in New York and the Mocambo in Hollywood, sang at the White House (for several presidents) and at Royal Albert Hall in London, and toured Europe.
He had an NBC radio show in the late 1940s and an NBC television show in the 1960s and ′70s, and he sold millions of records on the Mercury, Columbia, Capitol, RCA and Warner Bros. labels. His hits included “Again,” “On the Street Where You Live,” “You’re Breaking My Heart,” “I Have but One Heart” and “Gigi,” and his recordings also included the elegant repertoire of Gershwin, Berlin and Cole Porter.
He was in the Army from 1951 to 1953, then resumed his career with club dates and stage, recording and television work. He also appeared or sang in a dozen largely forgettable movies, including “Hit the Deck,” a 1955 MGM musical that also starred Jane Powell, Tony Martin, Debbie Reynolds and Ann Miller.

 
Mr. Damone with the singer and actress Diahann Carroll, his fourth wife, at their wedding in Atlantic City in 1987. Scott Stetzer/Associated Press
With the arrival of rock ′n’ roll, music underwent a revolution and many balladeers faded. But Mr. Damone, refusing to change his style, continued to appear on television and in nightclubs, becoming a regular in Las Vegas with a solid following.
He declined the part of the nightclub singer Johnny Fontaine in the first “Godfather” movie (1972), saying the film was “not in the best interests of Italian-Americans.” (Al Martino took the role.)
His personal life made headlines. In 1954, he married the actress Pier Angeli. They were divorced in 1959, but for six years battled over custody of their son. Ms. Angeli committed suicide in 1971.

 
Mr. Damone with his wife, Rena Rowan, at their home in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2000. David Spencer/The Palm Beach Post, via Associated Press
In 1963, Mr. Damone married Judy Rawlins, with whom he had three daughters. They were divorced in 1971, and she killed herself in 1974. His marriage to Rebecca Ann Jones, in 1974, also ended in divorce.
He married the singer and actress Diahann Carroll in 1987, and they divorced in 1996. In 1998 he married Rena Rowan, co-founder of the apparel line Jones New York. Ms. Rowan died in 2016 after a stroke.
He is survived by three daughters, Victoria Damone, Andrea Damone-Browne and Daniella Damone-Woodard; two sisters, Elaine Seneca and Terry Sicuso; and six grandchildren. His son, Perry, died in 2014.
Mr. Damone’s autobiography, “Singing Was the Easy Part,” written with David Chanoff, appeared in 2009. In it, he recalled a night when a mobster, angry that he had broken off an engagement to the thug’s daughter, dangled him out of a New York hotel window. The Luciano boss Frank Costello got him off the hook, he said.
“We didn’t think about it back then,” he said, “but the mob owned the nightclubs and theaters.”

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Lovebug Starski during a D.J. set in 2006. Joe Conzo
To hear Lovebug Starski tell it, he was there when the phrase “hip-hop” was coined, trading the two words back and forth while improvising lines with Cowboy of the Furious Five at a farewell party for a friend who was headed into the Army.
He incorporated the phrase into the D.J. sets he was playing in the South Bronx, helping to solidify it as lingo of the scene and inadvertently providing the opening line to “Rapper’s Delight,” the 1979 Sugarhill Gang song that would take hip-hop out of parties and onto the radio.
And about that song: To hear Lovebug Starski tell it, he was the inspiration for it.
“Sylvia Robinson will tell you: I was ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ ” he was quoted in the book “Yes Yes Y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade” (2002), referring to the record executive who formed the Sugarhill Gang and released the song. (She died in 2011.)
“She got the idea off of me,” he said. “I did her birthday party at Harlem World, and that’s where she got the idea. She said, ‘I’ve got to have him.’ She’ll tell you that, but I wasn’t interested in doing no record back in them days, ’cause I was getting so much money for just D.J.-ing.”
Lovebug Starski, a versatile D.J. and rapper who was a key figure in the development and early evolution of hip-hop in the South Bronx throughout the 1970s, died on Thursday in Las Vegas. He was 57.
His manager, Jeremy Crittenden, confirmed the death but did not specify the cause.
Lovebug Starski was born Kevin Smith in the Bronx on May 16, 1960. In his teenage years, he was a member of the Black Spades gang, one of the borough’s most notorious. “Everyone used to carry machetes,” he told Rolling Stone in 1993.
But he had musical aspirations and aptitude.
Decades before hip-hop was the dominant influence on American popular culture, it was the work of Bronx teenagers gathering in parks, recreation centers and clubs and improvising a new approach to music by jury-rigging old records and technology.

 
Lovebug Starski in the 1970s, when hip-hop was in its infancy. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Lovebug Starski was a mainstay of this scene in the 1970s. He started out carrying records and equipment for the disco and funk D.J. Pete (DJ) Jones — one of the first to mix two copies of the same record — at the Starland Ballroom in the Bronx before becoming a D.J. in his own right, spinning at numerous Bronx clubs.
He was a rapper as well, one of the first to rhyme and spin records at the same time. When rapping was little more than accompanying patter to enhance a D.J. set, he was a charismatic source of party-moving phraseology, and he would also handle the microphone for other D.J.s, including a young Grandmaster Flash.
In 1978, just as hip-hop was making the transition from live parties to records, Lovebug Starski (sometimes known as just Starski, or Love Bug Starski, or Luv Bug Starski, or Luvbug Starski) was the house D.J. at the crucial South Bronx club Disco Fever.
He was also a regular at the New York venues the Audubon Ballroom, Harlem World and the Renaissance. He was famously mentioned as part of the roll call of influential early hip-hop D.J.s on the Notorious B.I.G.’s seminal 1994 single “Juicy.”
While D.J.-ing was the coin of the realm in the 1970s, after “Rapper’s Delight” was released its importance took a back seat to rapping, and Lovebug Starski released some music of his own in the early and mid-1980s as an M.C.
His recorded output amounts to just a few 12-inch singles — “You’ve Gotta Believe” / “Starski Live at the Disco Fever” is the most essential — and one album. He also contributed the title track to the soundtrack of “Rappin’,” the third film in the “Breakin’ ” franchise. (“You’ve Gotta Believe” was sampled by the rock group Smiths and by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.)

 
Lovebug Starski in 2008. Joe Conzo
Drugs were a significant part of the night-life scene in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and as he was experiencing success and, later, as the genre was changing, moving away from the casual party rap of the early ‘80s, Lovebug Starski struggled with a cocaine habit.
“I was gettin’ paid. Coked out of my mind,” he told Rolling Stone. He was arrested twice for burglary and once for petty larceny in 1987 (he described the charges as drug-related) and was incarcerated for a few years, until 1991.
After his release he returned to D.J.-ing, along with producing. In the 1990s he was the D.J. at Russell Simmons’s wedding to Kimora Lee and at various events for the clothing company Phat Farm, and the M.C. at a birthday party for Wendy Williams, who was then a radio personality.
He moved to Las Vegas a year ago in hopes of securing regular work and had begun gaining traction there as a D.J.
He is survived by his mother, Martha Bowes; two sisters, Kim Shaw and Karen Rivers; two daughters, Tiffany Williams and Bryanna Smith; and two granddaughters.
 

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Wesla Whitfield performing at the Metropolitan Room in Manhattan in 2011. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Wesla Whitfield, a classically trained vocalist whose fresh interpretations of the Great American Songbook were anything but standard, died on Friday at her home in St. Helena, Calif. She was 70.
The cause was complications from bladder cancer, her husband, Mike Greensill, a jazz pianist who performed and recorded with Ms. Whitfield for decades, wrote in an email.
Ms. Whitfield trained as a coloratura soprano and sang with the San Francisco Opera chorus during the 1970s. But she found the experience unfulfilling, and after completing a performance, she would often sneak off to sing in piano bars.
“In opera, the voice was the only thing of importance,” Ms. Whitfield told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1995. “The lyric and the story didn’t count, and that was boring to me. I’m very interested in the song and the story that it has to tell.”
Ms. Whitfield told those stories with a clear, strong voice that could be languid or sprightly, playful or demure. Among those who praised her singing was Tony Bennett, who called her a “wonderful singer” who “thrills me when I hear her,” The Los Angeles Times reported in 1996.
A 1994 review in Newsday by Gene Seymour compared her to the celebrated swing-era vocalist Lee Wiley: “Her tone has a bracing, enveloping clarity reminiscent of Lee Wiley, who, like Whitfield, could make a song bend or jump in mid-verse without losing control of her timbre.”
Ms. Whitfield’s career took hold at West Coast clubs like the Cinegrill in Los Angeles and the Rrazz Room and the Empire Plush Room in San Francisco. She later became a regular performer at venues like the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan.
 
 
Wesla Whitfield – Walkin’ After Midnight
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Wesla Whitfield – Walkin’ After Midnight Video by Mike Greensill
But before that career had really begun, Ms. Whitfield had to surmount the kind of obstacle that few singers ever face. Her life changed forever after a chance encounter that turned violent on a San Francisco street in 1977.
“Two little boys came up to me and spoke, ‘You better come with us,’” Ms. Whitfield told The Associated Press in 1999. “I turned away, but I saw one little boy open his jacket.”
The boy drew a gun and shot Ms. Whitfield. The bullet struck her spine, and she was paralyzed from the waist down. But after a period of depression she returned to singing.
“It has almost nothing to do with my life, and certainly, definitely, nothing to do with my music,” she said in an interview on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” in 1993.

 
Ms. Whitfield during a 2005 cabaret performance. Richard Termine for The New York Times
Ms. Whitfield rarely discussed the shooting or her partial paralysis. Although she used a wheelchair, for many years she performed seated on a chair or stool, usually after being carried onstage by Mr. Greensill, because she did not want to distract the audience from her voice.
She met Mr. Greensill in 1981, and he soon became her pianist and arranger. They married in 1986.
Ms. Whitfield’s supple voice and Mr. Greensill’s dashes of improvisation reinvigorated familiar songs by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, and others, whose work they both considered timeless.
“We think of the songs we perform as classic, yes,” Ms. Whitfield told The New York Times in 1996. “But in the same way Schubert’s songs are classic. They’re not nostalgic even though they’re old. They speak to the human condition today.”
In their interpretations of songs like “A Kiss to Build a Dream On” and “When You Wish Upon a Star,” the mixture of their different musical backgrounds created an unusual sound that set them apart from similar lounge and cabaret acts.
“Although Ms. Whitfield and Mr. Greensill are not the only married cabaret performers who work together, no cabaret couple in recent memory has expressed their devotion through such intense but subtle musical communication,” Stephen Holden wrote of a four-week engagement they played at the Oak Room in 1993.
They released “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” (1987) and other albums on their own label, Myoho Records, before the Grammy-winning producer Orrin Keepnews signed them to his label, Landmark, in the early 1990s. They released some 20 more records together, often with other musicians, on Landmark and other labels, including “Beautiful Love” (1993) and “Teach Me Tonight” (1997).
In the 1990s, Ms. Whitfield and Mr. Greensill performed at Carnegie Hall and at a White House luncheon for Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, and spouses of senators. Their last performance together was at Silo’s in Napa, Calif., in June 2017.
Wesla Whitfield was born Weslia Marie Edwards on Sept. 15, 1947, in Santa Maria, Calif., about 60 miles northwest of Santa Barbara. She was the youngest of three daughters of Vernon Edwards, a welder who worked in oil fields, and the former Eleanor Smith, a homemaker.
She graduated from high school in Santa Maria and attended Pasadena City College before receiving a degree in music from San Francisco State University in 1971. She started singing with the San Francisco Opera that year and stayed with the company for the next four years, before her preference for nightclubs won out. After leaving the opera, she worked for a time as a singing cocktail waitress.
Her first marriage, to Richard Whitfield, ended in divorce, as did a brief second marriage. She kept the surname Whitfield because she liked the alliteration.
The story of Ms. Whitfield’s first name is more involved. Her mother said she was named after a friend whose name was spelled “Weslia,” with a silent i. Ms. Whitfield dropped the confusing i from her name after her mother’s death in 1998 — and later met the friend, who told her that her name had always been spelled “Wesla.”
In addition to her husband, Ms. Whitfield is survived by a sister, Laurella Pickett.
In 1993 Ms. Whitfield was asked whether having to sit impeded her singing. “Not at all,” she replied.
“I’ve always preferred sitting,” she said. “It brings everything to a stop, and then we just focus on the music.”

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