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A crowd sings “We Shall Overcome” at a rally in Farmville, Va., in 1966. The New York Times
A federal judge on Friday struck down the copyright for part of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” saying that the song’s adaptation from an older work — including changing “will” to “shall” — was not original enough to qualify for protection.
The case is the latest one to cancel the copyright of a time-honored song that many people may well assume was available for anyone to sing, after “Happy Birthday to You” was declared part of the public domain last year. A similar suit challenging Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” is pending.
The decision on “We Shall Overcome,” by Judge Denise L. Cote of United States District Court in Manhattan, concerns the first verse of the song, which contains the lyrics “We shall overcome / We shall overcome some day” and “Oh deep in my heart I do believe / We shall overcome some day.”
Those lines, repeated in the fifth verse, have been associated with civil rights and peaceful protest for decades, and resurfaced most recently after the white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Va.
The song’s origins have been traced to spirituals at the turn of the 20th century. In 1960 and 1963, the publisher Ludlow Music registered copyrights for it, saying that the song’s authors — including Pete Seeger — had made changes to earlier versions of it.
Last year, the song’s copyright was challenged by the makers of a documentary on the song’s history and by the makers the 2013 film “Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” who wanted to use part of the song in the movie.
Judge Cote granted partial summary judgment to the plaintiffs, saying that the song “lacks originality,” and in her ruling she focused on the changing of “will” to “shall.”
“This single word substitution is quintessentially trivial and does not raise a question of fact requiring a trial to assess whether it is more than trivial,” Judge Cote wrote. “The words will and shall are both common words. Neither is unusual.”
One party that stands to lose from the decision is a fund that supports social and cultural programs in the South, which receives royalties from commercial uses of the song.
“We are delighted with the court’s ruling today giving this iconic civil rights song back to the public,” said Mark C. Rifkin, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
Paul V. LiCalsi, a lawyer for the publisher, said, “We do believe that the changes made to the first verse were significant and iconic, and we are very disappointed in this ruling, which takes the determination away from a jury.”
In addition to challenging the first and fifth verses of “We Shall Overcome,” the plaintiffs also sought to have the copyright for the entire song declared invalid, accusing its publishers of committing a fraud on the United States Copyright Office through its registrations.
Judge Cote denied summary judgment on that point, saying it would take a trial to resolve the question.

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Murray Lerner in an undated photo. MLF Productions
Murray Lerner, whose documentaries captured some of the world’s greatest folk and rock musicians in era-defining performances, died on Saturday at his home in Long Island City, Queens. He was 90.
The cause was kidney failure, his assistant, Eliot Kissileff, said.
Mr. Lerner filmed the Newport Folk Festival for four years in the early and middle 1960s, including the much-referenced moment when Bob Dylan plugged in an electric guitar. He also filmed the volatile 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, where commercial and communal sensibilities collided.
But an entirely different type of music brought him his only Oscar, for “From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China,” which was named best documentary feature in 1981.
Murray Lerner was born on May 8, 1927, in Philadelphia. His father, Nacham, left the family soon after; he was raised by his mother, the former Goldie Levine, in New York.
Mr. Lerner graduated from Harvard in 1948 with a poetry degree, but also with the beginnings of a career: While there, he had helped create a film production society and had begun teaching himself how to be a filmmaker.
His first feature-length documentary was an underwater film called “Secrets of the Reef,” which he directed with Lloyd Ritter and Robert M. Young in 1956. But it was his decision to document the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 that proved pivotal.
He would return to that event for the next three years, coming away with hours of film of Mr. Dylan, Joan Baez, Mississippi John Hurt, Johnny Cash, Donovan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and more.

 
The blue musician Mississippi John Hurt performing at the Newport Folk Festival in the early 1960s in Murray Lerner’s film “Festival,” released in 1967. Criterion Collection-Janus Films
His first documentary made from that footage, “Festival,” came out in 1967. The images shot by Mr. Lerner have become an important archival trove, capturing a cultural moment, and the film was nominated for an Oscar.
(One critic, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, however, was put off by the mumbling and inarticulateness of both performers and audience members in “Festival.” “ You know’ is constantly interjected, even in the middle of sentences, to cover or even dismiss an inadequately clarified thought,” he wrote in his review. “However, it is in their music that these people express themselves, and I suppose the music is thoroughly adequate.”)
Forty years after making “Festival,” Mr. Lerner drew on the same material to tease out one particular story line in “The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival.” That film drew on three years’ worth of Mr. Dylan’s performances, including the one in 1965, in which he played an electric guitar, a development that may or may not have led the audience to boo (depending on whom you ask). But the film inarguably conveyed why Mr. Dylan mattered so much, then and now.
“It’s a remarkably pure and powerful documentary, partly because it’s so simple,” A. O. Scott wrote in his review in The Times. “The sound mix is crisp, the black-and-white photography is lovely, and the songs, above all, can be heard in all their earnest, enigmatic glory.”
 
 
Bob Dylan – Live at the Newport Folk Festival
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Bob Dylan – Live at the Newport Folk Festival Video by BobDylanTV
Mr. Lerner also made a series of documentaries from film he shot at the Isle of Wight Festival, off the south coast of England, in 1970, a year when that event had a particularly starry lineup and drew hundreds of thousands of fans, many without tickets. Fences were stormed, and the crowd disrupted some performances.
Mr. Lerner released “Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight” in 1991, and the more general “Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival” in 1996. Later films focused on the performances of others at the 1970 event, among them the Who, Jethro Tull, Miles Davis and Leonard Cohen. At his death, Mr. Lerner had just completed a film about Joni Mitchell’s Isle of Wight set.
His “Mao to Mozart” documented the violinist Isaac Stern’s trip to China in 1979, an important event in the culture thaw, taking place after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976.
Mr. Lerner is survived by his wife, the former Judith Levine, whom he married in 1961; a son, Noah; and two grandchildren.

 
Bob Dylan performing in Newport in Mr. Lerner’s documentary “Festival.” Criterion Collection-Janus Films
Throughout his career, Mr. Lerner also made films about subjects other than music, including “To Be a Man,” a 1966 documentary about student life at Yale, where Mr. Lerner would later teach film, and “Magic Journeys” (1982), a 3-D short depicting the world through the eyes of a child. It has been shown for years at Disney theme parks.
The music documentaries, though, remain his claim to fame. In a 2011 interview Mr. Lerner was asked about his apparent knack for being at big events with a camera.
“I think I have a feeling for what is happening and what is going to happen, and I move towards that moment,” he said. But he also knew that the filmmaker is not merely a passive observer.
“Maybe I’m being egotistical,” he said, “but to be honest, I’m making it that moment. I’m describing it in a way that makes it a moment.” He added, “I think I was using history to create an idea.”
Making a good music documentary, he said in the same interview, meant putting something of himself into it.
“I’m portraying what I feel, which is different from just recording a concert,” he said.
“Most people think if they just turn a camera on and the group is great, that that is what they need to do, which isn’t so at all,” he added. “I become part of the band when I film a band. That’s the secret, if it is a secret. Don’t tell anyone.”

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Johnson’s Happy Pals were the premier jazz band of central Virginia from the mid-1920s to World War II. At a 1929 big-band contest at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, they beat all comers — including the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
Alexandria native Claude Hopkins was the musical director of La Revue Nègre, a Parisian show starring the legendary Josephine Baker. His Claude Hopkins Orchestra would become one of the most popular big bands in the U.S. in the 1930s.
Joan Shaw of Newport News sang at the Apollo Theater and was recognized by Downbeat magazine critic Leonard Feather among the finest female jazz vocalists of 1964. Frustrations with her career and racism led her to reinvent herself as Salena Jones — her new first name a portmanteau of Sarah Vaughan and Lena Horne.
 
“She bought a one-way ticket to Europe and never came back,” said B.J. Brown, executive director of the Richmond Jazz Society. “When she gets to Europe, they fell in love with her.”
Those artists, as well as luminaries such as Ella Fitzgerald, Pearl Bailey, Ruth Brown and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, are part of an upcoming exhibition on the history of jazz in Virginia that will open in conjunction with concerts and conversations by the Richmond Jazz Society.
On Sept. 19, the exhibition “VIRGINIA JAZZ: The Early Years” will open at the Valentine with daylong activities and live music. This multimedia history of the development of jazz from the early 1900s to the mid-1960s includes photographs, biographies, a video montage of vintage film clips and music, and a Victor-Victrola.
More than 30 Virginia artists are in the exhibit. “These are artists who made national and international impact on jazz, and the development of jazz as an art form,” Brown said.
She called it incredible how many artists either born in or affiliated with Virginia became nationally or internationally known in the jazz world. “It was very much a learning experience for me.”
She hastened to add that the list is in no way definitive, and could easily have included more. “I’m hoping people will say, ‘You forgot that person.’”
“We are also recognizing that these musicians inspired other musicians like Lonnie Liston Smith and Al Foster,” a Richmond native who was a drummer with Miles Davis’ band. Weldon Irvine of Hampton was an organist and music director for Nina Simone. He wrote lyrics to her song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.”
Brown noted that Irvine stressed political awareness and was a mentor to many of New York’s hip-hop artists, including Common and Mos Def.
The exhibition features Robinson, the innovative dancer whose toe-tapping lent lightness and elegance to what had been a flat-footed form.
His choice may be less obvious than it seems.
One day at his Jackson Ward statue, “we were asking the kids if they knew who Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson was, and they said, ‘Bojangles chicken?’” Brown recalled. “The kids are not learning this, and we are not teaching them.”
 
 
Other choices are less obvious but remarkably noteworthy. Vaudevillian Henry Sterling Creamer, a Richmond native, wrote the lyrics to the popular song “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.” Norfolk native Keely Smith, with her husband. Louis Prima, won the first Grammy for best performance by a vocal group for “That Ol’ Black Magic” in 1959.
Lynchburg native Creed Taylor founded CTI Rec-ords, one of the most successful jazz labels. Its artists included Simone, Stanley Turrentine, Freddie Hubbard, George Benson and Herbie Hancock.
In conjunction with the Valentine exhibition, which will run through April, the jazz society will hold a series of programs and celebrity lectures, one featuring Mercedes Ellington, a dancer, entertainer, granddaughter of Duke Ellington and co-author of “Duke Ellington: An American Composer and Icon.” John Edward Hasse, retired curator of American music at the Smithsonian Institution, will also speak on Ellington.
On Tuesday, Sept. 12, the jazz society will launch its Fall Guest Educators Concert Series with a musical tribute to Thelonious Monk, whose 100th birthday would have been in October. The event at the Capital Ale House Downtown Music Hall will feature guest speaker Larry Ridley, a jazz bassist and former Monk sideman, followed by a performance by the Charles Owens Quartet.
Cecelia Calloway, a storyteller, vocalist and daughter of Cab Calloway, will perform in November.
The jazz society started the guest educators concert series in 1980 at the advice of jazz violinist Joe Kennedy Jr., a Richmond Public Schools educator and one of the first two African-Americans admitted into the Richmond Symphony, “to seek out those artists who deserve wider recognition, especially those Virginia jazz artists,” Brown said.
 
 
mwilliams@timesdispatch.com
(804) 649-6815
 

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Edward Furlong, left, and Willem Dafoe in the 2000 prison drama “Animal Factory,” directed by Steve Buscemi. Thomas Roma/Silver Nitrate Releasing
A few years ago, back when video rental stores were still around but clearly an endangered species (Tower Records had shut down, Blockbuster was in trouble and Netflix was still dealing in DVDs), I was chatting with a friend, a fellow cinephile experiencing an economic downturn. (As it happened, he had worked for Tower.) It was difficult to keep up with classic releases on home video, particularly stuff from the Criterion Collection, he said, but fortunately for him titles would eventually turn up at his local public library. And he didn’t have to wait long for them either, since few people in his New Jersey town (which had once been mine) were keen on art or foreign films.
People lucky enough to have a good amount of disposable income (or bad enough at managing money) don’t often think of the library as a home entertainment option. Yet I know a lot of people who have Netflix, Amazon Prime or cable with a lot of premium channels, who will balk at shelling out an extra six or seven or eight bucks a month for a more curated movie streaming service. For them, there is a solution, and all they need is their library card.
Anyone who has a New York Public Library or Brooklyn Library card now have free access to Kanopy, a streaming service that has a library of 30,000 movies, hundreds of them from the Criterion Collection.
The service is also free if you are affiliated with a college or university, either as a professor or a student. Kanopy, which is accessible as an app on Roku and Android and iOS devices, and as a website, is available to 477 public libraries and 1,424 learning institutions across the United States.
Kanopy’s offerings vary depending on where you live. Some collections and some titles may not be available at all; some may be available to an education-affiliated account but not to a public library-affiliated account. The New York Public Library version of the service offers 420 movies from the Criterion Collection’s deep library of international classics (from directors including Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin) and contemporary art house films.
Kanopy works like a standard paid streaming service, with limitations. Just as when you take a book out from the library and have a circumscribed amount of time to keep it, so it is with the movies here. Once you press “play” on a given movie, you have three days to watch it, as many times as you like, which uses up one play credit. The number of play credits for each user is determined by the library to which the membership is attached, not by the service. The New York Public Library offers Kanopy users 10 play credits a month. (Members affiliated with educational institutions get unlimited plays.)
Scrolling down the home page of the app version is awe-inspiring. In horizontal rows, 18 categories are presented, beginning with Criterion films. The others include “Popular Documentaries,” “Independent Films,” “World Cinema,” “Staff Picks,” “Audience Picks,” “New York Times Critics’ Picks” and my favorite, “Films Starring Actors From ‘Game of Thrones.’” There’s a fair amount of cross-categorization — you have to scroll far into “Classic Cinema” before you find a non-Criterion title. I was struck, and not in a bad way, by the occasional randomness of the selection. The unsophisticated but often laugh-out-loud funny 1977 anthology comedy “Kentucky Fried Movie” is here. As is the underrated 2000 prison drama “Animal Factory,” directed by Steve Buscemi and starring Willem Dafoe. As is “Boondock Saints,” an elaborate 1999 boondoggle of a crime picture that has somehow managed to attract a cult, also starring Mr. Dafoe.
In a phone interview, I asked Olivia Humphrey, Kanopy’s founder and chief executive, about such results. Many of the titles on the site are added via a “search and find” feature. College professors who need particular movies to assign to their students request titles, and Kanopy looks for them and tries to secure licensing rights.
Licensing movies is a byzantine business. I know of an independent DVD label owner whose inquiries into various obscure and hard-to-find titles in studio vaults was met with the response that the films were of such low priority that it wasn’t even worth it to do the paperwork to create an agreement. Ms. Humphrey told me that Kanopy had about 40 percent success with its searches, which is impressive, all things considered. “And yes, the challenge is usually not in finding the movie but in acquiring the rights,” she said. (I inferred from our chat that the presence of the two wildly disparate Dafoe films might have been because of some American academic researching the actor’s work.)
The site is a library vendor, not a nonprofit, and it splits revenues 50-50 with its licensees. This encourages the licensee to keep the movie on Kanopy for a long time, as it can yield a steady revenue stream. “We like to have full transparency with our licensees,” Ms. Humphrey said. “They are able to log on at any time and see how their titles are doing.”
She began the company in her native Australia in 2008. “My background was in film studios there,” she explained. “I became aware that universities that wanted to add film to their core curriculum had very little available in terms of resources. I saw college libraries with dusty DVDs and 16-millimeter cans on their shelves, so I wanted to create a way to address that.” She moved the company’s headquarters to the United States about four years ago, “mainly because the interest we were getting was largely from American institutions.”
Ms. Humphrey is gratified by how the site has been growing, and she sees Kanopy’s role in the academic world as going substantially beyond providing course resources: “At this time in their lives young people are challenging assumptions, and we try to stay relevant by offering material related to that.” She cites issues of identity as crucial to students, and points out “we have a lot of movies that address that.” As a cinephile herself, she is fervent about spreading the love. “I like to think of a whole world of other students, not enrolled in film school, watching Criterion titles,” she said. “We’re hopefully encouraging them to press ‘play’ on movies they have never heard of.”
 

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Shelley Berman in an undated photo. He was in the vanguard of a movement that transformed the comedy monologue from a rapid-fire string of gags to something more subtle.
Photofest
Shelley Berman, whose brittle persona and anxiety-ridden observations helped redefine stand-up comedy in the late 1950s and early ’60s, died early Friday morning at his home in Bell Canyon, Calif. He was 92.
His publicist, Glenn Schwartz, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr. Berman, one of the first comedians to have as much success on records as in person or on television, was in the vanguard of a movement that transformed the comedy monologue from a rapid-fire string of gags to something more subtle, more thoughtful and more personal.
The comedians of the preceding generation, Gerald Nachman wrote in “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s” (2003), were “one-liner salesmen” for whom “a joke was a cheap and reusable commodity, easily bought and sold, not a worldview or a political stance.” Comedians like Mr. Berman, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce had a different approach.
In 1959, Time magazine referred to this new breed as “sick” comics, and the term (which Mr. Berman hated) caught on. But they had little in common with one another besides a determination to remake stand-up comedy in their own image. Mr. Sahl was a wry political commentator; Mr. Bruce was a profane social satirist; Mr. Berman was a beleaguered observer of life’s frustrations and embarrassments.
Perched on a stool — unlike most stand-up comedians, he did his entire act sitting down — Mr. Berman focused on the little things. He talked about passionate kisses that miss the mark so that ‘‘you wind up with the tip of her nose in the corner of your mouth.” Or what to do when the person you are talking to accidentally spits in your face — do you wipe the spit off or make believe it didn’t happen?
Performing in upscale nightclubs and on concert stages, including Carnegie Hall at the height of his fame, he found humor in places where his borscht belt predecessors had never thought to look: ‘‘If you’ve never met a student from the University of Chicago, I’ll describe him to you. If you give him a glass of water, he says: ‘This is a glass of water. But is it a glass of water? And if it is a glass of water, why is it a glass of water?’ And eventually he dies of thirst.”
“Sometimes,” Mr. Berman told The New York Times in 1970, “I’m so oblique, even I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Like his fellow Chicago comedian Bob Newhart, Mr. Berman specialized in telephone monologues, in which the humor came from his reactions to the unheard voice on the other end of the line. (Mr. Berman often claimed that Mr. Newhart stole that idea from him. Mr. Newhart maintained that the idea did not originate with either of them, noting that comedians had been doing telephone monologues since at least the 1920s.)
In one classic routine, Mr. Berman, nursing a brutal hangover, listened with increasing horror as the host of the party he had attended the night before reminded him of the damage he had done: “How did I break a window? … Oh, I see. … Were you very fond of that cat?”
In another, he called a department store to report that a woman was hanging from a 10th-floor window ledge: “And I was just sitting, I was looking out my window, and I, uh, uh, noticed there’s a woman — there’s a woman hanging from a window ledge on your building about 10 flights up and she’s. … No, operator, you’re missing the point. I don’t wish to speak to the woman.”
His monologues were more like short plays than traditional comedy routines, and many of them — like the one in which he played his own father, trying to discourage young Sheldon from going into show business — had a poignant undertone. Mr. Berman was theatrically trained, and for most of his career he thought of himself more as an actor than as a comedian.
He was an actor both before and after he was a comedy star, and he continued acting well into his 80s, earning an Emmy Award nomination for his portrayal of Larry David’s father on the HBO comedy series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

<img class=”span-asset-img ” src=”https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2017/09/02/arts/berman-obit/berman-obit-articleLarge-v2.jpg” />
Shelley Berman, left, playing bingo with Larry David on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
Doug Hyun / HBO
In the heady early days of his comedy career, he appeared on Broadway in “The Girls Against the Boys” (1959) and “A Family Affair” (1962), and on television shows, including “Peter Gunn,” “Rawhide,” and “The Twilight Zone” (on which he memorably played the misanthropic Archibald Beechcroft, who gains the power to remake the world to his own liking). Acting became Mr. Berman’s main source of income when the comedy bookings began to dry up not long after.
Sheldon Leonard Berman was born in Chicago on Feb. 3, 1925, the son of Nathan Berman, who owned a tavern on the West Side, and the former Irene Marks. He was a show-off as a child; his parents, he once said, told him, ‘‘With your mouth, you could be a lawyer.”
After an asthmatic condition forced him out of the Navy, he studied drama at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where he met Sarah Herman, a fellow student, whom he married in 1947. He joined a stock company in Woodstock, Ill., in 1949, doing everything from playing lead roles to building scenery.
He and his wife then moved around the country — to Daytona Beach, Fla., where he worked as a social director at a hotel; to Los Angeles, where he taught at an acting school, worked in a clothing store and drove a taxi (he later recalled that he had three accidents in one month); to upstate New York, where he again acted in a stock company; to New York City, where he wrote sketches for Steve Allen’s TV show.
His career did not gain traction until he returned to Chicago in 1956 to join the Compass Players, an improvisational theater group that would evolve into the Second City. There, he began developing his comedic skills working with fellow performers like Mike Nichols and Elaine May.
A year later he ventured out on his own. He had a rough start; audiences were not sure what to make of his rather cerebral style, and he was not sure how to relate to them. “I was essentially a monologuist,” he once said. “I was not, in the strict sense of the word, a comedian. I was unable at first to cope with the atmosphere in a nightclub.”

<img class=”span-asset-img ” src=”https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2017/09/02/arts/berman4/berman4-articleLarge-v2.jpg” />
Mr. Berman as a misanthrope in a 1961 episode of “The Twilight Zone” in which, getting his wish, everyone ends up just like him.
CBS, via Photofest
Inspired by the success of the equally unorthodox Mort Sahl — “He showed that humor will sell, not stand-up jokes,” he told Gerald Nachman — Mr. Berman grew more comfortable onstage and had a triumphant run at the Chicago nightclub Mister Kelly’s. That led to work in New York, appearances on the TV shows of Jack Paar, Ed Sullivan and others, and, most important, a contract with Verve Records.
The first of his several albums, “Inside Shelley Berman” (1959), put both Mr. Berman and the phenomenon of long-playing comedy records on the map. There had been stand-up comedy albums before this, but none had made as much of a splash as this one. “Inside Shelley Berman” won a Grammy Award, reached No. 2 on the Billboard album chart and led the way for hit records by Mr. Newhart, Bill Cosby, Steve Martin and many others.
“I was nervous about that record, because I thought no one would want to see me anymore if they could just play it,” Mr. Berman told The Times in 2003. “Then, after it came out, I went to play a show on Sunset Boulevard, and there was a line around the block! I told my wife, ‘I can buy two suits now.’ ”
 
 
Shelley Berman – “Department Store”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Shelley Berman – “Department Store”
Video by baysvoice
In 1963, at the height of his success, Mr. Berman was the subject of an NBC-TV documentary, “Comedian Backstage,” which portrayed him as excitable and demanding and captured him losing his temper after a telephone rang backstage during his “Father and Son” monologue.
The reviews were mostly favorable (although Jack Gould of The Times called the documentary a “portrait of disagreeableness”), but Mr. Berman nonetheless said that the unflattering picture painted by “Comedian Backstage” made him a “pariah” in the industry, and that his comedy career never fully recovered.
In a 2005 Times profile of Mr. Berman, his wife played down that idea. While she acknowledged that he ended up filing for bankruptcy, she insisted, “The problem was not with the documentary but with the financial people we had in charge.” Whatever the reasons — changing tastes in comedy undoubtedly played a part as well — Mr. Berman was far less visible as a comedian after the mid-1960s.
His focus shifted back to acting. He appeared in numerous regional and summer-stock productions and played Tevye in a 1973 touring production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” In the 1960s he was in movies like “The Best Man” (1964) and “Divorce American Style” (1967); from the ’70s through the ’90s he was on numerous TV shows, including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” “St. Elsewhere” and “L.A. Law.”
He briefly returned to Broadway with a one-man show in 1980. A few years later he began teaching a course in humor writing at the University of Southern California, which he continued to teach until 2013. He retired from performing the next year.
The acting work had slowed down by 2002, when Larry David cast Mr. Berman in the recurring role of his irascible and often oblivious father on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” With its emphasis on improvisation, the show gave Mr. Berman the chance to return to his Compass Players roots. It also, he told The Times in 2003, led to “so much attention, I can’t even describe it.”
He went on to play a judge on several episodes of “Boston Legal” and to appear on other TV shows and in the hit movies “Meet the Fockers” (2004) and “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” (2008).

<img class=”span-asset-img ” src=”https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2017/09/02/obituaries/Berman2/Berman2-articleLarge.jpg” />
Mr. Berman performing in Chicago in 2009 in a 50th-anniversary celebration of the improvisational comedy troupe the Second City. He had been a member of the Compass Players, who evolved into the Second City.
Sally Ryan for The New York Times
Mr. Berman is survived by his wife; their daughter, Rachel Berman; and two grandsons. A son, Joshua, died of cancer in 1977.
In 2008 Mr. Berman was nominated for an Emmy as outstanding guest actor in a comedy series for his work in an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” It was the first Emmy nomination of his long career.
“I may get an Emmy, but I doubt very much that’s going to happen,” he said at a ceremony at U.S.C. shortly after the nominations were announced. “There’s a bunch of guys from ‘30 Rock’ who are going to get the Emmys. And I’m going to tell them how bad I feel when I lose.”
Mr. Berman’s fatalism was characteristic and, it turned out, justified. He did indeed lose — to Tim Conway, who won for a guest appearance on “30 Rock.”

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1958 DECOY – “The First Arrest” – Beverly Garland

 

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Come bend your ears to another voice of Lost New York.
 
 
https://talesoftimessquare.blogspot.com/2017/09/episode-1-pee-wee.html

Bonus
David Letterman interviews Pee Wee Marquette, then Pee Wee performs Pennies from Heaven
 
Originally aired February 6, 1985 David Letterman interviews Pee Wee Marquette. Pee Wee was a doorman at the Birdland Jazz Club in New York City in the 50’s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0flHJEfyJQ

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Variety
If music companies were brands, which labels did record nerds trust most?
The results are in via an informal poll of critics, influencers, music industry veterans, and vinyl enthusiasts conducted by Variety. Admittedly, the question asked was fairly basic — “what is your favorite record label from the 20th Century?” — and the pool that answered lacked some diversity within age, race and gender, but the results are no less interesting.
Many expressed nostalgia for their personal, musical coming-of-age. Some took a historical view towards the music industry — qualified by eras, musical genres and even indie vs. corporate contexts. Others went on sheer instinct citing revelatory inspirations, completist obsessions, aesthetic presentation, and taste-making consistency. A few felt it was impossible to answer — but answer they did.
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Of course, many of these record labels documented the birth and evolution of folk music, jazz, blues, hip-hop, soul, R&B, country and rock ‘n’ roll, so passions sometimes ran high. Most people took the question seriously, and some had a difficult time deciding. New York tastemaker David J. Prince felt the question was redundant since record labels didn’t exist before the 20th Century and now mean something quite different in the current millennia. Also critiqued was the subjectivity of polling a favorite label, but we remain satisfied with this line of questioning. People can argue all day long over which label was the best, but you can’t really dispute someone else’s favorite. Can you?
And so the winners are in order of votes (which totaled more than 300):

1. Atlantic
2. Blue Note
3. Columbia
4. Warner Brothers
5. Stax-Volt

Read some of the responses below, followed by the top 20 entries, and let us know: what’s your favorite and why?
“In terms of sheer, sustained and reverberating impact on global culture, and to reflect your desire for brevity, let’s say Chess. Or Sun. Chess. Both have Wolf……… But Chess.  Ok. I’ll stick with that. Chess. Unless….no. Chess.”
— Rob Miller, Bloodshot Records
There were over 140 different record labels suggested by those polled, with the majority of labels receiving less than five votes. Not surprisingly, some of the larger “corporate” labels dominated thanks to the quantity and quality of their products, as well as their ubiquitous distribution, radio play and advertising.
“That’s a hard one. If I’m going for a major label it would have to be Columbia Records because of Cohen, Dylan, Cash, Aretha, Simon & Garfunkel, Miles, and so many etceteras. Elektra would come a close second.” 
— Sylvie Simmons, Author (“I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen”)
Naturally, building blocks of American rock and soul were held in high regard. Legendary music great Al Kooper picked Stax. Veteran writer John Swenson said Chess. Jazz guitarist John Scofield chose Columbia over Blue Note. Manager Danny Goldberg, NPR critic Ann Powers and impresario Andrew Loog Oldham all voted for Atlantic. Writer and Sirius XM host Dave Marsh said Motown and Fortune, and Lenny Kaye said Fortune too. Wales native Jon Langford stood up for Sun.
On the flip side, Independent post-punk labels like Twin Tone, Sub Pop, Sire, Matador and Amphetamine Reptile received limited but enthusiastic endorsements.
“That’s super easy. Sire. Sire’s catalog sort of wrecked me.”
—Thom Monahan, Producer
“Either Casablanca or AmRep.” 
—Chuck Klosterman, Author
“Wow. Big question. AmRep is the one where I own practically everything.”  
—Tad Hendrickson, Journalist
Musician Richard Thompson and author David Hajdu (“Love for Sale: Pop Music in America”) both listed Paramount as their favorites, making us wonder if they had access to the massive Paramount Records Wonder-Cabinet (Third Man Records) that nobody could afford.
Industry rebels and sonic outsiders also had their say, reminding us how one small label with a maverick worldview could actually change the life of an obsessive music fan looking for clues.
“Impulse! until the late 70’s. And Warner Bros/Reprise 60’s till ’75. And short-lived Flying Dutchman. And short-lived Douglas Records. … Thinking of labels that one bought almost everything they put out.”
—Hal Willner, Producer
“Corny I know, but ESP-Disk probably had more to do with bending my young mind than anything else.”
—Byron Coley, Critic
“I’d like to say ESP but they still owe so many artists so much money!”
—Bob Fass, Radio Unnamable
Author Barney Hoskyns (“Small Town Talk”) liked Bearsville. Veteran hipster David Amram preferred Columbia. Promoter Peter Shapiro (Brooklyn Bowl, Capitol Theater), music supervisor Zach Cowie (“Master of None”) and actor Bruce Greenwood all voted for Island; Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo picked Neutral; Dallas Good of Canadian rock band The Sadies went for Norton; “Wrecking Crew” director Denny Tedesco wisecracked K-TEL, and world music promoter Bill Bragin said Stiff. Guitarist Neal Casal (Chris Robinson Brotherhood, Hard Working Americans) and radio bohemian Bob Fass both listed too many labels to repeat here.
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In a surprising turn, jazz imprints Blue Note and ECM each garnered a large amount of votes (both boasted great album graphics and superb music, by the way). Moreover, four of our survey’s top labels were jazz oriented (we know a lot of jazz lovers).
“The easy answer would be (and still could be) Blue Note, but that ignores the first 20 years. ECM ignores the first 50 years, but that’s a helluva catalog.”
—Neil Tesser, Critic
In any case, here are your Top 20 favorite record labels of the 20th Century. Please note that if we added the votes for Nonesuch to those cast for parent company Elektra, it would have pushed Elektra into the Top 5. We didn’t do anything like that, and stuck to the answers exactly as they were given.

1. Atlantic
2. Blue Note
3. Columbia
4. Warner Brothers
5. Stax-Volt
6. ECM
7. Chess
8. Elektra
9. Sun
10. Motown
11. Impulse!
12. Capitol
13. Island
14. IRS
15. Sire
16. Paramount
17. Touch & Go
18. Verve
19. Nonesuch
20. ESP-Disc

If you want to join in the conversation, cast your vote in the comments below.
 

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Woody Shaw Takes on “ ’Round Midnight,” the Trumpeter’s Supreme Challenge
Richard Brody
 
It ’s always terrific news when great music that has been hidden in the vaults is brought to light, but the excellent new release “The Tour: Volume Two,” featuring live European performances from 1976 and 1977 by the crucial modern trumpeter Woody Shaw, is shadowed by sadness: the label that released it, HighNote, lost its founder, Joe Fields, last month. Fields, who was eighty-eight, had been, for half a century, an important producer of modern jazz recordings. One of his labels, Muse, gave birth to many of Shaw’s best albums, starting with “The Moontrane,” from 1974, and also went back and released a wonderful, previously unissued session from 1965, “Cassandranite,” Shaw’s first date as a leader, recorded when he was twenty-one.
 
When Shaw made his first recording, as an unknown eighteen-year-old, in 1963, while a sideman with Eric Dolphy’s band, some listeners speculated that the name was a pseudonym for the trumpet hero Freddie Hubbard (and perhaps a ruse to get around contractual obligations). It was no such thing, and I confess that, though I’m a fan of Hubbard, I’d never have mistaken one for the other. Shaw’s tone is broader and grainier; his harmonic world is twistier. Shaw worked as a sideman for many of the great musicians of the time, including his longtime friend Larry Young (I wrote last year about some of their collaborations), Art Blakey, and Dexter Gordon; he also led his own bands, which included some of the younger great modernists, including Anthony Braxton, Billy Harper, Geri Allen, and Arthur Blythe. For the quintets of “The Tour,” Shaw was also officially a sideman—the group was nominally led by Louis Hayes (one of the most prominent modern drummers, who, happily, still records for HighNote), but Shaw is its dominant musical personality, and his improvisations shift the music from the delightful to the sublime.
 

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Forty Years Later, the Golden Record Goes Vinyl
The audio comes from the original tapes that sat untouched in an underground warehouse since the Voyager launched in 1977.
Marina KorenAug 25, 2017
The Voyager Golden Record was never really intended for human consumption. The target audience for the contents—popular songs, sounds from nature, photographs, spoken greetings in dozens of human languages and one whale language—was, and still is, an alien civilization capable of deciphering the instructions on the cover to learn about one small world in the universe. Two copies of the gold-plated copper record left Earth on Voyager 1 and 2, the first of which eventually left the solar system. The dozen extra copies that remained were distributed to mostly NASA facilities. Even Carl Sagan, who led the record’s production, couldn’t get a copy. When Sagan wrote NASA in 1978 asking if he could receive one as a keepsake, the agency’s administrator sent back an apologetic message saying no. “You do understand our concern about the matter of highly valuable mementos being given to individuals,” the note read.
Forty years later, the Golden Record is now on vinyl, and can be ordered online for $98.
Using audio from the original tapes from the 1970s, a small team in California has put the Golden Record on vinyl for the first time. The set contains three LPs and a book of the photos that were encoded in the original record. The records were co-produced by David Pescovitz, a research director at the nonprofit Institute for the Future and a partner and editor at the website Boing Boing. Pescotivz remembers hearing about the Voyager launch as a kid in 1977.
“When you’re seven years old and you hear that there’s a group of people who are creating a phonograph record that’s actually a message to extraterrestrials and attaching it to two space probes and launching it into the solar system and beyond—it sparks the imagination,” Pescovitz said. “That stuck with me.”
The record’s contents previously appeared on a CD-ROM in 1992, and about two years ago NASA uploaded the nature sounds and greetings on SoundCloud, without the music. The lack of a vinyl version, even in the days of digital, seemed like a missed opportunity. Tim Daly, a manager at San Francisco’s Amoeba Music, suggested to Pescovitz that they try to release it on vinyl. They teamed up with Lawrence Azerrad, a graphic designer who has worked on album covers for Miles Davis, Sting, and others. They launched a Kickstarter campaign last year to raise money for the project, asking for $200,000 to make 2,000 sets. The internet responded with $1.3 million. They made 10,000 special-edition copies for their backers, and are now selling a different edition on their website.
After the Voyagers launched, CBS Records, which was eventually bought by Sony, held onto the original reel-to-reel tape recordings. Pescovitz and his collaborators called Sony about them, and an archivist eventually found the tapes sitting in an underground, climate-controlled warehouse in western Pennsylvania. The tapes were exhumed, and Pescovitz and Daly, along with Tim Ferris, the producer of the Golden Record and Pescovitz’s former graduate school adviser, flew to New York to take a listen at Sony’s studios. Sound engineers first stuck the tapes into an oven and literally baked them, which prevents them from deteriorating, then put them on a vintage reel-to-reel player. Everyone in the room sat back and listened.
“It was absolutely sublime,” Pescovitz said. “The quality was like nothing we’d ever heard.” Sound engineers then transferred the audio on the tapes to digital files.
Here’s an excerpt of the remastered audio:
Even though they had the tapes, Pescovitz and the rest of the team still needed to secure permission to use copyrighted material. Getting the rights to songs from major record labels or images from national publications was easy, since such institutions usually have a process in place. Tracking down the owners of some of the more obscure content, like melodies by indigenous groups, proved more difficult, Pescovitz said. Notes from the time of the record’s original production were sometimes lacking or wrong, and online searches for some of the names listed turned up obituaries instead of contact information. “It came to the point where I was calling Papua New Guinea at 2 o’clock in the morning, and working with amazing ethnomusicologists around the world to try to track down as much information as possible, to find out about who these people were, what the music was, who collected it and when,” Pescovitz said.
The owner of one musical piece featuring panpipes was listed as the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation, so Pescovitz called. The staff didn’t know the name of the song or who played it, but a young woman who was at the radio station overheard them talking about it and told them her grandfather was one of the musicians. The man is now working on getting a bank account so Pescovitz and the team can pay royalties to the surviving musicians.
The team started shipping the vinyl records to their Kickstarter backers this week, in time for the Voyager mission’s 40th anniversary. The gold-plated versions, meanwhile, are hurtling away from Earth are more than 35,000 miles per hour, looking for an audience. They may go unheard forever. But that doesn’t really matter to Pescovitz.
“Yes, the Voyager record is a gift from humanity to the cosmos, but it’s also a gift to humanity,” he said. “It’s a manifestation of what we can accomplish through creativity, passion, and science. It instills a sense of hope and possibility in people.”
 
 

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By Gene Santoro

 
In 1946 two immigrant Polish-Jewish brothers Leonard and Phil Chess took over a bar on Chicago’s South Side. They saw that business boomed when they booked blues bands. So they started one of the hundreds of tiny niche-market labels then dotting America. 

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Paul Oliver interviewing the blues artist Lightnin’ Hopkins in Houston in 1960. Chris Strachwitz/Arhoolie Foundation
Paul Oliver, a Briton who wrote some of the earliest and most authoritative histories of one of America’s great indigenous musical forms, the blues, died on Tuesday in Shipton-under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire, England. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by Michael Roach, the co-executor of his estate.
Mr. Oliver first heard black American music as a teenager in England during World War II. While he was gathering crops for the war effort at a harvest camp in Suffolk, not far from an American military base, a friend asked him if he wanted to hear something unusual.
“He took me down to a kind of hedge between the two farms, and there was this extraordinary crying and yelling,” Mr. Oliver told the web publication earlyblues.com in 2009. “I couldn’t call it singing, but it was quite spine-chilling. He said, ‘Do you know what this is?’ I said, ‘No, I’ve no idea,’ and he said, ‘You’re listening to blues.’
“He wasn’t quite right, really,” Mr. Oliver added, “because we were actually listening to field hollers, but nevertheless I found it quite extraordinary.”
The extraordinary sounds sent Mr. Oliver on a lifelong quest as a record collector, field researcher and historian, the British counterpart to Samuel Charters, the American historian whose groundbreaking book “The Country Blues” appeared in 1959, the same year Mr. Oliver’s biography “Bessie Smith” was published in Britain. Mr. Charters died in 2015.
Mr. Oliver, a scrupulous researcher with a fluent writing style, opened the eyes of readers in Britain and the United States to a musical form that had been overlooked and often belittled.
“He possesses broad sympathies and deep insights lacking in most American writing on the blues,” the folklorist Benjamin A. Botkin wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1960, reviewing Mr. Oliver’s second book, “Blues Fell This Morning,” one of the first efforts to examine closely the music’s language and subject matter.
After taking a trip through the American South in 1964, interviewing and recording blues singers, Mr. Oliver wrote “The Story of the Blues.” Published in 1969, it was the first comprehensive history of the genre and remains an indispensable work.
“He provides a complete factual panorama from field hollers to Chicago electronics,” the jazz historian Stanley Dance wrote in Saturday Review. Mr. Oliver, he added, “relates people, time and place in a way that has not been done before.”
Brett Bonner, the editor of the magazine Living Blues, said in an interview: “Paul was one of the founders of blues scholarship. He and Sam Charters set the template for everything that followed. They also set the stage for the blues revival of the 1960s. Without them, people like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House and Skip James would not have had second careers.”
Despite its importance, Mr. Oliver’s work on the blues was a sideline to his principal occupation, as an architectural historian. He wrote extensively on local forms of architecture around the world, a field he extended to include suburban housing tracts and squatters’ camps, which he regarded as forms of cultural expression worthy of study, like the blues.
While teaching in the architecture department at Oxford Brookes University, he edited two monumental reference works: the three-volume Encylopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World (1997) and, with Marcel Vellinga and Alexander Bridge, “Atlas of Vernacular Architecture of the World” (2007).
Paul Hereford Oliver was born on May 25, 1927, in Nottingham, to W. Norman Oliver, an architect, and the former Dorothy Edmunds. The family moved to north London when he was young, and he attended the Harrow County School for Boys.
He trained as a painter and sculptor at the Harrow School of Art, but switched to graphic design because most art materials aggravated his asthma and various allergies. At the school he met Valerie Coxon, whom he later married. She died in 2002. He leaves no immediate survivors.

 
Published in 1969, “The Story of the Blues” was the first comprehensive history of the genre and remains an indispensable work. J.P. Roth collection
After earning a diploma in 1948 from Goldsmith’s College in London, Mr. Oliver returned to the Harrow County School to teach art. There he founded the Harrow Jazz Purist Society; played mandolin in the Crawdads, a skiffle band; and in 1951 wrote his first scholarly article, on gospel songs, for Jazz Monthly.
Dissatisfied with the quality of the cover art on records released by the British Decca label, he wrote to the company to complain and was hired as an illustrator. His first assignment was the cover for “Backwoods Blues,” a collection of songs by Bobby Grant, Buddy Boy Hawkins, King Solomon Hill and Big Bill Johnson, released in 1954.
He later illustrated and wrote the liner notes for dozens of albums. In 1955 he earned an art-history degree from the University of London.
Mr. Oliver was at work on “Blues Fell This Morning” when an editor at Cassell approached him to write a biography of Bessie Smith for its Kings of Jazz series. Pleased with the result, Cassell then brought out his second book.
Encouraged by librarians at the United States Embassy, Mr. Oliver won a grant from the State Department and received financing from the BBC to travel to the United States and record blues artists. His journey through the South led to an enormously popular exhibition at the embassy that was attended by the singer and guitarist Lightnin’ Hopkins, whom Mr. Oliver had interviewed at his house in Houston.
The exhibition became the starting point for “The Story of the Blues,” which was accompanied by a double album tracing the music’s development from its African roots to the 1960s.
Mr. Oliver edited nearly a hundred interviews from his trip for “Conversation With the Blues” (1965), an oral portrait of the music and the American South that included indigenous musical artists of every description.

 
Paul Oliver interviewing the blues artist Mance Lipscomb in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1970. Chris Strachwitz/Arhoolie Foundation
He wrote in the introduction: “Barrelhouse pianists and juke-joint guitarists, street singers and traveling show entertainers, jazz musicians and jug band players, sharecroppers and millworkers, vagrants and migrants, mechanics and laborers — these were amongst the speakers. Some had secure jobs, some had none; some were on relief and some in retirement; some played for themselves, some played for others, some had once ridden high and others were going down slow, some were famous, some unknown, some were young and others venerable: all had played their part in shaping the pattern of the blues.”
He explored the myriad influences on the development of the blues in “Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition” (1968) and “Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues” (1970).
His other books on the subject included “Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records” (1984), “Broadcasting the Blues: Black Blues in the Segregation Era” (2006) and “Barrelhouse Blues: Location Recordings and the Early Traditions of the Blues” (2009). His liner notes were collected in “Blues Off the Record: Thirty Years of Blues Commentary” (1984).
During this time, Mr. Oliver’s career as an architectural historian also blossomed. In 1960 he joined the Architectural Association as an artist. He became a lecturer on art and art history, and in the early 1970s served as head of the association’s graduate school.
He left in 1973 to lead the art and design department at Dartington College of Arts, in Dartington Hall, Devon, and in 1978 he joined the architecture department at Oxford Polytechnic in Headington, near Oxford. It was renamed Oxford Brookes University in 1992.
Mr. Oliver’s interest in vernacular architecture sprang from the same impulses that fueled his passion for the blues. Local forms, he said in a lecture at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 2015, “are an expression of the cultures that built them.” Architects failed, he added, by regarding architecture as an “abstraction separate, in a sense, from the values or the qualities that the peoples of the various cultures require in their buildings.”
His many books on architecture included “Shelter and Society” (1969), “English Cottages and Small Farmhouses: A Study of Vernacular Shelter” (1975), “Dwellings: The House Across the World” (1987) and “Built to Meet Needs: Cultural Issues in Vernacular Architecture” (2006).
At his death Mr. Oliver left a 1,400-page manuscript on the Texas blues that he had begun writing with the researcher Mack McCormick in 1959. The project was abandoned after the two men quarreled. Mr. McCormick died in 2015.
Texas A&M University Press is scheduled to publish it in fall 2018, with essays by Alan Govenar and Kip Lornell, as “The Blues Come to Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick’s Unfinished Book.”
Correction: August 19, 2017
A

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Jerry Lewis Conducts The Count Basie Orchestra (1980) – MDA Telethon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_yVmE6y53k

Buddy Rich & Jerry Lewis – Drum Solo Battle (1965)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=141o_jwG7cA

Jerry Lewis – Count Basie Orchestra, another pantomime
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfRWbynDGu8

Jerry Lewis – THE JAZZ SINGER 1959
https://vimeo.com/86241792
 
Bonus
JERRY LEWIS rock’n’roll
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkGTwmJxHA0

NYTs Obit
Jerry Lewis, Mercurial Comedian and Filmmaker, Dies at 91
By DAVE KEHR AUG. 20, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/movies/jerry-lewis-dead-celebrated-comedian-and-filmmaker.html?mcubz=1&_r=0

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POVAL ‪@POVAL_OBU
 
 
Sadly, Paul Oliver peacefully passed away last night. Paul was an inspiration, mentor and friend to many and will be greatly missed.
12:33 PM · Aug 15, 2017
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Oliver
 
Paul Hereford Oliver MBE (25 May 1927 – 15 August 2017) was a British architectural historian and writer on the blues and other forms of African-American music.^[1][2] His commentary and research into blues have been influential.

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The Canadian Press
August 14, 2017
10:02 AM EDT
MONTREAL — Daisy Sweeney, the woman credited with being the first teacher of Canadian musical talents like her brother Oscar Peterson and Oliver Jones, has died at the age of 97.
Sylvia Sweeney says her mother’s impact on numerous lives went beyond the musical icons who credit her with their success and Montreal’s black community.
“One of her greatest accomplishments: she broke the colour barrier by taking students she’d taught for 25 cents a lesson on Saturdays and took them to preparatorial exams at McGill University, to competitions,” Sweeney said Monday.
“She changed the picture of what was possible — not in the minds of those children — but in the minds of those who were adjudicating them.”
Daisy Sweeney, who died in Montreal on Friday, was born Daisy Elitha Peterson in 1920 in Montreal’s Saint-Henri district.
“She was born in Montreal in an era where it was fairly difficult for anyone to have a vision that was black, about being more than the opportunities before them which was railway work and domestic work,” her daughter said.
Even though black men and women were pigeon-holed into those vocations, she viewed it as a test and paid her way through a music degree at McGill University.
Meanwhile, she was enlisted by her father to train the other Peterson kids, among others.
“What she tried to do was to look at the children around her and have them see the potential in themselves,” Sweeney said of her mother’s teaching philosophy.
“She was always the one they all remembered because she took it beyond the piano bench, it was right into their lives, into their school, into their social (life).”
Sweeney said her mother had a philosophy of exceeding expectations — that was her legacy and what the mother of eight instilled in her own kids.
“My mom didn’t care whether it was piano, or any instrument or any vocation, she just always said ‘never leave anything, go to something’,” said Sweeney.
Although she wasn’t able to play music in the last years of her life, she still very much enjoyed music.
“The very last photo taken of her, my sister had her with her earphones on listening to Oscar play,” said Sweeney.
“She went out the way she lived, with music.”
A public service is planned for Saturday morning at Union United Church in Montreal.
 
 

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