Musicians’ Pension Plan Seeks to Cut Benefits

By Michael Cooper

Jan. 7, 2020

The plan, running out of money, wants to take the rare step of cutting benefits that have already been earned.

Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians endorsing Bill de Blasio for mayor of New York in 2013. The local’s new leadership is concerned about proposed changes to the union’s pension benefits.Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

The largest musicians’ pension plan in the United States is seeking to cut retirement benefits that have already been earned by thousands of musicians, in an effort to keep the plan from running out of money.

The plan, the American Federation of Musicians and Employers’ Pension Fund — which covers more than 50,000 people, including Broadway musicians, players in some orchestras, and freelance musicians and recording artists — declared over the summer that it was in “critical and declining status” and would run out of money to pay benefits within 20 years.

The fund calculated that it had, as of last March, roughly $1.8 billion in assets and $3 billion in projected liabilities — a severe shortfall. Now its trustees are taking the rare step of trying to cut benefits that have already been earned by many of the plan’s participants.

“We faced two challenging options — to allow the plan to run out of money within 20 years or try to prevent that from happening by applying to the government for approval to reduce earned benefits,” plan officials wrote in an email to participants on Tuesday. The email said that if the plan did nothing and ran out of money, the federal government’s insurer, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, would likely step in and pay retirees even less than the new proposal calls for.

Under the proposal that the plan filed with the Treasury Department late last month and shared with members on Tuesday, more than half the plan’s participants would see no reduction in their benefits; about 45 percent would see their retirement benefits reduced by up to 19 percent of what they have been promised; and a little under 2 percent would have their benefits cut by 20 to 40 percent. Benefits would not be cut for retirees over 80, and cuts would be reduced for those over 75. 

If approved, the cuts would go into effect next year.

Several musicians expressed concern about the proposed cuts. Adam Krauthamer, the president of the union’s largest local, Local 802 in New York, said in an email to The New York Times that it was “a tough day for unionism, for the A.F.M. and for my fellow musicians across the country.”

The executive board of Local 802 wrote in an email to its members that many musicians “will be severely impacted by the impending cuts.” Officials at the local pledged to scrutinize the proposed cuts and the application process; work to help Broadway musicians implement a new 401(k) plan to help them prepare for retirement; and push for more accountability from the pension fund and the board of trustees that oversees it. 

The American Federation of Musicians, both nationally and among its local chapters, has been pushing for federal legislation to help address the growing national problem of underfunded multiemployer pension plans. But there have been few signs of action in Washington.

The underfunded musicians’ plan and the prospect of benefit cuts have roiled the union in recent years. Mr. Krauthamer was an insurgent candidate who was elected president of Local 802 in 2018 in a major upset that was driven largely by concerns about the plan. Some musicians have sued the plan’s trustees, claiming mismanagement of the fund, which the trustees have denied. Many rank and file musicians are becoming activists when it comes to their pensions.

A number of factors have contributed to the fund’s shortfall, plan officials and musicians said. It enacted a series of expensive benefit increases before 2000, and then suffered major losses in the recessions since. The lawsuit brought by the musicians describes a series of bad investment decisions in recent years. And the fund now pays out more in benefits to retirees — whose ranks have swelled — than it receives in contributions from currently working musicians and employers, draining the fund.

The plan is seeking to cut benefits under a recent federal law, the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act, which was enacted in 2014. The Treasury Department will accept comments on the proposal and has until mid-August to review it. If it approves the plan, the proposed cuts will be put to a vote of the membership. But the law makes it difficult to reject cuts: Such a rejection would require a majority of all the plan’s participants, not just a majority of those who vote.

“This means that not voting counts the same as a vote to approve the reduction,” the plan noted in its email to members.

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Film Review: “Satan & Adam” — The Story of a Dynamic Blues Duo

January 4, 2020 Leave a Comment

By Matt Hanson

Following the stories of these unique, gifted, and sadly overlooked individuals can be as gripping as the music they made together.

Satan & Adam, directed by V. Scott Balcerek. Streaming on Netflix and elsewhere.

In the early ’80s, Adam Gussow was an Ivy Leaguer on his way to a teaching gig in The Bronx when he happened to pass an intriguing street musician, on a street corner in Harlem, right in front of the frosted glass door of The New York Telephone Company office. He was a one-man band simultaneously playing guitar and percussion, singing the blues with a ferocity that stopped Gussow in his tracks. Inquiring as to who this talented fellow might be, a local informed him that it was Satan. Come again? “Everybody around here knows Mister Satan.” Gussow was impressed by the bluesman’s chops and eventually worked up the courage to ask if he could sit in, charmingly promising that “I won’t embarrass you.” After pondering this for a minute, Satan accepted the offer. The unlikely duo started jamming, and it worked. The rest is history, lovingly and heartbreakingly documented in the new Netflix film Satan & Adam.

Of course, the obvious contrasts between these two bluesmen are the first thing you notice. Gussow is a brainy middle-class kid from the New York suburbs with Dutch Reform and Jewish ancestry who had graduated from Princeton with a degree in Literature and, after a bad breakup, decided to drop out of Columbia to play on the street with Satan full time. Gussow is also a talented harmonica player, but he hadn’t played much publicly before sitting in that random day in Harlem. The music clicked instantly, the passersby dug it too, and Gussow decided that the life of academia wasn’t for him. He would be Satan’s accompanist for the next several years.

“Satan” was the preferred moniker for Gussow’s partner/friend/mentor, whose Christian name was Sterling Magee. We get some of Magee’s backstory in the film, but there’s still a layer or two of mystery around him. In his former life as a sideman, Magee backed up a very impressive series of musicians, including the likes of George Benson, King Curtis, and even James Brown at the Apollo Theatre (tellingly it is within eye-shot of the spot in Harlem he later claimed for himself). Rumor has it that Ray Charles liked his playing but didn’t want to risk being overshadowed. The film attempts to explain the origin of Satan’s self-chosen sobriquet, but many of the explanations are vague — as they probably should be. Suffice to say that his moniker has less to do with diabolism and more to do with a deep personal loss, an immersion in the Bible, and an idiosyncratic aesthetic vision not unlike, as one critic puts it, that of a George Clinton or Sun Ra.

The political implications of these two pairing up are made clear. Harlem in the ’80s, as Al Sharpton explains, was economically depressed and edgy but culturally fruitful. The neighborhood has a tradition of being on the front lines of American artistic excellence in any number of ways, but seeing a nerdy white boy backing up a bearded eccentric black man playing music that is usually identified with the Southern African-American experience was a novelty that few failed to miss. At one point Gussow points out, with characteristic humility and frankness, that being in that deeply Other social space put him at risk. But the music he made with Satan undeniably clicked, despite the improbability of the two ever meeting otherwise, which provided plenty of reasons to keep their partnership intact.

For years, the two played at the same spot in Harlem and occasionally elsewhere around NYC, gaining something of an underground following in the process. U2 stumbled across them during their Rattle & Hum tour and were sufficiently awed to include one of Satan’s shorter ditties on one of their records. Satan and Adam laid down some killer records that reflected their amazing tightness as a unit and their street-honed chops. Better yet, they were prominently featured in the blues tent at New Orleans’s prestigious Jazz Fest a few times. They toured all over America and Europe together. Gussow wrote some books and articles about his experience, and Satan certainly appreciated being the bandleader for once, although he was justifiably deeply skeptical about a music industry that he had already seen rip off innumerable black artists. It was Satan who doled out the money after the shows.

For nonmusicians (like me) a band “getting discovered” can sound like a dream finally coming true; a golden ticket allowing scuffling artists to finally ride off into the sunset. But, as any musician will tell you, going on the road can be a huge grind. There’s the lack of sleep, the weird hours, the bad food, the pressure to perform, and the forced proximity to hangers-on. Satan and Adam lasted an impressive length of time playing great music together, but eventually even this dynamic duo succumbed to burnout. Satan’s troubled youth eventually gave way to a troubled old age. Despite the slow drain of time he still manages to find some moments of peace, embracing the joy and triumph that can only come when he plays his music.

Satan & Adam doesn’t end on a sour note, but some of the most dramatically weighted moments focus on the two men’s alternate life trajectories long after their partnership dissolved. There’s a special poignance in seeing how each reckons with the remembrance of blues past. The stereotype would have it that blues music is about feeling bad, drinking too much, or cavorting with shady company. But for those who love the genre this is only the tip of the emotional iceberg — seeing these two play the wonderful old standards initially made famous by luminaries like Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, and Ma Rainey demonstrates how songs we tend to take for granted continue to generate deeper emotional resonances — particularly when you know what it means to the musicians at that moment. Following the stories of these unique, gifted, and sadly overlooked individuals can be as gripping as the music they made together.

Matt Hanson is a contributing editor at The Arts Fuse whose work has also appeared in The American Interest, The Baffler, The Guardian, The Millions, The New Yorker, The Smart Set, and elsewhere. A longtime resident of Boston, he now lives in New Orleans.

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Old Musicians Never Die. They Just Become Holograms.

By Mark Binelli

Jan. 7, 2020

Buddy Holly revived as a hologram for a show in Los Angeles.Base Holograms

Companies are making plans to put droves of departed idols on tour — reanimating a live-music industry whose biggest earners will soon be dying off.

Buddy Holly revived as a hologram for a show in Los Angeles.Base Holograms

In preparation for his first American tour in a decade, Ronnie James Dio spent months sequestered in a modest office suite in Marina del Rey, in Los Angeles. The office was on the second floor of a strip mall, above a vape shop and a massage parlor. I visited at the end of May, only a couple of days before the opening date of the tour, and among Dio’s team, there was a tangible air of anticipation. Dio never became a household name, but he is considered one of the great heavy-metal vocalists of all time, up there with Ozzy Osbourne (whom he replaced in Black Sabbath) and metal-adjacent rockers like Axl Rose and Robert Plant. Beginning in the 1970s, Dio took a lead role in codifying a number of his genre’s most ludicrous, yet utterly foundational, conventions. He sang of wolves and demons, toured with an animatronic dragon and supposedly introduced the splay-fingered “devil horns” headbanger’s salute, which he claimed his Italian grandmother used to flash as an old-world method of warding off the malocchio and other forms of bad luck.

Opinion among the Dio faithful, nonetheless, was divided on the subject of his “Dio Returns” comeback tour, largely because Dio has been dead for almost 10 years. The Marina del Rey office suite was the site of a visual-effects company creating a Dio hologram. The hologram would tour with a living backing group consisting, in large part, of former Dio bandmates.

If you missed the tour, you might want to take a moment here and call up one of the fan-shot videos posted on YouTube — say, “Rainbow in the Dark,” Dio’s 1983 hit, filmed at the Center Stage Theater in Atlanta on June 3, during which the Dio hologram prowls a central portion of the stage, bobbing, weaving, twirling his microphone cord to the monster riffs and occasionally using his free hand to air-conduct his most operatic vocal flourishes. (“His” — would “its” be more apt? Neither word feels quite right.) At one point, the bassist, Bjorn Englen, takes several very deliberate steps to his left, allowing the hologram to dance in front of him and adding to the illusion of a three-dimensional conjuring.

The hologram itself has an uneasy pallor, a brighter shade than the humans onstage but at the same time insubstantial, like a ghost struggling to fully materialize. One crucial decision that had faced the animators was choosing the right age for their creation. Dio in his MTV-era prime tempted them, of course, but then wouldn’t it be strange to watch him perform alongside band members who were roughed up by the ensuing years like the rest of us? Then again, Dio’s actual age in 2019, were he alive, would be 77, which is not ideal for a heavy-metal frontman. The creative team ultimately settled on a spry, middle-aged Dio, outfitting him in black leather pants, a studded leather wristband and a bell-sleeved white tunic embossed with a silver cross.

A start-up called Eyellusion produced “Dio Returns.” It’s one of a handful of companies looking to mold and ultimately monetize a new, hybrid category of entertainment — part concert, part technology-driven spectacle — centered, thus far, on the holographic afterlives of deceased musical stars. Eyellusion also toured a hologram of Frank Zappa in the spring, in a show overseen by Zappa’s son Ahmet. The tour kicked off in April at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., about an hour north of Manhattan in Westchester County. A few hours before the show, I talked to the owner of the venue, the 47-year-old concert promoter Peter Shapiro. In 2015, he was a producer of the Grateful Dead’s 50th-anniversary “Fare Thee Well” concerts. The five shows grossed more than $50 million, becoming, according to Billboard, “one of the most successful events in live-music history.” We met at the Capitol Theater bar, which is called Garcia’s and serves as a sort of secular reliquary devoted to the Dead’s frontman, Jerry Garcia. The décor included one of Garcia’s banjos and a Chuck Close-style portrait of Garcia made entirely of Lego bricks. Shapiro, who attended a preview of the Zappa concert, said, “What I just saw felt closer to seeing Zappa than seeing a cover band do it,” adding that, based on ticket sales alone, he would definitely book another hologram show. The theater, which holds 1,800 people, was close to sold out for opening night.

“But here’s the headline,” Shapiro went on. “Look at who’s gone, just in the last couple of years: Bowie, Prince, Petty. Now look who’s still going but who’s not going to be here in 10 years, probably, at least not touring: the Stones, the Who, the Eagles, Aerosmith, Billy Joel, Elton John, McCartney, Springsteen. That is the base not just of classic rock but of the live-music touring business. Yes, there’s Taylor Swift, there’s Ariana Grande. But the base is these guys.”

Shapiro’s calculation might be morbid, but he isn’t wrong. According to the trade publication Pollstar, roughly half of the 20 top-grossing North American touring acts of 2019 were led by artists who were at least 60 years old, among them Cher, Kiss, Fleetwood Mac, Paul McCartney, Dead & Company and Billy Joel; the Rolling Stones, Elton John and Bob Seger took the top three slots. Using technology to blur the line between the quick and the dead tends to be a recipe for dystopian science fiction, but in this case, it could also mean a lucrative new income stream for a music industry in flux, at a time when beloved entertainers can no longer count on CD or download revenues to support their loved ones after they’ve died. “If you’re an estate in the age of streaming and algorithms, you’re thinking: Where is our revenue coming from?” Brian Baumley, who handles publicity for Eyellusion, told me. Some of those estates, Baumley bets, will arrive at a reasonable conclusion about the dead artists whose legacies they hope to extend: “We have to put them back on the road.”

Tupac Shakur became one of the earliest test subjects for the new technology 15 years after his murder, when his hologram made a surprise appearance at the 2012 Coachella festival. To actually project a person-size holographic image into three-dimensional space, à la Princess Leia in “Star Wars,” would require powerful, prohibitively expensive lasers that would also burn human flesh. The Tupac hologram was created with a combination of C.G.I., a body double and a 19th-century theatrical trick known as Pepper’s Ghost, some variation of which has been used for almost all the hologram musical performances of recent years.

As the magician and magic historian Jim Steinmeyer recounts in his book “Hiding the Elephant,” John Henry Pepper, the director of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London, popularized the technology with a dramatization of a scene from the Charles Dickens novella “The Haunted Man” on Christmas Eve 1862. To call up his ghosts, Pepper projected a bright light onto an actor in a hidden, cutout space beneath the stage, something like an orchestra pit, casting a reflection onto an angled pane of glass. The glass stood upright on the stage but remained invisible to the audience. The spectral image appeared slightly behind the glass, “moving in the same space with the actors and the scenery,” Steinmeyer writes. “If all the players were perfectly synchronized, the ghost could interact with the characters onstage, avoiding sword thrusts or walking through walls.” Pepper intended the original display, which took place at the Polytechnic Institution, as a scientific lecture, but the audience’s riotous response persuaded him to go the magician’s route, and soon he began touring the illusion in British and American theaters.

Base’s Whitney Houston begins performances this year.Base Holograms

The Tupac hologram performed only two songs, shouting, “What the [expletive] is up, Coachella?” and rapping “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” alongside Snoop Dogg. But his digital resurrection worked as a proof of concept. A handful of one-off stunts involving other dead musicians followed: A Michael Jackson hologram performed at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards, and the Mexican pop superstar Juan Gabriel made a holographic appearance at his own memorial concert after his sudden death in 2016. Still-breathing musicians also made use of the technology, including the rapper Chief Keef, who in 2015, as a means of avoiding outstanding legal warrants, beamed a hologram performance from California to a music festival in Hammond, Ind. But the outstanding question remained: Would audiences turn out for an entire hologram concert?

Marty Tudor, chief executive of Base Hologram Productions, is an entertainment-industry veteran whose multifarious career has included, among other things, managing Paula Abdul and Jon Cryer, producing a series of exercise videos with a trainer from “The Biggest Loser” and running an independent record label. When he saw footage of the Tupac hologram at Coachella, Tudor had a hunch that there might be potential for the new technology beyond gimmicky festival cameos.

Tudor took the idea to Brian Becker, the former chief executive of Clear Channel Entertainment, which was the largest events promoter and venue operator in the country during Becker’s tenure. For Becker, live entertainment was a family business. In 1966, his father, Allen Becker, a life-insurance salesman from Houston, helped found a regional events-promotion company called Pace Entertainment that eventually became a major national promoter. When Brian joined the company after college, he helped to start Pace’s theatrical division, which soon came to dominate, and largely invent, a regional touring market for effects-laden Broadway spectacles like “Cats,” “Miss Saigon,” “Les Misérables” and “The Phantom of the Opera.” The technical innovations of those shows, Becker told me, “evened the score,” signaling to regional audiences that they would be seeing a production with all the same bells, whistles and helicopters as a show in New York or London. “We’re always cognizant of seams in our industry that might allow us to do things differently,” Becker said. After hearing out Tudor’s hologram pitch, Becker wondered if the technology might represent such a seam.

In the wake of the Tupac performance, a somewhat motley assortment of newly minted hologram companies were asking themselves the same question, and soon a scramble to lock down exclusive deals with music estates ensued. Digital Domain, the visual-effects house that created Tupac, wound up declaring bankruptcy not long after the Coachella performance, but one of its owners, a Florida investor named John Textor, quickly started a new company, Pulse Evolution, which produced the Jackson hologram and soon after announced that it had also cut hologram deals with the estates of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, as well as for the band Abba, which broke up in 1982. An eccentric British-Greek billionaire named Alki David, meanwhile, started a rival hologram company, Hologram USA. An heir to a Coca-Cola bottling fortune, David, along with his partners, announced that he would be producing holographic images of Patsy Cline, Billie Holiday and Jackie Wilson, among others. (In September, David and Hologram USA were charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with “making false and misleading statements to investors and potential investors.” David has said he intends to countersue.)

Base Hologram, which was founded by Tudor and Becker, started out by securing rights to produce holograms of Maria Callas and Roy Orbison, debuting each show in 2018 with performances in Europe and America. Orbison’s estate, which is controlled by his three sons (via a company called Roy’s Boys), approached Base after a deal with another hologram producer fell through, Tudor told me. “Roy was a fairly static live performer — most of the movement you have onstage is him strumming his guitar — so he was the perfect first performer for our purposes,” Tudor said. (A 58-date Orbison-Buddy Holly hologram tour began in San Francisco in September.) The Callas hologram was necessarily more emotive. At a brief demonstration I attended at Sotheby’s in New York, the hologram wore a white gown and a long red shawl. After performing “Melons! Coupons!” from Act III of “Carmen,” a scene involving fortune telling, the hologram tossed a deck of cards in the air, which briefly froze alongside the music before drifting to the ground. “Though a melodramatic touch, it worked,” Anthony Tommasini wrote in his New York Times review of the Lincoln Center performance, in which he described the show as “amazing, yet also absurd; strangely captivating, yet also campy and ridiculous.” In February, Base will unveil the dead-celebrity-hologram sector’s biggest marquee name thus far, at least for a full concert: Whitney Houston, whose tragic, relatively recent death has made the planned tour the most controversial of any on the books. (Shortly after the announcement, Questlove tweeted: “& hell begins.”)

Deborah Speer, a features editor at Pollstar, which covers the live-entertainment industry, told me that based on the numbers she has seen for the Orbison and Zappa tours, “obviously, there’s a market” for hologram shows. According to the trade publication, the solo Orbison tour grossed nearly $1.7 million over 16 shows, selling 71 percent of the seats available, while Zappa sold an average of 973 seats per show, nearly selling out venues in Amsterdam and London. Whether such tours can cross over from clubs, theaters and performing-arts centers into arenas remains to be seen and will depend largely on the success of bigger-name stars like Houston.

Early one morning in May, I visited a soundstage in the Griffith Park neighborhood of Los Angeles to observe a motion-capture shoot for the Whitney Houston hologram. The soundstage was a cavernous, warehouselike space, moodily lit, aggressively air-conditioned. Several of the Angelenos on hand complained about the cold, including Tudor, who sat in a nearby director’s chair wearing a puffy vest over a striped dress shirt and jeans. Fatima Robinson, the director of the production, wore a head scarf and a winter jacket and cupped a rechargeable electronic hand-warming device between her palms. Robinson is a choreographer whose credits include Kendrick Lamar’s 2016 Grammys performance, the Weeknd’s 2016 Oscars performance, the film version of “Dreamgirls,” NBC’s live broadcast of “The Wiz” and music videos for Michael Jackson, Mary J. Blige and Aaliyah. Robinson also choreographed Houston herself — the living Houston — in 1993, for the “I’m Every Woman” video. “She was pregnant at the time and in a wonderful place,” Robinson told me.

Veterans of pedigreed Hollywood postproduction houses create the C.G.I. holograms in the same way they would make characters like Gollum or Thanos: Motion-capture photography records the performance of a body double, which becomes the basis for a three-dimensional digital model, a block of clay animators proceed to modify — in the case of celebrity holograms, most drastically by augmenting the body double’s features with a digitally sculpted likeness of the artist, which can lip-synch to an existing vocal track.

The Houston body double took the stage and began to run through the moves for the first song of the day: “Step by Step,” a jaunty, affirmational gospel-dance track from the 1996 soundtrack to “The Preacher’s Wife.” The double had freckles and wore her hair in dyed cornrows but possessed Houston’s approximate build. She wore black tights, a black T-shirt and a baggy white cardigan (costumes created by Houston’s former stylist would be worn in a subsequent shoot) and stood atop a sort of oversize lazy susan, which crouching tech guys, who referred to the device as a turntable, slowly spun as she lip-synched to the song.

Robinson sipped tea and watched the pantomime intently. After the first run-through, she said, “We need to go a little slower.” The body double had been chosen from a pool of 900 applicants, and she was clearly a talented performer in her own right. (Base requested that The Times not reveal her identity.) “Step by Step” remains an underappreciated Houston song, cloying but oddly irresistible, and as I watched it mock-sung over and over, I felt freshly reminded of Houston’s skill at putting over mediocre material, not just in the obvious way — that is, through the power of her voice — but with her presence, that way she had of conveying joy, supreme confidence and the ecstasy of the choir all at once, and at the same time letting us know, even back then, that she wasn’t as sweet as her songs’ lyrics might suggest. This complexity came through in the body double’s performance, in the way she worked her shoulders or flashed a hard look at the nonexistent audience. Houston wasn’t much of a dancer, but “she had a serious strut,” noted Robinson, who had studied her performances like game tapes.

Lit for the filming, the double cast a horror-movie shadow on the soundproofed wall of the otherwise darkened soundstage. There was something eerie about the way Houston’s voice and the mid-’90s dance beat echoed through the vast space — music being played at club volume to a nearly empty room, with no one dancing, not even the avatar pretending to sing. But despite the workaday setting and the unconcealed artifice, by the third or fourth time I heard the song, I couldn’t help feeling … something. Would I describe myself as moved? I’m not sure. But I also found myself wondering if, despite how fundamentally wrong the entire concept for this show felt, there might be some crazy way it could actually work. The future hologram moved her mouth around Houston’s voice:

Well there’s a bridge
And there’s a river
That I still must cross
As I’m going on my journey
Oh, I might be lost

In the final show, Tudor whispered to me, the turntable could be digitally removed or made to look like something else. The creative team hadn’t settled on anything yet. But if they wanted to, they could make Houston look as if she were floating on air, spinning, ascendant.

I met Ronnie James Dio once, when he was alive. Tenacious D, the parody band that gave Jack Black his start, had recorded a gently mocking tribute song called “Dio,” in which Black demands Dio’s cape and scepter and informs him that he’s too old to rock (“no more rockin’ for you!”). Dio had been a good sport about the whole thing and agreed to make a cameo in the Tenacious D movie, which premiered in 2006 at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. I remember standing around the after-party, nursing a drink and feeling awkward, when I spotted Dio, chatting in a corner of the ballroom with his wife. I decided to introduce myself. He was quite short, even for a celebrity, and exceedingly gracious. He told me Black had personally called to pitch the film, insisting that they wouldn’t make the movie unless he agreed to “play the part of Ronnie James Dio.” Smiling, Dio continued, “Then he said: ‘Well, we will make the movie. But it’ll be [expletive].’ ”

Across town in Marina del Rey 13 years later, I sat in the office of Eyellusion’s creative director, Chad Finnerty, as he digitally manipulated a photorealistic 3-D image of Dio’s face. Finnerty grew up in Pennsylvania with dreams of becoming a Disney animator — old-fashioned cell animation, like what they did on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” — but by the time he graduated from college, the world had gone digital. He spent years working as a C.G.I. animator at Digital Domain, on movies like “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.” When Jeff Pezzuti, a Westchester-based vice president of finance at a cloud-computing consulting firm, decided to start his own hologram company, Eyellusion, he reached out to Finnerty, asking if he wanted to talk. Pezzuti loved heavy metal — he wore a Dio T-shirt for his seventh-grade class picture — and after seeing the Tupac hologram, he wondered, “Can we do something like that in the rock world?” Eyellusion has since received a $2 million investment from Thomas Dolan, whose family owns controlling interests in Madison Square Garden and AMC Networks and whose father founded the New York-area cable-television giant Cablevision.

Finnerty supervised the creation of the Zappa and Dio holograms for Eyellusion. “I’m a bit rusty with this program,” he apologized, pecking at his desktop keyboard. Soon a hideously lifelike digital rendering of Dio’s face appeared on a large-screen monitor hanging on the wall. For a moment, it bobbed in front of a black backdrop, which made me think of the old “Charlie Rose” set. I briefly thought about pitching a “Black Mirror” episode in which a Charlie Rose-type character interviews the cryogenically preserved heads of rock stars. “We collected all of our data in 2017,” Finnerty explained. That’s when they filmed the body double and did the facial capture, is what he meant. During the facial capture, hundreds of eye, mouth and facial-muscle movements of a living subject (not necessarily the body double) are recorded. Imagine a puppeteer, Finnerty said, only with thousands of puppet strings to manipulate.

He clicked his mouse, manipulating a digital lever on the screen, and “Dio’s” eye suddenly, eerily shifted to the left. You couldn’t do this two years ago, Finnerty went on, moving another lever. “Dio’s” eyes shifted right, up, down. Finnerty said he had done lots of work on “The Walking Dead,” but that was forgiving, because it’s zombies. Having a person look real while performing a song for six minutes, with no cutting away or other editing assists that would be available in a film or television show, that was something else entirely.

“Dio” winked, puckered his lips, raised an eyebrow.

I stared at the image’s mottled skin, textured and painted with a level of detail down to the pore. “Hair simulation is the most difficult part of the entire process,” Finnerty said, adding, “My hair guy is also my fire, water and ice guy.” His lighting team had done the skin. Had Dio submitted himself to a full-body scan while alive, the process would have been much easier. Finnerty thought it would be great if more living musicians and actors were proactive about being scanned. Any actor who has starred in a movie involving significant amounts of C.G.I. has already been scanned, he pointed out.

The more bullish hologram boosters envision all sorts of uses beyond the second coming of music deities major and minor. Finnerty just made a hologram for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library of the former president. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has campaigned holographically, and a circus in Germany uses holographic projections of elephants and horses instead of live animals. Base, meanwhile, has cut a deal with Jack Horner, the paleontologist who served as a scientific adviser for “Jurassic Park,” to create dinosaur holograms that will travel to natural-history museums. Imagine, Becker said, a dialogue between holograms of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Or a Julia Child hologram teaching a cooking class. Or a Derek Jeter hologram teaching you how to bat.

As for concerts, in the not very distant future, Finnerty predicted, the technology would evolve to the point at which a puppeteer sitting in the wings with a laptop could work the digital strings live — allowing the hologram to react to the crowd or to members of a live band. Imagining this future as he watched “Dio” on his screen, Finnerty referred to him as the “asset,” as in: “This asset is ready for any other adventure we want to put him on. We could beam him into a bar. A coffee house. Not that Dio would play a coffee house.”

Whenever I wondered aloud whether fans might find the shows unsettling or disrespectful, the hologram-industry representative I happened to be speaking to would grow defensive. It’s stagecraft, part of a larger production, the person would tell me. We respect these artists, and we take what we’re doing very seriously. And as these representatives point out, people see tribute acts all the time. An Australian Pink Floyd, Tudor said, just played in Los Angeles! Pollstar’s Speer told me that well over 175 tribute bands reported numbers to the magazine; one of the better performers, “Rain — a Tribute to the Beatles,” often turns up in the top half of the Concert Pulse chart, averaging 1,833 tickets and $95,955 per show over the past three years.

For what it’s worth, the crowd at the Zappa concert seemed utterly charmed — cheering when the hologram Zappa materialized in the center of the stage during the opening number, “Cosmik Debris.” I was sitting about eight rows from the front. It looked like Zappa up there, more or less, though his form radiated the paranormal brightness that holograms can’t help emitting. Eventually, “Frank” addressed the audience: “Good evening. You won’t believe it, but I’m as happy to see you guys as you are to see the show. I’m your resident buffoon, and my name is Frank.” The artificiality of the canned banter had a “Weekend at Bernie’s” aspect to it, making me hyperaware of the sunglasses covering the lifeless eyes of the corpse propped up between living people (in this case, a hot backing band composed predominantly of musicians who had toured with Zappa over the years).

In certain respects, Zappa’s psychedelic jams and goofy, satirical lyrics lent themselves perfectly to the experiment, allowing the creative team to deploy the Zappa hologram judiciously (“like the shark from ‘Jaws,’ ” someone backstage told me) in and around trippy visuals that reminded me of old screen-saver graphics: animated dental floss, a penguin being punished by a dominatrix, Zappa as a leisure-suit-wearing Ken doll.

As I watched the show, my mind drifted, and I began to imagine more dubious ways corporate entities might exploit their particular assets. With artificial intelligence and voice cloning, there would be no reason to limit the shows to recordings made when the artist was still alive. An Aretha Franklin hologram could shush a noisy audience member, banter with her drummer and cover “Shallow.” Chris Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson could form a supergroup with holograms of Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings. Kurt Cobain, sporting the same faded green cardigan he wore on “MTV Unplugged,” might turn up at a surprise appearance with Billie Eilish at the Grammys. A one-off Beatles reunion in Hyde Park, live Paul and Ringo, hologram John and George. Hologram Biggie takes the Thomas Jefferson role in “Hamilton.” Bob Marley interrupts his performance of “Exodus” to plug the new season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

On the stage of the Capitol Theater, a grotesque claymation version of Zappa had materialized, and the guy sitting next to me began air-drumming alongside the live percussionists. Before the concert, Ahmet Zappa had pointed me to a passage in his father’s 1989 autobiography in which he seemed to predict the technology that would allow him to return to Port Chester 26 years after his death: a digressive riff about his “idea for a new device, potentially worth several billion dollars,” one that would “generate free-standing 3-d images, in any size (on your coffee table at home, or on a larger scale for theatrical use).” So maybe Zappa would have appreciated his 2019 tour. And maybe holograms will make the leap from ridiculous-seeming technology to ubiquity, like podcasts or e-cigarettes.

Ahmet was 15 when his father received a diagnosis of prostate cancer and was given three months to live. One way to think about the show, he told me, is as “a very childlike way of dealing with loss.” For a couple of hours every night, Frank is up there onstage again, playing with his guys, and Ahmet can almost convince himself that he has his father back. You’d think there would be a market for something like that.

Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote a Letter of Recommendation column about badly dubbed movies.

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In Appalachia, Crafting a Road to Recovery With Dulcimer Strings

By Patricia Leigh Brown

Published Jan. 3, 2020

Mike Belleme for The New York Times

In Kentucky, where music is the lifeblood, an apprentice program run by luthiers provides meaningful jobs and helps remove the stigma of opioid addiction. 

Mike Belleme for The New York Times

HINDMAN, KY. — The heritage of handcrafted stringed instruments runs deep in this tiny Appalachian village (pop. 770) stretched along the banks of Troublesome Creek. The community has been known as the homeplace of the mountain dulcimer ever since a revered maker, James Edward (“Uncle Ed”) Thomas, pushed a cartload of angelic-sounding dulcimers up and down the creek roads, keeping a chair handy to play tunes for passers-by.

Music is the region’s lifeblood: Locals like to say that “you can toss a rock and hit a musician.” But these strong cultural roots have been tested by the scourges that devastated Eastern Kentucky, an early epicenter of the opioid crisis. Hindman is the seat of Knott County, one of the poorest regions in the United States and one that continues to grapple with overdose death rates that are twice the national average. It is also in the top 5 percent of counties most vulnerable to the rapid spread of H.I.V. and hepatitis C, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The decline of the coal industry has brought even more economic hardship to these isolated hills and hollows — providing fertile ground for Appalachia’s signature epidemic.

But last year, an unlikely group of renegades — suspender-wearing luthiers from the Appalachian Artisan Center here — embarked on a novel approach to the hopelessness of addiction called Culture of Recovery, an apprentice program for young adults rebounding from the insidious treadmill of opioids and other substances. Participants, about 150 so far, learn traditional arts like luthiery — the making and repairing of stringed instruments — under the tutelage of skilled artisans. They come to the program through a partnership between the Artisan Center; a local residential rehab center for men, and the Knott County Drug Court, which is just down the block from the Appalachian School of Luthiery.

“We’re dusty old woodworkers, not trained therapists,” said Doug Naselroad, the master luthier who with a former colleague dreamed up the program. “But so many times now, giving somebody something to do has proved to be a powerful step in their recovery.”

Doug Naselroad, a master artisan, plays a mountain dulcimer in his Hindman apartment that he made as an exact reproduction of one created in 1928 by James Edward “Uncle Ed” Thomas. Mr. Naselroad is a founder of Culture of Recovery, which teaches traditional instrument making to adults rebounding from addiction.Mike Belleme for The New York Times

The factors that have led to the crisis here have followed a circuitous route, like the hairpin turns on mountain roads. They include a sky-high poverty rate, a legacy of accident-prone industries, high incidences of childhood trauma, low educational attainment and a fatalism springing from a lack of opportunity and geographic isolation. These treacherous social determinants laid out a welcome mat for Big Pharma.

“That Oxy is vicious,” said Randy Campbell, the Artisan Center’s executive director, referring to Oxycodone. He drove up a steep road to the family cemetery where his 64-year old brother, James Turner Campbell, was laid to rest from addictions to that drug and alcohol. “It grabs the educated as well as the noneducated.”

The art of crafting an instrument by hand requires keen focus, attention to detail and commitment to a goal — qualities that can help during recovery, in concert with therapy, peer-support groups and other rehabilitation work, experts say. The process is not linear: most people relapse at least once, said Kim Cornett Childers, a Circuit Court judge in Knott County who presides over the drug court.

Some opt for other activities like yoga, adult education or prayer groups. The power of Culture of Recovery, Judge Childers said, is the reconnection with the region’s resilient artistic heritage. “Many clients have never had anyone tell them they’re proud of them, or done something they’re proud of,” she said. “Now they’re creating something tangible and beautiful.”

The program was started with a $475,000 grant from ArtPlace America, a consortium of foundations, federal agencies and others who fund arts projects dedicated to community development. The results, albeit from a small sample, have been promising: About 94 percent have successfully graduated from the drug court, up from 86 percent before Culture of Recovery started. Most initially came to the court with indictments for drug possession, trafficking or burglary. The recidivism rate, which was already low, has dropped by more than half, with fewer people incurring new criminal charges, she said.

Transforming Wood Becomes a Passion 

One of the graduates is Nathan Smith, 39. Now a tenacious and promising luthier, Mr. Smith was swept up in a typical pattern in which the physical demands of his job shoveling coal and operating machinery led him beyond his doctor’s initial prescription for pain pills. He began buying them off the street — “It helped me work and not hurt as much,” he explained — and then started reselling the pills to support his habit. The result was a drug trafficking charge, a brief stint in jail and then entry into the Court’s intensive, supervised outpatient treatment program, which lasts 18 months and often more.

Mr. Smith gravitated to luthiery, making his first dulcimer, played on the lap, and apprenticing at the school for nearly a year. “I fell in love with it real quick,” he said. “It is something I had a passion for that I didn’t even realize.”

He has been off drugs for two years and four months and is employed full-time with the Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Company, a new nonprofit founded by Mr. Naselroad in partnership with the Artisan Center. Two of the company’s six full-time employees are former Culture of Recovery apprentices. All are in feverish deadline mode, honing the high-end artisanal guitars and mandolins made from Appalachian hardwoods that they will be taking to the National Association of Music Merchants trade show in Anaheim, Calif., on Jan. 16. 

Troublesome Creek hopes to garner enough orders to expand its operation and hire more committed Culture of Recovery apprentices. It offers a potential career path and the kind of meaningful work that pays a living wage without a college education. This effort is a rare economic beacon for the county and received an $865,000 boost from the congressionally funded Appalachian Regional Commission, which assists communities in 13 states affected by job losses from coal mining and related businesses. 

With his scraggly beard and pencils tucked into his cap, Mr. Smith showed off his training guitar recently: a black walnut and spruce beauty with a cursive “Smith” inlaid in abalone on the neck. The act of transforming a piece of wood into music still fills him with awe. “It’s an amazing feeling to hold a guitar and know I made it myself,” he said.

The sprawling factory in a former high school is imbued with the aromas of Red spruce and other woods, and the shoptalk is about screws and laminated steel chisels. Designing a fine stringed instrument requires years of experience, which is why most musicians don’t attempt it. The density of Appalachian hardwoods compares favorably with imported tropical rosewoods, Mr. Naselroad said. Though Osage orange and Black locust have traditionally been used for fence posts, they have what luthiers call a great “tap tone.” “The wood talks to us a little bit,” he explained. “It has to ring like silver.”

Creating Something ‘Tangible and Beautiful’

The name “troublesome” comes from the creek’s propensity for flash-flooding. It is one of many memorable place names — Mousie, Rowdy, Dismal Hollow — found among the jagged cliffs around Hindman. The city, built mostly from native stone, is “strung out along the creek like pearls on a necklace,” observed Ronald Pen, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky.

The main bridge is named for Jethro Amburgey (1895-1971), a dulcimer maker who taught generations of students at the historic Hindman Settlement School, which emphasizes Appalachian traditions, especially literature.

In true mountain style, Mr. Amburgey was related to “Uncle Ed” Thomas (1850-1933), credited with pioneering the Appalachian, or mountain, dulcimer with its heart-shaped sound holes and an hourglass form one maker described as “shaped like a lady with a quiet and lonely sound.” 

Thomas was also a distant cousin of Jean Ritchie (1922-2015) in nearby Viper. During the folk revival from 1940s to mid-60s, she did more than anyone to popularize the dulcimer in Greenwich Village and beyond. “Hey, what do you call that contraption?” Woody Guthrie asked her at the 1948 “Spring Fever Hootenanny” in New York, according to her book “The Dulcimer People.” “Why, you can get more music out of them three strings than I can get out of twelve!” Ritchie set the stage for the dulcimer’s broader embrace by musicians including the Rolling Stones (in “Lady Jane”) and Joni Mitchell’s irresistible album “Blue.”

Homer Ledford (1927-2006) was a gifted instrument maker and bluegrass musician who fashioned his first fiddle out of a dynamite box covered with matchsticks, or so the story goes. He was Mr. Naselroad’s mentor.

Mr. Naselroad built his first guitar at age 16 to bestow upon a love interest. “It wasn’t a very good one,” he recalled. “I don’t know what became of the guitar or the girl.” He honed his craft at Collings, the custom guitar company in Austin, Tx. “Because of Doug’s design and expertise these instruments will speak differently,” Prof. Pen said of Troublesome Creek, which hopes to lure Kentucky-raised stars like Chris Stapleton and Tyler Childers as supporters. 

The company joins a movement across Kentucky to provide “recovery-friendly” employment. 

“Our work force is dying,” said Beth Davisson, the executive director of the Kentucky Chamber Workforce Center, referring to government data showing drug companies saturated the state with 1.9 million pain pills — roughly 63 pills per person per year — between 2006 and 2012, which were then prescribed with wanton abandon. By 2018, statewide prescription drug monitoring programs were starting to have an effect, with overdose deaths beginning to decline slightly. But the abuse of prescription drugs, along with heroin and fentanyl, remains a critical public health issue.

‘A Talent You Never Knew You Had’

The idea for Culture of Recovery was inspired by Earl Moore, now 43, whose addiction began with buying OxyContin on the street, ultimately leading to several relapses, two suicide attempts and jail time for the illegal use of a credit card. His father left the family when Mr. Moore was young. “I took that personally,” he said. “I found I could do substances and erase all that.”

But Mr. Moore had an affinity for woodworking inherited from his forebears. He found out the Appalachian School of Luthiery had opened in town and approached Mr. Naselroad. “Earl said, ‘I know you have a felony background check, and I’m not going to pass it,’” Mr. Naselroad recalled. “But he told me he thought it would save his life.” One goal of Culture of Recovery is to reduce the stigma around addiction.

Mr. Moore apprenticed with Mr. Naselroad for six years, building some 70 instruments and forming a lasting bond. He went on to earn a master’s degree in cybersecurity, his full time career. “Addicts are the best hustlers,” he said. “I’ve spun it to the good.”

Kim Patton, 36, now the pottery instructor, went through the drug court after being indicted three times for trafficking. She was molested by a family member at age 14. “I never felt good about myself,” she said. “Anything you asked the doctors for, they would give.”

Now she turns recovering addicts toward pottery-making and sells her own work on Facebook and Instagram. Culture of Recovery led her to discover “a talent you never knew you had till you got clean and sober,” she said. Her T-shirt reads: “From Drug Addiction to Pottery Addiction.” “Without art, God knows where I’d be at,” she said.

Though hardly a cure-all, artistic activities “can be powerful antidotes to distress, emotional violence and drug abuse,” said Dr. Harvey Milkman, a professor emeritus of psychology at Metropolitan State University in Denver. They can help promote the brain’s natural ability to induce pleasure, which is “better than dope,” he said.

Idle time is detrimental to people in recovery. Mike Nix, the program director at the Hickory Hill Recovery Center in Hindman, and a former addict, said that once the men “shake off the streets” with detox, they may be ready to learn a skill. About 85 residents have participated in Culture of Recovery one day a week since the program began, and it has been a positive complement to peer-led recovery, Mr. Nix said. 

“Let’s be honest — these guys didn’t get here on a winning streak,” he said. “They come in pretty raw. It may seem small, but when they think, ‘I’m going to build a guitar,’ they take raw material from nothing and reach a goal — some for the first time in their lives.”

Culture of Recovery is at the forefront of nascent efforts by museums and other cultural institutions to address the addiction crisis. Doris Thurber, an artist in Frankfort, Ky., started a program for women now called “Yes Arts” four years ago after the overdose death of her 27 year-old daughter, Maya Rose. In Manchester, N.H., The Currier Museum of Art has teamed up with the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids on a program for parents and siblings dealing with a loved one’s substance use. With an art educator, the families discuss a painting or sculpture with a salient theme, and the contemplative nature of the space is a balm. 

“We have a big social crisis in New Hampshire,” said Alan Chong, the museum’s director. “This is more important than a blockbuster show, to be blunt about it.”

In Hindman one evening, a harvest moon laying heavy in the clouds, Mr. Naselroad, the master artisan, donned a red cowboy shirt and a Stetson to host the “Knott Downtown Radio Hour,” a monthly show on WMMT FM — a “Hindman Home Companion” of sorts. One of the highlights is a “Songwriters Circle” of tunes written by those in recovery. 

Last month, the show was recorded at Hickory Hill, which was built on an old strip mine site. Amid living room beams inscribed with words like “self-discipline and “perseverance,” “the Hickory Hill boys,” as Mr. Naselroad calls them on air, sang about regret, loss, longing and especially faith. One poignant anthem to the Lord was called “Calm a Storm in Me.”

Nevertheless, the storm of addiction is powerful. Dan Estep, who teaches blacksmithing for the program, lost a student to a fatal overdose recently. The man was in his mid-30s and the father of three. “This particular guy grew up with his whole family on drugs,” Mr. Estep said. “It must be like quicksand.” 

Mr. Estep, 62, who has been a blacksmith for 40 years, said that teaching his craft to people in recovery is the most important work he has ever done. “We can give it all we’ve got, but in the end it’s up to the individual,” he observed. “Humanity is the biggest project of all.”

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Get Those Records, Tapes and CDs Onto Your Smartphone

By J. D. Biersdorfer

Dec. 25, 2019

Ready to convert your older analog audio to more portable digital formats? Here’s how to make it happen.

With a bit of time, software and gear, you can convert your old audiotapes, CDs and vinyl records into digital files for personal use with your smartphone, media server or online archive.J.D. Biersdorfer

A huge amount of the world’s audio has been digitized, but many veterans of the Analog Age still have out-of-print albums, lectures and other content locked on vinyl records, cassettes and CDs. Converting the audio to digital formats for personal use is much simpler than it used to be, though, thanks in part to gadgets that connect to a computer’s USB port.

In addition to making files that play on your smartphone or media server, digitizing your analog audio creates an electronic archive you can store online for safekeeping. The steps for converting your old recordings vary on the formats and equipment you have, but here’s a general outline of the process and the equipment you may need. 

Get Audio-Editing Software

No matter what type of analog media you’re converting, you need software to digitize it. Capturing the audio to a computer has been a common approach for decades, and free programs to do the job include Apple’s GarageBand for Mac and the open-source Audacity (for Windows, Mac and Linux), which has its own guide for converting records and tapes. Commercial software is also available, like Roxio’s $50 Easy LP to MP3 or the $40 Golden Records from NCH Software.

Audacity is a free audio-editing program that can digitize records and cassette tapes.

Choose a digital format for recording. Uncompressed or lossless formats like WAV, FLAC and AIFF preserve more of the original audio for higher-quality sound, but compressed formats like MP3 create smaller files.

Follow the software’s instructions for importing audio. After you capture the whole album, you can use the program to slice up the recording into individual tracks, label the songs, and clean up hiss, pops and other noise.

Digitize Vinyl

If your stereo equipment is long gone but you held on to your old records for sentimental reasons, using a compact USB-based “conversion” turntable that connects directly to the computer is one approach. You may not have ultimate control over the recording quality, but it’s usually the easiest process to convert the vinyl yourself. 

For the less technically inclined, ION Audio makes several conversion turntables, including the $110 Premier LP, which connects to the computer with a USB cable and includes its own conversion software. Audio Technica, Crosleyand Sony also make USB turntables.

If you still have a turntable with a headphone jack or a port labeled “line” (or a stereo receiver with a “phono” input for the record player), a device called a USB phono preamplifier links your hardware together with audio and USB cables to pump the sound into the computer for recording. ART Pro Audio USB Phono Plus ($100) and Reloop iPhono 2 USB Recording Interface (about $100 in the United States) are two options.

For USB-based recording using older turntable systems without the headphone jack or line output, you’ll most likely need to include a separate phono preamplifier box to boost the audio signal as well. The $50 Rolls VP29 and the $66 ART Pro Audio DJPRE II are two models to consider. 

Digitize Audiotape

No tape deck? Tape players with USB connections for the computer or flash drives can be found online starting at around $20. These devices can be quite efficient for digitizing old lectures, family history and other recordings.

If you still have a tape deck, check its jacks. A cable with a 3.5-millimeter plug on both ends or an RCA-to-3.5mm cable are common for connecting to a computer’s line-in port (if it has one), or you may be able to use a USB interface box like those used for digitizing vinyl.

Convert CDs

Still have CDs you want to transfer but no CD player or computer disc drive? External USB-based CD players sell for as little as $20 online. Once you connect one, spin up those discs and import the tracks with Apple’s Music app for Mac, Microsoft’s Windows Media Player or another free CD-ripper app.

Outsource the Job 

The do-it-yourself approach is not for everyone, but audio conversion services will happily digitize your old analog media for you — for a price. This can range from $15 to $35 for each record or tape converted, but some companies include restoration and sound-cleanup services as well. Memories Renewed, Ever Present and DiJiFi area among the many conversion companies to check out.

Keep Looking

While not a surefire solution for a fully digitized library, some unreleased and obscure recordings turn up online eventually, as did tracks from Jeff Buckleyand Prince this year. 

The Internet Archive can also be a treasure trove for old 78 r.p.m. recordings from the early 20th century, as well as early hip-hop mixtapes, live concerts and other bits of audio history. But no matter if you’re converting your analog audio yourself or scouring the internet, patience has its rewards.

Celebrate curiosity. Gift subscriptions starting at $25.

Celebrate curiosity. Gift subscriptions starting at $25.

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It’s Got a Great Beat, and You Can File a Lawsuit to It

By Jon Caramanica

Updated 1:06 p.m. ET

Pop music isn’t made in a vacuum. Copying isn’t always bad. And a new trend pulling more pop stars into courtrooms is a dangerous one. 

Clockwise from top left: Katy Perry, Sam Smith, Ariana Grande, Robin Thicke, Lizzo and Ed Sheeran, pop stars who have been accused of borrowing in their music.Clockwise from top left: Getty Images; Associated Press; EPA, via Shutterstock

The past year was an exceptionally active, unusually silly and indubitably worrying one for pop music lawsuits. 

In August, after determining that Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse,” a very generic trap song, had borrowed from “Joyful Noise,” another very generic trap song by the Christian rapper Flame, a jury awarded Flame and his co-plaintiffs $2.8 million in damages. (Perry is appealing the verdict.) In October, the inactive third-rate emo band Yellowcard sued Juice WRLD for $15 million over perceived similarities between one of his big hits, “Lucid Dreams,” and one of their non-hits, “Holly Wood Died.” After the rapper’s death in December, the band announced it was still moving forward with the litigation.

In both cases, the alleged musical connection is flimsy at best. But these are the sort of claims that have found oxygen in the wake of the “Blurred Lines” ruling in 2015. In that case, a jury awarded the estate of Marvin Gaye $7.3 million (later lowered to $5.3 million) after it determined that Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams and T.I.’s song had a little too much in common with Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” It was preposterous, and chilling as well. Not only could you be held liable for theft, intentional or otherwise, but you now could be held liable for being influenced, too.

That is, to put it plainly, bad news for pop stars, and the producers and songwriters who help them craft hits. They are now marks for frivolous litigation premised upon nebulous assertions as well as a complete and willful ignorance of how pop music is actually made.

Occasionally, pop innovates in a hard stylistic jolt, or an outlier comes to rapid prominence (see: Lil Nas X), but more often, it moves as a kind of unconscious collective. An evolutionary step is rarely the product of one person working in isolation; it is one brick added atop hundreds of others.

Originality is a con: Pop music history is the history of near overlap. Ideas rarely emerge in complete isolation. In studios around the world, performers, producers and songwriters are all trying to innovate just one step beyond where music currently is, working from the same component parts. It shouldn’t be a surprise when some of what they come up with sounds similar — and also like what came before.

The idea that this might be actionable is the new twist. Every song benefits from what preceded it, whether it’s a melodic idea, a lyrical motif, a sung rhythm, a drum texture. A forensic analysis of any song would find all sorts of pre-existing DNA.

A copyright troll exploits that, turning inevitable influence into ungenerous and often highly frivolous litigation. And given how lucrative the “Blurred Lines” judgment proved to be, it has become a de facto blueprint for how claims about originality will be litigated moving forward: If there is a whiff of potential borrowing on a song (and there almost always is), the borrowed might come knocking.

This forecloses on the possibility that there is some value in copying, or duplicative ideas. It also suggests that all copying is alike — the brutally unethical kind, and also the Leibniz-Newton kind. It fails to make a distinction between theft and echo, or worse, presumes that all echo is theft. It ignores that the long continuum of pop revisits sonic approaches, melodies, beats and chord progressions time and again. It demands that each song be wholly distinct from everything that preceded it, an absurd and ultimately unenforceable dictate.

What’s left in its wake is a climate of fear. In some recent cases, you can sense pre-emptive gamesmanship, as when Taylor Swift gave a writing credit to Right Said Fred for a cadence on “Look What You Made Me Do” that recalled “I’m Too Sexy.” Or the rapid settlement Sam Smith reached with Tom Petty for perceived similarities between “Stay With Me” and “I Won’t Back Down.” Whether there was a direct borrowing didn’t seem to matter; the potential for the perception of theft was enough to instigate an arrangement.

In these situations, the alleged source song was a popular one — the case could be made that even if there was no direct influence, there was an ambient one. Copyright law makes no distinction between conscious and unconscious copying, which means that even though fully unpacking claims like these might mean parsing the difference between outright and unconscious theft, or between thievery and parallel influence, those distinctions may well be, apart from the determination of damages, moot. 

Cases like that are the exception, though. Most of the allegations that have been brought in recent years stretch the bounds of credulity. 

A singer-songwriter named Steve Ronsen suggested that a passage in “Shallow,” the Lady Gaga/Bradley Cooper hit from “A Star Is Born,” is partly derived from one of his songs, “Almost,” and threatened a lawsuit. The Weeknd was sued by a trio of songwriters — Brian Clover, Scott McCulloch, and William Smith — who allege that his song “A Lonely Night” was a rip-off of an unreleased song called “I Need Love” that they’d written more than a decade earlier. Migos were sued by a rapper, M.O.S., who said that the title phrase of their song “Walk It Like I Talk It” had appeared in a song of his more than a decade prior (the case was dismissed). Miley Cyrus is being sued by a Jamaican performer, Flourgon, over a lyric in her song “We Can’t Stop.” Ed Sheeran has been the target of several lawsuits; an infringement claim for an ostensible borrowing on “Shape of You” from a singer named Sam Chokri has his royalty payments for that song on hold. But in almost all of these cases, the scope of the alleged infringement is so minor, so generic, that it suggests that a basic element of composition is up for an ownership grab.

Perhaps these claims are legitimate. There is, maybe, a slight chance of that. Theft is not unheard-of. The signature boast in Lizzo’s No. 1 hit, “Truth Hurts,” was lifted from a tweet, and went wholly uncredited until two songwriters who worked with Lizzo at a session that initially yielded that critical line publicly staked a claim for credit. Lizzo responded by announcing a lawsuit seeking to have their claims formally declared invalid and, for good measure, extended songwriting credit to the author of the tweet.

Sometimes these quibbles come down to a determination of who has the permission — literal or social — to borrow, and from whom. Perry’s “Dark Horse” was a late-career attempt to absorb trap music, a genre far from her comfort zone. In a sense, the lawsuit by Flame, by no means the only performer to have used a similar-sounding beat, was a kind of culture-borrowing tax.

Or maybe Perry could have had an outcome more like Ariana Grande, whose 2019 No. 1 “7 Rings” was the subject of several claims about its originality, particularly a cadence associated with 2 Chainz or Soulja Boy. In this case, Grande had already ceded 90 percent of her royalties to the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization (the song interpolates “My Favorite Things” from “The Sound of Music”). But after a meeting with 2 Chainz, the two agreed to collaborate on a pair of songs. Similarly, an air-clearing phone call brought a claim by Three 6 Mafia against Travis Scott to a swift and amicable resolution this year.

The echoes deployed by Grande and Scott were intentional homage. In hip-hop especially, artists frequently incorporate fragments of earlier songs as a kind of wink, or nod to a forebear. But depending who’s doing the nodding, it doesn’t always go smoothly. In 2014, Drake revisited lyrics by the Bay Area hip-hop elder Rappin’ 4-Tay, who, unimpressed, chose to publicly invoice Drake for $100,000. (As of last year, Drake had not paid.)

If echoing is always going to be treated as thievery, then songwriting credits and payments should be trickling back way past the 1970s and 1980s, all the way back to Robert Johnson and the Carter Family and Chuck Berry and the Last Poets — perpetual royalties for foundational innovations.

The idea that there is a determinable origin point where a sonic idea was born is a romantic one. But a song is much more than romance these days — it is an asset, and a perpetual one at that. Note the recent boom market in the rights to song royalties. Check out the listings on royaltyexchange.com, where you can bid on fractional ownership to the rights for thousands of songs. Or the catalog gorging happening in the music publishing sector, with firms like Kobalt and Merck Mercuriadis amassing huge catalogs. Strategies like these are the equivalent of placing bets on every square on the roulette table. A fractional claim (via songwriting or sample credit) on a pop megahit can mean millions of dollars.

This system encourages bad-faith, long-shot action. Juries filled with non-music experts are ill-suited to make decisions in cases that tend to come down to the testimony of dueling musicologists. Perhaps a better solution is needed: an arbitration panel, with buy-in from all the major record labels and song publishers, where claims can be adjudicated by a jury of peers.

That system would certainly have spared Led Zeppelin, which has been embroiled in a copyright suit over “Stairway to Heaven” with the trustee of the singer of Spirit, a 1960s psychedelic rock band. That case, even flimsier than the “Blurred Lines” one, has dragged on since 2014 and will continue in 2020.

But a similar fate might be destined for “Blurred Lines,” too. Last fall, Pharrell Williams, the song’s producer, gave an interview in which he described his work on the song differently than he had in his sworn testimony. A few weeks later, the Gaye estate filed a motion accusing him of perjury and asking a judge to revisit the decision. Even $5.3 million doesn’t buy restraint.

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40 Years Later, Reggae’s Heart Still Beats in the Bronx

By Brandon Wilner

Jan. 5, 2020

Lloyd Barnes has run the Wackie’s recording studio and label since the late 1970s. As he prepares for his next chapter, he wants to ensure its spirit lives on.

Lloyd Barnes, known as Wackie, is behind one of the longest-running reggae studios in the United States. Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times

Lloyd Barnes carried a shopping bag full of cleaning supplies up to a humble recording studio tucked above a financial services center and a Caribbean restaurant in the Eastchester neighborhood of the Bronx. A colleague was in a session with a dancehall vocalist, and Barnes pointed out his most recent nonmusical project, a custom-upholstered sofa embroidered with his record label’s logo: a dreadlocked Lion of Judah with its tail cocked up aggressively, and a flag displaying a star of David next to the name Wackie’s. 

Together, the studio and label make up one of the most respected reggae institutions in the United States, and Barnes, a calm, lanky man with a penchant for crisp clothing, is their founder, chief producer and champion. Wackie’s began in 1976, but 1979 was the year he and his team locked in to their sound and released records by stars in their prime: Johnny Osbourne, Wayne Jarrett and the Heptones’ Leroy Sibbles. The label went on to put out cult classics like Horace Andy’s “Dance Hall Style” and Love Joys’ “Lovers Rock Reggae Style,” which, despite multiple reissue campaigns, are still not easy to find. 

It’s been 40 years since Wackie’s hit its stride, and it has held a prominent place in New York’s music history ever since. First as a reggae sound system that put on parties, later as a studio and record shop, it has served as an expression of the immigrant-led aesthetic exchanges that came to define the city’s musical fabric. But Barnes isn’t sure how much longer he’ll be able to focus on his beloved studio. Now 75, he underwent double bypass surgery in 2017 and later developed nerve damage affecting his neck and arms. Though he recovered, he’s now looking back at his career with appreciation.

“I’m just thankful I’ve gotten to make music how I want — a true feeling from within,” he said in an interview in the studio’s break room, decorated with posters for international events and the label’s original certificate of incorporation. “When you do that for as long as I have, you’re filled with gratitude.”

His concerns now are ensuring that his studio carries on the traditions of roots reggae and lovers rock — the primary styles he works in — and sharing his knowledge with the younger people who populate it. “I’m like a primary doctor,” he said. “I help them with whatever part of their music I can, but I know when to offer my skill and when to recommend someone else who can do that style better.”

Barnes, known to reggae fans as Bullwackie and to friends simply as Wackie, was born in the Trench Town neighborhood of Kingston, Jamaica, and joined his mother in New York in 1967. His nickname traces back to Trench Town, where his friends wanted a wild-sounding name for their crew. After deciding that their first choice was too lewd, they settled on Bullwackie Boys.

Trench Town is known as the birthplace of reggae, where bandleaders like Alton Ellis and Delroy Wilson forged the upbeat dance style of ska into the cool sway of rocksteady. Barnes recalled seeing greats like Ellis, Bob Marley and Ken Boothe around the neighborhood. He got involved with his church’s music program, helping to pump the pipe organ on Sundays, which also gave him access to other instruments. When he heard the new music bubbling up from the nascent Rastafari movement, he felt naturally drawn to it.

He would sit in on Duke Reid and Prince Buster sessions at Federal Records, the studio that later housed Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong label. Then he came across the work of the dub reggae innovator King Tubby.

“He was the real king of dub; he set the pace,” Barnes said. “There was always a standard way to do a mix, but when he used effects and played with the vocal or drum track, there was real expression and courage. Seeing that gave me the picture of freedom.”

Alongside Glen Adams’s Capo Records and Linval Thompson’s Thompson Sound, Wackie’s was one of the first reggae labels established in the United States. Most didn’t survive the switch to CDs and the rise of dancehall in the 1990s, but Barnes persevered by offering audio services to other artists and labels, and continuing to believe in his own musical instincts. Today, Wackie’s is probably the longest-running American reggae studio.

In 1976, Barnes set up shop at 4781 White Plains Road in the Bronx, where his studio had an adjoining record shop called Wackie’s House of Music. At the time he worked in construction, and spent his earnings on equipment from the Sam Ash music store on West 48th Street in Manhattan. Financial constraints led to technological ones, which required resourcefulness in his recording strategies. The result was a rich and textured sound that gave his studio’s music an audible signature, which in reggae and dub carries just as much weight as the songwriting; the studio itself is considered an instrument. 

Barnes recorded and released albums by a stable of lesser-known and emerging vocalists and songwriters — Love Joys, Milton Henry, Junior Delahaye, Annette Brissett and Prince Douglas — all backed by his mighty studio band, the six-piece Wackie’s Rhythm Force. On the early hip-hop single “Wack Rap” by Solid C., Bobby D. and Kool Drop, Barnes experimented with styles that demonstrated the Bronx’s swirl of influences at the time, combining M.C.s with a disco beat and elements of dub production. His innovations appealed to artists in other genres, too: The dub techno innovators Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus started reissuing Wackie’s records on their Basic Channel label in 2001.

Wackie’s relocated to Englewood, N.J., after the sale of the White Plains Road building in the late 1980s. Barnes spent much of the following decade in Kingston helping run a label the reggae musician Sugar Minott put together to bring up younger artists, but returned to New York in 1998 when his mother became ill. Around that time, Wackie’s moved back to the Bronx; it settled into its current location on Boston Road in 2014.

Ira Heaps of the now-defunct East Village record store Jammyland met Barnes when his shop became an outlet for some Wackie’s pressings done in 1998. For Heaps, the label captured a distinct New York spirit. “The dark, sparse sound was what I loved,” he wrote in an email. “New York was a great place in the ’70s and ’80s. It was dangerous, but full of soul. That whole vibe definitely found its way into the music.”

In 2013 the streetwear brand Supreme released a line of clothing honoring the label. “I grew up with that Sugar Minott record,” the company’s special projects director, West Rubinstein, said, referring to the 1983 album “Dance Hall Showcase Vol. II.” While the Wackie’s line wasn’t the most marketable collection, the goal was “to educate, to try to help young people understand the real culture that’s right beneath their feet, particularly in New York City.”

In the late 2000s Barnes took a break from recording and releasing new music, but continued to offer the mixing and mastering services that have paid the studio’s bills. He still makes his way to the studio several days a week to oversee projects he’s working on with his protégés, Eric “Synester” McGill and Steadley “Meddz” Reid, both producers and digital engineers. He records with his daughters Crystal and Jasmine, and is still working with artists whose names have adorned Wackie’s records for decades: Claudette Brown of Love Joys, Jah Batta, the Wackie’s Rhythm Force members Jerry Harris and Jerry Johnson, Prince Douglas and Coozie Mellers.

The studio has incorporated digital tools and techniques alongside the analog gear that Barnes has used for decades, but Barnes still considers himself a proponent of old-school recording techniques and hands-on instrumentation.

“Imagine you’re sitting in front of a program, and you got 500 hi-hats, and you’ve never listened to a real drum set,” he said. “I always tell the people around me: a real hi-hat, you can make it sound like anything. But you can’t make anything sound like a real hi-hat.”

Barnes and his wife, Sonia Cole Barnes, have lived in Yonkers for the past 20 years, and he still dreams of opening a music center in the Bronx to provide young people access to instruments and offer the kind of education and enthusiasm that he was exposed to back in Trench Town. He recalled going to watch studio sessions and being frustrated that he wasn’t permitted near the piano.

“I remember that all the time,” he said. “I used to say: ‘One day I would love to have a studio. Then people could touch the piano.’”

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He’s back, cool cats! WRTI jazz DJ Bob Perkins returns to the airwaves after a stroke

Posted: January 5, 2020 – 5:00 AM 

John Marchese

MICHAEL BRYANT / Staff Photographer 

Growing up in a two-bedroom rowhouse near 19th and Reed in South Philly during World War II, Bob Perkins received intimate and powerful instruction on the healing properties of radio.

“My dad was my radio school,” the 86-year-old remembered. “He fell ill around 1940 with rheumatoid arthritis,” and was forced to leave his job as an elevator operator. “He loved radio programming, and since I was the last kid at home, we listened together to all the great voices — John Facenda and Edward R. Murrow — anything that was on the radio, from Jack Benny to the Philadelphia Athletics games. I knew the Athletics’ batting averages like they were my own name.

“I got radio rammed down my throat, because that was my father’s relief from his pain.”

Perkins sat and listened and learned his lessons and developed a calling. For 50 years he has been one of the great voices of Philadelphia radio, starting in 1969 with a nearly 20-year stint as a news and editorial reader for WDAS, known in those days as The Voice of the Black Community.

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“I did what I could,” he said, “because I didn’t know a thing about writing editorials. But I mimicked what I thought the great guys I’d grown up with would do, and I got away with it for years.”

» READ MORE: Talking all that jazz with WRTI legend Bob Perkins

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His older brother had introduced him to the music of Duke Ellington, which sparked a lifelong love of big band and jazz music. He wanted to share his obsession. Not quite content as a newsman, in the late ‘70s he volunteered for a moonlighting job as a weekend music DJ with WHYY, where he coined his on-air moniker: “BP with the GM” — Bob Perkins with the Good Music.

“That when I first became aware of who he was,” said Larry McKenna, the tenor saxophonist who is one of the deans of Philly’s jazz scene. “The thing I liked about what Bob did was that he didn’t call it a jazz show. He’d just play people that he liked. On this show he would play a record by Dick Haymes or Doris Day or Rosemary Clooney. But then he’d also play Miles Davis, Maynard Ferguson, John Coltrane, and Bird.” (The last being the nickname for the brilliant bebop jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker.)

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“I remember telling my friends about it,” McKenna adds. “You should hear this guy.”

When WHYY dropped its music programming to concentrate on news and information, Perkins moved uptown. Over the last 20-some years, BP with the GM has become an icon of the Philadelphia airwaves, holding down a prime, three-hour early evening time slot Monday through Thursday on WRTI. The station, run by Temple University, plays classical music during the day and transforms in the evenings into one the country’s premier jazz music broadcasters. He throws in a four-hour show on Sunday mornings for good measure.

One day in late summer last year, his familiar and congenial voice — the aural equivalent of a cup of hot chocolate and a soft blanket — went silent.

» READ MORE: Two Philly jazz masters celebrate their birthdays (and their best-friendship)

Perkins had suffered a stroke. “Since I turned 65,” he reports with a tone more of irony than self-pity, “it’s been one thing after another. But what are you going to do? My gerontologist tells me, ‘Keep moving.’”

Maureen Malloy, the director of jazz programming at WRTI, says there was “an insane amount” of listener response to Perkins’ unexplained absence. “We weren’t sure at first when he’d be back, so we didn’t say anything.” Finally, in mid-November, a post went up on the WRTI web page. It was typically BP in tone.

“I’ve got high mileage on my odometer,” Perkins wrote. “BP and ‘Father Time’ have been having a continuous battle over the last several years and I’m trying not to let him win the battle! I’m waiting for my doc to give me clearance to return to work so that I can keep putting out that good GM …. I look forward to you lending me your finely tuned ears very soon.”

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BP brought the GM back for the first time in more than four months — his longest absence from the Philadelphia airwaves in 50 years — on a Thursday night in December, followed a few days later by his Sunday show at 9 a.m.

What he will bring to the microphone in a neat control room on Cecil B. Moore Boulevard just west of Broad Street is something his colleague Bob Craig describes as “a style that is very, very warm and very personal and very loose.”

WRTI’s legendary jazz host, Bob Perkins, in his Wyncote, PA home on December 19, 2019. Perkins has been ill and off the air for a few months but will make his return in the first week of January. 

“BP going one on one with the audience shows a very strong kinship,” said Craig, himself a 40-year veteran of local radio. “He’s speaking their language – especially people who have been listening for years and years.”

In this new age of music streaming, where a service like Spotify uses neural networks, big data language analysis, and artificial intelligence machine learning techniques to winnow songs that are channeled down a high-tech digital assembly line to listeners, Perkins relies on a soft, squishy computer that he admits is a bit more unreliable since his stroke and which he refers to in his characteristic parlance as “the old noggin.” In other words, he plays what he knows and likes. He is one of the few DJs at WRTI, or any radio station in existence nowadays, allowed such a luxury.

“I program most of the music on the station,” said Maureen Malloy. “But BP programs his own. I think it would be silly to have me programming for a jazz historian.”

The music that appeals to BP’s old noggin is what he calls “the melodic stuff with no expiration date,” most of it recorded decades ago.

A survey of the playlist from one of his last shows before his stroke is a ramble through classic jazz interpretations of American Songbook standards. Like the theme song from the 1944 film “Laura,” played by saxophone legend Coleman Hawkins. Or Tony Bennett singing “My Foolish Heart” accompanied by pianist Bill Evans. A few Philadelphia artists were sprinkled into the evening, including Perkins’ longtime friend, saxophonist Bootsie Barnes, and vocalist Phyllis Chapell, who dedicated her latest album to BP. The mix of music was an image of the man who chose it: smart and warm and nostalgic, displaying impeccable taste and a steady, low-key, and almost offhand hipness.

In mid-December, as he planned his return to the airwaves, Perkins was worried that some physical effects of his stroke — a few fingers that weren’t obliging — might compromise his technical performance in the control booth. But his well-honed approach to the music would remain unaffected.

“I look to my dad and my older brother,” Perkins said, “and I guess I was just programmed to do what I do. People say, ‘You ought to give it up, man, go retire somewhere.’ Why? I’m the only one that’s doing this thing on regular radio and I enjoy very much what I’m doing, and the feedback that I get from people who enjoy it. Maybe it’s one of the high points in their life. This music conjures up some beautiful memories. You can find some solace in what you like.

“Music,” said BP about the GM. “That’s our savior, man.”

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Jack Sheldon, Trumpeter and ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’ Singer, Is Dead at 88

By Peter Keepnews

Jan. 3, 2020

He played with leading jazz musicians. He bantered with Merv Griffin. But his best-known work may have been on a children’s cartoon series.

Jack Sheldon was the vocalist on songs like “I’m Just a Bill” from the animated television series “Schoolhouse Rock!” But he was also a prominent jazz trumpeter.Kari Rene Hall/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images

Jack Sheldon, an accomplished jazz trumpeter who also had a successful parallel career as an actor — but whose most widely heard work may have been as a vocalist on the animated television series “Schoolhouse Rock!” — died on Dec. 27. He was 88. 

His death was announced by his manager and partner, Dianne Jimenez. She did not say where he died or specify the cause.

Jazz fans know Mr. Sheldon as a mainstay of the once-thriving West Coast scene and as a sideman with Stan Kenton, Benny Goodman and other bandleaders, as well as the leader of his own ensembles. Lovers of obscure TV shows might remember him as the star of the sitcom “Run, Buddy, Run,” the story of an innocent bystander who finds himself being pursued by gangsters, which lasted all of 13 episodes in the 1966-67 season. 

And anyone who grew up learning about grammar, arithmetic and civics by watching the ingenious short musical cartoons known as “Schoolhouse Rock!” knows Mr. Sheldon’s voice, if not his name: He sang two of that series’ most memorable ditties, “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m Just a Bill.” 

He was also for many years a member of the band led by Mort Lindsey on “The Merv Griffin Show,” one of Johnny Carson’s more durable late-night competitors. In addition to being featured as a trumpet soloist, Mr. Sheldon honed his comic chops in goofy exchanges and vocal duets with Mr. Griffin. (His humor sometimes toyed with television’s taste standards. Mr. Griffin once asked him if he had finished high school; he responded by rolling up a sleeve, pointing to his arm and saying, “I had the highest marks in my class.”)

Beryl Cyril Sheldon Jr. was born on Nov. 30, 1931, in Jacksonville, Fla., and was playing trumpet professionally by his early teens. He briefly attended the University of Southern California and Los Angeles City College and, after two years in the Air Force, where he played in a military band, settled in Los Angeles in 1952.

He was soon working and recording regularly, with his own groups and with the saxophonists Art Pepper and Dexter Gordon, among many others. He toured Europe with Benny Goodman’s band in 1959 and continued to work with Goodman on and off for more than 20 years. 

“There actually weren’t so many of us at the time,” Mr. Sheldon told JazzTimes magazine in 2011, recalling a West Coast contingent of young modernists that also included his friend and fellow trumpeter Chet Baker. “Now there are a million jazz guys out there, and they all play great. But what we were doing back then, back in the ’50s — that was different. We knew we were doing something special.” 

Known for his warm, rich trumpet sound, Mr. Sheldon was also a busy studio musician, accompanying singers like Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee and playing on the soundtrack of numerous movies. He was a favorite of soundtrack composers like Johnny Mandel — who featured him on “The Shadow of Your Smile,” from the 1965 movie “The Sandpiper” — and Henry Mancini.

“It’s a haunting trumpet he plays,” Merv Griffin told The Los Angeles Times in 2002. “Henry Mancini once told me, ‘If I’ve got a couple making passionate love onscreen and I’m writing the score, it’s Jack Sheldon’s trumpet I want.’” 

Mr. Sheldon led an onscreen big band in the 1991 movie “For the Boys,” starring Bette Midler and James Caan as performers entertaining the troops through several wars, and kept the band together afterward for nightclub engagements. He also led a small group, the California Cool Quartet.

But he had more than trumpet playing in his portfolio. As a singer, he charmed audiences with an appealingly laconic, conversational style. His offbeat between-songs patter — inspired, he once said, by the nights he spent on bills with Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl — led to occasional work as a stand-up comicand acting opportunities on TV comedy shows including “The Cara Williams Show” (1964-65), on which he played a jazz musician, and “Run, Buddy, Run,” his first and only starring vehicle, as well as his long-running role as Mr. Griffin’s foil. 

When the jazz pianist, singer and songwriter Bob Dorough was hired in the 1970s to provide music for what became “Schoolhouse Rock!,” Mr. Sheldon was one of the vocalists he used. He breezily sang about the use of words like “and” and “but” on ”Conjunction Junction,” written by Mr. Dorough, and about how a bill becomes law on “I’m Just a Bill,” written by Dave Frishberg. Years later, he would sing parodies of those songs on episodes of “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy.”

In addition to Ms. Jimenez, Mr. Sheldon’s survivors include a son, John; a daughter, Jessie Sheldon; and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A daughter, Julie, and a son, Kevin, died earlier.

Mr. Sheldon was the subject of a 2008 documentary, “Trying to Get Good: The Jazz Odyssey of Jack Sheldon,” directed by Penny Peyser and Doug McIntyre, which in addition to featuring copious performance footage addressed his struggles with drug addiction and alcohol abuse. 

In recent years Mr. Sheldon had various health problems but continued working. He lost the use of his right arm after suffering a stroke in 2011, but he was eventually able to resume playing using one hand. 

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

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Wanted: A Home for Three Million Records

By Derek M. Norman

Jan. 3, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET

The Archive of Contemporary Music is losing its space in TriBeCa. 

A small selection of the massive analog holdings of the archive.OK McCausland for The New York Times

In a part of Manhattan booming with trendy green high rises, renovated lofts and digital media companies, a hidden trove of musical relics has been growing for over 30 years.

Housed in a nondescript building in TriBeCa is the Archive of Contemporary Music, a nonprofit founded in 1985. It is one of the world’s largest collections of popular music, with more than three million recordings, as well as music books, vintage memorabilia and press kits. For point of comparison, the Library of Congress estimates that it also holds nearly three million sound recordings.

Inside its space on White Street, there are shelves upon shelves upon shelves of vinyl records and CDS. Signed Johnny Cash records hang close to nearly 1,800 other signed albums. There are boxes of big band recordings, world music and jazz and original soundtracks. Most of the inventory is stored in the basement below.

Notably, the archive, which still receives about 250,000 recordings a year, is home to a majority of Keith Richards’s extensive blues collection. (Mr. Richards, of the Rolling Stones, sits on the board of advisers.)

And now it all has to go, somewhere. 

Rent in the neighborhood has continued to rise, challenging the organization to stay on budget, said Bob George, the founder and director of the archive. Recently, Mr. George reached an agreement with his landlord to get out of his lease early. He has until June to find another space. 

“We were running $100,000 in debt,” Mr. George said. “I’ve never been in debt over these 35 years, but over these last three years, it’s just become overwhelming.”

For the past few decades, researchers, writers and filmmakers have used the archive to find both common and obscure recordings, and inspiration in general. For instance, the music supervisor for the Ang Lee film “Taking Woodstock” found the archives indispensable when they were searching for recordings of Bert Sommer, a lesser-known Woodstock act. 

Although Mr. George has paid off the archive’s debts, he is still focused on finding an affordable space, preferably in New York City. But without crucial support from new donors or cultural institutions like the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, he said, finding a new location will be challenging.

As a nonprofit, Mr. George’s archive has survived because of the generosity of its board members, donations, the research services it provides and sales of excess inventory. But “the rising rent, our share of the building’s taxes and donor fatigue has taken its toll,” Mr. George said.

The archive began with Mr. George’s own collection of about 47,000 albums. Mr. George, who is now 70, moved to New York City in 1974 as a visual arts student, and he immediately started accumulating records as a D.J. He is the author of reference book “Volume: The International Discography of the New Wave,” and he produced an occasional survey of American pop and experimental music for the BBC as part of “The John Peel Show.”

In 1980, he released Laurie Anderson’s first single, “O Superman,” which sold almost a million copies worldwide and made it to No. 2 on the UK singles chart in 1981.

Word spread; those in the industry took notice. The collection grew from there. 

Since then, donors and board members have included David Bowie, Lou Reed and Paul Simon, as well as Jonathan Demme and Martin Scorsese.

As the city evolved, so did the archive’s holdings. 

“Most record companies who were there when we started are gone,” said Mr. George, who obtained many records from clubs around the city that either closed or went under. “We got things from places like the Mudd Club, the Paradise Garage, all these different clubs, the Peppermint Lounge, and all the D.J.s who used to work there who were friends of mine,” he added. 

But then music streaming came along. How do you collect that? 

“I don’t think it’s quite dawned on us because everything has been digitized and all is accessible,” said Craig Kallman, the chief executive officer of the Atlantic Records Group. 

Mr. Kallman, who has a collection of about 1.5 million albums in his own private collection, began his career as a D.J., and for the past three years has been on the archive’s board of trustees.

“There’s something interesting about this want for preservation of any medium that has gone through this transformation in a digital age,” he said. “So I think it’s only slowly seeping into consciousness as people begin to appreciate the original, or the return to vintage things.”

With deteriorating master tapes and tragedies like the Universal Studios fire in Hollywood that destroyed a stockpile of master tapes — Duke Ellington recordings, Chuck Berry sessions and virtually all of Buddy Holly’s master tapes, to name a few — Mr. Kallman believes the industry will turn to archives of vinyl records like Mr. George’s and his own as the next best original recording.

“We’ve kind of gone against the grain of what every other industry has seen,” he said. “The vinyl was euphonic, warm and musical. It’s absolutely a preservation.”

The archive has been working with the Internet Archive to digitize some of its collection. But Mr. George’s priority is to preserve the hard copy. He estimates it will take about 20,000 boxes to pack up his inventory. 

“What’s wonderful about his collection is it’s not judgmental by genre,” said Nile Rodgers, a record producer and co-founder of the band Chic, who has donated to the archive and sits on the board of advisers. “Now it’s probably even more important to support something like this.”

Mr. Rodgers himself has used the archive as a resource.

“A lot of romance comes from the way we made records,” Mr. Rodgers said. “And there’s something very romantic about the process, the environment, all those things we missed because we lived it.”

Recently, Mr. Rodgers was chatting with a film director — he won’t name names — about character concepts for a movie that will be released next year. An obscure recording from the Sugar Hill Records label popped into his mind, Mr. Rodgers recalled. He called Mr. George, who lent him a copy of the record, and he played it for the director. “Look at your character now!” Mr. Rodgers told him.

The archive has three employees, including Mr. George, and regularly hires interns to assist in cataloging. With five months to go before his agreed departure date, Mr. George is still sorting through boxes of new material.

Worst case scenario, he said, the archive will be put in storage.

“I still have yet to throw a record in good condition away,” Mr. George said, noting that he’d only toss a donated record if it was unplayable. “It’s very difficult to judge quality in its own time. Tastes change,” he continued. “It’s all generational and it’s all fleeting. But it’s history.”

Celebrate curiosity. Gift subscriptions starting at $25.

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Neil Innes, 1944-2019: A ninja of comedy and melody who touched Python, The Beatles, Oasis and beyond

3 days ago

When Noel Gallagher was called into the Creation offices in 1994 and told that he was the subject of a plagiarism lawsuit over similarities between Oasis’ non-album single ‘Whatever’ and a track called ‘How Sweet To Be An Idiot’ by Neil Innes of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Gallagher pled ignorance. He’d never heard the song, he claimed, and he probably believed he hadn’t.

For this was the fine art of Neil Innes, who died unexpectedly on December 29, aged 75; he was a world class ninja of the melodic hook. Everyone who had ever seen him perform ‘Idiot…’ during the Monty Python Live At The Hollywood Bowl show would undoubtedly have its infectious chorus surreptitiously imprinted forever in the back of their brain.

Likewise his only hit with the Bonzos, 1968’s ‘I’m The Urban Spaceman’, or one of his many contributions to the Monty Python musical canon – ‘Knights Of The Round Table’, or ‘Brave Sir Robin’. Whether as avant-garde comedy provocateur, straight song-writer or prime ‘60s and ‘70s musical satirist, Innes’ skill with a timelessly catchy melody verged on the surgical.

Born in Danbury, Essex in December 1944 and talented on piano and guitar from an early age, Innes would eventually study drama and fine art at Goldsmiths College in London and drawing at the Central School Of Art, where he first met Rodney Slater and Vivian Stanshall in a pub in 1963; Stanshall arrived wearing a Victorian frock coat, false plastic ears and with a Euphonium under his arm. Such attire was in keeping with the pair’s flailing trad jazz parody act The Bonzo Dog Dada Band, and Innes swiftly joined the band’s revolving line-up as a key songwriter and cohesive fulcrum.

Their mix of wit, mayhem, outlandish costumery, musicianship, cut-out comic speech bubbles and mid-set tap-dancing extravaganzas made the band a hit on the London pub circuit and in the Northern working men’s clubs. As a result, Innes and the band made their first TV appearance in 196 on Blue Peter, performing a Dadaist ‘20s style take on ‘Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey’ featuring exploding saxophones, spoon solos and random gunshots.

After several unsuccessful singles, the band (now renamed The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and eventually The Bonzo Dog Band) embraced the psychedelic times, and found their fresh brand of jazz, surrealism and music hall psychedelia struck a chord with the times, and particularly the Sgt Pepper-era Beatles. Paul McCartney offered them a slot in his Magical Mystery Tour film, playing their Elvis pastiche ‘Death Cab For Cutie’ in the strip club scene, and they were hired as the weekly house band for an afternoon children’s comedy show called Do Not Adjust Your Set, which featured Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Jones.

Besides giving the band vital exposure, several key relationships in Innes career were forged here; his link to the emerging Python team would prove fortuitous, while McCartney would co-produce the Bonzo’s only Top Five hit, ‘I’m The Urban Spaceman’, under the pseudonym Apollo C Vermouth. “I remember him walking into the studio, saying hello to everybody and spotting the grand piano in the corner,” Innes told Prog magazine. “He went straight over to it [and said]: ‘I’ve just written this,’ and he played Hey Jude all the way through. The Beatles probably hadn’t even heard it yet.”

The Bonzos would release four albums in their initial incarnation – featuring alleged guest spots from the likes of John Wayne, Harold Wilson and Hitler, sheep choirs, trouser press solos and concept pieces about the small town of Keynsham – and have the likes of Keith Moon sit in on drums while drummer ‘Legs’ Larry Smith did his tap-dancing segment during gigs such as the 1969 Isle Of Wight festival.

But failed attempts to break America and the pressures of self-management caused them to split in 1970, reuniting briefly in 1971 to fulfil a contractual obligation with fifth album ‘Let’s Make Up And Be Friendly’.

In the meantime, Innes had attempted to launch a more serious musical career with a new band The World, but would soon be drawn back to comedy. While working with a second new band GRIMMS, featuring Roger McGough and The Scaffold’s Mike McGear, he also contributed music to Monty Python albums and, following John Cleese’s temporary departure in 1974, Innes became a regular voice and face within the Python world.

It was here that his individual character as a kind of ‘70s jester minstrel shone through, enhancing and dovetailing with the songs of Idle and the other main Python players. Innes wrote songs and sketches for their final TV series and performed with the Python live show, famously introduced as Raymond Scum on the 1976 US-only live album ‘Monty Python Live At City Center’ and opening his Dylan pastiche ‘Protest Song’ with the words “I’ve suffered for my music, now it’s your turn”. He also wrote songs for and made cameos in Monty Python And The Holy Grail and Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, becoming sufficiently engrained in the troupe to earn the title of The Seventh Python.

It was his Beatles connection that would cement Innes’ post-Bonzo legend, however. In the wake of the Python TV series, Innes and Idle joined forces on Rutland Weekend Television, a spoof of a low-budget local TV station which spawned the sensation that was The Rutles, nicknamed The Pre-Fab Four. In this crudely-drawn pastiche of The Beatles Innes played Ron Nasty, the Lennon character, and their 1978 TV mockumentary All You Need Is Cash – a step-by-step spoof of The Beatles’ career – became a cult favourite thanks to affectionate playing-along cameos from Mick Jagger, Paul Simon, Ron Wood, John Belushi, Dan Akroyd, Bill Murray and George Harrison himself.

Innes’ mimics of classic Beatles songs were so convincing that his ‘Cheese And Onions’ even found its way onto a Beatles bootleg. “They were only intended to be a short-term, one-off gag because the timing seemed so right,” Innes said in 2012. “People were desperate to get the Beatles back together and a guy in America was offering them $20m each for a reunion! It was quite absurd. And George Harrison, who by then was closely involved with the Pythons, felt something even sillier needed to be done. He loved every moment of The Rutles.”

With Idle moving to LA, Innes made his own BBC TV series called The Innes Book Of Records in 1979 before utilising his family-friendly image to move into children’s TV and books in the ‘80s and ‘90s, as well as literary travel series Away With Words. The Bonzos and The Rutles would re-emerge sporadically over the coming decades, with The Rutles most notably releasing a parody of The Beatles’ ‘Anthology’ entitled ‘The Rutles Archaeology’ in 1996, but Innes’ tendency for comic subterfuge would remained undimmed into the new century. In 2010 he formed The Idiot Bastard Band, a purposefully unrehearsed comedy song collective which would include Phil Jupitus, Adrian Edmondson, Roland Rivron and Paul Whitehouse across the next two years.

Innes’ most recent album ‘Nearly Really’ acted as a timely catch-up, featuring songs stretching back to the ‘80s which he’d always wanted to record but never had. “It’s now or never,” he told Prog, and helpfully summed up his lifelong legacy. “Shakespeare wrote comedies as well as dramas, and I like to think I do that too,” he said. “I’m just like Shakespeare, except with better songs.”

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Jack Sheldon, jazz legend and ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’ singer, dies at 88

Jack Sheldon had an extensive career in music and television.

(CNN) — Jazz great Jack Sheldon, known for his work on “The Merv Griffin Show” and “Schoolhouse Rock!,” has died. He was 88.

Sheldon died December 27, said Cynthia Jimenez, the sister of Sheldon’s manager, Dianne Jimenez. 

“To all Jack Sheldon fans, on behalf of my sister Dianne Jimenez, sadly Jack passed away on December 27. May he rest in peace with all the Jazz Cats in heaven!,” Jimenez wrote in a Facebook post Monday.

More details about his death were not available Tuesday.

Sheldon was a charismatic trumpeter, singer and actor with a career that spanned several decades.

He was part of the 1950s West Coast jazz movement along with artists Art Pepper and Shorty Rogers. He collaborated on “The Shadow of Your Smile,” which was part of the soundtrack of the 1965 film “The Sandpiper.”

Sheldon was known for several roles in TV productions. In the 1970s, Sheldon joined “The Merv Griffin Show” as music director and trumpeter, and ultimately appeared as Griffin’s sidekick for 18 years. 

In 1973, he lent his voice to the children’s animated series “Schoolhouse Rock!” led by Bob Dorough. He sang tunes including the fun grammar lesson “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m Just a Bill.”

“I’m just a bill. Yes I am only a bill. And I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill,” he sang, explaining how a bill becomes law in the three-minute short that was broadcast between cartoons.

“Schoolhouse Rock” songs premiered in 1973 and ran on ABC for 12 years. The show came back on air in the 1990s for five more years. Today, the songs live on in YouTube videos — some with millions of views.

He had on-screen roles in the 1966 sitcom “Run, Buddy, Run” and appeared on Sally Field’s “The Girl With Something Extra” a few years later.

Services for Sheldon will be held January 10 at Forest Lawn in Cypress, California, Jimenez wrote in her post.

CNN’s Steve Almasy contributed to this report.

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Vic Juris, a guitarist whose stylistic breadth, technical fluency and selfless poise made him a first-rate sideman for more than 40 years, as well as an influential educator and a perennially underrated solo artist, died early this morning at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J. He was 66.

His wife, the jazz singer Kate Baker, said the cause was complications from cancer.

Juris came of age alongside a generation of guitarists broadly conversant in the jazz language, but also deeply informed by rock, soul, and myriad strains of classical music. Within that broadminded cohort, he commanded high esteem. “There is none better,” the late John Abercrombie once said of him. Another notable peer, Pat Metheny, once attested that “Vic Juris has been a total monster ever since we both hit the scene at around the same time in the 70’s, playing great no matter what the setting.”

Dave Stryker, who for the last 20 years has lived across the street from Juris in West Orange, N.J., characterizes his friend as “a musician’s musician.” Speaking this afternoon from the Juris household, Stryker added: “I don’t know anybody that doesn’t completely give it up for Vic, considering him one of the masters.”

But Juris’ sterling reputation among his fellow musicians was disproportionate to his low-key public profile, despite a trail of solo albums stretching back to the late ‘70s. A sideman to saxophonist Richie Cole during that decade and beyond, he also recorded with Hammond B-3 organists Don Patterson and Jimmy Smith, bassists Steve LaSpina and Gary Peacock, and keyboardist Peggy Stern. He’s most widely known for a long affiliation with saxophonist, flutist and NEA Jazz Master David Liebman; they began recording together in 1991.

“He should have been more famous,” Liebman tells WBGO. “He played unbelievably. He was not a showy guy, as a person or as a musician. And he was so eclectic — he could do so many things, from left to right, musically. When somebody’s that eclectic, you can come out as lesser in the eyes of the public, when it really is more.”

For his part, Juris took pride in the versatility that was a stock in trade. “I wanted to be a sideman and play in as many situations as possible,” he told Claire Daly, in a 2017 interview for DownBeat. “I still do. I find that to be rewarding. The drawback is that you don’t build a profile as a leader. You’re always below the radar and that’s basically what happened with me.”

At the same time, Juris put out some two dozen albums, more than half of them on the Dutch label SteepleChase. His most recent, from 2019, is Two Guitars; the title is a nod to his use of both a steel-string acoustic and a hollowbody electric. The album, which features an ace trio with bassist Jay Anderson and drummer Adam Nussbaum, is also a showcase for Juris’ compositions, including an Abercrombie tribute titled “To John” and the harmonically sophisticated opening track, “Cerise.”

Victor Edward Jurusz was born on Sept. 26, 1953 in Jersey City, N.J. His father, Victor Sr., was a Port Authority police officer, and his mother, Claire, worked as an executive secretary.

He began playing guitar in 1963, at age 10, and got his first electric guitar as a gift the following Christmas. The timing was right for him to cut his teeth on The Beatles, but he also studied privately with jazz guitarist and educator Ed Berg. (He later studied and befriended another jazz guitar guru, Pat Martino, and struck up a correspondence with pianist and pedagogue Charlie Banacos.)

“Beyond his initial lessons, he was pretty much self-taught,” Stryker marvels. “He got that experience early on, playing with the real masters of the music. He came about his harmony, which was pretty deep, on his own. He could play the most difficult kind of music — like the stuff David Liebman would write, with these big, fat, stacked chords — and figure out how to voice them on the guitar.”

Liebman had a longstanding pledge to do an album of Juris’ compositions. He says that a recording date had been set for February. “Last time I had contact with him was about the rehearsal, and the tunes we were going to do,” Liebman notes, recalling that one of those was a piece called “Romulan Ale.” Juris recorded that tune, whose title alludes to Star Trek, on a 2010 trio album called Omega is the Alpha. Here is footage of him performing it with Liebman’s band around the same time, at the Deer Head Inn in Delaware Water Gap, Penn.

Juris was also a committed educator, teaching at the New School, Rutgers and SUNY Purchase. He published method books and instructional videos, and instructed several generations of younger guitarists.

Baker, who survives Juris along with his sister, Denise Martish, says that over the last several months — since word of his cancer was made public, through a GoFundMe campaign — a steady stream of his students and peers have come to West Orange to pay their respects. “I think his legacy is also with how many guitarists he’s trained and mentored, from his heart,” she says. “Vic would do duos with them. He would have them come to the house. He wanted to really pass down the information.”

Baker also discloses that Juris has two albums releasing in the spring. One, due out on SteepleChase in March, will feature Anderson on bass, Gary Versace on keyboards and John Riley on drums.

The other will be a duets album, featuring her vocals and his guitar. 

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10:56 AM PST 12/31/2019 by Mike Barnes

National Jazz Archive/Heritage Images via Getty Images

Jack Sheldon

Jack Sheldon, the extraordinary West Coast jazz trumpeter and singer who played “The Shadow of Your Smile” for the big screen, served as Merv Griffin’s sidekick and voiced characters on Schoolhouse Rock!, died Friday, his longtime manager, Dianne Jimenez, reported. He was 88.

Sheldon performed the haunting “The Shadow of Your Smile” on the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton drama The Sandpiper (1965), and the tune, written by Johnny Mandel and Paul Francis Webster, won the Grammy Award for song of the year and the Academy Award for best original song.

He also played one of the many versions of “The Long Goodbye” on Robert Altman’s 1973 classic that starred Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe and was heard and/or seen in other films including Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Save the Tiger (1973), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Mommie Dearest (1981), Mr. Saturday Night (1992), Arachnophobia (1990) and For the Boys (1991).

Tony Gieske, the late jazz reviewer for The Hollywood Reporter, once describedSheldon’s “incomparable trumpet sound” as “rich and full as something I wish I could think of to compare it to — a bunch of dewy green grapes?”

On Griffin’s long-running TV talk show that began in 1962, the fun-loving Sheldon was front and center for 16 years after being hired for Mort Lindsey’s band and enjoyed rich comic banter with the host, a big band singer himself. Griffin’s favorite song was “The Shadow of Your Smile,” and Sheldon performed it at Griffin’s funeral in 2007.

Sheldon also provided the voice for the Conjunction Conductor and performed as proposed legislation in the memorable piece “I’m Just a Bill” on the Saturday morning kids educational series Schoolhouse Rock!, which premiered on ABC in 1973.

He parodied “I’m Just a Bill” as an “Amendment to Be” on an 1996 episode of The Simpsons and reprised his roles as the bill and the conductor on episodes of Family Guy in 2000 and 2001.

Sheldon was born on Nov. 30, 1931, in Jacksonville, Florida, and began playing trumpet at age 12. He moved to Los Angeles in 1947, attended L.A. City College and studied with Uan Rasey, then played with military bands in the U.S. Air Force and, after the service, with the likes of Jimmy Giuffre, Dexter Gordon and Chet Baker.

In the late 1950s, Sheldon toured with orchestras led by Stan Kenton and Benny Goodman and backed Rosemarie Clooney, Peggy Lee, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra and other vocal superstars. He also played with Herb Geller, Art Pepper, Wardell Gray, Dave Pell, Curtis Counce, Woody Herman, Al Porcino, Bill Berry, Maynard Ferguson and Buddy Childers.

An inventive player, he also headed his own 17-piece orchestra.

As as actor in the 1960s, Sheldon portrayed neighbor and jazz musician Fletcher Kincaid on The Cara Williams Show and starred as Buddy Overstreet, a young accountant on the run from gangsters, on another CBS series, Run, Buddy, Run. A spoof of The Fugitive from Get Smart producer Leonard Stern, it lasted just 13 episodes.

He then played the brother of John Davidson’s character on the 1973-74 NBC sitcom The Girl With Something Extra, starring Sally Field, and appeared in Freaky Friday (1976) and on episodes of Mike Hammer, Private Eye.

Sheldon also was the voice of Louie the Lightning Bug in a series of musical cartoon PSAs in the 1980s and performed the theme song for the 1990’s ABC series Homefront, starring Kyle Chandler.

Sheldon was the subject of a 2008 documentary, Trying to Get Good: The Jazz Odyssey of Jack Sheldon, in which he detailed his battle with alcohol and substance abuse. He then made a resounding recovery from a stroke suffered in 2011 that robbed him of the use of his right arm.

“I like the music to swing,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1987, “and I like to make people feel it, feel happy and sad, everything. If the music makes me smile and happy, then maybe the people will feel it, too.”

A memorial service is scheduled for 2 p.m. on Jan. 10 at Forest Lawn in Cypress, California.

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By Derrick Bryson Taylor

Dec. 28, 2019

Mr. Mendelson, who worked on dozens of animated projects, also wrote the enduring lyrics to the song “Christmas Time Is Here.”

Lee Mendelson, who produced “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” in 2015. He died on Christmas morning.Jason Mendelson, via Associated Press

Lee Mendelson, an Emmy Award-winning producer who was instrumental in bringing the holiday staple “A Charlie Brown Christmas” to television in 1965 and who wrote the enduring lyrics to the song “Christmas Time Is Here,” died on Christmas morning at his home in Hillsborough, Calif., about 15 miles south of San Francisco He was 86.

His son Jason  said the cause was congestive heart failure, and that Mr. Mendelson had had lung cancer. He said his father’s death on Christmas “was a pretty serendipitous thing.”

For more than 50 years “A Charlie Brown Christmas” has endured as a staple of holiday season programming, but the project would not have been created were it not for Mr. Mendelson’s persistence. 

Mr. Mendelson was initially turned down when he approached Charles M. Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” about making a documentary about his life and the comic strip starring Charlie Brown and Snoopy, he told The Los Angeles Times in 2015.

But toward the end of their phone conversation, Mr. Mendelson mentioned that he had made a documentary about the baseball player Willie Mays, whom Mr. Schulz admired, and that sealed the deal.

“Well, if Willie Mays can trust you with his life, maybe I can trust you with mine,” Mr. Schulz said.

After they completed the documentary, an advertising agency that represented Coca-Cola looking for family-oriented television shows to sponsor called Mr. Mendelson and asked if a “Peanuts” Christmas special could be created. Mr. Mendelson agreed.

Mr. Schulz, who died in 2000, created a story line about Charlie Brown’s attempt to direct a school Christmas play that included a fragile Christmas tree. Mr. Schulz did not want a laugh track to be used and was committed to keeping a religious message in the show, despite opposition from Mr. Mendelson.

The animator Bill Melendez and the jazz pianist and composer Vince Guaraldi were added to the project.

However, the lyrics to “Christmas Time Is Here” came from Mr. Mendelson.

“I just wrote, scribbled some words down on an envelope,” Mr. Mendelson told the Television Academy Foundation in 2010. “And never thought much about it.”

The music was “critical to its acceptance,” he said, adding that the show’s creators never thought the song would become a Christmas standard. “That just happened over the years,” he said.

Instead of adult actors, Mr. Mendelson chose children to voice the characters. 

The show became a success, with more than 15 million household views the night it premiered in 1965. It remains a holiday television fixture.

“It became part of everybody’s Christmas holidays,” Mr. Mendelson told The Los Angeles Times. “It was just passed on from generation to generation.”

Lee Mendelson was born on March 24, 1933, in San Francisco to Palmer and Jeanette (Wise) Mendelson. His father owned a fruit and produce business and his mother was a homemaker. He earned a degree in English from Stanford University in 1954, and entered the Air Force that year.

In 1961, he landed a job at KPIX-TV in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he won a Peabody Award for “San Francisco Pageant,” a documentary series on the history of the city. Two year later, he started Lee Mendelson Film Productions.

After the success of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” Mr. Mendelson produced television movies and shorts including “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” (1966), “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” (1973) and “It’s Your 50th Christmas, Charlie Brown!” (2015), for which he won his 12th Emmy Award. He also produced the 121-episode series “Garfield and Friends.”

Occasionally he recruited his own children to voice the characters in his animated projects.

In addition to his son Jason, Mr. Mendelson is survived by his wife, Ploenta; three more children, Glenn, Lynda, and Sean; a stepson, Ken; and eight grandchildren. Three previous marriages ended in divorce.

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Sleepy LaBeef in his early days
 

The American rockabilly artist Sleepy LaBeef, whose career spanned the 1950s into the just-ending decade, died today (Dec. 26), at age 84. The cause of death has not yet been revealed. LaBeef’s passing was confirmed on Facebook by his family, which posted, “It is with deep, agonizing sadness that we inform you of the news that this morning, Sleepy LaBeef, born Thomas Paulsley LaBeff, passed on from this life to be with the Lord. He died at home, in his own bed, surrounded by his family who loved him, and whom he dearly loved.”
 

Among those paying tribute to LaBeef online was singer-songwriter Deke Dickerson, who wrote, “Sleepy was one of the original ’50s rockabillies. He made excellent records for Starday, Mercury, Dixie and Wayside. In a way he was one of the first ’50s revivalists, cutting greasy rock and roll records all through the British Invasion years of the mid-’60s, but the truth was that Sleepy existed in a Gulf Coast world of rough bars and sleazy dives where the hard-driving ’50s rock and roll mixed with classic country never went away.”
 

A recent photo of Sleepy LaBeef
 

LaBeef was born July 20, 1935, in Smackover, Ark., the youngest of 10 children, and received his nickname “as the result of a lazy eye,” according to his Wikipedia entry. He moved to Houston at 18 and sang gospel music locally, before switching to rockabilly as that genre picked up in the mid-’50s. His first single, “I’m Through,” was issued on the Starday label in 1957, but although he released music prolifically from that point on, he never made the national Billboard pop chart. He did, however, place a couple of songs on the country chart—1968’s “Every Day,” which peaked at #73, and “Blackland Farmer,” which charted at #67 in 1971. He also recorded for the revived Sun label in the ’70s and Rounder in the ’80s. His popularity remained strong in Europe into his later years.
 

Related: Which first-generation rockers are still with us?

LaBeef was known as a great storyteller during his live performances. Bear Family Records released a collection, Sleepy Rocks, in 2008, and a documentary/concert DVD, Sleepy LaBeef Rides Again, was released in 2013.

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Sleepy LaBeef in his early days
 

The American rockabilly artist Sleepy LaBeef, whose career spanned the 1950s into the just-ending decade, died today (Dec. 26), at age 84. The cause of death has not yet been revealed. LaBeef’s passing was confirmed on Facebook by his family, which posted, “It is with deep, agonizing sadness that we inform you of the news that this morning, Sleepy LaBeef, born Thomas Paulsley LaBeff, passed on from this life to be with the Lord. He died at home, in his own bed, surrounded by his family who loved him, and whom he dearly loved.”
 

Among those paying tribute to LaBeef online was singer-songwriter Deke Dickerson, who wrote, “Sleepy was one of the original ’50s rockabillies. He made excellent records for Starday, Mercury, Dixie and Wayside. In a way he was one of the first ’50s revivalists, cutting greasy rock and roll records all through the British Invasion years of the mid-’60s, but the truth was that Sleepy existed in a Gulf Coast world of rough bars and sleazy dives where the hard-driving ’50s rock and roll mixed with classic country never went away.”
 

A recent photo of Sleepy LaBeef
 

LaBeef was born July 20, 1935, in Smackover, Ark., the youngest of 10 children, and received his nickname “as the result of a lazy eye,” according to his Wikipedia entry. He moved to Houston at 18 and sang gospel music locally, before switching to rockabilly as that genre picked up in the mid-’50s. His first single, “I’m Through,” was issued on the Starday label in 1957, but although he released music prolifically from that point on, he never made the national Billboard pop chart. He did, however, place a couple of songs on the country chart—1968’s “Every Day,” which peaked at #73, and “Blackland Farmer,” which charted at #67 in 1971. He also recorded for the revived Sun label in the ’70s and Rounder in the ’80s. His popularity remained strong in Europe into his later years.
 

Related: Which first-generation rockers are still with us?

LaBeef was known as a great storyteller during his live performances. Bear Family Records released a collection, Sleepy Rocks, in 2008, and a documentary/concert DVD, Sleepy LaBeef Rides Again, was released in 2013.

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The following remembrances ran in our pages this year. 

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There’s no better Christmas listen than “From Spirituals to Swing”—two jazzy Yuletide concerts from the late 1930s, brought to you by John Hammond and the wise men and women of rhythm.

The Jazz Magi of Carnegie Hall

As a massive fan of both Christmas and jazz, it was inevitable, upon learning of From Spirituals to Swing—John Hammond’s two Yuletide dream-roster gigs in 1938 and 1939—that they would lodge in my imagination like Saint Nick himself. I was in college at the time, newly into jazz, passions once unknown and dormant within me actuated by this form of music that held so many other forms within it.

That last notion grabbed me especially, the idea that an idiom requiring highly specific and specialized skills—does any musician need to think faster than a jazz musician?—was also ecumenical. I liked the idea of churches whose doors were open to all, whose prevailing idea of faith was the possession of a large and open heart, rather than adherence to a single doctrine. And it was the recordings of these two concerts, my version of jazz Christmas, that brought this particular sleigh ride home for me.

It’s easy to lose sight of how radical these two concerts were in their time. That each fell under the heading of From Spirituals to Swing offers a clue. That title was a tacit acknowledgment of how closely linked church music—which itself was closely linked to the music of the fields—was with the mighty chops of, say, a band like the Count Basie Orchestra. That’s what I experienced when I listened to Basie’s tenor man Herschel Evans tear into a solo: I felt the earthiness, the straining, the assertion of the indefatigable nature of the self present in field hollers—a human cry of freedom.

Jazz in the 1930s was the ultimate melting pot music. It stirred in the blues, the Baptist church service, strands of Ives and Dvorak, vaudeville, Sousa, and Creole funeral airs. Hammond was an artists and repertoire (A&R) man, the musical equivalent of a baseball scout who sits up in the stands with pencil and notebook trying to ascertain which players on the local unprofessional squad have the get-up-and-go—and the pluck—to go big time. These musicians gigged, and so did Hammond, in his way, a scout who beat feet on pavement. He “discovered” Count Basie and Billie Holiday, facilitating their journeys from the club to generations of record players in a manner for which we all ought to be grateful. But back in 1938, Hammond courted a line of fire.

Both Spirituals to Swing concerts were held at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. This was a largely black group of performers, but a big mixed crowd was expected, which was, disturbingly, a no-no at the time. Carnegie Hall was the place for European classical traditions, and that meant it was a place for whiteness. Hammond was not having it.

He had an ally of sorts in the American Communist Party. Though not a member himself, he found that his ethical train of thought overlapped with theirs, at least nominally, when it came to equal rights for all. Buoyed financially by the Marxist New Masses journal, Hammond was able to put enough pressure on the powers that be that a concert, a kind of away-in-a-manger celebration of jazz, would be held on December 23, 1938, with another to follow on Christmas Eve 1939. You might say that when it came to jazz and spreading its joyous gospel of inclusion, Hammond was akin to a boogie-woogie loving Good King Wenceslas. That benevolent fellow went out into the snow to give alms to those in need. I like to think that Hammond, who was all but going door to door, spreading the word, via the music, of jazz, would have dug that deeply. And who does not need music like this?

Both shows were recorded, and Hammond later dubbed in canned intros in the 1950s. This is about as early as it gets for live jazz recordings, which makes it all the more remarkable that both of these festal gigs slot on the shortlist for canonical field recordings. The first concert was dedicated to Bessie Smith, who died the summer before. A quick perusal of the dramatis personae attests to just how popular boogie-woogie was at the time. Pianists Albert Ammons, Meade “Lux” Lewis, and Pete Johnson all do their rolling triplets, good-time thing, turning the old classical joint into a sweaty juke joint that probably lent some heat to the cold December streets outside. We get the blues, too, in Big Bill Broonzy, a man who did not leave us much other live material, plus Sonny Terry and a dream pairing of Joe Turner with Pete Johnson—big-barreled blues stretching out with the tidal push-and-pull engineered only by the most dexterous of the Woogie gods.

In another performance for the ages, Ammons jammed with Sister Rosetta Tharpe. If you didn’t yet understand how jazz fused the sacred with the secular to create its unique form of immersive inclusivity—for people with dreams in the sky and lives atop the soil—then this is the listening service station you needed to get to, and which you should carry yourself to posthaste in the present.

Still, there was no topping the Basie unit, which featured prime Herschel Evans and Lester Young (“Prez”), the greatest tenor frontline in music’s history. They were rivals, and there’s a thematic tension throughout the live recordings they left us, an element of sparring foils. But I love the kinship evident on this night. Both men knew what an important gig this was, that it not only symbolized making it in the music world, but the world at large, where injustice must be vanquished, and equality is the true criterion of having really made it. They knew they belonged on this stage, more than belonged, and together they jointly sermonized, secular-style, that here, a couple nights before Christmas 1938, Santa Claus had come to town. A month and a half later, Herschel Evans would be dead, aged 29.

When I hear Prez at the Christmas Eve 1939 concert, I imagine that Evans must have been on his mind. It was the same stage, almost the same date, during the season of reflection and giving. One great player was down another great player, who had competed with him to make him even greater. For all of the celebrated partnerships in jazz’s history—Trane and Dolphy, Miles and Trane, Bird and Diz, Evans and LaFaro, Ella and Louis—the Evans-Young match is my favorite, and easily the most competitive. In the 1939 concert, Young played his Christmas blues in a band dubbed the Kansas City Six, a sextet you’d love to awake and find under your garland-decked tree. The family may have been down a member, but it was still Christmas.

The big addition in 1939 was Charlie Christian, who was more shocking on the electric guitar in his time than Jimi Hendrix would be in his, almost 30 years later. As with Hendrix, guys on the scene wanted to hear Christian. The artists gathered in the wings to listen in as he played on the stage. He certainly had the right name for a gig like this, at a time like that. Freddie Green from the Basie band plays rhythm, leaving the lead work to Christian. He’s in dazzle-mode, and if the electric guitar sounded crude to some, sonically circumscribed, a gimmick, he might as well have played the roof off of that old hall, letting loose the possibilities he fashioned from his instrument with seemingly every chord.

Christian cascades, but he also pulls back, skips through ankle-deep rills, crests upon currents born from deep chest cavities of exclaimed human experience that just happen to utilize this guitar as all-communicative mouth, sounding board, both. Symbolism is at play. The amalgamated style of music, involving so many other forms of music—which these two gigs served as a veritable workshop to experiment with—has come home to roost in strings, machine heads, sound hole.

The symbolism is advanced a symbol further with Christian joining Lionel Hampton on vibes, Fletcher Henderson at the piano, and Benny Goodman on clarinet for an integrated—in so many ways, with skin color being just one of them—jam session. This was not a band you heard every day, and it wasn’t one you would hear again without the recordings made from this particular Christmas story. So, behold. This is jazz’s star in the night, and these wise men and women knew how to bear, share, and celebrate the best of gifts.

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RIP at 85:  vocalist-actor Edward “Ed” Reed Battle Jr.

August 8, 1934, Bridgetown, NJ to December 26, Denver, CO

One of Denver’s most admired and beloved musicians and actors was the veteran vocalist Ed Battle.  Born into a family of singers in the small southern New Jersey town of Bridgetown in 1934, Ed was raised across the Delaware River in Philadelphia where he began singing as a youngster in the family’s church where many jazz musicians attended services.  When at home there was always a gathering around the family piano where everyone would take turns singing. When not singing with the family Edward would have his ears glued to the radio listening to the swingin’ big bands of the ear as well as the popular vocal harmony groups like the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers. Moreover, Ed became a fan of vocalists Billy Eckstine and Herb Jeffries. Battle’s family didn’t encourage Ed to sing jazz, but several jazz musicians did. In high school, Ed sang choral music and would sneak into the many jazz clubs in Philadelphia while hanging out future jazz stand outs such as trombonist Al Grey, guitarist Tiny Grimes and bass man Reggie Workman among others. After he graduated from high school Ed moved to Chicago to attend the Roy Knapp School of Percussion. Upon graduating he returned to Philadelphia and commenced dinging jazz in earnest with the jazz vocal group The Skylighters which led to his first recording session, a self-titled LP for the Epic label.
 

In 1972, Battle chose to move to Denver to live with his cousin, soon thereafter Ed became the lead vocalist for the Horace Henderson Combo which had a huge following, Horace was the brother of the famous big band leader, Fletcher Henderson. After Horace passed away in 1988, Ed became the house vocalist at the legendary El Chapultepec, at that time the ‘Pec was the hangout for visiting out-of-town jazz musicians to jam. When not at the ‘Pec, Ed started to act in stage productions and musicals which led him to tour the US with the Cleo Parker-Robinson Troupe, the Bonfils Theater and others. Battle also made appearances in various films shot in part in Denver. Of note was his role in 1996’s Almost Blue, a film about a jazz saxophonist. Ed was the longtime vocalist for Sam Biven’s Denver Municipal Big Band and often performed at the well-known Dick Gibson House Parties. Throughout the 2000s Ed has continued to sing and act around Denver and has served as a mentor to many young vocalists. In 2012, Ed Battle received a lifetime achievement award at the Annual Five Points Jazz Festival.
 

Ed’s amazing 2015 2-set show at Dazzle was recorded, remastered and released earlier this month by Michael Fitts of Synergy Music and it became KUVO Jazz’s December 2019 CD of the Month. Ed’s majestic baritone voice is heard accompanied by Jeff Jenkins-Hammond B-3, Dave Corbus-guitar, Neil Hemphill-drums and Peter Sommer-tenor saxophone. The 13-song set recorded in front of an enthusiastic audience on a cold January night spotlights the great ability of Ed to tell a story through song, hence the title Tiger By the Tale.

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Will Friedwald 

Dec. 26, 2019 4:10 pm ET

New York

“Harry Connick Jr. —A Celebration of Cole Porter, ” which is now playing at the Nederlander Theater, combines elements of a concert, a one-man cabaret show (of the kind usually found in supper clubs like Feinstein’s), and musical theater. It also makes copious use of multimedia (photographic images and video), and opens with a mostly CGI-animated film of Mr. Connick entering a Statue of Liberty-size likeness of the legendary songwriter, in which he explores Porter’s creative process from within.

But there’s not a didactic preponderance of biographical bullet points: Mr. Connick only lightly touches on Porter’s Yale education, his reputation as an irrepressible party animal, the soul-crunching burden he carried as a closeted gay man, and the riding accident that left him unable to walk for much of his life. This “Celebration” never becomes one of those talk-heavy cabaret shows where the patter becomes more important than the music.

And despite Mr. Connick’s vividly illustrated wish to get into Porter’s head, the 90-minute Broadway show (which plays until December 29) and the accompanying album, “True Love: A Celebration of Cole Porter” (his 26th release and his first for Verve Records), tell us just as much about the performer as about the songwriter.

Indeed, the project is a true meeting of two multitalented individuals accustomed to wearing multiple hats: the Peru, Ind.-born Porter as both composer and lyricist; the New Orleans-born Mr. Connick as star singer, piano soloist, arranger and orchestrator, and director. The album itself is Mr. Connick’s most successful set of standards from the Great American Songbook, and his first songbook package celebrating a single songwriter.

Some of Mr. Connick’s new interpretations are quite radical. “True Love” was famously introduced in the 1956 movie musical “High Society” as a low-key intimate waltz—here, Mr. Connick reimagines it as bright, brassy and swinging, like most of the rest of the album, and in a distinct 4/4 time signature. Likewise, “So In Love,” a dark, inwardly directed torch song in “Kiss Me Kate,” is now delivered in the show (the song did not make it on to the album) as a high-octane swinger of an encore, illuminated by brightly colored searchlights. 

Yet most of the time Mr. Connick doesn’t substantially change any fundamental aspects of the songs so much as reanimate them—his way of putting a distinctive stamp on classics that have, for the most part, been played and sung, arranged and rearranged a thousand times over. This isn’t the only way Mr. Connick knows how to operate; his charts on the 2009 Grammy nominee “Your Songs,” a set of mostly more contemporary standards, are considerably more subdued. But here, the arrangements are as shiny and gaudy as the baubles and beads hurled from parade floats during Mardi Gras.

On the album, “Begin the Beguine” is a vehicle for the Connick keyboard, in which Porter’s bolero-based melody is cocooned within a boogie-woogie vamp reminiscent of Meade Lux Lewis’s “Honky Tonk Train Blues.” On Broadway, it remains an instrumental showcase for piano—one that also includes sequences on screen and off with Mr. Connick encountering Porter as embodied by dancer Luke Hawkins. The two timestep atop a giant piano, or, more accurately, Mr. Connick plays it while simultaneously dancing around it. Another sequence has Mr. Connick using projections to guide us step by step through the orchestration process, offering the verse to “Night and Day” as an illustration.

Apart from Porter himself, the most obvious inspiration for the project is Frank Sinatra, who first showed the world, 60 to 70 years ago, how even Porter’s most sophisticated ballads could be swung with a Basie-esque jazz beat. In his early days, Mr. Connick was promoted (not his idea) as a young Sinatra, though he didn’t sound like Sinatra and, in fact, his strength was more modern standards, as well as other pursuits, like Dixieland jazz and New Orleans-style funk. It’s only with this current album, and show, that Mr. Connick has truly come into his own as a first-tier singer of the American Songbook, someone to be mentioned in the same breath as Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole.

At its best, Broadway’s “A Celebration of Cole Porter” is like Sinatra’s trend-setting “Man and His Music” specials of 1965-1969 and the Elvis Presley “comeback” special of 1968. There’s a ballad sequence set in a gloomy hotel room, featuring torchy renditions of “All of You” and “In the Still of the Night,” and another that takes place in a Preservation Hall-type venue where Mr. Connick performs a New Orleans-style version of “I Love Paris” with the ebullient saxophonist Jerry Weldon.

No less than three songs here were composed for the most celebrated Porter/Sinatra collaboration, the 1956 film “High Society,” including “Mind If I Make Love to You.” That song shows how only Porter could write a text about erotic love that included a casual expression more characteristically employed when making dinner reservations (“I’ll endeavor to persuade you / I’m your party-for-two”). Mr. Connick’s delivery of that lyric, and both the album and the show on the whole, illustrate how he “gets” Cole Porter better than any other mainstream pop star since the halcyon days of Sinatra.

—Mr. Friedwald writes about music and popular culture for the Journal.

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The Ukrainian National Chorus in Buenos Aires in 1923.

Courtesy of Oseredok, the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre, Winnipeg

A group of men and women in traditional embroidered dress took the stage at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 5, 1922, for a performance that the New York Tribune dubbed “a marvel of technical skill.” The New York Times called the music they made “simply spontaneous in origin and artistically harmonized.” The New York Herald described the costume-clad singers as expressing “a profound unanimity of feeling that aroused genuine emotion among the listeners.” The audience that cheered for encores and threw flowers on the stage didn’t know it at the time, but they had just heard what would eventually become one of the world’s most beloved and recognized Christmas songs: “Carol of the Bells.”

Onstage was the Ukrainian National Chorus conducted by Alexander Koshetz. At the end of Part 1 of the program at Carnegie Hall, they performed composer Mykola Leontovych’s arrangement of a traditional Ukrainian song the playbill called “Shtshedryk.” The audience likely also did not know that just over a year before the New York premiere, Leontovych had been assassinated by the Cheka—the Bolshevik secret police.

The song’s journey onto the world’s stage and its transformation into an American Christmas classic is a tale of musical inspiration, nationalism, and political violence. At its center is a beautiful, haunting melody that has captivated audiences for over a hundred years and spawned countless versions.

“There are many people who don’t know it’s Ukrainian, I think the majority,” says Larisa Ivchenko, head of the music department at the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv. When I visited in 2017, Ivchenko had spread out photographs, sheet music, and program tour brochures that are part of the archive’s collection. A photo dated 1919 from Prague shows the chorus, then known as the Ukrainian Republican Kapelle. In the photograph, a group of almost 80 people are posed without smiling—the men wearing black suits and the women in white dresses.

The chorus had just set off on a world tour that would take them across 10 countries in Europe over three years and then to North America where they’d sing widely across the U.S., including small towns far from the glitz of Carnegie Hall. In the U.S. alone, they visited 36 states and 115 cities, according to a countby Tina Peresunko, a researcher at the Ukrainian Institute of Archeography and Source Studies. “Shchedryk,” as it is more accurately spelled, was the standout “hit” from the chorus’ repertoire according to concert reviews and the conductor Koshetz’s own reaction recorded in his memoirs, she adds.

“There are many people who don’t know it’s Ukrainian, I think the majority.” — Larisa Ivchenko

“When they came over to America it would have been sort of this curiosity of interesting, exotic songs,” says Marika Kuzma, a professor emerita in the Department of Music at the University of California–Berkeley.

An article in the New York Times heralded the group’s arrival by boat in late September, “50 RUSSIAN SINGERS LAND IN GAY DRESS.” While the article praised the singers, it also reflected the attitudes of the time. The Times performance review described the singers in “motley costumes” with “gaudy” headdresses singing “primitive peasant airs” of the “six provinces of ‘Little’ or Southern Russia.” Conflation and confusion between Russia and Ukraine irritated the Ukrainian chorus who would correct reporters, according to archival material collected by Peresunko.

The review concluded that the music of “Ukrainia” did suggest “the colossal wealth of youthful and untouched vitality which had tided over centuries of the most tragic history in the world.”

The Ukrainian Republican Kapelle with conductor Alexander Koshetz in Prague in 1919.

Courtesy of the Central State Archives of Higher Authorities and Administration of Ukraine (Kyiv).

During her 25 years directing choirs, Kuzma taught “Shchedryk” to her students at Berkeley. “It’s curious to me how it really morphed into this different context and how much people don’t know what the carol is about,” she says.

Dating back to pagan times, Ukrainians sung shchedrivky, songs welcoming the start of the new year with hundreds of versions, including ones devoted to bears and bees, says Valentyna Kuzyk, a senior researcher at the Rylskyi Institute of Art, Folklore Studies and Ethnology in Ukraine.

Leontovych drew inspiration from Ukrainian folk songs and melodies as a composer, choral conductor, and also a teacher. He was born in 1877 to a religious family in the Podilia region of southwestern Ukraine and completed studies at a theological seminary. His musical career would take him across the region he called home as well as to Kyiv, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. Besides “Shchedryk,” he produced over 150 other classic works for choirs during a career that was cut short.

Leontovych worked for several years on his arrangement and orchestration of “Shchedryk.” It’s likely the song’s famous four-note tune started from a version he would have heard during his childhood in Podilia, Kuzyk says. Leontovych sent his arrangement to choir conductor Koshetz in August 1916 and several months later, a choir in Kyiv premiered the song.

The Ukrainian version has nothing to do with bells or Christmas. The lyrics tell the tale of a swallow summoning the master of the house to look at his livestock and the bounty the coming spring season will bring as well as to look at his beautiful dark-eyebrowed wife. In pre-Christian times, the coming of the new year and spring were celebrated in March.

“Shchedryk” came to prominence in its current version during a tumultuous and bloody period. The Romanov dynasty, which then ruled a vast part of Ukraine, fell in March 1917 and for a brief moment, an independent Ukrainian state—the Ukrainian People’s Republic—was declared in 1918. Symon Petliura, the president, saw the value in promoting Ukrainian culture around the world to gain support for his fledgling state. And it was in this window that the chorus, under Koshetz’s leadership, embarked on its tour.

While touring in Europe with the support of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the choir would pass out brochures with the symbols of their new country and sing what is today Ukraine’s national anthem, according to Persesunko’s research.

“Shchedryk” came to prominence in its current version during a tumultuous and bloody period.

By 1921, the short-lived People’s Republic had fallen. “During the interwar period (1918–1939), the Ukrainians emerged as the largest nation in Europe with an unresolved national question,” writes Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy in The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. “Ukraine lacked a state of its own, and four European states had divided its territories: Bolshevik Russia, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.” An independent Ukraine wouldn’t reemerge until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The choir left Ukraine during a period of great turmoil. The Cheka, which later evolved into the KGB, killed thousands in an effort to build and consolidate Bolshevik rule in a period (1918–1922) that became known as the Red Terror. The head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, brought 1,400 men into Ukraine to deal with unrest. In the first half of 1921, they killed 444 rural rebel leaders in Ukraine alone, according to Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine. Ukraine’s intellectual class and religious leaders were also targets.

This included the composer of “Shchedryk.” On the night of Jan. 23, 1921, in the village of Markivka, Leontovych was shot by Afanasy Grishchenko, who is described as an “agent” in a Soviet document. Leontovych had been staying at his father’s house when Grishchenko asked for shelter for the night. He shot Mykola Leontovych with a rifle, according to the archival document, and a few days later also shot and wounded a policeman.

While there has been speculation that the incident may have been a robbery, Kuzyk says, “This was a political matter.” She believes that Leontovych was targeted because of his association with the recently established Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.

A playbill of the Ukrainian National Chorus’ concert tour of U.S. cities and universities in October–December 1922.

Courtesy of the Central State Archives of Higher Authorities and Administration of Ukraine (Kyiv).

While their country was in turmoil, the chorus was still touring. With support from the now-defunct Ukrainian People’s Republic drying up, the tour took on a more commercial flavor. Over a year after Leontovych’s death, the choir came to New York under the management of Max Rabinoff, a Russian-born impresario who worked in the music and business worlds and had seen the choir perform in five countries.

According to legend, in the audience that night at Carnegie Hall was a man named Peter Wilhousky—who would go on to write the famous English lyrics about “sweet silver bells” ringing “ding dong ding dong.” Wilhousky was a classically trained choral director and music administrator in New York public schools.

Born in Passaic, New Jersey, Wilhousky attended the Russian Cathedral Choir School in New York as a child along with his siblings. He studied at Juilliard and later spent several years teaching there, according to archivist Jeni Farah.

“He came from a family with an intense interest in music,” reads Wilhousky’s 1978 obituary in the New York Times.

Wilhousky’s family was typical of the early parishioners at Saints Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Passaic, having immigrated from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is today part of northeastern Slovakia, said the Rev. Stephen Kaznica, a priest at the church. His family was of Carpatho-Rusyn heritage, and it was likely that Wilhousky would have spoken Rusyn—a regional language from Western Ukraine—at home and also learned Russian at school, Kaznica said.

Wilhousky worked with Italian composer Arturo Toscanini for NBC Symphony broadcasts; his arrangement of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” remains another of his most famous works. He also left a mark on his students, “He was one of the finest choral conductors in America, yet he chose to spend every Saturday morning with high-school kids,” wrote Stephen Jay Gould, a professor of geology at Harvard, in a 1988 New York Times piece recalling his time under Wilhousky’s direction.

Archivists and historians haven’t been able to substantiate whether or not Wilhousky was in the audience to hear the Ukrainian National Chorus at Carnegie Hall. It’s possible he also heard a recording made by the chorus for Brunswick Records that same year. His own version, with new lyrics and a new title—“Carol of the Bells”—was published and copyrighted in 1936 by Carl Fischer Music in New York.

“It just took off, it was incredible,” said Vera Forbes, Wilhousky’s niece, by phone in 2017 of her uncle’s version. Forbes, who herself was in show business and sang for many years, died in 2018.

Forbes recalled hearing the original “Shchedryk” sung when she was a child. Her memories of Christmastime include all the churches ringing their bells at midnight—something that may have inspired her uncle. Wilhousky had “a high voice, a fantastic voice,” Forbes said.

Forbes knew the song had reached commercial prominence when her husband called her to the television asking if a champagne ad was using her uncle’s song. “Uncle Peter is the guy who made ‘Carol of the Bells’ so popular,” she said.

“It’s used all the time. I can’t begin to tell you how many times it’s used,” saidJay Berger, manager for licensing and copyright at Carl Fischer Music/Theodore Presser Company. Christmas starts in July for Berger—with advertising companies deciding whether they will license “Carol of the Bells” for commercials and movie productions, he said.

“Carol of the Bells” is memorably used in Home Alone as Macaulay Culkin booby-traps his home. The Muppets tried their hand at singing it, too. It’s been in commercials for everything from André sparkling wine to Audi. In one memorable NBA promo from 2012, a lineup of basketball stars dribble the melody.

Other musicians have put their own touches on the tune from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and even a sultry sounding version by Destiny’s Child with Beyoncé. One of the most popular on YouTube, with over 149 million views, is a recent update by the a capella group Pentatonix. The artists singing these versions likely have little idea of the song’s tragic history.

There is still deep reverence for the original “Shchedryk” in Ukraine, Ivchenko said. While the song is being used in some commercials now, they are not Christmas ones, but for New Year’s. New versions are also being made in Ukraine, including a popular cartoon video by Ukrainian musician Oleg Skrypka and singer Tina Karol recording a popular video.

In recent years in Ukraine, there has been an effort to tell the story of the famous song. A museum dedicated to Leontovych’s life was updated in the town of Tulchyn where he spent his later years, and a festival celebrating the song took place there earlier this year.

While the Ukrainian chorus saw members come and go, those who finished the tour never returned to Ukraine and instead settled in the North America, Kuzyk says.

“You could be 5 years old or 95 years old. Everyone knows ‘Carol of the Bells,’ ” Berger says. “It has legs that last forever and forever and ever.”

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Hartford Courant |

Dec 21, 2019 | 6:00 AM 

| Wethersfield

Wethersfield, Ct. – 12/20/2019 – Customer Ken Sarges consults with Ed Krech in the record bins of Krech’s Integrity “n Music, a record store that is closing in January after being in business for 48 years “We have an expert here,” said Sarges who said talking about music with Krech brough value to visiting the store that could not be matched by shopping for music online. Photograph by Mark Mirko | mmirko@courant.com (Mark Mirko / Hartford Courant)

Ed Krech was a survivor.

His Integrity ‘N Music store in Wethersfield survived competition from the big box music stores, bookstores and department stores. He survived the internet and eBay. But he couldn’t survive iTunes and Spotify.

After 48 years in the business, Krech is closing his Silas Deane store that has become a sort of pilgrimage for many customers still enjoying the experience of listening to records on the turntable, tapes or rare CDs – all at a bargain price.

“I’m going to miss it for sure,” Krech said Friday, as he opened up his store for a half-dozen customers who trickled in over the first hour. “It has become more of a hobby for me now. I haven’t really made any profit over the past few years. I’ve kind of been doing it for the love of music. This has been pretty much my life.”

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What Is This?

Wethersfield, Ct. – 12/20/2019 – 36-Year-old Massachusetts musician John Beaudette talks with Ed Krech of Integrity ‘n Music while buying music in Krech’s Intergrity ‘n Music. After 48 years, the store where customers still purchase LP’s, CD’s and tapes is going the way of the corner pharmacy and Main Street movie house and closing its doors in January. Photograph by Mark Mirko | mmirko@courant.com (Mark Mirko / Hartford Courant)

The year was 1972 and Krech was a computer programmer stuck in a cubicle at Travelers insurance company. After a few months, he and a friend left the corporate world and opened a storefront alternative record store that specialized in rock and his beloved jazz. He notes he bought a house one week and opened a store the next.

Over the years, the store specialized in mostly jazz and would buy and sell new and used CDs, vinyl albums and tapes for cash or store credit. The “bricks and mortar” music store, as Krech calls it, also special ordered and shipped anything as Krech guided music lovers with his extensive knowledge. That’s something you can’t get streaming or on Amazon, according to customer Ken Sarges.

“It’s a lost art, it really is,” he said. “We have an expert here who knows his music and someone who understands the business that you can talk to and give you an explanation. I’m heartbroken. The man has a passion for this. He knows his history and you could easily talk to him for hours. It’s old school. It’s a loss. It really is. The hunt [for music] really makes it a lot of fun.”

Wethersfield, Ct. – 12/20/2019 – Black and white photographs of jazz giants (from left) John Coltrane, J.J. Johnson, Art Blakey and Gerry Mulligan, Ed Krech sorts through CD’s in bins of his Integrity “n Music. Krech is shuttering his store in January after 48 years. Customers can still purchase CDs, tapes and vinyl records and the store has hosted concerts by young jazz musicians for more than 20 years. Photograph by Mark Mirko | mmirko@courant.com (Mark Mirko / Hartford Courant)

For John Beaudette, nothing can compare to taking an album out of its sleeve and placing it on a turntable or reading every word on an album cover.

“I’ve been collecting vinyl my whole life,” he said. “I prefer it. It’s just the process of physically holding an album and putting a needle on it rather than clicking something on a phone. It’s an experience.”

For Krech, 75, the store has been a labor of love originally opening six days a week (no Sundays) which have now been pared down to five. And jazz music plays over the speakers all day long with occasional jazz concerts at nights for the past 20 years. He doesn’t really have a preference between vinyl or CDs or digital.

“Good music is good music even if it has ticks or pops in it,” he said.

Wethersfield, Ct. – 12/20/2019 – A record catalog is still available for customers to search for published music in Ed Krech’s Integrity “n Music. Krech is shuttering his store in January after 48 years. Customers can still purchase CDs, tapes and vinyl records in the store that also has hosted concerts by young jazz musicians for more than 20 years. Photograph by Mark Mirko | mmirko@courant.com (Mark Mirko / Hartford Courant)

It’s the jazz music that has kept him going as he talks starry-eyed about New Orleans and New York City and proudly points to the photos of famous musicians and a jazz history family tree poster on the wall. All of it will start to come down on Jan. 2 when the going-out-of-business sale begins. He expects to shutter everything by Jan. 24. There will be two more live jazz concerts on Jan. 4 and 11 beginning at 2 p.m. Dozens of young jazz musicians have played at the store for the past 20 years.

“I just loved being here and having music playing and people coming in here to find some of their favorites or listening to the live music being played. I just loved everything about it. I’ll miss it. But it was time. There have been a lot of good memories. That’s all I can say.”

Peter Marteka can be reached at pmarteka@courant.com.

Peter Marteka covers the town of Glastonbury for The Hartford Courant. He also writes the award-winning “Nature” column that runs each Sunday. Each week, he explores a preserve or state park – something off the beaten path – and brings that to readers in a column along with a photo gallery that runs online.

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Jazz Unlimited host and producer Dennis Owsley will retire from St. Louis Public Radio—with his final show airing December 29—ending his 36-year legacy of presenting jazz on KWMU. Throughout his time with the station he has produced over 1,800 scripted jazz radio shows, playing music largely from his own collection, and sharing his immense knowledge of jazz music history.

“Dennis has had an amazing career and made a huge impact in the St. Louis jazz community,” said St. Louis Public Radio General Manager Tim Eby. “We are so grateful to him for his more than 36 years of service sharing his passion for jazz music with listeners.”

Owsley has been a jazz album collector, aficionado and historian since 1958. During his time as host of Jazz Unlimited, he was named a “Jazz Hero of St. Louis” by the Jazz Journalists Association and chosen as a recipient for St. Louis Public Radio’s Millard S. Cohen Lifetime Achievement Award. Jazz Unlimited was named “Best Jazz Show” in the Riverfront Times’ annual Best in St. Louis Awards six times. A “Dennis Owsley Day” was proclaimed in 2008 by the mayor of St. Louis.

Owsley has published two books, the award-winning City of Gabriels—The Jazz History of St. Louis 1895-1973 (2006) and St. Louis Jazz—A History (2019). He has presented 37 lectures, published 22 essays in St. Louis Magazine, given 14 adult education classes on jazz, produced five jazz concerts and presented three jazz and photography concerts with Carolbeth True and vocalist Erika Johnson. 

Owsley also has an international reputation as a photographer of jazz musicians. He co-curated exhibitions of his jazz photography at the Sheldon Art Galleries in 2005 and 2006. Archives of his historic photographs and interviews with jazz musicians are available at stlpublicradio.org. 

While Jazz Unlimited will come to an end, jazz music will continue on 90.7 KWMU-1 on Sunday nights from 9 to midnight. We also offer a 24/7 jazz stream and HD radio channel, Jazz KWMU-2, and are dedicated to continuing Owsley’s legacy of sharing jazz with the St. Louis community and beyond.

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Glen Barros is leaving his role as Concord’s Chief Operating Officer on December 31.

According to an announcement from Concord, the exec is exiting the company in order to form a new business venture entitled Exceleration Music.

Through this new venture, Barros plans to invest in music rights while “providing strategic services to third party entities, primarily within the independent music community”.

His first investment, which Concord says has been made with its blessing, will be the acquisition of London-based jazz label, Candid Records.

According to a statement from Concord, Barros and the remaining Concord executive team are “exploring further ways in which Concord and Exceleration may collaborate on future business initiatives”.

Barros’ history with Concord began 25 years ago when, in December 1994, as a 28-year-old executive with Alliance Entertainment, he closed a deal to purchase the Concord Jazz label from its founder, Carl Jefferson.

“I am eternally grateful for all that I’ve experienced over the past twenty-five years at Concord and for the company’s help in allowing me to launch Exceleration Music.”

Glen Barros

Barros assumed the role of President & CEO for Concord Jazz when Jefferson passed away a few months later. From that point forward, Barros implemented a strategy that saw the company grow from a traditional jazz label into Concord Music Group, one of the largest independent music companies in the world today.

In 2015, Concord Music Group merged with independent music publisher Bicycle Music. Barros became COO of the new company in 2017 after its acquisition of Imagem Music Group, at which time Concord Music Group, Bicycle and Imagem divisions were all consolidated under the Concord name.

Scott Pascucci, Concord’s Chief Executive Officer, commented, “It’s been my privilege to work with Glen for almost seven years. The care and passion with which he led and grew Concord Music Group for decades has carried on into the current Concord and will surely continue after his departure. We are thankful for his dedication to the company and look forward to collaborating with him in the future.”

“The care and passion with which Glen led and grew Concord Music Group for decades has carried on into the current Concord and will surely continue after his departure.”

Scott Pascucci, Concord

Glen Barros stated, “I am eternally grateful for all that I’ve experienced over the past twenty-five years at Concord and for the company’s help in allowing me to launch Exceleration Music. It’s been an amazing ride and Concord will forever be in my heart. While leaving is incredibly difficult, I know that Concord is in great hands and will undoubtedly continue to flourish long into the future. When I look forward to my new venture, I’m tremendously excited by the prospect of using my past experiences to help others achieve their strategic goals in the future. And I find it very fitting that I begin this second act of my career the same way that I started the first one…with a great jazz label.”

Exceleration Music will commence operations when it closes its transaction to buy Candid Records from its current owners, Alan and Nieves Bates, on January 1, 2020.

The Candid catalog includes recordings from jazz and blues greats such as Charles Mingus, Abbey Lincoln, Otis Spann, Max Roach and Memphis Slim, as well as more contemporary records from artists such as Stacey Kent, Jamie Cullum, Kenny Barron and Kyle Eastwood.

[Pic credit: Beth Herzhaft]Music Business Worldwide

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1:34 PM PST 12/17/2019 by Mike Barnes

Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Emil Richards worked on the score for 2004’s ‘Spider-Man 2’ at Sony Studios.

Emil Richards, the famed percussionist, vibraphone specialist and L.A. session player who performed with Frank Sinatra, George Harrison, Frank Zappa and scores of other greats and beat the bongos on the Mission: Impossible theme song, has died. He was 87.

Richards died Friday, his daughter, Camille Radocchia Hecks, announced on Facebook.

“My dad had a saying, ‘As in music, as in life,” she wrote. “He lived and loved as he played: fully, deeply, with endless creativity, humor, discipline and spirituality. He never missed a beat. As Emil would say, ‘Good Vibes!'”

Richards, who considered Lionel Hampton to be a major influence on his career, was a session musician for the fabled Wrecking Crew in Los Angeles and played on thousands of recordings during his career.

He worked with the likes of Shorty Rogers, Judy Garland, Charles Mingus, Elvis Presley, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, Stan Kenton, Julie London, Ella Fitzgerald, Dick Dale, Sam Cooke, The Carpenters, Marvin Gaye, Dave Mason, The Monkees, Harry Nilsson, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Burt Bacharach, Michael Jackson, The Beach Boys, Glen Campbell and Luciano Pavarotti.

“My ideal situation for a session would be playing the hardest mallet parts conceivable,” he once said. “I like to go home exhausted from playing good, hard music. By hard I mean difficult, because it’s a challenge. I love a challenge.”

The innovative sonic expressionist did the finger-snapping on Vic Mizzy’s theme song for The Addams Family (“Yes, that was me — the clicks and the whole bit,” he admitted) and did the xylophone parts on The Simpsons‘ opening tune for Danny Elfman, who once called Richards “an irreplaceable original.”

Richards made his Hollywood debut when he was hired by Alfred Newman for The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), and he would team up with many members of the composer’s esteemed family, all the way from Lionel Newman to David Newman, Thomas Newman and Randy Newman. 

While recording the percolating Mission: Impossible theme in 1966 for composer Lalo Schifrin, Richards realized he had made a mistake and insisted the musicians do it all over again. “The French-horn players were real bummed at me — their lips were tired,” Richards told NPR in 2011. But it was worth it, he said. “That Mission: Impossible played for so many years. Had I listened to myself play a really bad mistake, I couldn’t have stood that.” 

In addition to Schifrin and Elfman, Richards was a regular collaborator with several other great movie composers, from Max Steiner, Jerry Goldsmith and Henry Mancini to John Williams, Elmer Bernstein and James Newton Howard.

Richards also toured with Harrison and played on four of the former Beatle’s albums, starting with 1974’s Dark Horse. Earlier, he traveled with Zappa’s Electric Symphony and performed on his 1968 album Lumpy Gravy.

Richards was in the orchestra pit for more than two dozen Oscar telecasts and often was onstage with comedian Lenny Bruce. “Lenny would get arrested almost every weekend for his risque language, but he loved musicians and always wanted a jazz group playing behind his act,” he wrote in his 2013 memoir, Wonderful World of Percussion, My Life Behind Bars.

The son of Italian immigrants, Emilio Joseph Radocchia was born on Sept. 2, 1932, in Hartford, Connecticut. His first encounter with the xylophone came at an early age, he recalled in a 1982 interview with Modern Drummer magazine. 

“My brother was 9 and I was 6,” he said. “He had been begging my father for an accordion and my father made the mistake of taking me with them to the music store. When he bought my brother the accordion, I cried; naturally, I wanted something, too. Finally, he said, ‘Well, what do you want?’ I immediately pointed to the first thing I saw, which was a xylophone. So for $60 we got a xylophone and six months’ worth of lessons.”

By the time he was in the 10th grade, Richards was performing with the Hartford Symphony, and he soon expanded his expertise to include the marimba and vibes (of all the instruments he played, the latter was his “real love”). He then attended the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford from 1949-52, studying with timpanist Al Lepak.

After being drafted and playing in the U.S. Army band in Japan for two years (he performed with pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi during his stay), Richards spent three years touring with George Shearing and his jazz quintet starting in 1954.

He arrived in Los Angeles in 1959 and worked with flautist Paul Horn, trumpeter Don Ellis and composer Harry Partch — known for building many of his own instruments — before launching his own group, the Microtonal Blues Band.

Richards appeared onscreen as a percussionist in The Nutty Professor (1963) and went on to contribute sounds to notable films including the Planet of the Apes movies, The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Grand Prix (1966), Ice Station Zebra (1968), The French Connection (1971), Dirty Harry(1971), Chinatown (1974), Jaws (1975), Taxi Driver (1976), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), The Stunt Man (1980), Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Toy Story (1995), Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Ratatouille (2007).

While on a 1962 world tour with Sinatra to raise money for children’s charities, Richards began collecting percussion instruments from faraway places like Switzerland, Egypt, Thailand and India. His stash would grow to more than 700 pieces.

“I’m still trying to learn them all,” he said in an undated interview on the Percussive Arts Society website. “Each one is a lifetime study. One of the newest instruments I’ve got is an Array mbira, which is a five-octave thumb piano, and I also got a two-octave marimba that has bars made from stone roof tiles, which really gets an unusual sound.”

Inducted into the Percussive Arts Society’s Hall of Fame in 1984, Richards donated 65 of his instruments to its museum in Lawton, Oklahoma, when it was built in 1992. But before that, he worked for Schifrin on the 1971 film The Hellstrom Chronicle.

The movie was about insects, and “considering that we don’t know what the insects hear, I decided to ‘invent’ their audio world,” the composer wrote in the foreword to Wonderful World of Percussion. “In order to do so, I needed Emil Richards to provide me with many of his instruments.

“We decided to meet at his home, where most of those instruments were part of the decor of the house and the garden and hanging in the patio — for example, wind chimes, African bells, Korean thumb pianos and many more. When I finished the project, Emil was telling everybody that ‘Lalo is playing my house.'”

With his second wife, Celeste, Richards co-authored a series of books about making music and musical instruments from commonly found objects. (In his Modern Drummer chat, he said he “could happily spend the rest of my life just shaking a tin can.”) And he never stopped studying.

“You have to be a student until you die,” he said, “because your whole lifetime spent trying to be proficient is not enough.”

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I was sad to read on The Quietus today that Moog pioneer Gershon Kingsley—best known for composing the worldwide novelty smash “Popcorn”—died in his Manhattan apartment on December 10th. He was 97 years old.

One half of Perrey and Kingsley with Jean-Jacques Perrey, their two best-selling albums of the mid-60s, The In Sound from Way Out and Kaleidoscopic Vibrations introduced the sound of electronic music to the masses. Their “Baroque Hoedown” provided the music for Disneyland’s “Main Street Electrical Parade” attraction (a fact actually unknown to Perrey until 1980). Their “Electronic Can-Can” became the theme music for the Wonderamachildren’s program of the early 1970s and the popular 70s game show The Joker’s Wild used their track “The Savers” as its instantly recognizable title tune. (On his own, Kingsley would compose the famous station ident music for WGBH, the PBS station in Boston which was well-known to 70s viewers of Zoom and The French Chef.)
 
Gershon Kingsley, left, and Jean-Jacques Perrey
 
Kingsley conducted several Broadway musicals and composed for film, including 1972’s proto-slasher Silent Night, Bloody Night and the Oliver Stone co-produced softcore crime drama Sugar Cookies the following year. He also worked on TV commercials and was the winner of two Clio awards. 
 
 
Although Kingsley’s compositions were wildly eclectic and varied from poppy novelty songs to funky weirdness, he also produced religious music, but with his own twist. His “Shabbat for Today” was an attempt to fuse traditional Jewish religious music with a more contemporary avant-garde sound, to draw in younger people to temple. The “Shabbat” utilized, of course, the then-futuristic electronic instrument Kingsley helped make famous, the Moog Synthesizer. A televised excerpt from “Shabbat for Today” was broadcast on PBS in 1971, conducted by the composer, and featuring cantor Ephraim Biran, Rabbi Gunter Hirschberg, narrator Alfred Drake and Kenneth Bichel on the Moog Modular.
 
 
In 1999, I was invited by Mr. Kingsley to hear his “Shabbat for Today” performed in a synagogue in Manhattan and it was a wonderful experience. I am pretty sure that recital was held in the same synagogue seen in the video below, Temple Rodeph Shalom, located on the Upper West Side. A compilation of Kingsley’s religious compositions, God is a Moog: The Electronic Prayers of Gershon Kingsley was released in 2006.  

  There are several Perrey & Kingsley numbers and two lesser known pieces by Kingsley on a long out of print CD I compiled for Sony titled Best Of Moog: Electronic Pop Hits From The 60’s & 70’s  

If you like “Shaft,” you’ll love “Shank”?  

“Hey, Hey” sounds like a rejected James Bond theme from 1967, does it not?  

“Popcorn”

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