Category: people

“Herbie Mann, the versatile jazz flutist who combined many musical styles and deeply influenced genres such as world music and fusion, died late Tuesday. He was 73… Mann will be remembered for playing different styles of jazz and then combining them. He did bebop and cool jazz, and toured Africa, Brazil and Japan searching for new sounds.”

By all the usual measures, the rapper Eminem should be despised by the cultural elite. His lyrics are violent, misogynistic, and homophobic, and he has systematically dismissed all suggestions that a musician with his talent doesn’t need the bigoted gimmickry to make it big. So how is it that young Marshall Mathers has come to be hailed as the next great poet of the music world by no less an authority than Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney? “The endorsement is just the latest indication that Eminem’s public image has completed the transition from obscene thug to gifted lyricist… The star from the trailer park is becoming, in the words of Britain’s The Independent, ‘the new darling of the liberal establishment.'”

Stanley Crouch was famously fired from his critic’s job at JazzTimes. “Crouch’s position has less to do with color than it does with sound. He defines jazz within famously narrow limits—a music that doesn’t stray far from the blues or the techniques that have traditionally produced it, musicians who never, ever forget where and how the sound was born. One doesn’t have to be black to find a groove (though some critics have taken him to mean this), but one must be willing to bow to the “Negro aesthetic.” He is convinced that the white establishment resents a musical history from which it can’t help but feel alienated, and so champions jazz that sounds “white” instead of jazz that looks backward. In this view, the desire to innovate past swing is tantamount to fearing its origins and the people who created it. The lines between the advancement of a music and the rejection of its history become entangled in the vast mire of racial politics.”

Brazil’s minister of Culture is Gilberto Gil – a big music star. But he’s taking a month off from his ministry job to go on tour in Europe boost his income. “The 60-year-old recording artist earns $2,900 (£1,700) a month in his government post but says this is not enough to maintain his standard of living.”

Katherine Hepburn was “admired not only by audiences but by her peers as well as critics. Her four best actress Oscars are an academy record for a performer, as are her 12 best actress nominations. And when the Manchester Guardian polled critics around the world a few years back to name the best ever on screen, she not only handily won the actress category but got more votes than the male acting winner as well.”

“Emmanuel Chabrier wanted to write operas so lewd, people would start to ‘make babies in the stalls’.” Where other composers wrote music full of the joy of God, or the joy of great knowledge, Chabrier wrote about the pure, unadulterated fun of being human. “His party piece was to sing the front page of that day’s newspaper, dramatising the events depicted – a street accident, the fall of the Bourse – with appropriate extra-musical effects.” But beyond all the bluster and hedonist revelry was a serious artist whose works attracted the admiration of composers as distinguished as Debussy and Ravel.

The actress Katherine Hepburn has died. Her career spanned more than half a century, and encompassed a breathtaking diversity of work. She won her first Oscar in 1933 for Morning Glory, and her last, for On Golden Pond, 48 years later. Her work with Spencer Tracy is the stuff of cinema legend, and she was completely at home in roles from Cleopatra to Violet Vennable. Hepburn was 96.

J. Seward Johnson Jr. can make a bronze sculpture so lifelike and convincing that you’ll want to talk to it. But his latest assignment is far more daunting than any park-bench mannequin. Johnson is recreating the works of the great Impressionist painters, in bronze, in real-life scale, and in three dimensions. “Visitors [to Johnson’s exhibit in Washington] will be able to walk into Vincent van Gogh’s ‘The Bedroom’ in Arles, France. They will be invited to touch the objects, to the expected horror of conservative museum folks. They will even be able to lie down on the bed, though they won’t be able to get under the covers.”

Joseph Chaiken, the much-esteemed actor and director who was involved in dozens of regional theatre productions in Atlanta and Los Angeles, along with his work in New York’s off-Broadway scene, has died. “The esteemed actor and director, who founded New York’s avant-garde Open Theater in 1963 and won five Obie Awards, died Sunday at his Greenwich Village home of congenital heart failure. He was 67 and had suffered from aphasia since experiencing a massive stroke in 1984.”

Kenneth Clark would have been 100 this year. “Clark was the incarnation of a deeply outmoded type: the white upper-class worthy. He is best remembered for his 1969 television series, Civilisation, about the history of Western European culture, an inscrutable, perfectly turned-out English gentleman lecturing on high culture and its values to the masses. By the mid-1970s, his brand of art history was already being criticised for being too elitist, an old-fashioned upper-class amateur connoisseurship that was being superseded by ways of looking at art that emphasised society and politics. By the 1980s, when he died, his series had come to seem the epitome of what some now call heritage TV.”