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The cause was multiple sclerosis and cancer, her brother, James E. Peterson, said.
The 575th title in Dell’s Candlelight Romance series, “Entwined Destinies” was published under the pen name Rosalind Welles. It tells the story of a beautiful young black woman, a magazine correspondent, who after many travails finds love with a tall, dashing black man, an oil company executive.
In 2002 Black Issues Book Review said the novel was “the first known romance featuring African-American characters written by an African-American author.”
“Entwined Destinies” was Ms. Washington’s only novel. Primarily a journalist, she wrote two nonfiction books, “Sickle Cell Anemia” (Third Press, 1974, with Anthony Cerami) and “Uncivil War: The Struggle Between Black Men and Women” (Noble Press, 1996).
Elsie Bernice Washington was born in the Bronx on Dec. 28, 1942. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from the City College of New York and afterward was a writer and editor with The New York Post, Life magazine, Newsweek and Essence magazine.
An essay by Ms. Washington in the January 1988 issue of Essence attracted wide attention in the news media. In it she deplored the trend among black people to conform to white standards of beauty by using tinted contact lenses to change the color of their eyes, among other things.
Besides her brother, Mr. Peterson, Ms. Washington is survived by her parents, Samuel Washington and Kathleen Peterson Erby.
The black romance novel is today a thriving genre that includes several publishing imprints devoted to it exclusively and that features books by Sandra Kitt, Beverly Jenkins, Rochelle Alers and many other writers.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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WAYMAN TISDALE, BASKETBALL STAR WHO BECAME NOTED JAZZ MUSICIAN
Published: May 15, 2009
Wayman Tisdale, who excelled at basketball at the college, Olympic and professional levels, then conquered new horizons by developing his own style of playing jazz melodies on the bass guitar, died Friday in Tulsa, Okla. He was 44.
United Press International
A three-time all-American at Oklahoma, Wayman Tisdale set a Big Eight record with 2,661 points.
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Wayman Tisdale later released 12 jazz albums.
The cause was bone cancer, Miles Ahead Entertainment, a public relations firm, announced. He had a leg amputated last August.
Tisdale led a life of storybook success. He was a three-time all-American basketball player at the University of Oklahoma, the leading rebounder on the gold-medal-winning 1984 United States Olympic basketball team and a highly respected 12-year veteran of the National Basketball Association.
He played for the Indiana Pacers, the Sacramento Kings and the Phoenix Suns, averaging 15.3 points a game. Sports Illustrated in 2003 included him in a list of the best players never chosen to play in an All-Star Game, along with stars like Sam Perkins and Byron Scott.
In 1995, two years before he retired from basketball, he put out his first album, “Power Forward,” which made it to No. 4 on Billboard’s contemporary jazz charts. Miles Ahead said that it was the first of his 12 albums, many of which crossed over to the R&B charts, in addition to making the contemporary jazz charts.
He used his bass guitar as a melodic lead instrument, and sometimes, depending on the song, invited another bassist to play the rhythm. The Web site All About Jazz in 2006 said that Tisdale “literally makes the music sing, particularly on high notes.”
Partly in his striving for a smooth combination of musical forms, Tisdale patterned his bass playing after that of the renowned bassist Stanley Clarke.
“I feel that jazz is in me, R&B is in me, gospel is in me, and you hear a lot of that in my music,” Tisdale said in an interview with The Philadelphia Tribune in 1996. “Just to be classified as a jazz bassist is limiting to me.”
Wayman Lawrence Tisdale was born on June 9, 1964, in Tulsa, where his father, the Rev. Louis Tisdale, was pastor of the Friendship Baptist Church for more than 20 years. Wayman idolized the bass players in the church band.
“I thought they were the coolest cats,” he said in an interview with Ebony in 2007. “They got to stand and do their thing in the back. I’d watch their fingering and how they played.”
Louis bought each of his sons a Mickey Mouse guitar. His brothers quickly turned them into paddles and baseball bats, but Wayman taught himself to play. He never took lessons or learned to read sheet music, but his mastery of the instrument flowered.
As a child Wayman had little interest in the pickup basketball games in his family’s yard. But after sprouting 24 inches in height during junior high school and learning to dunk a stick and then a ball, he began to like the game. At 6 feet 9 inches, he became a sensational player in high school.
More than 150 colleges tried to recruit him, The New York Times reported in 1983. The Times reported the next year that he had chosen the Oklahoma Sooners after Oklahoma recruited his considerably less talented older brother to play and his high school coach to be an assistant coach.
At Oklahoma, The Times said Tisdale’s freshman season was “like a continuous 33-game fireworks display,” and he became the first freshman to become a first-team all-American since freshmen were once again allowed to play, in the 1971-72 season. He became one of 10 three-time all-Americans in Division I basketball.
He skipped his senior year to enter the N.B.A. draft; he needed only 1,007 points to surpass Pete Maravich’s college scoring record. He scored 2,661 points in his career, a Big Eight Conference record. His 61 points in a 1983 game surpassed Wilt Chamberlain’s 52 in a 1956 game for Kansas, setting the league’s single-game scoring record.
Tisdale was the first Oklahoma athlete in any sport, including football, to have his jersey retired. Two years ago, Blake Griffin asked Tisdale for permission to wear No. 23, which Tisdale granted. Griffin went on to become the consensus national player of the year this past season as a sophomore.
On the 1984 Olympic team, then composed of amateurs, including Michael Jordan, Tisdale scored 14 points to help defeat Spain for the gold medal. In the 1985 N.B.A. draft, Tisdale was chosen second over all after Patrick Ewing. His best professional season was in 1989-90, when he averaged 22.3 points and 7.5 rebounds with the Kings. He retired in 1997 to pursue his musical career.
Tisdale’s survivors include his wife, Regina; his daughters, Tiffany, Danielle and Gabrielle; his son, Wayman II; and a granddaughter.
Last month, the former Yankees center fielder Bernie Williams, another professional sports star turned professional musician, as a guitarist, released an album in which Tisdale played on the title track. It is titled “Moving Forward.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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MARIO BENEDETTI, WRITER REVERED IN LATIN AMERICA
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: May 19, 2009
Mario Benedetti, one of Latin America’s most respected, popular and prolific writers, who excelled as a novelist, poet, playwright and essayist while immersing himself in the region’s political struggles, died on Sunday in Montevideo, Uruguay. He was 88.
 Andres Stapff/Reuters
Mario Benedetti in 2001.
His death was announced by his secretary, Ariel Silva. Mr. Benedetti had been hospitalized four times in the last year for intestinal and respiratory problems, according to Uruguayan news reports, and was released for the last time May 6.
In a career of more than 60 years, Mr. Benedetti wrote more than 80 books, addressing subjects that range from love and middle-class frustration in Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital, to the pain of exile. He also worked for decades as an editor of literary and political magazines and was a film, literary and theater critic for newspapers in Uruguay and elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world.
The Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago wrote this week in the Madrid daily El País: “The work of Mario Benedetti, my friend and brother, is surprising in all its aspects, whether the varied extent of genres it touches, the density of its poetic expression or the extreme conceptual freedom it employs.” He added, “To Benedetti, language, all of it, is poetic.”
Mario Benedetti Farrugia was born in 1920 into an Italian immigrant family in the cattle town of Paso de los Toros, in central Uruguay. But he came of age in Montevideo, going to work at 14 in an auto-parts shop before making his mark in Latin American literary circles in his mid-20s, first for poems and then for short stories.
Mr. Benedetti’s best-known work, however, is probably his 1960 novel “The Truce,” a film version of which, made in Argentina, was nominated for an Academy Award as best foreign film in 1975. “The Truce,” which has been translated into 19 languages, is written in the form of a diary and tells the story of a romance in Montevideo between a middle-aged widower and a woman half his age.
Several of Mr. Benedetti’s poems, which dealt mainly with love and politics, were set to music and recorded; a few even became pop hits. The most notable example is “The South Also Exists,” a collection of 10 songs, all with lyrics by Mr. Benedetti, which the popular Catalan singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat released in 1985.
“Mario is probably the poet most widely read in Latin America,” Mr. Serrat said Monday. “But we shouldn’t forget his contribution as a playwright, journalist and political activist.”
It was precisely that political engagement that complicated Mr. Benedetti’s life, especially during the cold war. He was a man of the left who criticized the United States, championed Cuba’s revolution, embraced independence for Puerto Rico and, in 1971, helped organize a left-wing coalition in Uruguay called the Broad Front to challenge the two-party system that had prevailed for nearly 150 years.
After a military coup in 1973, the front was outlawed and Mr. Benedetti’s magazine, Marcha, shut down. He went into exile, living first in Buenos Aires, until threats from right-wing death squads forced his departure; then in Lima, Peru, until he was detained and deported; next in Havana; and finally in Madrid. He returned to Uruguay 12 years later, but also continued to spend time in Spain, where his work was enormously popular.
Mr. Benedetti’s wife of 60 years, Luz López Alegre, died in 2006. His younger brother, Raúl, is the only immediate family member who survives.
Mr. Benedetti’s body lay in state at the Congress building in Montevideo for his admirers, ranging from Tabaré Vázquez, the president of Uruguay and leader of the Broad Front, to humble workers and young students. The burial was Tuesday.
“It wasn’t an easy life, frankly,” Mr. Benedetti said in one of his last books, “Songs of Someone Who Doesn’t Sing.” But, he added, it was the causes he believed in, even in defeat, that kept him going. “Thanks to them,” he said, “I can sleep tranquilly.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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DANEIL CARASSO, A PIONEER OF YOGURT
Published: May 20, 2009
Daniel Carasso, who helped turn yogurt from an obscure ethnic food into an international staple through the Danone brand in Europe and Dannon in the United States, died Sunday at his home in Paris. He was 103.
Jacky Naegelen/Reuters Daniel Carasso, at a Danone news conference in Paris in April.
The death was announced by Groupe Danone, of which Mr. Carasso was honorary chairman.
The Danone brand owes nearly everything to Mr. Carasso, including its name. When his father, Isaac, created the yogurt in Barcelona in 1919, he named it after his son, whose nickname in Catalan was Danon, or Danny.
From this small start-up operation Daniel Carasso developed a global business, beginning in France in 1929, expanding to the United States during World War II and eventually reaching markets as far-flung as Mexico, Brazil and Morocco. “My dream was to make Danone a worldwide brand,” he said at a news conference in April to celebrate Danone’s 90th anniversary.
Mr. Carasso was born in Thessalonika, Greece, where his Sephardic family had settled four centuries earlier after the Jews were driven out of Spain. In 1916 his father took the family back to Spain, where he became disturbed by the high incidence of intestinal disorders, especially among children.
Isaac Carasso began studying the work of Élie Metchnikoff, the Russian microbiologist who believed that human life could be extended by introducing lactic-acid bacilli, found in yogurt and sour milk, into the digestive system. Using cultures developed at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Isaac began producing Danone.
At the time, yogurt was exotic. Although a traditional food in Greece, the Middle East, southeastern Europe and large parts of Asia, it was known elsewhere only to a small population of health faddists. Early on, Danone was marketed as a health food and sold by prescription through pharmacies. Gradually it found favor as a milk product that did not spoil in the heat.
In 1923 Daniel Carasso enrolled in business school in Marseille and, the better to understand yogurt, took a training course in bacteriology at the Pasteur Institute.
In 1929 he planted the Danone flag in France, just in time for the worldwide business slump. “I barely realized that there was a financial crisis raging around me,” he said at a news conference in April. “I was too caught up in trying to find dairy stores to sell my product.”
His efforts paid off, as the French took to this newfangled food, but in 1941 the arrival of the Nazis forced him to flee to the United States. There he formed a partnership with two family friends, Joe Metzger, a Swiss-born Spanish businessman, and his son Juan, whose flair for marketing would make Dannon a household name in the United States.
Mr. Carasso and the Metzgers bought Oxy-Gala, a small Greek yogurt company in the Bronx, and in October 1942 began producing unflavored yogurt in half-pint glass bottles under the Americanized name Dannon.
Customers paid 11 cents and a 3-cent deposit. Juan washed out the returns. “We only sold $20 worth a day, but even then we were the bigger of the two companies in the business,” Juan Metzger, who died in 1998, told People magazine in 1980. (Joe Metzger had died in 1965.)
The little company operated at a loss until 1947, when, in a concession to the American sweet tooth, strawberry jam was added to the yogurt. Sales took off, new flavors were added to the product line, and Dannon yogurt made the leap from specialty product to snack food and dessert. In 1959 the company was bought by Beatrice Foods.
Mr. Carasso returned to Europe after the war to restart Danone in Spain and France. He then embarked on an aggressive campaign to expand the business by establishing Danone plants in other countries and merging with other food companies. It acquired the fresh-cheese company Gervais in 1967 and in 1973 merged with the bottle maker BSN, which was eager to expand the food side of its business.
The new company, BSN-Gervais Danone, bought Dannon from Beatrice Foods in 1981 and changed its name to Groupe Danone two years later. One of France’s largest food conglomerates, with revenue of nearly $19 billion in 2008, it ranks first in the world in sales of fresh dairy products and second in sales of bottled water and baby foods.
Mr. Carasso is survived by a daughter, Marina Nahmias, four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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LUCY GORDON, ‘SPIDER-MAN 3’ ACTRESS
 (Photo courtesy of http://www.thefablife.com/ )
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 21, 2009
PARIS (AP) — Lucy Gordon, a British actress who appeared in “Spider-Man 3,” was found dead in her Paris apartment, the French police said on Thursday. She was 28.
An autopsy has been ordered to determine the cause of death, though it appeared to be a suicide, a Paris police official said. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a police policy, gave no additional details.
Ms. Gordon, who would have turned 29 on Friday, appeared in about a dozen films. In “Spider-Man 3,” released in 2007, she played a reporter, Jennifer Dugan. In 2006 she played a spoiled British supermodel in “The Russian Dolls,” a French film with Audrey Tautou that was released in the United States. In a coming biopic about Serge Gainsbourg, she portrays the British singer and actress Jane Birkin.
Speaking from the family’s home in Oxford, Ms. Gordon’s father, Richard Gordon, told Britain’s Press Association that his daughter was “a natural actress all her life, since she was about 2.”
“She’s always loved being on stage and in front of the camera, and she has kept all her naturalness and charm all the way through,” he added. “She has been the most beautiful daughter. We are obviously devastated.”
He added that his daughter had spent much of her childhood and her summer vacations in France and was bilingual. She recently moved to Paris after living in New York.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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RAFAEL ESCALONA, COLOMBIAN FOLK BALLADEER
Published: May 19, 2009
Rafael Escalona, who absorbed the ways and wisdom of wandering troubadours to become a beloved writer of ballads that became classics of Colombia folk music and inspired the novelist Gabriel García Márquez, died Wednesday in Bogotá. He was 81.
 Adamis Guerra/Reuters
Rafael Escalona
The death was announced by the government of Colombia. Reports on the cause of death differed.
Mr. Escalona was a pioneering songwriter and singer of vallenato, the folk music of Colombia’s remote Caribbean region. The sound, driven by the plaintive wail of an accordion and raspy, often nostalgic voices, recalls Louisiana zydeco music. The vallenato — which can mean all music in that style or a particular song — goes back to the time when news, gossip and legends were passed by traveling minstrels.
It is a rough, whiskey-tinged sound with simple rhythms and tender lyrics that long fueled working-class celebrations. Now it has progressed from villages and shabby public buses to gleaming Bogotá bars and beyond, becoming a vibrant part of today’s global musical fusion.
Mr. Escalona, who helped bring the music to its new level of popularity, saw himself as rooted in the music’s humble past. He never learned to play a musical instrument.
“I don’t have a band,” he said in an interview with World Music Central in 2006. “I only sing with my friends at night while we party. I don’t make a living from music. I’m a cotton farmer and rancher on the northern coast of Colombia since I was a child. I like to work.
“I compose vallenatos in a different style,” he added, “sort of like musical chronicles — like the gentleman that crashed his cart, or the farmer that fell off his horse and broke his leg.”
Many of his songs became national classics. One was “The House in the Sky,” in which he pledges to the love of his life that he will “put up a big sign, framed by white clouds, that says Ada Luz.”
Mr. Escalona was a longtime friend of Mr. García Márquez, who once told Mr. Escalona that his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was nothing more than a 400-page vallenato. Mr. García Márquez referred to Mr. Escalona in the book.
Rafael Calixto Escalona Martínez was born on May 27, 1927, in Patillal, Colombia, a town known as the “cradle of maestros” not far from Mr. García Márquez’s hometown, Aracataca. Evenings in Patillal are still punctuated by musicians playing ballads under a mango tree.
Mr. Escalona first dreamed of becoming a cartoonist but turned out to be better at writing poems. He wrote his first song when he was 15. Three years later, he wrote a song about how bad the food was in his school and soon dropped out to work on his middle-class family’s farm.
Mr. Escalona became an enthusiastic parrandero, which roughly translates as someone who likes to party a lot.
Vallenato musicians often spend long evenings singing ballads with friends — songs of women and love, of vendettas and legends, and always of the land, with its mountains and valleys. And often they lubricate the proceedings with rum and whiskey and invite women to join in.
Mr. Escalona married Marina Arzuaga Mejía, called “La Maye,” who was the subject of several of his songs. They had six children before they eventually divorced. His youngest child, Rafael, told The Associated Press that Mr. Escalona is survived by a companion, Luz María Zambrano, and 23 children.
Despite his rough-and-ready image, Mr. Escalona said sensitivity was the key to his success.
“Because I am an educated person,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1998, “I know how to use poetic language that is more subtle, and that caught on.”
In 1968, Mr. Escalona helped found the Festival de la Leyanda Vallenata in Valledupar, Colombia, which became the most important gathering for vallenato music.
His life also became the basis of a soap opera, “Escalona,” in the early 1990s. Carlos Vives, a singer and actor who appeared in the show, went on to fuse vallenato music with rock, pop and other Colombian ethnic rhythms to spread a new sort of vallenato all over Latin America as well as to the United States and Europe.
Here is what Mr. García Márquez wrote about Mr. Escalona in “One Hundred Years” : “In the last open salon of the tumbledown red-light district an accordion group was playing the songs of Rafael Escalona, the bishop’s nephew, heir to the secrets of Francisco the Man.”
Francisco the Man — Francisco el Hombre in Spanish — was a legendary musician who, by one account, originated vallenato music in an accordion-playing contest with Satan. Mr. Escalona’s funeral was held on the Francisco el Hombre stage in Valledupar,
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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JOAN A. STANTON, RADIO VOICE OF LOIS LANE
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: May 22, 2009
Joan A. Stanton, who was known as Joan Alexander in the 1940s when she was the voice of Lois Lane on the radio version of “The Adventures of Superman,” died on Thursday in Manhattan. She was 94 and lived in Manhattan and East Hampton, N.Y.
WOR-Mutual
Joan A. Stanton around 1943.
The cause was an intestinal blockage, said her daughter, Jane Stanton Hitchcock.
Mrs. Stanton was a dark-haired beauty, model and stage actress before she became a radio star, performing on many shows, including “Perry Mason,” in which she played the loyal secretary Della Street. But it was as Lois Lane, the intrepid but perpetually imperiled reporter for The Daily Planet, where she was a colleague of Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, that she became a fixture in pop culture.
The show began in 1940, two years after Superman was introduced in comic-book form, and continued on the radio in various formats until 1951, doing much to establish the character as the quintessential American superhero. Lois Lane first appeared in the seventh episode, and though most sources indicate that Mrs. Stanton was not the first actress cast — Superman was played by Bud Collyer — she landed the part early in the show’s tenure and was heard in hundreds of episodes, becoming the identifiable radio Lois of lore.
She was born Louise Abrass in St. Paul on April 16, 1915, but when she was young, her father died, her mother remarried, and her stepfather moved the family to Brooklyn, where she was raised.
She called herself Joan because she loved the actress Joan Crawford. The origin of Alexander, according to her daughter, remains a mystery. So, for a long while, did an early marriage to the actor John Sylvester White, who eventually became known for playing the school principal, Mr. Woodman, on the television comedy “Welcome Back, Kotter.”
“Until about two years ago, I didn’t even know there was a first husband,” said Ms. Hitchcock, whose father was Mrs. Stanton’s second husband, Robert Crowley, a surgeon. Both marriages ended in divorce. In 1954 she married Arthur Stanton, a successful Volkswagen and Audi distributor. He died in 1987.
In addition to her daughter, a writer who lives in New York and Washington, Mrs. Stanton is survived by a son, Tim, of Manhattan, and a grandson, Liam.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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TURKAN SAYLAN, WOMEN’S RIGHTS CHAMPION
By SEBNEM ARSU
Published: May 21, 2009
ISTANBUL — Turkan Saylan, a champion of women’s rights and education for poor children in Turkey and a leader in the fight against leprosy, died here on Monday. She was 73.
Associated Press Turkan Saylan
The cause was breast cancer, which she had for 19 years, said her doctor, Yavuz Dizdar.
One of the first women to work as a dermatologist in Turkey, Dr. Saylan became active in the fight against leprosy in the 1970s, founding the Turkish Leprosy Relief Association.
Later, she was a consultant to the World Health Organization on leprosy and a founding member of the International Leprosy Union.
She worked for years in rural Turkey with limited resources, an experience that inspired her to organize an effort to provide education for poor children. In 1989 she helped found the Association to Support Contemporary Life, which focused primarily on the education of young girls.
A staunch secularist, she was put on a watch list compiled by public prosecutors looking into allegations that conspirators were planning a military coup against the Islamic-inspired Justice and Development government. A police raid on her home and office last month outraged many critics of the government, who say that the investigation is part of a power struggle between the secular establishment and the religiously conservative governing party.
After the raid, in which both private and professional documents were confiscated, Dr. Saylan appeared on television, looking weak but insisting that her association favored neither an Islamic state nor a military coup. “We want democracy and contemporary values to rule,” she said. “Therefore, we are ready to fight for this cause as long as it takes.”
Dr. Saylan promoted the image of secular Turkish women and denounced the sexual inequality often associated with the world view of the governing party.
Thousands of supporters filled the streets and joined her funeral in Istanbul on Tuesday, which coincided with Youth and Sports Day, a national holiday.
“Does seeking an independent, democratic university structure and secular education mean you favor military coups?” Prof. Aysel Celikel, deputy director of the education association, said at the funeral, which was broadcast live. “Then we all do.”
In her later years, Dr. Saylan dedicated herself to the education of young girls in rural parts of the country, where local customs force many to marry and have children when they are as young as 12. The education association has given grants and scholarships to at least 58,000 students since its establishment.
Dr. Saylan was born on Dec. 13, 1935, in Istanbul. She is survived by two sons, Cinar Orge, a medical doctor, and Caglayan Orge, a graphic designer.
As part of a book she had been working on before she died, Dr. Saylan wrote a letter to the girls of Turkey, which was read at her funeral. “You, my dear daughter,” it said in part, “stop asking yourself, ‘Why am I born a girl?’ and aim at becoming the best you can be.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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BUDDY MONTGOMERY, JAZZ PIANIST AND VIBRAPHONIST
By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: May 21, 2009
Buddy Montgomery, a jazz pianist and vibraphonist best known for his work with the guitarist Wes Montgomery, his older brother, died on May 14 at his home in Palmdale, Calif. He was 79.
 Associated Press, via Monterey County Herald
Charles “Buddy” Montgomery plays vibes with the Benny Barth Trio during the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2007.
The cause was a heart attack, said his granddaughter Mykah Montgomery.
Mr. Montgomery and another brother, the bassist Monk Montgomery, were members of Wes Montgomery’s quartet on and off during the 1960s. They first worked with him when he was critically acclaimed but little known outside the jazz world and toured with him again after he made a series of lushly orchestrated albums that cracked the pop charts, although they did not play on those records.
Both Buddy and Monk Montgomery had considerable success before then as members of the Mastersounds, a West Coast quartet that specialized in a quiet, gently swinging brand of modern jazz; Buddy played vibraphone with the group. It made several well-received albums for the Pacific Jazz Label between 1957 and 1961.
After Wes Montgomery’s death in 1968, Buddy became active as a jazz educator and advocate. He founded organizations in Milwaukee, where he lived from 1969 to 1982, and Oakland, Calif., where he lived for most of the 1980s, that offered jazz classes and presented free concerts. (Monk Montgomery, who went on to found the Las Vegas Jazz Society, died in 1982.)
Mr. Montgomery also continued to perform, primarily as a pianist, and led a trio at the Parker Meridien Hotel in New York from 1989 to 1993 before moving back to California.
Buddy Montgomery was born Charles Montgomery on Jan. 30, 1930, in Indianapolis. He began his musical career there before touring as a pianist with the blues singer Big Joe Turner. In 1955, after serving in the Army, he teamed with his brothers and two other Indianapolis musicians to form the Montgomery Johnson Quintet.
Over the years Mr. Montgomery recorded several albums as a leader. He also performed or recorded with the singer Marlena Shaw, the saxophonist David (Fathead) Newman and others.
Mr. Montgomery’s first marriage, to Lois Ann Smith, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Ann; a sister, Ervena Floyd; two children, David and Charla Montgomery; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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RORY TALBOT, BERMUDAN CALYPSO MUSICIAN
Published: May 23, 2009
Roy Talbot, the last surviving member of the original Talbot Brothers of Bermuda, one of the top calypso groups of the 1950s, died on May 15 in Paget, Bermuda. He was 94 and lived in Harris Bay.
Mark Tatem/The Royal Gazette Roy Talbot with his single-string “Bermudavarius” bass.
The death was confirmed by his nephew Clement Talbot.
Mr. Talbot lent his voice to the Talbots’ distinctive blended harmonies and cut a striking figure onstage with his homemade bass. Called the doghouse or the Bermudavarius, it was fashioned from a Swift meatpacking crate and had a single string made from fishing line. As the Talbot Brothers toured the world, fans would sign the instrument, among them Babe Ruth, Bing Crosby and Tommy Dorsey.
In their heyday, the late 1940s and ’50s, the Talbot Brothers were a major attraction at Bermuda’s hotels and clubs and at the private homes of wealthy Americans who were discovering the island. Their popularity is often credited with playing an important role in putting Bermuda on the tourist map. Songs like “Bermuda Buggy Ride” and “Bermuda’s Still Paradise,” with their smooth harmonies and easy, swinging beat, helped establish the islands’ image as a carefree, no-worries leisure destination.
Roy Talbot was born in Tucker’s Town, Bermuda, one of 10 siblings. His father cut coral stone in a quarry, and his mother played organ in the local Methodist church. When Roy, his brothers Archie and Austin and their cousin Ernest Stovell decided to form a singing group, Roy’s mother instructed them in the intricacies of four-part vocal harmony while playing piano accompaniment. The group gained local fame performing at weddings and clubs.
In the ’30s, as part of a government effort to promote Bermuda’s tourism industry, the Talbots and other families were relocated so that Tucker’s Town could be developed as an enclave for the rich. Today H. Ross Perot, the Texas businessman, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York own vacation homes there.
In the early ’40s, as the new sounds of calypso drifted over from Trinidad, Roy, Archie and Austin joined with their brothers Bryan and Ross and their cousin Cromwell Mandres to form the Talbot Brothers of Bermuda, a calypso group with a difference.
Unlike Trinidadian calypso groups, the Talbot Brothers did not use percussion, except for an occasional conga drum, and their instrumentation was unusual: a blend of acoustic and electric guitars, harmonicas, a 10-string ukulele called a tiple, an accordion and Roy’s booming bass. The group performed in floral shirts and straw hats.
“Bermuda Buggy Ride,” a swing ballad recorded in the United States, made the Talbot Brothers the musical act that tourists to Bermuda wanted to see. In addition to original songs like “Razor Razor” and the nuclear-bomb ballad “Atomic Nightmare” (“I’m going to run, run, run like a son of a gun”), the group recorded popular cover versions of the calypso classic “Yellow Bird” and the infectious “Is She Is, or Is She Ain’t?,” which was originally recorded by Louis Eugene Walcott, professionally known as the Charmer, who later achieved fame as Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader.
American enthusiasm for the group led to two appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and two albums on ABC Paramount Records, “Calypsos” and “Talbot Brothers of Bermuda.”
Roy Talbot’s nephew recently published a history of the group with two CDs, “Bermuda’s Famous Talbot Brothers: A Celebration in Pictures and Song.”
Although the Talbot Brothers stopped recording in 1962, they continued to perform until the 1980s.
Mr. Talbot is survived by his wife, Mary; a sister, Etta Talbot; three sons, Delmont, Vance and Brent; seven grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
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IN REMEMBRANCE: 5-24-2009
Filed under Uncategorized
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 