BILL DIXON, VOICE OF AVANT-GARDE JAZZ
Bill Dixon, Leading Edge of Avant-Garde Jazz
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: June 19, 2010
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Bill Dixon, the maverick trumpeter, composer, educator and major force in the jazz avant-garde movement of the 1960s, died on Wednesday at his home in North Bennington, Vt. He was 84.
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Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos
Bill Dixon performing at the Vision Festival in 2007.
In the early 1960s, when rock was swallowing popular culture and jazz clubs were taking few chances on the “new thing” — as the developing avant-garde was then known — Mr. Dixon, who was known for the deep and almost liquid texture of his sound, fought to raise the profile of free improvisation and put more control into musicians’ hands. In 1964 he organized “The October Revolution in Jazz,” four days of music and discussions at the Cellar Café on West 91st Street in Manhattan, with a cast including the pianist-composers Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor, among others. It was the first free-jazz festival and the model for present-day musician-run events including the Vision Festival.
Soon after that, he established the Jazz Composers Guild, a cooperative organization intended to create bargaining power with club owners and build greater media visibility. Mr. Dixon played hardball: he argued for a collective strike on playing in jazz clubs and hoped for the support of John Coltrane, the wave floating most boats of the “new thing.” The strike never happened, and the Guild fractured within a year.
William Robert Dixon was born in Nantucket, Mass., on Oct. 5, 1925. His family moved to Harlem when he was about 7; he first aspired to be a visual artist and studied commercial art in high school. (He continued to paint throughout his life.) In 1944 he enlisted in the Army, eventually serving in Germany during the last few months of war in Europe.
After his return he attended the Hartnett Conservatory in Manhattan and then started performing around town — alongside, among others, Mr. Taylor, whom he met in 1951; the bassist Wilbur Ware; and eventually the saxophonist Archie Shepp, with whom he formed a quartet.
On records including “Intents and Purposes” (1967) and the two-volume “Vade Mecum,” recorded in 1993, Mr. Dixon displayed a fascination with whispered notes and the lowest, darkest ends of a band’s sound. He used delay and reverb on his trumpet, in long, floating tones and scrabbling figures; his music got closer to the ideal of pure abstraction than that of many of his colleagues.
In the late 1950s, he was raising a family and working during the day as a secretary at the United Nations. By 1959 he was booking the new music into West Village cafes, including the Phase 2 and Le Figaro. Thus began a long-running role as bootstrap activist and outspoken critic of nearly all the systems of jazz: how it is presented, taught, promoted, recorded and written about.
Mr. Dixon is survived by his daughter, Claudia Dixon of Phoenix; his son, William R. Dixon II of New York; and two grandchildren, as well as his longtime partner, Sharon Vogel.
In 1968 he began a career in academia at Bennington College in Vermont. Hired simultaneously with the dancer Judith Dunn, with whom he collaborated in all his work for a six-year stretch, he worked first in the dance department and eventually in music. In 1973 he established the Black Music Division, a performance-and-theory curriculum of his own devising.
During the 1980s his recording career picked up: small-group music, orchestra pieces and a sideline of solo trumpet works, eventually released as a self-produced six-disc set, “Odyssey.”
In experimental jazz, where the most successful tend to be the most prolific, Mr. Dixon’s output looks comparatively scant. But most of his albums, even up to last year’s “Tapestries for Small Orchestra,” have a profound and eerie center, and his influence among contemporary trumpeters is clear.
“When I play,” he told the journalist Graham Lock in 2001, “whether you like it or not, I mean it.”
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MANUTE BOL, N.B.A. PLAYER AND ACTIVIST
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
Published: June 19, 2010
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Bill Polo/Boston Herald, via Associated Press
Manute Bol, shown playing for the University of Bridgeport in 1985, was a 7-foot-6 center from Sudan.
Bol, center, with the Washington Bullets in 1986.
Ed Zurga/Associated Press
After his N.B.A. career, Bol worked as an advisory board member of the Sudan Sunrise foundation.
The cause was severe kidney trouble and complications of a rare skin disorder known as Stevens-Johnson syndrome, said Tom Prichard, who runs Sudan Sunrise, a foundation that is building a school near Bol’s birthplace in Turalei. Bol had been hospitalized since late May when he fell ill during a layover on a trip home from Sudan, Mr. Prichard said.
Though he wore size 16 ½ sneakers and had a pair of the spindliest legs ever to protrude from a pair of nylon shorts, Bol, at 7 feet 6 inches, was an athletic marvel. He arrived in the National Basketball Association in 1985 and promptly set a rookie record by blocking an average of five shots per game — a total of 397 for the season. He is 14th on the N.B.A.’s career list with 2,086.
Fans flocked to see him and roundly urged him to shoot whenever he touched the ball. Despite being able to reach above the 10-foot rims flat-footed, Bol was not a scorer. He averaged fewer than 4 points a game in every season he played.
It was his defensive prowess, swatting shots away from the basket and discouraging opponents from trying to drive the ball past him, that kept Bol in the league for 10 seasons. The Washington Bullets drafted him three years after he immigrated to the United States in 1982, and he eventually played for three other teams: the Golden State Warriors, the Philadelphia 76ers and the Miami Heat.
For most of his career, Bol held the distinction of being the tallest player ever to compete in the N.B.A. But in 1993, the Bullets drafted Gheorghe Muresan, a Romanian who at 7-7 was a few centimeters taller than Bol. The Bullets brought Bol back to Washington to help teach Muresan how to play the professional game, but it took Muresan four seasons to compile as many blocks as Bol had as a rookie.
Bol eventually came to terms with the fascination Americans had with his height. When he was a young man in Sudan, he told The New York Times in a 1985 interview, his size was not so remarkable.
“My mother was 6 feet 10, my father 6 feet 8 and my sister is 6 feet 8,” he said. “And my great-grandfather was even taller — 7 feet 10.”
As a boy, Bol had tended his family’s cattle. According to a tale he was often asked to repeat in interviews, he once killed a lion with a spear while he was working as a cowherd.
In a 2001 interview with The Times in Khartoum, Bol said he dreamed of going back to Turalei and his roots. “I would have a big, big farm,” he said. “Then we have no worries about money. If you have the cows, you have the money.”
Bol returned to Sudan regularly during his playing days, and once he retired, he became more politically active there. He went there late last year to check on the school construction. Then he stayed to campaign for a candidate in the region’s presidential election, which was held in late April, said Mr. Prichard, who traveled there with Bol in November. During his extended visit, Bol became ill and was briefly hospitalized in Nairobi, Kenya, Mr. Prichard said.
“He really felt that his country needed him,” Mr. Prichard said. “He really died for his country. He wanted to do everything he could to see southern Sudan make it through this election in the best possible way.”
Bol is survived by 10 children, including four with his second wife, Ajok, of Olathe, Kan., his nephew Mayom Majok said.
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ROBERT B. RADNITZ, PRODUCER OF ‘SOUNDER’
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: June 17, 2010
Robert B. Radnitz, a producer of family moviesincluding “Sounder” and “Where the Lilies Bloom” and who was praised for not playing down to his audience or filling the screen with violence, died on June 6 at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 85.
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Universal Pictures, via Photofest
Robert B. Radnitz on the set of the 1983 film “Cross Creek.”
Most of Mr. Radnitz’s dozen or so films, set in exotic landscapes to scores laced with indigenous music, told tales of youngsters facing adversity and struggling to find their true selves.
His best-known movie, “Sounder,” based on the novel by William Armstrong, is the story of the son of a black Louisiana sharecropper and of the boy’s dog, Sounder, during the Depression. His kindly father is caught stealing food for his hungry family and is sentenced to a year of hard labor. During that year, the boy comes to terms with himself and learns to not accept his lot.
Released in 1972, “Sounder” was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture. Charles Champlin, a critic for The Los Angeles Times, called it “beautifully acted, honest, angering and inspiring.”
Two years later, “Where the Lilies Bloom” received similar reviews. “Without one false, hayseed note or drop of sugar, it depicts the struggle of a brave, stubborn Appalachian teenager to hold together her orphaned family,” Howard Thompson wrote in The New York Times.
Saying that Mr. Radnitz had “done it again,” Mr. Thompson continued, “Arriving now on a screen splattered with violence and sex, this beautiful little movie is like a cool, clear dip of mountain spring water.”
Among Mr. Radnitz’s other films are: “A Dog of Flanders” (1960), about a farm boy (and his dog) in Belgium who yearns to be an artist; “Misty” (1961), a tale of a pony and the children who love her, on an island off the Virginia coast; “Island of the Blue Dolphins” (1964), about an orphaned young Indian girl who finds a primitive home on an island off the California coast; and “My Side of the Mountain” (1969), in which a 12-year-old boy wanders away from Manhattan to live alone in the Catskill Mountains.
One of his last films, “Cross Creek” (1983), was based on the memoirs of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the author of “The Yearling.” It tells how, after leaving her husband, she found her literary voice while living among the people and tropical terrain of central Florida. It was nominated for four Academy Awards.
Robert Bonoff Radnitz was born in Great Neck, N.Y., on Aug. 9, 1924, the only child of Fred and Lilyan Radnitz. His parents owned a laundry in Brooklyn. His wife, the former Pearl Turner, is his only survivor.
Mr. Radnitz graduated from the University of Virginia in 1947 with a degree in English and drama, then taught at the university for a year. He later became an apprentice to the theater director Harold Clurman and went on to produce two Broadway plays in the mid-’50s, “The Frogs of Spring” and “The Young and the Beautiful.” Soon after, he went to Hollywood as a script consultant at 20th Century Fox.
In 1969, long before he had stopped producing films, Mr. Radnitz was honored with a week-long retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. In a tribute, the museum said that his movies showed more understanding of humanity, “compassion and sophistication than many so-called adult films.”
His approach to making movies for children was simple, Mr. Radnitz told The Los Angeles Times in 1991: “If you don’t talk down to them, you’d be surprised how high they can reach.”
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TOM STITH, ALL-AMERICAN AT ST. BONAVENTURA
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: June 16, 2010
Tom Stith, a two-time all-American forward and center who brought St. Bonaventure University to national basketball prominence in the early 1960s, then overcame tuberculosis and went on to play for the Knicks for a season, died Sunday at a hospice in Melville, on Long Island. He was 71 and lived nearby in Farmingville, N.Y.
Associated Press
Tom Stith in 1960. He played for the Knicks in 1962-63.
The cause was cancer, said his daughter Karin Stith.
Displaying an outstanding left-handed hook shot and a proficiency to hit from outside as well, the 6-foot-5 Stith twice led St. Bonaventure to the National Invitation Tournament. As a senior in 1961, he took St. Bonaventure, in western New York State, to its first berth in the N.C.A.A. tournament.
Stith averaged 27 points a game for his three college seasons, and St. Bonaventure was ranked No. 3 nationally in his senior season.
“He had a quick first step and he was a smooth player, just fluid,” his older brother, Sam, a guard who teamed with him for two seasons at St. Bonaventure, recalled Wednesday in an interview.
In March 1961, the Knicks selected Stith with the second pick of the N.B.A. draft and gave him a two-year contract.
But five weeks after he was drafted, Stith had a physical examination to determine why he had lost 15 pounds during his senior season. He was found to have pulmonary tuberculosis.
Stith recuperated in a sanitarium for several months, but “he didn’t say, Why me?” Sam Stith remembered. After his hospitalization, he began working out with Sam, who was in his rookie season with the Knicks.
Tom Stith made the Knicks’ 1962-63 team, coached by Eddie Donovan, who had coached him at St. Bonaventure. The crowd at Madison Square Garden gave Stith an ovation when he made his Knicks debut against the Boston Celtics in mid-November, but he played in only 25 games that season and averaged 3.1 points a game. The Knicks released him at the beginning of the next season.
Thomas Alvin Stith, born in Emporia, Va., grew up in Harlem. The Stith brothers received scholarships to St. Francis Prep of Brooklyn, where Tom Stith became one of New York City’s greatest schoolboy players.
Sam Stith was the first black player at St. Bonaventure. Tom Stith was the university’s first all-American and its highest-profile player until the arrival of center Bob Lanier, who took the Bonnies to the N.C.A.A. tournament’s Final Four in 1970.
After his basketball career, Stith was a sales executive for Shell Oil and Cablevision.
In addition to his daughter Karin, of Farmingville, and Sam Stith, of Buckeye, Ariz., who played one season for the Knicks, Tom Stith is survived by his wife, Gladys; another daughter, Lisa Stith, of Rockland County, N.Y.; a sister, Virginia Stith, of Manhattan; and two grandchildren.
For all the good times at St. Bonaventure, there was a disturbing moment for Tom Stith and several black teammates at the 1961 N.C.A.A. East Regional in North Carolina.
When it came time for a team meal, “the four of us were told that we had to go and eat in the back room,” Stith told the St. Bonaventure student newspaper The Bona Venture in 1998.
When the black players did that, their white teammates and coaches accompanied them. “We couldn’t eat in the main room, so no one did,” Stith recalled. “We were a team.”
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JIMMY DEAN, FOLKSY SINGER AND BUSINESSMAN
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: June 14, 2010
Jimmy Dean, a country singer and television-show host whose good looks, folksy integrity and aw-shucks Texas charm served him especially well when he went into the sausage business and became his own pitchman, died Sunday at his home in Varina, Va., outside Richmond. He was 81.
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Associated Press
Jimmy Dean had his own TV variety show from 1963 to 1966.
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Spencer Green/Associated Press
Mr. Dean started a sausage company in 1969.
The Jimmy Dean Show | Jimmy Dean Commercial (youtube.com)
His wife, Donna Meade Dean, told The Associated Press that he died suddenly while watching television.
Mr. Dean followed two separate paths to celebrity. For the generations that came to television consciousness after 1970, Mr. Dean, who grew up on a farm in West Texas, was the face and the voice of an eponymous brand of breakfast sausage, a product of the Jimmy Dean Meat Company, which he started in 1969.
In dozens of commercials that were broadcast for more than 30 years — Sara Lee bought the company in 1984 but kept Mr. Dean as a spokesman until 2003 — he represented the product as a wholesome family food, nutritious and delicious, as homey as a needlepoint epigram.
“Sausage is a great deal like life,” he said in one ad, in which he touted the quality of the ingredients. “You get out of it about what you put into it.”
The honest, homespun quality of Mr. Dean’s public personality was already well established, however, by the time he began selling sausages. He was a popular country singer who recorded his first song, “Bumming Around,” in 1953, and whose 1961 novelty number, “Big Bad John,” spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard charts.
It was a resonantly melodramatic ballad whose lyrics were largely spoken rather than sung, telling the story of a self-sacrificing hero who dies saving his fellow workers in a mine collapse. Mr. Dean said he wrote it in an hour and a half on his way to a Nashville recording session because he had only three songs ready to record and he needed a fourth. (Some sources credit Roy Acuff as a co-writer.)
From 1963 to 1966, Mr. Dean had his own television variety series, “The Jimmy Dean Show,” which featured country music, dancing and comic banter. Among his regular guests was Rowlf, a dog puppet created and performed by a young Jim Henson. Rowlf later joined the menagerie on “The Muppet Show” — he was the group pianist — but on “The Jimmy Dean Show” he was the first Muppet to become a national television star.
Jimmy Ray Dean was born in Seth Ward, just outside Plainview, at the base of the Texas panhandle, on Aug. 10, 1928.
His mother, Ruth, became a barber to support her two sons — Jimmy was the elder — after their father deserted them, and she taught him the piano. He taught himself to play the harmonica, the guitar and the accordion. He worked the farm, which dissuaded him from ever becoming a farmer.
“I was a hard-workin’ little boy,” he said in an interview with TV Guide in 1964. “Oh, I worked. Pullin’ cotton, shockin’ grain, cuttin’ wheat, loadin’ wheat, choppin’ cotton, cleanin’ chicken houses, milkin’ cows, plowin’.”
He dropped out of school at 16, spent two years in the merchant marine, then joined the Air Force and was sent to Bolling Air Force Base in Washington. He began his career as a musician at a bar near the base when he sat in with his accordion for a fiddler who had called in sick.
His first band was called the Tennessee Haymakers; by 1952 he was the frontman for a group known as the Texas Wildcats, playing on the radio and at county and state fairs.
In 1957 Jimmy Dean and the Texas Wildcats were hired by CBS to appear on national television from 7 to 7:45 each morning, opposite the opening hour of “Today” on NBC. The CBS show eventually appeared in other time slots until it was dropped in 1959.
In addition to “Big Bad John,” Mr. Dean had several other songs that were minor hits, including “P.T. 109,” a ballad lionizing the young John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as well as “Little Black Book,” “Sam Hill,” and “I.O.U.,” a spoken-word song, dedicated to his mother.
In the late 1960s he had a recurring role in the television series “Daniel Boone,” starring Fess Parker, and he appeared as an enigmatic Las Vegas millionaire in the 1971 James Bond film “Diamonds Are Forever.” In 1987 and 1988 he had a recurring role in the series “J.J. Starbuck.”
Mr. Dean’s first marriage, to the former Sue Wittauer, ended in divorce; they had three children. Information about his survivors, aside from his wife, Donna, was not available.
Mr. Dean’s persona was always one of straightforwardness and sincerity, and when his career turned from performing to sausage-making, he remained true to his roots. They slaughtered hogs on the family farm in Plainview.
“We’d buy a hog, fatten it out and butcher it,” he said in a 1961 interview with The New York World Telegram and Sun. “One of us would have to knock that hog on the head, and we’d have fights over who was going to do it. Then Mom would stick it.”
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GARY SHIDER, LONGTIME MUSICAL DIRECTOR OF PARLIAMENT-FUNKADELIC
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) – Garry Shider, the longtime musical director of Parliament-Funkadelic whose funky guitar work, songwriting skills and musical arrangements thrilled fans around the globe and earned him a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has died. He was 56.
Shider, who died Wednesday at his home in Upper Marlboro, Md., was known to millions of fans as “Starchild” or “Diaperman,” the latter because of the loincloth he often wore onstage.
Shider’s son, Garrett, said Thursday that his father had been diagnosed with brain and lung cancer in late March. He then briefly went out on tour one last time but had to stop because of his failing health.
“He was a beautiful man who had a beautiful heart, who loved his fans just as much as they loved him,” Garrett Shider said. “I’m sure if he had the choice, he would have passed on a tour bus, because he loved playing music, playing for the fans.”
A New Jersey native, Shider started his mus ical career as a young boy, performing mostly gospel music in churches in a group that included his brother and was overseen by their father. The band also played backup for many prominent gospel artists when they performed concerts in the area, but Shider’s musical taste soon grew more diverse.
The teenager first met P-Funk mastermind George Clinton in the late 1960s at a Plainfield barbershop Clinton owned, where future P-Funk members would sing doo-wop for customers and counsel local youths. Then, when he was around 16, Shider and a friend went to Canada, where they formed a funk/rock band called United Soul, or “U.S.” Clinton, who was living in Toronto at the time, heard about the band from people in the local music business, and took the band under his wing upon learning that Shider was a member. He helped produce some of their songs and eventually invited Shider to join P-Funk, a combination of two bands, Parliament and Funkadelic.
Shider soon became a mainstay of Clinton’s wide-ranging musical family, eventually serving as its musical director and co-writing some of Parliament-Funkadelic’s biggest hits. “Thank you, Garry for all you have done. Forever funkin’ on!” Clinton noted in a message posted on his website.
Shider first appeared on Funkadelic’s 1971 album “Maggot Brain” and Parliament’s second album “Up for the Down Stroke,” and joined P-Funk for good in 1972. He became one of Clinton’s most trusted lieutenants, co-writing and providing vocals on some of the band’s biggest hits – including “Atomic Dog,” ”Cosmic Slop,” ”Can You Get to That” and “One Nation Under the Groove.”
He also toured with P-Funk for many years and was still considered an active member of the group.
“My dad left home when he was about 16 years old, and wouldn’t come back until he had a hit. He obviously accomplished that goal and did so much more,” said Garrett Shider, who recently formed an entertainment company and ho pes to produce a movie on his father’s life. “People know about his talent, but I want them to know about the great man he was.”
Barbara Thomas, part of a group that is raising money to help Shider’s family cover his medical bills, said she was “truly heartbroken” over his death. She said upcoming benefit concerts in New York and New Jersey would go on as planned.
“Over the past forty years, Garry put his stamp and signature of everything he did musically,” stated a message posted on the group’s website, http://www.garryshidermedicalfund.com. “His talent was and always will be unmatched.”
LONDON (AP) — Jack Harrison, who survived the Great Escape plot by Allied prisoners in a German prison in World War II, has died at age 97, his family said.
Harrison died Friday at Erskine veterans’ home in Bishopton, Scotland.
As a camp gardener, Harrison helped dispose of the dirt excavated from three escape tunnels. He was 98th on the list of some 200 inmates designated to make the escape on March 24, 1944, but only 76 got away before guards detected the breakout and raised the alarm.
The breakout was celebrated in the 1963 film “The Great Escape.”
Only three men managed to reach safety. Adolf Hitler ordered the execution of 50 recaptured escapers, and 23 others were returned to custody.
British news reports said Harrison was believed to be the last survivor of the plot, but this could not be confirmed. In addition to the 200 men who won places in the escape queue through a drawing, others were also involved in preparations.
“I guess it was a blessing in disguise I never made it through, as most were shot,” Harrison said in an interview last year with the Scottish Sun newspaper. “But the main purpose wasn’t just to escape. It was to outfox the Germans. It was a huge moral victory. It humiliated Hitler and gave the Nazis a bloody nose.”
Of the three tunnels dug by prisoners, two had been found by guards and closed before the escape attempt.
When the escape was detected, Harrison said he had to quickly burn his disguise as a Siemens engineer and get back into his prison uniform.
“I was to be a Hungarian electrician so I became Aleksander Regenyi, who was employed by a German firm,” he recalled.
Harrison was a Royal Air Force pilot who was shot down and captured in November 1942 on his first mission, a raid on the Dutch port of Den Helder. He was taken to Stalag Luft III prison near Sagan in eastern Germany — now Zagan, Poland.
After the war, Harrison resumed his teaching career. He retired in 1975 as director of education for the isle of Bute.
“To others he was considered a war hero, but to us he was much more than that. He was a family man first and foremost as well as a church elder, Rotarian, scholar, traveler and athlete,” his son Chris and daughter Jane said in a statement.
They said Harrison took up marathon running in his seventies to raise money for charity.
Funeral plans were not immediately announced.
Ann
